The central project of this volume is a reappraisal of some of the great debates in psychology in the light of recent theoretical and empirical developments of recent years. The author reviews a range of thought and research to demonstrate how the dominant cognitive approach to pscyhology has failed. He makes a case that language is best understood as a kind of activity, as discourse. The argument draws upon enthomethodology, conversation analysis, linguistic philosophy, and social studies of science. These influences underpin an intellectual survey ranging across cognitivism. discursive psychology, shared knowledge, categories and metaphor, emotion and narrative. The emphasis throughout is on the value of close empirical study of text and talk, through which the topics of mind, world and "who we are" are all seen as "ways of talking".