Communicating Certainty and Uncertainty: multidisciplinary perspectives on epistemicity in everyday life

This special issue represents a collective effort to explore the territories of certainty and uncertainty and the relevance the management of epistemics has in social interaction. As recent studies suggest (see Stivers, Mondada, & Steensig, 2011) and this issue shows, communicating certainty and uncertainty is part of the process through which people construct and maintain shared knowledge, position themselves along the “knowledge and power” dimension and take or decline their responsibility in the representation of events.