Drawing upon ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, linguistic philosophy and social studies of science, Derek Edwards makes a compelling case for language to be best understood as a kind of activity, as discourse. These influences underpin a fascinating 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 seen as `ways of talking'.