chilton(2011)-still sometingh missing in cda

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DOI: 10.1177/1461445611421360a

2011 13: 769Discourse StudiesPaul Chilton

Still something missing in CDA

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Debate 769

Willett T (1988) A crosslinguistic survey of grammaticalisation of evidentiality. Studies in Language 12: 51–97.

Wodak R (2006) Mediation between discourse and society: Assessing cognitive approaches in CDA. Discourse Studies 8(1): 179–190.

Author biography

Christopher Hart is now Senior Lecturer in Cognitive Linguistics at Northumbria University. His research focuses on the relationship between language and cognition in political contexts. In particular, he is an advocate of the Cognitive Linguistic Approach to Critical Discourse Analysis, which he has primarily applied in studies of anti- immigration discourse. He is also interested in the relation between argument and adapted cognition, drawing on research in Evolutionary Psychology to explain the inten-tions and effects of particular argumentation schemes used in political discourse. He is author of Critical Discourse Analysis and Cognitive Science: New Perspectives on Immigration Discourse (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

Still something missing in CDA

Paul ChiltonLancaster University, UK

AbstractIn an important article (this issue), Chris Hart makes the case that CDA needs to draw on a wider range of theoretical sources in Cognitive Linguistics and Cognitive Science, giving particular attention to Evolutionary Psychology. While I support Hart’s case for this approach to CDA, and also support his argument, as a corrective to Chilton (2005), that Evolutionary Psychology actually shows the need for something like CDA, this present article advances three further points, aimed to supplement the cognitive approach to CDA. The first is that CDA could fruitfully draw on Cognitive Linguistics in a more detailed way than it has hitherto, and in particular on work that articulates Cognitive Linguistics with Cognitive Psychology of the kind developed by Tomasello. The second is that the insights of Habermas, much mentioned in CDA, need to be better integrated within a linguistic approach to CDA. The third and most important point is that the question of the underlying moral values of the critical stance in CDA now need to be explicated in view of the global context in which CDA operates. I also show, using Hart’s own data, how values are presupposed (or ‘presumed’) in many types of utterance. Hart is right to focus on evidentials in his data, as evidence of the critical abilities of human communicators. But there is something important missing for CDA to explore further: the presence of contestable values.

Corresponding author:Paul Chilton, Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YL, UK. Email: [email protected]



770 Discourse Studies 13(6)

Keywordscognition, critical, deontic expressions, discourse ethics, epistemic vigilance, evolution, frames, freedom of speech, language, moral philosophy, validity claims, values

For some time, a number of scholars whose main motivation has been ‘critical’ in the broad sense of ‘critical theory’, ‘critical linguistics’, ‘critical discourse analysis’ and ‘critical discourse studies’ have been in interested in and have developed ideas and meth-ods from Cognitive Science, Cognitive Linguistics and more recently Evolutionary Psychology (EP). Van Dijk’s work has always had a cognitive slant, based in the investi-gation of online discourse processing, the standard psychological model of memory, mental models and social psychology. This has fruitfully informed his influential accounts of racist discourse and ideology. I think it is not to his discredit in any way to note that this important research stops short of using the now rich and well established work in Cognitive Science and Cognitive Linguistics. So the appearance on the CDA scene of more cognitive work should come as no surprise. It does seem, however, that more recent work, which does draw deeply on the cognitive sciences, has raised hackles within some CDA circles. I do not understand why and only want to address that question briefly. One reason may simply be that all institutionalized ‘schools’, with acknowledged leaders and authorities, are resistant to change. The risk of institutionalized orthodoxy developing in CDA has been commented on by Billig (2000). Be that as it may, why, from a scientific and social-scientific viewpoint, should traditional CDA – traditional in the sense of the seminal texts and writers of the 1980s and 1990 – be resistant?

1. The cognitive turn in CDA

One thing that characterizes CDA, as distinct from, the analysis of discourse in some social science, philosophy and literature departments, is its insistence that ‘discourse’ is primarily, whatever else it may be, to do with language, or more specifically the use of language in society. This surely presupposes the analysis of language. The analysis of language surely presupposes a theory of language to structure description. Theories of language change. The most popular, and often recommended (Fairclough, 1995) theory of language is Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG). But SFG, while useful for limited purposes (e.g. analysing ‘transitivity’ patterns and ‘appraisal’ meanings, though there are other equally if not more insightful tools in linguistics for these), is demonstrably lacking. For example, it has no theory of speech acts, it has no theory of implied or implicit meanings such as presupposition (because its systems networks try to explicitly code all meaning choices), it has only an idiosyncratic and circumscribed theory of metaphor, and as Van Dijk has amply shown, an inadequate theory of context. So where else to look for good tools of linguistic description? I do not wish, as many CDA people like to do, to disparage Chomskyan generative grammar, though I do actu-ally think it is inadequate. For our purposes we do not have to look far. I am aware, of course, that there are distinguished CDA scholars who simply think that linguistics is not relevant to CDA at all. That is for debate within CDA circles; here I am assuming, in line with the origins and many assumptions of CDA writings, that serious interest in human society and politics logically presupposes that key characteristic of homo sapiens, namely



Debate 771

human language, and that we therefore need, on logical and philosophical grounds, to advert to the nature and use of language in the very best way we can.

The fact is that language is not ‘out there’, disembodied, somehow ‘in society’. It is in your head and your head is part of your body. What you know about English and how to use it in situations is in your head and the rest of your body. It is surely acceptable to CDA to say that use of language in situations means engaging in social structures and social practices. How do they think this is possible unless, individuals, part of collectivi-ties, to be sure, carry around in their memories understandings – changeable, variable but intersubjectively coordinated and interacting knowledge frames, that is cognitive frames that are representations of social structures and practices? When you are producing, say, racist discourse, or criticizing racist discourse, something is happening in that mass of neurons in your skull prior to and during the speaking or the writing, the hearing or the reading. There now exists a wealth of research into such matters, ranging from neural imaging, to rigorous argumentation about evolved mental modules, to the highly sophis-ticated and empirically grounded work in Cognitive Grammar, Cognitive Semantics and Cognitive Pragmatics. I am not saying that CDA does not also need traditional Pragmatics, Sociolinguistics and even classical Rhetoric. And I am certainly not saying it does not need a philosophical framework, including Marx, the Frankfurt School, Foucault, Bourdieu, Habermas, and others. But I am saying that I do not understand why the CDA elite should be suspicious of the cognitive turn within its ranks, especially the younger ranks. There is even a strange absence of detailed rational critique of the cognitive turn. Such remarks as exist seem to misunderstand the cognitive sciences, including Cognitive Linguistics. It’s no good just saying ‘it’s subjective’ – which it is not; or that we can’t see inside the ‘black box of the brain’ – something that cognitive linguists are fully aware of and which in any case is becoming less and less true; or linking it with reactionary appli-cations of sociobiology – with which it has no connection; or castigating it as Cartesian dualism – it does in fact view mind as embodied. It is the case, however, that some seri-ous arguments have been made against ‘cognitivism’ by the Loughborough school of discursive psychology (Potter, 1996). These deserve detailed attention, in particular to their roots in the ‘ghost in the machine’ arguments (Ryle, 1949) that dominated philoso-phy of mind prior to the expansion of cognitive science, neuroscience and linguistics.

The fact remains that for some time the most influential writings of CDA have relied on inadequate theories of language and, despite their core interest in ideology (surely something in your mind?), have (mostly) distrusted attention to the mind and even the very notion of mind. It is worth noting, finally, that the scholars who are engaged in the cognitive turn have not in fact dismissed the foundational insights of work by Fowler, Fairclough, Wodak and Van Dijk. That is, many of the new generation of scholars who draw on insights from Cognitive Science also draw on those in Critical Theory, Critical Discourse, the notion of semiosis as developed by Fairclough, Wodak’s Discourse Historical Approach, and other approaches to be found in CDA.

2. How the cognitive turn explains the need for CDA

Chris Hart’s article in the present issue fully accepts the importance and contemporary social relevance of the critical stance and engages with the deepening and broadening




of the phenomena that CDA takes as its objects of investigation. The article is also a significant step forward from the paper I published in 2005, which posed the question Hart addresses. Hart’s article does at least two important things.

First, it pushes further a cognitive explanation of the ‘critical stance’ that humans may or may not adopt. That is, it elucidates the nature of the communicative strategies that counter a hearer’s potential reluctance to accept a speaker’s communication as true and/or truthful. More specifically, it explicates what is essentially a semantic category in all human languages – evidentiality. Even more specifically, Hart is claiming that evi-dentiality is crucial to a type of discourse phenomenon well known in CDA and usually called ‘legitimization’. This enables Hart to make an important link between CDA and EP: legitimizations crucially demand that they be accepted as true and their utterers as truthful. Evidentials, which take a variety of linguistic forms across all human lan-guages, are strategically deployed by speakers to get around hearers’ potential critical defences. He thus provides a missing link: CDA scholars have described and classified various strategies (including the equivalents of evidentials; e.g. Reisigl and Wodak, 2001; Van Leeuwen and Wodak, 1999), but Hart has provided some insights into why they actually work and why they are prevalent in all human discourse.

The second thing the article does is to produce some answers to the question concern-ing whether we need CDA. With respect to the latter, Hart’s argument is that research from EP (and this includes empirical evidence in the literature, e.g. Sperber, 2000, 2001; Sperber et al., 2010 and others cited by Hart) strongly supports the existence in the human mind/brain of two related modules (do not think of these as little boxes in the brain): ‘epistemic vigilance’ and ‘logico-rhetorical module’. The central idea primarily is developed by Sperber (2000, 2001) on top of theories of the evolution of language that argue (convincingly to my mind) that human language could not have evolved without a cooperative assumption that predisposed humans to believe other communicators. But humans are also Machiavellian. So, argues Sperber, they need to be epistemically vigi-lant and check for cheaters. But if that is the case, cheaters need to find ways to circum-vent the epistemic defences of their audiences – whence the evolution (both biological and cultural) of a ‘logico-rhetorical module’, which acts both for persuasion and for detection of persuasive intent. As I understand his overall argument, Hart is saying that an epistemically vigilant individual (a potential natural discourse analyst!) uses the logic-rhetorical module as part of their cheater-checking, and the logico-rhetorical strate-gies they notice in potentially misleading discourse may satisfy their epistemic vigilance. This is not a simple matter of course: checking the external reputation of the source speaker, checking the internal logico-rhetoric of the source, and, one should add, relying on presupposed cultural cognitive frames, taken together with social constraints such as censorship and propaganda, all interact in ways that can defeat epistemic vigilance and the detection role of the logico-rhetorical module. The fact remains that humans are potential critical animals. What Hart’s arguments do is point out that despite that, we need institutionalized critical workers such as those in CDA.1

The important point in Hart’s argument is that epistemic vigilance, in the logic of evolution, is necessary because the fundamental tendency and assumption in language use is to accept as true (adopt a flexible ‘stance of trust’ towards) the incoming linguistic messages (see Sperber et al., 2010). The rationale for making this hypothesis is that



Debate 773

linguistic communication could not have evolved without the assumptions among con-specifics that other humans were communicating honestly (not lying) and that their communicated information was true (helpfully correspondent with the environment). This hypothesis is taken seriously in the cognitive science literature, and there is no need for CDA to dismiss it out of hand as lacking in arguments and evidence. On one level, it is simply self-evident that one cannot tell a lie or talk deceptively unless one thinks that others think one is telling the truth, and the fact that people do lie successfully is evi-dence that people are indeed predisposed to accept utterances as true and truthful. In fact, beyond the CDA core writers, but among authorities they adduce to enrich their critical framework, work in Pragmatics has long noted the role of the assumption of truth and truthfulness. This is the case, as Hart notes, for the ‘felicity conditions’ under-lying speech acts (Austin and Searle) and for theories of communicative cooperation (Grice, and to a qualified degree the neo-Gricean and strongly cognitive pragmatics of Sperber and Wilson). Even more important for CDA is the oft-cited work of Habermas, whose theory of validity claims not only draws upon linguistic pragmatics but is inte-grated with a social and ethical theory. One project for CDA is to update the Habermasian framework and investigate its possible integration with linguistics and EP. For example, Habermas’s notion of validity claims appears to be supported by the EP notion of cheater detection, epistemic vigilance and the logico-rhetorical module (for further pointers to re-theorizing Habermas in cognitive and partly EP terms, see Chilton, 2010a, 2010b).

In order to justify the need for CDA, Hart’s article builds on both the EP premise of ‘epistemic trust’ (Sperber et al., 2010) underlying the evolution of language, and the EP evidence for epistemic vigilance and the countervailing logico-rhetorical abilities. In fact, his principal claim is that one particular linguistic device (evidential expressions) ‘has the effect . . . of meeting the demands of a logico-rhetorical module thereby allow-ing propositions to be accepted by addressees as true’. This follows Sperber’s (2000, 2001) line that ‘display’ of apparently logical and evidential coherence satisfies the logico-rhetorical module. So both the tendency to trust and the tendency to want one’s logico-rhetorical module satisfied would lead to a diminished critical stance – and thus to the need for CDA. This is an important step forward in explaining existing CDA observations. It is unlikely to be the whole story, since epistemic vigilance is likely to be highly variable and to be strongly constrained not only by logico-rhetorical content but also by the authority of sources – as I am sure Hart would acknowledge – and by a whole host of societal and political barriers, blockages, biases and restrictions. In the same vein, there are EP models of how epistemic vigilance fails at the level of the transmission of ideas through whole populations (see Sperber et al. 2010, section 4, section 8 on the role of source-checking and authority figures).

But if we go along with the hypothesis that humans are predisposed to initially accept messages, especially ones supported by external and internal scaffolding, then indeed it might be the case that a specialized elite has a role to play in explicating deceptive strat-egies (see also Sperber et al., 2010, section 8). Hart illustrates how this may be done by investigating evidential expressions, which he takes to be part of the logico-rhetorical module. I will not comment on the details of the evidential expressions, except to note that what Hart is consciously doing is outlining an explanation of discourse devices that are well known to CDA and to Argumentation Theory in the guise of ‘topoi’, either in




the loose sense in which the term has been used, or in the traditional sense of topoi in classical rhetoric, or in the sense of Aristotle’s endoxa as adopted by Rigotti and Rocci (2005, and other rigorous studies). It would not, however, be a satisfactory response to say ‘we’ve already done it, see my publications’: what is being offered is an explanation of why these things exist at all and why they are, on occasion, effective.

There is one area that Hart’s article adumbrates but does not have space to clarify and develop: the potential of Cognitive Linguistics, which is still ill-understood in main-stream CDA, to link fundamental and universal human communication abilities with the meta-linguistic and critical stance assumed in CDA’s basic project. I would for now simply point to his section 4 concerning ‘attention, comparison and perspective . . . ’, ‘framing’ and ‘positioning’. The latter is discussed by Cap (2006, 2009) and Chilton (2004) and remains to be developed further if the ideas are valid. Attention and compari-son are fundamental in cognitive semantics and needed to elucidate the vague notions of ‘salience’ and ‘metaphor’ found in older but still mainstream CDA writing. In particular I want to note the importance of ‘perspective’, which may pose more theoretical chal-lenges to the version of EP currently applied by Hart. It seems from linguistic analysis, EP-style argumentation and also from empirical work, that humans are uniquely endowed for attention – specifically joint attention, co-operative aspects of communication and, most importantly, the syntactic and semantic structure that enables human communica-tors to adopt the perspective (corresponding literally to spatial ‘point of view’) of other individuals (the essential arguments and evidence, for both phylogenesis and ontogenesis, are in Tomasello, 1999, 2009, 2010). This cognitive-linguistic approach to ‘perspective’ is, incidentally, compatible with Habermas’ idea of ‘perspective’ (on the latter, see Forchtner, 2011). While Hart’s account, and also CDA’s, focus on manipulation, decep-tion and the conflictual nature of human communication, the evidence points also to the co-operative and altruistic potential of the human mind, in a variety of subtle though often ambiguous ways that can’t be addressed fully here. Sperber speaks of an evolution-ary ‘arms race’ in the evolution of epistemic vigilance and the logico-rhetorical ability, but the fact remains that a cooperative potential does not entirely go away. CDA may do well to consider the implications.

3. What is missing

The cognitive turn thus has rich potential for the development of CDA. Yet there is still something missing, something even deeper that is essential to CDA: values. Let me open up this fundamental issue by taking up again the problem of why people do not challenge claims or adopt a critical stance. The evolved acceptance tendency (and the attendant satisfaction of epistemic vigilance by logico-rhetorical display) is part of the story. But the tendency to accept is variable within and across situations, societies, polities and cultures. If we do not want CDA just to be an elite of critical mandarins, we might want to see how individuals can be liberated from whatever constrains their cheater detection stance in conjunction with logico-rhetorical abilities.

CDA now finds itself in a global environment. This is a communicative environment that reveals clashes of cultures and ideologies that CDA, which has been predominantly



Debate 775

Eurocentric since its inception, cannot escape attending to if it is to be credible. How can scholars, let alone those who are not, be critical in Iran, Belarus, China and other places where physical reprisals attend attempts at freedom of speech? In this short article I shall cut some corners and ask a further question: Why exactly do we think freedom of speech is a bedrock value – and I assume that is what Western CDA writers do think – in the first place? We have not felt it necessary to attend to such questions: CDA has been constituted of scholars who have shared a common core of ethical and political assumptions, whatever the philosophical and ideological nuances among them. Yet there are scholars around the globe, indeed scholars who have an interest in CDA, who will legitimize the restriction or repression of freedom of speech, among other values. These kinds of limitations and constraints go beyond the natural cognitive acceptance bias discussed above, though this later may be recruited and fine-tuned by local discursive input. To take another case of what I have in mind, it is perfectly reasonable to ask, but why is the exclusion of migrants, asylum-seekers and refugees from the UK wrong? Why does CDA spill so much critical ink condemning racism? (Of course, I personally do believe these things to be wrong.) Such a radical philosophical position on racist and anti-migrant discourse is in fact taken by Michael Dummett (2001), a writer not found in the CDA canon.2 Another thinker who poses fundamental questions of value, in this instance within the field of Critical Social Science, is Andrew Sayer (2009). And among the new generation of critical scholars, Bernhard Forchtner (2011) takes an unusually explicit step in addressing fundamental moral questions and the moral grounding of his critique of a particular type of discourse. But such concerns have not been at the forefront of mainstream CDA.

In a sense this is the converse of the line of argument in my 2005 article: there I tried to explain what could be the evolved cognitive structures making racism and exclusion acceptable and quasi-natural. This time I’m asking: why are they wrong? And this time, I doubt the answer can come entirely from Cognitive Science as we know it, or from linguistics and discourse analysis. We have to turn to moral philosophy and discourse ethics, and we have to do so because global human communication demands that we explain and, yes, legitimize in some sense, the ethical ground on which we stand and base our critical stance. All that can be done here is to indicate the directions in which the relevant work might go. I will first try to show how values are not only inevitably raised at the macro-level of global society, as I’ve tried to suggest above, but are also implicated at the micro-level of discourse and linguistic analysis – indeed in the very material that CDA , and Chris Hart’s paper, focus on: legitimizations. I will finish this essay by outlining how radical thinking in CDA about these areas might proceed, but I shall certainly not conclude.

Hart’s illuminating account of legitimizations of exclusionary attitudes towards immi-grants and refugees in the UK media concentrate, reasonably enough, on epistemic meanings. He does that in order to demonstrate a link between the linguistic micro-level of discourse and the universal underpinnings in the human mind. On reading his exam-ples, however, it seems to me that the epistemic element in the semantics of these typical legitimizations is far from the whole story. Here too something is missing.

Consider some of Hart’s examples (numbered as in his article), where I highlight elements on which I want to comment further:




(1) The Sun, 25 April 2003 Often it appears that these immigrants are looked after much better than our own

people.

(2) The Daily Mail, 27 July 2005 Britain is operating an asylum system . . . visibly loaded in favour of any foreigner . . .

staying here indefinitely

Here Hart properly identifies evidential expressions that are plausibly implicated, along-side other significant factors, in the satisfying of readers’ logico-rhetorical checking module. These expressions modalize a proposition. Some CDA authors (drawing on Reisigl and Wodak, 2001) would perhaps refer to ‘topoi’ at this point, underlying prem-ises that are not verbally expressed, and what I want to say is not, I think, inconsistent. This ‘premise’, not here perhaps the best term, is in fact a value judgement: it is deonti-cally wrong to prefer ‘foreigners’ to UK citizens, which may be a special case of a more general stance: ‘insiders should (deontically) always be preferred to outsiders’, or even ‘charity should begin at home’. Its corollary is: ‘foreigners should be excluded’. It can easily be seen that such underlying assumptions are linked with other kinds of concepts in other discourses.

(5) The Daily Mail, 15 March 2006 All international studies show that the benefit to the host community is very small.

(11) The Daily Telegraph, 19 April 2004 Clearly, immigration does bring economic benefits but there are, equally clearly,

costs as well.

Here, in addition to the evidential modalizers we have, as the core of the legitimization, a morally forceful assumption: in the domain of immigration we should use a cost–benefit frame of reasoning. The cost–benefit frame is linked to other discourses also.

(12) The Independent on Sunday, 9 September 2001 Mr Blunkett confirms the widely held view that the UK has become a haven for people

seeking asylum from around the world.

The proposition in the complement clauses here would simply be irrelevant – given the understanding of the co-text and context – unless they presumed ‘it is deontically wrong for the UK to be a haven for people seeking asylum’. There is, if you like, an ‘absent’ deontic modalizer that emerges in our making sense of the whole sentence qua legitimi-zation. While Hart has good reason to draw attention to the additional epistemic (eviden-tial) modalizer given by the matrix clause in such examples, evidentiality is only one element, and perhaps not the essential one. Consider (12) minus its evidential modalizer: the sentence ‘the UK has become a haven for people seeking asylum from around the world’ would still lead to a reader understanding the content as presuming deontic force: ‘it is wrong that the UK be a haven and right that it excludes migrants’, which, if accepted, must rest on non-stated but cognitively present presumptions of what is morally accept-able and required. It is thus presumptions about what is morally proper that do the crucial



Debate 777

legitimizing work here. How would it seem if that extract carried the implicature that the readers supported a moral proposition – that it was morally right and required to provide a haven to suffering people? (Well, of course, there are other available frames to offset that morally grounded notion: asylum seekers are ‘bogus’ or ‘phoney’, etc.)

What unifies these examples? First, they concern values that are taken for granted. I call these ‘presumptions’ to distinguish them from propositional presuppositions. Second, there are no linguistic markers of these values. They are in your head, but you know they are there. They must be activated, or the sentence would not have the sense we know it has. The best explanation will not come from SFG (for the reasons mentioned earlier), or, I believe, from discursive psychology. The most efficient account, I suggest, will come from a combination of EP, Relevance Theory and the theory of cognitive frames. Empirical work, as adumbrated at least in lists of ‘topoi’, and as carried out for endoxa through corpus research by Rigotti and Rocci, may help to consolidate the existence of presumed value frames.

Third, it is worth noting that not only is the theory of cognitive frames well estab-lished in cognitive semantics, computer science and empirical psychology, but further, in discourse-oriented Cognitive Linguistics, such as Lakoff’s, there is explicit linkage with moral values (Lakoff, 2002, 2008). There are, however, some questions to be raised in respect of Lakoffian frames. The key one in the present context is that they can be seen as culturally relative. For example, Lakoff identifies and implicitly criticizes on moral grounds the ‘self-interest’ frame, which asserts that one should act in accordance with individual self-interest. To be sure, Lakoff attempts (Lakoff, 2002) to ground his moral dislike of this frame in the claim that humans have natural empathy for others, which in turn he grounds in the discovery by the neuroscientists Rizzolatti and Gallese of ‘mirror neurons’. This kind of approach to moral values is to a degree compatible with the ethical naturalism of philosophers like Martha Nussbaum (e.g. 1996). Nonetheless, philosophi-cal questions against this approach are conceivable. Is neuronal empathy the same thing as a moral value, in particular the moral value denoted by the apparent synonym ‘compassion’? Can all the moral values liberal linguists and discourse analysts (not to mention people in general) would take for granted be grounded in this way? The idea of finding naturalistic, indeed EP explanations of moral value judgements may be attrac-tive, but it is probably too much to think biological evolution will explain (away) moral judgement: at the least, cultural evolution has to be considered, in its many forms. Such questions can’t be properly addressed here. What is plain is that moral judgement pops up not only in Hart’s examples, but also in the critical discourse of Critical Discourse Analysis. Questions of values, ethics and morality need to be brought to the forefront of discussion and I return briefly to this issue below.

There is also a cognitively and linguistically significant phenomenon, without which the cognitive frames involved in underlying value judgements do not have ‘force’. This is the ‘deontic force’ of expressions, found in all human languages, of deontic modal expressions and the prototypical sense of imperative forms and other expressions conveying commands and similar concepts. But deontic expressions, though they exert moral force, do not specify the value systems that they invoke: one can just as well say ‘foreigners should be excluded from our territory’ as they should not be (see Chilton, 2010c, for a technical investigation of the relations between deon-tic and epistemic modalities). Nor is deontic force always expressed overtly: this is the




point of the analytic notion of ‘presumption’ that I use to label the implied deontic force noted in Hart’s examples earlier. Deontic force is a component of legitimizations, as are the frames they act on.

There is room for more research on how presumptions work, but there is also a more general point that emerges from the above remarks. Presumed values may appear to be relative. But are they? Specifically, are the values presumed when a CDA analyst states or implies that, for example, racist discourse is wrong, culturally or socially relative, or are they universal? I have already introduced questions of moral grounding, in connec-tion the kind of critique implied by Lakoff. How might CDA enter this kind of re-thinking of its basis, given that it implies a new kind of cross-disciplinary venture into moral philosophy and related areas? An attractive possibility, given the cognitive and psychological orientation of the present discussion, is to look to empirical values research in social psychology (Grouzet et al., 2005; Kasser, in press; Schwartz, 1994).

This research demonstrates the recurrence of certain types of value (broadly those oriented to selfish interests and those oriented to altruism). However, it does not pro-vide a justification for what I would presume to be CDA’s general preference for self-transcendent altruistic moral values. A key philosophical question, then, seems to be whether CDA critique depends on values that it would claim to be universal. One way to pursue a naturalistic account of universal moral values might be attempted through Cognitive Science, especially through EP, in a similar way in which Lakoff attempts to ground an altruistic morality in neuroscience (empathy and mirror neurons would be universal and innate). Using Hart’s references, for example, one might develop an argu-ment around the universality of human communication in so far as the latter is dependent, following one EP argument for the evolution of human linguistic communication, on truth and truthfulness. This would make truth claims and truthfulness claims not simply rationally emergent essentials of discourse, but universal and innate values embedded in the human mind/brain. One might further develop an argument, for example, to ground the universality of the value and human right of freedom of expression. This could, roughly, build an argument around the idea that the ‘critical stance’ is a human ‘instinct’ that one had a moral obligation to respect. This may be insufficient, however, since there could also be a requirement that any linguistic expression, critical or other, should (in the deontic sense) exclude coercion and accept only, say, arguments judged to be rational – that is, appeal to mere critical instinct as an absolute value needs to be circumscribed. Readers may notice where this train of thought is leading . . .

Another avenue for CDA, and an alternative to Lakoff’s neuronal ethical naturalism and Nussbaum’s broader naturalist ethic, is to build CDA’s moral stance on the Discourse Ethics of Habermas, which is based in rationality and normative expectations rationally presupposed in human communication (see Forchtner, 2011). As I have already suggested, it may be possible to ground at least some of Habermas’ validity claims in natural (innate and universal) characteristics of human communication, though this in itself does not directly ground moral values. Habermas’ universal pragmatics actually is an argument for the grounding of universal moral principles in consensus warranted by ideal communica-tion conditions that include affected participants and rational standards of argument while excluding coercion. The philosophical problem here is whether it is safe to ground univer-sal morality in consensus, however apparently rational and free, and in the kind of open-ended dialogic process Habermas seems to envisage. The claim to rightness (Richtigkeit),



Debate 779

that is, the acceptability of accepted values, is vulnerable to this kind of criticism. The notion of rationality involved in this kind of ethics is also open to debate. Indeed, in a recent book Habermas himself has opened up vistas of radical new post-secular and post-Enlightenment processes for global dialogue on ethics (Habermas, 2010).

This is hardly the place to take on the whole of moral philosophy and I have merely tried to indicate some strands of thought that are becoming difficult for CDA to avoid. I am not saying CDA entirely has neglected such matters and obviously not saying that CDA writers are individually lacking in values that motivate their critiques. What I am saying is that if CDA is going global, as inevitably it is, then CDA cannot escape the making explicit and the justifying of the moral ground on which its critical stance rests. It seems to me at present that a claim has to be made that these values are universal. At present, quite apart from a lack of cross-cultural and cross-linguistic studies (despite notable exceptions), CDA is ill equipped to deal with challenges to its often tacit (‘pre-sumed’) liberal values. There are Islamic and Chinese scholars, for example, who will claim that there are no universal values or human rights on which CDA rests, that the human right of free expression is relative to Westerners and does not apply within their own cultures; and that any talk of such values is tantamount to cultural imperialism. The same argument is applied to such issues as the treatment of ethnic minorities. At the present time CDA is ill-prepared to answer, it seems to me, and this is in part because cultural relativism has been a part of the liberal agenda and too easily implies ethical relativism. It is only fair to mention that human rights are one area that CDA has in fact, from time to time, invoked in order to ground itself.3 But this has not been a focus of attention and the conflictual discourse around human rights has not yet been investi-gated. It has, however, become an urgent matter in my view in the global critical environ-ment (see the arguments of Shi-xu, forthcoming). I cannot be conclusive on these matters; perhaps there is inherently no conclusion. Other scholars, especially the new generation of CDA scholars, may or may not pick up the question of CDA’s ethical basis. If they did this would be a radical step.

Notes

1. As Sperber et al. (2010) point out in their section 4, such institutions exist in various forms: for example peer-review of scientific research, educational certification, etc.

2. He is a philosopher of language, logic and mathematics and an authority on Gottlob Frege, the father of formal semantics. He is also a pro-migrant activist.

3. Van Dijk and Wodak are examples I am aware of, though there may be others and if so I apologize for my ignorance.

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Debate 781

Author biography

Paul Chilton is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at Lancaster University. He is a cogni-tive linguist and critical discourse analyst who gained his undergraduate and doctoral degrees at the University of Oxford. His books include The Poetry of Jean de La Ceppede, Language and the Nuclear Arms Debate (ed.), Security Metaphors, Analysing Political Discourse: Theory and Practice. He is currently writing a book on his geometry-based Discourse Space Theory and another outlining his critical re-assessment of CDA. He also acts as a consultant cognitive linguist for NGOs, charities and other organizations.

Discourse analysis, cognition and evidentials

Louis de SaussureUniversity of Neuchâtel, Switzerland

AbstractThis article echoes concerns recently formulated regarding CDA’s lack of attention to cognitive science (or evolutionary psychology). From a cognitive pragmatic viewpoint, I argue that discourse analysis should undergo an epistemological change in order to seriously take into account what cognitive (thus naturalistic) approaches have to offer, in particular as regards the automatic processing of utterances and the subsequent non-conscious evaluation of contents vis-a-vis previously held beliefs. I regard the epistemological tension in CDA as stemming from a wider tension of the same sort affecting social science in general. Considering discourse as a process of interpretation and evaluation, I address briefly the influence of evidentiality as a pragmatic category in persuasive discourse and conclude that the uptake of new beliefs on the basis of discourse is oriented towards the maximization of relevance in the sense of Sperber and Wilson.

Keywordscognitive pragmatics, critical discourse analysis, evidentiality, persuasion, understanding

‘Look who speaks’ (my late father)

Corresponding author:Louis de Saussure, University of Neuchâtel, Institute of Language and Communication, Espace Louis Agassiz 1, CH-2000 Neuchâtel, Switzerland. Email: [email protected]



chilton(2011)-still sometingh missing in cda

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