cover
next page >
Page i
Discourse and Ideologies title: author: publisher: isbn10 | asin: print isbn13: ebook isbn13: language: subject publication date: lcc: ddc: subject:
Discourse and Ideologies Multilingual Matters (Series) Schäffner, Christina. Multilingual Matters 1853593672 9781853593673 9780585171609 English Discourse analysis--Social aspects, Ideology, Opinion (Philosophy) 1996 P302.84.D56 1996eb 140 Discourse analysis--Social aspects, Ideology, Opinion (Philosophy)
cover
next page >
< previous page
page_ii
intentionally left blank
next page >
< previous page
page_ii
next page > Page ii
Multilingual Matters Becoming Bilingual JEAN LYON Child Language MICHELLE ALDRIDGE (ed.) Ethnicity in Eastern Europe SUE WRIGHT (ed.) 'Francophonie' in the 1990s DENNIS AGER Intercultural Communication ROBERT YOUNG Language Attitudes in Sub-Saharan Africa E. ADEGBIJA Language, Culture and Communication in Contemporary Europe CHARLOTTE HOFFMANN (ed.) Language, Education and Society in a Changing World TINA HICKEY and JENNY WILLIAMS (eds) Languages in America SUSAN J. DICKER Languages in Contact and Conflict SUE WRIGHT (ed.) Language Policies in English-Dominant Countries MICHAEL HERRIMAN and BARBARA BURNABY (eds) Monolingualism and Bilingualism SUE WRIGHT (ed.) Multilingual Japan JOHN C. MAHER and KYOKO YASHIRO (eds) Quebec's Aboriginal Languages JACQUES MAURAIS (ed.) A Reader in French Sociolinguistics MALCOLM OFFORD (ed.) Please contact us for the latest book information: Multilingual Matters Ltd, Frankfurt Lodge, Clevedon Hall, Victoria Road, Clevedon, BS21 7SJ.
< previous page
page_ii
next page >
< previous page
page_iii
next page > Page iii
Discourse and Ideologies Edited by Christina Schäffner and Helen Kelly-Holmes MULTILINGUAL MATTERS LTD Clevedon Philadelphia Toronto Adelaide Johannesburg
< previous page
page_iii
next page >
< previous page
page_iv
next page > Page iv
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A Library of Congress Catalog record for this book is available. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 1-85359-367-2 (hbk) Multilingual Matters Ltd UK: Frankfurt Lodge, Clevedon Hall, Victoria Road, Clevedon BS21 7SJ. USA: 1900 Frost Road, Suite 101, Bristol, PA 19007, USA. Canada: OISE, 712 Gordon Baker Road, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M2H 3RT. Australia: P.O. Box 6025,95 Gilles Street, Adelaide, SA 5000, Australia. South Africa: PO Box 1080, Northcliffe 2115, Johannesburg, South Africa. Copyright © 1996 Christina Schäffner, Helen Kelly-Holmes and the authors of the individual chapters. This book is also available as Vol. 2, No. 2 of the journal Current Issues in Language and Society. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Short Run Press.
< previous page
page_iv
next page >
< previous page
next page >
page_v
Page v
Contents Christina Schäffner: Editorial
1
Teun A. van Dijk: Discourse, Opinions and Ideologies
7
The Debate
38
Michael Billig: Discourse, Opinions and Ideologies: A Comment
54
Teun A. van Dijk: Against Reductionism: A Rejoinder
60
< previous page
page_v
next page >
< previous page
page_1
next page > Page 1
Editorial Christina Schäffner Institute for the Study of Language and Society, Aston University, Aston Triangle, Birmingham B4 7ET, UK Introduction Studying texts and discourse and their social context provides evidence of ongoing processes, such as the relationship between social change and communicative or linguistic change, the constitution of social identities, or the (re)constitution of knowledge and ideology. Promoting a fruitful and interdisciplinary debate on such topics is the main aim of Current Issues in Language and Society. Since terms such as interaction, cognition, discourse, and ideology are regularly used in various disciplines, it appears appropriate to look at them in more detail. What is Ideology? The notion of ideology is a fairly complex and controversial one. According to Williams (1976: 126), the word 'ideology' 'first appeared in English in 1796, as a direct translation of the new French word idéologie which had been proposed in that year by the rationalist philosopher Destutt de Tracy', to denote the 'science of ideas, in order to distinguish it from the ancient metaphysics'. In addition to this scientific sense, there is a more pejorative sense of the word in the philosophical tradition, originating from the 19th century and popularised by the writings of Marx & Engels (1976). For them, the ruling ideas of an epoch were 'nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships', and failure to realise this produced ideology as an upside-down version of reality. This is reflected in the notion of ideology as 'false consciousness'. There is also a more neutral sense of ideology in Marx' writings, ideology as a 'set of ideas which arise from a given set of material interests' (Williams, 1976: 129). This sense was elaborated by Lenin for whom ideology is the system of ideas that are appropriate to a social class, usually an economically defined class, identified by a qualifying adjective: proletarian ideology, bourgeois ideology, etc. More recent philosophers have focused on the implicit and unconscious materialisation of ideologies in practice. For example, Gramsci (1971: 328) defined ideology as 'a conception of the world that is implicitly manifest in art, in law, in economic activity and in the manifestations of individual and collective life'. Ideologies are, thus, 'tied to action, and [...] judged in terms of their social effects rather than their truth values' (Fairclough, 1995:76). Ideology is also often connected with power and domination, i.e. class power and domination, in the Marxist tradition, or linked to Gramsci's concept of hegemony (cf. Fairclough, 1995: 17). The relationship between ideology and language has for a long time aroused the interest of scholars from various disciplines, particularly from linguistics, philosophy, political science, sociology, and psychology. Depending on their respective background, these scholars have given different answers to questions
< previous page
page_1
next page >
< previous page
page_2
next page > Page 2
such as what do ideologies look like, how can they be described and analysed, how can they be related to the processes involved in the production or interpretation of discourse, what are their social functions? Such questions were discussed at a seminar, held on 17 May 1995 at Aston University. The main speaker was Teun van Dijk, professor of Discourse Studies at the University of Amsterdam. His wide field of research interests is reflected in his numerous publications: in the 1970s, on literary studies, text grammar, the psychology of text comprehension; in the 1980s, studies of news in the press, and of the reproduction of racism through various types of discourse. His present research in the field of critical discourse analysis focuses on the relations between power, discourse and ideology. In this multidisciplinary project, van Dijk is trying to develop new theoretical notions, analytical distinctions and frameworks in order to explicitly link structures of society, cognition and discourse. Given this objective, his research is linked to Norman Fairclough's studies of the connections between language, power and ideology. For van Dijk, ideologies are conceived of as the basis of the social representations shared by (the members of) a group. As socially shared belief systems of groups, ideologies are both cognitive and social. Where Do We Find Ideologies? This definition leads to the question of where ideology is located. When ideology is seen as a system of beliefs, then it can be a real, mental structure rooted in the consciousness of individuals, as was argued in the debate on the paper. Other theorists hesitate to postulate 'mental' representations, arguing that this would mean indulging in mentalism. Instead, they have recourse to language use or discourse as a more 'material' or 'observable' form of ideology. Thus, ideology is located in language and/or discourse. For example, Thompson (1984) proposed that the study of language must necessarily occupy a privileged position within the theory of ideology: 'to study ideology is, in some part and in some way, to study language in the social world' (Thompson, 1984:3). A similar position is found in Gruber (1990: 195) when he says that 'ideology manifests itself linguistically and is made possible and created through language'. In social psychology, discourse has also become more prominent. In discursive psychology, ideology is conceptualised primarily as a property of language and discourse in the socio-cultural context. Ideology is seen as being discursively constituted. A discursive model of ideology has been developed for which ideology is not 'different in kind from discursive practice and process. Rather, discourse is a mode of its existence and a medium of its operation' (Shi-xu, 1994: 648). A similar view is expressed by Michael Billig in his reply paper when he argues that much of our thinking and opinionating is rhetorical, argumentative and dilemmatic, and hence oriented towards the actual uses we make of our mind in social interaction. For Fairclough, ideology is located 'in both structures (discourse conventions) and events. On the one hand, the conventions drawn upon in actual discursive events, which are structured together within "orders of discourse" associated with institutions, are ideologically invested in particular ways. On the other hand, ideologies are generated and transformed in actual discursive events' (Fairclough, 1995: 25).
< previous page
page_2
next page >
< previous page
page_3
next page > Page 3
Van Dijk prefers to distinguish analytically between discourse as a form of language use, on the one hand, and cognition on the other hand. Although recognising the central role of discourse in the study of the mind, he does not want to reduce the study of mental representations to a study of discourse or rhetoric. What Are the Functions and Structures of Ideologies? In van Dijk's framework, ideologies have social and cognitive functions. Their main social function is that they sustain the interests of a group. They monitor group-related social practices, including text and talk. In discourse and interaction, social members make use of ideologies in order to orient, legitimate, or justify their actions. Cognitively, ideologies organise and monitor one form of socially shared mental representation, viz. the organised evaluative beliefs, i.e. 'attitudes', shared by social groups. Ideologies are assumed to assign an overall orientation, perspective, coherence and organisation to a cluster of attitudes. Van Dijk argues that ideologies as well as their structures have to be inferred from more directly observable, accessible or otherwise 'known' structures of cognition, interaction and society. In his paper, he therefore examines in more detail the notion of 'opinion' and its complex relations to the structures of discourse and ideology. The questions he asks are: 'What are opinions exactlyconceptually, cognitively and linguistically? How are they typically expressed or otherwise conveyed to recipients in communicative and social contexts? What are their mental structures, and how are they formed, changed, stored, activated, used or otherwise mentally and socially manipulated by language users as social actors?' He defines an opinion as an evaluative belief, and he distinguishes between 'personal opinions as represented in the personal cognitive framework of individuals, and social opinions, which are shared by the members of a group or institution'. The notion of 'attitude' is used for larger, complex structures of opinions. And in the same way that attitudes organise social opinions, van Dijk assumes that ideologies organise attitudes. In his framework, 'ideologies and their general ideological opinions are in turn construed by a group-based selection and hierarchisation process of shared social norms and values, viz. as a function of the interests (identity, goals, tasks, mutual relationships and resources) of the group'. In his reply paper, Billig warns that the location of ideology within the domain of evaluation encourages a restricted view of ideology. He argues that the 'processes of ideology can be seen to be at work in the social construction of "facts" themselves', and that such a broader conception would point the way to a wider, critical task for ideological analysis, than the examination of attitudinal complexes. Ideology and Language; Ideology and Discourse Despite differences in the definition of ideology and its location, there is widespread agreement that language and language use, i.e. discourse and/or social interaction, are of major relevance to the study of ideology. In linguistics, it has often been stressed that ideologies find their clearest expression in language, and at different levels: at the lexical-semantic level, and
< previous page
page_3
next page >
< previous page
page_4
next page > Page 4
at the grammatical-syntactic level (e.g. Hodge & Kress, 1993). Often ideological language use was limited, in a simplified way, to words: i.e. their meaning and their use. For example, in order to compare the semantic structure of the political vocabulary in East and West Germany, the concepts of Ideologiegebundenheit (the phenomenon of being ideology-bound) and ideologische Polysemie (ideological polysemy) were introduced (Schmidt, 1969; Dieckmann, 1969, 1981) and dominated much of the research in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s. Ideologiegebundenheit was characterised as 'semantic determination of a word due to its being part of and having a specific value in the terminological system of a specific ideology or an ideological variant' (Schmidt, 1969: 256my translation). Extending the research from the isolated word level to larger structures and to language use, but working within the framework of a Marxist sociolinguistics, Neubert (1974) introduced the notion of Ideologeme to denote a complex and hierarchically structured system of lexical units. Words were seen as embedded in an Ideologeme, resulting in socially and ideologically determined variants of word meanings. From the perspective of content analysis and cognition criticism, Sowarka (1987) set up 18 categories with which to determine the 'ideologicalness' of a text in a quantitative way: the more frequent these categories, the more ideological a text. Discursively oriented linguistic analyses of ideological language use have shown that ideologically relevant aspects can be detected both at semantic and pragmatic levels. For example, Harris (1994) illustrated that ideological processes in court are expressed in complex ways and operate on both the propositional level (propositional content, choices of mood and modality, choices of lexical items) and pragmatic levels (interactive rules with regard to speaker rights, use of particular speech acts). Van Dijk argues that the link between ideologies and discourse is indirect, because between ideologies and discourse there is the presence of social cognitions, such as attitudes, opinions and knowledge, as well as personal cognitions, such as models. Opinions are typically used, expressed, acquired and changed by discourse in communicative, interactional contexts. He argues that for 'a linguistic and discursive theory, this communicative and interactional condition of the relevant and appropriate expression of opinions implies that specific grammatical or other verbal means are typically associated with the expression of opinions'. He mentions lexicalisation, explicit opinion expressions and their sentential or discursive topicalisation, implications, the indirect, hedged or mitigated formulation of problematic opinions, and argumentative strategies to make opinions plausible, credible and acceptable. Van Dijk illustrates his assumption that argumentation structures reflect pre-existing, underlying structures of social cognition and that they also provide evidence of the strategies of the social mind by a partial analysis of a New York Times editorial about the situation in former Yugoslavia. This sample text, i.e. its linguistic structure, its intertextual relations, its author's intentions, its effects, was then widely and controversially discussed during the debate.
< previous page
page_4
next page >
< previous page
page_5
next page > Page 5
Practical Applicability of Critical Discourse Analysis The question of the usefulness of such an analysis, which was also raised in the debate, is linked to one of the aims of critical discourse analysis, i.e. to describe and explain, and if necessary criticise (changing) social and discursive practices, based on solid research. In the case of the sample text, one of the findings is that the author not only defends isolated opinions, but indeed supports broader attitudes and ideologies, e.g. about US foreign policies. From the point of view of critical discourse analysis, one of the most interesting things, however, is not to find out whether the author is for or against American policy, a finding some other disciplines are content with, but to see in which complex way that opinion is being strategically managed in the text for a specific audience, and by which linguistic means. Indeed, what became obvious during the seminar is that a systematic text analysis, as Fairclough (1995: 185) puts it, 'can increase the value of discourse analysis as a method for researching a range of social science and cultural studies questions'. In this way, discourse analysts can contribute to the development of a critical language awareness. In his own work, for example in his editorials in the journal Discourse & Society, van Dijk has repeatedly called on linguists and political scientists to think about the application and the political relevance of their work. This is also acknowledged by Billig in his reply paper when he says that van Dijk's 'work is marked by two distinctive features: he insists upon the detailed, pragmatic study of language and he stresses the necessity for such analyses to be politically committed'. Future Seminars The next issue of the journal deals with the topics of language revival and language revitalisation, using the examples of Hebrew, Maori and Irish. The two contributors are Bernard Spolsky of Bar-Ilan University, Israel and Muiris O Laoire of the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment, Ireland. Anyone interested in attending future seminars should contact the Editor, CILS, Department of Languages and European Studies, Aston University, Birmingham B4 7ET, UK (Tel: +44 121 359 361 ext. 4234; e-mail:
[email protected]). Acknowledgements We would like to acknowledge the support from the Economics and Social Research Council Seminar Series fund in arranging and publishing these seminars. References Dieckmann, W. (1969) Sprache in der Politik: Einführung in die Pragmatik und Semantik der politischen Sprache. Heidelberg: Sprachwissenschaftliche Studienbücher. Dieckmann, W. (1981) Politische Sprache. Politische Kommunikation. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag. Fairclough, N. (1995) Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language. London: Longman. Gramsci, A. (1971) Selections From the Prison Notebooks (edited and translated by Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith). London: Lawrence & Wishart. Gruber, H. (1990) Ein Gespenst geht um in Österreich. In Ruth Wodak and Florian Menz
< previous page
page_5
next page >
< previous page
page_6
next page > Page 6
(eds) Sprache in der Politik: Politik in der Sprache. Analysen zum öffentlichen Sprachgebrauch (pp. 191-207). Klagenfurt: Drava. Harris, S. (1994) Ideological exchanges in British magistrate courts. In John Gibbons (ed.) Language and the Law (pp. 156-70). London and New York: Longman. Hodge, R. and Kress, G. (1993) Language as Ideology (2nd edn). London and New York: Routledge. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1976) (1845-6) The German Ideology: Collected Works Vol. 5. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Neubert, A. (1974) Zu Gegenstand und Grundbegriffen einer marxistisch-leninistischen Soziolinguistik. In Rudolf Große and Albrecht Neubert (eds) Beiträge zur Soziolinguistik (pp. 25-46). Halle: Verlag Enzyklopädie. Schmidt, W. (1969) Zur Ideologiegebundenheit der politischen Lexik. Zeitschrift fir Phonetik, Sprachwissenschaft und Kommunikationsforschung 22 (3), 255-71. Shi-xu (1994) Ideology: Strategies of reason and functions of control in accounts of the non-Western Other. Journal of Pragmatics 21 (6), 645-69. Sowarka, B. (1987) Die Ideologiehaftigkeit kognitiver Strukturen in Texten. In P. Vorderer and N. Groeben (eds) Textanalyse als Kognitionskritik? Möglichkeiten und Grenzen ideologiekritischer Inhaltsanalyse (pp. 46-136). Tiibingen: Narr. Thompson, J.B. (1984) Studies in the Theory of Ideology. Oxford: Polity Press. Williams, R. (1976) Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Fontana/Croom Helm.
< previous page
page_6
next page >
< previous page
page_7
next page > Page 7
Discourse, Opinions and Ideologies Teun A. van Dijk Program of Discourse Studies, University of Amsterdam, 210, Spuistraat, 1102 VT Amsterdam, The Netherlands Theories of discourse and ideologies should not be reduced to any partial discipline. This is also true for the cognitive aspects of ideologies, which cannot simply be accounted for in terms of their manifestation or use in text and talk. We need complex theories which link discourse, cognition and society in order to apply the notion of ideology explicitly as well as critically. Ideologies are conceived as basic systems of shared social representations that may control more specific group beliefs (knowledge, attitudes), and influence models via the instantiation of such beliefs in concrete models of situations and experiences. Ideologies themselves have to be inferred from more directly observable structures of cognition, interaction and society. For this reason, the paper sets out to show the linkage between opinions, attitudes and ideologies and to look for ways of explaining variation in opinions as well as in shared social dimensions of evaluative beliefs (attitudes). This is elucidated using a sample text. Introduction Within the framework of a multidisciplinary project on discourse and ideology, a new conception of ideology is being developed in which ideologies are conceived of as the basis of the social representations shared by (the members of) a group. The social position, interests and other vital properties of a group, and its relations to other groups, are thus socio-cognitively represented in such a way that the ideologies shared by its members may monitor the social representations underlying discourse and other social practices. That is, ideologies are necessary to explain why group members in different situations are able to act and communicate in accordance with the interests of the group (for details, see van Dijk, 1995a, 1995b). Ideologies in this framework are assumed to specifically organise and monitor one form of socially shared mental representation, viz. the organised evaluative beliefstraditionally called 'attitudes'shared by social groups. A racist ideology thus controls the development and uses of specific attitudes of whites about non-European minorities or immigrants, for instance about immigration, integration, affirmative action, second language learning, law and order, unemployment or cultural differences. Such social group attitudes are in turn assumed to consist of a schematically organised set of general, socially shared opinions, such as 'They do not belong here', 'They do not want to adapt', or 'We have priority in employment' in various attitudes about immigrants (van Dijk, 1984, 1987). Whether in this general or generic form, or applied to particular situations, such opinions are typically expressed or presupposed in text and talk in particular contexts of communication, e.g. in news reports, editorials, interviews or everyday conversations. Conversely, when expressed in a discourse, such opinions may or may not be represented by recipients in their models of the situation talked about (e.g. affirmative action policies of their own organisation), or in their mental models of the speaker or writer. As understood here, opinions
< previous page
page_7
next page >
< previous page
page_8
next page > Page 8
are not only expressed in discourse, but may also manifest themselves in other actions, for instance in acts of discrimination against immigrants. In this paper, I examine in somewhat more detail the notion of 'opinion' and its complex relations to the structures of discourse and ideology. That is, if we want to be able to relate discourse and ideologies, the theoretical framework summarised above suggests that this should be done 'through' or 'by way of' opinions. What then are opinions exactly, both conceptually, cognitively and linguistically? How are they typically expressed or otherwise conveyed to recipients in communicative and social contexts? What are their mental structures, and how are they formed, changed, stored, activated, used or otherwise mentally and socially manipulated by language users as social actors? Despite a long tradition in the social psychology of attitudes and opinions, such questions are not explicitly answered in that tradition (for a recent survey, see Eagly & Chaiken, 1993). Questions of detailed mental representations and their strategic processing were ignored in social psychology until the early 1980s, when 'social cognitions' became a primary concern of social psychology (Fiske & Taylor, 1991). Whereas the theory of knowledge has become a central concern of the various branches of cognitive science, little has as yet been done about the precise mental representations of opinions, attitudes and ideologies. That is, despite some scattered attempts, we do not have a detailed theory of the internal structures of attitudes, nor about the relations between opinions and attitudes, or between opinions and discourse. Indeed, many traditional approaches do not distinguish between opinions and attitudes at all, and most theories of attitudes (or opinions) hardly go beyond assuming that these have a cognitive, evaluative and a conative (action-oriented) dimension. The concept of 'opinion' seldom appears in the index of both traditional and modern studies in social psychology (see e.g. Bar-Tal & Kruglanski, 1988). Knowledge and Beliefs Both intuitively and conceptually, language users as well as theorists tend to distinguish between knowledge and beliefs, two notions extensively discussed in epistemology (for classical approaches, see e.g. Hintikka, 1962; Phillips Griffiths, 1967; for newer work, see Komblith, 1994; Lehrer, 1990; Schmitt, 1992). In these approaches, knowledge is variously defined in terms of 'true', 'supported', 'justified', 'verified' or 'consensual' beliefs, as 'corresponding' to the 'facts', or as 'coherent' with or 'inferable from' true propositions. In natural language, if somebody is said to 'know' that Amsterdam is the capital of the Netherlands, it is thereby presupposed by the speaker that it is true that Amsterdam is the capital of the Netherlands, 'as we all know'. Logically, no such presupposition holds when we say that someone 'believes' that Amsterdam is the capital of the Netherlands: the belief may be true or false in that case. In everyday language use, however, if we say that someone 'believes that p', we often presuppose that 'p' is not the case, and that therefore the belief is false. Thus, whereas attribution of knowledge seems to presuppose shared, social knowledge (something I, and others also know), this is not the case for beliefs, which may be personal. Of course, more people may be said to share the same belief, for instance a scholarly hypothesis or a religious assumption.
< previous page
page_8
next page >
< previous page
page_9
next page > Page 9
This may mean at least two things: either we hold something to be possibly or probably the case, but we are not sure (as in a hypothesis), or someone or some group thinks something is true, but we disagree, and then withhold the predicate of knowledge to denote the contents of such beliefs. Besides questions of (degrees of) truth, factuality or probability, then also the position of the speaker using the notions of knowledge and belief is clearly involved in attributing beliefs and knowledge to ourselves and others: we have seen that if I say that A knows that 'p' is the case, then this implies that I as a speaker also believe that 'p' is the case, and that therefore we 'share' the knowledge item 'p'. On the other hand, the use of 'belief' pragmatically implies that speakers (believe they) know that 'p' is false, or do not know whether 'p' is true. There are many further conceptual, philosophical and other theoretical properties of knowledge and beliefs, which we shall however ignore here. For the sake of simplicity, and from a psychological point of view, we shall assume that all propositional components of mental representations are 'beliefs'. Knowledge in that case is a specific sociocultural form of beliefs, viz. those that are held to be true by a speaker or a community, e.g. because they can be justified by sociocultural (and hence variable) criteria of truth, such as observation, logical inference or credible discourse and communication. To distinguish between knowledge as true and justified beliefs and other beliefs, we may call such other beliefs 'opinions'. That is, opinions are beliefs that (according to a speaker or community) are known or believed to be false, or whose truth cannot be established. Obviously, since knowledge and opinions thus defined are relative to those who use these notions (e.g. in the descriptions of self and others), what is knowledge for A may be 'merely' an unjustified belief or opinion for B, and vice versa. The relativity of these two notions may be defined in many different ways, viz. as relativity with respect to (the beliefs of) a speaker, a speech community, a belief-community, a body of established knowledge, socially accepted truth criteria, methods of proof and justification, and so on. Despite the many philosophical and common-sense variations in the analysis or account of beliefs, what is most relevant for us at the moment is that language users as naive epistemologists routinely distinguish between knowledge as true or justified beliefs, on the one hand, and between false or non-justified beliefs, or opinions, on the other hand. Opinions in that case are associated to individuals, deemed to be 'subjective' in the sense that they are what someone 'thinks' to be true, but which I or others know or believe to be false or at least not justified. In other words, opinions presuppose doubt, dissent or disputes about the truth of a belief. Evaluative Beliefs Now, whereas people may disagree about whether or not Amsterdam is the capital of the Netherlands, or whether or not sugar dissolves in water, we generally assume that such beliefs are either true or false, and that we are able to settle disputes about them rather straightforwardly by specific empirical truth criteria. There are, however, other beliefs that do not seem to be of this kind. Thus, when
< previous page
page_9
next page >
< previous page
page_10
next page > Page 10
we say that Yeltsin is a democrat, or that Reagan is a terrorist, we know that although we may be convinced that both these beliefs are true, we also know that others do, or may in principle, disagree with them, and that there may not be 'objective' or otherwise generally accepted criteria to settle such a disagreement. This is typically the case for the assignment of evaluative beliefs, that is, beliefs that feature an evaluation and that are the result of a mental judgement. Such beliefs are typically scalar or gradual: we know or assume that they are more or less true. Instead of being established to be true or false by straightforward truth criteria about which reasonable people agree, such beliefs are supported by arguments that make the belief more or less plausible, credible or acceptable. That is, like opinions in general, evaluative beliefs are subjective: they are inherently associated with the person(s) who have them. The common-sense notion of 'opinion' is usually taken to be the same thing as an evaluative belief, and that is how we shall use the term 'opinion' in the rest of this paper. The concept of 'opinion' defined earlier as unjustified belief, will simply be called a (factual) belief, that is, a belief about what is true or false. Now, although the predicates 'being the capital of' and 'being a terrorist' may seem clear examples of non-evaluative or factual, and evaluative concepts, respectively, the distinction may not always be that clear. That is, the very notions of factuality and evaluativeness are not well-defined. We may assume evaluative beliefs to imply the assignment of a position of some object of opinion on a scale of good to bad, unlike factual beliefs, which are neither scalar nor have this implication of being measured in terms of being more or less positive (good, desirable, pleasant, wanted, acceptable, and so on). The same is true for the distinction between 'objective' and 'subjective', where factual or objective beliefs are typically defined in terms of properties of objects of belief, whereas as subjective, evaluative beliefs are defined in terms of the properties of the person or group who 'has' the belief. For many predicates and beliefs, however, this intuitive distinction between factual (objective) and evaluative (subjective) is less clear. We may all agree that he who steals is a 'thief', and as such it would be a factual predicate: hence, by way of its own truth criteria (evidence, etc.), a court may convict someone of theft, and by definition someone thus convicted would be a 'thief'. Yet such a predication presupposes a moral order, and hence a judgement of 'good' or 'bad'. Also, the concept may be scalar, in the sense that people may be 'more or less' a thief: someone who once 'steals' a lump of sugar is usually found to be less of a thief than someone who regularly embezzles millions. Scalarity and conceptual fuzziness may even be the case for concepts that do not imply evaluative judgements within the framework of a moral order. Cognitive prototype and categorisation theories suggest that people may find an object a more or less 'good' instance of a category: a robin is found to be more 'birdlike' (closer to the prototypical bird) than a penguin (Rosch & Lloyd, 1978). Yet, to call a robin a bird is not usually found to be an 'opinion', although calling someone a thief may well be an opinion. Hence, fuzziness or scalarity of concepts as such is not a sufficient condition for opinions: they must always imply an evaluation of 'quality' relative to a social system of norms and values. On the other hand, if a court determines that sufficient proof has established
< previous page
page_10
next page >
< previous page
page_11
next page > Page 11
that someone has broken the law by stealing something of some value, also the notion of 'thief' becomes less evaluative, and more 'objective'. Calling someone a thief on such grounds, then, also becomes less an expression of an opinion than a statement of 'fact'. In such a case the evidence recognised by a court becomes a socially accepted truth warrant for the establishment of fact. No comparable instance of socially accepted judgement exists to determine whether someone is a democrat or whether a city is beautiful, even if some criteria, and hence arguments, may be used in the assignment of such evaluations. That is, opinions may be more or less grounded, but they still remain opinions as long as others may reasonably contest the opinions, apply reasonable or acceptable other criteria for the application of an evaluative predicate. Although opinions defined as evaluative beliefs often seem to presuppose a system of norms and values, we may finally ask whether all opinions imply a judgement along a scale of good to bad. If I think that someone is 'little' or that some stone is 'heavy', such judgements may well be called opinions with which others may disagree, simply because others have different criteria of applying such a judgement. No moral evaluation needs to be involved in that case. This is not exactly the same situation as for fuzzy concepts, for instance when we call a place a 'city', a 'town' or a 'village', depending on its size alone. That is, these fuzzy concepts may have fuzzy criteria of application, but these are less subjective than opinions about the weight of a stone. We see that the notion of an 'opinion', despite its unproblematic everyday uses, is quite complex. However, for the discussion in the rest of this paper, we shall assume that an opinion is an evaluative belief, presupposing moral or other systems of judgement, that is, principles for the essentially contestable application of predicates. These principles may vary from person to person, and then define subjective opinions, or from group to group, and then define intersubjective opinions. The subjectivity of opinions may also involve contextual variability. As we have seen for the 'thief' example, some predicates may be used as a descriptive, factual, or 'objective' term in one situation, and as a subjective, evaluative one, in another situation, or by other language users. Even such seemingly 'factual' predicates as 'being the capital of' may thus become evaluative, as when, for example, Cali in Colombia prides itself to be the 'capital of salsa'. In sum, here too the basic criteria applies that any predicate that either generally or contextually presupposes a judgement based on systems of norms and values is evaluative and constitutive of opinions. This brief definition also implies that false beliefs of individuals cannot simply be categorised as opinions. Someone who firmly but erroneously believes that The Hague is the capital of the Netherlands, is not therefore said to have a (contestable) opinion, because this is not an evaluative, but a factual belief: the belief does not presuppose a value-based system of judgement. We have also seen, however, that although this may be a rather clear case, other cases are less straightforward, e.g. whether or not calling someone a thief presupposes a factual or an evaluative belief.
< previous page
page_11
next page >
< previous page
page_12
next page > Page 12
Opinions and Values If opinions are evaluative beliefs, the mental evaluation processes of which they are the outcome presuppose social value systems (Rokeach, 1968, 1979). The opinion that somebody is stupid or intelligent thus presupposes values about the socially desirable functioning of our minds. Similarly, to call someone 'courteous' or 'blunt' presupposes values or norms about ideal social interaction in a given culture, where norms are values that specifically apply to actions, viz. what people should or should not do. Similar values apply to people's bodies (e.g. health), appearance (e.g. beauty), actions (e.g. effectiveness), or to properties of whole groups and societies (e.g. equality and democracy), as well as to properties of physical objects or nature (e.g. beauty or cleanliness). Thus, values codify for social groups, institutions or societies what are more or less desirable properties, which properties people do or should strive for, what personal or social goals should ideally be realised, and so on. As may be expected, most values are scalar: people or objects may 'more or less' implement specific values. Therefore, most values have a positive and a negative pole, as is obvious from such conceptual pairs as beautiful/ugly, clean/dirty, intelligent/stupid, polite/impolite or democratic/undemocratic. Assignment of a 'position' on the scale is based on personal or social criteria, and the measure of satisfaction of one or more of those criteria tends to be personally or socially variable: what/who is beautiful or intelligent for A, may not be so for B. This is also the rationale for the use of scales in traditional opinion or attitude measurement in social psychology and polls. However, as is the case for truth criteria, value criteria may also tend to be socially normalised: tests and exams may be designed to 'measure' knowledge and intelligence, competitions to make comparative judgements of beauty, health checks to test health, and ecological measures to test the presence or absence of pollution of air, water and soil. That is, although personally and socially variable, and hence contestable, the application of values is not arbitrary, even for such notoriously subjective ones as beauty or elegance. Criteria are being developed, and social norms govern the application of such criteria. Fuzziness and uncertainty however cannot be ruled out, especially when several criteria are relevant, and evaluation (positioning on a value) may therefore have different outcomes. Moreover, despite social normalisation, value criteria and their application may vary between groups and (sub)cultures. This means that opinions diverge, and their contestability communicatively manifests itself in argumentation: discourse participants may be socially obliged to spell out their relevant criteria, the prominence and the degree to which someone or something satisfies the criteria or not, such as 'the United States is (not) a democracy, because...'. Since evaluations are not arbitrary, neither is their argumentative support: normatively and hence socially, arguments need to have a minimum of rationality or reasonableness in order to be accepted as 'good' arguments, and their persuasiveness may be a function of that social value of rationality (see van Eemeren et al. 1993). Opinions thus may be more or less acceptable depending on the quality of the arguments that support them. Such criteria for the acceptability of opinions also suggests that there is a social constraint on the subjectivity of opinions. Whereas
< previous page
page_12
next page >
< previous page
page_13
next page > Page 13
it is socially acceptable to have purely personal opinions for some value criteria (e.g. those of beauty), for others less variability is acceptable. To advocate an undemocratic or racist society, to positively welcome sexual harassment of women by men, or to justify corruption, are social discourses and acts that are more or less frowned upon as being 'asocial' or otherwise unacceptable. One may be conceded to privately entertain such opinions (although such may still lead to social sanctions, such as marginalisation), but one may be morally or even legally constrained to publicly advocate or otherwise act on them. This is, of course, especially true for the set of social values, which pertain to acts, interactions or social structure. But even within the personal realm, values may be more or less normatively 'enforced', e.g. when smoking is dissuaded or prohibited as 'dangerous to one's health'. In other words, despite the personal variability and subjectivity of opinions, their underlying system of values, evaluation processes, criteria, and their discursive support or advocacy are socially based. That is, most personal opinions presuppose or imply social opinions. Personal opinions that are completely at odds with the values of the group, society or culture, tend to be sanctioned when acted upon, especially when they have negative consequences for other members of the group or culture. Opinions and Models The discussion about the social basis of personal opinions suggests that we should analytically distinguish between personal and social opinions, but at the same time specify how they are related. Thus, whereas socially shared opinions are defined in terms of socially shared representations of groups, societies or cultures, personal opinions also need to be cognitively identified. We do this by associating personal opinions with mental models (for the notion of mental model, see Johnson-Laird, 1983; van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983; van Oostendorp & Zwaan, 1994). Thus, when individuals build a mental model of an event or situation, including settings, participants, actions or interactions and their properties, they may also associate an opinion with the specific instances of these model-structures, that is, an evaluative belief about a participant, his or her properties or actions, or the event as a whole. Such a model-based opinion is not only personal, but also ad hoc and unique. People may 'change their minds' and in a next situation have a different opinion about a situation, event, action or its participants. That is, many everyday opinions are construed dynamically, depending on contextually variable constraints, and for each new situation a different model will be construed, possibly with a different opinion. However, not all personal opinions are ad hoc and contextually variable. Individuals may also have personal opinions that are more or less stable; they have their more or less fixed likes and dislikes, and we may assume that these are associated with generalised personal models, such as (our personal models about) going to the movies, taking a vacation or our daily work. That is, generalised personal models are more or less context-free and are developed and changed only gradually over time. Complex structures of such opinions may in
< previous page
page_13
next page >
< previous page
page_14
next page > Page 14
turn be organised in personal attitude schemata, for instance our personal attitude about our vacations, our job or our family life. In other words, besides making a distinction between social and personal opinions, it makes sense to distinguish between particular and general opinions, or between context-bound or context-free ones. Social opinions will often be general: in order to develop and be shared by a group, society or culture, opinions need to have some relative stability. Group members precisely presuppose in their everyday lives that other group members also share a social opinion, which precludes ad hoc changes for each context: it takes a fairly complex social process of communication and consensus building before an opinion is adopted by (larger) groups. True, due to the mass media, even large groups or societies may form and change social opinions quite quickly in contemporary society. Specific historical events, such as an earthquake in India or a coup in Moscow, may thus soon be associated with specific (context-bound) social opinions, but even then a minimum of stability is needed to allow the process of communication, sharing and acceptance to take effect. Thus, groups also do 'change their minds', but typically do so with some delay. Although particular personal opinions, as represented in mental models, may seem unique and ad hoc, they are not formed or changed from scratch. As we have suggested above, they often have a social basis. Many personal likes and dislikes presuppose socially shared criteria, general group opinions and attitudes and social norms and values. That is, I may dislike my neighbour because he is a racist, and that is a personal opinion, but the opinion is based on the social value that racism is wrong. Even more personally, I may like to take three showers a day, because that makes me feel clean, but cleanliness is also a social value. That is, personal opinions often implement social values, in the sense that individuals contextually determine to what extent social values apply to the present situation, that is, to the ongoing model of such a situation. In other words, many personal opinions are situated instantiations of social opinions. What may be unique, though, is the particular combination of the relevant properties of the present situation in which individuals construe their opinions. Also, opinions may be tied to unique events. If I dislike my neighbour, this is a personal but general opinion: it does apply in many situations. However, I may also dislike my otherwise likeable neighbour right now because he is making a lot of noise, and such an opinion may be unique, ad hoc, and context-bound. Note that even for such contextualised personal opinions, social opinions, norms and values may be at work: bothering others by making too much noise is also socially sanctioned, because 'environmental' silence may be a positive value in our society. This also allows me to 'reasonably' act upon my opinion by protesting against my neighbour's noise: there is a common ground (laws, social criteria, etc.) to support my personal opinion as a 'valid' one. In sum, opinions are social and personal, general and particular, relatively context-free and specifically context-bound. Particular personal opinions applying to one event will, however, often be derived from, or be applied relative to general and socially shared opinions. As soon as social communication and interaction is at stake, such social opinions become crucial for reasonable and
< previous page
page_14
next page >
< previous page
page_15
next page > Page 15
acceptable discourses and actions displaying such opinions: these may make our personal opinions valid and legitimate. Opinions and Attitudes Both in everyday informal language use as well as in much scholarly discourse, even in social psychology, the concepts of 'opinion' and 'attitude' are often used interchangeably (Eagly & Chaiken, 1993). In our theoretical framework, we use both terms to denote different (mental) things. An opinion is always a single evaluative belief, whether at the micro- or macro-level of representation, that is, whether very general or very specific. A further distinction is made, as we have seen, between personal opinions as represented in the personal cognitive framework of individuals, and social opinions, which are shared by the members of a group or institution. Similarly, (personal or social) opinions may be particular or general, viz. when they are about a unique event, or about objects, people, events or issues in general. Most social opinions are by definition general, given the complexity and the delay in group opinion formation and change: groups especially need to share general opinions so that they may be applied relevantly in a variety of social situations: a mass of (shared) group opinions about concrete events would be much less efficient for opinion formation about new events. Only generally known events with a large social impact will probably be associated with particular, socially shared opinions (as is the case for World War II, the Holocaust, the war in Bosnia, a local earthquake, or contemporary unemployment). Against this background of variously defined opinions, the notion of 'attitude' will here be reserved for larger, complex structures of opinions. That is, it makes sense to say that somebody has an attitude about Affirmative Action, probably featuring several opinions about various aspects of this issue, but does not have an 'attitude' about the apple he or she is now eating, although one may have an opinion about it (finding it delicious or not). Also, we shall generally reserve the term attitude to complexes of socially shared opinions of groups, namely, for socially relevant issues. That is, I may have a lot of opinions about my neighbour, but this personal 'opinion complex' would less readily be called an 'attitude'. Apart from everyday language use, there is also a more theoretical reason to reserve the word 'attitude' for complexes of social opinions, viz. the fact that especially important social issues, as well as public discourse and communication about them, is particularly favourable in creating more or less stable complexes of opinions of social group members. Of course, these are by definition shared by individuals as social group members, and in that sense we may speak about 'my' attitude about, for example, Affirmative Action. However, although such a distinction between opinions and attitudes makes theoretical sense, we might well accept to use the word 'attitude' also for purely personal opinion complexes, e.g. for my 'attitude' about having vacations in France. Note though that such opinions will, in that case, also be general, and hence applicable to several personal situations. In that case, attitudes are always 'complexes of general opinions', whether of individuals or of groups, and the notion is then used to be able to talk about the internal structures of such complexes (viz. the relations between opinions), as well as between such
< previous page
page_15
next page >
< previous page
page_16
next page > Page 16
complexes. I shall however avoid this 'personal' use of attitudes, and only speak of attitudes as socially shared opinion clusters of groups, that is, as forms of social representations. Opinions and Ideologies Similarly, we do not identify opinions, or attitudes for that matter, with ideologies. In the same way as attitudes organise social opinions, we shall assume that ideologies organise attitudes. This may well mean that ideologies, as basic frameworks of social cognition, also feature (very general), socially shared opinions, e.g. about equality of women and men in feminist ideologies, or about equal rights in humanitarian ideologies, about a clean environment in ecological ideologies, or about the exploitation of labour by capital in socialist ideologies, among others. Such ideologies and their general ideological opinions are in turn construed by a group-based selection and hierarchisation process of shared social norms and values, viz. as a function of the interests (identity, goals, tasks, mutual relationships and resources) of the group. For instance, Equality is probably a more relevant and prominent value in (the opinions of) feminist, anti-racist or socialist ideologies, than in sexist, racist, capitalist, or other 'non-egalitarian' ideologies. It follows that personal, particular opinions about specific events (what I now think of this political decision of our prime minister) are structurally several levels apart from ideologies, which are organising the socially shared opinion complexes (attitudes), which are again generalisations with respect to specific social opinions (e.g. about our prime minister), which are again developed by social group members (what each person thinks about the prime minister), which is again a generalisation from what I now think of his actions of today. Yet, despite this theoretical distance, ideologies not only feature very general opinions, they also indirectly control the overall coherence and continuity of the evaluative system. Therefore, despite their personal and contextual variation, specific opinions may ultimately be controlled by the basic frameworks of social cognition which we call ideologies. If this is so, we shall call them 'ideological opinions'. We shall see below in our discussion of some examples, that people routinely derive and support their specific opinions relative to the principles of social attitudes and ideologies of their group, or to the underlying norms and values of society and culture, generally. In sum, we need these basic systems of social cognition in order to be able to show how opinions are derived, changed, legitimated and discursively made acceptable. Opinions and Emotions Opinions are often related to emotions. The evaluation of events or other people may be accompanied by feelings of well-being, anger, shame, jealousy or resentment, and the verbal expression of such emotions at the same time may express an opinion, as in 'You are wonderful!' or 'He is a creep!'. However, both in discourse and in cognition, beliefs and emotions should be analysed in different terms. Not all emotion expressions are opinions ('I love you', 'I hate him'), nor do all opinion expressions necessarily presuppose emotional feelings.
< previous page
page_16
next page >
< previous page
page_17
next page > Page 17
Emotions and (cognitive) beliefs, similarly, seem to require a different theoretical analysis: positive or negative evaluations do not always imply positive or negative feelings. We may find our newspapers biased without feeling angry or disappointed because of such bias, as measured by the arousal and action tendencies that are usually associated with emotions. It is true, however, that positive or negative evaluations that are based on fundamental goals and values in our personal or social lives may often be the input of emotional reactions. If our life or that of those we love is threatened, we may not only experience fear or rage, but such reactions may be related (as cause or effect) to the negative belief derived from an evaluative process involving values of security and well-being. If beliefs and emotions run along different mental tracks, so to speak, such a link seems possible only if we assume that we cognitively interpret our emotions in a given context in terms of the measure of the realisation or frustration of such fundamental goals and values (for further discussion, see Frijda, 1987). Opinions and Discourse Opinions are typically expressed by text and talk, so much so that they are sometimes identified with their very verbal expressions, for instance in traditional 'opinion research' or in contemporary work on social psychological discourse analysis. Since opinions may be expressed, communicated, socially displayed or enacted also in other semiotic codes and in other social action, they obviously are not the same as 'opinion statements'. As explained above, they are evaluative beliefs, that is, cognitive constructs of some kind. The production and expression of opinions However, despite this independent cognitive nature of opinions, it is certainly true that they are typically used, expressed, acquired and changed by discourse in communicative, interactional contexts. For this reason, they have also been described as 'rhetorical' (Billig, 1991). In an account of cognitive discourse production, this means, among many other complex properties of speaking, that opinions are first selected from event models by the constraints of the context model (that is, the mental representations speech participants make of the context of communication), such as (assumptions) of the speaker about the present opinions of the recipient, the goals of the speaker, the speech acts to be performed, and various social constraints. That is, opinions cannot always acceptably and relevantly be expressed in each social context, and speakers therefore need to follow the constraints of the context to know whether an opinion may be expressed in the first place, to whom, about what, and so on. Once such a strategic evaluation of the context has been made, one or more propositions constituting the evaluative belief may be included in the local and global semantic text representation that are used as the basis for surface structure formulation. In actual processing, all these steps are strategic, that is, they are produced 'on line', tentatively, with continuous changes, contextual adaptations, repairs, and so on. That is, an opinion that has been selected for expression may be modified or wholly omitted when the speaker notices that it is no longer relevant or appropriate to express it in discourse. It is
< previous page
page_17
next page >
< previous page
page_18
next page > Page 18
in this respect also that it may often seem as if opinions are dynamically and 'locally produced', as a more ethnomethodological approach would probably have it (Button, 1991; see also Billig, 1991). In conversations, event models (including opinions about the event or its constitutive elements) as well as context models (and their opinions), may 'dynamically' change all the time, e.g. as a consequence of the mutual discursive contributions of the participants or the changing context. This may mean that speakers may form new opinions in the present context (e.g. because of what the previous speaker has said about the event), and/or modify previous opinions. It may appear in that case that speakers seem to be 'inconsistent', viz. when they express different and even contradictory opinions in the same situation. The 'on-line' formation, change and expression of new or different opinions may also be due to ongoing 'mental work': a speaker may evaluate an event relative to different personal or social attitudes, and such a different 'perspective' may also require a different opinion. Of course, such changing opinions need not all be expressed in discourse, as is typically the case for the ongoing 'impressions' speech participants form and change about each other. Relevant for our discussion, however, is the fact that 'ready-made' opinions of language users may be formed, adapted or changed 'locally', that is during talk, and such changes may or may not be signalled in discourse. Such ongoing, dynamic, local, or context-bound formation and change of opinions, however, does not mean that all opinions are 'locally produced', either in spoken conversation, or in written texts. People may already 'have' opinions which they want to persuasively express and communicate to their recipients. What may vary is their formulation, that is, their stylistic surface structures, again as a function of the speaker's model of the communicative context. For instance, a given opinion may be formulated more or less formally or informally, politely or impolitely, aggressively or cooperatively, and so on. That is, the expressions of opinions are, of course, always locally produced, and contextually variable. But that does not mean that social members may not have contextually independent, and relatively stable, opinions. Theoretically, we'll assume that these will typically be part of more general mental models of events, which may be activated and applied in different contexts. Discourse structures and opinions Opinions, when expressed in text and talk, often need to be identifiable as such. If language users 'give' an opinion, it may be generally assumed that the expression of that opinion should be interpretable as such, and not as an expression of a factual statement. Opinion expressions should, in principle, feature structural properties that allow them to be recognised or interpreted as expressing an evaluative belief of the speaker. This rule of opinion expression does not exclude the possibility that people may present their opinions as facts, although such 'facts' may then be challenged by recipients as 'mere opinions'. Opinion markers For a linguistic and discursive theory, this communicative and interactional condition on the relevant and appropriate expression of opinions implies that
< previous page
page_18
next page >
< previous page
page_19
next page > Page 19
specific grammatical or other verbal means are typically associated with the expression of opinions. Some standard initial proposition-introducing clauses such as 'My opinion is', 'I find', 'I think', 'I believe', or 'According to me', are typical examples. They signal that the propositional 'content' of the dependent clause should be interpreted as being an evaluative belief of the speaker, and should not, for instance, be interpreted as a factual belief. There are many other expressions that thus signal subjectivity and opinions (e.g. 'for me', 'as far as I am concerned', 'as I see it', 'I (dis)like', and so on). Similarly, modal expressions may presuppose norms, and hence also be based on opinions, as is the case for 'should', 'must', or 'may', as in 'We should not be late', or 'Mary must follow the advice of her sister!'. More complicated is the analysis of opinion expressions that do not have a typical phrase or other, unambiguous grammatical markers of opinions. Sentences such as 'This is a wonderful city', or 'John is a crook' are mostly understood to express opinions, but there is no structural property of these sentences that, as such, suggests the expression of an underlying opinion. True, both are straightforward predications, assigning properties to individuals referred to, but it obviously depends on the predicate (expressed by the adjective 'beautiful' and the noun 'crook', respectively), whether or not the sentences are interpreted as opinion statements. After all, the sentences 'This is a medieval city' and 'John is a lawyer' have the same structure as the opinion sentences, and are usually interpreted as expressing factual beliefs (knowledge). Evaluative predicates The rather obvious solution is that opinion recognition must be based on the semantic interpretation of predicates such as 'beautiful' and 'crook'. In their semantic meanings, or in the knowledge associated with these concepts, we find that 'beautiful' and 'crook' imply a value-based judgement, which would make the whole proposition evaluative. We have seen above, however, that although some words may have a 'standard' evaluative meaning, others are given such an interpretation only in specific contexts. Opinion statements usually remain such after negation: calling a city not-beautiful, and a person not a crook, is also an expression of an opinion. In sum, besides explicit opinion indicators as discussed above, one major clue for the interpretation of opinion expressions is the presence of 'evaluative' predicates in the semantic structure of the sentences. Note that this is true only for sentences or propositions to which the 'believer' has access. Thus, a sentence such as 'John said that Peter is a crook' is not normally an opinion statement, but a factual statement about what Peter said. That is, opinion statements are such only when the evaluative proposition is itself asserted or presupposed by the speaker. For instance, the sentence 'John knows that Peter is a crook' presupposes the truth or rather the subjective validity of the embedded proposition: I also think that Peter is a crook. Opinion speech acts This also suggests that questions with evaluative expressions need not themselves be opinion expressions. The questions 'Is that city beautiful?' and 'Is
< previous page
page_19
next page >
< previous page
page_20
next page > Page 20
John a crook?' obviously do not express opinions, but ask for opinions from recipients. Other speech acts, such as accusations or congratulations, on the other hand, may well allow opinion expressions, as in 'You are a crook!', and 'Congratulations with the publication of your paper!'. The latter congratulation presupposes, as an essential condition, that the speaker thinks that the publication of the paper was a 'good' thing (for the recipient), which is obviously an opinion. That is, in some speech acts, it is not necessarily the surface structure expression that signals the underlying opinion, but the appropriateness of conditions themselves: one usually accuses people only of having done things one dislikes or that have violated specific agreements, norms, rules or laws. Other opinion expressions Whereas explicit opinion markers, opinion predicates and some opinion-presupposing speech acts are rather straightforward ways to express and convey opinions, there are of course many other ways speakers and writers are able to display their evaluative beliefs. Thus, the use of some verbs or nominalisations also presupposes opinions, as in the following discourse fragments: (1) Terrorists deserve no mercy! (2) Racism is a major threat to European democracy. (3) John is neglecting his children. Generally, then, all predicates, whether expressed as adjectives, nouns or verbs that presuppose moral or other forms of evaluation, may express opinions. As a practical test, thus, sentences that express opinions may be prefaced by phrases such as 'In my opinion', which is indeed the case for (1)-(3), but not for, e.g. (4) John is a lawyer. (5) Amsterdam is the capital of the Netherlands. (6) Sugar dissolves in water. If the latter sentences are prefaced with the phrase 'In my opinion', this phrase is rather a modality for a factual statement, meaning something like 'As far as I know', or 'I may be wrong, but' or simply 'I believe that'. That is, no evaluative belief is expressed in that case, but a factual belief that is hedged or deictically limited with respect to the speaker, signalling personal belief. Complex discourse structures The opinion expressions briefly discussed above remain with the boundaries of sentences. Opinions, however, are not limited to such sentence level structures, but typically are expressed in whole texts and conversations. An editorial or 'opinion article' in a newspaper, political propaganda, an advertisement or a daily conversation may, also as a whole, function as an expression of one or more opinions. Indeed, in the same way as a local proposition may express an opinion, also the macro-propositions that define overall topics of discourse may of course express an opinion. That is, empirically, also the summary, headline or abstract of a text may feature opinion expressions. This is so even when at the local level of text or talk not all sentences express opinions. For instance, the arguments of
< previous page
page_20
next page >
< previous page
page_21
next page > Page 21
an argumentation may be quite factual, and only its conclusion may be expressing an opinion, viz. an opinion supported by the arguments. What is true for overall macropropositions also holds for interpropositional relations of coherence expressed in complex sentences or in sequences of sentences. If employers in the Netherlands claim, as they do, that high minority unemployment is due to lacking education, language knowledge, cultural deviance or motivation of minorities, they express an opinion about the relations between facts. Thus, more generally, explanations may be subjective, biased and hence based on opinions about the necessary or sufficient conditions of social situations and events. This means that also local discourse coherence, as signalled by connectives such as 'because', 'therefore', or 'due to', may depend on evaluative beliefs. Many of the sexist or racist prejudices are thus used to 'explain away' or legitimate social inequality. The same is true for the use of presuppositions in discourse. If beliefs are presupposed to be true, they may be strategically used to indirectly express opinions, as in such typical expressions as: (7) Lacking motivation among minorities to search for jobs is one of the causes of high minority unemployment. The rhetoric of opinions Rhetorical structures of discourse typically aim at impressing or persuading their recipients, and are therefore a prime locus for the expression of opinions. What is at stake here, are not so much specific categories of words that express opinions, as the strategically used structures that emphasise, highlight or otherwise call attention to such opinion expressions. Thus, alliterations, rhymes and other phonological figures of style are common in advertising, political slogans, tabloid headlines or everyday conversations to emphasise expressed opinions, as is also the case for syntactic parallelism: (8) I like Ike! (Political slogan in favour of President Eisenhower.) (9) He is a bloody bastard! (10) BOMBS, BULLETS, BLOOD IN BARRICADED BRITAIN. (The Daily Mail, December 27, 1985; on the Tottenham 'riot'.) (11) 'BIAS' BARS BLACKS FROM JOBS. (The Daily Mail, September 18, 1985.) (12) Sansui. High Rise Hi-Fi (Advertisement). (13) For speaking common sense he's been vilified; for being courageous he's been damned, for refusing to concede defeat his enemies can't forgive him. (...) (The Daily Mail, September 18, 1985; column by Lynda Lee-Potter about Honeyford, a Bradford headmaster suspended because of his racist writing.) Besides signalling emphasis and influencing attention of the recipients, the main cognitive function of such rhetorical repetition is to influence processing of such opinion expressions: while better organised in memory, they are also better retrievable and may therefore be more prominent in opinion formation. Similar remarks hold for semantic figures of style, such as comparison, metaphor, irony, understatement or hyperbole, among others, as in the following
< previous page
page_21
next page >
< previous page
page_22
next page > Page 22
editorial, in which metaphors ('thought-crime') and hyperbole ('nightmare') are used by a tabloid to marginalise critique of racism in British society: (14) THOUGHT-CRIME NIGHTMARE. In the nightmare world of George Orwell's 1984, those guilty of such things as thought-crime were always made to stage a full public confession. From Orwell's 1984 to Islington's 1985 is but a short step. The demand by union militants that a supervisor sign statements confessing her racism reminds of what life would be like for the rest of us if these people ever came to power. (The Daily Mail [editorial] August 3, 1985full text) Note in the last example also the use of negatively distancing 'these people', which suggests that also pronouns (as in 'us' and 'them') or demonstratives also may signal underlying opinions, e.g. about ingroups and outgroups. The following collection of expressions used by right-wing British newspapers to express their opinions about anti-racists and the 'loony left', similarly shows how rhetorical hyperboles and metaphors play a prominent role in the formulation of opinions: (15) A noisy mob of activist demonstrators (The Daily Telegraph, September 23, 1985). (16) These dismal fanatics, monstrous creatures (The Daily Telegraph, September 26, 1985). (17) Unscrupulous or feather-brained observers (The Daily Telegraph, September 30, 1985). (18) The British race relations pundits (The Daily Telegraph, October 1, 1985). (19) Trotzkyites, socialist extremists, Revolutionary Communists, Marxists and Black militants (The Daily Telegraph, October 9, 1985). (20) Race conflict 'high priests' (The Daily Telegraph, October 11, 1985). (21) Bone-brained Left-fascism (The Daily Telegraph [editorial] November 30, 1985). (22) The multi-nonsense brigade (The Daily Telegraph, January 11, 1985). (23) Mob of left-wing crazies (The Daily Mail, September 24, 1985). (24) THE RENT-A-RIOT AGITATORS (The Daily Mail, September 30, 1985). (25) SNOOPERS, untiring busybodies (The Sun [editorial] August 2, 1985). (26) Blinkered tyrants (The Sun, September 6, 1985). (27) Left-wing crackpots (The Sun, September 7, 1985). (28) Unleashing packs of Government snoopers (The Sun, October 16, 1985). (29) The Ayatollahs of Bradford, the Left-wing anti-racist mob. (The Sun, October 23, 1985). The metaphors, comparisons and hyperboles all have the function here of associating the Others (blacks, white anti-racists, leftists) with highly negative values and concepts, such as threatening animals ('monstrous creatures', 'hounds', 'pack'), undemocratic and oppressive rule and oppression ('Trotzkyites', 'snoopers', 'tyrants', 'Ayatollahs'), irrational crowds ('mob'), or the mentally disturbed ('crazies', 'crackpots'). That is, whereas hyperboles simply highlight and emphasise negative opinions, metaphors are a major means to establish mental associations between 'them' and prominent negative domains
< previous page
page_22
next page >
< previous page
page_23
next page > Page 23
of human experience and evaluation (for further analysis and discussion of these examples from the British press, see van Dijk, 1991). The organisation of opinion expressions As is already clear in the rhetoric of opinions, discourse has various means to organise the expression of opinions. Figures of style thus may emphasise, highlight or otherwise draw attention to specific opinions. The same is true for the various means to organise opinions in a specific order. That is, prominent opinions may be expressed first, or in other prominent positions, for instance at the beginning of clauses, sentences and whole texts, for instance in headlines, headers, or initial summaries. That is, sentential or discursive topicalisation of opinion expressions thus not only draws attention because of prominent placement, but also, and more crucially, may influence further processing: initial opinions may influence understanding, interpretation and evaluation of later information in the text. Hence, an opinion headline is not merely an expression of an evaluative belief, but also suggests that the whole semantic structure of the text should be interpreted in terms of such an opinion, as we have seen for the headline in example (14) about 'thought-crime nightmare'. As a result, opinion expressions may lead to mental models of readers that have an opinion as their dominant proposition (for discussion of this role of headlines, see van Dijk, 1988a, 1988b). Conversational opinion management Opinions expressed in everyday conversations and other dialogues are subject to a number of specific forms of strategic management. Thus, face-keeping, impression management or politeness constraints, among other strategies of interaction, put constraints on the open, direct or blatant expression of opinions, especially those about the recipient. Mitigation, hedging, hesitations, repairs and other forms to minimise or 'take back' (too) strong opinions may be the result (Brown & Levinson, 1987). Speakers also want to make sure that they control the recipient's opinion about themselves, which may also influence more generally the expression of 'risky' social opinions. They may then take recourse to strategic denials, such as 'I am not a racist, but...', or 'I have nothing against women's rights, but...'. The but-clauses that usually follow such disclaimers, always express socially controversial negative opinions, and the disclaimer thus aims at limiting the risk that recipients make negative inferences about the speaker from the expression of such negative opinions (Hewitt & Stokes, 1975; van Dijk, 1984, 1987). This also shows that the interactive dimension of the discursive expression of opinions is crucial. We have seen that opinions are not only personal but also socially based. Expressing strange, strong, controversial or otherwise problematic opinions, thus, needs to be interactively managed with care. Opinions that imply a critique of recipients or of those they associate with (family, friends, colleagues, parties, etc.) therefore tend to be formulated indirectly, or in a hedged or mitigated form. Ritual permissions may be asked or preliminary excuses may be made before they are being expressed ('If you allow me to say this: ...', 'Excuse me, but...').
< previous page
page_23
next page >
< previous page
page_24
next page > Page 24
Both in conversations and in written texts, there are many argumentative strategies to make opinions plausible, credible and acceptable, e.g. when it is claimed, in a Consensus move that 'not only I, but all people here think that...', or in a Consistency move that 'this happens all the time', or 'he is always doing that'. In many ways evidence may be put forward or credibility enhanced to support opinions, e.g. by telling about personal experiences that support positive or negative conclusions ('I have seen that myself'), by adducing authoritative or expert support for one's opinion ('You read that in the paper everyday', 'The prime minister also said so', etc.), as is the case for the strategic defence of racist opinions (van Dijk, 1984, 1987). The management of agreement and disagreement in argumentative conversation basically is about opinions that are put forward, supported and challenged. Much work in argumentation and conversation analysis has shown the complex interactional strategies involved in the management of disputes, conflicts or 'differences of opinion' in general (Greatbatch, 1992; Grimshaw, 1990; Jacobs, 1987; Pomerantz, 1984; Schiffrin, 1985). In sum, opinion expressions in text and talk seldom come alone. They tend to be organised by positioning them in prominent places, by stylistically or rhetorically highlighting them, by expressing them in specific schematic categories (such as Conclusions, Headlines, Leads or other initial and summarising categories), or by supporting them with arguments, evidence, credibility moves, and other discursive means to make opinions prominent, understandable and acceptable, or to de-emphasise and dissimulate them when they are risky. Contexts of communication (including the goals, values or opinions of recipients) are continuously monitored to avoid negative consequences of opinion expression, as well as to enhance the credibility or acceptability of opinions. Opinions and argumentation Evaluative social belief statements, because of their inherent variability over (groups of) language users and contexts, usually need to be supported by arguments. Fact statements may be detailed by specification and description, they may be generalised, or they may be explained by other fact statements which make them more credible and hence communicatively more acceptable. Opinions, on the other hand, express social or mental 'positions' or 'standpoints' on an issue, a perspective on events, or personal selections and hierarchies of social values, each of which may have to be backed up (van Eemeren et al., 1993). Whereas proof of any kind may be the discursive structure organising the demonstration of truth, or at least of socially based credibility and plausibility with respect to the 'facts', opinion statements are typically embedded in argumentation that makes them more or less defensible, reasonable, justifiable, or legitimate as conclusions. Unlike claims of truth, such opinion conclusions do not follow from their premises, but they become only more or less reasonable because of the arguments adduced to support them. And the aim of the discursive argument is not truth or knowledge, but the defence or the desired acceptance of the opinion. In other words, the very 'point' of most arguments is precisely the persuasive expression and support of an opinion. There are multiple argumentative strategies that aim to support opinion
< previous page
page_24
next page >
< previous page
page_25
next page > Page 25
statements. Factual statements, if considered beyond dispute, are of course also important in evaluative argumentation. If I think that the world community should stop the slaughter and the rapes in Bosnia, even by military intervention, such an opinion first of all presupposes the facts that slaughter and rapes in Bosnia actually do occur and that the world community has access to military might. Opinions however also have implications, and these might have to be supported or defended by fact statements that are possibly or probably true, or that express causal or rational relationships. Thus, the opinion statement about Bosnia is reasonable and defensible only if I have grounds to believe that military intervention will stop the civil war, such as the belief that the Serbian military in Bosnia can be conquered and disarmed, or otherwise forced to negotiate or stop the killings. Each of these implications may be challenged, and each of them may be in need of further support, thus leading to a sequence of proand con-arguments that support or challenge an opinion conclusion or its implications. Note that the very normative opinion about the war in Bosnia is itself the result of a strategic process of evaluation, in which values about human life, safety and the integrity of the body play a prominent role: indeed, the opinion presupposes the basic value statement that killing people and raping women is bad, and inconsistent with basic human rights. Usually, such basic opinion propositions need not be made explicit in talk. As is the case with general knowledge and presuppositions in factual proof, also basic ideological or value statements may be presupposed to be shared by virtually all social members. If it follows from such a basic statement that therefore the civil war in Bosnia is morally unacceptable, and if it holds true for all states and international organisations that they must prevent morally unacceptable situations if they can, it follows that they must also try to stop the war by any legitimate and realistic means. In sum, the mental underlying structures of an opinion may have to be brought to bear in parts of the argumentation when an opinion or its implications are being challenged. Indeed, it may be argued that even massive international intervention will not be able to conquer guerrilla armies, and will only bring more violence and more deaths, and won't change the causes of the civil war, so that it may soon start again. Such counter-arguments thus focus on causal links (military intervention causes that the war will stop, and international military escalation of the conflict will cause more deaths). Counter-arguments themselves may need to be backed up, e.g. by comparisons to other situations of ethnic or nationalistic conflict, that is, by examples, or by detailing a plausible scenario of military intervention that invariably has such a consequence. Consequently, the argumentative support of opinions, either in monological text or in dialogical disputes, features presupposed (and hence often non-expressed) facts, assumptions about cause-consequence relations, beliefs about the possibility or probability of action and events, as well as basic value statements about socially desirable (or non-desirable) properties, actions and interactions of social actors, about group relations or about societal structures, that is, about the social moral order. Interestingly, this suggests not only that argumentation may be locally, and hence strategically, 'produced', viz. in response to counter-arguments and the
< previous page
page_25
next page >
< previous page
page_26
next page > Page 26
requirements of the communicative context (we usually need to argue more extensively or explicitly during an exam or in an editorial than in an everyday conversation), but also that argumentation structures may reflect pre-existing, underlying structures of social cognition. Basic norms and values, fundamental social knowledge, or widely shared attitudes, goals or aims, are by definition not invented on the fly. On the contrary, we need such an extensive system of evaluative and other beliefs in order to understand, produce and derive new opinions that are tailored to new situations, and to new communicative contexts for their defence or challenge. This flexible combination of extant personal and especially socially shared cognitions with situationally variable conditions and interactionally 'ongoing' changes of context, defines all discourse, and hence also the argumentative support of opinions. Examination of argumentation structures thus provides interesting evidence about the structures and the strategies of the social mind. True, much of the 'obvious' underlying structures may remain presupposed in text and talk, but there are many strategies to force them into the open, such as repeated 'Why?' questions, like 'Why should the killing be stopped?' ('Because killing and raping is wrong'). 'Why is killing and raping wrong' ('Because people's right to life and integrity of their body is a basic human right'), etc. In sum, several challenges in spontaneous or controlled interaction may force social members to express opinion 'premises' that would otherwise be taken for granted, and hence remain presupposed. Illustration: An Op-Ed Article Let us finally illustrate and test some of the observations made above in a partial analysis of an editorial by Anthony Lewis about the situation in former Yugoslavia, originally published in the New York Times, and reprinted in the International Herald Tribune on October 2-3, 1993 (see Appendix for full text). The headline of the article is itself a macro-proposition expressing an opinion, and may be assumed to summarise the opinion conclusion of the op-ed article: (30) To Accept Greater Serbia Is to Fan the Blaze Ahead The opinion expressed here (the original NYT headline was 'The Price of Surrender') is based on a belief about the consequences of accepting Serbia's nationalist and expansionist policies, consequences that are politically and morally unacceptable: the metaphor 'fanning the blaze' implies that we would contribute to an even worse situation in the future, which is in conflict with the values of a peaceful world and hence morally or politically unacceptable. We see that an opinion statement about what we should or should not do is (a) ultimately based on norms and values, and (b) on beliefs that are derived from plausible guesses about specific consequences of specific present actions and events, viz. those in former Yugoslavia, which in turn are implicitly based on (c) beliefs about general causes, reasons and consequences of human political action. In the analysis of the rest of the article, we focus on those elements of the text that express or imply an opinion (in italics in the examples). Previous factual statements in which the opinion is embedded may be summarised.
< previous page
page_26
next page >
< previous page
page_27
next page > Page 27
(31) By rejecting terms for the dismemberment of their country, members of the Bosnian parliament have given the West a last chance to understand its policy there: a chance to draw back from folly and danger. That this is the last chance is obviously an opinion of Lewis, since he cannot know whether further chances will occur. That is, we may assume that all statements about the future (or statements about the present that imply statements about the future), may be taken to express an opinion while they do not express a factual belief. Note that this belief is not evaluative: no value is involved, but only beliefs about what will or will not happen in the future. The use of 'folly' and 'danger', however, does express evaluative beliefs, viz. about the nature of present Western policies. Given the values of wisdom and safety, foolish and dangerous policies are by definition bad, and if the West is engaged in such policies, it is a defensible opinion that the West should change them while it still can. Note that the opinion about the 'folly' and 'danger' of Western policies is not asserted, but presupposed here. This policy, the author continues, is to accept the ethnic partition of Bosnia, and he adds, in a relative clause modifying 'policy': however clothed. This metaphorical modifier also implies an opinion (about this policy), viz. that it is not explicit and open, but disguised. If openness and honesty are social or political values, then, implying that a policy is disguised, this presupposes the opinion that the very enactment of the policy is bad, while dishonest. Referring to the acceptance of an ethnic partition may itself imply an opinion, viz. because of the stylistic lexical choice, which associates this political decision with immoral systems like Apartheid, segregation and racism. Obviously, if Lewis had merely referred to the policy as accepting 'partition', it would have implied less moral disapproval, and if he had called it the 'political reality' in Bosnia, he would have implied a more or less positive opinion about the policy if 'facing the facts' is a positive value. Conversely, he could have been even more critical by speaking of a 'racist partition', or of the 'genocidal partition' of Bosnia. These examples suggest that opinions may appear with varying strengths, and directly or indirectly in discourse, viz. as weak or strong implications of metaphors or lexical choices. When Lewis in the next paragraph identifies the Serbs as the aggressor, he explicitly displays another opinion by his lexical choice, viz. about guilt and responsibility for aggression, given that aggression is inconsistent with the value of non-violence. Seizure of territory is used to spell out the nature of the aggression, and also that description of the acts of the Serbs implies a negative opinion, given the political value of national integrity and independence: someone who seizes territory, that is, someone who takes what belongs to others, is a thief. Methodologically, we may ask whether such a description, as such, expresses an opinion. After all, it may be considered a generally accepted fact that Serbia or its Serbian forces in Bosnia did seize land in Bosnia, so that Lewis only describes the facts, and does not give an opinion. While this is so, it is not only true that such a view of the facts may be disputed by Serbia, but also that the Serbian actions might have been described even more neutrally (Serbia's
< previous page
page_27
next page >
< previous page
page_28
next page > Page 28
acceptance of the actions of Bosnian Serbs) or positively (the right of all Serbs to form one nation). That is, as a rule we shall assume that any description of a person, action or event that implies a property that is inconsistent with prevalent laws, rules, norms or values, is an opinion statement. Describing the Serbian acts as 'seizing territory' thus expresses an evaluative belief about the nature of such acts in relation to international laws. If Serbia disputes such a transgression of international laws, as it does, then Lewis' statement is part of a political debate, in which he takes position against Serbia, and hence expresses an opinion by his negative description of the acts of Serbia. The examples of aggressor and seizure of territory recall the earlier example of calling someone a 'thief' who is believed to have stolen something. Obviously, if such a belief is unfounded, the term 'thief' expresses an opinion, and not a fact. If however there is legal or other proof of somebody's stealing, then the description would be acceptable as stating a fact. Indeed, someone accused of being a thief could not sue for slander in that case. The same would be true in international affairs. If an international organisation such as the United Nations, or the international Law Court, determines that Serbia was the 'aggressor' and has unlawfully 'seized territory' in Bosnia, Lewis' opinion statement would change into a factual statement, or at least into a founded, socially shared, legitimate opinion statement. Thus, fact descriptions are opinions if they imply negative evaluations that may be challenged, and are factual if there is consensus that they are true 'as described'. Obviously, this still leaves room for dispute, which suggests that the difference between factual and evaluative beliefs is gradual. However, consensual event descriptions are more legitimate and reasonable as 'characterisations of the truth' than non-consensual ones. It is therefore crucial to realise that opinions about people, actions and events are as such always relative to their conceptualisation, and opinion statements are only relative to their descriptions. Lewis recognises that those who favour the present policy have some point if they defend it in moral terms: acceptance of the partition will save lives. However, he rejects such an argument by calling upon even more fundamental principles 'fundamental to peace and decency in the world'. This opinion, formulated as a counter-argument, is itself founded on the principle that there is a hierarchy of norms and values: although an ad hoc realistic policy that may save lives has a moral point (saving lives is good), it is nevertheless a bad policy because it is a violation of general values (peace and decency): a higher order value (world peace) is thus set off against a lower order one (saving lives in one country). This comparison of basic values is part of the system of the moral and political order, and therefore a strategic move in the foundation of moral reasoning and opinion formation. However, since Lewis cannot know for sure whether world peace will be threatened by this policy, he cannot simply make an inference from this general principle, but only expresses an opinion: categorising this partition as indecent and a threat to world peace is an evaluative mental act. Lewis' opinion about 'territorial acquisition' becomes even more explicit when he mentions the underlying norms and values that guide his opinion: 'it is
< previous page
page_28
next page >
< previous page
page_29
next page > Page 29
forbidden by international law and the United Nations Charter'. That is, whether it may be theoretically problematic and whether merely using the phrase 'seizure of territory' implies an opinion, mention of international law obviously shows that he thinks such seizure is wrong, while 'forbidden'. That territorial seizure is generally forbidden is a fact, but this fact is here referred to as support for his specific critical opinion about the 'dismemberment' of Bosnia by Serbian 'conquest'. To further spell out the grounds for his opinion, Lewis does not merely refer to international law or the UN Charter, which could be seen as legalistic: if an action were morally right, international law might be less relevant. However, by spelling out the implications, viz. that accepting partition 'means genocide', he not only refers to international laws against genocide, but also implies that accepting 'dismemberment' of Bosnia is fundamentally and morally wrong, since genocide is generally considered to be one of the worst crimes in the world. The same is true for his argument that accepting partition implies the 'destruction of a UN member state': here too, a formal, legalistic argument (Bosnia's membership of the UN) and a more moral one (destruction), are combined. In somewhat more detail, we now see how opinions are strategically expressed in text: a specific, personal opinion about a specific case (the partition of Bosnia) is supported by a sequence of arguments which are themselves partly factual and partly evaluative, partly general and partly specific. The general ones, if shared and known, need not always be made explicit, although it is a strong move to do so in some context, as is the case when Lewis recalls that 'acquisition of territory' is forbidden by international law. That dismemberment, destruction and genocide are (generally) forbidden or morally wrong is not explicitly spelled out, but directly and explicitly applied to the Bosnian case as a specific example. That is, one of the ways opinions may be supported is to spell out their consequences or implications, and to qualify these as being wrong. In other words, the general rule for opinion discourse is that a statement is an opinion statement if it is shown that its implications are opinions: the partition of Bosnia is wrong because it has wrong consequences. Despite its explicitness, this opinion article also has numerous implicit opinions. It may seem a factual statement that the United States has 'a particularly heavy responsibility' because it is the only superpower. That is, if we generally accept that superpowers have special responsibilities, it would logically follow that the US has. However, again we may read this as an opinion, viz. as saying that the US should take its responsibility because of its superpower status, which presupposes that the US does not now take this responsibility. Indeed a sentence later this is made explicit: President Clinton avoids his responsibility and is 'waffling', which clearly implies an opinion about Clinton, since 'waffling' is a negative action given the positive social values of decisiveness and determination. Similarly, referring to Clinton's actions as a 'refusal to face the real problem' also implies an opinion since such an action is inconsistent with the positive values of 'being realistic' and 'facing the facts'. After this brief analysis of the first paragraphs, let us now list some of the other opinion arguments of Lewis in separate clauses, and try to see what their properties are in a somewhat more systematic way:
< previous page
page_29
next page >
< previous page
page_30
next page > Page 30
(32) The danger is extreme Serbian nationalism. (33) No, the Serbian demagogue is not a physical threat to all of Europe. (34) But he is a psychological threat, a mortal one. (35) For he is creating a climate hospitable to that menacing phenomenon, extreme nationalism. (36) The dangers of nationalism taken too far hardly have to be pointed out. (37) The gathering storm in Europe is extreme nationalism. (38) America has the most vital security interest in stopping it. (39) By doing nothing in Bosnia we have legitimised its fearful tool, 'ethnic cleansing'. (40) The excuse [of Clinton saying that he was prevented by Europe] is feeble. (41) Mr Christopher said no, he preferred simply to talk the idea over... (42) There was no firm US leadership. (43) Defenders of apartheid in South Africa used to tell visitors that the problem was 'complex', when in fact it was simple. (44) So too in Bosnia. (45) The noblest purposes in foreign policy mean little without the use of power to achieve them. (46) Bosnia is not a sideshow but the main event, because it has eroded belief in America's resolve. (47) What is the use of professions about democracy if we will not act against ethnic barbarism and aggression in Europe? Not surprisingly, virtually the whole remainder of the article is replete with opinions, as may be expected from an opinion article. The sections that do not explicitly express opinions are mostly statements of facts (or beliefs about facts) that are used as targets of opinions (e.g. about what the US, Mr Christopher, or Clinton's National Security adviser Mr Lake said and did), possible or real counter-arguments of the US administration (Europe prevented the US from acting more decisively), or as factual support of opinions (similar arguments were used by those who defended apartheid). Note that part of such 'factual' statements may well incorporate words that imply opinions, such as referring to the Serbs as the 'aggressors' and to the Bosnian Muslims as 'victims'. In this latter part of his article, Lewis focuses on US policy, and explains why, in his opinion, the US cannot afford to act, viz. while 'extreme European nationalism is against the vital security interests of the US', an overall opinion explicitly expressed in (38). Let us examine the constitutive opinions of that overall opinion, as well as their organisation and underlying structures in somewhat more detail, by commenting on some of the relevant words and propositions. 'Danger' in (32) signals an opinion because of the positive values of safety and security, whereas 'extreme' generally implies a negative opinion, given the value of moderation in (US) political philosophy. The next opinion (33), is a concession and a disclaimer, but also hides a personal opinion ('demagogue'): agreement with an opinion of the opponent, which serves as an introduction to the following but-clause, which is an opinion because psychological and mortal threats are inconsistent with our goals, norms and values of security. The opinion is emphasised by reference to the ultimate consequence: death. Since, as a rule
< previous page
page_30
next page >
< previous page
page_31
next page > Page 31
formulated above, negative consequences of an act imply that also the act itself is valued negatively, Serbia's extreme nationalism is also valued negatively because it is a condition of fomenting extreme nationalism elsewhere in Europe. The overall opinion argument that extreme nationalism is dangerous is then spelled out, after metaphorically identifying it again as 'a gathering storm', which itself is an expression of an opinion (storms are dangerous, while threatening our safety). At this point the core opinion argument is brought to the fore, an argument that the author knows is one that counts in Washington and among the US public: our vital security interests. We need not recall that this opinion in its many guises has been the supporting argument for most US interventions abroad during the last 100 years, but it shows that Lewis knows what really plays a role in US foreign policy. He does not spell out why or how the situation in Bosnia or extreme Serbian nationalism might be a threat to the United States. Instead he reverts to the equally powerful moral argument: if the US does nothing it legitimises ethnic cleansing. Then Lewis proceeds to rejecting the counter-arguments of the US administration, which implies that he holds the opinion that such arguments are not valid, an opinion which he also expresses explicitly when he qualifies US excuses as 'feeble'. His counter-arguments seem largely factual: Europe did not merely prevent the US, and NATO was prepared to discuss US proposals for action, but Foreign Secretary Mr Christopher 'said no, he preferred simply to talk the idea over'. As such, this seems like a factual statement, viz. of what Christopher did and did not do, but the way it is phrased implies an opinion: 'saying no', and 'simply' wanting to talk things over may be construed as irresponsible refusal and lack of initiative. Methodologically, this is an interesting example since there does not seem to be a direct opinion signal in the sentence: describing an action as 'simply' wanting to do something may, depending on the situation, be positive, neutral or negative. However, given the previous part of the discussion, describing Christopher's actions in this way obviously implies that Lewis does not agree with this lack of US initiative when an opportunity was there. Saying no, and simply talking things over, thus means refusal to accept an opportunity, which is unacceptable if the opportunity should have been used to try to stop the killing in Bosnia. Thus, the underlying (normative) opinion rule is that if A must do X to prevent Y, and if Y is particularly bad, and if A has the opportunity and ability to do X, but does not do so, not-doing X is morally wrong. It follows that if A is described in a text as not doing X in a context where obviously X is preferable or mandatory, such a description may be construed as an opinion. This implied opinion is eventually made explicit, as a local opinion conclusion from this passage about Christopher, when Lewis affirms that US leadership was not 'firm'. Another interesting example is the strategic comparison of the US administration's position on Bosnia with South Africa and apartheid. Again, the relevant paragraph seems largely factual: Lewis merely recalls the argument of the proponents of Apartheid that the situation in South Africa 'was complex', and contrasts this with his own explicit opinion, viz. that it was 'simple'. He does not spell out why this was so, but his implications are clear since most of us share his view why it was 'simple'viz. racism and white group power and dominance
< previous page
page_31
next page >
< previous page
page_32
next page > Page 32
over a black majority. Similarly, the sentence 'So too in Bosnia' is not merely a factual statement. It reverts back to the present situation in Bosnia, and implies that the opinion about South African apartheid is also valid for Bosnia, and that therefore the US arguments are not only invalid, but also immoral. The point here is that, as usual, discourses are like semantic icebergs: they may express a simple proposition that can be properly understood only when linked to a complex network of explicit (previously expressed) as well as implicit (mentally represented, e.g. socially shared) propositions. Without these relationships a sentence such as 'So too in Bosnia' could hardly be understood to express an opinion, since it appears only to state a comparison. Underlying this example, there seems to be another (well-known) opinion rule: if A is compared to B, and if B is qualified negatively, then it implies that A too is negative. And for texts: describing or implying B as being negative, and identifying B as a comparative example of A, is sufficient to imply that A is negative. Finally, Lewis wraps up his discussion by a number of general statements, formulated as morals, rules or aphorisms applicable in politics. Whereas 'noble purposes' obviously implies something positive, this positive evaluation is contrasted by the negative evaluation of refusing to realise such purposes (viz. by using one's power). This evaluation is again based on the value of decisiveness and the general norm that it is imperative 'to do good if one can'. By formulating a general principle, Lewis implicitly applies the principle to US foreign policy. Again, we encounter an indirect way of expressing an opinion. This time not by comparison with a similar case (as between Bosnia and South Africa), but by subsuming a specific case (inaction in Bosnia) under a general normative principle. Countering the US administration's argument (mentioned in the previous paragraph), viz. that the US should look at the larger picture of democracy in the world, Lewis metaphorically expresses the opinion that Bosnia is not a marginal case but the main issue at stake. This opinion is not supported by moral arguments (such as the deaths in Bosnia), but by US interests: that the world should continue to respect 'America's resolve'. Again, Lewis knows that what happens in faraway Bosnia may not be relevant for most US citizens, and certainly not to the US administration, but arguments of power and credibility, and hence US interests, are crucial to persuade the politicians. However, here again, the political argument (US credibility) is coupled with a moral one: if we profess democracy we must act against 'ethnic barbarism' in Europe. The term 'ethnic barbarism' itself is an explicit opinion expression, while barbarism is generally found inconsistent with a tolerant, humane and democratic society. Implied is the opinion that professing democracy without acting to defend it is morally wrong, given the values of decisiveness and the norm, mentioned above, that 'one must do good if one can'. Note finally that the last sentence is not a direct assertion, but a rhetorical question, which emphasises its implied opinion. Note too that the coherence of Lewis' text not only seems to be based on the facts or opinions of his underlying mental model about US relations with the events in Bosnia, but also on the relations between social opinions and attitudes and their ideological basis. In this way, Lewis not only defends isolated opinions,
< previous page
page_32
next page >
< previous page
page_33
next page > Page 33
but indeed supports broader attitudes and ideologies, e.g. about US foreign policies, about humanitarian intervention, about democratic principles or about non-violence. Thus, in the same way that the coherence of a factual text resides on the structures of facts in a model, in relation to more general knowledge structures, an opinion text becomes coherent when it is based on the relations between (specific) opinions in a model in relation to more general attitudes and ideologies. Since different attitudes and ideologies may be involved, this may also mean that an opinion text is evaluatively inconsistent. The same is true when events are being evaluated from different points of view, different perspectives, or on the basis of conflicting values. Concluding Remarks From this (partial) analysis of some fragments of an opinion article in the press, we may draw the following conclusions: (a) Opinion statements do not always feature explicit evaluative words. They may appear quite factual, and only the implications of such factual statements may involve norms and values. Often, it is the combination of factual statements with previously expressed or implied beliefs that makes factual statements evaluative. This suggests that both the expression and the understanding of an opinion is a complex process involving sometimes many interpretative (mental) steps. This also means that opinions and opinion statements are relative to the recipients: some recipients may, and others may not interpret a proposition as the expression of an evaluative belief. (b) In general, specific textual expressions may be interpreted as stating a (specific) opinion if they directly or indirectly imply consistency or inconsistency with prevalent, socially shared, opinions or the norms or values underlying them. (c) It is often difficult to decide whether the mere reference to 'negative' events, that is events that are inconsistent with social or human values and norms (like war, death, violence, crime) always implies a negative opinion. Crucial is the position of the author about these events, which may be expressed, directly or indirectly, by the formulation of a description of the events. That is, if the same events may be described in neutral or positive terms, e.g. 'separate development', then describing them in negative terms (such as 'ethnic barbarism') displays an opinion. It might even be assumed that opinions may be involved by default: if an event is generally evaluated and described as negative, even a neutral description may imply an evaluation. If we adopt that principle, it crucially implies that much of purportedly 'neutral' or 'non-partisan' expressions in news reports about negative events are expressions of an opinion. Refraining from formulating an opinion, thus, may also be based on an opinion: not taking a stand, is also a stand. The former point suggests that there are not only norms, values, rules, or laws, or socially shared attitudes with respect to which opinions are being formed and changed, but also general principles for the expression or formulation of opinions. That is, evaluative expressions may sometimes count as factual, and
< previous page
page_33
next page >
< previous page
page_34
next page > Page 34
vice versa, depending on the shared, consensual ways of describing social and political events. Semantic or rhetorical mitigation and exaggeration with respect to the 'norm' may in such cases count as implying an opinion. Describing the Holocaust of the Jews in terms of the 'demise of a number of Jews' would be a typical example of a gravely insulting mitigation of the facts. In this sense, expressions of opinions such as 'ethnic cleansing' and 'ethnic barbarism' in the example we analysed are dovetailing with widespread evaluations of the situation in Bosnia, so much so that they may be interpreted as describing the facts 'as they are', and hence as factual. One might say that if there is no variation in opinion, that is, if consensus is virtually total, then opinion statements may become factual, even if, as such, they may appear to be evaluative while describing a situation as being in conflict with social norms, values or goals. The same is true for opinions supported by official institutions or consensual procedures, as when calling somebody a 'thief' becomes factual if it has been proven in a court of law or otherwise that he or she has indeed stolen something. In the same way that consensually shared factual beliefs may become knowledge, also consensually shared evaluative opinions may become 'factual'. Another view of this theoretical dilemma would be to maintain that also shared social opinions are no less opinions as long as they are based on processes of evaluation involving basic norms and values, but that in that case personal beliefs become 'valid' in another way, viz. as socially shared evaluative beliefs, viz. group attitudes. (e) The two last points also suggest that concepts or the words that express them have more or less opinion implications or associations. That is, in our culture the concepts/words 'democracy', 'barbarism', 'thief', 'racism' or 'murder' have generally more evaluative implications than the concepts/words 'lamp', 'yellow' or 'stone'. That is, the implied meanings or conditions of use more often involve evaluations with respect to socially shared norms, values or goals. Applying such words in specific contexts, thus, means that the speaker uses such terms as 'conclusions' of a (possibly routine and conventionalised) evaluation process: we call an act 'barbaric' only if it satisfies a number of negative criteria relative to our basic values of action (non-violence, humane, etc.). (f) There are a number of strategic principles and maxims governing the interpretation of opinions, such as those of Relevant Comparison (if A is compared to B, and A is described negatively, then B is also negative), Generalisation (if A is a generalisation of B, and if A is described negatively, then the instantiation B is also negative) and Relevant Consequences (if B1, B2, ... are described as negative consequences of A, then A is also negative). (g) Opinion statements seldom come alone. They are embedded in complex sequences of argumentation, in which both factual and evaluative statements may be made as support of an opinion, and in which counter-arguments (opinions of opponents) are formulated, partly accepted or challenged. Following the usual primacy and prominence ordering of media discourse, this opinion article usually states a major opinion before supporting arguments. (h) Opinion sequences in discourse are usually incomplete, in the sense that
< previous page
page_34
next page >
< previous page
page_35
next page > Page 35
most of the propositions involved in the support of an opinion remain implicit, viz. as less relevant contents of personal models, or as well-known opinions and implications of socially shared attitudes, ideological frameworks or general social norms, values and goals. Thus, as is the case for knowledge, evaluative social cognitions underlying the production and interpretation of discourse also play an important role in the expression and understanding of opinions. To fully understand an opinion, recipients need to reconstruct at least part of the presupposed shared social cognitions from which the opinions are derived. (i) Specific or personal opinions are often based on social, shared opinions within a group or culture. These in turn appear to be organised in more complex clusters, such as attitudes about US foreign policy, intervention or the partition of Bosnia. Finally, these attitudes may further be organised in ideologically based systems, such as those of democracy, nationalism, or anti-racism, and based on fundamental cultural norms and values, such as equality, non-violence, autonomy, and so on. In sum, personal opinions may express individual evaluations about situations, events, actions or people, but the criteria, principles or values involved in the judgement may be social, as are the more general opinions and attitudes of which a specific opinion may be an instance. This relation between specific, personal opinions, and general social opinions, may also make a text more or less evaluatively coherent. References Bar-Tal, D. and Kruglanski, A.W. (eds) (1988) The Social Psychology of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Billig, M. (1991) Ideology and Opinions: Studies in Rhetorical Psychology. London: Sage Publications. Brown, P. and Levinson, S.C. (1987) Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Button, G. (ed.) (1991) Ethnomethodology and the Human Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eagly, A.H. and Chaiken, S. (1993) The Psychology of Attitudes. Orlando: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Fiske, S.T. and Taylor, S.E. (1991) Social Cognition (2nd edn). New York: McGraw-Hill. Frijda, N. (1987) The Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Greatbatch, D. (1992) On the management of disagreement between news interviewees. In P. Drew and J. Heritage (eds) Talk at Work. Interaction in Institutional Settings (pp. 268-301). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grimshaw, A.D. (1990) Conflict Talk. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hewitt, J.P. and Stokes, R. (1975) Disclaimers. American Sociological Review 40, 1-11. Hintikka,J. (1962) Knowledge and Belief. An Introduction to the Logic of the Two Notions. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Jacobs, S. (1987) The management of disagreement in conversation. In F.H. van Eemeren, R. Grootendorst, J.A. Blair and C.A. Willard (eds) Argumentation Across the Lines of Discipline (pp. 229-39). Dordrecht: Foris. Johnson-Laird, P.N. (1983) Mental Models. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kornblith, H. (ed.) (1994) Naturalizing Epistemology (2nd edn). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lehrer, K. (1990) Theory of Knowledge. London: Routledge. Phillips Griffiths, A. (1967) Knowledge and Beliefs. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pomerantz, A. (1984) Agreeing and disagreeing with assessments: Some features of
< previous page
page_35
next page >
< previous page
page_36
next page > Page 36
preferred/dispreferred turn shapes. In J.M. Atkinson and J. Heritage (eds) Structures of Social Action (pp 57-101). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rokeach, M. (1968) Beliefs, Attitudes and Values. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. (1979) Understanding Human Values: Individual and Societal. New York: Free Press. Rosch, E. and Lloyd, B.B. (eds) (1978) Cognition and categorization. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Schiffrin, D. (1985) Everyday argument: The organisation of diversity in talk. In T.A. van Dijk (ed.) Handbook of Discourse Analysis, Vol. 3 (pp. 35-46). London: Academic Press. Schmitt, F.F. (1992) Knowledge and Belief. London: Routledge. van Dijk, T.A. (1984) Prejudice in Discourse: An Analysis of Ethnic Prejudice in Cognition and Conversation. Amsterdam: Benjamins. (1987) Communicating Racism: Ethnic Prejudice in Thought and Talk. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, Inc. (1988a) News Analysis. Case Studies of International and National News in the Press. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. (1988b) News as Discourse. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. (1991) Racism and the Press. London: Routledge. (1995a) Discourse semantics and ideology. Discourse and Society 6 (2), 243-89. (1995b) Discourse analysis as ideology analysis. In C. Schäffner and A. Wenden (eds) Language and Peace (pp. 17-33). Aldershot: Dartmouth. van Dijk, T.A. and Kintsch, W. (1983) Strategies of Discourse Comprehension. New York: Academic Press. van Eemeren, F.H., Grootendorst, R., Jackson, S. and Jacobs, S. (1993) Reconstructing Argumentative Discourse. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press. Van Oostendorp, H. and Zwaan, R.A. (eds) (1994) Naturalistic Text Comprehension. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Appendix To Accept Greater Serbia Is to Fan the Blaze Ahead Anthony Lewis WASHINGTON By rejecting terms for the dismemberment of their country, members of the Bosnian Parliament have given the West a last chance to understand the consequences of its policy there: a chance to draw back from folly and danger. What is the policy? For months now, however clothed, it has been to accept the ethnic partition of Bosnia. Western publics as well as the Bosnians have been told in effect that partition is inevitable. The negotiations conducted by Lord Owen and Thorvald Stoltenberg have essentially been about legitimizing the Serbian aggressors' seizure of territory. The agreement they propose would award legitimacy by lifting sanctions on Serbia in return for the Serbs' giving up a part of their conquests. Defenders of the dismemberment agreement say that it is the least bad outcome, given present realities. It would at least stop the killing and starvation before another terrible winter sets in. That argument has some force. But those who make itthe international mediators and political leadersdo not mention the price that would be paid: the abandonment of principles fundamental to peace and decency in the world. Acquisition of territory by force is forbidden by international law and the United Nations Charter. The Bosnian dismemberment agreement means accept-
< previous page
page_36
next page >
< previous page
page_37
next page > Page 37
ing territorial conquest. It means accepting genocide as a way of acquiring territory. It means accepting the destruction of a UN member state. Because it is the only superpower, the United States has a particularly heavy responsibility for this outcome. President Clinton has tried to avoid the responsibility by waffling. But he, like his predecessor, has refused to face the real problem, the real danger in the former Yugoslavia. The danger is extreme Serbian nationalism. The last two US Administrations have effectively concluded that it is better to come to terms with a Greater Serbia. After all, it is said, Slobodan Milosevic is not a Hitler trying to conquer all of Europe. No, the Serbian demagogue is not a physical threat to all of Europe. But he is a psychological threat, a mortal one. For he is creating a climate hospitable to that menacing phenomenon, extreme nationalism. The dangers of nationalism taken too far hardly have to be pointed out. All around the former Soviet Union ethnic excesses have burst into violence or are on the edge. In Germany and France racism acts under the banner of ethnic purity. The gathering storm in Europe is extreme nationalism. America has the most vital security interest in stopping it. But by doing nothing in Bosnia we have legitimized its fearful tool, ethnic cleansing. President Clinton says that he wanted to actlift the arms embargo on the Bosnian Muslim victims of aggression and carry out air strikes on the aggressorsbut was prevented by European objections. The excuse is feeble. When Secretary of State Christopher met NATO ministers in May, according to an account by Joseph Fitchett in The International Herald Tribune, the NATO Secretary General, Manfred Worner, offered to call a meeting and support the lift-andstrike proposal as a vital NATO initiative. But Mr Christopher said no, he preferred simply to talk the idea over with each of the other countries' representatives. There was no firm US Ieadership. President Clinton's national security adviser, Anthony Lake, said last week that the Administration had 'struggled with the complex tragedy in Bosnia'. Defenders of apartheid in South Africa used to tell visitors the problem was 'complex', when in fact its cause was overpoweringly simple. So too in Bosnia. As Mr Lake said at another point in that speech, the tragedy results from 'ethnic barbarism' and 'aggression against an independent state'. Mr Lake said American foreign policy debates were focusing too much on such issues as Bosnia. We should look to the larger picture, he said: to the Clinton Administration's 'strategy of enlargement' of democracy. But the noblest purposes in foreign policy mean little without the use of power to achieve them. Bosnia is not a sideshow but the main event, because it has eroded belief in America's resolve. What is the use of professions about democracy if we will not act against ethnic barbarism and aggression in Europe? (From: International Herald Tribune, October 2-3, 1993). Reproduced by kind permission of the New York Times.
< previous page
page_37
next page >
< previous page
page_38
next page > Page 38
The Debate Ideologies and Other Disciplines Angel Gordo Lopez (University of Bradford): Not coming from a linguistic background, I would like to talk about the politics of the scheme you used. I find your use of some concepts from cognitive psychology to try to explain the structuring of attitudes, opinions etc. interesting since cognitive theory does not yet have a model to represent the internal ordering of the mind. Teun van Dijk: When I think about structures of cognition, my interpretation is very far away from current debates in cognitive psychology. I am not concerned with whether memory is structured in the computer metaphor of interface, because I am not aware of any other alternatives that I could use in my analysis. I am aware of the fact that when you opt for certain cognitive concepts, you may, to a certain extent, be adopting socio-cultural or political notions that you do not want in your analysis. But to be able to speak about representations of reality, I need a terminology and a theory for this, and, at the moment, I have no alternative than the one offered by cognitive psychology. I am open to other things, but however this theory is formulated, I need a theory of structures of the mind which accounts for thoughts, interpretations, opinions, ideologies, beliefs etc. I will not accept a theory that explains them away by saying'It's all discourse', 'I don't know what the mind is', 'the only evidence we have is discourse, so why don't we talk about opinions etc. in terms of discursive configurations?' I don't want to reduce the mind to discourse, or vice versa. Alexandra Korol (University of Manchester): Could we expand a bit on the reflexivity of attitudes and their connection to ideology. Because you did show the attitude to ideology link, but not the link the other way around, and for me, the relationship is reflexive. The social environment where these intercourses are going on, and where this ideology exists must be taken into account. Teun van Dijk: Yes, of course, and one of the things I try to fight against is the discussion of ideology as 'here' and society or social context as 'there'. So, one of my pleas is that the social context should be an integral part of the analysis. Ideologies are acquired, used, negotiated, changed in specific social contexts and these contexts may be localin the sense of talk, interpersonal communication etc.or they may be the broader social context in the sense of social structure. Sue Wright (Aston University): I'm interested in seeing how ideology affects structures of vocabulary and how ideology is related to the way we formulate ideas in speech. You seem to see this as a linear processfrom the ideology to the way you're using the language. I see this rather as a circular process. Since you can only express it in language, the structures you are using will affect your ideology. I suppose it's very weak Sapir-Whorf reallybut you can't say what you don't have the words to say, can you? For example, there are certain words for 'foreigner' which carry with them a value judgement and this will affect how you think and talk and feel. You can't frame the concept without words and you can't really stand outside the concept and find a different way of framing it,
< previous page
page_38
next page >
< previous page
page_39
next page > Page 39
because you're still using the same language that framed the concept! So, would you agree that it is perhaps more circular than linear? Teun van Dijk: Yes. People acquire ideologies, attitudes, opinions etc. through speaking and communicatingso, of course, the process is two-way. But you can also acquire and change attitudes and ideologies on the basis of discourse. That is why discourse is so fundamental, because it is part of the whole acquisition process. But then you have the problem of the chicken and the egg! Which comes first? How can people understand language in the first place, if they don't have all the knowledge needed to understand it, and how can they acquire this knowledge without the language? This brings us to the field of psycholinguistics and language acquisition theories. The second issue is more problematic. Do the concepts people have necessarily depend on the words they use? As regards the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, I would say, yes, in a way everything we know is determined by language, but in another way it is not. People can conceptualise outside of natural languages. Sue Wright: And you can always invent. Teun van Dijk: Yes, exactly. This is why black people in the United States are continuously inventing new words to describe themselves, because of the associations that words like 'negro' have. So, to answer the major question which you asked: yes, the process is circular and social cognitions are based on the discourse in which we participate and they are the conditions for our knowledge in general and for attitudes and ideologies in particular, and vice versa. Once you have acquired this knowledge and these social representations, once you have specific models and attitudes, much more of your reading of texts will be determined by these things. Ideology as Hypernym Ulrike Meinhof (University of Bradford): I'd like to address the link between discourse structures and attitudes, opinions and ideologies. My primary interest is how to deduce opinions, attitudes and ideologies through discourse analysis? If we are not convinced of this interconnection, questions such as how to define attitudes, values, and opinions, or their internal structuring and social functions do not make much sense. So, if we work from this assumption, then everything else will fall into place. I can follow you through the mental models, I can follow you as far as attitudes, and I can see that you can theorise about the mental models and attitudes and opinions coming from and being linked with discourse. What I have a problem with, is when you go one step further back and postulate that these attitudes form a particular ideology which monitors various other mental models. I'm no longer sure about this. I'd like to be because it would solve some of the perennial problems of our research. Teun van Dijk: Let's assume someone is talking about affirmative action or abortion. There will always be some kind of coherence, allowing for personal interpretation and individual inconsistencies. So whether the event being discussed is abortion or affirmative action or whatever, what someone says will
< previous page
page_39
next page >
< previous page
page_40
next page > Page 40
inevitably be controlled by a few basic views of gender relationships. This overall view will be the 'ideology'. And I am claiming that you will see evidence for this in the discourse itself. Tom Bloor (Aston University): Isn't ideology in fact a collection of those things? You say that it directs attitudes, but it seems to me that attitudes are rather instantiations of ideologies. Teun van Dijk: I think that is a good alternative which I've thought about myself. It's always wise in any kind of scholarly activity to ask whether we need a particular term and what purpose it serves. So we could say that 'ideology' is just the collection of those particular attitudesnothing more and assume that there isn't some kind of underlying structure or force. I use some discursive metaphors to show that in the same way that you have sequences of sentences, local coherence and so on, we also have an overall organisation which controls the unity and continuity of the whole text. We assume that these attitudes are not an arbitrary collection, they follow a certain direction, they have some kind of continuity. And I want to explain that. Why is it that if someone acquires an attitude about abortion and one about class ceilings, that these don't just go in different directions? Why can we say that someone has a sexist or a conservative or a liberal view of these things? Somehow, I want to capture this kind of everyday observation and that comes very close to the traditional notion of ideology. I want something which defines this unity and that I would like to call 'ideology'. Tom Bloor: Isn't it just a superordinate term? I wouldn't disagree with what you said. I'm not suggesting that feminism is just a random collection of attitudes that might happen to fall together, I think there is some kind of overall connection. But, you seem to suggest that ideology is something independent of a set of attitudes, whereas I see it as a superordinate term for a set of attitudes. I think there is a substantive difference here. Teun van Dijk: Maybe there is, but this separation is a result of the particular analysis one carries out. As linguists differentiate, for analytical reasons, between syntax, semantics and pragmatics, even though all aspects of discourse are interrelated and happen simultaneously, I separate ideologies from attitudes for analytical reasons. When I speak about the mind, we all have these social representations in the mind, depending on how we talk about and represent these things, and it may very well be that in the structure of the mind there is some overall unityhowever this is definedand this particular unity can be called the 'ideology'. The only thing I do is I take this structure out and represent it separately and say this is, provisionally, the 'ideology'. It can be compared to what I do with macro-structures in texts. They are not there, they don't exist separately, but they are an abstract structure I need in order to explain something. And if you say that this is a superordinate structure, that's fine with me. Ideology: Personal or Socially Shared? Robin Warner (University of Sheffield): But when you're working with something as contradictory and self-disguising as ideology, don't you think that to use tiered structures and linear processes might actually prejudice the way we
< previous page
page_40
next page >
< previous page
page_41
next page > Page 41
think about it? If you see ideology as an organising level of attitudes, this is the same as saying that the function of an ideology for a person is to achieve coherence of attitudes. And attitudes again are something above the level of personal opinion. It did occur to me that we could start with the person. I'm sure there is such a thing as an ideology of the person, of the self, which does include one's own sense of coherence of one's own attitudes and beliefs. Do you see what I'm getting at? The whole thing can become completely interpenetrated. It seems perhaps a bit dangerous to start to consider a higher level of organisation and a lower level of organisation or a more social and a more personal level, where something like ideology is concerned. This is the first point I wanted to make. Secondly, I'm not sure about the way you're defining and describing ideologies: you call both the organisation of attitudes effected by ultra-nationalists and the organisation of attitudes effected by socio-lingual advocates of affirmative action 'ideologies'. I think in the latter case it's very likely that you have a reflexive awareness of attitudes and the process of reaching points of view and decisions. This reflexive awareness makes the organisation of these attitudes qualitatively different to someone who simply works in terms of getting their prejudices into some kind of coherent order. Teun van Dijk: I have no fixed answers to these questions, and that is why this is one of the most complex projects I have ever worked on. So many things are interacting which I cannot bring into some kind of solution. That's why I welcome this type of forum and the suggestions you can make. But in a tentative response to your question, I have decided, for myself, to try to explicate a notion of ideology which is useful for all kinds of purposes, for example, for critical discourse analysis. This is why I am not going to search for ideology everywhere and why, for me, discourse and ideology or discourse and action are not identical. There are so many offerings in the literature on 'definitions' that you can take your pick from them. So I have decided to define ideology exclusively as a socially shared thing, just as language isthat's my most persuasive analogy. In my definition, there is no such thing as a personal ideology. That's a claim. What you mention about personal ideology is, however, interesting because for an individual there may very well be some kind of coherence in his/her thoughts. I have two explanations for this: first, the individual makes these thoughts coherent as a member of a group, and by definition s/he knows the language of the group and therefore s/he knows the ideology in which s/he is participating. So, where each member of the group accepts the particular ideology, s/he is doing so freely for him/herself and feels personal coherence. But, secondly, as individuals, people have their own principles and these may have their own consistency what traditional psychology calls personality. Both of these will control how individuals think, speak, read, understand, represent etc. and this accounts for the differences between individuals. Political scientists argue that this unity doesn't exist because of individual variation. This is true in a sense, but there is also an overriding coherence. For example, ultra-nationalists in various countries come up with the same arguments. How can I explain this is in a purely individual way? I can't.
< previous page
page_41
next page >
< previous page
page_42
next page > Page 42
Robin Warner: I was thinking more of the ideology of the selfthe perception of the relationship between (in crude terms) the mind and the body. Teun van Dijk: But don't you think that part of that is also socially shared? Robin Warner: I think it's reciprocal. It is the other half of the group ideology. David Graddol (Open University): And it goes back to politics and discourse within which you constructed the problem. The kind of terms within which you have constructed the model itselfthe individual, the social groupare very realist and humanist terms. You are suggesting this is an ideological discourse, the Western, humanist ideological discourse within which we all try to rationalise our behaviour, so that we can conceive of ourselves as being autonomous, rational selves. But that is causing me a bit of a problem, because you're starting within that place where you constructed the problem, i.e. that people are rational, autonomous selves, that things like opinions which you objectify have structures, systems that you're trying to get atthis you've constructed as your research problem. But some of us in this room have been trying to work in an alternative discourse about language and social identity. For instance, you can't talk about someone having an intention, instantiating it, encoding it somehow in language, producing utterances and taking individual responsibility for the meaning of that utterance, without looking at how much of language is jointly and collectively constructed, even at the clause level. We know how problematic things like meanings of individual utterances are. Now that is obviously problematising the notion of the autonomous self in relation to things like opinions, intentions and language. I don't think its throwing that model out completely, because I wouldn't feel happy about abandoning the discourse in which you're working and it's necessary for talking about these issues empirically. But I can't help feeling that some of the issues you're looking for, you can't really find entirely within the individual. Integrity and structure won't be found just within the individual mind. Some of these things do appear to be the result of collective action from which they may emerge in a very messy way. The notion of social is not something we have all internalised in an identical way, but something that arises out of interaction because a bit of it is inside you and a bit of it is inside me, and when the two of us get together to interact, something different but almost predictable comes out. Teun van Dijk: Yes, I agree totally with that. These cognitions are crucially not exclusively, because I don't know for sureconstructed during interaction and discourse with other people of the group or the culture. The question now is: what is the consequence of that particular observation? Once these people have construed their meanings and so on through this on-line talking, or joint reduction, what decides the direction this meaning takes in our minds? Some people say that it's all locally produced, it is contextual to the limitthese people are radical contextualists. Others, like me, will say yes, that's how things are actually being done, that's how things are manifested. But at the same time there is a kind of result, consequence, emerging property which goes beyond the context. So, you learn something. You store something from this interaction in the minda category, a concept or whateverand later you will use this again. So, it is not the case that you have to reinvent language, the world, ideologies
< previous page
page_42
next page >
< previous page
page_43
next page > Page 43
every time you interact, you use fragments which you already have and that have to be stored and represented somewhere and I have no other way than to say that this takes place in the mind. But although you have this stored knowledge, sometimes the context is so complex and inconsistent that there is no evidence of the social thing which interacting partners share. My objective is, on the one hand, to account for that kind of unique context, both for the uniqueness and for the ad hoc construction of meaning in this situation, and on the other, to investigate whether we all have a particular context that will still be there the next time, that is permanent, continuous. In fact, most people don't remember individual interactions at all, what they do remember is for example, how to speak to a professor, or how to express one's sympathy. This is evidenced by repetition, recognition etc., which show that this is permanent. There is a conflict between saying everything is locally constructed or saying everything is controlled by things that are already there. For example, some people say: I'll tell you a story, and there are schemata for stories, and that's what controls storytelling. Other people say: no, storytelling is not based on ready-made schemata, it's based on interaction now. I think it's both. Alexandra Korol: I'd like to pursue this idea of ideology as a socially-shared thing. I always prefer to locate a particular phenomenon in its context and if we are talking about ideology as shared by a group of people, the question arises, what group of people? We shouldn't forget about the larger contextcall it society. The ideology is not just shared by the group, but also constructed by society and then reconstructed by the group. There is this interrelationship all the time, this negotiation about what is being accepted or rejected by this particular group, or by this particular society. If we talk about ideology, we always talk about the ideology of some particular society at some particular time. So, on the one hand, there is the continuity, but, on the other, there also is the specificity of the particular time. I would think that ideology is social, and also societalconstructed by and for some people, some class or group that comes to power. To talk about the 'group' only is not enough. Teun van Dijk: I think this is important theoretically: are ideologies for the society as a whole, or must they, necessarily, be linked to specific groups? Is there for instance an ideology for one nation; is there something like a North American ideology, for example? Alexandra Korol: Yes, in the North American context, we could say that this is the ideology of a society that tries to build capitalism and that this is an ideology for the whole of that society. We could also speak about the ideology of communist society. In both cases, to what extent does the ideology of the society correspond with the personal views and beliefs of the individual members of that society? I also have a problem with the notion of identity as part of group ideology. To what extent do personal views express group ideology? To what extent do I make the group ideology my own? Who does the group ideology belong to? Teun van Dijk: I take your point, but the link between group identity and ideology helps to explain why people will defend it in a certain situation, if they
< previous page
page_43
next page >
< previous page
page_44
next page > Page 44
feel that they are members of a group. If that membership feeling is not fulfilled, if they don't identify with feminism or Dutch nationalism or socialism, then, by definition, the basis for this ideology is not there, according to that theory. You can of course be a Dutch person, but you may not identify with the Dutch at all, which means that you are unlikely to espouse a Dutch nationalist position. So, as an individual, of course you have the possibility of identifying with several groups and this identification is just one element of accepting the basic ideas of that particular group, which I call an ideology. Christina Schäffner (Aston University): Does this mean that there is no limit to the number of ideologies you as an individual person can have? You speak of 'racist' or 'feminist' ideologies: where do these labels come from? How do we find the names for these groups? How are they identified compared with other groups? In Marxist-Leninist teaching, we get this very simplified explanation: since ideology is defined as a class-based concept, and since in each social system there are only two main, antagonistic, classes, there are also only two ideologies, e.g. in the capitalist society, the bourgeois ideology of the ruling bourgeoisie as opposed to the socialist ideology of the working class. When we link ideologies to groups, which I think makes sense, we have the problem of specifying how many groups. Teun van Dijk: This is where I have run into problems myself and it is related to how we define groups. Do groups adopt ideologies or is the definition of a group related to its having an ideology? It may in fact be both. For example, Norman Fairclough would argue that there must necessarily be some kind of struggle and power relationship or dominance. But I doubt that. Helen Kelly-Holmes (Aston University): Would 'world-view' be a better concept in terms of group identity? This would get us away from the associations which particular ideologies such as 'feminism' and 'communism' have and which, perhaps, limit the definition of ideology. Teun van Dijk: This is one of the many words that has been used, but it doesn't really matter what you call it. I would say that 'world-view' is more complex and encompasses everythingall social representations, knowledge, attitudes, plus basic orientation. Within that social cognition, there is one structuring, organising, monitoring element and that's what I call ideology. So it's not the same thing as world-view. Other people suggest it's the same as belief, but belief is much too general, too vague. We have all kinds of beliefs. Inconsistencies in Ideologies Kay Richardson (University of Liverpool): I'd like to come back to what you said about a unique context of interaction that can be complex and inconsistent, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, can have permanent and coherent aspects. My question concerns the methodological interpretation of what's going on. Is there not a problem of projecting too much coherence, and then perhaps too much rationality, onto the underlying thing that is carried from one context to another? I think this connects with what David was saying in terms of the extent to which we expect the components of an ideology (within the individual or even in the social) to be tied together without contradiction, inconsistency and
< previous page
page_44
next page >
< previous page
page_45
next page > Page 45
irrationality. And if you are looking for coherence, aren't you at least going to run the risk of seeing it where it isn't, or probably isn't, there? I want to connect this with another point: the variability of levels of coherence. If you want to call Keynesian economics or monetarist economics an ideology but also racism an ideology, what kind of fancy footwork are you going to have to do to account for the fact that people have sat down and thought about monetarist economics? What kind of careful unpicking of carefully thought-out constructs will you have to be involved in to prove that this is a self-serving ideologyalthough I understand that this may not be your definition of what an ideology is? Whereas with racism, to come back to what you were saying, there is a level of thought production which isn't nearly as rational and thought through with as much intellectual energy as is the case for Keynesian economic theory. Teun van Dijk: There is a lot of debate going on about how complex, how consistent ideologies are. We can collect evidence from polls which shows that opinions are not consistent. Personal deviations seem to be one element of the evidence we do have. But my way of looking at things is not to say that ideologies are rational, because they may be very irrational. Secondly, I do not say that they are necessarily consistent; they may be construed from inconsistent parts and this is true for a lot of racist thinking. Therefore, I use the term 'coherence' to say that there are relationships that ensure that there is some kind of orientation in the attitudes people choose once they have a racist outlook on the world. Another thing I do not want to say is that they are more or less complex, as it is discussed in political science. Philip Tetlock makes a distinction between ideologues and nonideologues. The ideologues are the people who consciously think about all these things, in rational terms and concepts, the people who write the books and propaganda for a party. But one of the things that has been neglected is the notion of common sense. So, for example, everyday theorising about economics etc. would be seen by some people simply as common sense and would not be a consciously thought-out ideology for them. One way of explaining irrationalities, inconsistencies and incoherences in the way people speak about certain issues is to say that the ideologies or attitudes don't exist because it is all local, related only to particular issues and individuals. My suggestion is that you don't have to throw out the theory because of these inconsistencies. The relationship between ideologies and discourse is so complex. People as individuals are members of different groups and this will affect attitudes. Similarly, the individual has his/her own priorities which will also impinge on that. Sometimes this will take precedence and this causes variation, inconsistencies etc. I want to account for that variation and that continuity. Kay Richardson: Well, this is why I termed it a methodological question. Given all the ways in which the particular discourse could be produced, how do you make a claim in any particular case that it's coming from one source and not another? Tom Bloor: Concerning inconsistencies, I would say that the very fact that we can socially recognise inconsistencies is proof that there's something there which we could call an ideology. But it doesn't exist independently. For example, if
< previous page
page_45
next page >
< previous page
page_46
next page > Page 46
someone whom we recognise as a 'progressive humanist' suddenly comes out with a comment in favour of hanging, we will be shocked. Nevertheless we don't have hard and fast rules that say the ideology must determine the attitude. In fact there is a kind of prestige in our society attached to people who don't accept ideologypackageseven though most people don't fit neatly into one particular ideology. So it's a cloud, a fuzzy mass, rather than a rigid structure. Teun van Dijk: My view is that we should try to account for both, when you get these inconsistenciesfor example s/he is liberal on economics, but tough on punishment. These combinations and configurations exist. However, what is interesting here is not the inconsistencies, but the expectations we have, as listeners, that attitudes will be consistent. Ideally, someone who is for hanging is also a racist and a redneck and all these things that we expect them to be. That expectation is also a socially constructed thing. It is something we reproduce by our discourse. So, what I am talking about is not the description of an individual, but the description of groups. This takes us back to the problem of group definition mentioned abovei.e. is a group defined by an ideology? That's what I want to find out. Srikant Sarangi (University of Wales, Cardiff): I think we've been looking here at the positioning of the discourse analyst carrying out ideological analyses as opposed to discourse analyseswhere the discourse becomes the way through. Ideology is embedded in the text, it is presupposed and naturalised in the way the text is produced. So, in that sense, it's there. But it's not explicit and, therefore, we study speech acts or opinions or attitudes. In a sense, it seems to me, as a discourse analyst, that the problem is the ideology that you have as a discourse analyst and the way in which you use your ideology and language to carry out the analysis. Teun van Dijk: It's a theoretical concept, invented obviously to explain certain features of discourse. Srikant Sarangi: Ideology is also an analytical construct of our scholarship to explain social attitudes in discourse opinions. Teun van Dijk: When we read the text of the newspaper editorial for example, we are able to say that the ideology of the author is liberal. My question, then, is how do we explain the fact that we are able to make that kind of judgement. And when we read other texts in a particular paper on a specific topic, for example terrorism, we will also notice (sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly) a certain coherence in the way this topic is being reportedand I call this ideology. Now, my question is: how do we explain that social competence which we obviously have that enables us to say a certain author has a certain attitude or position. And we share this competence with others. This is what I'm trying to explain by introducing this theoretical notion. Alexandra Korol: We shouldn't forget that what we are reading, what is being reported is the reproduction of the ideology of society in general, the personal view of the individual author and the policy of the particular newspaper. It is a complex, ideological relationship. It's not only me as a reader, an actor trying to interpret this text: I have to try to deconstruct what is already there.
< previous page
page_46
next page >
< previous page
page_47
next page > Page 47
Teun van Dijk: This links back to your previous question: can a whole society have an overarching ideology which keeps everything together? An ideology that explains everything? However, not all individuals in the society will identify with this overarching ideologyas was proved in the easy transition from communism to capitalism in Central and Eastern Europe. In socialist countries, those people who perhaps did identify with this ideology were the ideologues, the people who consciously thought about the ideology as something in its own right. Ulrike Meinhof: If newspapers and individuals are reproducing the ideology of society, and this would have been particularly the case in the more monolithic societies of these countries, where would dissent find its expression? As you say there is consistency and reproduction and coherence, but at the same time you allow for these fractures and fissures in people's mental models. Where do you find traces of that? What Evidence Can We Get from the Sample Text? Kay Richardson: As a response to this, could we try and link this with the text you have given us, this newspaper editorial. Can I ask about the question of voice in all of this? Because it seems to me that this is absolutely fundamental. You could do a straightforward, Machiavellian analysis, even with a clause-by-clause approach. Or we could do a global analysis of the text, an overall analysis of how ethical those in power need to be. The problem with using voice is that it won't let you do that, it's really difficult textually to see whether that Machiavellian analysis is the author's, or whether the author is trying to persuade the politicians to do what's in their interest, or just ventriloquising the politicians and inviting his readers to do a cynical reading. I can't tell which is the right way of reading it and who is speaking or who is speaking for whom? The textual traces aren't strong enough for me to know what game the author is playing. Robin Warner: A factor in this text that is interesting for me is the use of what I call reproduced discourse. I use this term because none of the other terms, such as intertextuality or indirect speech embrace the whole range I want to talk aboutI'm using 'discourse' in a wide sense. There are fairly unproblematic things you can do with a text like this: for example, you can look at the definite descriptions and presuppositions. When the author refers to 'the West' for instance, there is an assumption that it is a coherent political entity. Are we to accept this? This article is also about taking control of the discourses of others, bending them to a certain end. To what extent can we try and think what was actually said, given the way in which this reproduction has coloured and shaped the original discourse? Angel Gordo Lopez: We should be careful with interpretations. There is a danger in such a grand project that we might be mapping out ideologies based on texts. There is the political agenda which we must be aware of, a grand narrative that is controlling people, and there is also the danger that in trying to formalise and generalise things in a model, we are not listening to minor voices, or that these will be ignoredthese traces of dissent as Ulrike said. Even from our formal perspective, we should try to recognise variety. Analyses based on Bakhtin, on
< previous page
page_47
next page >
< previous page
page_48
next page > Page 48
postmodernism and post-structuralism would come up with quite different methodologies and interpretations. Teun van Dijk: One or two brief reactions. First of all I'm not a formalist in that sense, I'm not trying to formalise for the sake of formalisationI'm theorising at this moment. The second thing is that I'm trying to approach one big question, namely that of ideological relationships : the way ideologies show up in discourse; how discourses can be understood or analysed as ideological. There may be other ways to do it, but for me it is by using the scholarly instruments which I understand, which I can handle and manipulate. Psychoanalysts and literary theorists would probably approach this in other ways. However, my experience of literary theory has taught me the limits of this approach and I've moved away from more intuitive ways of talking about this. This is why I don't have much affinity with postmodernist and post-structuralist approaches, because they do not allow me to explain things, to analyse things. With regard to the political agenda and what you term the narrative controlling what people say, I'm aware of the postmodernist approach that we don't have evidence. I think it's nice as a hypothesis, but it cannot be confirmed. There is evidence that what people say is controlled by what you call narratives, but what are these but ideologies? All the evidence I have comes from the area of racism and it may be that this is easier, in the sense that in other fields it might not be so clear that people are controlled by these things. It may well be that many of the articles in a newspaper do not have these clear voices that you can hear or this grand narrative behind them that you can see. The other general definitions of ideology, for example the Marxist notion of false consciousness, are too vague. And then there are the endless debates about what false consciousness is. And none of this helps me. I want to analyse it and take it apart. I want to know what is involved in this complex theory of ideology, therefore I go to more concrete things like opinions, or a model people have of specific structures of discourse. But on the other hand, I'm not an empiricist who looks at discourse structures and hopes that a theory will emerge. Because for me it's obvious that this happens the other way around. Paul Chilton (University of Warwick): I also don't think that postmodernism is helpful. I would like to respond to Kay's question and return to the text. It seems to me to be very important to look at this kind of text not in isolation but in the whole historical contextthat might include recent history. The scripts, the programmes that have been articulated are in some sense ideologically driven. In order to make sense of the text, you don't just have to bear recent American foreign policy in mind, you have to look at something more long-standing than that, discoursesif that's the right wordthat were being constructed in the period of the Cold War and in particular just after World War II. The discourse or script that is being invoked here and on which the reading depends is the American obsession with the dangers of appeasement. That's not mentioned explicitly, but then an American reader would be aware of that. The second thing has to do with more recent debates about American policy in the former Yugoslavia. The paragraph beginning 'President Clinton says...'
< previous page
page_48
next page >
< previous page
page_49
next page > Page 49
starts with a straightforward instance of reported speech, but it finishes with the sentence 'The excuse is feeble', which guides our interpretation and how he wants us to read it. From this and knowing the context, we infer his position. There are some more examples where he is using other people's words. We're dealing with a very complex set of political and linguistic interactions. The reading depends on a lot of prior, stored knowledge, scripts, discourses, scenarioswhich I suppose one could call ideology. But if one did, I would want to bring in the notion of power, because ultimately it has to do with power. Srikant Sarangi: I think in your analysis of the text you refer to what is right and wrong in terms of ideologies. I wonder to what extent the moral dimension and ideologies collide or connect? Teun van Dijk: It's a summarising term to refer to the whole value basis of ideology. So, ideologies are constructed from value components. In relating this to texts, are we able to tease apart the various voices to try to identify the ideologies and morals? For instance in this particular text, is Anthony Lewis speaking for himself, or as an American columnist? Also, we need to consider the selection of particular words, such as the use of the word 'dismemberment'. This is certainly not a neutral word and it's certainly not an innocent term. And many other terms and structures are not either. So we should ask: is the choice of this word controlled by a specific opinion and, if so, what kind of opinion is itpositive or negative? Do all the choices, lexical and otherwise, point to a particular perspective? Christina Schäffner: I think this question of choice is very important, and it is also linked to intertextuality. Terms such as 'dismemberment' have been used before in the context of international relations, they have been established as political concepts, and have thus acquired a certain meaning and value. That's why they can readily be taken up in a new context, to be confirmed or challenged. Teun van Dijk: When we speak of intertextuality in this context, it is the textual manifestation of what I see as an ideology. The continuity expressed through intertextuality simply means that not only can the mental structures be the same, but the formulations too. So we have a very strange kind of intertextuality where people in different countries talking about the topic, not only have the same attitudes, but also use the same formulations. They could not have heard them from each other. Kay Richardson: But you have to work with the voice that they offer you. The journalistic voice in this article is very hot under the collar. He's got righteousness on his side, most of the time. He doesn't really need this approach. Paul Chilton: No. This hotunder-the collar approach is necessary for legitimising his argument. That is part of the discourse of foreign policy. Kay Richardson: To me, the hot-under-the-collar approach is just the journalistic voice. In the rest of the text he is talking to these politicians who are constructed as being completely cynical. Robin Warner: There are a lot of contradictions in the text. This sort of contradiction and uncertainty I find quite characteristic of ideologically condi-
< previous page
page_49
next page >
< previous page
page_50
next page > Page 50
tioned discourse. What bothers me is why he has to be so indirect about expressing his opinion about American foreign policy. Sharon Imtiaz (University of Warwick): Has that not got to do with the medium in which the article appeared? It's the International Herald Tribune. He's not talking solely to a domestic audience. Teun van Dijk: But all the articles are taken from domestic newspapers. So it is an American audience he's talking to first. Sharon Imtiaz: But it's then redirected and so we have the phenomenon of global intertextuality. Even rhetoric becomes recontextualised. David Graddol: There is a multiple nature to the audience for a medium like this, even if the articles were originally written for a domestic audience. Going back to voice, what struck me at a deeper level in this text is how many of the propositions are assigned to other people. It is woven out of the voices of other people and what is problematic is knowing where the author identifies with those opinions. This notion of possession of opinions is problematic for methat someone has an opinion, that you want to find out that opinion and how the discourse emerges from the holding of that opinion. I was interested to hear people saying how they find literary theory useless for this purpose, because Bakhtinian theory, as I understand it, comes from literary theory and it seems to be one of the most useful ways of approaching this. You get simple formulations, because everybody is appropriating each other's language, but that doesn't necessarily mean that everyone has the same opinions and beliefs. It's problematic because people are also putting in distancing devices, evaluations of these opinions or they might even be trying out certain opinions to see how they are working in a particular social context. We may have representationsas you call themof these opinions and know what kind of opinions are appropriate to have in particular social contexts. But where we position ourselves in relation to those opinions is much more problematic. Teun van Dijk: As readers or as analysts? David Graddol: As individuals speaking and that makes it even worse to try to analyse the speech of other people. But why is the author so indirect here? Why is so much of the passage made up of other people's words? Srikant Sarangi: Isn't it also a question of other voices being silenced? It's not just what voices are represented, but which aren't. We need to ask, who is not quoted? Teun van Dijk: I agree. From the discourse analysis point of view, one of the most interesting things is not to find out whether Anthony Lewis is pro or contra American policy, but to see in which complex way that opinion is being managed in this text for a specific audience. In all the ways this is being done, there's a long list of complex strategies: moves, ways of mitigating, emphasising, avoiding opinions he agrees with but also finds reprehensible. Kay Richardson: What is interesting is that although values are invoked, they are being invoked so that they can be manipulated between a discourse that is
< previous page
page_50
next page >
< previous page
page_51
next page > Page 51
completely cynical about them and Lewis' discourse that you should do moral things for the sake of morality. Isn't that the playoff? Julian Edge (Aston University): Not knowing anything else about the author or his views, if I want an interpretation without comments, I would say that the text is about attacking President Clinton. What I'm hoping for now is some help with the idea of opinions grouping into attitudes and attitudes being governed by an underlying ideology and how this model is illuminating the text. Teun van Dijk: To do this, you need a large number of textswhich I'm currently compiling. Analysis should provide evidence of strategies and show how basic, ideological propositions show up in these texts. For example, in an argument, people will say 'this is my opinion'. In some aspects of argumentation, people will resort to using something we all know or we all agree upon and this is where we get into the area of attitudes. Sometimes it can be more fundamental, involving a proper ideological proposition. In this kind of analysis, you get these various levels of generality and sharing. Lorna Milne (Aston University): I think we should also consider the notion of an ideology as having a vocation to transfer itself and we haven't talked at all about propaganda or the transfer of ideology. I just wonder whether this catchall, have-your-cakeand-eat-it kind of discourse is one which is particularly useful when trying to persuade people. The more you can show two facets of an argument, the more people you can recruit to your way of thinking. Robin Warner: I'm not sure about this. I find that most political discourse uses other people's discourses. A lot of the time it seems to be about talk and how talk is evaluated, not about reality. Paul Chilton: I would like to comment on David's question about the indirectness. I think you might get some answers to this by drawing on politeness theory. As Julian mentioned, the text is a criticism and indeed we do find some face-threatening acts in the textand these have to be justified. For example, the author has to explain why the USA should commit its forces to Yugoslavia. The persuasive content can be seen as that kind of active self-justification. To do this, he seems to trigger off existing discourses through lexical cues. For example, he refers to the notion of what a state is in international law. Another example is where he invokes directly a Hitler figure, which is not only World War II discourse, but also evokes the 1990 Gulf War discourse. This is the way historians have talked about it. So, there are many cues with various resonances in the text. Teun van Dijk: I think that's why so many people working in the area of discourse analysis find the notion of repertoire useful. They say it's not just underlying ideas and structures but also collections of expressions and so on. For example, in the text, when Lewis speaks about the 'dismemberment' of the country, he is invoking a basic argument that although it is not a nice process, it is necessary for human lives to be saved. His argument about what is allowed and what is notthe humanitarian attitude of avoiding death, of valuing lifethese are very basic culturally-shared things. He has to concede that, because he cannot ignore this fundamental value of our culture. So, now he is no longer arguing superficial things, relating to what Clinton has to do, he is much more concerned with arguing basics of our society and therefore he has to say that this
< previous page
page_51
next page >
< previous page
page_52
next page > Page 52
argument has some force. But, having said this, there is the disclaimer, the 'but'; 'But those who make it...'. Then comes his own basic principle 'the abandonment of principles...'. So, what I read from this as a suggestion for my theoretical construction is that apparently people have some very basic value principles and that they have some kind of hierarchy or priority that gives some order to them. In the author's hierarchy, justice is even more fundamental than saving lives. So, I read this kind of argument as a manifestation in the text of some kind of structure in the underlying system. From Discourse Structures to Attitudes, Opinions and Ideologies? Julian Edge: Aren't they two different propositions? The one being that underlying values are used to justify opinions and positions. The claim that through identifying opinions and attitudes, one can come to an underlying ideology. One needs to find evidence for that tripartite organisation in discourse. Teun van Dijk: Yes, especially through clusterings of opinions that reveal attitudes. These can be identified through, for example, the choice of words, in his argumentation and legitimation strategies. Take, for example, political correctness. When you have a position like this, it is assumed that you will adopt a particular vocabulary. Here, in particular, we can see the relationship between discourse and ideology. The question for us as discourse analysts is, is it useful? Does it bring us anything interesting? I would say, yes. Otherwise I would not be able to explain continuity in lexical choice. Sue Wright: Isn't this all rather dangerous? You see some attitudes and then you surmise the ideology. You have to be aware that you are expecting clusters of opinion to occur. If you expect to find the whole set of attitudes that go with that ideology, isn't this a form of stereotyping? Teun van Dijk: Exactly. As you say that's the danger in our everyday life. We expect people to have consistent ideologies; when people say a, we expect them to say b, c, d as wellI want to explain why this is so, why people do that. People are stereotyping and generalising, from hearing a, they conclude the rest which, for me, is evidence that this actually happens. The dangers you mentioned link in with ethicsthe ethics of everyday life and the ethics of scholarship. Sue Wright: Yes. I feel very insecure about the way we unpick texts. It seems to me that a lot is taken out with very little to go on and we bring so much of ourselves to the process as well. In this kind of analysis, we make so many assumptions on the basis of so little evidence, that we often reveal as much about ourselves as anything else. Paul Chilton: Yes, but what is ourselves? Surely it's us as the reader informed by interaction with other discourses and cultural knowledge, ideologies which we bring to the text. Sue Wright: But it's interesting that what we're talking about is not what we have brought to the text, but what is coming from the text to us. Paul Chilton: Well, I think of myself as someone interacting with Lewis.
< previous page
page_52
next page >
< previous page
page_53
next page > Page 53
David Graddol: Do you? Or do you actually think of yourself as someone interacting with the text? Helen Kelly-Holmes: There may be a danger that we find in the text what we want to find. Where, as analysts, we are sure that the author has a very strong ideology, there is a temptation to find evidence to support this. Julian Edge: It seems less dangerous than speculation without any data. Ulrike Meinhof: Yes, and this text is riddled with presuppositionsand you don't have to postulate anything, you can just identify them. This shows the advantage of having a discourse analysis toolkit. We don't say that this is what the text means; we're just saying that these items exist in the text and that they can indicate a certain attitude. But my problem is that I still don't know whether I necessarily find evidence of something that I would be prepared to call an ideology. I like the word 'cluster' or 'filter'. For me, ideology is a much more fixed term, much more dominant and I would be wary of trying to discover this through examining statements. I think it's very difficult to argue for any kind of fixed ideology, because this would be totally unshakeable, made up of discursive formulaic speechsuch as Thatcherism was. Teun van Dijk: This brings us back to the contradictions. People are exposed to the discourse of party political ideologies etc. in the public sphere, but they also interact with groups and in groups and this may give rise to another type of discourse. Ulrike Meinhof: But this is a superficial way of using the word ideology. I think from your paper you're trying to get at something much more complex. We use phrases like 'Tory ideology' as a short cut, meaning a cluster or set of beliefs, that translate into the individual ticking a particular box. What is interesting for me is how these competing sets of clusters survive and how they are not in fact governed by this very monolithic set, which I'll call an ideology, but how they keep on reproducing such things as racist discoursenot just in the way people speak, but in the way they act. Ideology doesn't help me with that. Teun van Dijk: But I find that it helps me to explain certain things and I don't have other instruments for this. Discourse analysis can highlight and select. But I want to go beyond this to another level of description and explanation, and social psychology offers things such as impression management and face-saving, that can help me. But these are just elements in a more complex system. Why, for instance, when people make a negative comment about somebody else, do they follow it with an apology or use face-saving strategies? Such strategies in connection with racist discourse reveal links to ethics and power, and this brings you to questions of basic norms and values. So in order to explain what's behind this, you don't just have one word or one structureyou have all these layers of explanation. I can get a long way with notions or concepts from discourse analysis and they explain a lot but not everything. Now if I bring discourse and its structures and ideology together in a clear, systematic way, that explains what I am after. I would love to find another word rather than ideology: the term is always loaded and I keep having to defend the concept of 'ideology' whenever I use it.
< previous page
page_53
next page >
< previous page
page_54
next page > Page 54
Discourse, Opinions and Ideologies: A Comment Michael Billig Department of Social Sciences, University of Loughborough, Loughborough, Leicestershire, LE11 3TU, UK It is a pleasure to have the opportunity to comment on Teun van Dijk's paper. For a number of years van Dijk has been creatively exploring the relations between language and ideology. His work is marked by two distinctive features: he insists upon the detailed, pragmatic study of language and he stresses the necessity for such analyses to be politically committed. In both respects, he has set examples to be followed. This latest paper is part of van Dijk's wider, developing project to understand the nature of contemporary ideology, in order to make critiques of racism, inequality and imperialism. If I make criticisms of his paper, then these should be understood as friendly suggestions, made in the spirit of dialogue and aimed to further a project which I admire greatly. There is somewhat of an intellectual tension between the first and second halves of van Dijk's paper. In the first part, van Dijk is concerned to establish definitions and distinctions. In the second part, he produces a detailed and imaginative textual analysis of a political text. The analysis, however, bursts open some of the distinctions made in the first part of the paper. Among the distinctions which van Dijk proposes in the first part, are those between attitude/opinion, attitude/ideology and factual proposition/evaluative proposition. At times, van Dijk implies that some of these distinctions map onto psychological characteristics, being reproduced internally in unseen, hidden mental structures. In making the distinctions, van Dijk adopts a rather traditionally propositional procedure. He treats knowledge and belief as if they were based upon propositions, and he discusses exemplary propositions. As is common with propositional approaches, there is an implication that meaning inheres in propositions, and that this meaning can be understood over and above particular usages. Thus, van Dijk discusses the differences between 'I know Amsterdam is the capital of the Netherlands', 'I believe Amsterdam is the capital of the Netherlands' and 'Amsterdam is the capital of the Netherlands'. A 'regular' or 'usual' usage is presumed; van Dijk does not imagine a context for the utterance of these propositions. It is as if speakers select their propositional formats for the occasion from types whose meaning is clearly preformulated before usage. In a similar vein, van Dijk distinguishes between propositions of fact and those of evaluation. He conveys the impression that the distinction can be upheld without difficulty or controversy, for one is dealing with qualitatively different types of proposition. Without considering contextual uses of such statements, van Dijk distinguishes between factual propositionssuch as 'Amsterdam is the capital of the Netherlands'and evaluative propositionssuch as 'Reagan is a terrorist'. Van Dijk employs this propositional approach to the discourse of opinions and knowledge. The impression is conveyed that the propositions of
< previous page
page_54
next page >
< previous page
page_55
next page > Page 55
opinions and of attitudes are equipped with distinct linguistic features. These enable analysts and prospective speakers to distinguish between these types of proposition; more importantly, such features allow analysts and speaker to distinguish both propositions of attitude and opinion from those of fact. There is the further implication: these distinct types of proposition might correspond to distinct types of mental structure, or mental model. In this way, it might seem that linguistics, social practice and internal psychology are neatly ordered together. The problem is that language is not so ordered in practice. As Wittgenstein emphasised many years ago, linguistic devices do not map neatly onto presumed mental states. Each utterance of 'I know' or 'I believe' cannot be taken as a sign of 'knowing' or 'believing' and, thus, as a signifier of different psychological processes: When I say 'I remember, I believed...', don't ask yourself 'What fact, what process is he remembering?' (that has already been stipulated)ask rather: 'What is the purpose of this language, how is it being used?' (Wittgenstein, 1967, remark 716) Wittgenstein was urging that analysts should observe how language is used and should note what speakers are doing with their words. His injunction has important methodological and theoretical implications, especially in relation to the examination of everyday 'psychological' language. The point is currently being taken seriously by discourse analysts, who are combining Wittgensteinian ideas about the observable, discursive nature of psychological phenomena, together with the close techniques of investigation provided by conversation analysis (Antaki, 1994; Billig, in press; Edwards & Potter, 1992, 1993; Harré and Gillett, 1994; Potter & Wetherell, 1987; Shotter, 1993a, 1993b). As Wittgenstein emphasised, analysts should not be deceived by the outward propositional form of utterances, but should always seek to understand what speakers (and writers) are doing with their utterances. This is particularly relevant to the discourse of attitudes and opinions. Van Dijk implies, at least in the first part of the paper, that the business of 'giving opinions' might be somewhat straightforward: one is offering evaluations and therefore one uses special forms of evaluative propositions. Opinion markers, such as 'my opinion is', 'I find', 'I think', 'I believe' are particularly useful. Van Dijk writes: 'They signal that the propositional ''content'' of the dependent clause should be interpreted as being an evaluative belief of the speaker, and should not, for instance, be interpreted as factual belief'. But, of course, it is not so simple in practice. Utterances are made in context, directed at addressees. The so-called 'opinion markers' might be performing interactional business, rather than signalling the distinction between fact and evaluation. One might imagine a conversation in which one partner says to the other: 'I think we're going to be late if we don't hurry'. 'I think' might achieve a polite hedging, mitigating the impolite peremptoriness of 'hurry up, we're going to be late' and seeking to avoid the confrontation of an argument (Brown & Levinson, 1987). It need not be understood to indicate a tentative, subjective evaluation on the passage of time. Interestingly, van Dijk's own examples, in the second part of the paper,
< previous page
page_55
next page >
< previous page
page_56
next page > Page 56
illustrate that the distinctions between evaluative and factual propositions are not strictly maintained in discursive practice. As he concludes, 'opinion statements do not always feature explicit evaluative words'. If such statements can still be recognised as 'opinion statements', then the analyst, not to mention lay speakers, must have criteria, other than propositional form, for determining when the activity of giving opinions is taking place. This mixing of fact and evaluation is to be expected, given the rhetorical and argumentative nature of giving opinions and attitudes. Typically, when people are giving their opinions, they are not claiming to make reports of internal states (although in some rhetorical contexts this might be specifically claimed), but they are arguing on matters of controversy (Billig, 1987, 1991). Van Dijk's example is not merely identified as a piece of opiniongiving because Anthony Lewis's article is signalled as 'op-ed' by its location in the newspaper; it is also an overt piece of stancetaking on a matter of public controversy. In taking stances on controversial matters, speakers will be engaged in an inherently complex and rhetorically dilemmatic business. They will be presenting 'their opinions' as 'theirs', but they will also be arguing for those opinions; as such they will be criticising rival opinions, and justifying their own. In this rhetorical business, they will not merely be declaring their own 'subjectivity' but will be implying that their position is 'better' (in ways to be discursively justified) than the counter-views (Schiffrin, 1985; Billig, 1991). It is not surprising that claims of objectivity and subjectivity should be mingled in this discursive activity, and that the boundaries between fact and evaluation should constantly be blurred. After all, Lewis was not merely giving his opinion: he was arguing a point. A brief categorisation of subjectivity'Well, that's just your opinion'is only likely to be given by an opponent, for it is a move to undermine the argument's validity by dismissing it as 'just' opinion. The fact/value distinction is important in van Dijk's analysis. The theoretical concepts of opinion, attitude and ideology are defined in terms of widening clusters of evaluations, and, as such, they appear to exclude factual propositions. Opinions are evaluations of particular issues; attitudes are systematic clusters of opinions. Larger clusterings of attitudes are provided by ideologies, which organise socially shared attitudinal complexes. In this respect, ideologies function to control the overall coherence of evaluative complexes. They represent the organising of large blocks of evaluations, such as liberalism or conservatism. This view of ideology carries a limiting disadvantage. Because a distinction is made between fact and evaluation, the implication is that facts exist apart from ideologies; indeed, facts may be what competing ideologies share in common. Yet, the separation of fact and evaluation, and the location of ideology within the domain of evaluation, encourages a restricted view of 'ideology'. The processes of ideology can be seen to be at work in the social construction of 'facts' themselves. It is for this reason that some analysts have insisted that the word 'ideology' be used to describe those practices of thought, action and discourse by which the socially constructed, contingent world becomes experienced as 'natural', 'inevitable' or 'factual' (Eagleton, 1991; McLellan, 1986; Larrain, 1983). Accordingly, ideology often operates beyond, as well as within, the realms of evaluative disagreement. The 'factual' is often diffused with the ideological, in
< previous page
page_56
next page >
< previous page
page_57
next page > Page 57
ways which are not directly tied into the overt rhetoric of controversy. Van Dijk uses 'Amsterdam is the capital of the Netherlands' as an illustrative factual proposition. It is factual inasmuch as it is unlikely to be disputed at present (although grammatically similar statements about 'Jerusalem' or 'Ottawa' as capital cities can be highly controversial). Yet, the 'factual nature' of Amsterdam as a capital city rests upon the acceptance of a range of other 'facts' about the nature of community and nationhood: that there are nation-states; that each nation-state has one and only one 'capital city'; that the existence of nationstates is unproblematic and, somehow, that capital cities are 'natural', factual entities. Indeed, the very discourse about the factual nature of capital cities is itself part of conventional discourses which reproduce the world of nation-states as the world, the 'natural' world of today. Such 'factual', or assumptive, discourses are part of what can be called 'banal nationalism' (Billig, 1995). This is not the nationalism of contending partiessuch as Serbian versus Bosnian nationalisms. It is the nationalism of common sense, which informs so much of contemporary thinking and whose premises often lie beyond the overt disagreements of opinions, but which make possible (indeed, inevitable) such disagreements. This banal nationalism, whose assumptions and practices are diffused through the contemporary world, permits the nationalism of contention to take place. The choice between a narrower conception of ideology, based upon evaluative aspects, or a broader one, encompassing the social construction of facts, is not merely a choice between different definitions. More is at stake. The broader conception points the way to a wider, critical task for ideological analysis, than the examination of attitudinal complexes. Indeed, it should encompass the language of attitudes and opinions as part of its topics. Today, in late capitalist democracies, it is taken as 'natural' (or 'factual') that people 'have' attitudes and opinions: we are well equipped with the discursive resources for speaking of our (and others') attitudes. To understand this talk, we must not only chart the uses of 'in my opinion', 'that's just your view' etc., in our talk. In addition, we need to chart the ideological nature and functions of this talk itself. For such purposes, analysts must look beyond differences in evaluative disagreement; they should also investigate the common assumptions which make such disagreements possible. To achieve this level of ideological analysis, it is necessary to resist the temptation of treating 'opinions', 'attitudes' etc. as if they were inevitable, universal phenomena. The words themselves'opinions' and 'attitudes'in their contemporary usage, are of comparatively recent origin. Historically, not all cultures have developed the discursive practices for the 'giving of opinions' in the complex, baroque forms, which one finds in contemporary societies. For example, one does not find this rich discourse of opinionsso familiar, so 'natural' to usin the Bible. There is little to suggest that Moses or Aaron could answer the questions of opinion pollsters in the ways which contemporary citizens find so unproblematic, locating, for example, their stances about the likelihood of miraculous occurrences on five-point scales. In short, the analyst should not presume that all peoples have 'held attitudes' in analogous ways to those which the late twentieth-century citizens of Western
< previous page
page_57
next page >
< previous page
page_58
next page > Page 58
states claim to 'have attitudes'. The presumption that the holding of attitudes is universal and transhistorical itself might be part of contemporary ideology. One might generalise the point in order to state that the critical analysis of ideological discourse must seek to go beyond 'opinions' and 'attitudes', for ideology overspills the outward rhetoric of evaluation. Indeed, ideology often functions to limit the realm of disagreement by reproducing the socially contingent as necessarily factual. Van Dijk's own analyses of racism have shown this. He has demonstrated that the so-called 'facts' of racism, which speakers use to justify their positions, and many of the assumptions which underlie their reasonings, are part of the wider racist ideology (see also Wetherell & Potter, 1992). Moreover, one might say that the 'facts' are not racist because of the 'opinions' or 'mental models' of those who cite them. They are racist because they are reproduced as 'objective necessities' in a world in which racist divisions and inequalities appear 'normal' and, indeed, 'inevitable'. So normal do these divisions appear that they often escape the label 'racist'. The narrowing of the evaluative categoryand the corresponding widening of apparently 'objective' categoriescan be expected to be involved in reproducing what Etienne Balibar, in a telling phrase, called 'racism without races' (1991: 21). It is not easy to spot the elisions and assumptions of apparently commonsense discourses which claim their own objectivity. Over the years, van Dijk has taught us how to understand the discourses of racismand, particularly, to look for racism in the words of the powerfully respectable, who 'naturally' disclaim their own racism. In so doing, Teun van Dijk's work illustrates the importance of ideological analysis. It also shows why, for methodological, conceptual and political reasons, the study of ideology should transcend the study of opinions and attitudes. References Antaki, C. (1994) Explaining and Arguing. London: Sage. Balibar, E. (1991). Is there a 'neo-racism'? In E. Balibar and I. Wallerstein Race, Nation, Class. London: Verso. Billig, M. (1987) Arguing and Thinking. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (1991) Ideology and Opinions. London: Sage. (1995) Banal Nationalism. London: Sage. (in press). Discursive, rhetorical and ideological messages. In C. McGarty and A. Haslam (eds) Message of Social Psychology: Perspectives on Mind in Society. Oxford: Blackwell. Brown, P. and Levinson, S.C. (1987) Politeness: Some Universals in Language Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eagleton, T. (1991) Ideology: An Introduction. London: Verso. Edwards, D. and Potter, J. (1992) Discursive Psychology. London: Sage. (1993) Language and causation: A discursive action model of description and attribution. Psychological Review 100,23-41. Harré, R. and Gillet, G. (1994) The Discursive Mind. London: Sage. Larrain, J. (1983) Marxism and Ideology. London: Macmillan. McLellan, D. (1986) Ideology. Milton Keynes: Open University. Potter, J. and Wetherell, M. (1987) Discourse and Social Psychology. London: Sage. Schiffrin D. (1985). Everyday argument: The organization of diversity in talk. In T.A. van Dijk (ed.) Handbook of Discourse Analysis. London: Academic Press. Shotter, J. (1993a) The Cultural Politics of Everyday Life. Milton Keynes: Open University. (1993b) Conversational Realities: Studies in Social Constructionism. London: Sage.
< previous page
page_58
next page >
< previous page
page_59
next page > Page 59
Wetherell, M. and Potter, J. (1992) Mapping the Language of Racism. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Wittgenstein, L. (1967) Zettel. Oxford: Blackwell.
< previous page
page_59
next page >
< previous page
page_60
next page > Page 60
Against Reductionism: A Rejoinder Teun A. van Dijk Program of Discourse Studies, University of Amsterdam, 210, Spuistraat, 1102 VT Amsterdam, The Netherlands Let me begin by emphasising that I am pleased with Mick Billig's constructive critique of my paper, and his kind remarks about my work. It is my pleasure to state from the outset how much I have always admired his work, and how much I have learned from it, from his early work on fascism to his later work on nationalism. This is social psychology at its best, and discourse analysts should be inspired by it. Indeed, his explicit rhetorical approach to discourse and the mind is one of the interdisciplinary bridges his work has built. Because of limitations of space I must be brief about the important issues he raises. They would deserve a whole volume, and we are planning just that: an encounter between discursive psychology and socio-cognitive discourse studies. I'll therefore merely summarise some of the remarks his critique calls for. A Tentative Proposal Though not intended as a cheap disclaimer, I would like to stress that my new work on discourse, opinions and ideologies is still very tentative. I have no definite answers, only some suggestions and a proposal about where to look for such answers. Most notions involved in this debate, such as those of knowledge, beliefs, opinions and ideologies, have been dealt with in several disciplines and in hundreds of books and thousands of articles. I don't know all of this literature, nor do I pretend to have solved all the puzzles. No Reduction One crucial point of divergence between Mick Billig and discursive psychology on the one hand, and my proposals on the other, is that I think that cognition and especially social cognition should be dealt with in its own, theoretical way, and not reduced to structures of interaction, discourse or rhetoric. Language and thought are intimately related, and my aim is to explain some of these relations, but they should not be reduced to each other. Cognition as Explanation of Discourse Hence, ideologies, attitudes and opinions cannot merely be accounted for in terms of their manifestations, expressions or socially relevant enactment in text and talk. On the contrary, they need to be analysed in their own right so as to explain some important properties of discourse. To do this, we need to examine what contemporary cognitive science has to offer, while at the same time critically analysing its limitations, such as its neglect of the discursive and social basis and context of social cognition.
< previous page
page_60
next page >
< previous page
page_61
next page > Page 61
Discourse Meaning(s) One point of discussion is the old question about the nature of meaning. Billig espouses a Wittgensteinian conception about meaning as 'use'. I contend that this is merely one aspect or dimension of meaning. Moreover, I suggest that such a 'meaning = use' hypothesis needs to be made explicit, e.g. in terms of the contextually bounded constructions of language users, typically so in talk or text produced or interpreted in an ongoing way. These constructions can only be mental, viz. cognitive representations, and they may be jointly produced in interaction. That is, they are both cognitive and social. However, as unique cognitions they are individual, and monitored by the personal experiences, viz. the models of language users. And as jointly produced they are equally unique, viz. as being defined by the social parameters of the present context. Abstract Meanings Besides these contextually bounded, unique interpretations of language users, it makes sense to assume more abstract, contextfree meanings. Indeed, these allow language users to construct contextual meanings 'in use', and, for instance, select appropriate words in the first place. Traditionally abstract meanings were dealt with as the lexical meanings and semantic representations of linguistics in general and grammar in particular. However, current approaches would take a more cognitive view of such meanings, and, for example, represent them as forms of knowledge. It is this socially shared knowledge that enables discourse and understanding in any context, and it is needed to construct the personally and contextually variable meanings language users assign to utterances. Also, abstract meanings are both cognitive and social. They are cognitive while represented in the mind of language users. They are social because they are acquired, shared and used by the members of a speech community. Thus, instead of staying with dated philosophies of 'meaning = use', we need an explicit cognitive, discursive and pragmatic semantics that spells out in detail what meanings look like, that explains how they are constructed or understood in specific contexts, and how this happens as a function of (mental representations and social constructions of) context. In sum: since each discourse is contextually unique, so is its meaning. However, this uniqueness presupposes more general, abstract, social or shared meanings and interpretation processes. We need to account for both; in the same way we need theories of social interaction and social actors at the micro-level as well as theories of societal structure and social groups, communities and culture at the macro-level. The Social and Cognitive Functions of Discourse Structures Discourse structures have many functions. They obviously do what Mick Billig emphasises: they are involved in 'interactional business'. Thus, yes, the formulation of opinions is a function of context and interaction. But he, along with discursive psychologists, seems to ignore the fact that discourse structures also are a function of 'cognitive business'. Indeed, they allow people to express their thoughts and opinions, to communicate them to others, to recall and learn
< previous page
page_61
next page >
< previous page
page_62
next page > Page 62
things, and so on. Hence we need a fully fledged theory of discourse, in which both cognition and interaction as well as society have a descriptive and explanatory role. Opinions in Discourse Of course it is true that when expressing opinions people do so mostly in 'rhetorical contexts' and often in 'matters of controversy'. These are the social functions of opinion discourse. But at the same time, people are at odds about something, viz. conflicting opinions, and it is the business of discourse to express and formulate them. Language users are at pains to tailor such discourse to the context at hand, but at the same time they try to match such expressions with the complexity of their personal thoughts, beliefs, and evaluative processes, as well as with their socially shared knowledge and attitudes. Language users do routinely report their internal states, and they know they do. Again: such cognitive representations cannot be reduced to the social functions of text or talk. They need their own analysis, e.g. to describe and explain the very processes of speaking, understanding, interpretation and communication. Mental Representations of Context Indeed, these mental representations and processes are even necessary to model the very interactional and broader societal context of discourse itself. Without such representations, language users would not even be able to adapt themselves and their discourse to a context: indeed, how would the properties of context ever be able to directly monitor discourse without this cognitive interface? Virtually all cognitive psychologists of language and discourse agree on versions of these assumptions. This agreement does not make the hypothesis true, but only suggests that at the moment we have no viable theoretical alternative. No theory of context or interaction can by itself explain the (production or reception of) the relations between the structures of text and context. Facts vs. Opinions Provisionally I do indeed assume that ideologies basically regulate social (group-based) evaluations of the world. I also assume that there is both a common-sense and an analytical distinction between knowledge and opinions. That social members make this distinction is beyond dispute. Now, should we also make it as theorists? Yes and no. No, because we know that all knowledge is relative to socio-culturally and historically variable verification criteria. Knowledge is, as suggested by most epistemologists, what someone or rather some group or culture calls 'true' beliefs. But given and within each relative, cultural framework, yes, it makes sense to distinguish between factual beliefs (knowledge) and other beliefs, including opinions that are based on evaluations. We do so first to account for common-sense distinctions people make. Second, as discourse analysts we do so because these common-sense distinctions show up in a rich discourse about these beliefs. People have a vast array of discursive means to separate fact and fiction, to distinguish between whether they or others
< previous page
page_62
next page >
< previous page
page_63
next page > Page 63
know something (and have evidence for it) or merely believe something. Indeed, the very point of argumentation and controversy is often precisely this distinction: we argue because we believe that what others believe we merely believe (and do not know) is in fact true, and want to prove it. Ideology and Beliefs These distinctions (which need to be discussed in much more detail) also allow an account of the ideological basis of knowledge and beliefs. I fully agree with Mick Billig that ideologies underlie what people construct as facts, and that knowledge may be taken for granted and as 'naturally' true. This testifies precisely to what I claim, viz. that (as a whole) systems of knowledge are socially and culturally relative, and often related to the goals, interests or other ideological parameters of a group. But that does not mean that (1) people within a culture or group cannot and do not distinguish between 'true' knowledge and 'mere' beliefs, nor that (2) we are unable to criticise the ideologically based 'knowledge' as in fact being 'false', which again presupposes another system of evaluation and truth. Ideological critique in this sense often presupposes what it seems to reject itself, viz. the analytical distinction between truth and falsity, or at least between what is right and what is wrong. These are not merely common-sense distinctions. They also have powerful analytical and explanatory functions in a proper theory of ideology and how it relates to other socially shared mental representations as well as to the discourse manifesting them. On Terminology The concepts used above, such as 'belief', 'knowledge', 'opinion', 'attitude' and 'ideology' are, however, just that: theoretical, analytical concepts. Their use for me does not at all commit me to any mentalist essentialism, to the traditional social psychology of attitudes, to classical epistemology, to Marxist or Neo-Marxist ideas on ideology, or to any other theory and framework in which they have been used and abused. I define what they mean for me within my theoretical framework, and I explain why I need them. Not being a solipsist, I of course respect some historical continuity and presuppose some mutual social understanding, also within scholarship. Much of what I invest in the concept and the theory of ideology has to do with what many people usually understand by ideology. But on the other hand, I also reject many other traditional aspects of the theory of ideology, because, for example, I find them intolerably vague and imprecise, as is the case for notions such as 'false consciousness'. The same is true for opinions and attitudes. Instead of merely looking backward in the construction of a theory of ideology, as is so often the case in more philosophical approaches, I want to look ahead and reconstruct it with all the theoretical instruments we now have in discourse studies, cognitive science and the social sciences. Ideology and Critique I obviously do not reduce a theory of ideology to a narrow cognitive theory of opinions and attitudes, and not even to a theory of social representations and
< previous page
page_63
next page >
< previous page
page_64
next page > Page 64
their manifestations in discourse and other social practices, as indeed my work on racism shows. These are merely small components of a much more complex endeavour, but even as small components they should be useful theoretical instruments. Obviously, ideologies as I define them have to do with (the basic social representations shared by) groups, institutions, nations or even cultures. They are crucial in the cognitive and social management of group relations, such as dominance, conflict and resistance. They are used in the legitimation of, and the resistance against, power abuse and inequality. That is, they have societal and political functions. We obviously agree on that. What we do not seem to agree on is how to describe and explain in detail what such ideologies look like, how they are acquired and changed by social actors, how they monitor knowledge and opinions, and how they are involved in the production of discourse and other social practices. Each of these aspects of the fully fledged theory needs its own theory, formulated in its own theoretical terms. In the same way that ideologies thus cannot be reduced to mere social cognitions, they cannot be reduced to mere societal functions. A critical discourse analysis is only effective if it is based on explicit theories about all the dimensions involved in the ideologically based reproduction of power and inequality. And this is my programme for the years ahead.
< previous page
page_64
next page >
