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Debate 781

Author biography

Paul Chilton is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at Lancaster University. He is a cogni-tive linguist and critical discourse analyst who gained his undergraduate and doctoral

degrees at the University of Oxford. His books include The Poetry of Jean de La Ceppede,Language and the Nuclear Arms Debate(ed.), Security Metaphors,Analysing Political

Discourse: Theory and Practice. He is currently writing a book on his geometry-based

Discourse Space Theory and another outlining his critical re-assessment of CDA. He

also acts as a consultant cognitive linguist for NGOs, charities and other organizations.

Discourse analysis, cognition and evidentials

Louis de SaussureUniversity of Neuchtel, Switzerland

Abstract

This article echoes concerns recently formulated regarding CDAs lack of attention to cognitivescience (or evolutionary psychology). From a cognitive pragmatic viewpoint, I argue that discourse

analysis should undergo an epistemological change in order to seriously take into account what

cognitive (thus naturalistic) approaches have to offer, in particular as regards the automatic

processing of utterances and the subsequent non-conscious evaluation of contents vis-a-vis

previously held beliefs. I regard the epistemological tension in CDA as stemming from a wider

tension of the same sort affecting social science in general. Considering discourse as a process

of interpretation and evaluation, I address briefly the influence of evidentiality as a pragmatic

category in persuasive discourse and conclude that the uptake of new beliefs on the basis of

discourse is oriented towards the maximization of relevance in the sense of Sperber and Wilson.

Keywords

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

Look who speaks (my late father)

Corresponding author:

Louis de Saussure, University of Neuchtel, Institute of Language and Communication, Espace Louis Agassiz

1, CH-2000 Neuchtel, Switzerland.

Email: [email protected]

at Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM) on January 7, 2015dis.sagepub.comDownloaded from
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782 Discourse Studies 13(6)

1. Introduction

Some recent works in critical discourse analysis (CDA) call for an epistemological

change. A reflection of this is to be found in Harts article (this issue), where he both

pleads for an infusion of cognitive or evolutionarypsychology (EP) into CDA and detailsthe impact of evidentiality on the persuasive efficiency of discourses; he finds his inspi-

ration in a range of works but in particular in the recent paper by Sperber et al. (2010) on

epistemic vigilance. The central question that underlies the worries expressed in these

recent works (see also Chilton, 2005a; Hart, 2010; OHalloran, 2003; Oswald, 2010) is

whether CDA should (and can) adapt vis-a-vis these EP newcomers on the field of

persuasion in discourse, a crucial object of study for CDA.1

In what follows, I discuss this issue as a cognitive pragmaticist. I advocate that the

current tension within CDA reflects a broader tension in the social sciences, which is

about the import of naturalistic approaches to human behaviour. I then consider whatcognitive pragmatics bring into the picture through a short discussion of meaning,

understanding and believing, with some reference to notions such as evidentiality as a

pragmatic category.

CDA, as I understand it, is very much about the social effects of discourses as repro-

ducing and shaping ideologies seen as socially constructed representations; these con-

siderations are much needed, today as always but today in particular. Yet, if not carefully

drawn from facts, methods and consistent theories, such considerations will always

appear to the sceptical opinions from biased intellectuals prompt to find in the empirical

material the confirmation of a priori conceptions (Widdowson, 20042). In the matter of

discourse studies, a serious epistemological standard should imply that one cannot

rightfully jump to broad social and ethical considerations on discourse before establish-

ing what the part of cognitive processes of understandingand believingare in the over-

all process of social influence and spreading of ideas mediated by discourse. I am

returning to these concepts below, but I think that Harts attempt to explain facts of

influence through the lens of meaning, here of evidentiality, is the kind of approach that

CDA and persuasion studies can benefit from although with some nuances.

2. A naturalistic approach to discourseIn the course of its development across various schools of thought, CDA established

itself as a broad domain anchoring in social thinking and widely adopting the main-

stream scientific attitudes of social science in the 20th century. Roughly (because these

attitudes are differently assumed in a great number of scholarly trends), they imply,

among others, the following assumptions, more or less explicitly stated.

i) Human and social behaviour, and thus human consent to socially constructed repre-

sentations, is out of the realm of natural causes and thus escapes from the epistemologies

of naturalistic perspectives and, as a consequence, of EP and philosophy of mind.

A weaker version of this is that natural causes to such things are intrinsically impossibleto study, or that they play little role.

To this, EP opposes the idea that human behaviour, including the adoption by humans

of beliefs and ideologies, is determined, not in all details (there is a strata of relativity in

those facts), but at a crucial fundamental level, by the architecture of the brain resulting

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Debate 783

from evolution, any sociocultural fact being a parameter (and a result) from these (social

facts are results of the cognition of individuals). In that sense, EP endorses a determinis-

tic position, which seems incompatible with mainstream CDA. Yet it needs to be distin-

guished between what can be investigated by deterministic science in this perspective

and what facts are outside its scope (at least for the moment); as regards discourse andcommunication, this implies a difference between studying the speaker and studying the

hearer, as I will suggest later.

ii) Whereas the human brain is the primary locusof behaviour, questions about how

the brain works when processing information and adapting to social environments is

widely banned, not only because action is supposedly shaped exclusively by social

contexts but also because the brain is considered an inscrutable black box. To this,

expectedly, EP opposes the possibility of studying cognitive activity not only theoretically,

but also empirically (in particular experimentally).

A noticeable exception to this, mentioned by Hart, is the considerable infusion ofcognitive linguistics (CL) into CDA. The success of it shows that cognitive processes

cant be ignored by discourse analysis. Even if considering that metaphors are conven-

tional and culture-specific constructs which is debatable to some extent it remains

that stable mental processes are exploited by metaphors in a particular way in the very

processing of discourse (otherwise it becomes complicated to explain that they are

persuasive), which entails that intercultural variation is epiphenomenal to a hard-core

universal mechanism. It is striking in this respect that proponents of CL like Chilton and

Hart are among the most concerned with the need for more infusion of cognitive science

into CDA. Yet, at the same time, it may seem astonishing that Hart (this issue) is anxiousto make a precision when he advocates for some infusion of EP into CDA. This, he

says, is not a biologically determinist position as some might charge. Besides the fact

that this precision shows how much determinism is banned from CDA, the need for this

precision illuminates also that there is indeed a tension between a natural biological type

of model and anti-determinism as a supposed principle of social life. What if this tension

could be resolved only when the deterministic model is fine-grained enough to wipe off

what simply wrongly appears to us as non-deterministic processes, or, rather, when the

model delimits the zone where predictions are impossible?

It would be interesting to know more about Harts position on the problem of deter-minism, but let me make a point. Clearly, what a speaker isgoing to sayis unpredictable

(even the conventions of speech use cant predict whatever content; we can merely, with

some indeterminacy, surmise a preferred type of speech act); on the contrary, what a

hearer is going to interpret is clearly predictable on the simple basis of the concerned

utterance and a limited set of contextual assumptions. We may make wrong predictions

on this occasionally, but there are right predictions that can be made if the model and the

data are adequate. But there is more: speakers themselves predict what their interlocutor

is going to interpret, otherwise they cant hope to pass on a message unless by chance.

Therefore, speakers have a model of human natural understanding, according to which

they shape their communication (unconsciously), and which belongs to theory of mind

(ToM). This is the reason for which many pragmatic theories of the (post-)Gricean tradi-

tion, now cognitive theories of meaning, focus on the process of understanding (as

Relevance Theory) and not on that of new speech acts. For discourse analysis, the invited

conclusion of this attitude is that, if the choice of words and linguistic structures is not



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innocent, as posited by functional linguistics (see Halliday, 1985, for instance) and right-

fully consensually admitted, it is primarily because these linguistic forms are destined to

trigger cognitive effects according to ToM.3

But what is at stake with CDA is one step further: from a solid prediction of under-

standing, can we go up to a prediction on believing(which includes also being trappedinto some ideological set of beliefs, consciously or not)? Either the answer is a clear no,

and then the conclusion is that accepting a belief on the basis of an utterance within a

discourse and a context is a totally erratic and random type of event; or the answer may

be that believing is a type of situation which is onlyfavouredby this or that factor, but

then one wonders what it is tofavourif not the confession of a deterministic process still

unknown; the third answer isyes to some extent(a full and plainyesseems unrealistic,

given the amount of factors at play), but then deterministic aspects must be part of the

theory and admitted at a core level of the whole process, and the scope of deterministic

theory must be set, relativism rightfully expanding below its border in terms of arbitraryand conventional parameters. The fact is that I cant choose to understand or to believe.

I dont apply any kind of conscious decision-making procedure or evaluation when I

understanda sentence or a discourse, when I derive an implicature or extract a presup-

position, and, obviously, when I come to believea new proposition: this is out of the

scope of will.4Therefore, these events cant happen without a stable natural determinist

core of causalities, whatever complex it may be, since when these events happen, my

mind works them out without me exerting any control over them. Needless to say, a

deterministic attitude forces the scope of the concerned scientific domain to settle. This

is why cognitive pragmatics, for instance (the type of which being Relevance Theory),has settled its scope over understandingand more recently believing, not over determi-

nations at work when speakers involved in a conversation prefer, choose, or are anyway

driven, tosay(this is the work of conversational analysis).

At this stage, it should be stated that if considering that CDA aims at doing critical

discourse analysis, the import of such approaches must be more than the advance of

science. If there are grounds ultimately neurological grounds for assessing that

some discursive patterns exploit biases that are as unavoidable as, say, optical illusions

(Pohl, 2004, rightfully calls cognitive illusions the cognitive biases known as heuristics

in the tradition of Tversky and Kahneman, 1974; see also Caverni et al., 1990), and thatthe devices that exploit them (for example, metaphor, but there are many others) are

brought to light, then the aim of enhancing the critical literacy of people will be better

reached than it has been, if at all, within mainstream CDA.5

Earlier, I suggested that the study of understanding is central to the project of dis-

course analysis. I might put it like this: the study of meaning is central to the project of

a cognitive approach to discourse, in particular to the project of better knowing the

influence of communication on belief change or reproduction. This calls for a definition

of discourse and some examples of how persuasion works in discourse from the

cognitive pragmatic viewpoint.

3. Discourse, understanding, believing

There is an intrinsic link between understanding what is communicated understanding

a discourse and getting to believe its contents: both are automatic and uncontrollable



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Debate 785

processes, and believing is based on evidences that intervene at the level of understand-

ing already.6Processing utterances means putting in relation many pieces of information

in order to draw conclusions. Many of them are already held assumptions about the

world, the context and the speaker. Among these pieces of information, some are not

only about what is to be understoodbut also about what is to be believed; these involveepistemic and evidential assumptions. Again, some are communicated and some are

previously held. The process that goes from a verbal stimulus to a belief is, however,

managed by various devices of evaluation (call it critical module) where some assump-

tions intervene, such as suspicion, guesses about the speakers intentions and interests

which might derogate anticipation of competence and benevolence, etc. But the hearer

can very well fail to notice them, not only because of lack of knowledge, but also because

of low-level processes taking place in the mind, which guarantee efficient communica-

tion in everyday settings but leave open a possibility for manipulation (see Chilton,

2005b; De Saussure, 2005; Maillat and Oswald, 2009; Oswald, 2010). Many of thesebiases are active in communication, some do affect the processing of utterances, others

affect the context (for example, when a repeated information tends to integrate our cog-

nitive environment by means of the mere exposure effect; Zajonc, 1968). All this, it

must be emphasized, is a process taking place utterance after utterance, therefore not

over whole discourses at once.

Cognitive pragmatics rejects the idea that discourses are mere structures of contents

tied together with markers of cohesion, and that therefore discourses are wholes best

studied by a phenomenological ex postanalysis. Reboul and Moeschler (1998) define

discourse as a non-arbitrary suite of utterances (my emphasis); in the same vein, Chafe(1987) expresses that discourses are best studied asprocesses(discussed in De Saussure,

2007; see also Wilson, 1998). The reason for this is that utterances are never processed

without the preceding utterances forming a context, that is, a set of elements which,

together with the current utterance, lead to the deduction of inferences, in turn entering

further deductions when processing the next utterance. As such, the understanding of a

discourse is nothing more than understanding the flow of utterances composing it till the

end. Furthermore, Reboul and Moeschler (1998) insightfully explain that what makes a

series of utterances compose a discourse is that they converge towards a global meaning

intention (or several of them) on the part of the speaker. Relevance Theory suggests anoverarching principle managing the processing of communicated information: a path of

least effort is followed in search of compensation in terms of cognitive information

(Sperber and Wilson, 1995).

Evidentiality seems one of the most crucial pieces of information at work in the inter-

face between understanding and believing. Let me quickly take two short examples.

In 1999, French journalist Philippe Vandel went on the streets of a city with the full

professional apparatus, camera and microphone, and interrogated people: Experts have

calculated that New Years Day 2000 will be on a Friday the 13th, are you afraid of

this?; people (at least those in the show) didnt notice the inconsistency and answered

that they were, or not, afraid, and for which reasons.7Apart from the fact that online

utterances are less subject to critical evaluation, there are two components in this type of

manipulation: shallow processing of Friday the 13th reinterpreted as some dangerous

day in order to re-establish consistency (Oswald, 2010; see Allott, 2005, about shallow

processing in relation to political discourse) and evidentiality (experts have said



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something). No doubt shallow processing was reinforced by evidentiality, and no doubt

either that such things, although less evidently of course, occur in ordinary political

discourse everyday.

But if the evidence on which the information relies is unsaid, it may be strongly pre-

supposed (or implied8).9Things are similar with epistemic modality.A case in point in order to show that epistemic features can be left inferred as assump-

tions on the commitment of the speaker is to be found in reported speech and thought

(Morency et al., 2008), which involve a representation by the speaker of a representation

by a third party. Reported speech is precisely a case of (indirect) evidentiality that raises

complex issues. In the example above, the segment experts have calculated that Pimplies

that experts are committed to P as a mathematical fact. Usually, we treat utterances such

asExperts believe that Pjust as we treat things likeMary said its time to gowhich normally

entails that it is time to go on the basis of the expertise of Mary on the topic. This infer-

ence changes significantly if the speaker saysIts time to go, except if it is contextuallymanifest that he just spoke with Mary; in that case, evidentiality does exist as a pragmatic

feature of communication, although inferred on the basis of contextual knowledge.10

Similarly, if a representative of a government expresses (1):

(1) The country faces a budgetary crisis.

There is inferential evidence, here presupposed, that a staff of experts have established

(1) as true (some would speak here of intertextuality). If the crisis is not budgetary

but rather financial, hence not due to state budget mismanagement by the previousgovernment but rather to the failure of private financial institutions, it can be left unno-

ticed because of processes basically similar to that of the Friday the 13th case: budget-

ary is shallow processed because the utterance must be consistent with other knowledge

and expectations of relevance (the economical jargon makes it even more easy to go),

sustained by an evidential presupposition. Some economists can see the problem, but in

the absence of cautious examination, many people wont, except if they have some

knowledge about it, and, I would stress, some motivation to think about the contents

and the speakers intentions.

4. Conclusion: Relevance to believe

Such knowledge on how we process utterances, just as knowledge about possible hidden

intentions of the speaker or simply about the competence of the speaker (my late father

used to tell me to always wonder who is speaking), can be thought of as contextual

assumptions among others, but of a meta-type. Evidentiality, if considered as one of

these contextual assumptions, and not only as a linguistic type of marker, then enters a

calculus of relevance too; yet its outcome is ultimately about the relevance there would

be in adopting the concerned belief, that is, the positive impact of that new belief on my

personal set of representations. That is, in sum: relevance to believe. This impact is very

important in specific situations, in particular risky ones: if, among the background

assumptions I hold, I consider that we are in a dangerous crisis, it may be very useful



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Debate 787

to the speaker that I find relevance in assuming it as budgetary so that I accept the

budgetary solutions proposed by experts to solve the crisis.

Notes

1. Van Dijk (2008, 2011) also addresses this issue in his attempt to reconcile a mental model

with a context model.

2. After a long series of previous critical works targeting not only CDA but various approaches

to language use.

3. What the right model of ToM should be (simulation, empathy, theory-theory, etc.) is not my

concern here.

4. Obviously this holds for wishful thinking too which is not about conscious will.

5. One may object that if we are deterministically subject to such illusions, then they are una-

voidable. Here a comparison with optical illusions is enlightening: being subject to optical

illusions leads to believing in what you see only inasmuch as you dont know that it is anillusion. Thus the import of EP and cognitive science is to bring about a reflexive apparatus

that helps hearers to identify those illusions as manipulative. Knowing the results of scientific

research should here suffice, just as knowing that radioactive material has specific effects on

the human body. Anyone as a citizen, not only scientists, and certainly often far better than

scientists, is able to understand that it is therefore undesirable.

6. There are other, crucial, factors that orient towards believing, among which, perhaps most

crucially, emotion and desire to believe what fit best with our assumptions, comfort and

worldview. I am leaving these aside here (see however Clment, 2006).

7. Steve Oswald brought this case to my attention in 2005. He extensively explains it in Oswald

(2010). 8. If evidentiality is the purpose of communication, then its an implicature (for Gricean

pragmatics, it would then be triggered on the basis of the maxim of quality).

9. Some linguists might oppose this point of view as they count evidentiality as an explicit type

of linguistic marking. Yet I consider here evidentialityas a pragmatic, not a purely linguistic,

category (see De Saussure, forthcoming).

10. Epistemic mustcan be discussed in this regard: mustexpresses necessity, but an utterance like

John must be at the swimming poolexpresses the necessity only of an inference on the basis

of (incomplete) premises available to the speaker, hence the usual idea that epistemic must

indicates inferential evidentiality.

References

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Caverni J-P, Fabre J-P and Gonzalez M (eds) (1990) Cognitive Biases. Amsterdam: North-Holland

Elsevier.

Chafe W (1987) Cognitive constraints on information flow. In: Tomlin R (ed.) Coherence and

Grounding in Discourse. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, 2151.Chilton P (2005a) Missing links in mainstream CDA: Modules, blends and the critical instinct. In:

Wodak R and Chilton P (eds)A New Research Agenda in Critical Discourse Analysis: Theory

and Interdisciplinarity. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1952.



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Author biography

Louis de Saussureis Professor of Linguistics and Discourse Analysis at the University of

Neuchtel. He formerly taught at the University of Texas at Austin, the Ecole des Hautes

Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and the Universities of Geneva, Lugano and

Fribourg. He was visiting researcher at University College London and at the French

Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) in Nancy. He pursues research

mostly in the fields of pragmatics, French linguistics and discourse analysis, all envis-

aged from a cognitive pragmatics perspective.

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