A Critical view on 'Missing the Links in Mainstream CDA, Paul Chilton'

Missing the Links in Mainstream CDA,Modles, Blends, and the Critical Instinct Paul Chilton'
Paul Chilton in this article makes some uprooting remarks against the mere necessity of CDA on the basis that it doesn’t focus on the explanation of what really happens in mind and its so called ignorance of evolutionary psychology. Although he admits that mainly Van Dijk in most of his works and Wodak in some of hers have been drawing on these ideas substantially but he does not find them on the right tract partly caused they are not incorporating enough of cognitive psychology in their methodology and partly due to commitment element which is explicit in their works.

On the same note somewhere in between he draws on to the classic debate of subjectivity vs. objectivity in science and the definition of ‘science’ which seems to be heavily out of context in discussion on CDA as it is a major paradigmic definition which needs to be dealt and done with before getting into more detailed discussion on disciplines like CDA.

Paul Chilton seems to strongly believe in the role of cognitive psychology and advocates the incorporation of cognitive psychology into CDA as the only way of meaningful survival of CDA which will then probably called cognitive Linguistics.

He argues that although attempts have been made to incorporate cognitive psychology in CDA specifically by Van Dijk 1984,19991,1993 etc and Reisigl and Wodak 2001, none have been really integrating it into their methodology of analysis. This is a point about the necessity, plausibility or desirability of which there is a lot of doubt. He argues that CDA should abandon its socio-cultural or socio-economic approaches of explanation in its discourse analysis while there is a strong belief that the sociological, cultural and historical characteristics of a society- e.g. bourgeois mood of life- do have a lot to explain about tendencies and macro reasons of mass formation of certain ideology in a society e.g. ‘racist’ among all the other ideological moods of a society. Besides, one would argue that drawing on sociological factor is not to necessarily negate the innate psychological process of ideology in humans and it is not clear why CDA should deprive itself of using all the resources available in its explanatory agenda.

He moves on and reviews some aspects of recent developments of cognitive psychology like, modularity of mind, initiative psychology, Machiavellian intelligence, intuitive biology, and cognitive fluidity, out of which the relevance of a limited number of the notions to CDA is partly established and the rest remains strictly decontextualized review of some cognitive psychology development.

He points out that Machiavellian intelligence (instrumental rationality in Habermasian terms I would say) is an innate biological characteristic of humans (or indeed among other human family primates) and by that we can explain the humans’ natural tendencies like social categorisation, interaction, manipulation etc and that is how we should look at the phenomenon rather than assuming them to have anything to do with social modes of life. And by that he concludes:

‘CDA as an academic and pedagogical enterprise might not be necessary at all. This startling interference could be drawn from the claim- indeed the evidence-that humans have in any case an innate ‘theory of mind [intuitive psychology] and a metarepresentationl module. If individual humans are innately Machiavellian, they are also innately able to counter one another’s machination. If language is crucial to this ability and associated activity, then they should have innate ability not just to use language in Machiavellian ways but to detect and counter one another’s Machiavellian use of language….the question is, given the forgoing remarks: what is CDA for f people can do it anyway?’ (p 31)


This conclusion is heavily simplistic. This seems to partly come from a common problem of all explanations which have their root in psychology or social psychology in which they are too individualistic in over generalising what happens in society based on how an individual mind works and over simplifying of reducing the social cognition to individual level.

What Chilton says in this quote is to reduce the highly complicated discoursal practice and mass communication of the modern life to some individual primate communication of the simplest nature. I do not think that we can deny that the tendency to generalize and categorise social phenomena is a natural trait in human and having this skill is not a matter of luxury but rather it is an essential feature in human conducts. Humans are sure equipped with such an apparatus to be able to deal with such a great deal of sophistications of social life. However, it is a naïve simplification to think that every body is equipped with the same level of expertise to manipulate a certain communicative event. If that were the case we would have expected any ordinary person to be able to do the job of the linguists, journalists, news writers, lecture writers, spin doctors or any body else whose essential work material is language. This is the case not only for CDA but for almost any other humanistic sciences where they seem to explain what seem is ‘obvious’ at first sight.

Besides, we agree that every body has this ability to recognise and probably counter attack unfavourable generalizations and manipulations in language use (which is definitely a fact in essence) but are we only dealing with interpersonal language use? What about the role of far ranging media, be it a newspaper, a TV channels or radio? Does the range of influence have nothing to do with the effects that a language mediated event may have? Do all people involved in a discourse which is manipulated by a newspaper get a chance to use their innate ability to counterattack? Is it just so simple and straight forward for every body to guess what ideology is behind a set of news casts? Does every ordinary person know how the process of selection, production, marketisation and deliverance of a piece of news work? Is manipulation or what Chilton calls ‘Machiavellian’ use of language just a very simple transparent endeavour which can be recognisable by every body?

He then continues to take up a social case of racism- acute anti-Semitic text of Mein Kempf- and by referring to Sperber’s experiments comes up with a diagram of how meta templates work in humans’ minds. The diagram reminds me of Chomsky’s notion of innate language apparatus of humans and how it can be fed by different linguistic date to produce the acquisition of different language. This diagram also indicates that we as humans have a metatemplate about living things and we tend to do analysis and categorisation of things naturally like the zoological hierarchy of animals we draw about animals. If this meta template is ‘initialised’ (exposed to a certain data in Chomsky’s notion) by ‘cultural input’ (discourse) of certain kind then it can start do produce any social categorisation e.g. racism or exclusionary ideologies. Figure 3 page 35. This may bring the danger of falling into a severe positivistic relativism where everything is natural.

He seems to be proposing a cognitive linguistics whose primary intention it is to add to the body of human understanding on how and why humans produce collective cognitions like ideologies. This as he mentions:

‘is not a means of combating directly those with whose ideologies we might disagree’ (p38)

That is, such an academic activity does not or can not distinguish between ‘good’ or ‘bad’, in other words CL as Chilton proposes does/can/should/may not have a ‘critical agenda’ and places itself into the rhyme of other purely ‘scientific’ activities.

On the same note he explains how by the use of cognitive insights Mein Kempf can be analysed and points out to Wodak’s work as being too limited in its range of explanation of ‘why’ this particular cognitive effect arise. That is, her work fails to have psychological account of what really happens in mind while on the other hand he calls on CDA to wholesomely leave the social, economic, historical analysis of the context to disciplines like political economy, sociology and history.

What he is not at this point acknowledging is that a CDA work (at least on cases like racism) is to raise an awareness and explain the patterns in which a wrong ideology is being proliferated and it is purely on these grounds that it draws on historical, political or sociological accounts like Wodak and Fairclough works or cognitive psychology among other sources in Van Dijk’s works. Even Van Dijk being the CDA scholar who is very interested in ‘why’ questions of Chilton’s type also gives a primary role to language as not merely a carrier but also a birth space of generalisations of collective ideologies where the group ideologies do not exist or at least cannot be formalised without some form of discourse being present. (Van Dijk 1991).

What Chilton proposes for CDA is strictly an apolitical linguistics which may act as an integral, data container of a cognitive psychology to contribute to human knowledge on mind or a data feeding phase for political science, sociology, or history disciplines in case CDA insists on staying ‘critical’. Thus, there is no such thing as ‘Discourse Analysis with an attitude’ (Wodak?).

What he is not considering is that CDA has been drawing upon sociology, history or political sciences as its ways of foregrounding its critique of the present social order and critique is an integral part of it. Even studies in which the researchers draw upon cognitive psychology like Van Dijk’s and some of Wodak’s are not neutral in what they want to achieve and have an explicit officially announced ‘critical agenda’ in fighting inequalities, criticising unfair power relations and dominance. It is strictly based on these causes that CDA is interested in cognitive psychology, sociology, history, political science or philosophy. Besides, CDA is trying to raise the awareness of public in the same trend as social phenomena are getting more and more complicated and in the same line raising awareness as a strictly modest summary of critical research has been quite effective in changing a lot of unfair ‘cognitive effects’ in the societies of modern life.

While CDA is about casting light on systems of ideas or macro ideological structures at work on showing what the process of manipulation is on a grand level by systemically drawing upon linguistic, discursive, semantic example on the inductive level, Chilton tries to reduce CDA to an unnecessary verbal analysis of a kind that any unacademic person is able to do.

Among other unfavourable conclusions that may be inferred from a ‘purely scientific’ notion of a field like CL, is the one that such an ethic-free analysis of human seems to reduce humans to the level of purely biological animals who just do what they do and principles among other notions of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ have no role to play. His account totally lacks or ignores the role of ethics and goodness in humans as a factor and humans are thought to do what their innate dispositions tell them to do. The history of what human on the other hand has not shown a stagnation of human development in that way. This heavy reduction of human to biology seems to be a bit irritating at times.

Paul Chilton’s article is a very strong challenge to CDA and how it should justify its existence as a strong academic field. He has some points there which need to be addressed by CDA scholars for example; the relationship between CDA and cognitive psychology and how they can/should interact, how actual cognitive processes in mind of individuals or collective ideologies in minds of groups are formed, need to be defined.

However, the main attribute of CDA remains to be its emancipatory agenda a critique on the base of the use of language which is the carrier and/or producer of most data in ideologies of any kind. Thus, if you take the element of social commitment out of CDA then nothing much will remain and the same goes for most studies of language use in society. What would remain is pure linguistics with its own range of influence and importance, a point form which we started from.