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2011-oswald-discoursestudies136
Journal article

From interpretation to consent: Arguments, beliefs and meaning

BLE-BLL

  • 2011
Published in:
  • Discourse Studies. - SAGE Publications. - 2011, vol. 13, no. 6, p. 806-814
Argumentation
Beliefs
Cognitive pragmatics
Constraint
Critical discourse analysis
Fallacies
Information-selection
Interpretation
Meaning
English This article addresses the relationship between understanding and believing from the cognitive perspective of information-processing. I promote, within the scope of the Critical Discourse Analysis agenda, the relevance of an account of belief-fixation sustained by a combination of argumentative and cognitive insights. To this end, I first argue that discursive strategies fulfilling legitimization purposes, such as evidentials (see Hart, this issue), tap into the same cognitive mechanisms as (both sound and fallacious) arguments. I then proceed to examine the idea that the most effective arguments are the ones that manage to obscure or make irrelevant counter-evidence and propose, from a cognitive pragmatic perspective, a formulation of rhetorical effectiveness as a constraint on information-selection taking place at the interpretation stage and decisively influencing the evaluation stage responsible for belief-fixation.
Faculty
Faculté des lettres et des sciences humaines
Department
Département d'anglais
Language
  • English
Classification
Language, linguistics
License
Rights reserved
Open access status
green
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://folia.unifr.ch/unifr/documents/323883
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