From interpretation to consent: Arguments, beliefs and meaning
BLE-BLL
Published in:
- Discourse Studies. - SAGE Publications. - 2011, vol. 13, no. 6, p. 806-814
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.
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Faculty
- Faculté des lettres et des sciences humaines
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Department
- Département d'anglais
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Language
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Classification
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Language, linguistics
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License
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Rights reserved
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Open access status
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green
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Identifiers
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Persistent URL
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https://folia.unifr.ch/unifr/documents/323883
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