How to Do Things With Words

Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories

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The Uses Of Argument

Relevance Communication And Cognition

The Paranoid Style in American Politics. And Other Essays

Manipulative discourse has attracted a lot of attention in various adjacent domains of linguistic research, notably in rhetoric, argumentation theory, philosophy of language, discourse analysis, pragmatics, among others. We start with a review of the existing definitions provided in these fields and highlight some of the difficulties they encounter. In particular, we argue that there is still a need for an analytic model that makes predictions about manipulative discourse. We propose an alternative account of manipulation couched in the relevance-theoretic framework which treats manipulation as a two-step communicative attempt at misleading the context-selection process when interpreting a target utterance. We argue further that such attempts systematically exploit the inherent weaknesses or flaws of the human cognitive system that are amply discussed in cognitive psychology under the heading of “cognitive illusions”. We claim that such a model correctly captures classical instances of manipulative discourse which fall outside the scope of other accounts.

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Defining Manipulative Discourse: The Pragmatics of Cognitive Illusions

This paper proposes a cognitive-pragmatic alternative to the traditional, speech-acttheoretic, account of the notion of commitment. The perspective adopted here questions the relevance of addressing actual commitment as a speaker category and shifts the focus of the discussion from properties of speaker commitment to processes ofcommitment attribution. Using a relevance-theoretic framework, it will be suggested that inferring commitment in ordinary, cooperative, communication is part of the processes by which hearers derive speaker meaning, and that the degree of reliability that a hearer may expect to attain in attributing commitment to a speaker correlates with the degree of certainty associated to the derivation of explicatures and implicatures from an utterance.

Explicitness, implicitness and commitment attribution: A cognitive pragmatic approach

This paper examines from a cognitive perspective the rhetorical and epistemic advantages that can be gained from the use of (extended) metaphors in political discourse. We defend the assumption that extended metaphors can be argumentatively exploited, and provide two arguments in support of the claim. First, considering that each instantiation of the metaphorical mapping in the text may function as a confirmation of the overall relevance of the main core mapping, we argue that extended metaphors carry self-validating claims that increase the chances of their content being accepted. Second, we show how the recognition of an extended metaphor’s sophistication and relevance (on behalf of the addressee) can benefit the speaker’s perceived competence (ethos). We then assess whether these two arguments measure against the dual epistemic monitoring postulated in the notion of epistemic vigilance (i.e., assessment of the source of a message and assessment of the message) and conclude that extended metaphors may fulfil the requirements of epistemic vigilance and lead to the stabilisation of a belief. We illustrate our account with an analysis of the extended metaphor of the USA as an empire found in a political pamphlet written by the Swiss politician Oskar Freysinger.

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Metaphor as Argument: Rhetorical and Epistemic Advantages of Extended Metaphors

When and how do we deal with straw men? A normative and cognitive pragmatic account

Many accounts of manipulative communication stemming from a discourse analytical perspective tackle the conditions under which a discourse can be termed ‘manipulative’, usually by focusing their analysis on two points. One of them is a careful examination of the external contextual settings of the particular communicative event, that is, its broad social context, which includes the social relationship between speaker and audience, their respective roles and prerogatives, the status of their respective knowledge, the purpose of the event, and so on. This somewhat contextually external take on manipulation, which takes into consideration the inherently social nature of manipulative communication, is summarised by Van Dijk when he posits that ‘it only makes sense to speak of manipulation [...] when speakers or writers are manipulating others in their role as a member of a dominant collectivity’ (2006: 364).1 A second point of focus is traditionally set on the discursive and linguistic devices which can strategically be put to use by unscrupulous speakers in order to gain consent through ‘illegitimate’, to some extent uncooperative, means which escape the audience’s awareness, notably in the (re)production of ideological systems.2

Steve Oswald

Papers

Defining Manipulative Discourse: The Pragmatics of Cognitive Illusions

Explicitness, implicitness and commitment attribution: A cognitive pragmatic approach

Metaphor as Argument: Rhetorical and Epistemic Advantages of Extended Metaphors

When and how do we deal with straw men? A normative and cognitive pragmatic account

Constraining context: a pragmatic account of cognitive manipulation