Article published In:
Journal of Language and PoliticsVol. 11:1 (2012) ► pp.31–50
Critique and argumentation
On the relation between the discourse-historical approach and pragma-dialectics
At the core of critical discourse analysis lies its emancipatory agenda: arguing for social equality and against discrimination. In the case of the discourse-historical approach (DHA), this stance has been theoretically justified mainly through references to Habermas’ language-philosophy. At the same time, the analysis of actually occurring argumentative speech requires more than a theoretical underpinning of one’s critique and, here, DHA has benefitted from drawing on van Eemeren and Grootendorst’s Pragma-Dialectical argumentation theory. However, Pragma-Dialectics is not just a tool kit but rests on Popper and Albert’s critical rationalism. This results in both epistemological as well as normative conflicts at the paradigm-core of DHA between critical rationalism and Habermas’ critical theory regarding the concept of critique. In this article, we review the different epistemological and normative underpinnings of DHA and Pragma-Dialectics and discuss the consequences of implementing the latter in the former. We conclude by arguing for a coherent orientation towards Habermas’ language-philosophy in order to maintain a high degree of consistency in DHA.
References (41)
Adorno, Theodor W. 1976. The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology. London: Heinemann.
Albert, Hans. 1968. Traktat über kritische Vernunft. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr.
Alexy, Robert. 2010. A Theory of Legal Argumentation: The Theory of Rational Discourse as Theory of Legal Justification. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Apel, Karl-Otto. 1980. The a priori of the communication community and the foundation of ethics: the problem of a rational foundation of ethics in the scientific age. In: Towards a Transformation of Philosophy. London/Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 225—300.
Austin, John L. 1975. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 
Biro, John and Siegel, Harvey. 2006. Pragma-Dialectics versus epistemological theories of arguing and arguments: rivals or partners. In: Peter Houtlosser and Agnes van Rees (eds). Considering Pragma-Dialectics. A Festschrift for Frans H. Eemeren on the Occasion of his 60th Birthday. Mahwahl/New Jersey/London: Lawrence Erlbaum Association, 1—10.
Blair, Anthony J. 2006. Pragma-Dialectics and pragma-dialectics. In: Peter Houtlosser and Agnes van Rees (eds). Considering Pragma-Dialectics. A Festschrift for Frans H. Eemeren on the Occasion of his 60th Birthday. Mahwahl/New Jersey/London: Lawrence Erlbaum Association, 11—22.
Corvi, Roberta. 1997. An Introduction to the Thought of Karl Popper. London: Routledge.
Fairclough, Norman and Wodak, Ruth. 1997. Critical Discourse Analysis. In: Teun A. van Dijk (ed.). Discourse as Social Interaction. London: Sage, 258—284.
Forchtner, Bernhard. 2011. Critique, the discourse-historical approach, and the Frankfurt School. Critical Discourse Studies 8 (1), 1—14.
Garssen, Bart and van Laar, Jan Albert. 2010. A Pragma-Dialectical response to objectivist epistemic challenges. Informal Logic 30 (2), 122—141.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1972. Wahrheitstheorien. In: 1984. Vorstudien und Ergänzungen zur Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 127—183.
. 1976. What is universal pragmatics? In: 1979. Communication and the Evolution of Society. London: Heinemann, 1—68.
. 1983. Discourse ethics: notes on a program of philosophical justification. In: 1990. Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. Cambridge: MIT Press, 43—115.
. 1984. The Theory of Communicative Action. Volume I. Reason and the Rationalization of Society. London: Heinemann.
. 1991. Remarks on discourse ethics. In: 1993. Justification and Application. Remarks on Discourse Ethics. Cambridge: MIT Press, 19—111.
. 1997. Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. Cambridge: Polity Press.
. 1998. Hermeneutic and analytic philosophy: two complementary versions of the linguistic turn. In: 2005. Truth and Justification. Cambridge: MIT Press, 51—81.
. 2008. Communicative reason and the detranscendentalized “Use of Reason”. In: Between Naturalism and Religion. Cambridge: Polity Press. 24—76.
Hacohen, Malachi Haim. 2002. Karl Popper. The Formative years, 1902—1945. Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Popper, Karl. 1962a. The Open Society and Its Enemies. Volume I. London: Routledge
. 1962b. The Open Society and Its Enemies. Volume II1. London: Routledge.
. 2008. Conjectures and Refutations. The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. London/New York: Routledge.
Rehg, William. 2001. Adjusting the pragmatic turn: ethnomethodology and critical argumentation theory. In: William Rehg and James Bohman (eds). Pluralism and the Pragmatic Turn. The Transformation of Critical Theory. Essays in Honour of Thomas McCarthy. Cambridge: MIT Press, 115—143.
Reisigl, Martin and Wodak, Ruth. 2001. Discourse and Discrimination. Rhetorics of Racism and Antisemitism. London: Routledge.
. 2009. The discourse-historical approach. In: Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer (eds). Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Sage, 87—121.
Siegel, Harvey and Biro, John. 2008. Rationality, reasonabless, and critical rationalism: problems with the pragma-dialectical view. Argumentation 221, 191—203.
Tomasello, Michael. 2010. Origins of Human Communication. Cambridge: MIT Press.
van Dijk, Teun A. 2008. Critical Discourse Analysis and nominalization. Discourse & Society 19 (6), 821—828.
van Eemeren, Frans H. 2010. Strategic Maneuvering in Argumentative Discourse. Extending the Pragma-Dialectical Theory of Argumentation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
van Eemeren, Frans H. and Grootendorst, Rob. 1988. Rationale for a pragma-dialectical perspective. Argumentation 2 (2), 271—291.
. 1992. Argumentation, Communication and Fallacies: A Pragma-Dialectical Perspective. London: Routledge.
. 1994. Speech Acts in Argumentative Discussions. A Theoretical Model for the Analysis of Discussions Directed towards Solving Conflicts of Opinion. Dordrecht/Cinnaminson: Foris Publications.
. 2004. A Systematic Theory of Argumentation. The Pragma-Dialectical Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
van Eemeren, Frans H., Garssen, Bart and Meuffels, Bert. 2009. Fallacies and Judgments of Reasonableness: Empirical Research Concerning the Pragma-Dialectical Discussion Rules. Dordrecht/Heidelberg/London/New York: Springer.
van Eemeren, Frans H., Grootendorst, Rob and Snoeck Henkemans, Francisca A. 2002. Argumentation. Analysis, evaluation, presentation. Mahwah/New York/London: Lawrence Erlbaum Association.
van Eemeren, Frans H., Grootendorst, Rob, Jackson, Sally and Jacobs, Scott. 1993. Reconstructing Argumentative Discourse. The University of Alabama Press.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1968. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell.
Wodak, Ruth and Meyer, Michael. 2009. Critical discourse analysis. History, agenda, theory and methodology. In: Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer (eds). Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Sage, 1—33.
Wodak, Ruth. 1996. Disorders of Discourse. London: Longman.
. 2001. What CDA is about — a summary of its history, important concepts and its developments. In: Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer (eds). Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. London. Sage, 1—13.
Cited by (29)
Cited by 29 other publications
Eranfeno, Gizachew Nemomsa, Agaredech Jemaneh Gemeda & Abdissa Zerai Bamano
2024. News discourses threatening multiculturalism in Ethiopian mainstream TV channels: Discourse historical approach. Heliyon 10:4 ► pp. e25641 ff. 
Serafis, Dimitris & Assimakis Tseronis
2023. The front page as a canvas for multimodal argumentation: Brexit in the Greek press. Frontiers in Communication 8
Serafis, Dimitris, Franco Zappettini & Stavros Assimakopoulos
2023. The Institutionalization of Hatred Politics in the Mediterranean: Studying Corpora of Online News Portals During the European ‘Refugee Crisis’. Topoi 42:2 ► pp. 651 ff.
Wang, Jiayu & Mingfeng Yang
2023. Interpersonal-function topoi in Chinese central government’s work report (2020) as epidemic (counter-)crisis discourse. Journal of Language and Politics 22:2 ► pp. 185 ff.
Salahshour, Neda & Dimitris Serafis
2022. (De-)constructing New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern’s initiative to wear the hijab after the Christchurch terrorist attack. Journal of Argumentation in Context 11:2 ► pp. 157 ff.
Serafis, Dimitris
2022. Unveiling the rationale of soft hate speech in multimodal artefacts. Journal of Language and Discrimination
Serafis, Dimitris, E. Dimitris Kitis & Stavros Assimakopoulos
Kutter, Amelie
2020. Advancing the Linguistic Turn: Premises of Conceptual Work. In Legitimation in the European Union, ► pp. 35 ff.
Agbozo, G. Edzordzi, Mary Edward & Fatiatu Inusah
2019. “Onaapo” vs. “One Factory”. In Music and Messaging in the African Political Arena [Advances in Religious and Cultural Studies, ], ► pp. 221 ff.
Rheindorf, Markus
2019. Introduction. In Revisiting the Toolbox of Discourse Studies, ► pp. 1 ff.
Roderick, Ian
2018. Multimodal critical discourse analysis as ethical praxis. Critical Discourse Studies 15:2 ► pp. 154 ff.
Zienkowski, Jan
2017. Discourse Theory on the Logics of Articulation, Politics and Subjectivity. In Articulations of Self and Politics in Activist Discourse, ► pp. 35 ff.
Zienkowski, Jan
2017. Reflexivity in the transdisciplinary field of critical discourse studies. Palgrave Communications 3:1
Forchtner, Bernhard & Christian Schneickert
2016. Collective learning in social fields: Bourdieu, Habermas and critical discourse studies. Discourse & Society 27:3 ► pp. 293 ff.
Gachigua, Sammy Gakero
2016. Legislating for a De Jure One-Party State in 1982 and “Party Hopping” in 2012. In Political Discourse in Emergent, Fragile, and Failed Democracies [Advances in Electronic Government, Digital Divide, and Regional Development, ], ► pp. 286 ff.
Herzog, Benno
2016. Discourse analysis as immanent critique: Possibilities and limits of normative critique in empirical discourse studies. Discourse & Society 27:3 ► pp. 278 ff.
Herzog, Benno
2016. Theoretical Approaches to Critique. In Discourse Analysis as Social Critique, ► pp. 1 ff.
Krzyżanowski, Michał
2016. Recontextualisation of neoliberalism and the increasingly conceptual nature of discourse: Challenges for critical discourse studies. Discourse & Society 27:3 ► pp. 308 ff.
Krzyżanowski, Michał & Bernhard Forchtner
2016. Theories and concepts in critical discourse studies: Facing challenges, moving beyond foundations. Discourse & Society 27:3 ► pp. 253 ff.
Macgilchrist, Felicitas
2016. Fissures in the discourse-scape: Critique, rationality and validity in post-foundational approaches to CDS. Discourse & Society 27:3 ► pp. 262 ff.
Põiklik, Pille
Efe, Ibrahim & Bernhard Forchtner
Hansson, Sten
2015. Discursive strategies of blame avoidance in government: A framework for analysis. Discourse & Society 26:3 ► pp. 297 ff.
Wodak, Ruth
Wodak, Ruth & Bernhard Forchtner
2014. Embattled Vienna 1683/2010: right-wing populism, collective memory and the fictionalisation of politics. Visual Communication 13:2 ► pp. 231 ff.
Forchtner, Bernhard, Michał Krzyżanowski & Ruth Wodak
2013. Mediatization, Right-Wing Populism and Political Campaigning: The Case of the Austrian Freedom Party. In Media Talk and Political Elections in Europe and America, ► pp. 205 ff.
van Eemeren, Frans H., Bart Garssen, Erik C. W. Krabbe, A. Francisca Snoeck Henkemans, Bart Verheij & Jean H. M. Wagemans
2013. Research in Related Disciplines and Non-Anglophone Areas. In Handbook of Argumentation Theory, ► pp. 1 ff.
van Eemeren, Frans H., Bart Garssen, Erik C. W. Krabbe, A. Francisca Snoeck Henkemans, Bart Verheij & Jean H. M. Wagemans
2014. Research in Related Disciplines and Non-Anglophone Areas. In Handbook of Argumentation Theory, ► pp. 677 ff.
Forchtner, Bernhard & Christoffer Kølvraa
2012. Narrating a ‘new Europe’: From ‘bitter past’ to self-righteousness?. Discourse & Society 23:4 ► pp. 377 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 19 october 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.