Critical discourse analysis and the development of the new science

pp. 47-62

in: Gilbert Weiss, Ruth Wodak (eds), Critical discourse analysis, Berlin, Springer, 2003

Abstract

When looking back over the last three or four decades of the twentieth century, one cannot avoid noticing some widespread signals of a deep crisis that is affecting the model of scientific rationality that governs us. Revealing itself more and more at the core of the configurative lines of that model of rationality, this crisis has been identified (Santos, 1987, 1989, 2000, for instance) as the result of both societal and theoretical conditions that have developed interactively. In the light of this reading, and following the work of authors who have addressed the subject from different perspectives (Capra, 1982, 1996; Santos, 1987, 1989, 2000; Lemke 1995; Horgan 1996), my purpose in this chapter is threefold. First, I will propose a reading of the development of linguistics as reflecting attitudes and ways of looking at the experience of language that, if not ahead of, have been homologous with the new conditions undermining the paradigm of modern science. I will argue that the discursive turn in (social) science(s), being the result of the crisis of the paradigm of modern science, is itself a condition for that crisis.