Scarica Analyzing Facticity Patterns & Convictions in Texts: Climate Change Debate Case Study e più Appunti in PDF di Lingua Inglese solo su Docsity! CHAPTER 7 - CONVICTION AND FACTICITY PATTERNS Texts put forward descriptions of the world and represent these descriptions as true, false or uncertain. So texts place descriptions on a spectrum of facticity, from absolute truth to absolute falsehood, with levels of uncertainty in between. By doing so, texts influence people’s convictions, which are (in this book) stories in people’s minds about whether certain descriptions of reality are true, false or uncertain. Some descriptions, even though they are supported by no factual information at all, may have higher facticity than other that are supported by factual information. For example descriptions of climate change countermovements are characterized by high factuality even though they are supported by no factual information and often attract news organizations that give them high visibility through publicity. Ecolinguistics can analyse texts to show how they build or undermine certain descriptions such as “climate change is caused by humans” which are important for the future of humanity. A level of facticity is achieved not through isolated sentences but through the use of facticity patterns. Convictions are stories in people’s minds about whether a particular description is true, uncertain or false. Facticity patterns are cluster of linguistic devices which come together to represent descriptions as true or certain, or to undermine descriptions as uncertain or false. A way of constructing facticity is the use of empiricist repertoire, a form of language where conclusion are represented as arriving directly from empirical data (Potter). This form of language is not used only by scientists, but is a standard way of constructing facticity of descriptions used by a wide range of participants in social life. Linguistic features that build up facticity can be analysed by Critical Discourse Analysis. These features include modals (should, must, might, which describe how probable a description is), calls to experts, quantifiers (some, many, to gloss over the lack of concrete evidence), presuppositions (those which construct the description as taken for granted rather than currently at issue). Another useful concept is modality, which indicates the degree to which a writer or speaker is committed to the claim he or she is making (Richardson). It is on a scale from low commitment to high commitment. Chain of increasing modality in a texts contributes in building facticity. If a facticity of a description is high enough and widespread enough it can achieve hegemony, a condition in which its arbitrariness is concealed and the description is considered to be just “the way things are” rather than a particular perspective. An example of study is that of Alexander who examines the descriptions of anti-green movement. He describes how these groups use “simulated rationality” (use of scientific vocabulary, selected facts and statistics) to create descriptions that are plausibly rational to an uninformed listener but are not based on actual evidence. He also shows that polluting industries assimilate former environmentalists and use their “simulate” backing to build up the facticity of their descriptions. Another aspect that Alexander describes is the vocabulary choice: anti-green movement describe its activities with vague and positive terms such as “common sense”, “scientific”, “commitment” to achieve a degree of facticity without providing factual evidence. These groups also uses negative expressions such as “ecoterrorist” to discredit their opponents. Other climate change sceptics try undermine the facticity of this description through the metaphor of “science is religion” (Nerlich). This counter descriptions of climate change influence people’s convictions and undermine the credibility of scientists, besides maintaining a public confusion about climate change. This descriptions lead to a distorted view of science which deviates from genuine concerns over scientific uncertainty. Another aspect to be considered is that the facticity of academic research may be transformed, filtered, distorted, when facts provided by scientists are reported by the media. Media can transform facticity in order to achieve sensationalism and obtain more views, but can also do that in order to align with the prevailing ideology of the publication. For example Men’s Health magazines transform, distort medical research to build up the facticity of its description about meat consumption. This is constructed as harmless, drawing from scientific research through a process of filtering and distortion. So basically Men’s Health magazine promotes certain convictions which encourage unhealthy and environmentally damaging
