Critical Discourse Analysis

Abstract

In this article, Norman Fairclough provides a careful summary of his approach to critical discourse analysis, which he called practical reasoning, which he established in relation to political discourse around the 2008 financial crisis and appeared in his book with Elizabeth Fairclough on the analysis of political discourse 2012. Fairclough locates this approach within critical social analysis. This approach aims to analyze social errors and criticize them normatively and interpretively in order to solve them by starting from the discursive level, or what he calls semiosis. It establishes a formative, productive, and transformative dialectical relationship between social structures, systems, practices, and events and discursive structures, systems, practices, and events.  Unlike his first, dialectical, relational model, this model focuses on the manner of action and its practical justifications. That is, decisions for change resulting from practical reasoning and arguments in rhetorical deliberation between competing discourses and visions, rather than focusing on the discourses themselves, that is, ideological representations. He saw that the goal of critical discourse analysis does not end with the normative criticism that condemns social errors based on specific standards and values, nor with the explanatory criticism that reveals and clarifies the foundations of these errors, but rather in the action that leads to resolving them and changing the social reality that embraces them.