The renowned philosopher John Searle reveals the fundamental nature of social reality. What kinds of things are money, property, governments, nations, marriages, cocktail parties, and football games? Searle explains the key role played by language in the creation, constitution, and maintenance of social reality. We make statements about social facts that are completely objective, for example: Barack Obama is President of the United States, the piece of paper in my hand is a twenty-dollar bill, I got married in London, etc. (...) And yet these facts only exist because we think they exist. How is it possible that we can have factual objective knowledge of a reality that is created by subjective opinions? This is part of a much larger question: How can we give an account of ourselves, with our peculiar human traits DS mind, reason, freedom, society - in a world that we know independently consists of mindless, meaningless particles? How can we account for our social and mental existence in a realm of brute physical facts? In answering this question, Searle avoids postulating different realms of being, a mental and a physical, or worse yet, a mental, a physical, and a social. There is just one reality: Searle shows how the human reality fits into that one reality. Mind, language, and civilization are natural products of the basic facts of the physical world described by physics, chemistry and biology. Searle explains how language creates and maintains the elaborate structures of human social institutions. These institutions serve to create and distribute power relations that are pervasive and often invisible. These power relations motivate human actions in a way that provides the glue that holds human civilization together. Searle shows how this account illuminates human rationality, free will, political power, and human rights. Our social world is a world created and maintained by language. (shrink)

The purpose of this book -- Intentionality -- Collective intentionality and the assignment of function -- Language as biological and social -- The general theory of institutions and institutional facts: -- Language and social reality -- Free will, rationality, and institutional facts -- Power : deontic, background, political, and other -- Human rights -- Concluding remarks : the ontological foundations of the social sciences.

The aim of this article is to explore the problem of social ontology. The form that the exploration will take is a development of the argument that I presented in The Construction of Social Realty[2]. I will summarize some of the results of that book and then develop the ideas further.

The communicative affordances of the participatory web have opened up new and multifarious channels for the proliferation of hate. In particular, women navigating the cybersphere seem to be the target of a disproportionate amount of hostility. This paper explores the contexts, approaches and conceptual synergies around research on online misogyny within the new communicative paradigm of social media communication. The paper builds on the core principle that online misogyny is demonstrably and inherently a discourse; therefore, the field is envisaged at (...) the intersection of digital media scholarship, discourse theorization and critical feminist explications. As an ever-burgeoning phenomenon, online hate has been approached from a range of disciplinary perspectives but has only been partially mapped at the interface of meaning making contents/processes and new mediation technologies. The paper aims to advance the state of the art by investigating online hate in general, and misogyny in particular, from the vantage point of Social Media Critical Discourse Studies ; an emerging model of theorization and operationalization of research combining tenets from Critical Discourse Studies with scholarship in digital media and technology research. Our SM-CDS approach to online misogyny demarcates itself from insinuation whereby the phenomenon is reduced to digital communicative affordances per se and argues in favor of a double critical contextualization of research findings at both digital participatory as well as social and cultural levels. (shrink)

The article focuses on Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech and its recontextualisation 50 years later in view of the rising anti-immigration sentiment and Brexit campaign. Having discussed the dynamics of the threat construction process and its role in shaping public attitudes to migration and policies related to it across time and space, we proceed to analyse Powell’s speech in terms of lexical, grammatical, and discursive fear-inciting devices and strategies. While doing so we draw on the insights from neuroscientific research (...) on the role of lexis in fear stimulation and functional-cognitive models of grammatical structure. The second part of our analysis is meant to demonstrate how the semiotic potential of cyberspace and social media, along with multimodal integration of various forms, intertextuality, and interdiscursivity they enable, endow fear-inciting discourse with new spatiotemporal and affective qualities. To this end we examine one of the most popular YouTube videos making “Rivers of Blood” speech part of its anti-immigration stance. (shrink)

Packaging messages from different times and places, combining cognitive stimuli that would not otherwise be found together, journalists work discursively on various dimensions of distance to make the reality they construct and present more relevant and emotionally engaging for the audience. The present article makes a claim that such journalistic ‘work on distance’ and the resulting impression of ‘co-presence’ are central to the potential of television news discourse to affect cognitive–affective attitudes of the audience. The process of reducing the distance (...) is discussed under the term proximization and linked to the semiotic properties of the medium itself and to the news, understood both as a process and as a product. The data analysed come from the CNN news coverage of the Horn of Africa crisis in 2011. (shrink)

Given that we all live in the same world, how is it that we can have such very different worldviews? Answers to this question may be found in worldview constructions and their cognitive affordances in text and discourse. This paper discusses why and how worldviews can unfold from a schematic rationale that is grounded in ‘the primacy of spatial cognition’ in perception, thought patterns and their presentations in language. Although worldview frames are selective, and therefore subjective coordinate systems, the spatial (...) organising principle provides a tangible ground for abstract worldview ontologies. Rhetorically, this real-world/social-world analogy gives worldview constructions an objective epistemic quality that can prime commitment and activate intentions and actions. To operationalise this discourse-space theory, a model is proposed to investigate variation in spatial and temporal frames in political texts, involving their scope of attention and point of view. Examples are taken from an election manifesto analysis for Dutch party positioning. The critical question concerns the rhetorical nature of time- and space frames of reference in discursive constructions: How ‘real’ are text and discourse worlds and how does this relate to variation in discourse-world constructions and stance? (shrink)

This article intends to build bridges between two recent trends within Critical Discourse Studies as exemplified by cognitive linguistics and multimodality. Thus, the postulates of spatial cognition will be followed to do an analysis of the musical re-contextualization of Barack Obama's New Hampshire 2008 speech. In Will.i.am's music video ‘Yes, we can’, uploaded on YouTube under the username WeCan08, we can listen to a song whose lyrics are made of different extracts from Obama's speech. This type of communicative strategy results (...) in a multiple re-contextualization of the political speech. The effectiveness of the musical video can be explained by identifying it as a blended mental space incorporating elements of the text-world, the music-world and visual-world. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe present paper analyses the anti-immigration discourse in Poland in terms of Proximization Theory. PT [Cap, P.. Towards the proximization model of the analysis of legitimization in political discourse. Journal of Pragmatics, 40, 17–41; Cap, P.. Axiological aspects of proximization. Journal of Pragmatics, 42, 392–407; Cap, P.. Proximization: The pragmatics of symbolic distance crossing. Amsterdam: John Benjamins; Cap, P.. The language of fear: Communicating threat in public discourse. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan; among others] is a cognitive-critical model that accounts for the (...) ways in which the discursive construction of closeness and remoteness can be manipulated in the political sphere and bound up with fear, security and conflict. It reveals how top public actors construe closeness of an external threat, to claim leadership and solicit legitimization of preventive measures to offset the effects of the threat. The present paper applies PT in the domain of state political discourse in today’s Poland, outlining strategies whereby anti-immigration stance and policies are legitimized by discursively constructed fear appeals and other coercion patterns. It demonstrates how the ‘emerging’, ‘growing’, ‘gathering’ threats – physical as well as ideological – are construed by the Polish right-wing government, who thus claim their right to oppose EU immigration agreements and pursue strict anti-immigration measures. (shrink)