Posthumanism and Deconstructing Arguments

Corpora and Digitally-driven Critical Analysis

Kieran O'Halloran

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317223801
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Linguistica

Posthumanism and Deconstructing Arguments: Corpora and Digitally-driven Critical Analysis presents a new and practical approach in Critical Discourse Studies. Providing a data-driven and ethically-based method for the examination of arguments in the public sphere, this ground-breaking book:

• Highlights how the reader can evaluate arguments from points of view other than their own;
• Demonstrates how digital tools can be used to generate 'ethical subjectivities' from large numbers of dissenting voices on the world-wide-web;
• Draws on ideas from posthumanist philosophy as well as from Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari for theorising these subjectivities;
• Showcases a critical deconstructive approach, using different corpus linguistic programs such as AntConc, WMatrix and Sketchengine.

Posthumanism and Deconstructing Arguments is essential reading for lecturers and researchers with an interest in critical discourse studies, critical thinking, corpus linguistics and digital humanities.

Chapter 1

Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315622705-1

1.1 Orientation

1.1.1 Public sphere arguments

The ref’s ludicrous decision . . . blogging disgust at the electorate’s bad choice of senator . . . I think you’ll find it’s your turn to empty the dishwasher . . . At the breakfast table, in court, on our phones, in all manner of places, with all manner of media and over all manner of things, the mundane and the elevated, we argue. And we don’t just engage in argument – arguing is an entertaining spectator sport. A couple airing their dirty laundry on a bus, online clips of politicians in hot-tempered dispute with ensuing fisticuffs, and the more sedate pleasure of listening to meaningful political debate when that happens. Arguing is revelation too. Committing to a reasoned marshalling of our ideas which we are prepared to defend is to find out what we really think. And, to stomach counter-arguments from friends and colleagues, rather than retching back with indignation, can promote improvement of our ideas and different paths of thinking. To argue, to consume counter-arguments and digest them, is fundamental to being a human and fundamental to any progress. This is what makes the study of argumentation – the process of arguing – and argument – the product of argumentation – so fascinating.

While argument and argumentation penetrate many aspects of life, this is only one book.¹ I have a particular focus here – ‘public sphere arguments’. These are arguments intended for wide consumption in the public domain. Public sphere arguments are part of our cultural connective tissue, having the power to shape agendas. The public sphere arguments that I deconstruct in this book are written. With the extraordinary advance of the World Wide Web, written public sphere arguments are more pervasive than ever. Learning how to evaluate effectively such arguments is then an important skill, vital to any participation in national and international debates.

1.1.2 Digitally-driven critical ways of reading

While there is no substitute for the effort spent addressing knowledge gaps, consider the reader who is not wholly familiar with the topic of an argument that concerns them. How might they still achieve a useful critical perspective in a rigorous manner (with detailed knowledge development later an option)? The first critical way of reading I flagged in the preface does this, opening the reader up to the appreciation of potentially relevant absences from the argument and how they may adversely affect its cohesion – how the text ties together. These are absences from how the topic is normally discussed, such as in the expression ‘tried and tested science’, regardless of how a topic is evaluated. And, if an argument’s cohesion suffers, if its sentences no longer stick together on the page, then there are probably repercussions for the sense we can make of it. If our reading comprehension suffers as a result of loss of cohesion, the argument also lacks coherence. In turn, its credibility suffers. The first critical way of reading has general application in that language use in any public sphere argument can be compared with the same in a large corpus. The concepts of cohesion (a property of the text) and coherence (a property of the mind) are key to this book.²

There are often two sides to an argument – and either side can use a well-known tactic: distorting the other’s position so that it is easy to then knock it down and claim a victory. This is known as a straw man fallacy. The second critical way of reading involves, in the first instance, ascertaining whether an argument has committed a straw man fallacy. As I flagged in the preface, this entails creating a corpus of texts written by those arguing for that standpoint. Through use of software tools we can find out their common concerns. The analyst then explores the extent to which the coherence of the argument is affected by how it may have distorted the standpoint it is criticising or omitted crucial elements of it. Both critical ways of reading, then, rest on the following idea: an argument may appear cohesive on the page and coherent in our reading because of what it excludes.

1.1.3 Ethics of digital hospitality

The second critical way of reading applies to public sphere arguments with two sides. That said, in this book I will focus on a particular form of public sphere argument with two sides. This is one which misrepresents the standpoint of the relatively powerless, thus reinforcing – deliberately or inadvertently – a status quo of social and economic inequality. I take as obvious that the world is an unequal place in its societal opportunities, e.g. to education, cultural capital, clean water, housing, transport infrastructure. The world is unequal too in how the Other is treated: e.g. girls and women, homosexuals, those with different skin colours. And the world is severely economically unequal in many ways. Here is one: hundreds of thousands of children live privileged, privately educated lives in the developed world; hundreds of thousands of children live off rubbish dumps in the developing world. I also take it as incontrovertible that a free market contributes to inequality of income. A free market rewards professions that can be ‘monetised’. Premier league footballers provide entertainment; nurses provide care. Both have value. But members of the former profession will always be far richer because their profit potential is much greater. None of the above are political statements. I am merely describing life. Politics is the discourse and action politicians and/or the populace engage in to change society, which can include action to reduce inequality in addressing the problems of the disadvantaged.

In looking at a public sphere argument from the position of the socially/economically disadvantaged, I yoke the second critical way of reading to an ‘ethics of hospitality’. By this I mean that the analyst shows hospitality to relatively powerless groups with which they are unfamiliar or do not know in any depth. This is an ethical deed because it entails leaving our own preoccupations for a moment and trying to understand the goals, concerns and frustrations of those who would benefit from political change which would address their social and economic disadvantage. Acting in this way interrupts our routine perspectives, enabling us to evaluate an argument from a new point of view, to assess whether or not it is coherent and thus credible relative to the ‘counter-discourse’. We are refreshed and extended in the process.

In the preface, from the comfort of my office, I looked at the snippet of an argument from the point of view of small-scale farmers in the developing world. Ethical tourism? There is nothing like first-hand experience of people’s problems. But most university students – primarily the target audience of the method being offered here for critically deconstructing public sphere arguments – are unlikely to be in a position, or have the inclination, to visit the developing world just to complete their assignment. They can voyage, instead, on the amazing resource of the World Wide Web beyond their natural habitat, and show ‘digital hospitality’ to those who are looking to change their circumstances. This does not mean, I should stress, that students are expected to take on the politics of (those who support) the disadvantaged. It is hardly the place of an educator to exhort students to follow a particular political outlook. It is, though, part of a teacher’s job description not only to help students to think for themselves but to encourage them to extend their horizons, showing them appropriate software tools to enable this.

1.2 The software-based analysis of language use

1.2.1 Corpus linguistic method

Corpora (the plural of ‘corpus’) are crucial to the strategies of this book. The method used for analysing digital language corpora is important too – corpus linguistics. If you were asked to come up with the most recurrent five word expressions in English, it would be quite a difficult task. We don’t store information about our language use in this way. Yet, with corpora in the millions and increasingly in the billions of words, we have access to such quantitative information. We don’t have to be stumped by the inadequacies of our intuitions about language use. It cannot be overstated just how important this still recent development is. This is because, as the corpus linguistics scholar, John Sinclair, said:

the ability to examine large text corpora in a systematic manner allows access to a quality of evidence that has not been available before.

(Sinclair, 1991: 4)

And one quality of evidence from a big corpus which largely eluded previous language study is that language use is highly patterned. Words habitually huddle together and habitually shun one another too. (So, as I highlighted, ‘tried and tested’ commonly associates with ‘technology’, but not ‘science’.) This insight of corpus linguistics is important to the practices of this book.

1.2.2 Generating alternative subjectivities

A key value of corpus linguistic method for this book is how it helps us to create ‘alternative subjectivities’. By this I mean how it enables us to see a public sphere argument from points of view other than our own. The first critical way of reading enables a reader to look at the argument from the perspective of a subjectivity which knows how a topic is commonly spoken or written about. For example, this subjectivity would be able to spot that ‘tried and tested science’ is a highly unusual expression. Since this subjectivity is associated with common discourse, I refer to it as a discursive subjectivity. The second critical way of reading relies on a different subjectivity. This subjectivity equates to the recurrent concerns of the standpoint which is opposed in an argument. I call this a standpoint subjectivity. As I have said, a standpoint I am interested in is that of the socially/economically disadvantaged. Since I have contended that it is an ethical deed to try to see things from the perspective of this group, I refer to this specific standpoint subjectivity as an ethical subjectivity.

1.2.3 Digital humanities and corpus linguistics

More and more scholars and students in the humanities are using software to facilitate their engagements with data. If someone is doing this, then they are doing their humanities study digitally. They are conducting work which would be seen as part of the digital humanities. This is a diverse, exciting and ever blooming set of practices in the humanities (and, despite the name, in the social sciences too). Transformation is key. Digital humanities scholars use software to transform the habitual way of researching and teaching.

There is much cross-over between software designed in corpus linguistics for use by linguists and software used by digital humanists whose research involves looking at language. You don’t need to be a linguist to use software developed by corpus linguists productively. However, there are techniques of language analysis within corpus linguistics which digital humanists may be less familiar with, but could be useful to their endeavours. I detail and use these techniques extensively in the book. Since use of software drives the evaluative analysis of argument in this book, and no specialist framework of linguistic analysis is required, the approach: i) sits across the digital humanities and social sciences; ii) could thus be used by students and lecturers open to the use of software in a variety of disciplines where the study of public sphere argument is relevant.

There are plenty of analytical frameworks in linguistics which are technically sophisticated, demanding to learn and challenging to apply successfully. But this is not the case for corpus linguistics. Compared to many other approaches in linguistics, it is accessible, and light on concepts and terminology. This is because it is much more a set of techniques and principles for the analysis of electronic language data than a complex theoretical perspective on language. That said, it would be misleading to cast corpus linguistics as only a method. It has produced important insights into language use. These have ramifications for anybody concerned with language study, ramifications that are less well known across the digital humanities than they are in linguistics. I detail, in Chapter 4, a number of these key insights since they are important for the approach of this book. I have produced a glossary where corpus linguistic terms are explained.

1.3 Deterri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Preparing the ground
• Part II Using big ready-made corpora to generate discursive subjectivities
• Part III Making corpora to generate ethical subjectivities
• Part IV Reflection: posthuman subjectivities and critical reading
• Glossary
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index