NATURALIZED DISCOURSE IN ARGUMENTS: A TEXTUAL APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF SOCIAL REPRESENTATIONS

This paperdiscusses that using a textual approach to study social representations in arguments could help to better understand the relationships among naturalized discourse and argumentation. To naturalize an utterance,i.e. to make it commonsensical, is to give an arbitrary utterance the quality of “true” without questioning the ideological context which frames -and, therefore, gives meaning- to that utterance. Naturalized discourse is discourse that has become commonsensical even though it has actually been framed by the values and beliefs of a given social group. This paper argues that using critical discourse analysis (CDA) to study discourseat the textual level might be useful to find how social representations could affect the strength of an argument.