Goals, Games, and Moral Orders

All discourse analysis is concerned with making sense of a fundamental human phenomenon: communication. At the heart of discourse analysis is the assignment of meaning to communicative practices. This chapter is concerned with how we can assign meaning to communication occurring in a particular context: courts of law. This chapter is also concerned with doing so from a particular point of view, based on new developments in ways of thinking about social practices. These new developments have been taken to reflect a paradigm shift from modern to postmodern science (e.g., Bernstein, 1983; Toulmin, 1982).