ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that the critical discourse analysts have always been interested in how ‘truth’, or, at least, in how different conceptualizations of ‘the truth’ have been portrayed in different kinds of texts. It suggests some methods for studying this ‘discursive shift’ in society. The chapter considers a particular model of language that not only has significant potential for the analysis of ‘truth’ in discourse, but also for the analysis of the other cognitive and social variables that come into play. The task of a programme in universal pragmatics is, according to Jurgen Habermas, a Frankfurt-School philosopher, to identify and reconstruct universal conditions of possible understanding; to account, in other words, for the general presuppositions of communicative action. The tack taken by Edginton and Montgomery is an interesting one because it uses the Habermasian model to detect an asymmetrical pattern in the emergent media reaction to the Party Election Broadcast.
