ABSTRACT
This chapter argues with the value of moral talk. It suggests that assessing the value of forms, or instances, of talk is what a critical approach to language seeks to do. The chapter is about forms of critique focused on people's choice to say particular things. Many fields of social and human research took an explicitly 'critical' turn in the late twentieth century, and socially oriented areas of linguistic and semiotic research were no exception. The impression sometimes given is that critical researchers are those who adopt subjective points of view of language where others do not, and that their doing so is just a matter of personal persuasion. The critique of discourse in late capitalism becomes the critique of some bad people. So there is good reason to consider the relations between the critique of particular acts of language use and the broader social reality in which those acts take place.
