The "boomerang" effect of the radicalism in discourse analysis

Levine, Resnick and Higgins’ critical review The social foundation of cognition
aims to outline “the future of the new field of socio-cognition. This includes any social
interaction as simply stimulating cognition or as deeply constituting cognition”. It is no
accident that at the end of their review, quoting Moscovici’s theory of social
representations, they are “... prepared to argue that all mental activity - from perceptual
recognition to memory to problem solving - involves either representations of other
people or to use the artefacts and cultural forms that have a social history” (ibidem, p.
604).
Other influential authors (Zajonc, 1960, 1989; and Adelman, 1987) argue that “it is a
strange paradox that cognition is studied in isolation of a very essential process that is
its immediate antecedent and consequence - communication. ...) cognition is the
currency of communication” (Zajonc, 1989, p. 357).
However, whilst the cognitivist start to complain of the rare attention to
communication and probably start to recognise that language and comunication are
more than exchanging a “bit” of information, in the RDA:
“The communication metaphor is rejected as inadequate for dealing with the complexities of action
and interaction.”
(Potter & Edwards, 1999, p. 449)
The RDA substitutes the typical vocabulary of the science of communications (a
tropology", according to Potter & Edwards, 1999, p. 454) with another vocabulary that
seems to be based on the hypostatisation of the concept of action. To the traditional
lexicon of communications (code, interpretation, decoding, transmission, information,
reception, message), the RDA sets a vocabulary in which all is "to do something"
(actions, to use, to do, to perform, to construct, to do a task, to blame, to accuse, to
justify, performative-function, action-oriented).
The refusal of the concept of communication, and of the vocabulary that describes its
processes, is obviously not neutral, and reflects both an epistemological orientation and
a methodolgy of analysis.
(a) The traditional vocabulary of communication (adopted, but also influenced by
the cognitive sciences) expresses the existence of a process of representations
transmission filtered by codes and based on visions of the world, themselves generated
socially "by the" and negotiated "in the" social exchanges. This vocabulary expresses, in
addition, the assumption that there are different aspects involved in the production of a
discourse or text, implying the need for dufferent codes, which not only orient the
production of the message, but also its decodification and interpretation.
(b) The RDA vocabulary, by denying the role of the cognitive and of the sociocognitive
in orienting the social practices and interactions, reifies the communication
processes considering them as the observable "actions". The vocabulary expresses,
moreover, the assumption that nothing external to the action and the discursive practice
exists.
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