Cargo-Cult Science and the Mimesis of Research Practice: Response to "Critical Discourse Analysis of Rhetoric Against Complementary Medicine"

Critical Discourse Analysis may be broadly understood as the analysis of linguistic structures to determine how they embody and reflect underlying power structures (Fairclough, 1989). More narrowly, it has been defined as having an explicit political aim: to frame discourse in such a fashion as to impose a dichotomy between a more powerful group and a less powerful group, and to empower the less powerful group (Wodak & Meyer, 2001). This narrower normative definition has a strong implied value judgment. As defined by van Dijk, Critical Discourse Analysis "is a type of discourse analytical research that primarily studies the way social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context. With such dissident research, critical discourse analysts take explicit position, and thus want to understand, expose, and ultimately resist social inequality"(van Dijk, 1993).