Cognition and Politics

Abstract

While the previous chapter focused on some important aspects of scholarly research on American political discourse that are relevant for the type of linguistic investigation carried out in the book, this chapter concentrates on the relation between political language and cognition, and provides the theoretical foundation for the analysis presented in the following chapters.

The reason why man is a being meant for a political association … is evident. Nature, according to our theory, makes nothing in vain; man alone of the animals is furnished with the faculty of language … [this faculty] serves to declare what is advantageous and what is the reverse, and it therefore serves to declare what is just and what is unjust. It is the peculiarity of man, … that he alone possesses a perception of good and evil, of the just and the unjust … and it is association in these things which makes a family and a polis.

(Aristotle, Politics, quoted in Zashin 1974: 290, my emphasis)