2. Opinions
The concept of 'opinion' belongs to the set of those concepts that are commonly used in everyday life, but whose theoretical analysis is far from straightforward. Whether in philosophy, psychology or the social sciences, opinions have defied many scholars, and we are therefore able to summarize only some of their characteristics, viz., those we need in order to understand their 'linguistic' manifestations in discourse.
It is not surprising that most work on opinion is being done in social psychology, the study of mass communication and political science, viz., on what is generally known as 'public opinion', for which there is even a special journal, viz., the Public Opinion Quarterly , after its first influential use by well-known journalist Walter Lippmann (1922). In most of this work, the notion of opinion is not theoretically analyzed, although Lippman already had a rather sophisticated cognitive approach, e.g. in terms of prejudices defined as schematic 'pictures in our heads'.
Opinions and attitudes are usually collapsed in such studies, as are personal and social opinions (see the critique of this reduction of social attitudes to individual ones in Jaspars & Fraser, 1984). Much social psychological work is on 'attitude change' as a function of some communicator or message 'variable'. Virtually no studies deal with the detailed mental representations of opinions. That is, public opinion in most of this work barely goes beyond the level of practical, commonsense definitions (for some of the more detailed studies of (public) opinion, see e.g., Bennett, 1980; Bogart, 1985; Crespi, 1989; Eagly & Chaiken, 1993; Erikson, Luttbeg, & Tedin, 1988; Fraser & Gaskell, 1990; Holloway & George, 1986; Kinder & Sears, 1985; Milburn, 1991; Noelle-Neumann, 1984; Oskamp, 1991; Price, 1992; Taylor-Gooby, 1985; Zaller, 1992).
Our conception of opinions is multidisciplinary: As such, we define them as a special form of mental representations; their acquisition, usages and functions are social, and their expression often discursive. That is, any satisfactory theory of opinions should, in our opinion, be located in the triangle that relates cognition , society and discourse . Any reduction of one angle of the triangle to any other will result, not only geometrically, into a simple direct line or to one point, that is, a simplistic theoretical representation. Thus, we need the triple approach because as to their nature (location, structure) opinions are mental, whereas much of their acquisition, uses and functions are social, and their expression and reproduction often (though not always) discursive. That is, opinions are mostly formed within contexts of social interaction in general, and through text and talk in particular.
Opinions as mental representations
A first theoretical decision we take is to locate opinions where also our common sense and everyday language use locate them, viz., in the mind . Thus, 'having an opinion about X' will here first be taken to mean something like 'having some mental representation of X.'
Given our knowledge of contemporary cognitive psychology, this may seem quite straightforward, even if for some strange reason most cognitive psychologists leave the study of opinions to their colleagues in social psychology. However, some scholars prefer to reduce opinions to their manifestations in text or talk. This would imply that people do not 'have' opinions before they start talking about them, and that opinions only are context-bound and constructed as part of discourse itself (see especially the work in discursive and rhetorical psychology, e.g., Billig, 1991; Harre & Stearns, 1995; Potter & Wetherell, 1987, 1988).
In our view, this reduction of mental representations to their discursive expression or construction is not only counter-intuitive, but also does not account for the facts. Indeed, it does not explain
- that people may have opinions without expressing them (in discourse or otherwise);
- that they may have an opinion A but express an opinion B for well-known contextual reasons of politeness, face-keeping, impression management or social norms;
- that they may give many different expressions to the 'same' opinion;
- that they may have the 'same' opinion on different occasions;
- and that they may share the 'same' opinion with others.
On a strict conception of opinions as discourse, thus, we would have as many opinions as we have opinion-discourses, and no way to account for the cross-situational or socially shared identity of opinions. Indeed, since all discourse is contextual, the very notion of shared, social opinions would be impossible, or at most reduced to the ways groups of people talk about an issue (in many different ways).
For these and other reasons, therefore, we analytically distinguish between opinions as mental representations, on the one hand, and their discursive manifestations (acquisition, uses, etc.), on the other hand.
Also, we distinguish between an opinion and the many ways it may actually be used, applied or expressed in various social contexts. That is, opinions, and especially socially shared ones, are relatively context-free, although of course the way they are being used and expressed, especially in talk, are contextually variable. In this way, we account both for the relative stability of social opinions and attitudes, as well as for their contextual and individual uses and variations. Below we first deal with the mental representations of opinions, and then focus on their social uses in editorials.
So far we have made no distinction between 'mental' and 'cognitive', as if all processes and representations of the mind are cognitive. If we assume that the mind may also feature non-cognitive processes or representations, such as emotion or affect, then such a reduction of the mental to the cognitive is not-warranted. It is undeniably the case that opinions may be associated with emotions. However, although opinions will be defined as evaluative beliefs, this does not imply that evaluations are, as such, emotive or affective. Thus journalists or readers may feel angry when writing or reading an editorial, but such a 'state of mind' (or rather: state of the body) is not part of the opinions expressed in the editorial: People may express or form an opinion without being 'emotional'.
In the rest of this paper we shall further ignore the relations between opinions and emotions, and only take a cognitive approach. One reason for this decision is that emotions are usually defined as properties of (the arousal of) individual persons, whereas we are interested especially in opinions as forms of social cognition. Thus, when we say that opinions are mental representations this means that they are dealt with as cognitive representations, but without excluding the role of emotions in their formation, change and use (for discussion, see Frijda, 1987; Ortony, Clore & Collins, 1988).
Opinions as evaluative beliefs
Cutting a long and complex philosophical and psychological discussion short, we thus assume that opinions are a type of belief , as also knowledge, attitudes, ideologies and other mental representations consist of beliefs. Although widely used in everyday life, we don't know exactly what beliefs are, but shall take them as the basic building blocks of mental representations, as well as the units of thought and judgment. Both opinions and beliefs are typically said to be 'about' something, viz., some aspect of real or imagined states of affairs, something that is true or false, or something about which we like or dislike.
Although a typical mental notion, also the notion of 'belief' is not commonly theorized very deeply in cognitive, social and political psychology (see, however, e.g., Abelson, 1973; Bar-Tal, 1990; Bar-Tal & Kruglanski, 1988; Iyengar & McGuire, 1993; Fraser & Gaskell, 1990; Kruglanski, 1989; Wegman, 1981). In many studies, beliefs, belief systems, opinions and attitudes are not carefully defined and distinguished. The focus is often on what people have beliefs about . The precise nature, the structures or internal representations of beliefs have received scant attention, as is the case for opinions and attitudes.
In philosophy, epistemology, and philosophical logic, both knowledge and beliefs tend to be abstractly associated with propositions, and hence with what is defined (or asserted) as true or false, and analyzed in terms of a predicate and a number of arguments, possibly combined with a doxastic or other modal operator ('It is believed that...' or 'It is necessary that...'). The precise mental nature of such knowledge and beliefs is usually ignored here (Cohen, 1992; Graham, 1993; Hintikka, 1962; Kornblith, 1994; Lehrer, 1990; Moravcsik, 1990; Searle, 1995).
At this point, let us begin by the common sense notion used in everyday language and thought, in which a distinction is made between knowledge and opinions . Following suggestions from contemporary epistemology, knowledge here consists of true justified beliefs, viz., beliefs that satisfy socioculturally variable but shared truth criteria (Kornblith, 1994). In other words, beliefs constitute knowledge if they are true and based on sufficient and acceptable evidence. Depending on the kind of knowledge we are talking about, this may be everyday, commonsense evidence, or scientific proof.
In everyday discourse, someone's beliefs are usually called 'knowledge' only if the speaker also thinks these beliefs are true. In other words, the notion of knowledge is relative to socioculturally shared commonsense or scientific truth criteria or verification instances. In other --more pragmatic-- words, knowledge is being ascribed or attributed to others by those who (e.g. as observers or speakers) evaluate the beliefs of others relative to their own beliefs. As we shall see later, these conditions involve the notion of social or shared cognition , and hence a social and cultural dimension, in the theory of knowledge and beliefs.
Opinions , on the other hand, are generally defined as those beliefs that do not pass the test criteria of knowledge. That is, they may be beliefs some people have but which (for all we know) arefalse , or more generally beliefs about which we or others may disagree . When distinguished from knowledge, such opinions may also simply be called 'beliefs'. However, we shall use 'beliefs' only to generally refer to any kind of (true, false or disputed) belief.
Next, we shall further restrict the notion of opinion to those beliefs that have an evaluative dimension, viz., those beliefs that imply that something is good or bad, right or wrong. Obviously, such an evaluative dimension is also relative, viz., relative to the person or groups of people who 'find' that something is good/bad or right/wrong. Whereas the criteria used to establish true beliefs, viz., knowledge, are epistemic, the criteria underlying these evaluative beliefs are norms and values .
Thus, the belief 'that Reagan was a bad president' is an opinion if the belief is the result of a judgment in which value-criteria for the quality of presidents are being applied. We especially use the notion of opinion when the application of such values to a particular case is or could be disputed, that is, when there are 'differences of opinion' (Billig, 1991). This further property of opinions also suggests that opinions, just like knowledge, may have a social or cultural basis. This also distinguishes opinions from beliefs that happen to be false. The belief that Reagan was president in 1995 is (for all we know) false, but it does not seem to involve an evaluative dimension, and we would usually call such a belief an 'erroneous' belief or 'error' rather than an opinion. Like (justified and true) knowledge, these false beliefs are also factual , in the sense that we assume that the same epistemic criteria apply in order to accept or reject them as true or false.
Thus, whereas both true and false beliefs are defined here as factual, opinions are defined here as evaluative. The difference lies in the kind of social evaluation criteria being used and the social uses and functions of factual beliefs and opinions: Opinions thus seem to deal more with the evaluators and their norms and values, whereas factual beliefs rather focus on the 'objective' or intersubjectively accepted (observable, non controversial) properties of things, people and events.
As may be expected, the distinction between (true or false) factual beliefs and evaluative beliefs is not sharp. This is, first of all, the case because the criteria on which the distinction is based are not always mutually exclusive. That John is a thief may be a true belief, and hence knowledge, if John was convicted of theft by a court of law, and if such a conviction is taken as the sole criterion of truth in this case. Such a belief may be quite matter-of-factlike, viz., if we have no positive or negative opinion about his 'being' a thief. In more commonsense language we would say: If we could not care less whether John is a thief or not, this is knowledge rather than an opinion . This is one of the reasons why knowledge is often called a form of 'cold' cognition, and opinions a form of 'hot' cognition.
We may also have the opinion that John is a thief (whether or not this is true), if we believe he appropriated something that did not belong to him, and if we think that that action was wrong . The mental process of evaluating people, actions or events relative to some personal or social norms or values will here be called, as usual, a judgment (Arkes & Hammond, 1986; Martin & Tesser, 1992). That is, unlike knowledge, opinions are the result of a (value) judgment. To have a comparable term for the establishment of truth on the basis of truth criteria or verification instances, we shall use the term assessment. Thus, in order to know, we may find out (verify) whether Reagan was a president in 1995 (e.g., by checking the media or history books), but in order to find that Reagan was a bad president we would rather use value-based arguments than to go to the archives. The respective adjectives used in relation to knowledge and opinions are epistemic anddoxastic , respectively.
Since judgments are usually socially acceptable if only we defend them in terms of our norms and values, which may be quite personal, opinions were also described above as a property of the relation between persons and the things being evaluated (a relation sometimes, but rather inappropriately, called a 'propositional attitude' in philosophy). In other words, the evaluation basis of judgments is personal or internal (even if this basis may be shared with other people). To assess the truth of a belief, however, we usually need to refer to 'outside' evidence or proof: Simply referring to our own point of view will not usually count as sufficient evidence, unless the beliefs are based on personal experiences, as is typically the case in storytelling.
Despite these approximate distinctions, much of our knowledge (e.g., about theft) may be imbued with evaluative elements, so that the distinction between factual and evaluative beliefs is not always clear-cut. Thus, many predicates whose use is normally based on knowledge criteria, may also be used in a more evaluative sense. For instance, we may use the predicate 'to be the capital of' epistemically in 'Amsterdam is the capital of the Netherlands' and doxastically in 'Amsterdam is the capital of drugs'. As we shall see, this also brings in contextual and social aspects of beliefs, to which we shall turn below.
Whatever the basis of judgment, however, as soon as a belief presupposes norms and values, we shall here call it an opinion. This also means that the 'same' belief may be an opinion in one context (for one person) and knowledge in another context. For instance, the belief 'smoking is bad for your health' may be a negative opinion shared by many people, especially when being used to prevent others from smoking; in another, e.g., medical, context, it may be an epistemic conclusion from scientific proof, that is a (true) factual belief, that is, knowledge.
Incidentally, this last example does not imply that all scientific beliefs are necessarily factual beliefs, even if there is a strong and widespread ideology that this is the case, or at least should be the case. Nor do we hold the skeptical opposite opinion, viz., that all beliefs (scientific or otherwise) are always merely opinions because all assessments and their truth criteria eventually also imply personal or social norms and values, perspectives or points of view. In other words, for all practical purposes, the assessment of beliefs as knowledge maybe relative to socially and culturally shared truth criteria, but these will simply be accepted as a (practically) sufficient basis of truth. This theory of truth also allows what we think it should allow, viz., that truth criteria undergo historical change, e.g., as a consequence of social changes, scientific research, technological advances and experiences as well as their consequences on our knowledge (and knowledge criteria) in everyday life.
Social beliefs
As has been suggested several times above, beliefs may be shared by more than one person. Indeed, the very notion of knowledge implies, as we defined it, that other people share the same true belief: Beliefs (about other things than personal experiences) held by one person may well (later) turn out to be true, but are usually not (yet) accepted as such, and hence treated as 'mere beliefs'. Henceforth, we shall use the notion of knowledge only in this sense of socially shared true beliefs, and mark true personal beliefs (e.g., those of personal experiences) specifically as such, viz., as 'personal knowledge'. This is not merely a philosophical decision, but also a cognitive one: Knowledge will be henceforth dealt with only as a special type of cognition, viz., as social cognition . Its mental representation is therefore also a form of social representation (Farr & Moscovici, 1984; Breakwell & Canter, 1993; Fraser & Gaskell, 1990).
Technically, social knowledge is usually located in 'semantic' Long Term Memory, which we shall simply call Social Memory , because such social representations are shared by social groups and communities and acquired, used and validated essentially in social contexts. Personal knowledge, e.g., in the form of personal experiences, on the other hand, will be thought to be represented in Episodic Memory (or Personal Memory)(Tulving, 1983). Such personal experiences may of course be shared with others, typically so in storytelling, but this need not result in the kind of 'common, shared beliefs' we here call knowledge, and which require person-independent and event-independent knowledge of groups of people.
Since social knowledge is usually context-free , it will usually also be abstract and general , for the simple reason that it need to be applicable, by all group members, in many different social situations and communicative events. An exception to this principle forms the shared social knowledge of historical facts , e.g., the news events we read about in the paper, see on television or know from our history textbooks: These may be socially shared but are at the same time specific and concrete.
At the same time as we may have both specific and general socially shared knowledge, we may probably also have both specific and general personal knowledge. Personal experiences may embody knowledge about specific events, but also general knowledge about our personal experiences: I may know that my neighbors came to dinner yesterday, which is knowledge about a specific events, but obviously I also have more general personal knowledge about my neighbors.
The same reasoning applies to opinions . People may have personal opinions, but they may also share them with others, that is, with other members of a group. Thus, I may have a typical personal opinion about my neighbor, but opinions about e.g. social issues such as abortion, nuclear energy or unemployment tend to be shared by other people. According to the definition of opinion, social opinions must be based on socially shared evaluation instances, on the sociocultural norms and values shared by a group or community, and thus are measured and evaluated relative to a moral order (Eisenberg, Reykowski, & Staub, Rokeach, 1973, 1979).
Complex structures of such social opinions (for instance about an issue such as abortion) will here be called attitudes . That is, unlike much attitude research in social psychology (Eagly & Chaiken, 1993), we carefully distinguish between --specific, personal-- evaluative beliefs (opinions) and social, general and abstract evaluative beliefs shared by the members of a group, viz., attitudes (Jaspars & Fraser, 1984). The notion of 'attitude' will here only be used in this latter, social sense. This implies that in our theoretical language it does not make sense to say that individual persons have an 'attitude' about this apple, their neighbor or about the war in Bosnia. They either have personal opinions about them, or, in case of socially known events or issues, they may share (social) opinions or attitudes with others. In sum, together with knowledge, attitudes are part of social cognition and are mentally represented as social representations.
Social representations of knowledge and attitudes do not consist of arbitrary collections of beliefs. Most contemporary psychologists assume that they must be structured in some way, if only because such structures facilitate learning, use and change. Thus, for knowledge notions such as scripts and frames were introduced to account for the internal organization of knowledge, e.g. of stereotypical events such as going to the movies, or for our conventional knowledge about houses, respectively (Schank & Abelson, 1977). Such structures may be seen as schemata , consisting of a hierarchically ordered and linked number of categories. Somewhat less successfully, such attempts at a more sophisticated organization of social memory have also been made for attitudes (Abelson, 1976). So far, however, no generally accepted representation format for attitudes has been proposed in the literature, and we shall further ignore this important issue in this paper (see also, Fiske & Taylor, 1991; Himmelweit & Gaskell, 1990; Wyer & Srull, 1984, 1989).
Models
Personal experiences, including personal opinions, as represented in Episodic memory, are currently usually represented in terms of mental models (Johnson-Laird, 1983; van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983; van Dijk, 1987; van Oostendorp & Zwaan, 1994). Since this notion is also crucial as a basis for the production and comprehension of discourse, we need to briefly introduce it after the previous notions of social representations.
Contrary to socially shared representations, models are personal and subjective. They represent the individual ways people make sense of their environment, and how they interpret events and discourse. Models represent what we usually call our 'experiences'. Thus, each event, when understood and represented by an individual, will be represented as such a model. The same is true for discourse comprehension: Understanding a text not only involves the construction of a textual representation in memory, but also the construction (or updating) of a mental, episodic model. We say that we have (more or less) 'understood' a text if we are able to construct a (partial) model for this text. Similarly, during discourse production, people activate or form a new model and use this as a basis for their text or talk.
In discourse, thus, a model is a subjective representation of what the text is (to be) 'about'. This offers also a useful cognitive counterpart of the notion of reference and referent, and a solid basis for the subjective and intersubjective definition of coherence: A text is meaningful and coherent (for some language users) if it has a mental model. In other words, it is not the 'world' or the 'events' themselves that make discourse meaningful, coherent or indeed true or false, but the model people construct of such events. All meaning and interpretation is therefore relative to our models. We see that models help explain many of the familiar problems of the philosophy of language, epistemology and the theory of discourse.
Relevant and crucial for our purposes here is that models not only represent true or false (factual) beliefs, but also opinions . Thus, whereas groups represent their opinions in shared mental representations (much in the same way as they do with grammars), individuals represent their personal evaluative beliefs, e.g. about specific events, in their models.
At present we ignore the internal structures of such models. If models routinely are constructed to understand events or discourses about events, they must have a strategically applicable schematic form. Such a form may be thought of as consisting of a number of relevant categories, such as Setting (Time, Location, Circumstances), Participants (Agents, etc.), Events or Actions, as well as their evaluative modifiers, representing personal opinions. That is, each time we witness or participate in an event or read or hear about it, we apply such a schematic form to it in order to understand it. Since event representation is of course routinely related to the ways we talk or write about events, it is not surprising that the semantic ('case') structure of sentences (or of stories) is in several ways similar to the structures of the 'underlying' models used to communicate about such events.
Obviously, such a fast, strategic process may not be perfect, and we may therefore also misinterpret events, and construe 'wrong' or 'biased' models. Such biases may also result from (biased, group based) knowledge and opinions, prejudices and stereotypes, e.g., when the 'facts' do not square with our general representations about them. As we shall see later, editorials are typically based on such personally or socially biased models of editors.
Models have another fundamental role in mental processing: They represent the interface between social representations of groups, on the one hand, and individual experiences, social practices and discourse, on the other hand. Thus, social members may activate, instantiate and integrate elements of socially shared knowledge and attitudes as (specific) beliefs in their models. For instance, general knowledge and attitudes about civil wars may be instantiated in a model representing a person's knowledge and opinions about the civil war in Bosnia. This relationship also works conversely: Once constructed a series of models about the same or similar events, people are able to infer more general, and more abstract factual or evaluative beliefs from them. That is, one way people learn is by model generalization.
Of course, such processes take place in a social context, and need social 'normalization': Once generalized, models still need to be compared with the knowledge shared and expressed by other social members. This is especially the case for 'accepted' knowledge. For general opinions the social criteria may be less strict (although they also apply): We may accept to share our opinions only with a small number of people, and not with everybody, but will generally expect or claim that our knowledge is more generally shared. Hence the conventional distinction between 'subjective' and 'objective' beliefs.
This is also one of the ways that prejudices are being formed and changed, viz., as non-warranted overgeneralizations of models of personal experiences (or of models of events talked about by others). Of course, knowledge and attitudes (including prejudices) may also be formed directly, that is, without the generalization of personal models, e.g., when people accept social representations directly from other group members, e.g., through persuasive discourse. Propaganda and manipulation are well-known examples in which knowledge and attitudes may be influenced without the interface of personal experiences. The same is true for editorials, as we shall see below.
The briefly summarized theoretical framework discussed so far, is able for the first time to describe and explain some of the processes involved in editorial influence, manipulation and the 'manufacture of consent': No theory of discourse understanding and social influence is complete without an account of the role of models and their relations to shared social representations.
Context models
Essential in our analysis of editorials, as well as for the study of discourse in general, is the assumption that language users not only construct models of events they talk about , but also of the communicative events in which they participate. Such models will be called context models (van Dijk, 1996a). Such models represent the knowledge and opinions speakers and writers (as well as recipients) have about themselves and each other, in various communicative and social roles, as well as about the setting, circumstances, intentions, goals, purposes, and other properties of the context. That is, also contexts are subjectively represented by language users. Contrary to standard conceptions in social psychology and much discourse and conversation analysis, it is crucial to emphasize that therefore it is not the context itself that influence our discourse or the interpretation of discourse, but our subjective models of the context.
Thus, whereas event models as discussed above provide the (subjective) knowledge we have about events we talk or write about, that is, form the basis of discursive semantics, context models provide all necessary information for the contextually variable or pragmatic information that influences the interaction strategies (e.g., of politeness, self-presentation, etc.), the style, rhetoric and the surface structures of text and talk. That is, as we shall see for editorials, many of the properties of opinion discourse are not merely based on the opinions we have about some fact or issue, but also, and crucially, on the contextual constraints on how to formulate such opinions, as represented in context models. Indeed, as is well known, editorial writers thus represent and express their identity as journalists, elites, middle class, etc., as well as their assumptions about the expectations, knowledge and attitudes of the readers. A theory of context models allows us to finally describe and explain the relations between these properties of the social context on the one hand and discourse meaning and structure, on the other hand.