Ideology is most effective if it is accepted as common sense with nobody questioning the given dominant ideology. Jones and Wareing (1999) believe that the majority of the society will not rebel against the dominant ideology as the given society considers such existing social setup as natural and unquestionable. Ideology, thus, works effectively if members of a given society accept the existing power relations through social cognition. As certain realisations of social cognition surface in discourse, social cognition constitutes the mental link between ideology and discourse. Therefore, in order to be able to account for discoursal realisations of ideology, it is necessary to understand what social cognition is and what mental constructs constitute it.

 

In the van Dijkian CDA, social cognition comprises several types of mental actions and their behavioural realisations surfacing partly in discourse. Such mental actions include: beliefs, opinions, attitudes and the different kinds of such beliefs, opinions and attitudes. In order be able to account for the reproduction of ideology through social cognition, these mental actions need to be understood and their possible discoursal realisations need to be accounted for.

Relying on cognitive sciences, van Dijk (2003, p. 7) argues that cognitive and social psychology distinguishes between many types of mental information a person deems true, i.e. beliefs: personal vs. social beliefs, knowledge, opinions and attitudes. Below, the different types of beliefs, opinions and attitudes established in van Dijk’s CDA will be outlined so that it can be described later on which of these beliefs surface as discoursal realisations.

If beliefs (personal beliefs or evaluative beliefs or their different kinds, cf. discussion below) are shared by numerous people, we talk about social beliefs. “These are the beliefs that typically need to be asserted, contended and defended, especially also in interaction with members of other groups” in the society (van Dijk, 2003, p. 9). Naturally, within a given group, typical and commonly shared group opinions and attitudes may be taken for granted and unquestioned (van Dijk 2003), which results in commonly accepted group norms and values articulated in discourse. On a larger scale, therefore, ideologies are composed of such social beliefs shared by a group “that are associated with the characteristic properties of a group, such as their identity, their position in society, their interests and aims, their relations to other groups” (van Dijk, 2003, p. 7).

According to van Dijk (van Dijk in Schäffner and Kelly-Holmes, 1996, pp. 8–19), individuals, while relying on their mental representations of the surrounding world, keep producing utterances at the root of which one finds personal beliefs, i.e. mental information the given persons deem true or rightful from their own perspective. Such beliefs are of two kinds: they can either constitute knowledge or an evaluative belief. Knowledge is a justified belief based on facts or experiences connected to the outside world: in this respect knowledge is coherent with reality. Knowledge, at the same time, presupposes common, general social knowledge (shared knowledge contents, cultural knowledge, etc.) possessed and accepted by the members of the given society.

Evaluative beliefs, on the other hand, evolve by way of mental judgement and are characterised by the fact that there is no objective, empirical truth criteria on the basis of which it can be incontestably decided whether the given statement functioning as evaluative belief is true or false. An example to illustrate this as follows: the utterance Mr. Smith is a good man is an evaluative belief, which comes about as a result of a personal decision concerning Mr. Smith through the application of an individually subjective system of judgement of the person in question.

A kind of evaluative belief is an opinion. An opinion is a practically unjustifiable or false belief that is grounded in moral or other judgements. It must be noted, however, that, as a result of different mental representations of individuals and the knowledge possessed by them, the boundaries between opinion and knowledge as well as between opinions and evaluative beliefs may differ from individual to individual. For establishing moral or other systems of judgement necessary to form opinions, it is inevitable that the individual be affected by social norms. This presupposes that the individual accepts and internalises such norms beforehand. It seems evident then that individuals’ opinions are grounded by socially accepted norms even if social norms may differ from society to society and from group to group within societies.

Furthermore, opinions can be classified into two distinct types: personal opinions and social opinions. Personal opinions comprise evaluative beliefs of an individual, whereas social opinions refer to evaluative beliefs shared by a distinct, given social group with reference to a certain issue. Larger, complex, interrelated and interdependent structures of opinions shared and accepted by the members of certain social groups are termed attitudes.

The interrelation between personal beliefs, knowledge, evaluative beliefs, opinions, personal and social opinions, attitudes, social beliefs and ideology is illustrated in Figure 4.1. At this point it must be noted that personal beliefs and social beliefs mutually affect each other and, consequently, the borderline between them is often blurred, which is illustrated by the use of the arrow.

As far as the relationship between discourse practices – including translation – and personal beliefs are concerned, “concrete text production and interpretation are based on so-called models, that is, mental representations of experiences, events or situations, as well as the opinions we have about them” (van Dijk 1993, p. 258). This suggests that no textual reproduction is possible without necessarily involving personal, non-objective beliefs, opinions and attitudes and that the effects of the society on the individual cannot be disregarded when discussing these mental representations. It follows from this that these mental representations are individual and are consequently person-specific, unique and socially contextualised (van Dijk 1993). This means that social beliefs are always interpreted and articulated through personal beliefs in discourse as single individuals communicate social beliefs in their discourse. As far as everyday discursive practices are concerned, personal beliefs in everyday discourse surface mostly as evaluative beliefs unless one is talking about strictly factual details without any interpretation, which is unlikely to ever happen. In this sense, a piece of discourse reflects its author’s personal beliefs (cf. Bánhegyi 2009b). This implies that ideology in the newspaper articles under scrutiny and in their translations are likely to be reproduced in the form of evaluative beliefs and the person-specific collection of evaluative beliefs, i.e. opinions. Consequently, the textual realisations of ideology will surface partly as evaluative beliefs and partly as opinions in discourse.

Ideology, on the other hand, can also be expressed by stylistic features and metaphoric expressions surfacing as lexical choice, metaphors, parallels, etc. These expressions, if they express social opinions, are also capable of (re)producing ideology. Apart from style, formulaic language has the potential to (re)produce ideology. Van Dijk (1993, pp. 266–67) gives the following categories of such formulaic language and provides the following examples: apparent denial (I have nothing against X but ...); apparent sympathy (we make these decisions for their own best interest); populism or apparent democracy (the people do not want more immigration) and blaming the victim (they are themselves to blame for unemployment).

An especially common way of the (re)production of ideology in political texts is the application of the well-established distinction of US vs. THEM (van Dijk 1993). This distinction can be realised by: