• Oswald Steve

This proseminar will be devoted to the analysis of the argumentative and persuasive features of conspiracy theories (CTs). CTs are justificatory narratives which provide an account of significant political or social events, usually by refuting the official version given by established authorities and by attributing the responsibility of said events to a group of conspiracists. CTs do not typically resist critical scrutiny and can many times be shown to exhibit poor – or at least inconclusive – argumentation, and yet, judging by their popularity (online or in paper publications), they seem to be somewhat appealing to the general public.

During the semester, we will look at the linguistic, pragmatic and discursive features of CTs in an attempt to identify (i) their argumentative profile and (ii) their potential persuasiveness. In other words, we will explore two issues, the first being related to the argumentative features of CTs, the second to the means CTs use to convince. The questions that we will address are therefore (among others) the following: what kinds of arguments do CTs typically resort to? Are these weak, strong, sound, fallacious? Do they have a typical discursive structure? Do we find specific linguistic patterns in all CTs? Are there pragmatic mechanisms that can be taken to be responsible for their persuasive success?

The coursework will be designed so as to combine the theoretical input of linguistic pragmatics, discourse analysis (taken broadly) and argumentation theory with the concrete analysis of CT corpus, which we will build together from online material.

At the end of the proseminar, students should:

• be able to describe and analyse CT material in terms of their argumentative features
• be able to formulate hypotheses as to why CTs might be persuasive

General reference:

• Byford, J. (2011). Conspiracy Theories. A critical introduction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Other bibliographical references will be given on Moodle, session after session.