Author Archives: Dan Stoica

There are many ways people use some established wooden language and this differentiate them when they are targeted by manipulative discourses. Some people would be genuinely politically correct and use the speech code with all their heart. Those ones can be manipulated by the bias of targeted discourses in the given wooden language. Some other people would not believe that wooden languages could be used in real communication. Part of these later ones would fake using the established wooden language in their group or society, part of them would overtly refuse to use such a language, while some of them would use the wooden language in an ironic key, to rally human or social shortcomings. Counting apart the first category, all these kinds of people would escape any manipulation attempt. Continue reading →

Traditionally, the term “manipulation” is used in a morally depreciative sense, as a pejorative expression. The present paper tries to propose another view on manipulation as action and thus another perception of the linguistic term. For this, we will leave the territory of moral distinctions (good vs. bad, moral vs. immoral) and go camp in the territory of adequacy, a territory of instruments and their efficiency in usage (the distinction will be good vs. bad, in the sense of the appropriateness and efficiency of the chosen instrument in performing some particular action).

Taken as such, the manipulation is no longer viewed as moral or immoral, but simply as amoral. In contrast with that, manipulation will be discussed under the opposition good vs. bad in terms of the pragmatics of the action. We will then accept that there can be morally good manipulation, which also means that an expression like “bad manipulation” is not a pleonasm, but a way to refer to manipulation that didn’t produce the expected effect. Continue reading →