312 ANALYZING DATA
typically involve conflicts between “communities of meaning” that frame alternative understand-
ings of the policy issue (Yanow 2000, 10–13). An implicit or explicit “picture” of the social
context is “drawn” by policy advocates that lends support to their own views of the direction in
which public policy should move. How, then, do we respond when others point out that we have
“stacked the cards” in our depiction of the situation? How comprehensive are our “pictures”
lending support to our policy positions? Can we make our policy frames more “accurate” and/or
more comprehensive in this sense, and, if so, does this change our view of the most appropriate
policy approach to take? Are there important legitimate group interests or communities of meaning
that are being left out of the picture being drawn by one set of protagonists, for example? If so, will
their inclusion change our understanding of the most appropriate policy solutions for the situation?
In the case of the U.S. language policy conflict, as noted above, pluralists and assimilationists
have very different understandings of the social context relevant to this issue. Pluralists have
emphasized the history of ethno-racial domination and exclusion in this country and the injus-
tices visited upon ethno-linguistic minorities, while assimilationists have fixated on contempo-
rary immigrants and the presumed differences between the social context of the “old” and
“new” immigration.
In my value-critical policy analysis of the protagonists’ arguments, I argued that both “pic-
tures” are incomplete, and therefore inaccurate. Most pluralists seem to have little to say about the
reality that the vast majority of non-English speakers in U.S. society today are, in fact, recent
immigrants who have voluntarily chosen to migrate to this country and who must feel some
obligation to adjust culturally to the country in which they have chosen to live. At the same time,
I argued, most assimilationists have a very distorted and romanticized view of the reality of
immigrant incorporation in this country, both now and in the past. Their assumption that the “old”
immigrants of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries were eager to assimilate cultur-
ally and linguistically in order to become fully “Americanized” is highly distorted, as is their
understanding of the racialized context within which contemporary immigrants are being “as-
similated” (R. Schmidt 2000, chapter 7). Accordingly, a just language policy requires attending
to the depictions of the social reality of our time contained in both accounts in relation to U.S.
language diversity.
In this example, as in many similar cases, “the facts” cannot be taken as givens for purposes of
resolving the policy dispute. Rather, the meaning and significance of the facts lie in their interpre-
tation, and this is a matter of judgment. The strengths and weaknesses of these judgments cannot
be determined through the use of positivist social scientific methods, but this does not mean that
they are simply matters of preference or taste. Subjecting our individual and collective judgments
to open and systematic critical analysis, rather, can help us determine the extent to which they are
inaccurate, incomplete, or shallow (Grant 2002). And this is a public task in which policy analysts
can play helpful roles.Examining the Internal Logic of Moral ArgumentsAnother mode of critical analysis involves the systematic examination of moral arguments for the
consistency of their internal logic. Making moral claims persuasive involves not only painting a
contextual “picture” that seems compelling, but also making logical claims that are presumed to
derive from widely accepted premises. Critical analysis focuses here on subjecting these claims
and premises to systematic interrogation. Are the argument’s premises really unobjectionable?
Are they truly reasonable and widely accepted as such? Are the steps in the argument derived
from these premises logically consistent? Often we make value judgments on the basis of