154 Douglas J. Glick
causal forces, such as peer pressure, a corrupt school system, a violent youth sub-culture, to
name but a few, were transparent and easy to identify.
From the analytical perspective taken here then, at this second, more significant, level of
analysis, the actual written data recorded were reduced to classes based on their virtual
propositional equivalence.^8
Only one final methodological note remains. Based on the argument above about the
ways in which the data was collected, recall the first analytical goal: to present a factual study
of the constituent propositions for this particular Israeli discursive construction. In order to
arrive at propositional classes, only those cases that were instanced over a hundred times in
the data were considered to be ̳common‘ and thus analyzed further in this study. Those above
this number were interpreted to be representative of the most widely circulating propositions
in this discursive construction because they occurred at this rate across instances taken from
different types of newspapers and the different textual framings found within them.
Moreover, this number was selected because it ended up marking a somewhat obvious
numeric break in the data.^9
ARGUMENT STRUCTURE
The argument that follows is composed of the following interrelated parts. The first claim
to be argued is that the methods of this study have uncovered common causal propositions in
a discursive construction of the problem of school violence in Israel. As such, they thus
constitute a legitimate analytical representation of this particular discursive construction in
Israel today.
The second claim is laid out in a series of related sub-claims. It aims to document ways in
which the causal propositions that constitute this linguistic practice are reflexively
constrained and supported by the influences of material from other discursive constructions
discovered within and around it.
Building on the second series of claims above, the third claim relates to the reflexively
framing influence of Israel‘s dominant political ideology, democracy. It is argued that one can
(^8) Presentations of this material have made clear to me the importance of methodological clarity here. The data in
this study was transformed from a long list of propositions into a limited number of causal propositional types
not only because presenting instances of the former was methodologically and theoretically intractable, but
also because the presentation of instances was unwarranted given the denotational focus on propositions about
cause. The appropriate analogy here is to a certain kind of sociolinguistic work. In that type of work,
individual instances of variable sounds (or phrases) aren‘t reported because it is their relative frequency as
indexically distinct reproductions of denotationally equivalent forms of speech that is at issue. Here, the case is
even simpler because denotational concepts and causal directionality are the constants that define the general
denotationally equivalent types of propositions being analyzed. Individual instances with respect either to
variation in the type itself or based on its surrounding written context are irrelevant to the structure of the
argument (at least to this point). Put another way, given the argument to this point, it doesn‘t matter if the
actual written language states, for example, that ̳the schools have messed up and caused this problem‘ or ̳One
must truly consider how schools have played a role here as I believe they are at fault‘. These and many other
similar examples have been analyzed here as (virtually) identical propositions for the purposes of this study to
9 this point in the argument (cf. fn. 11 below for further comments on this point).
The vast majority of the causal propositions that did not occur frequently enough to be considered ̳common‘ were
individual causes for particular events. As such, they were typically ̳one-offs‘. A few others however did
appear more than just a few times, but not frequently enough to be discussed in the first part of the analysis. A
few of these interesting cases will be discussed later in the argument.