In what sense is CDA critical? Critical social research aims to contribute to addressing the social “Wrongs” of the day (in a broad sense – injustice, inequality, lack of freedom, etc.) b analyzing their sources and causes, resistance to them and possibilities of overcoming them. We can say that it has both a “negative” and a “positive” character. On hand, it analyses and seeks to explain dialectical relations between semiosis and other social elements to clarify how semiosis figures in the establishment, reproduction and change of unequal power relations (domination, marginalization, exclusion of some people by others) and in ideological processes, and how in more general terms it bears upon human “well-being”. These relations require analysis because there are no societies whose logic and dymamic, including how semiosis figures within them, are fully transparent to all: the forms in which they appear to people are often partial and in part misleading, On the other hand, critique is oriented to analyzing and explaining. With a focus on these dialectical relations, the many ways in which the dominant logic and dynamic are tested, challenged and disrupted by people, and to identifying possibilities which these suggest for overcoming obstacles to addressing “wrongs” and improving well-being.