For Deliberative Disagreement: Its Venues, Varieties and Values (original) (raw)

Even in established democracies, an observer of political debates and political communication generally cannot help being struck by discouraging developments. The notion of "fake news" represents just one of the worrying factors. The purpose of this article is not to investigate causes, but to sketch a theory of political debate that can provide a reasoned foundation for normative monitoring of debate and undergird proposals for improvement. A basic insight for a theory of political debate is that at its core it is "practical reasoning" -i.e., is essentially and ultimately about what to do. Political debate and argumentation is discourse about what a polity, such as a nation, is to do. Many argumentation scholars arguably fail to fully recognize what this insight entails. A philosophical axiom, an heirloom from Plato, prevents them from it: the idea that all argumentation is about the truth of some claim. This goes even for much work within "Informal Logic", a school in argumentation studies that arose from a need to adequately consider practical argument, in the belief that deductive logic could not do so. For example, Johnson & Blair in their classic textbook, Logical Self-Defense, posit as a shared feature of all arguments that "their motivation is doubt about the truth of the claim that occupies the position of conclusion" (2006, p. 246). These scholars founded the most realistic philosophically based For Deliberative Disagreement 114