Dialectical Obligations in Political Debate
Political debate is a distinctive domain in argumentation, characterized by these features: it is about proposals for action, not about propositions that may have a truth value; there may be good arguments on both sides; neither the proposal nor its rejection follows by necessity or inference; the p...
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
University of Windsor
2008-02-01
|
| Series: | Informal Logic |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://informallogic.ca/index.php/informal_logic/article/view/483 |
| Summary: | Political debate is a distinctive domain in argumentation, characterized by these features: it is about proposals for action, not about propositions that may have a truth value; there may be good arguments on both sides; neither the proposal nor its rejection follows by necessity or inference; the pros and the cons generally cannot, being multidimensional and hence incommen- surable, be aggregated in an objective way; each audience member must subjectively compare and balance arguments on the two sides; eventual consensus between the debaters is not a reasonable requirement. From all this follows a view of the rhetor’s special obligation in democratic, deliberative rhetoric on which it becomes crucial, in the interest of the audience, that political debaters acknowledge good arguments on the opposite side and explain why, on balance, they deem the arguments favoring their own side to be stronger. |
|---|---|
| ISSN: | 0824-2577 2293-734X |