Dialectical Obligations in Political Debate

Informal Logic 27 (3):223-247 (2007)
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Abstract

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

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Citations of this work

The Limitations of the Open Mind.Jeremy Fantl - 2018 - Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Rhetoric, Dialectic, and Logic as Related to Argument.J. Anthony Blair - 2012 - Philosophy and Rhetoric 45 (2):148-164.
Defining Rhetorical Argumentation.Christian Kock - 2013 - Philosophy and Rhetoric 46 (4):437-464.

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References found in this work

Political Liberalism.J. Rawls - 1995 - Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 57 (3):596-598.
The Morality of Freedom.Joseph Raz - 1986 - Philosophy 63 (243):119-122.
A practical study of argument.Trudy Govier - 1991 - Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Pub. Co..
Argumentation schemes for presumptive reasoning.Douglas N. Walton - 1996 - Mahwah, N.J.: L. Erlbaum Associates.

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