Argument teachers and scholars have frequently invoked external justification-impressing one's viewpoint upon another-as the primary social function of argument. Pluralism and fundamental disagreement in contemporary democratic societies raise questions regarding the status of argument, including the functions argument should serve. In this essay, I suggest alternatives of agenda expansion, responsibility attribution, and identity formation as important functions of argument in diverse societies. Thesealternative functions are especially important under conditions of social inequality, since they allow less powerful individuals and groups to (...) confront more powerful actors in situations where decision making is not open to all. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.4 (2002) 345-367 [Access article in PDF] Imagining in the Public Sphere Robert Asen Contemporary public sphere scholarship has been motivated significantly by a concern to overcome historical and conceptual exclusions in public spheres. Recent theory and criticism has investigated direct and indirect exclusions. Direct exclusions expressly prevent the participation of particular individuals and groups in public discussions and debates. Prohibitions against women speaking in (...) public, for example, have served historically to inhibit women's participation in various forums (see, e.g., Landes 1998). Indirect exclusions function tacitly through discursive norms and practices that prescribe particular ways of interacting in public forums. Indirect exclusions compel participants to conform to established modes of discourse that effectively negate the perspectives and contributions of previously directly excluded individuals and groups. Calls for "objective" and "dispassionate" debate, for instance, sometimes have restricted public agendas by portraying culturally specific forms of address as universally practiced (see, e.g., Warner 1993). Indirect exclusions may regulate discourse in various forums even when direct exclusions have been counteracted. Scholarship seeking to overcome these exclusions has proceeded on two levels. On one level, scholars have recounted the efforts of excluded persons to participate in public life despite restrictions by developing alternative modes of publicity (see, e.g., Ryan 1990; Zaeske 2002). On a second level, theorists have proposed more inclusive conceptual models of the public sphere that may overcome historical exclusions of the bourgeois public sphere while retaining a commitment to critical publicity (see, e.g., Asen 1999; Benhabib 1996; Hauser 1999; Mouffe 2000).Practicing democratic discourse fairly and justly depends indispensably on enabling inclusion. Proponents of deliberative democracy argue that political legitimacy arises from processes of inclusive public debate. Seyla Benhabib asserts that "legitimacy in complex societies must be [End Page 345] thought to result from the free and unconstrained public deliberation of all about matters of common concern" (1996, 68). Others regard inclusive public discourse as crucial for the formation of affirmative individual and collective identities. Craig Calhoun faults bourgeois notions of publicity for treating "identity formation as essentially private and prior to participation in the idealized public sphere of rational-critical discourse" (1993, 274). Identity formation entails mutual recognition among members of diverse cultures, yet theorists have observed that truncated discursive processes may inhibit mutual recognition. Charles Taylor writes that practicing a politics of recognition requires an openness toward other cultures—a presumption of value tested through sustained engagement so that "what we have formerly taken for granted as the background to valuation can be situated as one possibility alongside the background of the formerly unfamiliar culture" (1994, 67). Inclusiveness is also important for individuals and groups seeking to advance self-fashioned interpretations of their interests and needs against interpretations imposed by others. Nancy Fraser explains that self-fashioning is necessary because in public debates and controversies "who gets to establish authoritative thick definitions of people's needs is itself a political stake" (1989, 164).Although inclusion is indispensable, exclusion is never total. Sometimes, people force their way into public forums and agendas. For example, participation by activists in discussions of AIDS research and treatment often has been limited by researchers' assertions of expert privilege in investigating scientific matters. Valeria Fabj and Matthew J. Sobnosky (1995) detail how AIDS activists have responded by engaging in discursive acts of redefinition and translation to gain entry into previously circumscribed forums. At other times, people surreptitiously access public arenas. Prison writing is one way that those officially banished from public view nevertheless continue to participate in oppositional discourses and movements. Gerard A. Hauser (2001) considers how dissident Adam Michnik remained a vibrant voice in Polish civil society through his writings even after his imprisonment in the 1980s by an authoritarian regime. At still other times, typically excluded people may be invited to participate in public discussions. Members of the AIDS activist group ACT UP occasionally have testified in the traditional setting of the congressional committee hearing as invited witnesses. Daniel C. Brouwer (2001) maintains that politically sympathetic committee chairs facilitated ACT UP's "official" appearances before members of Congress. Whether invited or... (shrink)

The last decade of the Qing dynasty and Republican period saw intensive efforts to revise the Qing Code, promulgate modern legal codes based on Japanese and German law, establish a modern system of courts, and develop a professional corps of lawyers and jurists. These institutional reforms were implemented as part of the drive to have extraterritoriality rescinded and safeguard the sovereignty of the Qing dynasty and then Republic of China. The reforms were accompanied by new categories within civil and criminal (...) law, new conceptions of legal knowledge and expertise, and rich discussions over sources of law which took place within the legal realm as well as the readership of Republican newspapers and journals. If, as Roger Berkowitz writes in his study of scientific codification in continental Europe, “in a legal system, there must be some way that the law comes to be known,” how did ways of knowing law change during this period of legal reform and broader intellectual change? Through a survey of jurisprudence textbooks and other legal publications, this paper argues that writers in early 20th-century China came to define jurisprudence in positivistic terms, ultimately using new conceptions of science and social science to identify its place within a new ordering of modern knowledge. (shrink)

The Great Recession of 2008 underscored the precarity of housing for many people living in the United States, as well as the unequal conditions that structure housing policy and practices. Victimized by predatory lending practices, many families lost their homes as a speculative housing bubble burst. Facing tremendous uncertainty, these families joined tens of thousands of others across the country who struggle with housing for a variety of reasons—leaving an abusive partner, struggling with medical and other unforeseen expenses, coping with (...) addiction and/or mental illness, and more. Indeed, as Melanie Loehwing explains in her important new book, “housed” and “unhoused” represent not fixed categories or stable life... (shrink)

Can the public sphere be conceptualised in a manner that is non-reductive and inclusive? In this article, we survey the main literature on the public sphere and demonstrate that, despite apparent diversity, the dominant approaches to its conceptualisation share the same ‘matter and form’ or hylomorphic assumptions. In challenging these assumptions, our aim is to demonstrate that it is the hylomorphic model of the public sphere that prevents non-reductive conceptualisation of its essentially changing nature. Hylomorphic models of the public sphere, (...) we argue, will never yield this result because they perpetuate established identities over emergent differences. We conclude that progress toward non-reductive and inclusive accounts of the public sphere would be best served by foregoing hylomorphic models in favour of ontogenetic ones, when thinking about the changing nature of the public sphere. (shrink)

An outsider to argument theory, should she look through the rich outpouring of our recent work, might be amused to find us theorists not following our own prescriptions. We propound our ideas, but we don't always interact with each other--we don't argue. The essays by William Rehg and Robert Asen make promising start on rectifying this difficulty. I want to discuss them, first, to show how they acknowledge in exemplary fashion a pair of challenges I think we should all (...) be addressing; and next to consider their specific responses. (shrink)

This paper is a commentary on the articles by William Rehg and Robert Asen in this issue of Informal Logic. It compares the subject matter of the two papers, offers an interpretation of and commentary on each paper separately, then discusses their overlapping problematic: the importance of public sphere argumentation.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Publics, Counterpublics, and the Promise of DemocracyMelanie Loehwing and Jeff MotterTheories of publics and counterpublics remain as contested as the issues, identities, and politics they serve. Across the disciplinary spectrum, scholars turn to publics and counterpublics to help elucidate problems of inclusion and exclusion, projects of social justice, and the waning promise of democratic politics. Such work often enters the scholarly conversation at the points of contestation famously introduced (...) by Jürgen Habermas and Nancy Fraser: publics or counterpublics? While Fraser's influence in rhetorical studies usefully prompts us to think about challenges to dominant discourse, the particular sense in which democracy undergirds projects about publics lingers as a question in need of exploration and clarification. Many take Fraser's intervention as a corrective to the politically insufficient Habermasian theory found in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1991). We argue, however, for a return to the original point of theoretical contention in an effort to specify the different normative commitments of the two perspectives and reevaluate the role each envisions for rhetoric as a potentially democratic praxis.Many critics concur with Fraser in describing the normative commitments of the Habermasian theory of the public sphere as idealized or exclusionary, and as such, "the problem is not only that Habermas idealizes the bourgeois public sphere but also that he fails to examine other, nonliberal, [End Page 220] nonbourgeois, competing public spheres. Or rather, it is precisely because he fails to examine these other public spheres that he ends up idealizing the bourgeois public sphere" (Fraser 1997, 74). However, this position relies on a reading of Habermas that focuses on the particular historical examples he investigates, rather than the democratic potential he extends from such historical practices, however deficient critics may judge them to be. Nevertheless, the intervention initiated by Fraser and elaborated by rhetorical scholars compels us to consider in what ways advancing a normative justification of democracy grounded in specific historical practices asks markedly different questions than pursuing a realist project of scrutinizing "actually existing" political formations.Further, the role of rhetoric in rejuvenated democratic politics stands as an important component of public and counterpublic sphere scholarship, though little work beyond that of Robert Asen and Daniel Brouwer has been done to articulate the senses of rhetoric embraced by the two perspectives, or their compatibility with contemporary understandings of rhetoric as social praxis that constitutes the communities, ideologies, and citizenship of those it serves (Asen 2003; Asen and Brouwer 2003; Asen 2004; Brouwer 2006). It is our contention that while Fraser's vein of counterpublic scholarship asks how existing and future publics can be treated democratically, Habermasian public sphere theory inquires into the means by which publics create democracy, and this essay represents a first attempt at delineating the implications of adopting one perspective over the other.To do so, we begin by discussing Habermas's initial assessment of the shifts in political culture that lead to the reconstitution of publicity and authority in the bourgeois public sphere, as well as Fraser's critique of the Habermasian vision of the public sphere and the subsequent development of counterpublic scholarship. A comparison between the two allows us to consider what kind of function each imagines rhetoric to serve in the creation and maintenance of democratic culture. Moreover, the juxtaposition of these two theoretical perspectives prompts us to specify precisely what we refer to when we speak of rhetorical democracy and its relationship to public spheres, and we offer in the final section a preliminary discussion of how the specific problematic of publics and counterpublics sheds light on the broadly relevant theme of the intersections between democratic politics and rhetorical culture.Before proceeding, however, we want to note the long and troubled relationship scholars of rhetoric have had with Habermas's work. Given his sociological training and identifications with social scientific [End Page 221] disciplines, as well as his stated goal of extending the Enlightenment project (Habermas 1990), it should not come as much of a surprise that many rhetoricians find little reason to comb his vast writings for resources (though for notable exceptions to this tendency, see Goodnight 1992; Farrell 1993; Goodnight and Hingstman 1997; Hauser 1999... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kenneth Burke, John Dewey, and the Pursuit of the PublicPaul StobIn Deliberation Day, Bruce Ackerman and James Fishkin argue for the creation of a national holiday, "Deliberation Day," in which citizens come together over a two-day period in their local schools and community centers to deliberate over the merits of presidential candidates and their platforms (Ackerman and Fishkin 2004). While Ackerman and Fishkin propose that the government pay each (...) citizen a $150 stipend for voluntary participation, the purpose is not so much to monetarily to reward citizens for "showing up" as it is to foster an enriched civic culture that would send shockwaves through America's political infrastructure: "If Deliberation Day succeeded, everything else would change: the candidates, the media, the activists, the interest groups, the spin doctors, the advertisers, the pollsters, the fund raisers, the lobbyists, the political parties. All would have no choice but to adapt to a more attentive and informed public" (3). The task of Deliberation Day would be to create a new social context in which citizens could become enlightened through public participation. As the authors conclude the book, "We can, through an act of political imagination, create new institutions for redeeming the ancient promise of democratic citizenship. Ordinary men and women need not be the hapless playthings of the powerful. They can and must find new ways to hold their leaders to account, and redeem their dignity as human beings by responsibly shaping their collective destiny" (219).Ackerman and Fishkin's proposal is indeed filled with political imagination. I bring their proposal to light not to critique the possibilities and limitations of Deliberation Day, but to understand the way in which the authors understand "the public." At the bottom, what the polity needs, Ackerman and Fishkin believe, is a public space dedicated to the reinvigoration [End Page 226] of political culture. It is not that the citizenry is incapable of hammering out intelligent political solutions, but that it needs access to social contexts that facilitate deliberation and the emergence of a common good. To foster a culture of political intelligence, the public needs only the chance to enter the forums that will facilitate thorough, cooperative political decision-making.Ackerman and Fishkin are not alone in calling for access to or creation of these types of forums. Habermas's bourgeois public sphere—a public space in which citizens could come together and rationally debate the activities of the state—essentially represents the evolution of a context, a social space, a public arena (Habermas 1989). The bourgeois public sphere is meant to be egalitarian, providing citizens a forum in which to debate openly and foster a common political consciousness.1 But this sphere has proved problematic for a number of scholars. Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge (1993), for example, propose a proletarian public sphere to counter capitalism's socioeconomic domination over public resources. Joan Landes (1988) argues that the bourgeois public sphere entails male domination in public life, to the exclusion of women. Nancy Fraser (1992) builds on the feminist critique by adopting the term "counterpublics," collectives of citizens—women, peasants, the working class, and other groups demarcated by issues of race, gender, and ethnicity—that arise in reaction to the dominant public sphere.2In the introduction to Counterpublics and the State (2001), Robert Asen and Daniel Brouwer argue that critiques of the bourgeois public sphere specifically and public sphere theory generally amount to three "reconfigurations" in the way in which scholars think of the public. First, scholars have come to recognize the existence and interaction of multiple public spheres. Second, they have come to acknowledge permeable boundaries of access to the multiple public spheres. Third, scholars have come to recognize the dynamic role of the state in shaping public discourse. One considerable result of these three reconfigurations is an increasing recognition of the political divisions that permeate society (Asen and Brouwer 2001, 17-25).If Asen and Brouwer are right, and I think they are, these three reconfigurations represent the general thrust of contemporary public sphere scholarship, including as it is understood among communication scholars.3 And however diverse such scholarship may be, a few common themes seem to recur across... (shrink)

Twenty years ago, even ten years ago, one might have begun an essay about the intersection of pragmatism and rhetoric by lamenting the dearth of scholarship on the subject. Today, no such lamentations are needed. The past decade has seen an explosion of interest in the way pragmatism and rhetoric can profitably inform each other. Offering everything from formulations of pragmatist rhetorical theory (Mailloux 1998; Schollmeier 2002; Danisch 2007; Crick 2010) to explorations of pragmatist methodology in the study of rhetorical (...) texts (Stroud 2009a; Stroud 2010) to analyses of what individual pragmatists have contributed to the history of rhetoric (Asen and Brouwer 2003; Asen 2003; Finnegan 2003; Greene 2003; Stob .. (shrink)