Date of Award

2-5-2025

Publication Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Department

Philosophy

Supervisor

Christopher Tindale

Rights

info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

Abstract

The subject of this dissertation is the argumentative analysis of political discourse. My general purpose is to argue in favor of a series of concepts that I consider useful for conducting analyses of certain argumentative situations typical of the political domain. Specifically, as an alternative to dominant perspectives of political deliberation, I argue in favor of a series of rhetorical perspectives of political controversy, which I ultimately apply in the discussion of a case that took place in Colombia in 2020. That is, a controversy about how to define certain events of violence, whether as a massacre or as a collective homicide. I proceed here in a “deductive” manner. That is, I start from the general, which is the meta-theory of argumentation, towards the particular, which is the case analysis. In the first chapter I introduce perspectivism as a meta-theory that is helpful in mapping the different frameworks that contemporary argumentation theory offers to analyze political argumentation. In chapter two I use the (meta) framework of perspectivism to describe the common and dominant model in different perspectives on argumentation: political epistemology, civic and deliberative rhetoric, pragma-dialectics, political discourse analysis, and civic logic. Also, I explain the close relationship between what I call the “dominant model of political deliberation” and different notions of disagreement, which are taken as descriptions of the argumentative situation in the political domain. In the third chapter I discuss the rhetorical perspectives that I use as an alternative to the model of political deliberation. From their reflections, I elaborate on the ideas that I take as central to my understanding of political argumentation and its analysis, namely: the revitalization of the epideictic genre, the need to consider ethos and pathos as legitimate means of persuasion, attention to rhetorical relations and the particularity of political argument, and notions of difference such as controversy, polemics, and incompatibility. In chapter four I discuss in detail the main notions mentioned earlier that are useful for understanding argumentative situations in the political domain. Thus, I answer three main issues; what is (genuine) disagreement, what is deep disagreement, and what is controversy/polemics. In the fifth chapter I develop the analysis of the controversy over how to define events of violence in Colombia. In the conclusion I discuss the difficulties of using the model of political deliberation and notions of disagreement to deal with the case at hand.

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