Demanding a halt to metadiscussions

Pragmatic perspectives on disagreement

“…Viewing argumentation as a type of pragmatic and conversational activity which is greatly shaped by contextual and communicative constraints is a research programme that has sparked considerable interest, for instance within the subfield of normative pragmatics (see e.g., Goodwin 2001;Goodwin and Innocenti 2019;Jacobs 2000;van Eemeren et al 1993;Innocenti 2022;Jacobs and Jackson 1982;Kauffeld 1998;Weger and Aakhus 2005) and more recently in conversational approaches to argument (Rocci et al 2020;Mundwiler and Kreuz 2018;Luginbühl and Kreuz 2020;Jacobs, Jackson, and Zhang 2022;Jacobs and Jackson 1992) or linguistic and pragmatic approaches to argumentation more broadly (Boogaart, Jansen, and van Leeuwen 2021;Oswald, Herman, and Jacquin 2018;Hinton 2021;Herman, Jacquin, and Oswald 2018;Herman and Oswald 2014;Pollaroli et al 2019;Bermejo Luque and Moldovan 2021;Lewiński et al 2023;). This growing body of research consistently investigates the pragmatics and argumentation interface, and, to a large extent, this special issue can be seen as participating in this linguistic turn in argumentation scholarship.…”

The Pragmatics and Argumentation Interface

“…Other pragmatic frameworks have been recruited to address research questions in the field of argumentation theory, especially when it comes to analysing argumentation as a structured communicative activity. Two of the main assumptions of the normative pragmatic approach to argumentation (see, e.g., Goodwin and Innocenti 2019;Innocenti 2022;Jacobs 2000;Jacobs and Jackson 1982;Kauffeld 1998;van Eemeren et al 1993;Weger and Aakhus 2005) are (i) that argumentative reality is emergent, that is, it is constituted through interaction, and that (ii) argumentative moves, even if they may be seen as individual, are the fruit of collaborative productions. Classical conversation analytic considerations (Sacks et al 1974) are quite valuable in this endeavour to account for the reality of argumentative exchanges and offer useful methodological starting points to explore the way argumentative exchanges are sequenced and structured across talk exchanges and through various conversational moves.…”

What Was the President’s Standpoint and When Did He Take It? A Normative Pragmatic Study of Standpoint Emergence in a Presidential Press Conference

“…Elsewhere, we have described argumentation as a very abstract set of resources for managing disagreement, grounded in the pragmatics of communication and overlaid with situated norms of reasonableness (van Eemeren et al 1993, p. 2;Jackson 2019;Jackson and Jacobs 1980;Jacobs 1999;Jacobs and Jackson 1989). Along with other communication scholars (e.g., Innocenti 2022;Kauffeld and Goodwin 2022;Weger and Aakhus 2005), we have embraced 'normative pragmatics' as a label for our approach. Though informed and influenced by other contemporary argumentation theories, normative pragmatics is distinctive in asserting that both the structure and the substance of argumentative discourse emerge from interaction, meaning that what participants in argumentation end up producing as positions and standpoints are collaborative productions.…”