Lenore Langsdorf

Regulating Disagreement, Constituting Participants: A Critique of Proceduralist Theories of Democracy

In his keynote address at the 1995 Ontario Society for the Study ofArgumentation conference, Frans van Eemeren contended that ‘[a]rgu-mentative discussion is the main tool for managing democratic processes’and therefore, ‘argumentation should be valued as the elixir of life of par-ticipatory democracy’ (1995, p. 145). Because we agree that argumenta-tion is the lifeblood of democratic governance, we believe that it is crucialto explicate the relationship between argumentation and democracy. Thisrelationship is complex, and the lack of a single account of argumentativeactivity or a unitary conception of democracy makes its analysis difficult.Joseph Wenzel (1990) identifies three distinct perspectives from whichto theorize argumentation: –a logical perspective focuses on relevancy, sufficiency, and acceptabilityof the arguments made by individuals to justify their convictions;–a rhetorical perspective focuses on the process by which argumentativediscourse simultaneously appeals to and creates the communal identi-ties and norms that serve as the bases for persuasion (cf. Greene, 1997);and –a dialectical perspective finds in communicative interaction the resourcesfor developing a set of principled procedures for resolving differencesof opinion.Correlatively, we propose, Jurgen Habermas (1994, 1996a) identifies threenormative conceptions of democracy:–a liberal conception understands the role of government as mediatingbetween the conflicting private interests of individuals;–a republican conception understands the purpose of politics as thearticulation of a common good embodied in the ethical life of a com-munity; and–a procedural conception claims democratic legitimacy cannot be guar-anteed by either the administrative capacities of the state/ market orthe virtues of ethical communities, but instead is grounded in the very

Argument as Inquiry in a Postmodern Context

Argumentation is a form of communication, rather than an application of(formal) logic, and is used in communicative activity as a means forinquiry, although it is more typically thought of as bringing inquiry toclosure. Thus interpretation is an intrinsic and crucial aspect ofconversational (interactive) argumentation. In order to further thisunderstanding of argumentative activity, I propose a procedure forinterpretation that draws upon hermeneutic phenomenology. In response tocriticisms by argumentation theorists (and others) who understand thistradition as oriented to psychological, perceptual, or textual objects, Iargue that hermeneutic phenomenology supports methods for analysis ofpublic communicative activity. The resulting conception of ’thick argumentation‘ responds to contemporary (postmodern) claims that argumentation valorizes univocity, stasis, and certainty at the expense ofthe pluralism, fluctuation, and range of epistemic results thatcharacterize discourse in the public sphere.

Realism and Idealism in the Kuhnian Account of Science

Kuhn’s theory of paradigms is a textualism: there is, so to speak, nothing outside the paradigm. Thus (following Richard Rorty’s remarks on affinities between textualism and idealism), this theory is an idealism. However, Kuhn relies upon an implicit realism that is forced upon him by the very nature of science. In other words: his idealism is prompted by his astute attention to the act of scientific inquiry, while his realism enters by way of his characterization of the object of that inquiry. I use Ricoeur’s text theory in responding to this dual commitment as exemplifying certain tendencies in our contemporary intellectual situation.

Noetic Insight and Noematic Recalcitrance

There are not many facts about the noema, and the portrait that emerges from them is far from clear. Thus a “phenomenology of the noema” that would follow Husserl’s instructions on how to do phenomenology begins with difficulties that may well be responsible for the variety of incompatible descriptions in the phenomenological community and on so many pages of commentary. This lack of consensus about a central feature of Husserlian phenomenology presents a challenge (at best) and a confusion (at worst) to readers new to Husserlian scholarship. But in the context of a symposium devoted not to using noematic analysis for phenomenological investigations of other topics, but to developing a “phenomenology of the noema,” we can appreciate and even savor Husserl’s injunction: Be a perpetual beginner; question, radically, the very subject-matter at issue.1 Very well: our subject-matter is the noema. We want then to consider what it is, why Husserl introduced it, and how it functions in phenomenological practice. In other words, we want to consider the noema’s character, value, and purpose.

Everything is in the Detail: On the Humanness of Rhetorical Judging

“A good philosophical education,” Robert Sokolowski has taught us, must avoid artificial problems. It must address and clarify important things and distinguish them from one another. Moreover, a good philosophical education should clarify a lot of important things and … should not try to address grandiose problems … such as ‘Is there really an external world?’

On the uses of language in working and idealized logic

The interpretation of discourse covers a continuum with two extremes: on the one hand, a text considered as an ideal, distant object, and on the other hand, a conversation regarded as a real, present event. On the basis of a distinction between relatively context-invariant propositions and relatively context-dependent statements, it is argued that statements in conversational discourse are easier to interpret than statements in texts, whereas only propositions in symbolic logic can be interpreted with exactitude. In the same way, the interpretation of dialogical arguments proceeds more easily than the interpretation of arguments in texts. While dialogical argumentation requires a dialectical approach, textual argumentation necessitates an imaginative reconstruction of the argument. From this it can be concluded that for different sorts of argumentative discourse diverse sorts of interpretative activities have to be used.