Norms of Public Argument: A Speech Act Perspective
Workshop at the NOVA University Lisbon, Portugal
As well as Special issue of Topoi: An International Journal of Philosophy
The aim of the workshop and the special issue is to use the framework of speech act theory to understand the broadly construed normativity of disputes (“argument” in one sense) and reasoning (“argument” in another sense) in the public sphere. We preserve the ambiguity of the natural-language “argument” to capture the broad range of communicative phenomena where normative aspects of discourse are particularly at stake. Indeed, disputes as breakdowns of communication reveal the norms and sanctions governing our linguistic exchanges. We believe that speech act theory, which is enjoying nothing short of a revival today, provides a promising framework for combining insights from philosophy, pragmatics, argumentation theory, legal theory, and other disciplines studying the normative aspect of public argument.
Our focus is on the variety and dynamics of norms governing argumentative practices. In other words, we want to examine and catalogue the mechanisms that underlie their enactment, persistence, and evolution as well as the various ways in which they shape our discursive practices. In particular, we are interested in communicative phenomena – e.g., back-door speech acts, authoritative illocutions, counter speech, insinuation, demonstrations and other forms of social protest, and the like – to be found in the domain of public argument which result from following, negotiating, exploiting, or accommodating discursive norms.
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This is an in-person only event, please fill this form if you wish to attend.
The workshop, the special issue, and the summer school form part of research activities within the broader EU-funded COST Action project European Network for Argumentation and Public Policy Analysis (APPLY, CA17132) and are supported by the Horizon Europe Framework Programme. No registration fees are required and some travel bursaries will be available to the authors of the best selected papers / ECIs invited to the summer school.
Marcin Lewiński (NOVA University Lisbon, PT – Chair)
Steve Oswald (University of Fribourg, CH)
Maciej Witek (University of Szczecin, PL)
Álvaro Domínguez Armas (NOVA University Lisbon, PT)
Andrés Soria-Ruiz (NOVA University Lisbon, PT)
Marcin Lewiński, Chair of the APPLY project