Abstract
The early years of the BSE inquiry marked out a period of considerable scientific and political activity in relation to public health in the UK. The emergence of a new brain disease in cattle mounted a significant challenge to scientists who were required to form judgements and make decisions about BSE in a context of pervasive uncertainty. At the same time, government ministers and officials struggled to develop policies and legislation that would adequately address the perceived risk that BSE presented to human and animal health. Against the backdrop of an escalating public health crisis, scientists secured a rational basis for their approach to the management of BSE in a group of reasoning strategies that have traditionally been characterized as informal fallacies. These strategies, which included question-begging argument and the argument from ignorance, conferred a number of gains upon inquiry and placed several new modes of reasoning at the disposal of scientific investigators.
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Cummings, L. (2010). The Unravelling of an Argumentative Strategy. In: Rethinking the BSE Crisis. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9504-6_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9504-6_5
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