Collection
Norms of Public Argument: A Speech Act Perspective
The aim of this topical collection and the forthcoming 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, and other disciplines studying the normative aspect of public argument.
The focus of this topical collection is on the variety and dynamics of norms governing communicative and argumentative practices. In other words, the articles in this collection examine and catalogue the mechanisms that underlie the enactment, persistence, and evolution of norms as well as the various ways in which they shape our discursive practices. Some contributions study the very nature of such norms and look into the criteria for their correct application in “valuable” speech acts of (practical) argumentation, assertion, or explanation. Others examine normatively “fishy” communicative phenomena—hate speech, duplicity, puffery, dog whistles, insinuations, figleaves, threats, lies, disavowals —to be found in the domain of public argument which result from violating, exploiting, or negotiating discursive norms.
Most articles published in the Special Issue were presented at the workshop “Norms of Public Argument: A Speech Act Perspective” organised at the NOVA University Lisbon, Portugal, and supported by the COST Action European network for argumentation and public policy analysis (CA17132).
Editors
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Marcin Lewiński
MARCIN LEWIŃSKI is Assistant Professor in the NOVA Institute of Philosophy and the Dept. of Communication, NOVA Univ. Lisbon. His research applying philosophical concepts to the study of public argumentation has been published in journals, edited volumes, and special issues. His most recent work (co-authored with Mark Aakhus, Rutgers University) is a monograph, Argumentation in Complex Communication: Managing Disagreement in a Polylogue published by Cambridge University Press (2023). He is currently leading a EU-funded project COST Action European network for argumentation and public policy analysis (APPLY: 2018-2023). m.lewinski@fcsh.unl.pt
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Bianca Cepollaro
Bianca is Tenure-Track Assistant Professor of Philosophy of Language at Vita-Salute San Raffaele University (Fac. of Philosophy). She earned a PhD in Philosophy (Institut Jean Nicod, ENS, Paris) and Linguistics (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa). She was a post-doc at IFILNOVA (Lisbon), and at the University of Milan. She is interested in social philosophy of language, pragmatics, and metaethics. Her research focuses on the theoretical and experimental investigation of expressives, hate speech and counterspeech. Her last book is Slurs and Thick Terms – When Language Encodes Values, Rowman & Littlefield (2020). cepollaro.biancamaria@unisr.it
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Steve Oswald
Steve Oswald (steve.oswald@unifr.ch) is Senior Lecturer at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. He was trained as a linguist specialising in semantics and pragmatics, and his research interests lie at the interface between discourse, language and cognition. He has worked extensively on the role of influence in communication (e.g., when communication is non-cooperative, deceptive, or persuasive), with a strong focus on argumentative discourse. His current research projects and publications are devoted to the role of pragmatic meaning in processes of argumentation, which he approaches from both theoretical and empirical perspectives.
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Maciej Witek
Maciej Witek is Head of the Institute of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at the University of Szczecin (Poland) and the coordinator of the Cognition & Communication Research Group. He works on philosophy of language, pragmatics, and metapragmatics. He has published on speech acts and their normative aspects, score-keeping, accommodation, linguistic underdeterminacy, and irony in journals such as Journal of Pragmatics, Language Sciences, Language & Communication, Synthese, and Argumentation. He has co-edited (with Iwona Witczak-Plisiecka) a monograph “Normativity and Variety of Speech Actions” (Leiden: Brill 2019). maciej.witek@usz.edu.pl
