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Fallacies as Argumentative Devices in Political Debates

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Multimodal Communication in Political Speech. Shaping Minds and Social Action (PS 2010)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 7688))

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Abstract

The current paper attempts to contribute to the study of argumentation in political debates. We propose an examination of the role of fallacies in political argumentation. In the first two sections we conduct a brief review of literature on the concepts of argumentation and fallacies to show that they both converge in emphasizing the role of discourse type when evaluating the efficacy of communicative strategies. This perspective is then applied in the analysis section to look at the role of fallacies in a political debate on nuclear energy held in Italy. We conduct a discourse analysis of the transcript based on which we identify a variety of relevant paths followed by speakers when constructing arguments. The findings demonstrate how several informal fallacies (argumentum ad baculum, argumentum ad hominem, argument from analogy, argumentum ad consequentiam) are strategically used by politicians in order to put forward coherent and strong positions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CESCOM – Centre for Studies in Communication Sciences, Faculty of Education Sciences, University of Milano-Bicocca, Via Giolli ang. Via T. Mann – U16 4th Floor, 20162, Milan, Italy

    Valentino Zurloni & Luigi Anolli

Authors
  1. Valentino Zurloni
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  2. Luigi Anolli
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Filosofia, Comunicazione e Spettacolo, Università Roma Tre, 00146, Rome, Italy

    Isabella Poggi

  2. Faculty of Psychology, Uninettuno International Telematic University (Utiu), 00186, Rome, Italy

    Francesca D’Errico

  3. Department of Education, Università Roma Tre, 00146, Rome, Italy

    Laura Vincze

  4. Computer Science, University of Glasgow, G12 8QQ, Glasgow, UK

    Alessandro Vinciarelli

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Zurloni, V., Anolli, L. (2013). Fallacies as Argumentative Devices in Political Debates. In: Poggi, I., D’Errico, F., Vincze, L., Vinciarelli, A. (eds) Multimodal Communication in Political Speech. Shaping Minds and Social Action. PS 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 7688. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41545-6_18

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41545-6_18

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-41544-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-41545-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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