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).