The Ecological View of Practical Argumentation

Abstract The most intuitive, and presumably the most widely accepted description of what we do when we argue about politics is that we aim to pass our belief on to another person, and that this is done by demonstrating the truth of our claims. Although this is common sense itself, a more careful pragmatics of what happens when we argue about politics seems to raise a number of objections to this basic view. In this paper, I formulate some of these objections and argue that they suffice to justify the abandonment of this view. First, I propose an alternative account of what we do when we argue about politics, which I call the Ecological view. Then, I argue that the Ecological view is immune to these objections. In the final section, I draw a few normative conclusions from this improved model.