Argumentation Conspiracy and the Moon A Rhetorical Pragmatic Analysis
In what probably amounts to the first scholarly inquiry into Conspiracy Theories (henceforth CTs) Richard Hofstadter (1964) describes in detail a particular way of making sense of the political world he refers to as the 'paranoid style' and provides several examples of such style while broadly defining its features. Hofstadter's pioneering work has subsequently been discussed and expanded mainly in relation to (i) the epistemological problems CTs pose and (ii) their problematic status within civil societies and what should/could be done to weaken or cancel their impact. In this chapter we address the first set of issues related to the epistemological shortcomings of CTs by examining their argumentative features and by conducting a hybrid rhetorical pragmatic analysis. Our approach to argumentation is founded on the idea that argumentation is, on the discursive level, the manifestation of what reasoning is on the cognitive level. As a discursive phenomenon, argumentation ideally lends itself to a discourse analytical approach: indeed, arguments and standpoints are speech acts which are articulated together in specific ways by speakers, and which are uttered to ideally fulfil the communicative function of convincing or persuading addressee(s) Our proposal seeks to gain insights on how these are articulated, in what ways, and to what ends. The framework presented here is therefore a discursive one, as it seeks to account for the reality of argumentative moves performed by speakers and its consequences for/in communication. As such, its first purpose is to provide a thorough description of the nature and structure of argumentation as it can be found in discourse. Studying a discursive object from an empirical perspective which takes into account its embeddedness in a communicative situation is common practice in discourse analytical approaches. The second