Telling Examples. Strategic manoeuvring in plenary debates in the European Parliament
Members of Parliament may make use of argumentation from examples to justify policies and legislation. In this contribution I concentrate on how argumentation from example may be used to manoeuvre strategically in plenary legislative debates in the European parliament. As a framework for the analysis of the strategic use of examples in the institutional setting of the European parliament, I shall make use of van Eemeren and Houtlosser’s (1999, 2002) concept of strategic manoeuvring.
Seizing the Occasion: Parameters for Analysing Ways of Strategic Manoeuvring
People who are engaged in argumentative discourse are characteristically not only out to conclude their differences of opinion their way but also oriented towards reaching this conclusion in a reasonable way: they may be regarded committed to norms that are instrumental in maintaining critical standards for being reasonable and to expect others to comply with the same standards. This means in practice that, while being out for the optimal rhetorical result, they may at the same time be presumed to hold at every stage of the resolution process to the dialectical objective of the stage concerned.
Debaters as Storytellers: The Narrative Perspective in Academic Debate.
This paper argues that academic debate has become elitist. Our students make arguments which can be understood by highly trained expert judges, but not by public audiences. The paper argues that we...