About rational argument

The often-mentioned second phase of my research is about understanding whether or not deliberation happens on social news sites, and whether it has anything to do with how the front page of the sites will end up looking like.

So one of the tasks of the moment is to find a way to conceptualize deliberation, and to put it into the context that is provided by Habermas, and his various critics, such as Mouffe, about the role of rational argumentation in democracy.

This lead me to pick up Stanley S. Kleinberg’s book “Politics & Philosophy: The necessity and limitations of rational argument.” It did not turn out to be helpful in the conceptualization of deliberation, or understanding what “good argument” was, but on the other hand, it is a very interesting philosophical account of a line of thought about the role of rational argument in general.

I try to summarize this line of thought here.

In the defense of Habermas

I’m at the moment enrolled in a web course – run by the University of Tampere -, called “Current issues in Communication Studies: Perspectives on Democracy and Citizenship.” One of the tasks during this course has been to comment on Juha Koivisto’s and Esa Valiverronen’s article from 1996, entitled “The Resurgence of the Critical Theories of Public Sphere” (Journal of Communication Inquiry 20:2 (1996): 18-36). I copy and paste my comments on the article here.