Manipulation as breach of arguer responsibility in \u27Welcome to Obamaville\u27

Argumentation should encourage autonomous decision-making. Rick Santorum’s political campaign ad Welcome to Obamaville violates this requirement by deploying a flood of subliminal images. Santorum’s ad involves a fallacy by virtue of clear intent to manipulate. Arguers are responsible for the foreseeable consequences of their action. Santorum acts in bad faith even if subliminal messages are in fact ineffective and he is wrong about the consequences foreseen

Employing and Exploiting the Presumptions of Communication in Argumentation: An Application of Normative Pragmatics

Argumentation occurs through and as communicative activity. Communication (and therefore argumentation) is organized by pragmatic principles of expression and interpretation. Grice’s (1975) theory of conversational implicature provides a model for how people use rational principles to manage the ways in which they reason to representations of arguments, and not just reason from those representations. These principles are systematic biases that make possible reasonable decision-making and intersubjective understandings in the first place; but they also make possible all manner of errors and abuses. Much of what is problematic in argumentation involves the ways in which the pragmatic principles of communication are exploited and the difficulties audiences and interlocutors have detecting and managing these abuses

Commentary on: Assimakis Tseronis\u27 Argumentative functions of visuals: Beyond claiming and justifying

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