When the same words matter
What is it about?
In Canada, the government must consult Indigenous communities over resource projects. Unfortunately, cultural incommensurability in beliefs often produces epistemic disagreement between government officials and Indigenous communities over these projects. Disagreement becomes an intrinsic feature of Indigenous consultations, and the critical question of participatory democracy is how those in institutional power respond to disagreement from epistemically diverse people. Sometimes officials respond to outstanding Indigenous concerns with the repeating tokens of the same counterarguments – without considering the merits of opposing Indigenous arguments and evidence. Those responses are argumentatively fallacious moves that undermine Indigenous consultations at a ground level. However, restatements are hard to detect as fallacious responses, especially when an institutionally dominant arguer produces them under the institutional norm (rules) of the dominant argumentative discourse. The paper introduces a new category of argumentative discourse analysis – Argument Continuity – that recognizes the fallacious nature of restatements by detecting their relationships with other elements of the dominant argumentative discourse – reasoning goal and practices of evaluation of arguments opposing this goal. The paper concludes that the interaction effect of the institutional dominance (previously enacted rules and established procedures) and the interpretive effects of a dominant arguer’s confirmation/disconfirmation bias (previously stated arguments/counterarguments) produces context-specific increasing returns, which form the context-specific sequences of Argument Continuities. The paper presents two sequences of Argument Continuities over the issues of Indigenous disagreement with the Trans-Mountain project-related underwater noise and impacts to archaeological and cultural heritage sites. The paper argues that in the reasoning context of the Trans Mountain consultations, fallacies came from the institutionalized (through rules of consultations) violation of the pragma-dialectical nature of argumentation, leading to the Crown officials’ failure to be equally critical of the arguments articulated both for and against Trans Mountain project.
Why is it important?
Motivated criticism is a hidden reasoning practice employed to avoid critical engagement with those who disagree. Argument Continuities detect motivated criticism through the feedback mechanism of increasing returns as self-reinforcing behavioral dynamics generated by arguers under the interpretive effects of the confirmation/disconfirmation bias and according to the resources and incentives given by rules as main contextual constraints of the controlled reasoning exchanges. This knowledge will tremendously benefit epistemically diverse arguers who need to participate in government-led reasoning exchanges over an issue of public policy controversy.