Notes on the Tenacity of Therapeutic Presuppositions in Process Research: Examining the Artfulness of Blamings in Family Therapy

In their recent contribution to the Journal of Family Therapy , Frosh et al . apply discourse analytic methods to the study of 'process' in family therapy. While we welcome this contribution, we suggest that the authors' reading of the data has been affected by a number of fundamental presuppositions, which have led them to neglect the skilful rhetorical work taking place in the session. In this paper, we have undertaken an alternative analysis of the data, examining its rhetorical features and suspending judgement on the efficacy of the therapeutic project and on the truth status of statements made by participants in the session. While acknowledging that our microanalytic method has some shortcomings, we contend that attention to the situated and strategic nature of 'therapy talk' has exposed the primacy of notions of responsibility and blame in family work, and has shown how these issues are artfully negotiated by therapist and family in the cut and thrust of the therapeutic interview.     

Discursive constructions of otherness in populist radical right political blogs

This article provides a comparative study of the discursive construction and use of Otherness among anti‐immigration populist radical right politicians in Sweden and Finland. Based on rhetorical and critical discursive psychology, our analyses of discourse within nine political blogs identified three distinct representations of Otherness. These representations of a deviant group of people, of a threatening ideology and of inner enemies are highly familiar from previous research on radical right discourse. However, what seems to characterize populist radical right discourse in the Nordic context is the strong reliance on the rhetorical juxtaposition between the welfare system and immigration. Our study furthermore highlights how populist radical right politicians exploit the digital discursive tools provided by political blogging. These tools, first, create a sense of connectedness and mutual understanding between blogger and reader and, second, allow the blogger to convey messages that are hostile towards immigrants and ethnic minorities without expressing an explicit personal opinion. In combination, the features provided by political blogging and the discursive and rhetorical strategies that deny racism make discourse within a populist radical right political blog especially powerful and convincing. We conclude that research must be sensitive to this ‘digital discourse’, as it reaches a public far beyond the sphere of a political blog through its potential to spread and influence mainstream media.     

Keeping It Simple: Rethinking Abilities and Moral Responsibility

Moral responsibility requires that we are in control of what we do. Many contemporary accounts of responsibility cash out this control in terms of abilities and hold that the relevant abilities are strong abilities, like general abilities. This paper raises a problem for strong abilities views: an agent can plausibly be morally responsible for an action or omission, despite lacking any strong abilities to do the relevant thing. It then offers a way forward for ability-based views, arguing that very weak abilities can form the basis of moral responsibility for both actions and omissions.     

Some reflections on the notion of hypotyposis in Kant

In the Critique of Judgement, Kant, despite his strong condemnation of rhetoric, introduces the figure of hypotyposis at the very moment he sets out to tackle the philosophical problem of presentation as such. This study holds that this choice of the rhetorical term is not fortuitous. Its connotations of vivid illustration, synopsis, and moral grandeur serve Kant in arguing that, on a transcendental level, presentation secures the mind's life, unity, and self-affection. Although of rhetorical origin, hypotyposis is thus shown to link up with a specifically philosophical meaning of the term in the writings of Aristotle.     

Scaffolding agency: A proleptic account of the reactive attitudes

This paper examines the methodological claim made famous by P. F. Strawson: that we understand what features are required for responsible agency by exploring our attitudes and practices of holding responsible. What is the presumed metaphysical connection between holding responsible and being fit to be held responsible that makes this claim credible? I propose a non‐standard answer to this question, arguing for a view of responsible agency that is neither antirealist nor straightforwardly realist. It is instead “constructivist.” On the “Scaffolding View” I defend, reactive attitudes play an essential role in developing, supporting, and thereby maintaining the capacities that make for responsible agency. Although this view has relatively novel implications for a metaphysical understanding of capacities, its chief virtue, in contrast with more standard views, is in providing a plausible defense of why so‐called “responsible agents” genuinely deserve to be treated as such.     

Pray for the fatherland! Discursive and digital strategies at play in nationalist political blogging

Political blogs have come to constitute important channels for expressing nationalist and anti-immigration political views. The new forms that this rhetoric may take, comprising an intricate intermingling of verbal, digital, (audio-)visual, and communicative elements, present challenges for qualitative research. In this article we propose a way for analysing this “new” nationalist political discourse from a qualitative social psychological perspective. The suggested approach combines analytical procedures form critical discursive and rhetorical psychology with social semiotic and rhetorical studies of images, completed with analytical tools and concepts from narrative psychology and research into online political communication. Using two empirical examples of nationalist and anti-immigration political blog-entries written during the 2015 “refugee crisis,” we show this approach enables the researcher to adequately study how such political messages are conveyed through the multitude of elements provided by the blogs. In so doing, our ultimate goal is to contribute to the analytical capacity of qualitative social psychological research into contemporary political communication and persuasion.     

The Rhetoric of Deliberation: Some Problems in Kantian Theories of Deliberative Democracy

Deliberative or discursive models of democracy have recently enjoyed a revival in both political theory and policy practice. Against the picture of democracy as a procedure for aggregating and effectively meeting the given preference of individuals, deliberative theory offers a model of democracy as a forum through which judgements and preferences are formed and altered through reasoned dialogue between free and equal citizens. Much in the recent revival of deliberative democracy, especially that which comes through Habermas and Rawls, has Kantian roots. Deliberative institutions are embodiments of the free public use of reason that Kant takes to define the enlightenment project. Within the Kantian model the public use of reason is incompatible with the use of rhetoric. While this paper rejects strong rhetorical criticisms of deliberative democracy which render all communication strategic, it argues that rhetorical studies of deliberation have highlighted features of deliberation which point to significant weaknesses in Kantian approaches to it. Two features are of particular importance: the role of testimony and judgements of credibility in deliberation; and the role of appeal to emotions in public discourse. Both from the Kantian perspective are potential sources of heteronomy. However, the appeal to testimony and emotion are features of public deliberation that cannot and should not be eliminated. For those committed to the enlightenment values that underlie the deliberative model of democracy the question is whether these rhetorical features of deliberation are incompatible with those values. The paper argues that they are compatible. It does so by defending an Aristotelian account of rhetoric in public deliberation which denies the Platonic contrast between reasoned discourse and rhetoric which the Kantian model inherits. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Joining with all members of a family system: The rhetoric of antilogic in family therapy dialogue

Family therapists face a significant rhetorical challenge in working with families that disagree about the problematic life-situation which brought them to therapy. Therapists must find a way to join with disagreeing family members and then find a way to engage in a therapeutically useful conversation with them. Thus, they must deal resourcefully with contradictions. This article explores the ways that the Sophistic rhetorical concept of antilogic may be employed in helping therapists join and then engage in a therapeutically useful conversation with families who hold contradictory views concerning the problem that brought them to therapy.The author wishes to thank Ronald Chenail, PhD, Douglas Flemons, PhD, and Shelly Green, PhD, for their assistance in the development of this project.     

Some views are better than others: evidence for a visual bias in object views self‐generated by toddlers

How objects are held determines how they are seen, and may thereby play an important developmental role in building visual object representations. Previous research suggests that toddlers, like adults, show themselves a disproportionate number of planar object views – that is, views in which the objects' axes of elongation are perpendicular or parallel to the line of sight. Here, three experiments address three explanations of this bias: (1) that the locations of interesting features of objects determine how they are held and thus how they are viewed; (2) that ease of holding determines object views; and (3) that there is a visual bias for planar views that exists independently of holding and of interesting surface properties. Children 18 to 24 months of age manually and visually explored novel objects (1) with interesting features centered in planar or ¾ views; (2) positioned inside Plexiglas boxes so that holding biased either planar or non‐planar views; and (3) positioned inside Plexiglas spheres, so that no object properties directly influenced holding. Results indicate a visual bias for planar views that is influenced by interesting surface properties and ease of holding, but that continues to exist even when these factors push for alternative views.     

Confidence in expectations: A test of the triangle hypothesis

Kelley and Stahelski's (1970) triangle hypothesis states that competitors hold homogeneous views of others by assuming that most others are competitive, whereas cooperators or pro-social people hold more heterogeneous views by assuming that others are either cooperative or competitive. To evaluate the triangle hypothesis, this study examines differences between pro-socials, individualists, and competitors not only in their expectations about others' choice behaviour, but also in the confidence with which such expectations are held. It was found that pro-social subjects expected more cooperation than individualists and competitors. More importantly, as predicted on the basis of the triangle hypothesis, pro-socials were less confident about their expectations than competitors, with individualists holding intermediate levels of confidence.     

The Process of Constructing Main Ideas From Text

A discourse-analytical approach to children's knowledge is offered, focusing on extracts of classroom talk between a teacher and a kindergarten class. After rejecting the possibility of defining concepts and memories as cognitive states prior to or underlying discourse, the talk is examined for how participants define and deal with such notions as a feature of the sequential and rhetorical organization of discourse. An argument is advanced for the analysis of knowledge, reality, and education as public, interactionally managed participants' concerns that can be studied as discursive practices. It is argued that the study of discourse does not ignore nondiscursive realms of mind and reality but permits analysis of how those things are defined, so that any explanatory appeal to what is beyond or behind the talk is unwarranted.     

Branding ‘Canadian Experience’ in Immigration Policy: Nation Building in a Neoliberal Era

This paper examines the branding of ‘Canadian experience’ in Canadian immigration policy as a rhetorical strategy for neoliberal nation-building. Since 2008, the Canadian government has introduced an unprecedented number of changes to immigration policy. While the bulk of these policies produce more temporary and precarious forms of migration, the Canadian government has mobilized the rhetoric of ‘Canadian experience’ as a means to identify immigrants who carry the promise of economic and social integration. Through a critical discourse analysis of Canadian print media and political discourse, we trace how the brand of Canadian experience taps into the affective value of national identity in an era of global economic insecurity. We also illustrate how the discourse of Canadian experience (CE) remains ideologically deracialized, such that the government’s embrace of CE as an immigrant selection criterion dismisses the discriminatory effects that this discourse is shown to have for racialized immigrants in Canada.     

Representing the ‘other’: a discursive analysis of prejudice and moral exclusion in talk about Romanies

This article investigates the particulars of prejudiced and moral exclusion discourse about ethnic minorities in a Romanian socio‐cultural context. It examines in detail the discourse of middle‐class Romanian professionals taking up different ideological positions on the issue of the fairness of extremist politics towards ethnic minorities. A comparison is made between participants ‘supporting’ extremist politics and those ‘opposing’ this kind of politics to see whether there are differences in the way participants from both categories talk about the Romanies. It is suggested that a very similar expression of moral exclusion discourse is to be found across both positions, a very similar use of various discursive and rhetorical strategies to blame the Romanies and ‘naturalize’ their characteristics, position them beyond the moral order, nationhood and difference. The analysis, inspired by a critical discursive approach will focus on the construction of ideological representations of Romanies. In examining prejudiced and moral exclusion discourse against Romanies, this article constitutes an attempt to understand the situated dynamics of prejudice and some of the ways in which particular ways of talking delegitimize and, sometimes, dehumanize the ‘other’. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Pastoral Care of Political Discourse: Shepherding Communication

I argue that the tradition(s) of pastoral care contributes to our understanding of Christian discipleship vis-à-vis political discourse. In particular, I understand pastoral care, in part, as shepherding political discourse. To care for and about political discourse involves a radical openness to the Other, which is made possible by the virtues of hospitality, compassion, humility, and forgiveness. The primary pastoral aim in shepherding political discourse is not the realization of political power or the realization of Christian beliefs through rhetorical coercion, evangelical assimilation, or consensus. Positively, the aim of pastoral political discourse is to shepherd the communicative processes such that there is a possibility of real meetings.     

The contribution of postural bias to lateral preferences for holding human infants

When asked to hold an infant, 60-85% of adults hold on their left, so that the infant's head is to the left of their midline (Brüser, 1981; de Chateau, 1983; Saling & Tyson, 1981). The same group bias has been found even when persons are merely asked to imagine holding an infant (Nakamichi & Takeda, 1995; Harris, Almerigi, & Kirsch, 2000). A number of variables have been found to contribute modestly to the bias, including the sex and handedness of the holder. In the current study, the role of a new variable is investigated, namely, the feeling of comfort for holding an infant on a particular side as indexed by one's foot preference for acts of stabilizing or postural support. To test this hypothesis, 282 right-handed college students (218 women, 64 men) were given the imagine-hold task along with 4 questions about their foot preference for posture and balance. The results showed that, at least for women, the two measures were modestly but significantly related.     

British Citizenship and the ‘Other’: An Analysis of the Earned Citizenship Discourse

This paper presents an analysis of interviews conducted with citizenship officers in London, working within the field of British naturalisation. We draw from a rhetorical psychology perspective to study the dilemmatic tensions that exist in the participants' discourse about naturalisation applicants who are constructed as ‘good’ and ‘bad’, as both ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ of British citizenship. In line with a rhetorical approach, we argue that these different constructions of the migrant are strategic and are associated with different constructions of Britain as humanitarian and tolerant, on the one hand, and as being under threat by the influx of immigration, on the other hand. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of this ambivalence for processes of inclusion and exclusion. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Six things worth understanding about psychoanalytic psychotherapy

This paper is written for family therapists who may be curious but sceptical about psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy. It examines a number of areas of misunderstanding within mainstream family therapy discourse (diversity, authoritarianism, terminology, blame, history and separation) which, the author believes, have acted to help maintain a false coherence for family therapy through a distorted construction of the otherness of psychoanalytic therapy and, in so doing, inhibited a potentially more productive relationship.     

Intrinsic Versus Instrumental Values of Argumentation: The Rhetorical Dimension of Argumentation

I distinguish four current strategies for integrating a rhetorical perspective within normative models for argumentation. Then I propose and argue for a fifth one by defending a conception of acts of arguing as having a rhetorical dimension that provides conditions for characterizing good argumentation, understood as argumentation that justifies a target-claim.     

Naming and Nonexistence

I defend a cluster of views about names from fiction and myth. The views are based on two claims: first, proper names refer directly to their bearers; and second, names from fiction and myth are genuinely empty, they simply do not refer. I argue that when such names are used in direct discourse, utterances containing them have truth values but do not express propositions. I also argue that it is a mistake to think that if an utterance of, for example, “Vulcan is a planet” fails to express a proposition, then an utterance of “Le Verrier believed that Vulcan is a planet” cannot express a proposition. The argument applies to claims about fiction, such as “Sherlock Holmes is strong,” and claims about the attitudes of authors and auditors. The upshot is a semantics for fictional statements that provides a satisfying way for direct reference theorists to avoid taking fictional entities to be abstract objects and to accept the commonsense view that what is true in a fiction is ultimately a matter of what is pretended to be the case.