Rudd's Apology to the Stolen Generations: Challenging Self‐Sufficient Arguments in “Race” Discourse

While the public debate on whether to apologise to the Stolen Generations ended on 13 February, 2008, public opinion was still divided, reflected particularly in the arguments against apologising that were common in political and public discourse. We examine the ways in which differing arguments can be flexibly deployed and combined within a political context to not just resist, but also to support, an act of reparation for historical injustice. In particular, we consider how Rudd makes use of specific rhetorically self‐sufficient arguments to justify offering the apology; precisely the same arguments that had previously been used by political leaders and members of the public to oppose the apology. It is the use of such arguments in combination with each other and additional common tropes drawn from egalitarian and liberal discourse that allow for the building of a rhetorically powerful case for offering the apology. Rather than the traditional focus of such research on the ways in which racism is accomplished in talk, we suggest that Rudd's apology to the Stolen Generations can be seen as a practical tool‐kit for building an “anti‐racist” rhetoric in the context of Indigenous and non‐Indigenous relations in Australia.     

The Minority-Majority Conundrum in Northern Ireland: An Orange Order Perspective

Researchers have argued that, depending on the framing of the Northern Ireland conflict, each group could either be a minority or a majority relative to the other. This complicates macrosocial explanations of the conflict which make specific predictions on the basis of minority or majority positions. The present paper argues that this conundrum may have arisen from the inherent variability in microidentity processes that do not fit easily with macroexplanations. In this paper the rhetoric of relative group position is analysed in political speeches delivered by leading members of an influential Protestant institution in Northern Ireland. It is apparent that minority and majority claims are not fixed but are flexibly used to achieve local rhetorical goals. Furthermore, the speeches differ before and after the Good Friday Agreement, with a reactionary "hegemonic" Unionist position giving way to a "majority-rights power sharing" argument and a "pseudo-minority" status giving way to a "disempowered minority" argument. These results suggest a view of the Northern Ireland conflict as a struggle for "symbolic power," i.e., the ability to flexibly define the intergroup situation to the ingroup's advantage.     

MORALITY THROUGH INQUIRY,MOTIVE THROUGH RHETORIC: THE POLITICS OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION IN THE EPOCH OF THE ANTHROPOCENE

In an epoch marked by the threat of global warming, the conflicts between science and religion are no longer simply matters that concern only intellectual elites and armchair philosophers; they are in many ways matters that will determine the degree to which we can meet the challenges of our times. John H. Evans's Morals Not Knowledge represents an important provocation for those committed not only to using scientific method as a resource for making moral judgments but also to creating political alliances with religious constituencies. In this important work, Evans argues that most conflicts between science and religion do not concern a clash between two contradictory ways of knowing, but rather a clash over our moral responsibilities and ultimate values. In my response to his work, I suggest that integrating both John Dewey's pragmatic understanding of the moral situation and Kenneth Burke's rhetorical interpretation of motives helps bolster Evans's cause and provides support for a political movement that aims to bridge the divide between science and religion in the epoch of the Anthropocene.     

The Power of Invitation: The Moral Discourse of Kairos Palestine

Abstract: In this article I analyze the moral discourse of the Palestinian kairos document A Moment of Truth (2009) using the distinctions between prophetic, ethical, narrative, policy, and participatory discourse offered by James M. Gustafson and Lisa S. Cahill. I conclude that the document articulates a sixth variety: invitational discourse. This is a kind of moral discourse that invites a wide range of groups and individuals into a normative discussion on a given issue.     

The Rhetoric Side of Fake News: A New Weapon for Anti-Politics?

Abstract

As an “insidious form of post-truth rhetoric”, fake news find a fertile ground in the complex scenario of new media and fruitful fertilizers in several psychological foundations and social phenomena. As a consequence, social scientists and psychologists are more and more interested to deepen these dynamics. Nonetheless, the study of the discursive and rhetoric facets of fake news has been rather neglected. The aim of this work is to investigate their discursive construction in one of the preferred domains of this misleading process of construction of reality, the political world. Through the discourse analysis applied to several fake news involving a very popular female Italian politician, we emphasize the risk of empowering the (already widespread) anti-political feeling.     

Rhetoric and Dialectic from the Standpoint of Normative Pragmatics

Normative pragmatics can bridge the differences between dialectical and rhetorical theories in a way that saves the central insights of both. Normative pragmatics calls attention to how the manifest strategic design of a message produces interpretive effects and interactional consequences. Argumentative analysis of messages should begin with the manifest persuasive rationale they communicate. But not all persuasive inducements should be treated as arguments. Arguments express with a special pragmatic force propositions where those propositions stand in particular inferential relations to one another. Normative pragmatics provides a framework within which varieties of propositional inference and pragmatic force may be kept straight. Normative pragmatics conceptualizes argumentative effectiveness in a way that integrates notions of rhetorical strategy and rhetorical situation with dialectical norms and procedures for reasonable deliberation. Strategic effectiveness should be seen in terms of maximizing the chances that claims and arguments will be reasonably evaluated, whether or not they are accepted. Procedural rationality should be seen in terms of adjustment to the demands of concrete circumstances. Two types of adjustment are illustrated: rhetorical strategies for framing the conditions for dialectical deliberation and rhetorical strategies for making do with limitations to dialectical deliberation.     

Inconsistency as an interactional problem: a lesson from political rhetoric

The classical theory of cognitive dissonance suggests that when two related cognitions are mutually inconsistent, one of them will change to restore consistency. However, Billig suggests that inconsistency is primarily an interactional problem between subjects and not a cognitive problem within a subject. In the current paper, we adopt Billig's rhetorical approach to inconsistency and study inconsistency as an interactional problem in the context of political rhetoric. More specifically, we use Action-Implicative Discourse Analysis to identify the discursive strategies the former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, used to cope with the inconsistency between his national ideology and his contradictory behavior during his short term in office.     

“Put a Little Love in Your Heart”: Acceptance of Paternalistic and Ally Political Discourses Both Predict Pro-Roma Solidarity Intentions Through Moral Inclusion

The way politicians talk about minorities institutes the normative context of intergroup relations. We investigated how endorsement of different political discourses predicts donation and collective action intentions by majority members toward the Roma in five European countries. The survey was conducted online using samples demographically similar to the populations of Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, France, and Ireland (N = 5,054). First, results showed that accepting paternalistic discourse versus discourse promoting allyship were not distinguishable; both promoted higher moral inclusion which in turn predicted higher prosocial intentions. Second, donations (i.e., immediate relief) and collective action (i.e., social change action) were driven by identical factors. Third, acceptance of openly hostile political discourse neither predicted moral exclusion, nor lower prosocial intentions. In summary, our research provides important evidence that when it comes to Roma—non-Roma relations, the previously established distinction between solidarity intentions that aim to solidify status relations versus bring about social change is completely blurred, presumably because of the social context in which any positive message communicates moral inclusion challenging the hostile status quo.     

Retour(s) sur “Mir Rose” ou comment analyser et représenter le texte argumentatif (écrit)?

The main purpose of this paper is to account for the varying analysis and formalisations of a same advertisement text, Mir Rose, by Jean Michel Adam. First, we draw the methodological frame of this psycholinguistic approach of composing and understanding-memorizing texts. We refer to the notions of prototypical textual schema, semantic macrostructure and superstructure. Then we point out the differences between argumentative text and argumentative discourse. Last, we try to explain why it has been possible for Adam to analyse and formalise the same text first as a narrative one and a few years later as an argumentative one. We suggest that his narrative approach is not specific and textual narrative means here temporal-causative sequence or problem solving, i.e., deeper and more general psychological devices than those involved in processing narrative text per se. From Toulmin and van Dijk approaches of argumentation, we propose our own analysis and formalisation of Mir Rose, the psychological validity or plausibility of which should be tested in experimental tasks of reading-memorising.

     

Religion,Spirituality, and Alternative Health Practices: The Baby Boomer and Cold War Cohorts

Research in religion and health has suggested positive relationships, and most recently has concentrated on the experience of religion, or spirituality. Currently, cohort studies have shown that the baby boomers differ significantly from their elders in their approach to religion, preferring to explore spirituality rather than the religious doctrine of their elders. They also differ in their approaches to health, including greater acceptance and use of alternative health practices. This study isolates the baby boomer and cold war cohorts in order to explore differences in religion, spirituality and alternative health practices. Findings indicate that, for boomers, increased spirituality is significantly related to increased positive health perceptions, while their elders' health perceptions are related to increased religiosity. Alternative health practices and spirituality, however, are not related for either cohort. However, this study does identify important distinctions between the two cohorts. Future studies must recognize differing cohort constructions of reality concerning the meanings of health, spirituality and religion.     

‘It is safe to use if you are healthy’: A discursive analysis of men’s online accounts of ephedrine use

Ephedrine use in sport is a common practice among men. Less well understood is men’s use of ephedrine as a slimming aid. Arguably fuelled by the ‘war on obesity’ and the drive for muscularity, the Internet has become awash with claims presenting ephedrine as safe. The use of this psychoactive substance can have acute health implications such as tachycardia, arrhythmias and cardiovascular disease. Given the tension between health risk and ephedrine-induced weight loss, how men justify their use of ephedrine becomes an important question. In particular, we wished to analyse how male users talked to others about ephedrine in discussions linked to an online version of a popular men’s magazine. Because we were particularly interested in how men accounted for their ephedrine use, we used discourse analysis to examine their posts. In analysing the data, we noted that a ‘community of practice’ was constructed online categorising legitimate (and barred) users, emphasising the benefits of ephedrine and downplaying health-defeating side effects. Our analysis has clear implications for engaging men who use ephedrine in health promotion interventions.     

Do changes in threat salience predict the moral content of sermons? The case of Friday Khutbas in Turkey

We analyzed the content of “Friday Khutbas” delivered in Turkish mosques between January 2001 and December 2018 to test the prediction of moral foundations theory (MFT) literature that threat salience would lead to an increased endorsement of binding moral foundations. As societal-level indicators of threat, we examined (a) historical data on the proportion of terrorism-related news published in a Turkish newspaper, (b) the geopolitical risk score of Turkey as measured by Geopolitical Risk Index, and (c) Google Trends data on the search frequency of words “terror”, “terrorism”, or “terrorist”. To measure the endorsement of moral foundations, we built a Turkish Moral Foundations Dictionary and counted the relative frequency of morality-related words in the khutbas delivered in Istanbul, Turkey. Time series analyses showed that risk salience in a certain month was positively related to endorsement of the loyalty/betrayal foundation in that month’s Friday Khutbas. There were mixed results for the other moral foundations.     

How Emotional Are Populists Really? Factors Explaining Emotional Appeals in the Communication of Political Parties

Are populists really more emotional than mainstream parties? The alleged link between populism and emotional communication has barely been subject to systematic empirical scrutiny. I use literature on populist communication and appraisal theory to generate expectations about which political parties use which emotional appeals. I test these claims by applying a novel emotional dictionary to a large set of text data including more than 700,000 press releases and tweets from three European countries. As expected, I find that populist parties use significantly more negative emotional appeals (anger, fear, disgust, sadness) and less positive emotional appeals (joy, enthusiasm, pride, hope) than mainstream parties. Furthermore, I find that political actors adapt the usage of emotional appeals to different purposes depending on the communication medium and the politicians' status level. This study entails important implications for the research on emotional appeals in politics and populist communication.