Chapter 1. The reasonableness of confrontational strategic maneuvering in political interviews

Corina Andone

The goal of this paper is to evaluate a politician’s responses to an interviewer’s accusation that his current standpoint is inconsistent with an earlier expressed standpoint on the same issue. The author focuses on the case in which the politician responds to such criticism by retracting the earlier expressed standpoint and subsequently reformulating it. Taking a pragma-dialectical perspective on argumentation, the author assesses whether the politician’s sequence of moves contributes to a reasonable resolution of the difference of opinion that is at stake in a political interview. To this end, the author formulates a set of soundness conditions that should be fulfilled if a politician is to reasonably retract a standpoint that is afterwards reformulated. The author applies the soundness conditions to a number of concrete cases taken from BBC political interviews to judge whether the responses are reasonable or not.

Published online: 28 March 2012
https://doi.org/10.1075/aic.4.01and

Cited by

Cited by 3 other publications

Arcidiacono, Francesco & Antonio Bova

2015. Activity-bound and activity-unbound arguments in response to parental eat-directives at mealtimes: Differences and similarities in children of 3–5 and 6–9 years old. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction 6 ► pp. 40 ff.

Bova, Antonio

2015. “This is the cheese bought by Grandpa”. Journal of Argumentation in Context 4:2 ► pp. 133 ff.

Ragni, Marco, Sangeet Khemlani & P. N. Johnson-Laird

2014. The evaluation of the consistency of quantified assertions. Memory & Cognition 42:1 ► pp. 53 ff.

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 25 april 2021. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.