Critical Political Epistemology of Argumentation

Recent years have seen a rising interest in the ethics and moral epistemology of argumentation, fields which normatively study the interpersonal moral behaviour of arguers and its effects on and entanglements with rationality and the production of knowledge (see e.g. Bondy, 2010; Stevens, 2021; Moulton, 1983; Aberdein, 2016; Henning, 2018; Hundleby, 2013). This dissertation contributes to these debates by blending six political-theoretical perspectives and concepts; it takes steps toward what I call a critical political epistemology of argumentation, whose purpose is to emphasise the significance of contexts of social and political power in accounting for the epistemological contours of the practice of argumentation. The animating motivation behind this work is to raise and investigate normative issues that arise when argumentation is societally ascribed the political and epistemic privilege it currently has, especially in political systems that call themselves liberal democracies. To this end, this dissertation frames argumentation as a socio-epistemic practice rather than as an abstract phenomenon, thus rejecting an exclusive focus on arguments as (putative) freestanding entities (as done in much of the research on argumentation theory to date). Chapter 1 argues that argumentation and its normative (epistemic, moral, and political) dimensions ought to be considered from structural perspectives and without strict requirements of rationality. I then focus on the contexts and effects that argumentation has, such as generating political legitimacy (Chapter 2), structurally excluding or forcefully including specific arguers through rhetoric (Chapters 3) or technological design (Chapter 4), serving as a pedagogical tool for radical anti-colonial political action (Chapter 5), and retaining unjust social orders through the legal system (Chapter 6).