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Article: Is There Hope for the Public Realm? Conversation as Interpretation.
- Article from:
- Social Research
- Article date:
- September 22, 1998
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1998 New School for Social Research. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Publicness as Argument and Conversation
In the classical liberal tradition, to produce public discourse is to provide reasons for one's assertions. To provide reasons is to render one's claims shareable, public. To provide reasons is to be willing to engage in argument. For argument is clearly the most obvious form of genuinely public discourse. To engage in argument is to make claims and to give the warrants and backings for those claims. Argument is not exhausted by the purely deductive procedures of the traditional syllogism nor by too narrow understandings of logic. To be reasonable is, however, to be logical. To be logical is to be coherent. To argue is to ...