An interpretation of political argument
| Published date | 01 July 2020 |
| Author | William Bosworth |
| Date | 01 July 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885116659842 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
European Journal of Political Theory
2020, Vol. 19(3) 293–313
!The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1474885116659842
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Article
An interpretation
of political argument
William Bosworth
School of Politics and International Relations, Australian National
University, Canberra, Australia
Abstract
How do we determine whether individuals accept the actual consistency of a political
argument instead of just its rhetorical good looks? This article answers this question by
proposing an interpretation of political argument within the constraints of political liber-
alism. It utilises modern developments in the philosophy of logic and language to reclaim
‘meaningless nonsense’ from use as a partisan war cry and to build up political argument
as something more than a power struggle between competing conceptions of the good.
Standard solutions for ‘clarifying’ meaning through descriptive definition encounter diffi-
culties with the biases of status quo idioms (long noted by theorists like William Connolly
and Quentin Skinner), as well as partisan translations and circularity. Collectively called
linguistic gerrymandering, these difficulties threaten political liberalism’s underlying coher-
ency. The proposed interpretation of political argument overcomes this with a new brand
of conceptual analysis that can falsifiably determinewhether rhetoric has hijacked political
argument.
Keywords
Political argument, political liberalism, conceptual analysis, rhetoric, ideology, philosophy
of language
How do we determine whether individuals accept the actual consistency of a poli-
tical argument instead of just its rhetorical good looks? To answer this question we
first need to interpret what exactly is presupposed by an assertion in political
argument that makes it part of the political argument. We then need the interpreta-
tion to render these assertions false if they have been hijacked by rhetoric.
An interpretation of the presupposition of political argument isn’t difficult in an
unrefined sense. In an unrefined sense, the problem of rhetoric doesn’t even come
Corresponding author:
William Bosworth, School of Politics and International Relations (CASS), Australian National University,
Canberra, Australian Capital Territory 0200, Australia.
Email: william.bosworth@anu.edu.au
up. We can say political argument is simply the process of giving reasons for
thinking some solution to the problem of politics is acceptable (Barry, 2011: 2–
12). Difficulties arise, however, when we try and refine this description further by
elaborating what we mean by the political problem, which is to specify what makes
the argument distinctly political. Political liberalism considers the problem as that
of coordinating a peaceful coexistence within a plural society (Barry 1995; Rawls,
2005). From the liberal perspective, then, political arguments are attempts to
render solutions to this coordination problem discursively acceptable to those
affected by it. Such acceptability is a tenet of political liberalism to the extent
that difficulties distinguishing between substantive political argument and non-
substantive rhetoric threaten its underlying coherency. This article shows that
modern developments in the philosophy of language have now provided political
liberalism with a way around these difficulties.
While thin, the liberal perspective introduces a rather large constraint for the
interpretation of political argument. Given plural societies are comprised of indivi-
duals with different conceptions of the good and corresponding comprehensive doc-
trines, no conception of the good can be presumed by the presupposition. That is,
THE LIBERAL CONSTRAINT
No assumption is made concerning the truth of conceptions of the good or the truth of
substantive beliefs of comprehensive doctrines in the presupposition of political
argument.
If the presupposition were biased against any conception of the good, the mere
practice (let alone the specific assertions) of political argument would be automa-
tically unacceptable to certain groups affected by the proposed solutions. This is
not to say the policy of a liberal state must be completely neutral, only that the
justification for policies tracking some conception of the good should not assume
that conception from the start. Otherwise, political argument would simply be
another organ of suppression, with force the only alternative for those wishing
to oppose status quo conceptions of the good.
So construed, political argument does not establish which claims about the good
are true. That is what moral argument is for. Nor is it concerned with establishing
the truth of cultural, religious, or literary platitudes. Political argument is only
concerned with determining which solutions to the problem of politics are unrea-
sonable. Reasonable solutions are solutions justifiable to everybody affected
(including concerned onlookers) no matter their conception of the good. For
example, an Islamic Caliphate imposed through force and brainwashing may be
a solution to the coordination problem, but it presumably could not be justified to
somebody who currently holds a non-Islamic conception of the good. That is to
say, it does not comprise a ‘reasonable comprehensive doctrine’ (Rawls, 2005: xxx)
and it is a position that would be ‘reasonably rejected’ in the contracting position
294 European Journal of Political Theory 19(3)
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