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section iii toward better deliberative practices The final section of the book is oriented toward the future, as it presents proposals for how to conduct or consider public deliberation in practice so that it might generate, metaphorically speaking, less heat and more light. John Adams and Stephen West suggest that presidential primary campaign debates, as currently conducted, are not really debates but rather belong to the genre of interview-based, information-seeking journalistic discourse ; they should be keyed, the authors propose, to preannounced policy issues, be moderated by nonjournalists, and follow a form of discourse more suitable to setting, vetting, and settling conflicted positions. Their chapter also recommends a revised format for presidential primary debates in which the focus is on debating rather than merely informing, and on whose plan is better or worse rather than on entertainment value or purely strategic considerations . Like Just and Gabrielsen in chapter 14, Christian Kock looks to key notions from ancient status theories and proposes to generalize and integrate some of these into one coherent scheme. Perhaps most significantly, the status legales are seen as types of issues belonging to status definitivus. Rather than try to offer a new interpretation of what ancient thinkers had in mind, Kock aims to widen the applicability of ancient status thinking, transforming it into a tool that may help clarify, for debaters and observers alike, not only what a disagreement is essentially about but, just as important, what it is not about. Looking at current sociopolitical disagreements in this way, his chapter contends, might help debaters on opposite sides of an issue focus more on the essential points of disagreement between them—for the benefit of deliberating audiences. Broad and heated clashes between polarized factions might cool down, and observers and critics, such as argumentation scholars, rhetoricians, journalists, and educators, might acquire an additional tool for the monitoring of public argument and the teaching of rhetorical citizenship. Georgia Warnke revisits her view, proposed in Legitimate Differences (1999), that even deep social disagreements may sometimes be seen as differences in interpretation of norms that are to a large extent shared. Rather than see ethical and political controversies as intractable, she suggests modeling such disputes on disagreements about textual interpretation; this might create fresh insights into the multiple dimensions that texts possess. Warnke illustrates this view by considering two principles, “liberty” and “respect for the sanctity of human life,” as evidenced in the U.S. debate over abortion, a debate in which both sides claim allegiance to these principles, though they interpret them in quite different ways. Relying on Gadamer’s account of a true second-person, dialogic “I-thou” relation, Warnke notes that when opposing interpretations meet, a dialogue might ensue that changes both subjects—since each interpretation is a contribution to an ongoing discussion rather than the last word on the matter. Warnke considers objections to the “interpretive” view of deep disagreements, such as the view that entrenched definitions are less interpretations of meaning than attempts to exercise power. But, Warnke argues, if power matters, so does interpretation: even power-driven attempts to solidify definitions work with interpretations that might still achieve an increase in mutual understanding. 266 rhetorical citizenship and public deliberation ...

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