Reasoning means providing reasons for a motion, with the aim of making this motion acceptable to someone else, thus creating an instance of a discursive situation. That ‘someone else’ can either be an audience, an interlocutor, a refuter or an opponent, depending on the specific discursive situation.
Let’s first look at the basic dialectical situation (a full glossary will follow after the series has ended). If someone in a dialectical context sincerely wants to persuade his interlocutor, he is practically limited in the types of reasons he can provide for his beliefs and actions. To see why this is so, consider a dialectical situation between a conservative christian and someone else. The conservative christian wants to persuade his interlocutor that abortion is wrong. The first reason he provides is ‘because god forbids it’. This won’t be effective though: his interlocutor happens to be an atheist, so doesn’t believe in the existence of god, so any reason that is based on god’s presumed existence falls flat.
Suppose they both are willing to continue the discussion in a civilized manner. Now, the conservative christian will probably think of another reason. Maybe something like “an unborn child is potentially a fully autonomous person. We generally don’t accept autonomous persons killing other autonomous persons, therefore we shouldn’t also accept autonomous persons killing other potentially autonomous persons”. This has a higher chance of being acceptable to the interlocutor, because the argument is based on premises she (probably) finds acceptable, whilst at the same time still being acceptable to the original proponent.
So, for reasons to be persuasive, they need to be intersubjectively acceptable – acceptable to both the proponent and the interlocutor. Note that there is nothing stopping the proponent from offering reasons that are not intersubjectively acceptable: he can continue offering his own, not-intersubjectively acceptable reasons if he wants – the likely consequence is that he won’t persuade his interlocutor.
Trying to offer reasons that are intersubjectively acceptable is a demanding mental effort: each proponent needs to construct a mental model of the interlocutor to be able to craft reasons that are intersubjectively acceptable. This ‘constructed interlocutor’ consists of an approximation of the acceptable premises the actual interlocutor holds. Through the ongoing process of assertions and questioning, proponents continuously check whether their constructed interlocutor is an accurate mental model of their actual interlocutor.
Through this process of continuously offering reasons and checking whether the other side finds these based on acceptable premises, the participants are slowly uncovering a set of intersubjectively acceptable premises that they can use as criteria for persuasion. Once such a common ground is found, it can be used to decide whether the proponent ‘wins’ this dialectical exchange: does the common ground provide sufficient justification for the motion to be acceptable, and thus for the interlocutor to be persuaded?
So, reasoning starts with proponents offering reasons acceptable to their counterpart(s) and ends with a common ground: a set of intersubjectively acceptable premises discussants can use as criteria for persuasion. What does this idea of a common ground mean for debating as a competitive game?
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