Structure of Political Argument
Any argument claims to prove something. In the case of arguments used in politics, this something is an assertion about an element of the public sphere, such as economic policy, the environment, decisions about war and peace, abortion etc. An argument cannot start from purely logical principles. An argument is based on premises and some methods for reasoning from premises to conclusions. The validity of an argument in politics can be evaluated in at least two ways: in purely semantic terms or in terms of adherence to certain rules of argument (which we can consider rules of fairness).
Semantically, one should note that some of the premises used in an argument and the relationships between the assertions in the argument, are associated to specific models of economic or political processes. Other premises are moral assumptions: whether a particular action is good or desirable. For example, arguments concerning war against and must consider questions about specific threats that the adversary poses, the likelihood of success, the cost of war and so on. In practice, purely semantical evaluations of argument validity are extremely difficult to formulate in a politically neutral way, since political positions usually involve commitment to some model of social and economic processes.
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