What Was the President’s Standpoint and When Did He Take It? A Normative Pragmatic Study of Standpoint Emergence in a Presidential Press Conference

Abstract

In contrast to views that treat positions and standpoints as defining the scope of argumentation, our normative pragmatic approach sees positions and standpoints as interactionally emergent products of argumentative work. Here, this is shown in a detailed case study of a question-answer session in which former US President Donald J. Trump was pressed by journalists to express and defend his standpoint on the Charlottesville protests by neo-Nazis and White nationalists. Trump repeatedly evaded efforts to pin down his standpoint; however, with each of his answers to the questions, his built-up position circumscribed the range of possible standpoints he could take. To the end, he avoided backing down from any prior statement expressing his standpoint, while also preserving a degree of maneuverability regarding what his standpoint amounted to.

Pragmatic perspectives on disagreement

“…Viewing argumentation as a type of pragmatic and conversational activity which is greatly shaped by contextual and communicative constraints is a research programme that has sparked considerable interest, for instance within the subfield of normative pragmatics (see e.g., Goodwin 2001;Goodwin and Innocenti 2019;Jacobs 2000;van Eemeren et al 1993;Innocenti 2022;Jacobs and Jackson 1982;Kauffeld 1998;Weger and Aakhus 2005) and more recently in conversational approaches to argument (Rocci et al 2020;Mundwiler and Kreuz 2018;Luginbühl and Kreuz 2020;Jacobs, Jackson, and Zhang 2022;Jacobs and Jackson 1992) or linguistic and pragmatic approaches to argumentation more broadly (Boogaart, Jansen, and van Leeuwen 2021;Oswald, Herman, and Jacquin 2018;Hinton 2021;Herman, Jacquin, and Oswald 2018;Herman and Oswald 2014;Pollaroli et al 2019;Bermejo Luque and Moldovan 2021;Lewiński et al 2023;). This growing body of research consistently investigates the pragmatics and argumentation interface, and, to a large extent, this special issue can be seen as participating in this linguistic turn in argumentation scholarship.…”

Online Health Communities in Controversy over ME/CFS and Long Covid

“…4. The deeper theoretical roots of the argumentative polylogue framework cannot be explored here, but the player/position/place ontology assumes an understanding of positions informed by two closely related argumentation theories known as pragma-dialectics (van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 2004) and normative pragmatics (Goodwin & Innocenti, 2019;Jacobs, 2000;Jacobs, Jackson & Zhang, 2022;van Eemeren et al, 2014, pp. 454-459).…”

Challenging Authority with Argumentation: The Pragmatics of Arguments from and to Authority

“…Donald Trump's presidency has been a continuous source of inspiration for research interested in the tricky, and often outright harmful, pragmatics of public argument (Beaver and Stanley 2019;Herman 2022;Herman and Oswald 2021;Jacobs et al 2022;Khoo 2017Khoo , 2021Neville-Shepard 2019;Ryan Kelly 2020;Saul 2017Saul , 2021Tirrell 2017). One of the presidency's fascinating twists came on 23 April 2020, during one of the daily press conferences Trump's White House organized in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.…”

“…12 As reported in The Guardian's piece "Coronavirus: medical experts denounce Trump's theory of 'disinfectant injection'" at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/23/trump-coronavirus-treatment-disinfectant (accessed on 8 Feburary 2022). For a detailed case study exposing Trump's skill of evading efforts to pin down his standpoint by inquisitive journalists during press conferences, see Jacobs et al 2022).…”