'Reasonable Hostility': Its Usefulness and Limitation as a Norm for Public Hearings

Autor: Karen Tracy
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2011
Předmět:
Zdroj: Informal Logic, Vol 31, Iss 3 (2011)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 0824-2577
2293-734X
DOI: 10.22329/il.v31i3.3399
Popis: “Reasonable hostility” is a norm of communicative conduct initially developed by studying public exchanges in education governance meetings in local U.S. communities. In this paper I consider the norm’s usefulness for and applicability to a U.S. state-level public hearing about a bill to legalize civil unions. Following an explication of reasonable hostility and grounded practical theory, the approach to inquiry that guides my work, I de-scribe Hawaii’s 2009, 18-hour pub-lic hearing and analyze selected segments of it. I show that this par-ticular public hearing raised de-mands for testifiers on the anti-civil union side of the argument that rea-sonable hostility does not do a good job of addressing. Development of a norm of communication conduct for this practice, as well as others, must engage with the culture and time-specific beliefs that a society holds, beliefs that will shape not only how to argue but what may be argued and what must be assumed about particular categories of persons.
Databáze: Directory of Open Access Journals