H. Jose Plug

The Dutch Supreme Court hears grievances against motivations of judicial decisions that are based on the ground that formulations in a motivation of a decision are obscure. It is, however, difficult to determine if such an appeal against the decision will be successful. From a pragma-dialectical perspective, the use of obscure or ambiguous language may be considered fallacious if it obstructs the resolution of a dispute. In this contribution I will discuss the way in which the Dutch Supreme Court decides on differences of opinion about the obscurity of the motivation of a legal decision. I will demonstrate how insights provided by argumentation theory may be used to clarify criteria that are used in Dutch legal practice to evaluate complaints about obscure and ambiguous language in motivations.

The advancement of the justification of criminal sentences. Research into the effectiveness of the PROMIS model In response to both laymen and professionals criticizing the obscurity of criminal sentences, the Dutch judiciary, in 2004, started a large-scale project called Promis. The aim of the project was to improve the justification of judicial decisions and thus advance communication between the criminal judge, the people concerned and, finally, the general public. To achieve this goal, the initiators of Promis developed a model. The positive evaluations of the project did, however, provide no clear indications whether the justifications of criminal sentences that were presented after the introduction of the model, provided more insight in the argumentation for the type of punishment and the length of the punishment that were imposed than the ones preceding Promis. This uncertainty induced us to try and ascertain, by means of a comparison of corpora, whether the argumentation in ...

The quality of argumentation in parliamentary debates may play an important role in the evaluation of legislative decisions. In this contribution I will discuss shortcomings in the application of the pragma-dialectical argumentation theory for the analysis and evaluation of the argumentation in a parliamentary debate on the penalization of stalking. The case illustrates that institutional preconditions of a specific type of debate should be taken into account in order to be able to give an adequate analysis of these debates.

Political cartoons may be understood as instances of visual or multimodal argumentative discourse. When a political cartoon is a subject of controversy, the criticism of the cartoon may therefore be aimed at the argumentation. For the purpose of a systematic analysis of visual and multimodal argumentation that gives rise to controversy, I make use of insights of the extended pragma-dialectical argumentation theory by van Eemeren (2010). The analysis provides a starting point to determine what aspect of strategic manoeuvring is criticised and to specify the derailment of strategic manoeuvring the cartoonist is accused of. Accordingly, the analysis facilitates a refined evaluation of the accusation in which general soundness conditions are amended or supplemented by relevant institutional conditions. In this study I will concentrate on controversies on political cartoons that make use of visual metaphors to scrutinize politicians’ behaviour or actions.

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In deze bijdrage onderzoekt de auteur met behulp van het begrip van strategisch manoeuvreren of en op welke manier politici proberen te voorkomen dat hun discussiebijdrage wordt bekritiseerd wanneer zij in een parlementair debat hun opponent persoonlijk aanvallen. De auteur gaat na in hoeverre institutionele kenmerken van het Nederlandse parlementaire debat van invloed zijn op de manier waarop politici persoonlijke aanvallen naar voren brengen.

... Witteveen (Dutch Labour Party): Mister Speaker! My admiration for the bill and for those by whom it was submitted has grown in the course of the evening. In my opinion the questions were very adequately answered and I did not detect any fallacy at all. ...

The quality of argumentation in parliamentary debates may play an important role in the evaluation of legislative decisions. In this contribution I will discuss shortcomings in the application of the pragma-dialectical argumentation theory for the analysis and evaluation of the argumentation in a parliamentary debate op the penalization of stalking. The case illustrates that institutional preconditions of a specific type of debate should be taken into account in order to be able to give an adequate analysis of these debates.