Arguing by analogy: The emotion in the analysis of a socio-scientific issue

Abstract

The objectives of this article are to analyze the use of analogy as an argumentative form to justify the approval or rejection of agro-mining projects' implementation in territories from a Colombian indigenous community; at the same time, to study the emotional substrate of this argumentative scheme in relation to Christian Plantin's theory of denoted emotion. From a qualitative and interactional perspective, 18 participants (11 women and 7 men aged 17.3 years up to 23.8 years) discussed an oil extraction project. The corpus used in this report was composed of 8 registers with 1,163 word shifts with a combined duration of 121 minutes and 15 seconds from which two specific sequences were chosen. The analyzes give account of how analogy is used unanimously by the students to justify the rejection of mining on indigenous territories. This resource allowed an analysis of the plausible consequences of mining both financial, environmental and cultural. The scheme proposed by Plantin is pertinent to study the use of emotions as adjuvants to the rejection of the dilemma presented as the object of discussion.