Fallacies as argumentative devices in political debates

Abstract

The current paper attempts to contribute to the study of argumentation in political debates. We propose an examination of the role of fallacies in political argumentation. In the first two sections we conduct a brief review of literature on the concepts of argumentation and fallacies to show that they both converge in emphasizing the role of discourse type when evaluating the efficacy of communicative strategies. This perspective is then applied in the analysis section to look at the role of fallacies in a political debate on nuclear energy held in Italy. We conduct a discourse analysis of the transcript based on which we identify a variety of relevant paths followed by speakers when constructing arguments. The findings demonstrate how several informal fallacies (argumentum ad baculum, argumentum ad hominem, argument from analogy, argumentum ad consequentiam) are strategically used by politicians in order to put forward coherent and strong positions. © Springer-Verlag 2013.