Comments on ‘Strategic Maneuvering in Direct to Consumer Drug Advertising: A Study in Argumentation Theory and New Institutional Theory’

Abstract

In his paper, Thomas Goodnight contributes to the discussion on strategic manoeuvring within institutional argumentative exchanges starting from the idea that the obligations imposed and possibilities provided by the particular institution in which the exchange takes place define the way arguers resolve their differences of opinion. Argumentative exchanges between doctor and patient involving direct-toconsumer drug advertising are given as an example. In this commentary I will focus on Goodnight’s employment of the concept of reasonableness and show how it differs from the concept of reasonableness adopted in the pragma-dialectical theory, arguing that the latter can be instrumental in accounting more systematically for argumentation both within and among institutions. Goodnight’s basic starting point in his endeavour is that rationality comes from the institution. It is ‘reducible neither to interactions which are regulated by conversational norms nor to the obligations of achieving effects on opinion through persuasive exchange.’ ‘What counts as reasonable thinking and valid judgment is’, according to Goodnight, ‘grounded in the logic of the institution.’ By taking account of the type of reasonableness advocated by Goodnight, one may say that his endeavour is not so much to show how in a pragma-dialectical sense the arguers’ strategic manoeuvring within an institutional context is affected by the contingencies of the institutional situations but to show how this strategic manoeuvring is actually defined by the institutional context because it is this institutional context that determines what is reasonable and what is not. In fact, the idea for this conception of strategic manoeuvring is understandable to some extent because it is clearly based on the belief that in institutional settings arguers also have to balance their personal ambitions with the norms imposed by the institution within which the argumentation takes place. So what is there to be said against this conception?