Toward an Alliance Between the Issue-Processing

Approach and Pragma-Dialectical Analysis

DAVID BRAYBROOKE

Departments of Government and Philosophy

The University of Texas at Austin
U.S.A.

ABSTRACT: On the approach to discussions of policy choices that treats such discussions
as instances of issue-processing, the joint use of the logic of questions and the logic of rules
gives precise formulation to two sorts of issues. To one sort of issue belong issue-circum-
scribing questions; to another sort, issues-simplicter, which consist of disjunctions of policy
proposals – so many proposed social rules – that are answers, in the case of each disjunc-
tion, to a given issue-circumscribing question. Work in pragma-dialectics can take over the
issue-processing approach; and by doing so add to the pragma-dialectical repertory further
dimensions in the analysis of issues and in protocol-narratives of discussion. The analysis
and narratives would now include accounts of how issue-circumscribing questions generate
initial standpoints and how discussions sometimes end with compromises between stand-
points. Further research questions follow about transformations of issues and the compar-
ison of successive rounds of discussion. A narrative of one period of discussion during ‘the
War on Drugs’ in the United States illustrates these points.

KEY WORDS: compromise, issue-circumscribitng questions, issue-processing, issues sim-

pliciter, pragma-dialectics, protocol-narratives, rounds of discussion, the logic of questions,
the logic of rules, transformations of issues

This paper, I hope, will be of interest to almost anyone interested in argu-

mentation theory. However, it has the specific ulterior motive of handing
over to my friends at the University of Amsterdam, leading figures in the
the pragma-dialectical school of argumentation theory, the work carried
on intermittently since about 1962, that I have done on what I call ‘issue-
processing’.1 So my focus will be the benefits to pragma-dialectics of an
alliance with the issue-processing approach. I shall try to persuade the
pragma-dialecticians, by bringing forward the chief features of the issue-
processing approach and showing how these features fit in with the pragma-
dialectical analysis of deliberation, that the cause of pragma-dialectics will
benefit from my handover. I believe that pragma-dialectics is prominent
enough in the field of argumentation theory to make the project of adding
to its refinements, amplifying its applications, and connecting it with neigh-
boring inquiries one that can hope to obtain attention throughout the
field.
The pragma-dialecticians of the Amsterdam School have a protocol for
accounts of discussion that they seek to complete in detail for discussions

Argumentation 17: 513–535, 2003.

 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
514 DAVID BRAYBROOKE

of all kinds and even in the presence of what may seem at first sight
unregulated clamor. The protocol begins with
a try-out stage,
in which someone expresses commitment to what the pragma-dialecti-
cians call (in better Dutch or German than in English) a ‘standpoint,’2
i.e., a certain proposition, and then moves, if this standpoint is chal-
lenged by another one incompatible with it, to
a debate-opening stage,
in which it is agreed to argue for and against the different standpoints
in a reasonable way; this may be expected to be followed by
an argumentation stage,
in which arguments come forward designed to defend the proposition
or to discredit it, and along the way to defend or discredit propositions
on which, taken as such arguments, stands are taken as grounds for
defending or discrediting the original standpoint or proposition.
If the discussion succeeds in the objective formally assigned it, it ends,
after the arguments pro and con have been duly ventilated and appreci-
ated, with consensus on the proposition or failing this, with the original
standpoint negated or at least retracted.3
The Amsterdam protocol has the merit, not only of facilitating for appli-
cation in close analysis the assembly and concentration of many basic
requirements of well-formed discussion, but also of accommodating many
different sorts of discussions. It will accommodate discussions between
friends and within families, on trains or at race-tracks, in scientific com-
munities, in business relationships, in courts, in the bureaucracy, and in
legislatures.
However, I think to make the most of the protocol in certain contexts,
including political ones, it is useful to bring into it from the logic of
questions and the logic of rules notions about the character of issues.
These notions, which I shall define in a moment, are key features of
the issue-processing approach. But issues change in character in the course
of deliberation; the same apparatus for defining issues helps to identify
transformations of issues, which sometimes make a crucial difference to
the course of deliberation. A further feature of the issue-processing
approach has been the division of deliberation into rounds; and I shall
specify several advantages for doing this under the alliance of the issue-
processing approach with pragma-dialectics. All along, descriptions of
discourse that identify these features will go hand in hand, as the issue-
processing approach intends no less than pragma-dialectics,4 with evalua-
tions of the discourse as making use of these features to good purpose or
otherwise.
After saying something about these things, and illustrating what I say,
I shall conclude by taking up the question of how to make reasonably sure
of the accuracy of the protocols filled in one way rather than another –
 ALLIANCE BETWEEN ISSUE-PROCESSING AND PRAGMA-DIALECTICS 515

that is to say, the accuracy of what I shall call ‘protocol-narratives.’ This

is often, I suppose, relatively easy to deal with at the microscopic level
where the protocols, refined or not as they may be by ideas drawn from
the issue-processing approach, can be matched against complete transcripts
of the discussions narrated. However, when we rise to the macroscopic level
of national policy discussions (or, in the United States, state policy dis-
cussions), which is mainly where I have pursued the issue-processing
approach, there is an important problem about selecting the agents, issues,
and arguments to recount. Without this selection, the protocol-narratives
will become too complicated to manage or to take in; but the selection
will always be open to challenge on the point of omissions (as well as dis-
tortions). This problem is aggravated, of course, if we aim (as I have done)
to track discussions that last for a number of years; and it affects in several
ways attempts to use pragma-dialectical analysis in combination with the
issue-processing approach on the macroscopic level.

AMPLIFICATION REGARDING ISSUES:

Where do the propositions adopted in the standpoints come from? I would

say that it is often useful, enlarging our picture of what is going on, to go
back one stage earlier than the try-out stage in which the initial standpoint
is expressed. There, one stage earlier, an issue is broached. The initial stand-
point can then be seen as a position on the issue. Then, moving to the con-
frontation stage, the initial standpoint can be taken to be one answer among
several to the original issue, as can each of the challenges, if these take
the form of presenting alternative standpoints.
There are, on the issue-processing approach, two sorts of issues to deal
with. To begin with, issues that are issue-circumscribing questions, corre-
sponding to what in Belnap’s logic of questions are called which-questions,
more easily in my view thought of as what-questions (‘What shall we do
about trafficking in drugs?’). If we bring up another issue-circumscribing
question (say, ‘What shall we do about recreation for our young people?),
we would be said to be ‘changing the issue’ in this sense of ‘issue.’ Besides
issues in this sense, however, there are, issues that are what I call issues-
simpliciter, corresponding to Belnap’s whether-questions, where the issue
has the form of a disjunction. In policy-making, it would be a disjunction
of alternatives offered for adoption (P1 or P2 . . . or Pn) – for example,
whether we should cut off trafficking at the source of the drugs or stop it
at the point of sale to the final consumers or just leave it alone.5
Are there other sorts of issues? No doubt there are,6 but these two sorts
will go a long way in tracking discussions of public policy and other
matters. They also reflect, as other sorts of issues may not, fundamental
categories in the logic of questions. Moreover, they may both be subjects
of controversy. There is a sense in which neither an issue-circumscribing
516 DAVID BRAYBROOKE

question nor an issue-simpliciter becomes an issue unless people make an

issue of it. Verbalizing them on a piece of paper or on a blackboard, even
broadcasting them on radio or TV, does not make an issue of them. People
have to accept them as issues, which they have to resolve, and begin dis-
cussing them, with a view to reaching a resolution. They need not, in the
case of issue-circumscribing questions, be controverted; it suffices in their
case simply to take them as points of departure for discussion. However,
acceptance itself may be controversial; people may strongly resist the
suggestion that they should discuss the issue-circumscribing question,
‘What shall be done to expel the Arabs from Palestine?’ Moreover, issue-
circumscribing questions may be controverted by proposing variations on
them:7 People may not accept the issue-circumscribing question. ‘What is
to be done to check the growth of traffic congestion?’, when they really
want to discuss, ‘What is to be done to reduce traffic congestion as it now
exists?’ Similarly, some people alarmed about increases in population may
wish to take up the issue-circumscribing question, ‘What is to be done to
reduce the rate of increase in population?’ Other people may favor the
question, ‘What is to be done to prevent any increase?’ Still others may
favor the question, ‘What is to be done to reduce future populations?’8
The controversy over which of these questions to take up, in the ante-try-
out stage, invites pragma-dialectical identification of the arguments put
forward to take up one or another, and pragma-dialectical tracking during
the controversy of the fate of these arguments and the questions to be
chosen from.9
The form of what an issue is made of is, on the issue-processing
approach, either the form of an issue-circumscribing question or the form
of an issue-simpliciter. I shall assume in the following discussion, that the
issues which come up in these forms, are in every case, whether this is
perfectly visible or not, matters than an issue has been made of.10
The issue broached (that it is decided to broach) at the ante-tryout stage
will be an issue-circumscribing question. At the try-out stage (and, then,
carried over to the debate-opening stage), the initial standpoint forms an
issue-simpliciter with the challenging standpoint. Or if the challenge does
not take the form of expressing an alternative standpoint, but just raises
an objection (‘You can’t do that, because . . .’), the initial standpoint can
be treated as figuring for the moment in an issue-simpliciter in which the
second and only alternative is ‘Let’s do [accept] something else.’ This alter-
native may not be explicit; but allowing for it anticipates real developments
that can be expected to occur if the initial standpoint succumbs to the chal-
lenges brought up against it.
In my illustrative whether-questions the forms of words used to express
the elementary disjuncts (cut off trafficking at the source; stop it at the
point of sale; leave it alone) can be given various interpretations. Are they
imperatives? Propositions? Neither, just topics awaiting further stipulation?
For applications to deliberations about public policy I think it is useful to
 ALLIANCE BETWEEN ISSUE-PROCESSING AND PRAGMA-DIALECTICS 517

assume that the issues are about what social rules to adopt. What social
rule shall we adopt to deal with such and such a matter, for example, the
use of drugs? This is a simple and appropriate way, during preliminary
attention to issue-circumscribing questions, of fixing the notion of what
an issue is in public policy. An issue, once we get to the whether-question,
the issue-simpliciter, is a disjunction of social rules each of which is a
relevant answer to a given issue-circumscribing question (which is an issue,
too, and an associated issue, but an issue of a different kind).
Formulas for any social rule can be drawn from a logic of rules, for
example, the one laid out in Logic on the Track of Social Change, which
require us to be specific (more specific than I shall be in this paper) about
the VOLK, the WENN, and the NONO components of the rule.
The form of a social rule (F.x) with these components will be
(F.x) VOLK: The people subject to the rule
(F.x) WENN: The conditions under which the rule applies to those
people
(F.x) NONO: The action or sequence of actions, defined in either case
by its upshot, that the rule forbids.
Just who are the people – the VOLK – to whom the rule is to apply? In
deliberations about public policy, there are two main alternatives: govern-
ment officials, including sometimes people recruited temporarily to staff
government programs; or the whole population of the jurisdiction in
question.
In this logic, all rules are reduced finally to prohibitions. To fill in the
NONO component, we need to specify just what actions or sequences of
actions are prohibited by the rule.
However, generally speaking, the actions and sequences of actions are
prohibited only under certain conditions; it is the business of the WENN
component to say what conditions.
For example, consider the rule, which we shall encounter again later in
this paper, that the treatment of hard-core drug addicts is to be vested in a
Federal agency devoted to treatment and education, leaving to other
agencies the enforcement of laws against the use of drugs and trading in
them. Expressed more formally, this rule has to do with a VOLK consisting
of government officials, a WENN consisting of the condition that Federal
funds are to be expended on promoting the treatment of hard-core drug
addicts, a NONO that prohibits doing this under any agency that combines
treatment and its management with the task of enforcing laws against the
use of drugs and trading in them.
As each component is filled in, questions arise about how this is to be
done; and answering the questions leads to a helpful precision about what
the proposed rule amounts to. The precision exposes features of the rule
that bear upon its relation to other rules, including other proposed rules in
the present issue-simpliciter and established rules of general policy that any
518 DAVID BRAYBROOKE

answer to the issue-simpliciter may be expected to satisfy. Is it compatible

with them? Or incompatible (perhaps creating a quandary under which
every allowable action is prohibited)? Is it something that other rules or a
combination of other rules entail or come close to entailing?
Suppose someone says, hearing the question about drug-trafficking men-
tioned earlier, ‘The thing to do is just leave trafficking alone.’ He might
be expressing the initial standpoint to be noted in a protocol; or, equally
well, a standpoint adopted as a challenge to another one, one, say, calling
for severer criminal penalties, which was in fact the initial standpoint. ‘Just
leave trafficking alone’ is an answer to the whether-question. It is also
an answer to the what-question, to make again a point important enough
to repeat, the issue-circumscribing question, as are the other answers
enumerated in the issue-simpliciter and answers that might be added to
the disjunction of propositions or proposals of which it consists.
People in the Amsterdam School have been troubled about the question
of relevance.11 Some help can come from the logic of questions: Relevance
in the first instance has to do with being an answer to an issue-circum-
scribing question; in the second instance it has to do with being a consid-
eration that supports or discredits such an answer, taking it as a disjunct
in an issue-simpliciter.
Further help can come from the logic of rules: If it is a rule or a proposed
rule that is at issue, information is relevant if it is eligible (under whatever
conditions one wants to impose) to fill in the VOLK or the WENN or the
NONO components of the rule.
This (double) conception of relevance is imperfect, leaving as it may a
lot of work to be done by intuition that would be more happily expressed
(at least a certain sort of philosopher – my sort – would think) in an
analysis. It does, however, give us something to work upon when we try
to establish whether a certain discussion has conformed, with interventions
continually making sure of relevance, to critical-rational standards or gone
wrong (perhaps fatally) because of lapses in this respect.

TRANSFORMATIONS OF ISSUES

Bringing in issues (of the two sorts that I have distinguished, issue-
circumscribing and issues-simpliciter) also puts us in a position to appre-
ciate that a discussion, so far unproductive, might be launched on a more
promising path, with better prospects of acceptable results, by transforming
the issues, of one sort or the other, under discussion.
Issues-simpliciter can be transformed by subtracting or adding disjuncts
(in public policy deliberations, proposed rules).
The possibility of subtracting is already given with the use of the
Amsterdam protocol; propositions are subtracted when they are dis-
credited.
 ALLIANCE BETWEEN ISSUE-PROCESSING AND PRAGMA-DIALECTICS 519

However, the protocol invites no special attention to additions to issues-

simpliciter, and here it runs some of the same risks commonly run (and
commonly unrecognized) by decision theory and social choice theory,
which give additions no attention at all, assuming as they time and again
do that the set of alternatives presented to choice is completely given to
begin with.12 An apt addition of a new proposal may revolutionize the
discussion, by showing a way out of difficulties hitherto deemed intractable.
A case in point is the ingenious proposal put forward in the British
Parliament in the 1790’s to break through the dilemma of letting the odious
trade continue, on the one hand, or on the other hand, of making the
property right of plantation owners in the West Indies valueless (not only
an impairment to property rights, but a breach of trust, since government
policy had encouraged people to go out and set up the plantations). The
proposal was to raise taxes on importing slaves into the West Indies year
by year to the point at which they became prohibitive, meanwhile encour-
aging by subsidies family life in the slave population, thus encouraging
the slaves to reproduce themselves. This promised to bring to an end the
dependence of the plantations on fresh supplies of slaves from overseas;
indeed, it promised to bring into being a self-sufficient laboring popula-
tion ready for liberation. Hence the abolition of the trade in slaves could
proceed without rendering the plantations unworkable and unprofitable, and
thus without impairing the property rights of the plantation owners in the
way in which cutting off a supply of labor would have impaired them. The
prospect of impairing those rights in this way was one of the principal
obstacles felt in Parliament to abolition.13 (Impairing the rights by in the
end abolishing slavery was another matter.)
This is arguably not a pure example of transformation by addition, since
the issue-circumscribing question at issue was not in the minds of some
of the leading participants (e.g., William Wilberforce) what to do about
abolishing the trade in slaves sometime or other (and slavery itself
sometime or other). It was what to do about abolishing the slave trade and
slavery immediately. So Wilberforce had good reason to protest that the
issue – the issue-circumscribing question – had been changed; and to resist
the change. However, accepting this point allows us to see the ingenious
proposal as bringing about a transformation not just in the issue-simpliciter
but also in the issue-circumscribing question. It illustrates how this sort of
transformation, too, might improve the prospects of resolution, and even
more radically. In this case it showed a way to escape the dilemma –
between abolishing the slave-trade and respecting the claims of the plan-
tation-owners to a continuing supply of labor – that at least had attrac-
tions not present in the continuing deadlock.
Clearly the operation of issue-transformation here is closely allied to the
search for compromise, often an illustration of it. Compromise may also
figure in transformations by addition of issues-simpliciter: An apt addition
might, for example, combine the attractive features of two proposals already
520 DAVID BRAYBROOKE

present and set aside their drawbacks.14 It has been suggested to me that
pragma-dialecticians are interested in having discussions, once they have
run their due course, end in consensus rather than compromise. This,
however, is a false antithesis, since there may be consensus on a compro-
mise. Moreover, should not pragma-dialectics be content sometimes, as the
issue-processing approach is content, with having the discussions brought
to an end, short of consensus, with the vote of a substantial convinced
majority? It will have to be so content if it is to have full application to
political discussions. In that application, there must be allowance, which
the issue-processing approach can assist pragma-dialectics to make, for the
introduction of unexpected new standpoints and the amalgamation of
existing ones. But this allowance is called for more generally: Discussions,
under scientific auspices or otherwise, of points of knowledge often end
best with standpoints that reflect in part several of the standpoints taken
in the course of the discussions. It is not, for example, entirely true or
entirely false that broken homes foster juvenile delinquency.

VARYING COMPLEXITY IN DISCUSSIONS

Working with the Amsterdam protocol, the pragma-dialecticians have been

tracking many instances of discussion from their beginnings, through their
debate-opening and argumentation stages to their endings in resolution or
rejection (or at least the retraction) of the initial standpoints expressed.
What I have been suggesting is that there be introduced, into the protocol-
narratives generated in various instances by this tracking, explicit atten-
tion to an original issue-circumscribing question and to all the various ways
in which the issues brought up may be transformed before the discussion
reaches an end.
(1) In the very simplest cases of discussion, only one standpoint may
be in view throughout; and to give a tolerably adequate account of the dis-
cussion one need only note, looking from stage to stage for the sorts of
moves that the pragma-dialecticians have been concerned with, the objec-
tions and counterobjections that follow until the standpoint is accepted or
rejected (or retracted). The issue, acceptance or not, remains the same until
it is thus disposed of. (Explaining how the standpoint came up as an answer
to an issue-circumscribing question would, of course, enlarge the story in
an historically valuable way, though this is something that may lie beyond
the investigative preoccupations of pragma-dialectics or even of pragma-
dialectics allied with the issue-processing approach.)
(2) If the challenge to an initial standpoint expresses an alternative
standpoint then in effect an issue-simpliciter has come into being. Some
of the instances in which the account recognizes the occurrence of such
an issue-simpliciter at the beginning may (after making explicit the issue-
circumscribing question that logically precedes) run to the end almost as
 ALLIANCE BETWEEN ISSUE-PROCESSING AND PRAGMA-DIALECTICS 521

straightforwardly as in the one-standpoint cases. The same two standpoints

continue to be the only ones discussed and the discussion consists of propo-
sitions advanced as arguments for adopting one or the other. Again, the
issue remains the same throughout; and there is no need to consider trans-
formations. I shall class with discussions of this kind discussions in which
the issue-simpliciter includes, to begin with, more than two standpoints and
these remain in view without addition or subtraction until the resolution
stage.
(3) A third (very miscellaneous) kind of discussion embraces compli-
cations of sorts not found in the first two; and it is here that issue-trans-
formations find their place. At the very least, the issue-simpliciter changes
in the course of discussion by subtraction or addition. In either case that
is, logically, a transformation. The issue-simpliciter may change more than
once in either way. In addition, the issue-circumscribing question may
change. That, too, is a transformation; and it is likely to be an important
one. Metered parking came up in British discussions of traffic problems in
London and other cities as an answer to the issue-circumscribing question,
‘What would be a fair basis for sharing out parking spaces in the central
city?’ But it became in the course of discussion an answer to another issue-
circumscribing question, namely, ‘What can be done to deter motorists from
commuting into the central city?’ (They would not be able to park all day
while they were at work if the metered time had a limit of an hour or two.)
This example shows that the change in issue-circumscribing questions may
be quite radical logically and still – given the history and the relation to a
given topic (in this case, automobile traffic) – fall within the bounds of one
discussion, continuously occupied with the problems created by heavy
traffic in the city center.
I say, ‘one discussion.’ But the discussion may stop at times, before a
subordinate issue (e. g., whether one of the proposals that has come up in
the issue-simpliciter is worth pursuing) has been decided, and start up on
another subordinate issue (dealing with another proposal). In effect, the
first issue will have been tabled for the time being (in the American sense
of ‘tabling,’ that is to say, ‘suspended from discussion’). Moreover, to say
that there is one discussion may be an idealization. The ante-try-out stage
may not have been properly finished; there may be continuing great con-
fusion about what issue-circumscribing question or exactly what issue-sim-
pliciter is being discussed, so that for a time at least some discussants are
deliberating something very different from what other discussants are delib-
erating and neither of these subgroups is aware of the difference.

AMPLIFICATION REGARDING ROUNDS

A useful amplification of the Amsterdam protocol, I think, would be pro-

vision for recognizing rounds of discussion. A discussion of any of the
522 DAVID BRAYBROOKE

three kinds just described may figure as one round in a sequence of rounds.
In an extremely simple case, the next round begins with exactly the same
issue-circumscribing question and deals with exactly the same issue-sim-
pliciter as the initial round. One way in which this might come about is
through dissatisfaction in practice with the proposal adopted at the end of
the initial round. A round is not just a new discussion; it is a renewed dis-
cussion under the same issue-circumscribing question. People call for a
renewed discussion, often thinking that they could do better weighing the
same alternatives. However, a new round may begin because someone has
thought of a new proposal answering to the same issue-circumscribing
question and it seems promising enough to return to the question and to
an issue-simpliciter that may be the same as before except for the addition
of this proposal.
A change in the issue-circumscribing question may raise more difficul-
ties about continuity; but even here, in some cases it will be reasonable to
recognize a new round in the same continuing discussion. The issue-cir-
cumscribing question may be, for example, only a variation on the earlier
one (‘What shall we do to bring an end to the slave trade?’ becoming ‘What
shall we do to bring the slave trade to an end in a generation’s time?’). I
am not saying that the variation does not make an important difference.
Sometimes the rounds will end up again and again with the same policy
or a minor variation of it (e.g., ‘Extend the area subject to parking meters’
as the remedy for checking the growth of traffic congestion in central
London).
This may not always be a bad thing: There may be an underlying impasse
that for the time being could be resolved only at great cost in social conflict.
On the other hand, it may be a matter of missed opportunities – oppor-
tunities for missed arguments for proposals already present, and missed
opportunities for progress through issue-transformation. In the discussion
of how to check the growth of traffic congestion in 20th Century London,
full roadpricing, after it was proposed, serves as an example of the first,
insofar as no effective public refutation came forward against its tenden-
tious characterization by the British motorists’ clubs as an additional road
tax. At the end of the 18th Century, in various rounds of discussion in
Parliament of the issue of abolishing the slave trade there was a missed
opportunity for issue-transformation (a double transformation both of the
issue-circumscribing question and the issues-simpliciter brought up in those
rounds) having to do with the ingenious proposal for increasing taxes, sub-
sidies, and the encouragement of family life among the slaves. (The oppor-
tunity was not one, as we have seen, that Wilberforce would have wanted
to seize; but others – a majority of MP’s – saw it as a way out of a
dilemma.)
The opportunities in question may be missed again and again, as it were
systematically. The protocol-narrative, and with it the program of proposals,
 ALLIANCE BETWEEN ISSUE-PROCESSING AND PRAGMA-DIALECTICS 523

arguments, counterarguments, and conclusion may be the same in each

round. This is what I have called ‘P-Stability.’ The program may be the
same because the participants (persons or agencies) are the same, even
taking part in the same order. This is what I have called ‘S-Stability’ (‘S’
for ‘stations,’ where stations are sources of proposals and arguments). More
fruitful results may depend on shaking up both the program and the network
of stations or participants.15 But to do this we first need to observe
sequences of rounds to identify the stable features, some of them obstruc-
tive, of the discussions in them.
These are questions about institutional context that may lie outside the
present program of pragma-dialectics. However, since they make an impor-
tant difference to how discussions of policy are carried on, they can hardly
be ignored; and an alliance between pragma-dialectics and the issue-pro-
cessing approach would not ignore them. The protocols supplied by
pragma-dialectical analysis for successive rounds invite the questions; and
the issue-processing approach answers them.
There can be progress from round to round without any change in the
issue-circumscribing question. Even if the conclusion differs only mini-
mally from the conclusion of the earlier round this might constitute
progress. Thus the decision to extend the area of metered parking in central
London differed only minimally at the end of a second round from the the
decision in the first round to do the same thing; it simply took a different
– larger – area under metering as the point of departure. But it did some-
thing to further reduce congestion (or at least check the further growth of
congestion).
Any change from round to round in the governing issue-circumscribing
question may signal progress in the discussion, even if the change is a minor
one. Thus the change from ‘What shall we do to bring an end to the slave
trade?’ to ‘What shall we do to bring the slave trade to an end in a gener-
ation’s time?’ is not so significant a change as to prevent thinking of the
change as beginning a new round on the same subject. But it made a good
deal of difference to progress with the subject, in particular to overcoming
the objections about impairing the property-rights of the plantation-owners
in respect to cutting off their supply of labor. We would be missing some
of the most important things to understand about the deliberations that are
under analysis if we did not take into account such shifts, sometimes
exciting ones, in the terms of discussion.
Thus the identification of rounds, by making it possible to analyze the
relations between them, helps bring to light both progress in deliberation
as well as stagnation. (Deterioration is possible, too, and can be seen to
happen from round to round.)
524 DAVID BRAYBROOKE

DIFFICULTIES SORTING OUT THE PHENOMENA OF DISCUSSION

Identifying rounds can serve to illustrate, not only the benefits to be had
from repeating the application of the protocol in a certain way, but also
the difficulties in extending the temporal and analytical reach of the
protocol, amplified or unamplified. To be sure, it is not always difficult to
identify rounds. The Department of Government at The University of Texas
at Austin, like other departments at the University, must decide every three
years whether it is to be governed by an Executive Committee or by a
Budget Council composed of all tenured professors. Similarly, on a grander
scale, the legislature of the State of Texas must decide on a budget every
two years; and often during successive two-year intervals between these
decisions the proposal for a state income tax comes up (only to be defeated).
We could look upon the intervals between decisions on a budget as defining
so many rounds of discussion about the issue of whether to have a state
income tax (one answer among many to the issue-circumscribing question
what to do about increasing state revenue).
Even with conveniently given rounds like these, however, there may be
difficulties – something to sacrifice that a well-focussed inquiry would
not wish to: The rounds that best exhibit progress (if there is progress)
toward resolving an important issue may not coincide with the institu-
tionally given ones. It might give a better picture of what is going on
to group a number of institutionally given rounds together, first, as one
constructed round working to an agenda limited by one issue-circum-
scribing question to an issue-simpliciter that invited deadlock, second, as
another constructed round with an agenda shifted to an enlarged and more
promising issue-simpliciter, perhaps under a transformed issue-circum-
scribing question. The discussion may conclude in a special session of the
state legislature; or all but conclude sometime before the legislative
formalities of deciding on a budget.
A specific example of difficulties about constructing rounds, when those
given by ‘Nature,’ that is to say, by received social institutions, are not con-
venient, can be found in the decades-long debate in the United States about
‘the War on Drugs.’ One crucial turning-point in the debate occurred when
a wave of renewed public hysteria about teen-agers using marijuana
overtook a promising beginning under the Nixon administration on a
program of treatment for hard-drug use rather than imprisonment, and
(needlessly) removed crucial support for the program. Should this turning-
point be identified as the end of a round? Perhaps the next round could
then be said to end when support for the treatment alternative comes back
(if it ever does). But where would be the beginning of the round that is
supposed to end with the turning-point? In relation to the debate over treat-
ment of hard-drug users the hysterical rise of a parents’ movement against
marijuana looks like an incursion from outside or (better) as a return to an
 ALLIANCE BETWEEN ISSUE-PROCESSING AND PRAGMA-DIALECTICS 525

issue that had been set aside, in either case more of a round beginning
than an end. The debate over treatment had had an end, which determined
policy for a number of years, in the establishment of an agency that con-
centrated on reducing the use of drugs by offering hard-core heroin users
multiplied opportunities for treatment.
However, the data (as assembled by Michael Massing)16 seem to invite
both a one-round picture beginning with Nixon’s call for renewed efforts
to reduce the use of drugs and ending with the establishment of this agency;
and a two-round picture beginning with the decision to give much less
attention to marijuana than to hard-drugs and beginning again with the
demand that the amounts of attention be reversed, with marijuana becoming
the focus. What grounds can be given for the selection of beginning-points
and ending-points in either of these pictures? The grounds should be
comparable to those used for identification of beginnings and endings in
rounds on other issues and available to a reliable technique (and hence to
replication).
These are just the beginnings, moreover, of difficulties that may have
to be attended to in completing the protocol in ambitious cases. If the
handover of my work on the issue-processing approach is (to use without
irony the words of one reader) ‘a lovely gift’ to pragma-dialectics, it is
the gift of a kit that is not yet fully assembled (or even complete). At the
heart of the difficulties in ambitious cases is the plethora of data about
discussion, going on at many levels, pursued by multiple participants, with
crossover relations between different tracks and even different issues.
Recording them in detail is too labor-intensive to be practical. Consider
an example of detailed reporting by Agnes van Rees of deliberation within
the management of one hospital about the prospect of collaboration with
another, reporting practical only because of the judiciously limited target.17
The reporting is so detailed as to put down ‘uh’s,’ ‘er’s,’ ‘ah’s’ and other
utterances with vanishingly little semantic import. The overall narrative
of an ambitious case could not go into this sort of detail from beginning
to end, though it could offer places for detailed ‘close-ups.’
The same problem, of selection, extraction, simplification, is familiar,
of course, in the work of historians. But it is aggravated in our case because
of the possibly great differences in our assessment of the logical (the
pragma-dialectical) features of the target discussion that can follow from
slight and subtle differences in characterizing successive interventions.
Consider again how bringing up the proposal providing among other things
for family life among the West Indian slaves by implication significantly
changed the issue-circumscribing question. Moreover, it is just this sort of
assessment that we distinctively want to put through.
526 DAVID BRAYBROOKE

ADEQUATE VS INADEQUATE PROTOCOL-NARRATIVES

Let us assume that Amsterdam protocols will be relativized to single

rounds. Then a protocol-narrative will be a protocol filled-in on the basis
of observing one round of discussion of a given issue – gun control; the
War on Drugs. If we are in the business of giving accounts of more than
one round of discussion on what is at least plausibly regarded as the same
issue, we shall be dealing with a sequence of protocol-narratives.
We may distinguish between adequate protocol-narratives and inade-
quate ones. An adequate one will be filled in with sufficient appropriate
detail to enable us to say what important proposals came up during the
round (at its beginning or later) and of any specified proposal or argument
whether it was given effective attention during the round.
The concept of an ‘important proposal’ needs clarification; and so does
the concept of ‘effective attention.’ By ‘important proposal’ we might mean
a proposal that had serious backing in the original issue-simpliciter or being
added later has a genuine prospect of backing by some participants in the
deliberation. Suppose by ‘significant move’ we mean moving to reject or
to approve a given proposal, or presenting a reason for or against rejec-
tion or adoption. Such a move would count for something in moving the
discussion toward a certain resolution or away from it. ‘Effective attention’
might then mean that there were in regard to given proposals such moves
forthcoming from participants in the discussion. All of these definitions are
uncomfortably, but perhaps inevitably, too vague as they stand, but they
are all capable of judicious management in application. Pragma-dialectics
anticipates all these concerns in theory and in practice takes them in hand;
hence its experience there can be drawn upon in applying the definitions.
Adequate protocol-narratives will also enable us to say whether there
was consensus on what was the issue-circumscribing question under dis-
cussion; and whether there was a change, recognized or unrecognized, to
a different issue-circumscribing question during the round.
There may be more than one adequate protocol-narrative for a given
round; but as they are filled in to give sufficient detail to answer questions
about the matters just mentioned we may suppose they will converge on
the same content.
We should be aiming to say such things as that a given round of dis-
cussion succeeded or failed to come to a conclusion that took full account
of various specified proposals or arguments or issues in spite of or because
of various omissions, redundancies, discontinuities (e.g., effective atten-
tion for a while, then disregard).
Then we could ask what in the institutional setting facilitated or
obstructed the discussion as represented in the protocol-narrative in hand.
This would takes us back to P-Stability and S-Stability among other
things.18
 ALLIANCE BETWEEN ISSUE-PROCESSING AND PRAGMA-DIALECTICS 527

AN ILLUSTRATIVE PROTOCOL-NARRATIVE

To illustrate some of these points, let me outline a protocol-narrative,

based on Michael Massing’s account of the establishment in June 1971 in
the Nixon administration of the Special Action Office for Drug Abuse
Prevention under the direction of Jerome H. Jaffe. I shall treat the
narrative as having to do with one round of discussion, but it is a round
complicated internally among other things by shifts from one issue-
circumscribing question to another. It might well be treated as a series of
rounds, successive and closely related.
In January 1969 Nixon announced that he was taking vigorous measures
to reduce crime in the District of Columbia. But his attention and that of
his staff gravitated quickly to embracing the high crime rate in the country
as a whole.
Therefore, it does not misrepresent the starting point of the protocol-
narrative as the issue-circumscribing question, raised by Nixon,
(Q1) What is to be done to reduce the crime rate in the District of
Columbia and the rest of the country (especially in the large
cities)?
The immediate answer by the staff, accepted by Nixon, was
(P1.2) Reduce the use of drugs in those places,
which may be regarded (to make a move prompted by analysis rather than
observation) as one policy proposal in a disjunction (an issue-
simpliciter) of two, the other being
(P1.1) Rely on the present general pattern of law-enforcement
regarding drugs and other things,
a proposal discredited in the minds of Nixon and his staff, without a
hearing, by the increasing crime rate. Maybe only a proposal by default,
it still has a claim to be numbered first, and I so number it.
The next issue-circumscribing question to which Nixon and his staff
moved was
(Q2) What is to be done to reduce the use of drugs in the District of
Columbia and elsewhere?
Here the answer forthcoming from the staff and accepted by Nixon,
was
(P2.2) Concentrate on reducing the use of hard-core drugs by addicts,
which meant at the time, the use of heroin.
The proposal set aside the alternative, given some attention by the staff,
(P2.1) Treat the use of heroin on an equal footing with marijuana.
528 DAVID BRAYBROOKE

(Again I treat the alternative as coming first and number it accordingly.)

Why was this set aside, with the relevant issue-simpliciter resolved in favor
of reducing the use of heroin by people addicted to that drug? The prin-
cipal reason appears to have been the predominant belief among profes-
sionals dealing with drug abuse that marijuana was a relatively trivial
problem, though it was more widespread, since it did not generate the
crimes that addicts resorted to to raise money to buy drugs or that the people
supplying the addicts committed to keep or expand their share of the trade
in drugs.
We thus arrive at the issue-circumscribing question that governs for
Nixon, his staff, and other discussants the remainder of the protocol-
narrative, if we take it as beginning with a series of issue-circumscribing
questions. Alternatively we can take the question as governing the whole
of the protocol-narrative, if we take the narrative proper as beginning here.
The question is

(Q3) What is to be done to deal with heroin addicts (in the District
of Columbia and elsewhere)?

To this question a series of issues-simpliciter responded.

First, proposed by Jerome Jaffe,

(P3.11) Follow a mixed approach ready to use psychopharmocology (at

this time, supplying addicts with methadone as substitute for
heroin)

or, proposed by the National Institute of Mental Health task force,

(P3.12) Rely on psychotherapy.

It was argued by proponents of the mixed approach, mobilized in a com-

peting task force of experts at the same time as the task force organized
by the National Institute of Mental Health, that psychotherapy had proved
ineffective in treating addiction, while the mixed approach, in particular
Jaffe’s version of it, had been spectacularly successful in Illinois. The other
task force favored psychotherapy, but did not make any headway against
these arguments.
With the mixed approach decided upon, there was a return to the
governing issue-circumscribing question (Q3) to consider the issue-
simpliciter,

(P3.21) (put forward by Jaffe) A new agency to be set up under Jaffe

should be separate from any agency occupied with the enforce-
ment of the criminal laws against using drugs and trading in
them

or
 ALLIANCE BETWEEN ISSUE-PROCESSING AND PRAGMA-DIALECTICS 529

(P3.22) (proposed in Congress) The new agency should combine respon-

sibility for education and treatment with responsibility for
enforcing the criminal laws.

Up to this point, the deliberants had included only the proponents of the
various proposals – certain members of Nixon’s staff, Jaffe, the head of
the NIMH – with Nixon serving as the audience and the deciding authority.
But the second proposal in this disjunction – the combined agency – was
strongly advocated in Congress, though Nixon, given his staff members’
advice, decided to go with the proposal for a separate agency, which Jaffe
had argued for on the grounds that the tasks were very different and called
for different sorts of people. The agency thus favored took the name
‘Special Action Office for Drug Abuse Prevention’ (SAODAP).
The National Institute of Mental Health, in the person of its determined
head, returned to the scene to dispute whether (P3.31) it or (P3.32) Jaffe’s
agency, SAODAP, should take the lead (take precedence) in the effort to
deal with hard-core heroin addicts. This briefly visited issue-simpliciter
was decided in favor of Jaffe’s agency, on the basis of Jaffe’s contention
that the NIMH was preoccupied with the problems of middle-class whites,
while the crime-generating problem lay with hard-core addicts in the central
cities.
Set up in June 1971 by Presidential fiat, Jaffe’s agency won unanimous
endorsement by Congress in March 1972. It had results to show by
September 1972: intermediately, in a sharp reduction in the addicts on
waiting lists for treatment, ultimately, in descending crime rates in large
cities and in a slow-down in the rate of drug-related deaths, though these
results also reflected a temporary success in the interdiction of heroin
supplies from overseas. The agency inspired so much confidence that the
Federal budget for 1973 allocated $420 million for treatment and preven-
tion, eight times as much as was being spent when Nixon came into office.
When Jaffe resigned in May 1973 to go back to academic life, SAODAP
had become a solid success. Here I bring my protocol-narrative to an end,
omitting subsequent developments, which instead of building on the success
moved off with the wave of hysteria about the use of marijuana in the direc-
tion of intensifying the punitive approach characteristic of the ‘War on
Drugs.’
Without descending into the sort of close-up detail that would call for
transcripts of discussions, there are rich pickings in these developments for
pragma-dialectical detection of unhelpful lapses from the standards of
critical rational discussion.
Many participants just ignored the evidence about the comparative
efficacy in reducing the use of hard-core drugs and reducing crime of
harsh law enforcement as compared with treatment. It was objected by
one Senator that treatment was a ‘revolving door.’ He did not consider
that it was for many people treated no such thing, and he did not consider
530 DAVID BRAYBROOKE

either that insofar as it was, it was cheaper and less crime-provoking to

have people repeatedly under treatment than repeatedly in prison.
Another lapse, which had an important effect just after the end of the
protocol-narrative, was the three-part contention by a leader of the parents’
movement against marijuana that marijuana was a ‘gateway drug,’ leading
users to a higher rate of addiction to hard-core drugs; that it was promoted
to children as alcohol and tobacco were not; and that it was used by high-
schoolers more often than alcohol (not to speak of tobacco). All these
propositions had been refuted by the evidence, but had survived notwith-
standing. They would not have survived refutation in a deliberation that
met the standards of critical rational discussion.
There is, however, another use for pragma-dialectical analysis in the
company of a macroscopic narrative, besides identifying the sorts of lapses
that I have illustrated. Such an analysis might be interpolated in the
protocol-narrative for Q3 at each of the points at which the three issues-
simpliciter that fell under that issue-circumscribing question arose. If any
of these issues-simpliciter were discussed for several months or even
several weeks, full transcripts would give too much information to manage.
However, a synopsis answering in detail to the demands of pragma-dialec-
tical analysis might be constructed. Alternatively, it might be possible to
select for attention on the basis of a transcript a crucial episode – a day;
an afternoon – that would exemplify the character and quality of the whole
discussion of the issue-simpliciter in question.
The point to see here, I think, about the alliance of pragma-dialectics
with the issue-processing approach, is that we could hardly tell where to
position interpolations of pragma-dialectical analysis in either of these ways
unless we had an accurate sense of the overall train of discussion of the
sort that the issue-processing approach can supply.

ADEQUACY IN THE ILLUSTRATIVE PROTOCOL-NARRATIVE

The illustrative protocol-narrative shows, during the period that it covers,

few lapses from the standards of critical-rational discussion, and those not
fatal ones. To some extent, this may because the narrative runs at a level
too general for some of the lapses to be pinpointed. Yet the level is not
too general to visibly invite at various places hypotheses about the lapses
that may have occurred, like the hypothesis about a failure of deliberation
when the treatment program was needlessly displaced by the renewed effort
against marijuana. I have also cited a couple of lapses on the part of a
Senator and on the part of some parents. But there are not many lapses or
many places inviting hypotheses about lapses. Was this because of biased
selection that qualifies the reliability of the narrative? The way to answer
this question, if it is a way that can be put through, is to argue that the
protocol-narrative took into account all the people (or agencies) that figured
 ALLIANCE BETWEEN ISSUE-PROCESSING AND PRAGMA-DIALECTICS 531

in the top circle of influence on policies to deal with the use of drugs; and
in its account of the significant moves in deliberation made during the
period of the narrative by members of this top circle found none of them
to be fatal lapses.
But does the protocol-narrative take into account all the people and
agencies that could reasonably be reckoned to be in the top circle? This is
a question subject to reasonably straightforward empirical inquiry, starting
with the identification of an issue-circumscribing question and a round
dealing with it. Were there important initiatives during the period in
Congress or elsewhere that Massing, on whose historical account I have
been relying, does not mention? Important enough, let us say, to have had
a chance of establishing policy if they had not been somehow cut off short
of doing so?
Suppose, however, that the top circle identified in the protocol-narra-
tive is suitably identified. (That Massing turns out to be reliable in this con-
nection.) Then the question arises, does every significant move taken by
members of the top circle figure in the protocol-narrative? But it must not
only figure, it must figure at the right place in the sequence. It would be
an advantage to eliminate idly repetitive moves, but then the narrator needs
to show that they really do repeat (and very likely with them a whole sub-
sequence of exchanges) without making a difference. The protocol-narra-
tive must show the moves in their proper places, where they do advance
the discussion, for example, by eliminating some proposal that (even if it
is repeated) does not survive until the end of the deliberation. I shall
conclude this part of the paper by outlining how to take care of these points
systematically in the illustrative protocol-narrative or any other.
In general, a recommendable way to construct a protocol-narrative is to
identify an event with which the beginning or the end of a round may be
identified; then search for an appropriate event to define the other end of
the round. The event might be passage of some legislation at the end of a
legislative session but it could be passage well before the end of the session;
or, as in the illustrative protocol-narrative, neither of these, just an impor-
tant event not directly related to the beginning or end of a legislative
session, or to a legislative session at all.
The next step has two tasks: to identify the top circle of deliberating par-
ticipants and to identify the issue-circumscribing question with which the
round begins. In some instances, this may persist throughout the round; or
give way to successively more particularized issue-circumscribing ques-
tions, as is the case with the illustrative protocol-narrative. All of the ques-
tions will be questions that members of the top circle are preoccupied with
during the round, as can be told either by their explicit mention of them,
or by inference from other significant moves.
On the same basis the narrator is to identify for each issue-circum-
scribing question an initial issue-simpliciter consisting of proposals, P1 or
P2 or P3 or . . . Pn that answer to it. The narrator will trace the fate of
532 DAVID BRAYBROOKE

each issue-simpliciter through the round, noting subtractions from it and

additions to it, and calling in pragma-dialectical analysis for close-up views
of crucial episodes in the discussion. In the standard case, the subtractions
will occur because the proposals in question have been rejected (not just
dropped out of attention) as the deliberants will signify, after hearing
reasons advanced for or against them. Likewise the additions will be
mounted on the basis of arguments; and will elicit arguments corroborating
these or contending with them.
Finally, the round will be said to end when either all the proposals in
the surviving issue-simpliciter have been rejected or when one or more of
them (supposing that the disjuncts do not conflict) have been adopted.
How adequate will the resulting narrative be? The narrative may be
expected to be more adequate, of course, the more care is taken about ana-
lyzing the data in identifying participants, issues, proposals, and signfi-
cant moves. However, the test of adequacy will be going back over the data
– expanding the data if possible – and seeing how well the features of the
narrative stand up to this examination.
One may expect revisions to be in order; indeed waves of revision. Even
a narrative that has survived several waves of revision will almost surely
be imperfect enough to invite another wave; but one may hope that it
will be several degrees less imperfect, and the method of successive
approximations that the waves of revision illustrate seems appropriate and
inevitable.

SUMMING-UP

The issue-processing approach, I have claimed, can bring a number of

refinements into pragma-dialectical analysis; or, if it is a little presump-
tuous of me to speak of additional ‘refinements,’ I can at least claim that
the approach adds some useful features. They include attention to issues,
given a firm distinction, based on the logic of questions, between issues
that are issue-circumscribing questions and issues-simpliciter (disjunctions
of proposed answers to the first sort). For application to discussions of
policy, the issue-processing approach recommends, furthermore, that both
sorts of issues be conceived as being concerned with what social rules to
adopt; hence the disjuncts in the issues-simpliciter will be proposed social
rules, which can be expressed in precise formulas available in the logic of
rules. This apparatus has the further advantage for pragma-dialectical
analysis of facilitating the identification and tracking of transformations
of issues, first, by the addition of proposed answers to issues-simpliciter
as well as the subtraction of answers, but also, second, by shifting from
one issue-circumscribing question to another.
These additions all, I think, lie within the compass of pragma-dialectical
analysis as it is currently practiced. But I have claimed that the issue-
 ALLIANCE BETWEEN ISSUE-PROCESSING AND PRAGMA-DIALECTICS 533

processing approach can be thought of as amplifying pragma-dialectics and

capturing for descriptive purposes and the normative purposes that the
descriptive purposes anticipate long-sustained overall trains of discussion.
The amplifictions that I have discussed, include, first, stepping back behind
the first stage recognized in the pragma-dialectical protocols to identify the
issue-circumscribing question that generates the initial standpoints. The
identification may have to take into account a controversy there about what
issue-circumscribing quetion to adopt; and pragma-dialectics has a further
application specifically in sorting out such controversies. A second ampli-
fication has to do with embracing not only discussions that conclude with
upholding the initial standpoint or its negation (at least its retraction), but
also discussions that may conclude in a compromise in which perhaps
directly reflects neither the initial standpoint in the protocol at issue nor
its negation, but which is nonetheless the subject of consensus. (In appli-
cation to policy discussions, a conclusion may be worth recording if it
has, short of consensus, the agreement of a substantial majority.) A third
amplification suggested by the issue-processing approach is attention to
successive rounds of discussion dealing at the beginning of each with
the same issue-circumscribing question or with a closely related one.
Comparing these rounds enables the analyst to say whether the discus-
sions in them exhibit either or both of two kinds of stability – program
stability(P-stability) or stability in respect to stations or discussants (S-
stability). Neither is necessarily harmful, but sometimes both combine to
preclude new views of policy problems and innovative solutions.
The identification of P-stability and S-stability arrives, I suppose, at
the limits of discourse analysis and argumentation theory, whether this is
carried on by pragma-dialectics, by the issue-processing approach, or by
an alliance between the two. The identification itself is a task that lies
within discourse analysis. However, to explain why either sort of stability
exists requires investigations of the character and history of the institutions
under the auspices of which the discourse under analyais has taken place.
An alliance between the issue-processing approach and pragma-dialectics
has the merit in this connection of going as far as discourse analysis can
in preparing its subject-matter for further inquiry by the social sciences
treating institutions.19

NOTES

1
The ulterior motive was present, but not yet fully formed, when I presented an earlier
version of the paper at a conference on ‘ArgumentationTheory: Models of Fruitful Discussion
in Social Life and Politics’ held at The University of Texas at Austin in March 2002, at
which Frans van Eemeren, Agnes van Rees, and Francisca Snoeck Henkemans, all from
The University of Amsterdam, joined in discussion with me and other members of the Texas
Philosophy Department.
2
I am teasing. What they mean by ‘standpoint’ is pretty clear; moreover, by now they
534 DAVID BRAYBROOKE

have written so much using ‘standpoint’ this way that they may have established a new
meaning for it in English; and they could hardly give it up now anyway. For all my training
and practice in ordinary language philosophy I did not notice the slight solecism until C. E.
Lindblom pointed it out.
3
See, for example, Frans H. van Eemeren et al., Reconstructing Argumentative Discourse
(Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1993), 31. I have changed the nomenclature
for the first two stages, which the pragma-dialecticians call the ‘confrontation stage,’ followed
by the ‘opening stage.’ This does not seem to me entirely felicitous terminology; it would
make as much sense, or more, if it were transposed. Sometimes, the try-out stage could be
called the ‘provocation stage,’ as when someone announces that English is not a language
fit for singing, or that the only good movies are Western movies (Wittgenstein, on one
occasion, to Ryle). But ‘try-out’ fits the many cases in which the speaker is not being provoca-
tive, or even trying something on (though this phrase comes quite close to what I think the
pragma-dialecticians are aiming at under the excessively strident term ‘confrontation’).
4
For an expression of the position that in pragma-dialectics descriptive and normative
considerations go hand in hand, see Frans H. van Eemeren, ‘The Study of Argumentation
as Normative Pragmatics,’ in F. H. van Eemeren and R. Grootendorst, eds., Studies
in Pragma-Dialectics (Amsterdam: Sic Sac [International Centre for the Study of
Argumentation], 1994, 3–8.
5
See D. Braybrooke, Traffic Congestion Goes Through the Issue-Machine (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), Chapter 4; also D. Braybrooke, ‘Policy Formation with
Issue Processing and Transformation of Issues,’ in his collected essays, Moral Objectives,
Rules, and the Forms of Social Change (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998),
331–347 (reprinted from C. A. Hooker et al., eds., Foundations and Applications of Decision
Theory, Vol. II (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1978), 1–16; D. Braybrooke, Bryson Brown, and Peter
K. Schotch, Logic on the Track of Social Change (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 18–19,
21, 192, 195, 213–217, 256; and David Braybrooke, ed., Social Rules: Origin; Character;
Logic; Change (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press [Harper-Collins], 1996, especially
Chapter 1, ‘The Representation of Rules in Logic and Their Definition,’ and Chapter 5,
‘Changes of Rules, Issue-Circumscription, and Issue-Processing,’ both by Braybrooke. The
distinction discussed in these passages between issue-circumscribing questions and issues-
simpliciter was inspired by the logic of questions worked out by Nuel D. Belnap, Jr, in a
monograph of 1968 that was reproduced as the first part of Nuel D. Belnap, Jr, and Thomas
B. Steel, Jr, The Logic of Questions and Answers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976).
6
One sort is the sort that consists simply in naming the topic: for example, the slogan that
propelled Clinton to victory, ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’ Jean Goodwin, in ‘Designing Issues,’
F.H. van Eemeren and P. Houtlosser, eds., Dialectic and Rhetoric: The Warp and Woof of
Argumentation, Analysis, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002, 81–97, rightly calls for attention to issues
of this sort.
7
Goodwin gives issues consisting of naming the topic an important role in signifying the
indeterminacy in which issues often come up, an indeterminacy reduced by ‘framing’ the
issue. In my terminology, the indeterminacy has to do with which of a number of issue-
circumscribing questions to adopt, and an issue is ‘framed’ when an issue-circumscribing
question has been settled upon.
8
There are organizations in the United States active on each of these questions. Planned
Parenthood is active on the first; and I began by contributing to Planned Parenthood. Then
I discovered an organization called ‘Zero Population Growth,’ and began contributing to that.
Finally I came upon an organization called ‘Negative Population Growth.’ I now contribute
to all three.
9
Why not treat the rival issue-circumscribing questions as disjuncts in an issue-simpliciter?
We could do this, but it may lead, to fill the role of generating the issue-simpliciter, to pos-
tulating an awkward second-order issue-circumscribing question, too vague to be very helpful
(‘What issue-circumscribing question shall we take up?’ or ‘What issue-circumscribing
question about the economy shall we take up?) It is better, I think, to start up an account of
 ALLIANCE BETWEEN ISSUE-PROCESSING AND PRAGMA-DIALECTICS 535

the controversy in the standard pragma-dialectical way by identifying a standpoint taken by

somebody on a specific issue-circumscribing question as the one to discuss, to which another
standpoint on another issue-circumscribing question may be opposed.
10
They are logically quite distinct forms: To any given issue-circumscribing question, a
number of different issues simpliciter may correspond; and, likewise, a given issue simpliciter
may correspond to more than one issue-circumscribing question. Extending the area in the
central city of metered parking and instituting full road-pricing are two proposals that offer
a plausible disjunction of answers to both the issue-circumscribing question about making
more parking spaces available and the question about reducing traffic congestion. To the
latter question also corresponds the issue-simpliciter with the entirely different disjuncts of
staggering working hours or making travel by bus more attractive.
11
See, for example, Reconstructing Argumentative Discourse (cited above), 10. In
‘Relevance Reviewed: the Case of “Argumentum ad Hominem”,’ Studies in Pragma-
Dialectics (1994), 51–68, van Eemeren and Grootendorst make some headway with defining
relevance, but do not make what I am about to say redundant.
12
See again the essay ‘Policy Formation etc.’ in Moral Objectives, Rules, and the Forms
of Social Change.
13
See Logic on the Track of Social Change, Chapter 10.
14
See David Braybrooke, ‘The Possibilities of Compromise,’ a review essay in Ethics 93
(October 1982), 139–150.
15
See the discussion in Traffic Congestion etc. of P-Stability and S-Stability.
16
In his book The Fix, paperback edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999),
of which I shall make repeated use.
17
‘Analyzing and evaluating problem-solving discussions,’ in Frans H. van Eemeren and
Rob Grootendorst, Studies in Pragma-Dialectics 4 (Amsterdam: Sic Sat [International Centre
for the Study of Argumentation], 1994, 197–217.
18
See note above.
19
The journal Argumentation sent a previous version of this paper to two readers, who both
did conscientious work. Both incited useful revisions in the paper – corrections when what
I said needed correction, clarifications when the comments seemed to me misguided. I end
up some distance from agreeing with one of them; but I am grateful to them both. I must
also thank my friend Mats Furberg for going over the paper with microscopic vision and
showing me the need for a number of clarifying nuances.