The Problem with Disagreement on Social Media

2021 ◽  
pp. 259-279
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Edenberg
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Political Liberalism ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
Epistemic Agency ◽  
Political Cooperation ◽  
Divided Society ◽  
The Common ◽  
Different Sources

Intractable political disagreements threaten to fracture the common ground upon which we can build a political community. The deepening divisions in society are partly fueled by the ways social media has shaped political engagement. Social media allows us to sort ourselves into increasingly likeminded groups, consume information from different sources, and end up in polarized and insular echo chambers. To solve this, many argue for various ways of cultivating more responsible epistemic agency. This chapter argues that this epistemic lens does not reveal the complete picture and therefore misses a form of moral respect required to reestablish cooperation across disagreements in a divided society. The breakdown of discourse online provides renewed reasons to draw out not an epistemic but a moral basis for political cooperation among diverse citizens—one inspired by Rawlsian political liberalism. We need ways to cultivate mutual respect for our fellow citizens in order to reestablish common moral ground for political debate.

Social Project Management?

2016 ◽  
pp. 2067-2071
Author(s):  
Gilbert Silvius
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Project Management ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Future Outlook ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Common ◽  
Social Project

This conclusion aims to reflect upon and summarize the lessons that may be learned from this book. In three concise paragraphs, it discusses the common ground amongst the different contributions, the ‘takeaways' from the book and the concept of ‘social project management' as the future outlook on social media in project management.

Social media is the new player in the politics of education

2017 ◽  
Vol 99 (3) ◽  
pp. 50-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Supovitz
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Common Core ◽  
Common Core State Standards ◽  
State Standards ◽  
Politics Of Education ◽  
Core State ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
The Social ◽  
Proxy War ◽  
The Common

Political debate about the Common Core State Standards (the first major education policy initiative in the social media age) ramped up quickly on social media, particularly on Twitter. However, while the increased and intense conversation influenced many states to disavow Common Core in name, those states ended up adopting standards that were essentially the same. More important, the author argues, the Twitter-based conflict over Common Core served as a proxy war for other concerns and revealed lasting changes in the nature of political advocacy in education.

Incoherent but Reasonable

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 573-603
Author(s):  
Alexander Schaefer ◽  
Robert Weston Siscoe ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Political Institutions ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Political Liberalism ◽  
Overlapping Consensus ◽  
Political Consensus ◽  
Joseph Raz ◽  
The Common ◽  
Joshua Cohen ◽  
Comprehensive Doctrines ◽  
Concept Of Truth

A strength of liberal political institutions is their ability to accommodate pluralism, both allowing divergent comprehensive doctrines as well as constructing the common ground necessary for diverse people to live together. A pressing question is how far such pluralism extends. Which comprehensive doctrines are simply beyond the pale and need not be accommodated by a political consensus? Rawls attempted to keep the boundaries of reasonable disagreement quite broad by infamously denying that political liberalism need make reference to the concept of truth, a claim that has been criticized by Joseph Raz, Joshua Cohen, and David Estlund. In this paper, we argue that these criticisms fail due to the fact that political liberalism can remain non-committal on the nature of truth, leaving the concept of truth in the domain of comprehensive doctrines while still avoiding the issues raised by Raz, Cohen, and Estlund. Further substantiating this point is the fact that Rawls would, and should, include parties in the overlapping consensus whose views on truth may be incoherent. Once it is seen that political liberalism allows such incoherence to reasonable parties, it is clear that the inclusion of truth and the requirement of coherence urged by Raz, Cohen, and Estlund requires more of reasonable people than is necessary for a political consensus.

scholarly journals Elicitive Conflict Transformation and New Media: In Search for a Common Ground

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-14
Author(s):  
Wolfgang Suetzl
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Conflict Resolution ◽  
New Media ◽  
Conflict Management ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Conflict Transformation ◽  
Important Resource ◽  
The Common ◽  
Communicative Processes

Advocates of elicitive conflict transformation (ECT) maintain that the parties to a conflict are the most important resource in efforts to render that conflict less violent. According to them, the transformation of the conflict is immanent to the conflict itself. The claim of ECT theorists is that classical conflict resolution has mostly aimed at overcoming a conflict by means of neutral mediation, while conflict transformation is not primarily concerned with terminating a conflict and considers the conflict worker as part of the conflict system. Although ECT is a communication-based model of conflict management and relies on human media, its media-theoretical aspects are not made explicit, raising the question of what role technological media play in the communicative processes that make up ECT techniques. Through an examination of the claimed differences between conflict resolution and conflict transformation, and focusing on the common roots of new media and the elicitive model in systems and cybernetic theory, this paper asks whether any peacebuilding potential of new media could be found in a specific anti-propagandistic quality of distributed technological media. It concludes by looking at any such potential in social media.

Social Project Management?

2016 ◽  
pp. 293-297 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gilbert Silvius
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Project Management ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Future Outlook ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Common ◽  
Social Project

This conclusion aims to reflect upon and summarize the lessons that may be learned from this book. In three concise paragraphs, it discusses the common ground amongst the different contributions, the ‘takeaways' from the book and the concept of ‘social project management' as the future outlook on social media in project management.

Religion’s Political Role in Rawlsian Key

2012 ◽  
Vol 19 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 1-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johannes A. van der Ven
Keyword(s):  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
Public Reason ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Political Liberalism ◽  
Language Game ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Quadratic Equation ◽  
Political Role ◽  
The Common

AbstractIn Political Liberalism, expanded edition, Rawls repeatedly wants religions to accept liberal democracy for intrinsic reasons from their own religious premises, not as a modus vivendi. This article is to be considered an exploration in that field. In the first part the narrative of the St. Paul’s speech before the Areopagus in Athens by Luke is hermeneutically analyzed, as it tries to find common ground with Hellenistic philosophy and to do so by using deliberative rhetoric. In the second part these two characteristics of the Lukean story are considered the building blocks for the intrinsic acceptance of liberal democracy, albeit not in a substantive, but a formal key. The common ground Luke explored then was religious in nature, whereas in our days, at least in North-Western Europe, religion belongs to a cognitive minority. Moreover philosophy does not provide a common ground either, as there is a pluralism of competing schools nowadays. But intercontextual hermeneutics metaphorically permits to draw the following quadratic equation: as Lukean Paul related the Christian message to his philosophical context in order to find common ground, so we are to relate it to our context, the common ground of which is not philosophical, but political, which refers to the context of public reason. This article argues for accepting Rawls’ concept of using a bilingual language game for religion to present its religious convictions into the public debate and in due course translate them in terms of public reason. Such a translation requires a deliberative argumentation, that corresponds to the rules of logics and epistemology in practical reason.

Searching for Political Parties in the Past

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Piero Ignazi
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Political Party ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Common

Chapter 1 introduces the long and difficult process of the theoretical legitimation of the political party as such. The analysis of the meaning and acceptance of ‘parties’ as tools of expressing contrasting visions moves forward from ancient Greece and Rome where (democratic) politics had first become a matter of speculation and practice, and ends up with the first cautious acceptance of parties by eighteenth-century British thinkers. The chapter explores how parties or factions have been constantly considered tools of division of the ‘common wealth’ and the ‘good society’. The holist and monist vision of a harmonious and compounded society, stigmatized parties and factions as an ultimate danger for the political community. Only when a new way of thinking, that is liberalism, emerged, was room for the acceptance of parties set.

The Semantics of Evidentials

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah E. Murray
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Formal Semantics ◽  
Empirical Support ◽  
Propositional Content ◽  
Primary Data ◽  
Truth Conditional ◽  
The Common ◽  
Issue Content

This book gives a compositional, truth‐conditional, crosslinguistic semantics for evidentials set in a theory of the semantics for sentential mood. Central to this semantics is a proposal about a distinction between what propositional content is at‐issue, roughly primary or proffered, and what content is not‐at‐issue. Evidentials contribute not‐at‐issue content, more specifically what I will call a not‐at‐issue restriction. In addition, evidentials can affect the level of commitment a sentence makes to the main proposition, contributed by sentential mood. Building on recent work in the formal semantics of evidentials and related phenomena, the proposed semantics does not appeal to separate dimensions of illocutionary meaning. Instead, I argue that all sentences make three contributions: at‐issue content, not‐at‐issue content, and an illocutionary relation. At‐issue content is presented, made available for subsequent anaphora, but is not directly added to the common ground. Not‐at‐issue content directly updates the common ground. The illocutionary relation uses the at‐issue content to impose structure on the common ground, which, depending on the clause type (e.g., declarative, interrogative), can trigger further updates. Empirical support for this proposal comes from Cheyenne (Algonquian, primary data from the author’s fieldwork), English, and a wide variety of languages that have been discussed in the literature on evidentials.

Can Groups Assert That P?

2019 ◽  
pp. 326-344
Author(s):  
Deborah Tollefsen
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Single Individual ◽  
Constitutive Rule ◽  
The Past ◽  
Group Members ◽  
The Common ◽  
Declarative Statement ◽  
John Macfarlane

When a group or institution issues a declarative statement, what sort of speech act is this? Is it the assertion of a single individual (perhaps the group’s spokesperson or leader) or the assertion of all or most of the group members? Or is there a sense in which the group itself asserts that p? If assertion is a speech act, then who is the actor in the case of group assertion? These are the questions this chapter aims to address. Whether groups themselves can make assertions or whether a group of individuals can jointly assert that p depends, in part, on what sort of speech act assertion is. The literature on assertion has burgeoned over the past few years, and there is a great deal of debate regarding the nature of assertion. John MacFarlane has helpfully identified four theories of assertion. Following Sandy Goldberg, we can call these the attitudinal account, the constitutive rule account, the common-ground account, and the commitment account. I shall consider what group assertion might look like under each of these accounts and doing so will help us to examine some of the accounts of group assertion (often presented as theories of group testimony) on offer. I shall argue that, of the four accounts, the commitment account can best be extended to make sense of group assertion in all its various forms.

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