Funny Thing, Argument

I was recently flying back home after an interview when I thought of Giandomenico Majone's book Evidence, Argument, and Persuasion in the Policy Process.  I first encountered Majone's book several years ago in Kieran Donaghy's course in planning theory, which was then the sole required course for doctoral students  at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  I didn't think much of Majone at the time, didn't give him much attention, and hadn't thought about him since.  In fact, I'm certain that the only reason I remembered it again after a number of years is because I found Majone's argument so irksome.

In Evidence, Argument, and Persuasion, Majone makes the case for reemphasizing the art of rhetoric in policy analysis.  He suggests that the kind of public debate to which we contribute tends to be not unlike the adversarial environment of legal proceedings.  Actors in public debates bring differing points of view, and differing preconceptions, in part based on their interests. Deliberation in such debates has less to do with formal techniques of problem solving, Majone argues, than with a process of argumentation - a process that involves (even conflates?) both factual statements and subjective evaluations. Evidence in argumentation involves bringing information to bear at a particular point in the argument, and must be evaluated not just for its factual reliability, but also for its relevance to the argument as well as for the subjective reasons behind why it is introduced. Part of E, A, & P is a criticism of what Majone calls "decisionism" - a technical/professional paradigm of rational analysis that policy makers inherited from economists and operations research. Majone claims decisionism is less well suited to environments with a plurality of values, and where plausible recommendations must be made despite factual uncertainty. The real trick, according to Majone, is learning to make good persuasive arguments, to distinguish good argument from bad, to make judgments between competing sets of evidence and competing value claims.  (I should say that this is what I remember of E, A, & P.  I've only looked back at my class notes, and I evidently wasn't a good note-taker.  Oops.)

Anyway, Majone's argument was irksome.  To describe planning as an adversarial process and rhetoric its central activity seemed to be very nice for those good at rhetoric: I wasn't sure how it would protect the interests of everyone else from those better able to control the process of deliberation.  If 'decisionism' had limits it at least made a play at objectivity.   Better to be screwed by a process that has some kind of objective standards, I thought, than by one that could be hijacked by slick talkers.

In the intervening years, I've come around to Majone's argument, at least to a degree. It still seems to me that Majone is a bit too idealistic in his advocacy of rhetoric and persuasion. But I think he does a good job of characterizing the environment of public deliberation that planners operate in.  Planning in the real world is more pragmatic, and more messed up, than we like to allow. While we doctoral students tend to focus on making knowledge that is hard and sure, Majone reminds us that it is less the making of knowledge so much as bringing knowledge to action that is central to urban planning.

By the way, Evidence, Argument and Persuasion in the Policy Process is in stock at Amazon.  It sells for $20.