The most recent exchange we've had on this question involved political argumentation. Politicians voting aye or nay on a statement will inevitably give some explanation for doing so - it would hurt workers, it would undermine national security, etc etc. And when they give those reasons, it's almost always the case that everybody knows that the individual politicians were driven by some other concerns - political calculations, party loyalty, etc. Why, then, go through the motions?

The misreading here is to think that the politicians were giving arguments. It's useful here to distinguish between illocutionary acts and locutionary acts. Locutionary acts are entirely straightforward: the speaker means what the speaker says. Illocutionary acts are a little muddier - the emphasis of an illocutionary act is not on the manifest content of the speech, but rather on what saying those words indicates about the speaker. If you'll allow us a moment of potential vulgarity, the girlfriend who asks "does this dress make me look fat" is not asking for an evaluation of her physique. Rather, the speech act interrogates issues of trust, reassurance, and perhaps even willingness to pretend to fib (and then a reflexive building of trust in the form of the "I know you know I know what's expected..." and so on). Regardless of how tangled the actual dynamic is - the significance of the question has nothing to do with its manifest content.

In this sense, the Congresspeople who are going through the motions of making an argument are performing an illocutionary act. They are indicating their knowledge of - and willingness to conform to - the social expectation that politicians give colorably rational reasons for their behavior. The open secret, of course, is their votes have little to do with their pretexts. And so the question arises, why go through the motions - because being a Congressperson involves giving rational reasons.

A particular interpretation of Wittgenstein involves the idea that so-called "pain language" - statements of the form "I feel pain" - are nothing more than "sophisticated ouch"s. That is, though they have the form of propositions, they do not have propositional content as such. This move is necessary to preserve the dichotomy between private and public languages, and to maintain the coherence of propositional analysis. A similar dynamic is at work when Congresspeople go through the motions of presenting pretexts of their actions, knowing full well that nobody thinks that they were motivated by those pretexts. Analyzing those discursive situations with the tools in the argumentation toolbox would lead to untenable claims about how persuasion and political discourse work

We should be relatively precise here: argument is that which presumes that the locutionary content of a speech act is what does the persuasive work. Argumentation theory is premised on analyzing situations in which the force of the better argument does the persuasive work - that premise is everything for argumentation, both in normative and in empirical registers.

And so when politicians know that everyone else knows that they know that their pretexts ring hollow - there's definitely something discursive going on, but it's beyond the horizon of what argumentation theory can usefully illuminate.

Previously:
* Prof. Nietzsche Frowns Upon Your Glib Globalized Paradigms