Why deliberation is never as neutral as it claims to be? MultiPoD researchers respond

Marginalized speakers do not simply lose arguments. New research from MultiPoD shows they can lose the standing to argue at all and that the consequences reach further than any individual exchange.

In deliberative spaces, not all voices carry equal weight. A speaker can advance a perfectly valid claim and still find it passed over, distorted, or met with silence, not because the argument was weak, but because of who was making it. Recent research from MultiPoD members takes that observation seriously, tracing the specific mechanisms through which injustice enters argumentative practice and examining what is lost when it does.

Silenced by the rules

Amalia Haro Marchal has approached this problem from several angles in a series of publications over the past year. In two articles in Informal Logic, she develops an account of discursive injustice grounded in the joint nature of argumentative meaning. Since meaning in argument is always co-constructed, the social standing of each participant shapes what gets produced, and when one party’s position is systematically discounted, their contribution to the exchange is diminished before any reasoning has properly begun.

It’s A Two-Way Street: The Joint Meaning of Illocutionary Acts of Arguing

Mind The Gap: Commitment Attributions in Argumentative Exchanges

A companion piece examines the misattribution of commitments, the practice of assigning a speaker positions they never held. Under fair conditions this might amount to a simple interpretive error, but under unfair norms it functions as a mechanism of exclusion, one that redirects a speaker’s own words against them and forecloses the possibility of genuine dialogue. Losing an argument costs a debate, but losing the standing to argue costs something considerably harder to recover.

Both themes extend into her contributions to Pathologies of Public Discourse, a special issue of Pensamiento al Margen. There she argues that when discursive injustice operates inside spaces already governed by unfair norms, the damage extends well beyond individual speakers: argumentation itself is compromised, stripped of its capacity to legitimate claims and open new ground. The issue also includes her review of Manuel Almagro Holgado’s The Rise of Polarization, a work that traces how affective polarization does not merely inflame deliberative spaces but fundamentally restructures the conditions under which debate can occur.

Mapping the territory

Identifying injustice in argument requires first being precise about what argument is. Marcin Lewiński’s One Concept of Argument addresses that foundational question by developing a comprehensive ontology of argumentative phenomena, proposing that a single unified concept is sufficient to account for the full diversity of argumentative forms. Without that kind of conceptual clarity, the boundaries of argumentative injustice remain difficult to draw, and the research built on top of them correspondingly imprecise.

Deliberation beyond institutional channels

Álvaro Domínguez approaches the question from a different vantage point. Drawing on the feminist demonstrations held in Lisbon on 8 March 2020, his article Protests as Group Speech Acts argues that collective protest is not a breakdown of deliberation but a continuation of it by other means. When institutional channels for argument are closed or structurally foreclosed, social movements can still make public claims through collective action, asserting a voice in the spaces where formal deliberation has failed to offer one.

Across these contributions, a common thread emerges: in any deliberative space, the critical question is not only who prevails in an argument, but who was ever in a position to make one.