“Reasonable Hostility”: Its Usefulness and Limitation as a Norm for Public Hearings

• Main Author: Karen Tracy
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: University of Windsor 2011-09-01
• Series: Informal Logic
• Subjects: argument; citizen testimony; civil unions; civility; conduct norm; discourse
• Online Access: https://informallogic.ca/index.php/informal_logic/article/view/3399

“Reasonable hostility” is a norm of communicative conduct initially developed by studying public exchanges in education governance meetings in local U.S. communities. In this paper I consider the norm’s usefulness for and applicability to a U.S. state-level public hearing about a bill to legalize civil unions. Following an explication of reasonable hostility and grounded practical theory, the approach to inquiry that guides my work, I de-scribe Hawaii’s 2009, 18-hour pub-lic hearing and analyze selected segments of it. I show that this par-ticular public hearing raised de-mands for testifiers on the anti-civil union side of the argument that rea-sonable hostility does not do a good job of addressing. Development of a norm of communication conduct for this practice, as well as others, must engage with the culture and time-specific beliefs that a society holds, beliefs that will shape not only how to argue but what may be argued and what must be assumed about particular categories of persons.