Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Emotional Legal Arguments And A Broken Leg, Rubens Damasceno-Morais

OSSA Conference Archive

We intend to examine ways that emotions may be intertwined within argumentative legal discourses. From the transcript of a brief trial in a Court of Appeal in Brazil we have the opportunity to observe how the emotional and rational reasoning live together in a deliberation among magistrates. “The leg broken case” allow us to examine how judges define the value of compensation to be paid in cases of moral damage. We show that not only technical arguments are the compounds of one decision; subjectivity is also important in that legal context. We would yet confirm what jurists and …

On Being Objective: Hard Data, Soft Data And Baseball., Michael A. Gilbert

OSSA Conference Archive

“Objective” is a term that has a long and sometimes tumultuous history and a wide range of meanings. The sense in which I am interested here is the one that refers to ways of thinking, and especially the explicit criticism of an argument or judgment as not being “objective,” as exemplified in the following.

• You’re not being objective.
• You have to look at it objectively.
• Objectively, the best choice is…
• Being objective, I’d have to say…

Implicit in these statements is an ideology that denigrates emotion and other communicative aspects in favour of an idealized sense of fact, data and …

Commentary On The Emotional Life Of Reason: Exploring Conceptions Of Objectivity, Moira Howes

OSSA Conference Archive

Robert Pinto and Laura Pinto advance a non-binary account of reason and emotion in the reasoning process and argue for a naturalistic understanding of objectivity that will allow for the evaluation of emotions as reasonable. Pinto and Pinto’s promising argument generates important and productive lines of inquiry. I suggest a few such lines of inquiry, including the idea that it may be important to support reflexivity and interpretive community with equanimity; that we should further examine the potential of new ideals of objectivity that explicitly incorporate emotion and virtue; and finally, that we should craft methodologies to deepen our understanding …