:: Events :: The Expertise, Evidence and Argumentation in the Context of Public Policy-Making Workshop will take place on March 3-4 at the New University of Lisbon, Portugal. Registration deadline: February 24
BACKGROUND
Evidence-based policy-making rests on three pillars that correspond to interlocking phases of the policy-making process. The first pillar is the gathering of facts and evidence, which by themselves would be useless without the second pillar, i.e., the search for causal relations between inputs and outputs. It cannot suffice to know the facts, we also need to understand them in terms of useful relational laws or regularities, which can be employed to influence other facts, so that a policy may successfully intervene on a causal structure. But these two pillars are insufficient to support a policy if the arguments used in the first two phases aren’t both objectively strong and subjectively persuasive. The argumentative perspective thus constitutes a fundamental dimension to policy-making. Addressing the relation between evidence, explanation/prediction, and argumentation, the workshop sheds light on how evidence is selected, assessed and presented to support a policy, thus combining communicative, scientific, and political considerations.
SPEAKERS
– Anna Leuschner (Hannover University, Germany): The Epistemic Implications of Climate Change Denial: Reasons for Concern
– Garrath Williams (Lancaster University, UK): Evidence, argumentation and the framing of policy questions
– Karl Reinmuth (University of Flensburg, Germany): Rule evaluation in evidence-based policy-making. The role of evidence in argumentations for policy options
– Lilian Bermejo-Luque (University of Granada, Spain): The uses of argumentative schemas as strategies for risk assessment
– Marica Ferri (European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, Lisbon, Portugal): Evidence base for drug policies: evolution and challenges
– Martin Hinton (University of Łódź, Poland): Who are experts and what can they do?
– Sally Jackson and Scott Jacobs (University of Illinois, USA): Argument as Expansion Around Disagreement
– Sean Sinclair (University of Leeds, UK): How Policy-Makers Should Understand Qualitative Evidence
– Tom Gordon (FOKUS, Fraunhofer Institute, Berlin, Germany): Argument diagramming tools for policy deliberations
PRACTICALITIES AND REGISTRATION
Expect to arrive in Lisbon for an informal dinner on the evening of March 2nd, and to leave as early as March 5th. The workshop dinner is held on March 4th. To register, please go to https://goo.gl/rdJh8W . The registration deadline is 24 FEB 2016. There is no fee. Please see the website for abstracts and program:
https://evidencecausationargumentation.wordpress.com/ .
ORGANIZERS
The workshop is organized by the project “The Trinity of Policy-Making: Evidence, Causation and Argumentation,” awarded to Carlo Martini (Helsinki, Finland), Rani Lill Anjum (As, Norway) and Frank Zenker (Lund, Sweden / Konstanz, Germany / SAS Bratislava, Slovakia) by the Finnish Cultural Foundation (https://skr.fi/en) in cooperation with Fabrizio Macagno’s (ArgLab, IFILNOVA, Portugal) strategic project “Values and the Experience of Rational Decision Making,” funded by the Portuguese Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (http://www.fct.pt/).
Tarello Institute for Legal Philosophy 