Common Ground or Conceptual Reframing? A Study of the Common Elements in Conflicting Positions in French Interactions - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 140

calls “the ethics of politics”. As we have already seen, Royal means by that a
particular kind of responsibility, one that engenders the obligation on the part of
the subject of this responsibility, to account for what happened to the object of the
responsibility while exercising it.
The Ethics of Politics (according to Royal)
(14) [to have the responsibility for something THEREFORE to account for what happened
to it]
If one accepts this, a straightforward description of Royal's and Sarkozy's
positions is possible. According to Royal, Sarkozy must account for the way things
went in France because he was (or was partly) responsible for its government, so
she states the following concept:
Royal's position
(15) [Sarkozy is partly responsible for the situation in which France finds itself today
THEREFORE he must account for it] 5
Sarkozy shows himself as respecting “the ethics of politics”, he does not contest
the link between having the responsibility for something and the obligation to
account for what happens when exercising this responsibility: instead he contests
being himself solely responsible for the situation. Sarkozy's position can be
described using almost the same concept that describes Royal's position, the
difference being that in his position, besides the Right (or himself), the previous
Socialist party government has also held a responsibility that engenders accounting
for .
Sarkozy's position
(16) Left and Right are both partly responsible for the situation in which France finds itself
today THEREFORE Left and Right must account for it
Sarkozy not only accepts in his discourse “the ethics of politics” as defined
by Royal, he even situates his own position within this concept, but does so in a
way that makes Royal's position appear as a particular (partial) interpretation of
his own (larger) vision of the world. Hence, it becomes necessary to consider the
way concepts can relate to one another. Here, the relevant relationship seems to be
“specification” (Lescano 2013 ). A concept C1 specifies another concept C2, when
C1 appears—in a given conceptual space—as a particular version of C2. One crucial
feature of specification is that the more abstract concept of the two plays a role in the
interpretation of the more specific one, in a way that makes it pertinent to say that
the more abstract concept functions as the conceptual “frame” of the more specific
one. If we take the concept [to be tired THEREFORE NEG to work] , it is easy to see
5 If we remember that a concept is a connection between signifiers, it may become suspicious
to make concepts connect entire sentences. Nevertheless, the whole sentence may function as a
unique signifier which relates to other sentences-signifiers with different kinds of links. Normative
and transgressive links are the links that form concepts, but that does not exclude the existence of
other kinds of links, since the sentence-signifier, as well as every signifier, may be linked to other
concepts in a given conceptual space.