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 149

at least for ALPHA—if we do not take this conceptual linking into account.
For ALPHA, populism is the very fact that popular opinion conditions political
decisions. We can obtain this general concept of what ALPHA calls populist
mathematics by giving a more abstract form to (24).
Populist Mathematics (according to ALPHA)
(25) the opinion of the majority is something THEREFORE the politician defends that
something
If we recall that the “common ground” isolates pieces of information, we can
see why this notion fails to describe what populism is for ALPHA, hence how
ALPHA depicts Valls. We cannot describe what populism is here by saying that
on the one hand, we have popular opinion, and on the other hand, a politician
who defends a point of view—even if it happens to be the same point of view.
From an informational perspective—which is, I insist, the perspective within which
the notion of “common ground” makes sense —, if you have established a cause-
consequence relationship it is because you have performed some kind of operation
on propositions, not within them. My claim is that understanding what populism is
for ALPHA involves a THEREFORE connection that is internal to concept (25).
Let us turn now to what is common to both positions. ALPHA's position, which
I schematise in Fig. 8.8 , is formed by concept (25)—which describes Valls' attitude
—specifying in a particular way concept (23)—which defines populism.
In this figure I intend to show that, in ALPHA's text, Valls' attitude appears as a
particular manifestation of populism . Let us remind ourselves that, in a conceptual
specification like this, the more abstract concept acts as the frame for the more
specific one. Here (25), which defines populism , is the frame in which the link is
made between popular opinion and Valls' opinion.
Conceptual specification plays also an important role in BETA's strategy. Let us
see how it works. Concept (26) gives a connective form to BETA's position about
Valls.
(26) voters desire the return of the Romani to B & R THEREFORE Valls responds to this
desire
In BETA's discourse, when Valls responds to the desire of voters, he acts by
strictly playing the game of democracy , that is to say that in BETA's text, concept
Fig. 8.8 A region of the conceptual space of the interaction as determined by ALPHA's
intervention