Wild Words and the Assault of Reason: Resolving the Role of Emotions in Deliberation

Deliberation, once viewed as ideally a calm process absent of the fog of emotions, has been subjected to criticism for potential exclusionary effects {Young, 2000 #2091} and increasingly opened up to permit different forms of contribution, including rhetorical forms of communication {see \Bächtiger, 2010 #2273}. This more inclusive approach has raised the question concerning the boundaries of what counts as deliberation {Goodin, 2018 #3521}. This paper explores the question of the role of emotion and deliberative procedure via exploration of questions concerning the objective of deliberation, the evidence of conditions that are conducive to that objective informed by contemporary research in cognitive psychology, and the implications for deliberative theory. The discussion is informed by recent studies in minipublic deliberation and the role of emotions in activating deliberative modes of behaviour. The findings are drawn together via a discussion of implications for ideas about deliberative capacity and deliberative systems thinking to consider the whether wild words as non-deliberative acts can indeed have deliberative consequences over the short and long term and the mediating role of other conditions, such as the disposition of message receivers in a deliberative system.