Pacisco/Motivation

Never before has so much information been available to such a substantial proportion of the population; but how much use is made of it?  Policy decisions with both global and local scope are driven through by lobby groups and careerist politicians, often in thrall to multinational businesses, with informed input from the citizen confined to ticking a party box on a voting slip once every five years or so.  Petitions, protests, and perhaps even to letters to the editors of newspapers can have some influence, but at a very gross level usually creating a false binary divide between supporters and opponents of a policy.  What they might agree on is lost in the rhetorical clamour of public debate, such as it is.

The issues at stake, be they ethical, economic, environmental, legal, scientific, whatever, are often enormously complex in the evidence that needs to be sifted and the implications for outcomes that must be assessed.  So much so that dedicated expertise is required even to begin engaging with real evaluation.  But experts often have their own agendas and when mediated through the institutions of representative democracy, expert opinion looses all subtlety.  Its presentation is open to manipulation by powerful interested parties.

So the problem that Pacisco attempts to address is this; how can decision-making processes of complex policies be understood and influenced by informed, but not expert to citizens?

Pacisco’s answer is a tool for analysing complex argumentation into an accessible structure.  It should be possible for the non-expert in the field to see at least that all positions have been addressed, even if at some point the fine detail of the argument eludes them.  It is essentially an argument auditing tool.

Its use should keep politicians and policy makers honest.

Well, that’s the idea anyway….

Postscript February 2021

So, that was a rather ambitious manifesto drafted well before I got into the nitty-gritty detail of making it work.  The ambition is still there, but I have to acknowledge that what I have produced is not going to be as universally usable as I had hoped.  Analysing arguments into clear propositions is hard and not for everyone.  However, if this is your stock in trade (lawyers, scientists, philosophers, I’m looking at you) then I still believe this is a potentially useful tool.  Also reading the result to audit an argument is certainly a lot easier than to write it.