Social media platforms have become the privileged venues for extending criticisms, producing justifications, and forming opinions on issues of common concern. Thanks also to platform algorithms, virtually all issues are transformed into and participated in as controversies. A recent proposal in argumentation studies in this regard concerns the system-level or macro-scale argument (Goodwin, 2020), developed on the micro-scale of premise-conclusion structures and meso-scale of argumentative interactions. Macro arguments can be useful tools in summarizing and analyzing societal debates and controversies. This study is an attempt to address Goodwin’s call to elaborate on the relationship between system-level abstract arguments and their concrete instantiations. To that end, we draw on the notions of position and claim (Gilbert, 2016), respectively, and examine how positions are negotiated in a post-disaster context of controversy. The study focuses on the social media debate on the 2017 Pedrógão Grande wildfire, which turned out to be the deadliest disaster in the country’s recent history, with significant political consequences, including high-level resignations. We work with a corpus of 1428 Portuguese language Facebook posts, which span seven years after the disaster, and examine how the rights and responsibilities are attributed and negotiated in the post-disaster controversy. We identify six central positions and a web of associated claims they share and strive to appropriate, and offer evidence on how criticisms in controversy are mainly oriented to such cornerstone or virtual positions (Jackson, 1992), rather than addressing individual claims. While this alone may render controversies more intractable, we argue that the problem extends further, involving also the tension between concrete and abstract values, and the variably extending temporal scope of arguments.

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• Sociology - Social Sciences
• Media and Communications - Social Sciences