Abstract

This article demonstrates that the public debate over the MX program alters what we normally perceive as the preconditions for public debate. Instead of establishing the materially relevant facts of the issue at hand in order to provide a point of stasis for formulating competing positions to facilitate argumentative clash, the decision rendered by the Congress responds to justifications from both positions to formulate its policy. The controversy provides insight into the way stasis is established in public debates by challenging the understanding that they are determined in advance. We argue stasis points are established retroactively by the agent of judgment ratifying a point of contact as if this point of stasis had organized the debate all along.