Jean Goodwin

North Carolina State University | NCSU · Department of Communication

I inquire into argument at the system level, exploring the controversy over whether climate scientists should fly. I document participants’ knowledge of a skeptical argument that because scientists fly, they cannot testify credibly about the climate emergency. I show how this argument has been managed by pro-climate action arguers, and how some cli...

Making arguments makes reasons apparent. Sometimes those reasons may affect audiences’ relationships to claims (e.g., accept, adhere). But an over-emphasis on audience effects encouraged by functionalist theories of argumentation distracts attention from other things that making arguments can accomplish. We advance the normative pragmatic program o...

A case study of a short televised debate between a climate scientist and an advocate for climate skepticism provides the basis for developing a contemporary conception of sophistry. The sophist has a high degree of argumentative content knowledge – knowledge of a domain selected and structured in ways that are most germane for its use in making arg...

Citizen scientists find their conduct to be ethically justified when it accords with the norms and practices of the community with which they identify. These communities will always be challenging to form since they must integrate people with diverse expertise. And occasionally it will be necessary to transcend the perspectives of one's own communi...

Making arguments makes reasons apparent. Sometimes those reasons may affect audiences. But over-emphasis on effects distracts from other things that making arguments accomplishes and thus fails to account for its pragmatic force. We advance the normative pragmatic program on argumentation through case studies of how early advocates for women’s suff...

From Poroi: Definitions of agency vary, but most begin with the idea of the freedom to make choices and take actions that benefit an agent. To that foundation, most rhetorical theories of agency add an acknowledgment of the social and political forces constraining the agent—often using Kenneth Burke’s dramatistic pentad to attribute these forces t...

The primary loyalty of argumentation theory should be to the practical knowledges arguers are exhibiting and thematizing in ordinary argumentative interactions, since such knowledges make the interactions work. In this essay, I show how theorists can learn from practitioners through a close analysis of the argumentologie populaire that emerged in a...

Far from being of interest only to argumentation theorists, conceptions of speech acts play an important role in practitioners’ self-reflection on their own activities. After a brief review of work by Houtlosser, Jackson and Kauffeld on the ways that speech acts provide normative frameworks for argumentative interactions, this essay examines an ong...

Leaders of the science establishment are seeking help with communicating science to the public. Rhetoricians of science are eager to respond. The two communities, however, continue to have mismatched expectations of each other; while scientists are looking for quick communication fixes, rhetoricians want to make everything more complicated. These e...

Climate scientists need the trust of lay audiences if they are to share their knowledge. But significant audience segments—those doubtful or dismissive of climate change—distrust climate scientists. In response, climate scientists can undertake one of two general communication strategies for enhancing trust, each appealing to one of two broad types...

Lippmann and Dewey both confronted the problem of how to get the nation’s highly successful science to have impact in the public sphere. Dewey’s solution to the problem is well known: an underspecified form of communication which would transform the Great Society beyond the understanding of any individual into the Great Community where policies cou...

Work in Argumentation Studies (AS) and Studies in Expertise and Experience (SEE) has been proceeding on converging trajectories, moving from resistance to expert authority to a cautious acceptance of its legitimacy. The two projects are therefore also converging on the need to account for how, in the course of complex and confused civic deliberatio...

This study investigates how sustainability and its inherent values figure into farmers' discourse, i.e., how farmers and members of farming communities talk about sustainability. We conducted qualitative interviews of various individuals in a single Iowa community to determine whether the visions guiding their land management choices resembled at a...

Science is communicated in many contexts. It is explained in formal and informal educational settings. It is offered to policymakers in blue-ribbon reports and personal testimony. But there is an additional context of particular interest to climate scientists: the communication of findings, theories and predictions in the context of the often-heate...

We compare spatial metaphors for argumentation used by theorists with those used by practitioners as represented in discourse collected in four diverse corpora. Theorists and practitioners share a few metaphors — most notably, POINT and BASE. Their use of other spatial metaphors, however, suggest substantial diffe- rences in interests and focus. Th...

Philosophers of argumentation and of testimony suggest that we can rely on what someone says because of its epistemic merits. If so, then we should never credit Wikipedia, since we cannot assess what its anonymous contributors know. I propose instead that Wikipedia can have pragmatic merits, in that the contributors' passion for the project, and th...

Douglas Walton tem tido razao em chamar-nos a atencao para os aspectos pragmaticos da argumentacao. Contudo, insistiu tambem que as argumentacoes devem ser compreendidas e avaliadas considerando a funcao que desempenham; e, disto, discordo. As argumentacoes nao tem uma funcao determinavel no sentido proposto por Walton e, mesmo que tivessem, nao po...

Our interest in argumentation is provoked at least in part by the apparent paradox it presents. People are arguing because they disagree, sometimes deeply. But despite their disagreement, their transaction is orderly – at least, somewhat orderly. Furthermore, this orderliness apparently has a normative element; it establishes grounds for participan...

Resumo: Douglas Walton tem tido razão em chamar-nos a atenção para os aspectos pragmáticos da argumentação. Contudo, insistiu também que as argumentações devem ser compreendidas e avaliadas considerando a função que desempenham; e, disto, dis-cordo. As argumentações não têm uma função determinável no sentido proposto por Walton e, mesmo que tivesse...

The greatest single infl uence on rhetorical theory throughout its long history, and likewise on its daughter or sister enterprise, the theory of argument, has without doubt been students. In part, the infl uence has been bad. Docile students have (it seems) offered little resistance to their teachers' theoretical hobbyhorses, being willing to cram...

The greatest single influence on rhetorical theory throughout its long history, and likewise on its daughter or sister enterprise, the theory of argument, has without doubt been students. In part, the influence has been bad. Docile students have (it seems) offered little resistance to their teachers' theoretical hobbyhorses, being willing to cram f...

Douglas Walton has been right in calling us to attend to the pragmatics of argument. He has, however, also insisted that arguments should be understood and assessed by considering the functions they perform; and from this, I dissent. Argument has no determinable function in the sense Walton needs, and even if it did, that function would not ground...

Closing arguments in the highly regulated context of criminal trials should be governed by rules, right? They aren’t. This suggests that arguing is an “unruly” activity, and that we shouldn’t be trying to model it by theorizing sets of rules.

Abstract

An outsider to argument theory, should she look through the rich outpouring of our recent work, might be amused to find us theorists not following our own prescriptions. We propound our ideas, but we don't always interact with each other-we don't argue. The essays by William Rehg and Robert Asen make promising start on rectifying this difficulty. I...

The recent movement to promote debate across the curriculum presumes that debate-like activities in content-area classes can enhance disciplinary learning as well as core skills. Yet students in such classes may resist debate activities if they believe (1) debate promotes hostility; (2) debate disadvantages demographic groups preferring noncompetit...

Scholarship on the practical art of arguing has the good luck of inheriting from its subject a rich native vocabulary for capturing what is going on. Still, this very richness can distract the scholars — natives themselves — from giving the vocabulary a closer look. And that is unfortunate. Although our goal as argumentation theorists must not be t...

Philosophy and Rhetoric 34.1 (2001) 38-60 On a stray planet in an out-of-the-way corner of the universe live odd beings with patterns of behavior odder still. It can be frequently observed that one of them stands before another, moving its limbs or producing some sounds, and the other responds -- apparently quite as the first expected. But why? Why...

Given the pragmatic tum recently taken by argumentation studies, we owe renewed attention to Henry Johnstone's views on the primacy of process over product. In particular, Johnstone's decidedly non-cooperative model is a refreshing alternative to the current dialogic theories of arguing, one which opens the way for specifically rhe-tori cal lines o...

A generation before Beardsley, legal scholar John Henry Wigmore invented a scheme for representing arguments in a tree diagram, aimed to help advocates analyze the proof of facts at trial. In this essay, I describe Wigmore's "Chart Method" and trace its origin and influence. Wigmore, I argue, contributes to contemporary theory in two ways. His rhet...

Many of the major policy challenges facing governments today are in some sense collective problems calling for joint solutions. However, even when effective solutions can be developed and implemented only through joint efforts, voluntary cooperation can be hard to establish and maintain, making it all the more impor- tant to understand the conditio...

Some contemporary theories of argumentation derive normative rules for the argumentative process from the assumption that it is a cooperative one. Based on this case study of the principles invoked by advocates in the closing arguments of the OJ Simpson criminal trial, I show that arguing can be both noncooperative and normatively regulated. I clos...

Why should we consider the far future when we deliberate? The question puzzles both philosophers and advocates. I isolate from civic discourses three motivations: love of children, obligation to heirs, lust for fame among posterity. All embody the future in persons related to us: the faces of the future.

When faced with a topic like 'dialectic and rhetoric,' the student of rhetoric is, I suppose, by trained incapacity disposed to view it as 'dialectic versus rhetoric' and to take up arms in defense of her much-maligned Dame. The pleasures and payoffs of zealous advocacy, after all, have not waned even through 2,500 years. Unfortunately, I find myse...

Lincoln persistently and effectively uses a number of "dialectical" or "dialogical" figures such as prolepsis, prosopopoeia, and correctio. These figures help to frame his rhetorical texts within a universe of argument and give him the opportunity to voice and transcend positions that differ from his own. Attention to this aspect of Lincoln's rheto...

This paper provides a typology of appeals to authority, identifying three distinct types: that which is based on a command; that which is based on expertise; and that which is based on dignity. Each type is distinguished with respect to the reaction that a failure to follow it ordinarily evokes. The rhetorical roots of Locke's ad verecundiam are tr...

Speaking as a relatively newcomer to the "rhetoric of science", it looks to me as if there has been a phase change in the rhetoric of science in the past decade or so. While what Collins & Evans (2002) have termed the "second wave" of science studies took as a central problematic the opening up of science to public involvement, the current "third w...

Typescript. Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1996. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 320-338).