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Second Order Intersubjectivity: The Dialectical Dimension of Argumentation
Abstract
I propose a characterization of the dialectical dimension of argumentation by considering the activity of arguing as involving
a “second order intersubjectivity”. I argue that argumentative communication enables this kind of intersubjectivity as a matter
of the recursive nature of acts of arguing—both as justificatory and as persuasive devices. Calling attention to this feature
is a way to underline that argumentative discourses represent the explicit part of a dynamic activity, “a mechanism of rational
validation”, as Rescher (Dialectics. A controversy oriented approach to the theory of knowledge. SUNY Press, Albany, 1977) showed, which is a practice that presupposes the possibility of attaining objectivity.
... Communication scholars have asserted that communication is the means through which intersubjectivity is manifest; reality is socially constructed and understood through communication (e.g., Brummett 1976;Grossberg 1982;Smeltzer 1996). Argumentation scholars have used intersubjectivity to examine a variety of topics including dialectic and lying (Bermejo-Luque 2010;Smeltzer 1996). I am drawing from a phenomenological perspective on intersubjectivity that assumes that intersubjectivity is not just a relationship between humans, but can be a relationship between all sensing subjects. ...
My focus in this essay is Shoshone and Paiute arguments against the Yucca Mountain site that claim that because Yucca Mountain is a culturally significant sacred place it should not be used to store nuclear waste. Within this set of arguments for the cultural value of Yucca Mountain, I focus on arguments that claim that the proposed nuclear waste site will damage Yucca Mountain and its ecosystem—the mountain, plants, and animals themselves. These arguments assume that Yucca Mountain and its ecosystem are animate and will suffer. An understanding of Western Shoshone and Southern Paiute perspectives on the human relationship to nature, particularly adherence to the concept of animist intersubjectivity, is crucial towards interpreting these arguments. As such, my purpose in this essay is an in-depth analysis of the relationship between the cultural presumption of animist intersubjectivity and Shoshone and Paiute arguments against the Yucca Mountain site. In order to explore this relationship, I begin the paper by discussing concept of animist intersubjectivity as a cultural presumption and its relationship to arguments. Then, I analyze Shoshone and Paiute arguments against the Yucca Mountain site to reveal how animist intersubjectivity influences these arguments. I conclude the essay by explaining the implications of this analysis.
Recourse to meta-argument is an important feature of successful argument exchanges; it is where norms are made explicit or clarified, corrections are offered, and inferences are evaluated, among much else. Sadly, it is often an avenue for abuse, as the very virtues of meta-argument are turned against it. The question as to how to manage such abuses is a vexing one. Erik Krabbe proposed that one be levied a fine in cases of inappropriate meta-argumentative bids (2003). In a recent publication (2022) Beth Innocenti expands on this notion of a penalty, arguing that some meta-arguments should be halted with “shouting, cussing, sarcasm, name-calling.” In this essay, we review Innocenti’s case that these confrontations and haltings improve the argumentative circumstances. We provide three reasons that this promise is not well-founded. First, that such confrontations have a significant audience problem, in that they are more likely to be interpreted as destroying the argumentative context than improving it. Second, that Innocenti’s procedural justification, that those who lose meta-discussions should pay a penalty, is not satisfied if the meta-discussion is halted. And third, there is a boundary problem for the cases, since it seems there is no principled reason to restrict halting meta-arguments just to these cases (especially if there is no meta-discussion on the matter to make the bounds explicit). Though expressions of anger can be appropriate in argument, we argue, it cannot take the place of argument.
The article outlines the author’s vision of the formation and development of “intersubjectivity” as a concept of socially oriented thought. Introduced into sociohumanitarian knowledge by E. Husserl’s phenomenology, this notion initially possessed powerful sociological potential and was called to explain on an abstract-philosophical level the existence of social order from an egological perspective (which is the perspective of a subject with a sphere of consciousness that other participants of interaction have no access to). The main tendency inherent to the post-Husserlian change in the concept’s semantic profile is linked to the gradual loss of its metaphysical potential, as well as its psychologization and instrumentalization. Intersubjectivity — which is something that was brought into sociology by A. Schütz’s social phenomenology — gained a pragmatic interpretation, effectively becoming an axiomatically presupposed attribute of the “life world”. Constructivist semantic valences of the analyzed concept were implemented in the social constructivism of P. Berger and T. Lukman, and at this point said concept had pretty much exhausted its initial analytical potential. The reinvigoration of sociological interest towards this category is associated with a postclassical redirection of attention towards interactive processes of generating meanings within situations of the “life world”, processes that are multidimensional, conditioned by context and cannot be fully reduced to just the subject. The matter of whether returning to Husserl’s intuitions is appropriate demands further consideration, in order to consider other interpretations of intersubjectivity, including those that focus on the historical course of the social process.
I defend a conception of Logic as normative for the sort of activities in which inferences super-vene, namely, reasoning and arguing. Toulmin's criticism of formal logic will be our framework to shape the idea that in order to make sense of Logic as normative, we should con-ceive it as a discipline devoted to the layout of arguments, understood as the representations of the semantic, truth relevant, properties of the inferences that we make in arguing and reason-ing. Résumé: Je défends une conception normative de la logique appliquée aux inférences, notamment aux raisonne-ments et aux arguments. La critique avancée par Toulmin de la logique formelle sera notre fondement pour façonner l'idée qu'une logique norma-tive doit se concevoir comme une discipline consacrée à décrire et à expliciter des arguments, compris comme des représentations véridiques et sémantiques des inférences que nous faisons dans des arguments et dans des raisonnements Keywords: formal/informal logic, inference, normative theory of inference, Toulmin's model of argument.
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 myself in the uncomfortable position of agreeing with my adversary's proposal for union, or at least detente, between the dialectical and rhetorical inquiries into argumentation. I want to begin, therefore, by reiterating five theses Jacobs has nailed up for us, before closing with what I see as the major area of continued dif- ference in viewpoints. Thesis 1. The common thrust of both rhetorical and dialectical inquiries into argumentation - what provides discipline to the nondiscipline of argu- mentation studies - is as Jacobs says our shared commitment 'to come to grips with real messages in theoretically productive ways.' Our work must be stubbornly loyal to the 'real messages,' always complex and situated; our work must also be 'theoretically productive,' aiming for precise and increasingly comprehensive conceptualizations. Thesis 2. Argument itself is however only one subset or aspect of the 'real messages' we ought to be examining. Since in Gricean terms all com- munication works by inducing the auditor to make specific inferences, it is tempting to reconstruct any communicative act as an argument with an inherent and (moreover) sound inferential structure. When, for example, Willard's hotel doorman scowls at the bum who wants to enter, the bum is supposed to infer that he should get out of there; it is tempting to say that that's the doorman's 'implicit' and 'nonverbal' argument (1983, p. 53). But this temptation must be resisted. The doorman has not made an argument. 'Arguments' as Jacobs puts it, are only those 'fundamentally linguistic entities that express in a special way propositions that stand in particular inferential relations to one another.' So not all discourse is argument, much less good argument, nor should it be interpreted as argument. Thesis 3. Nevertheless, careful attention to nonargumentative aspects of discourse is vital for argumentation studies, because nonargumentative
Despite various attempts to rectify matters, the internalism-externalism (I-E) debate in epistemology remains mired in serious confusion. I present a new account of this debate, one which fits well with entrenched views on the I-E distinction and illuminates the fundamental disagreements at the heart of the debate. Roughly speaking, the I-E debate is over whether or not certain of the necessary conditions of positive epistemic status are internal. But what is the sense of internal here? And of which conditions of which positive epistemic status are we speaking? I argue that an adequate answer to these questions requires reference to what I call the no-defeater condition which is satisfied by a subjects belief B just in case she does not believe that B is defeated. I close by stating succinctly the main positions taken in the I-E debate, identifying the basic points of disagreement and suggesting fruitful courses for future discussion.
In Biro and Siegel (1992) we argued that a theory of argumentation mustfully engage the normativity of judgments about arguments, and we developedsuch a theory. In this paper we further develop and defend our theory.
Normative pragmatics can bridge the differences between dialectical and rhetorical theories in a way that saves the central insights of both. Normative pragmatics calls attention to how the manifest strategic design of a message produces interpretive effects and interactional consequences. Argumentative analysis of messages should begin with the manifest persuasive rationale they communicate. But not all persuasive inducements should be treated as arguments. Arguments express with a special pragmatic force propositions where those propositions stand in particular inferential relations to one another. Normative pragmatics provides a framework within which varieties of propositional inference and pragmatic force may be kept straight. Normative pragmatics conceptualizes argumentative effectiveness in a way that integrates notions of rhetorical strategy and rhetorical situation with dialectical norms and procedures for reasonable deliberation. Strategic effectiveness should be seen in terms of maximizing the chances that claims and arguments will be reasonably evaluated, whether or not they are accepted. Procedural rationality should be seen in terms of adjustment to the demands of concrete circumstances. Two types of adjustment are illustrated: rhetorical strategies for framing the conditions for dialectical deliberation and rhetorical strategies for making do with limitations to dialectical deliberation.
Two authorities in argumentation theory present a view of argumentation as a means of resolving differences of opinion by testing the acceptability of the disputed positions. Their model of a “critical discussion” serves as a theoretical tool for analyzing, evaluating and producing argumentative discourse. This major contribution to the study of argumentation will be of particular value to professionals and graduate students in speech communication, informal logic, rhetoric, critical thinking, linguistics, and philosophy. © Frans H. van Eemeren and Henriette Greebe and Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Is there a duty to respond to objections in order to present a good argument? Ralph Johnson argues that there is such a duty, which he refers to as the dialectical tier of an argument. I deny the (alleged) duty primarily on grounds that it would exert too great a demand on arguers, harming argumentation practices. The valuable aim of responding to objections, which Johnsons dialectical tier is meant to satisfy, can be achieved in better ways, as argumentation is a social-epistemic activity.
La Concepció Retó del valor de la argumentació
- Amsterdam
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- L Bermejo-Luque
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Response to Hitchcock
- L Bermejo-Luque
Bermejo-Luque, L. 2007b. Response to Hitchcock. In Dissensus and the search for common ground:
Proceedings of the seventh OSSA conference on argumentation. Windsor: CD-ROM.
A Toulmian account of epistemic modals
- L Bermejo-Luque
Bermejo-Luque, L. 2009. A Toulmian account of epistemic modals (in preparation).
La Concepción Retórica del valor de la argumentación
- L Bermejo-Luque
Bermejo-Luque, L. 2007a. La Concepción Retórica del valor de la argumentación. In Estudios en
Argumentacio´n y Reto´rica. Teorı´as Contempora´neas y Aplicaciones, ed. C. Santibáñez and B. Riffo,
39-56. Santiago de Chile: Publicaciones de laUniversidad de Concepción.
Argument, inference and dialectic
- R C Pinto
Pinto, R.C. 2001. Argument, inference and dialectic. Dordrecht: Kluwer.