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Abstract
A pervasive aspect of human communication and sociality is argumentation: the practice of making and criticizing reasons in the context of doubt and disagreement. Argumentation underpins and shapes the decision-making, problem-solving, and conflict management which are fundamental to human relationships. However, argumentation is predominantly conceptualized as two parties arguing pro and con positions with each other in one place. This dyadic bias undermines the capacity to engage argumentation in complex communication in contemporary, digital society. This book offers an ambitious alternative course of inquiry for the analysis, evaluation, and design of argumentation as polylogue: various actors arguing over many positions across multiple places. Taking up key aspects of the twentieth-century revival of argumentation as a communicative, situated practice, the polylogue framework engages a wider range of discourses, messages, interactions, technologies, and institutions necessary for adequately engaging the contemporary entanglement of argumentation and complex communication in human activities.
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How do adherents to hegemonic discourses construe and respond to radical arguments by activists? To address the question, we examined how adherents to hegemonic climate change discourses react to a climate activist’s arguments. In interviews conducted with corporate actors of low-carbon transitions, we used a video excerpt to elicit critical reactions to an activist’s argumentation on carbon offsetting. We used the critical reactions as an index of interviewees’ reception of the activist’s case and pragma-dialectical theory to analyze them. We found that interviewees advanced four types of criticism concerning individual agency, awareness-raising, neutralization, and financial instruments. We discuss their inter-relations and how interviewees construed the activist’s argumentation in ways that evaded his more antagonistic claims.
This paper presents the analysis of the Hungarian nuclear expansion controversy using a conceptual framework that links strategic maneuvering with an extended polylogical controversy and evaluates the strategic maneuvering of political, environmentalist and expert actors. The paper aims to show that the three aspects of strategic maneuvering (audience demand, topical potential, presentational devices) are flexible enough that they can be analyzed when the object of study is not a spatially and temporally localized argumentative situation, but a decade-long debate with multiple actors. In 2014, Hungary signed a deal with Russia to finance 80% of the investment costs and supply two new reactors to maintain the 40–50% of nuclear energy in the national energy production.
Conclusions of theoretical reasoning are assertions—or at least speech acts belonging to the class of assertives, such as hypotheses, predictions or estimates. What, however, are the conclusions of practical reasoning? Employing the concepts of speech act theory, in this paper I investigate which speech acts we perform when we’re done with an instance of a practical argument and present its result in a linguistic form. To this end, I first offer a detailed scheme of practical argument suitable for an external pragmatic account (rather than an internal cognitive account). Resorting to actual examples, I then identify a class of action-inducing speech acts as characteristic conclusions of practical argument. I argue that these speech acts—promises, orders, pieces of advice, proposals, and others—differ chiefly depending on the agent of the action induced (me, us, you, them) and their illocutionary strength.
This paper addresses the following question: Can one and the same utterance token, in one unique speech situation, intentionally and conventionally perform a plurality of illocutionary acts? While some of the recent literature has considered such a possibility (Sbisà, in: Capone, Lo Piparo, Carapezza (eds) Perspectives on pragmatics and philosophy. Springer, Cham, pp 227–244, 2013; Johnson in Synthese 196(3):1151–1165, 2019), I build a case for it by drawing attention to common conversational complexities unrecognized in speech acts analysis. Traditional speech act theory treats communication as: (1) a dyadic exchange between a Speaker and a Hearer who (2) trade illocutionary acts endowed with one and only one primary force. I first challenge assumption (2) by discussing two contexts where plural illocutionary forces are performed in dyadic discussions: dilemmatic deliberations and strategic ambiguity. Further, I challenge assumption (1) by analyzing poly-adic discussions, where a speaker can target various participants with different illocutionary acts performed via the same utterance. Together, these analyses defend illocutionary pluralism as a significant but overlooked fact about communication. I conclude by showing how some phenomena recently analyzed in speech act theory—back-door speech acts (Langton, in: Fogal, Harris, Moss (eds) New work on speech acts. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 144–164, 2018) and dog-whistles (Saul, in: Fogal, Harris, Moss (eds) New work on speech acts. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 360–383, 2018)—implicitly presuppose illocutionary pluralism without recognizing it.
This paper examines how fear and insecurity are deployed in disputes over austerity. Drawing on discussions on the cultures of fear and on the social and political process which weaves fear and insecurity into the fabric of society, we analyse how austerity was justified and opposed in the Finnish parliament in 2015. We bring out different renditions of fear in five registers of justification that were deployed in the dispute. The registers evoked fear with threats to national sovereignty, dangers to societal security, and threats of harm and vulnerability. In addition, the registers evoked fear by drawing rhetorical force from the welfare state identity and by intertwining fear with political trust. Even though the renditions of fear played an important role, our findings also speak against straightforward interpretation of the politics of austerity as an example of moving into a culture of fear and insecurity.
In light of the ongoing public controversy surrounding fashion sustainability, this paper sets out to identify misalignments that relate to the definitions of sustainable fashion. It does so by examining the discourse of different agents in this polylogical argumentation - fashion companies and the European Parliament as well as citizens, small brands and NGOs - as revealed through documents and tweets published online. Our findings show misalignments in the opening stage of the argumentative discussion at the level of explicit and implicit definitions of sustainability as well as in how the agents responsible are discursively portrayed. We argue that the existence of these misalignments may explain the ongoing controversy surrounding sustainable fashion: the different actors do not share univocal starting points and representations of this phenomenon. Methodologically, this paper also advances research on argumentative polylogues, by demonstrating a method for comparing argumentation by different actors using different data sources.
This essay has two connected theses. First, that given the contrastivity of reasons, a form of dialectical adversariality of argument follows. This dialectical adversariality accounts for a broad variety of both argumentative virtues and vices. Second, in light of this contrastivist view of reasons, the primary objection to argumentative adversarialism, the winners-and-losers problem, can be answered.
Rational agency is of central interest to philosophy, with evolutionary accounts of the cognitive underpinnings of rational agency being much debated. Yet one building block—our ability to argue—is less studied, except Mercier and Sperber’s argumentative theory (Mercier and Sperber in Behav Brain Sci 34(02):57–74, https://doi.org/10.1017/s0140525x10000968, 2011, in The enigma of reason. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2017). I discuss their account and argue that it faces a lacuna: It cannot explain the origin of argumentation as a series of small steps that reveal how hominins with baseline abilities of the trait in question could turn into full-blown owners of it. This paper then provides a first sketch of the desired evolutionary trajectory. I argue that reasoning coevolves with the ability to coordinate behavior. After that, I establish a model based on niche construction theory. This model yields a story with following claims. First, argumentation came into being during the Oldowan period as a tool for justifying information ‘out of sight’. Second, argumentation enabled hominins to solve collective action problems with collaborators out of sight, which stabilized argumentative practices eventually. Archeological findings are discussed to substantiate both claims. I conclude with outlining changes resultant from my model for the concept of rational agency.
In “Deductivism as an Interpretative Strategy: A Reply to Groarke’s Defense of Reconstructive Deductivism,” David Godden (2005) distinguished two notions of deductivism. On the one hand, as an interpretative thesis, deductivism is the view that all-natural language argumentation must be interpreted as being deductive. On the other hand, as an evaluative thesis, deductivism is the view that for a conclusion to follow, it has to follow of necessity from the premises—or, in other words, that being a good inference implies being deductive. The main goal of this paper is to show that evaluative deductivism is wrong.
The four contributions in this special issue on Argumentation Through Languages and Cultures deals with clear cases of such argumentative situations as they develop in different cultures and language groups. One of these papers comes from the Inuit oral culture; three papers from written cultures, Chinese, Muslim and Indian cultures. Among written cultures, the Indian and Muslim cultures have developed sophisticated theories of argument, while the Chinese culture, according to Graham (Disputers of the Tao—Philosophical argument in Ancient China, Open Court, Chicago, 1989, p. 169), combined “a sense of rigorous proof with the indifference to logical forms”.
In this paper, I develop a speech-act based account of presumptions. Using a score-keeping model of illocutionary games, I argue that presumptions construed as speech acts can be grouped into three illocutionary act types defined by reference to how they affect the state of a conversation. The paper is organized into two parts. In the first one, I present the score-keeping model of speech act dynamics; in particular, I distinguish between two types of mechanisms—the direct mechanism of illocution and the indirect one of accommodation—that underlie the functioning of illocutionary acts. In the second part, I use the presented model to distinguish between (1) the unilateral act of individual presumption, the point of which is to shift the burden of proof by making the hearer committed to justifying his refusal to endorse the proposition communicated by the speaker, whenever he refuses to endorse it, (2) the bilateral act of joint presumption—‘bilateral’ in that it is performed jointly by at least two conversing agents—the function of which is to confer on the proposition endorsed by the speaker the normative status of jointly recognized though tentative acceptability, and (3) the indirect or back-door act of collective presumption, the purpose of which is to sustain rules and practices to which the conversing agents defer the felicity of their conversational moves.
Peter Ludlow argues that perspectival content, or what some call indexical content, is ineliminable and ubiquitous, running through our accounts of human action and emotions, perception, normative behavior, and even our theories of computation and information. While such content may be ineliminable, it also gives rise to philosophical puzzles—particularly those involving reporting these contents from different perspectival positions. Such puzzles have led some to try and abandon perspectival content, and others to despair of communication across perspectival positions. Ludlow argues that communication across diverse perspectival positions is not only possible, but routine, and develops a theory of interperspectival content to explain how it is accomplished.
In this paper, we analyze the argumentative strategies deployed in the Ecomodernist Manifesto , published in 2015 by a group of leading environmental thinkers. We draw on pragma-dialectics and Perelman’s rhetoric to characterize manifesto as a genre of practical argumentation. Our goal is to explore the relation of manifesto as a discursive genre to the argumentative structures and techniques used in the Ecomodernist Manifesto . We therefore take into scrutiny the elements of practical argumentation employed in the manifesto and describe the polylogical strategies of dissociation in negotiating the ecological value of nature and the modernist value of progress.
Common sense tells me I can control my life to some extent; should I then, faced with a logical argument for fatalism, reject common sense? There seems to be no place in a physical theory of the universe for the sensory experiences of colours, taste and smells, yet I know I have these experiences. In this book, Gilbert Ryle explores the conflicts that arise in everyday life and shows that the either/or which such dilemmas seem to suggest is a false dilemma: one side of the dilemma does not deny what we know to be true on the other side. This classic book has been revived in a new series livery for twenty-first-century readers, featuring a specially commissioned Preface written by Barry Stroud.
Since a clear account of the fallacy of false disjunctive syllogism is missing in the literature, the fallacy is defined and its three types are differentiated after some preliminaries. Section 4 further elaborates the differentia specifica for each of the three types by analyzing relevant argument criticism of each, as well as the related profiles of dialogue. After defining false disjunctive syllogisms, it becomes possible to distinguish between a false dilemma and a false disjunctive syllogism: section 5 analyzes their similarities (which explains why the fallacies are often confused with one another) and section 6 explains their differences.
I challenge two key assumptions of speech act theory, as applied to argumentation: illocutionary monism, grounded in the idea each utterance has only one (primary) illocutionary force, and the dyadic reduction, which models interaction as a dyadic affair between only two agents (speaker-hearer, proponentopponent). I show how major contributions to speech act inspired study of argumentation adhere to these assumptions even as illocutionary pluralism in argumentative polylogues is a significant empirical fact in need of theoretical attention. I demonstrate this with two examples where arguers interacting with multiple persons convey plural, argumentatively relevant illocutionary forces. Understanding illocutionary pluralism in argumentative polylogues also affords a better account of fallacious and manipulative discourse.
This comprehensive account of the concept and practices of deduction is the first to bring together perspectives from philosophy, history, psychology and cognitive science, and mathematical practice. Catarina Dutilh Novaes draws on all of these perspectives to argue for an overarching conceptualization of deduction as a dialogical practice: deduction has dialogical roots, and these dialogical roots are still largely present both in theories and in practices of deduction. Dutilh Novaes' account also highlights the deeply human and in fact social nature of deduction, as embedded in actual human practices; as such, it presents a highly innovative account of deduction. The book will be of interest to a wide range of readers, from advanced students to senior scholars, and from philosophers to mathematicians and cognitive scientists.
This study extends the rhetorical arena approach to crisis communication with an argumentative perspective. A rhetorical activity in which reasons are communicated to justify and obtain acceptance for a claim, argumentation plays a crucial role in (re)legitimizing corporate trustworthiness following a crisis episode. Arguments supporting or rejecting trust claims do not only pervade the corporate crisis response message (e.g., an apology), but also the public reactions in the rhetorical arena, i.e., the multivocal conversational space that opens up in a crisis context. Therefore, rhetorical arena crisis communication takes the form of an argumentative polylogue in which corporate trustworthiness features as the main issue. We develop a method for the analysis of trust-related polylogues occurring in rhetorical (sub-)arenas. Unlike existing methods, like tone analysis of online comments, our approach enables to examine, more specifically, the reasons organizations and stakeholders present for or against trust. This, in turn, provides an enhanced method to assess the effectiveness of a crisis response strategy. In order to illustrate our approach, we elaborate a case study based on an apologetic article published by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and a sample of public reactions appearing on media articles and on subsequent online discussion websites.
In this paper, I preliminarily characterize and evaluate two variants of a pattern of collective argumentative criticism in online political discussion forums available through Google Groups. In the first variant-horizontal criticism-a group of arguers jointly objects to distinct elements of complex argumentation put forward by their opponent. In the second variant-vertical criticism-a group of arguers acts in sequence by deepening the previously voiced criticisms against one element of their opponent's argumentation. Such collective criticism of arguments is to a certain extent the reverse of a pattern of joint production of arguments, or a “tag-team argument, “identified by analysts of argument in small face-to-face groups. I argue that collective criticism can enhance public scrutiny of opinions expressed in informal deliberation, yet it can also lead to inconclusive argumentative discussions.
Conceptual engineering should be understood as the design, implementation, and evaluation of concepts. Conceptual engineering includes or should include de novo conceptual engineering (designing a new concept) as well as conceptual re-engineering (fixing an old concept). It should also include heteronymous (different-word) as well as homonymous (same-word) conceptual engineering. I discuss the importance and the difficulty of these sorts of conceptual engineering in philosophy and elsewhere.
In the United States, political argumentation occurs in institutionalized settings and the broader public forum, in efforts to resolve conflict and efforts to foster it, in settings with time limits and controversies that extend over centuries. From the ratification of the U.S. Constitution to the presidency of Barack Obama, this book contains twenty studies of U.S. political argumentation, grouped under four themes: early American political discourse, Abraham Lincoln’s political argumentation, argumentation about foreign policy, and public policy argumentation since the 1960s. Deploying methods of rhetorical criticism, argument analysis and evaluation, the studies are rich in contextual grounding and critical perspective. They integrate the European emphasis on politics as an argumentative context with the U.S. tradition of public address studies. Two essays have never before been published. The others are retrieved from journals and books published between 1979 and 2014. The introductory essay is new for this volume.
This volume collects Davidson's seminal contributions to the philosophy of language. Its key insight is that the concept of truth can shed light on various issues connected to meaning: Davidson, who assumes a partial and primitive understanding of the truth predicate, reverses Tarski who had succeeded in elucidating the concept of truth by taking the notion of ‘translation’ (preservation of meaning) for granted. In the first of five subsections into which the papers are thematically organized, Davidson develops the systematic constraints a theory of meaning has to meet and shows how an approach to semantics based on the concept of truth meets these demands better than any rival approach. Sect. 2 explores whether one can give semantic analyses of quotation, intensional contexts, and force within the extensional limitations of the truth‐theoretic framework. Viewing the theories of meaning developed in the first section as empirical, Sect. 3 inquires into their testability: can we verify these theories without presupposing concepts too closely aligned to that of meaning, interpretation, and synonymy? Davidson develops constitutive constraints on applying truth theories to interpret the speech behaviour of others: we have to view utterances for the most part as assertions of the speaker's beliefs and those beliefs as largely true and consistent (he terms this the ‘Principle of Charity’). Sect. 4 combines these interpretative constraints with the semantic concept of truth developed in Sect. 1 to tackle metaphysical issues. Davidson claims that truth is not relative to conceptual schemes but only to languages that can be shown to be largely correct about the world; consequently, by studying those languages via the semantic concept of truth we can derive ontological conclusions. Sect. 5 explores aspects of linguistic usage that form a particular threat to theories of meaning (such as Davidson's) that focus on the literal meaning of sentences: for truth theory to be adequate as a general theory of language, it must give valid accounts of sentence mood, illocutionary force, and metaphorical meaning.
The analysis of decision making under uncertainty has again become a major focus of interest. This volume presents contributions from leading specialists in different fields and provides a summary and synthesis of work in this area. It is based on a conference held at the Harvard Business School. The book brings together the different approaches to decision making - normative, descriptive, and prescriptive - which largely correspond to different disciplinary interests. Mathematicians have concentrated on rational procedures for decision making - how people should make decisions. Psychologists have examined how poeple do make decisions, and how far their behaviour is compatible with any rational model. Operations researchers study the application of decision models to actual problems. Throughout, the aim is to present the current state of research and its application and also to show how the different disciplinary approaches can inform one another and thus lay the foundations for the integrated analysis of decision making. The book will be of interest to researchers, teachers - for use as background reading for a decision theory course - students, and consultants and others involved in the practical application of the analysis of decision making. It will be of interest to specialists and students in statistics, mathematics, economics, psychology and the behavioural sciences, operations research, and management science.
This book reconstructs the tradition of dialectic from Aristotle's Topics , its founding text, up to its "renaissance" in 16th century Italy, and focuses on the role of dialectic in the production of knowledge. Aristotle defines dialectic as a structured exchange of questions and answers and thus links it to dialogue and disputation, while Cicero develops a mildly skeptical version of dialectic, identifies it with reasoning in utramque partem and connects it closely to rhetoric. These two interpretations constitute the backbone of the living tradition of dialectic and are variously developed in the Renaissance against the Medieval background. The book scrutinizes three separate contexts in which these developments occur: Rudolph Agricola's attempt to develop a new dialectic in close connection with rhetoric, Agostino Nifo's thoroughly Aristotelian approach and its use of the newly translated commentaries of Alexander of Aphrodisias and Averroes, and Carlo Sigonio's literary theory of the dialogue form, which is centered around Aristotle's Topics . Today, Aristotelian dialectic enjoys a new life within argumentation theory: the final chapter of the book briefly revisits these contemporary developments and draws some general epistemological conclusions linking the tradition of dialectic to a fallibilist view of knowledge.
Herbert Simon's classic work on artificial intelligence in the expanded and updated third edition from 1996, with a new introduction by John E. Laird.
Herbert Simon's classic and influential The Sciences of the Artificial declares definitively that there can be a science not only of natural phenomena but also of what is artificial. Exploring the commonalities of artificial systems, including economic systems, the business firm, artificial intelligence, complex engineering projects, and social plans, Simon argues that designed systems are a valid field of study, and he proposes a science of design. For this third edition, originally published in 1996, Simon added new material that takes into account advances in cognitive psychology and the science of design while confirming and extending the book's basic thesis: that a physical symbol system has the necessary and sufficient means for intelligent action.
Simon won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1978 for his research into the decision-making process within economic organizations and the Turing Award (considered by some the computer science equivalent to the Nobel) with Allen Newell in 1975 for contributions to artificial intelligence, the psychology of human cognition, and list processing. The Sciences of the Artificial distills the essence of Simon's thought accessibly and coherently. This reissue of the third edition makes a pioneering work available to a new audience.
Philosophical argumentation presents a puzzle for pragma-dialectics: both from the perspective of 2500 years of history and from what we can ourselves witness in the present, philosophers seem to be exclusively intent on strengthening and elaborating their differences of opinion. Nothing like that happens in other academic endeavors. This is an anomaly in pragma-dialectical terms because, if philosophical discussants do not want to resolve their differences of opinion, then they would seem to be unreasonable by definition. In other words, no critical discussion would be possible in philosophy because of the peculiar way philosophers argue. The anomaly can, however, be dispelled by using the elementary distinction between single and multiple differences of opinion. It is argued that, in spite of occasional appearances, all philosophical differences of opinion are multiple . From that it is argued that the ‘institutional point’ ( van Eemeren, 2010 ) of philosophy is to create the broadest map of arguable positions. If this is true, then philosophers may after all be pursuing a higher-order kind of consensus, bearing in particular on how many arguments can be marshaled around any given philosophical question.
Cambridge Core - Media, Mass Communication - The Practice of Argumentation - by David Zarefsky
We all know that speech is harmful but we need to be as clear as possible about what the harms are and how the speech in question brings about those harms. Clarity on these two points is important for jurisprudential reasons. It is also important for social, political, and moral reasons. Just Words identifies a previously overlooked mechanism by which speech constitutes, rather than merely causes, harm. Speech constitutes harm when it enacts a norm that prescribes that harm (so that following the norm brings about the harm). Just Words argues that there is a ubiquitous but hidden way that speech enacts norms thereby highlighting important but previously overlooked constitutive connections between speech and harm. The investigation begins in the kinematics of conversation where it is argued that conversational contributions (surreptitiously but routinely) enact highly localized norms for the very conversation to which they contribute. It is then argued that the phenomenon generalizes to extra-conversational social practices. Just Words explores many categories of speech including sexist remarks, racist hate speech, pornography, verbal triggers for stereotype threat, micro-aggressions, political dog whistles, SLAM poetry, and even the hanging of posters. It also explores a variety of harms including oppression, subordination, discrimination, domination, harassment, and marginalization. In addition to exploring how speech enacts such harms, Just Words also explores ways to remedy those harms.