ISSA Proceedings 1998 – Looking At Argumentation Through Communicative Intentions: Ways To Define Fallacies

ISSAlogo19981. American print media argumentation and the notion of fallacy
The paper has three closely related purposes to fulfill. The first main purpose is to identify American print media arguers’ communicative strategies; establish a cause-effect relationship between the illocutionary forces of argumentative discourses as illocutionary act complexes and their perlocutionary effects; and, as stated in the title of the paper, to present ways to define fallacies by looking at argumentation through communicative intentions of the authors of the discourses. The second purpose is to present a tool with which it would be possible to describe the means by which emotional appeal is created. The third purpose is to make a clear distinction between an illocutionary force of asserting/claiming and that of stating, and demonstrate the importance of this distinction in the study of argumentation.
In order to identify fallacies, we should first make it clear how we define the notion of fallacy in this paper. To do that, we have to define the type of dialogue we deal with in the American print media. D. Walton identifies ten specific types of dialogue according to the goals parties seek to achieve. A dialogue is defined as “an exchange of speech acts between two speech partners in turn-taking sequence aimed at a collective goal” (Walton 1992: 19). With the exception of the genre of interview, whose analysis will not be a focus of our study since the goal of an interview is seeking information, not arguing points of view, American print media do not contain direct dialogues but rather are sites of a deferred type of dialogue where the two parties’ reactions are presented in monologues separated from each other in time and space. However, this type of dialogue allows American print media authors to carry on an ongoing discussion of various issues. The real target audience of an American print media arguer is not an “official” antagonist in discussion, but the reader who is presumed to be a real antagonist in dispute, since to communicate news and opinion to the reader are the two main mass media functions. The real goal of both parties in most American print media dialogues is not to arrive at the truth of a matter, but to win a dispute. In other words we witness in the American print media a deferred persuasion dialogue. In terms of extent to which the American print media deferred dialogue resembles the critical discussion in the format of a direct dialogue, three types of American print media discussion can be identified.

The first type of American print media discussion, the most similar to critical discussion, occurs in the genre of letters to the editor whose authors react directly either to an editorial or to another letter to the editor. The dialogue is focused on one specific topic, and the parties of the dialogue advocate opposite positions on the issue. Obviously, both parties in the discussion are rather concerned to defeat the official active opponent but the main goal, however, of either party still remains to achieve persuasion of the passive reader. The second type of American print media discussion is manifest on the Pro/Con section of a newspaper or magazine. Again, the discussion focuses on one particular topic. The arguers do not react directly to an opposing discourse because neither party is familiar with the particular discourse their discourse will be juxtaposed with. While they are only asked to submit a text in support of a position in the argument they advocate, because of the specificity of the topic, they often show good knowledge of opposing arguments and rebut them. The third type of American print media discussion may be reconstructed on a larger scale across various American print media sources. Publications can be found in different American newspapers or magazines that focus on a number of related issues, including an issue common to both opposing parties, but one will find almost no rebuttals of specific arguments contained in the opposing discourse. Obviously, the last type of American print media discussion is the least similar to the critical discussion we deal with in real dialogue.

In this paper we shall consider two discourses contained in two articles published in the Health magazine’s Pro/Con section (September 1993). According to our classification this discussion belongs to the second type of American print media discussion. Both parties’ primary goals are to achieve persuasion of the reader. That is why we ought to use a rhetorical audience-oriented discourse analysis rather than a dialectical resolution-oriented one. Since, therefore, our interest will be centered on the factors affecting the cogency of argumentative discourse, we will use the traditional “rhetorical” notion of fallacy where a fallacy is an argument that “seems to be valid but is not so” (Hamblin 1970: 12). Read more

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ISSA Proceedings 1998 – How Rhetoric Became A Science

ISSAlogo1998Our day has witnessed the establishment of new disciplines running from women’s, to ethnic, to multi-cultural studies, to name but a few representative of this academic current. From antiquity to the end of the 19th century the aspect of Argumentation Theory which was understood as rhetoric was an officially recognised discipline. It was recognised as one of the traditional seven Liberal Arts. How did rhetoric achieve this status? What is there to be learned from the rationales that raised it to this status which is relevant to coming to grips with the status, inclusive of their justifications, their need for models, their self-understandings, of the new disciplines of our day? Can a recovery of the grounds for the establishment of the traditional liberal arts shed light on these and associated questions? To answer, however tentatively, these questions is the aim of this paper.
The seven liberal arts, the quadrivium and trivium, have had an extraordinary run. For two millennia in one form or another they provide the backdrop or the foreground of higher education. But of these seven there is only one which has a source text whose name is coextensive with the art. Aristotle’s Rhetoric and the trivial art of Rhetoric share this common trait. Moreover through all of the vicissitudes of the history of rhetoric from antiquity through the Christian ages, dark and middle, through the renaissance, and into the modern age, Aristotle’s text in sometimes hidden and other times manifest ways has been a source and authority for the discipline of rhetoric.
In order to appreciate what Aristotle accomplished for rhetoric with his Rhetoric it is necessary to orient ourselves along an appropriate chronological parameter. Looked at retrospectively from the perspective of 1998 or of 1298, in the decades of William of Moerbke’s translation of this work into Latin, it’s a done thing. But looked at prospectively, with the assumption that there is nothing in the text which suggests Aristotle anticipated future developments one can search for the conditions which transformed a sometime misprised techne into a Liberal Art. With that said, allow me to focus on a few selected ways of coming to grips with these issues. Read more

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ISSA Proceedings 1998 – Root Metaphors And Critical Inquiry Into Social Controversies: Redeeming Stephen Pepper In And For The Study Of Argument

ISSAlogo1998Human communication is an unfinished social and cultural project undertaken anew by each generation. Yet the constellation of controversy on both large and small scales may be discovered when competing understandings of communication come at odds within and across fora. Whatever the particular or local stakes of a controversy, the understandings which ground arguments advancing a particular cause or point of view put at risk by opening up to interest and inspection the modes of communication and styles of thinking which are imbricated in the discussion. This essay examines four root metaphors which ground versions of communication in certain values: mechanism, formism, contextualism, and organicism.
Critical inquiry into controversy takes upon itself the responsibility of engagement, that is of reading what the debate has to say about reason and communication as social practices. Reading a controversy requires a descriptive phase where the world is explicated in its coherence and incoherence, agreements and disagreements, shared assumptions and contested differences by advocates. The reading is an examination of how disagreement and communication rendered possible by the discourses.
One approach taken in recent studies of argument has been to develop the notion of “argument communities, “with overlapping, multiple contextualization of communication conventions, genres and rules. This notion appears to offer a situated view of argument practices compatible with the controversial. But however helpful such work can be in disclosing diversity and combating hidden analytical prejudices, it does not go far enough to assess what is at stake in the communicative engagement. What does the text put at risk?
Critical intervention into controversies is necessary because categories among reason and communication are themselves put at risk through practice. Root metaphors can open the arc of controversy by offering grounds for the critique of practice inconsistent with the metaphor. Controversies exhibit opposition as a kind of drawing from or occupation of root metaphors. Indeed, the purification of root metaphors, or reduction of argument to a single ground, can itself become an object of controversy. Root metaphors as places for a dynamic of controversy account for institutional arguments insofar as a root metaphor offers a line of argument that can integrate the practices of an institution while leaving open ever greater spaces for opposition. The drawing from alternative groundings gives to controversy its unstable alliances of motives and its combination of “fruitful ambiguity” where people support the same thing but for different reasons. Finally, communication itself is grounded in world hypotheses that employ root metaphors as ways of making acts of discourse for self and others.
The emphasis in this essay upon the relationship between root metaphors and communicative practice differentiates our approach sharply from previous appropriations of Pepper’s categories within schemes of interpretation that make the metaphors incommensurable, and thus incapable of intellectual intercourse. White, in particular reduces Pepper’s root metaphors from cultural resources to particular forms or notions of historical consciousness that are assumed by, and characterize, the philosophical thinking of particular historians (13). They become tools to classify historiographic specimens
according to their qualities as cognitively responsible discourses. What is at stake for the study of argument practices in the dispute between Pepper’s and White’s appropriations of root metaphors is the very flexibility of those practices as conceived by the positioning of the metaphors within their theories. White’s reduction of the metaphors to mere perspectives of individual historians assumed without further argument makes the metaphors incommensurable in practice. It assumes that the root metaphor explanations in historical narratives can be communicated with no risks of failure. The contextualizing discussions in Pepper’s book about the root metaphors opens space for an alternative interpretation of them as sites of production whose ability to shape practice are always in jeopardy because of the interplay of dependence and autonomy in particular institutional disputes. Read more

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ISSA Proceedings 1998 – Good Argumentation Without Resolution

ISSAlogo19981. Introduction
Three lines of inquiry have converged on a single conception of the function, end or aim of argumentation: that argumentation is the rational method for resolving differences of opinion. This conception has of course received its clearest expression in the works of our conference hosts, the Amsterdam school of pragma-dialectics. “Inspired by Karl Popper’s critical rationalism” for scientific inquiry (van Eemeren, Grootendorst, Henkemans et al. 1996 (“FAT”): 274), the pragma-dialecticians have grounded their project in an ideal model of argumentation, the critical discussion. Critical discussions serve to resolve disagreements in a way that is “recognized by both parties as correct, justified, and rational” (van Eemeren, Grootendorst, Jackson & Jacobs 1993 (“RAD”): 25). A standpoint is advanced; criticisms are raised against it and responses developed; when the opponent is convinced to accept or the proponent convinced to withdraw the standpoint, the process concludes. In the pragma-dialectical view, argumentation is to be evaluated according to its contribution to the critical discussion, that is, its contribution to resolving the disagreement. Rules of argumentative engagement are justified because they secure this goal and particular argumentative moves excluded as fallacies because they hinder it (van Eemeren & Grootendorst 1992 (“ACF”): 104).
The same conception has emerged within the tradition of scholarship associated with the teaching and practice of collegiate debate in the United States, and especially in the work of Douglas Ehninger. Ehninger starts from the Deweyian notion that we best solve social problems through group discussion and argues that this ideal encompasses also the more adversarial procedure of debate. Debate too is a critical – that is, reflective, reason-actualizing – and cooperative method for settling differences (Ehninger 1958: 27). “The function of debate,” Ehninger affirms, “is to enable men to make collective choices and decisions critically when inferential questions become subjects for dispute” (Ehninger & Brockriede 1963: 15). This is a normative, not an empirical, claim. If debate does not always resolve disagreements, it is a result of human failings, not of a weakness in the method; participants in a debate must discipline themselves to meet its strictures, not use it as an instrument to achieve victory (Ibid.: 17-9).
A third line of inquiry has been pursued by political theorists swayed by Habermas (cf. Habermas 1996, Cohen, 1989, Manin 1987). Seeking to establish the legitimacy of democratic political institutions, some theorists have shifted from looking for principles to which all rational citizens must consent to looking for procedures through which such a universal and rational consensus can be attained. These, they agree, are procedures of speech, and in particular, the procedures of deliberation. Though other speech acts are involved in deliberation – for example, speech securing the free flow of information throughout society – it is clear that one of the central activities of deliberation is arguing. The deliberation theorists thus implicitly adopt a conception of argumentation in which argumentation ideally performs the function of rationally and therefore legitimately resolving differences of opinion. Read more

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ISSA Proceedings 1998 – Argument, Adversariality, And Controversy

ISSAlogo1998In this paper I wish to explore the relationship between adversariality and controversy. My interest in this subject stems from two sources: first from those feminist critics who have claimed the fact that arguing, and thus derivatively, arguments, have an unduly adversarial caste; second, from my conviction that controversy is in many respects necessary and healthy.
For those not familiar with the feminist allegations, the following choice passage may offer a sense of their charges: “Without batting an eye the ancient rhetors, the men of the church, and scholars of argument from Bacon, Blair and Whately to Toulmin, Perelman and McLuhan, have taken as a given that it is proper and even necessary human function to attempt to change others.” According to this author, argument is the essential part of a belligerent context in which contestants seek mastery of each other. To argue is to adopt a male centered verbal means of exercising power over others (Gearhart in Hynes, 1995: 464).
Respondents to such allegations have tended to agree with the feminist assumption that adversariality is negative, while contending that adversariality is nevertheless not an intrinsic and inevitable feature of argument (Ayim in Govier, 1988; Ayim, 1991; Nye 1991; Govier, 1995; Cohen 1995). Such respondents – present author included – have pointed out that despite the prevalence of militaristic metaphors for describing argument, non-militaristic metaphors do exist. And people may offer arguments in recognition of difference and out of respect for those who do not share their views.
Reflecting on adversariality, which like many others I had assumed to be of negative value, and controversy, which like some others, I had assumed to have important positive value, I came to ask myself whether adversariality was a necessary element of controversy – whether, in effect, my views on adversariality and controversy were consistent.

In the fall of 1997 Stephen Toulmin gave a lecture in Amsterdam. He called his lecture “The Importance of Dissent,” but it had been advertised under the title “The Importance of Controversy.” Toulmin’s lecture dealt with political dissent, and the importance for societies of allowing that dissent. Toulmin mentioned the many intellectuals, including Canada’s Charles Taylor, who are currently stressing the importance of community and cultural identity. He noted that the quest for community and roots may go too far in the direction of exclusivism, cultural conformity, and even virulent nationalism. Toulmin noted that leaders may take on power and seek to insulate people from alternative currents of thought. In his lecture, he argued that dissent and dissenters are especially important  for avoiding conformity and exclusivism, and for the building of bridges and establishment of common ground between different communities and groups. In short, Toulmin defended the political and ethical value of dissent.
I had expected Toulmin to address a rather different range of questions. While contemplating the advertised title, I had come to wonder about the value of intellectual controversy and the relationship between controversy and adversariality. But Toulmin had his own ideas and did not do my work for me. Thus I must face the task myself. Read more

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ISSA Proceedings 1998 – Normative Argumentation In A Pluralist World

ISSAlogo1998In this paper I discuss a problem for normative reasoning which arises from the particular circumstances of a pluralist world. I attempt to clarify the nature of the problem and consider possible responses to it. I then make suggestions about the form and content which a solution to the problem must possess.
In section 1 I introduce three simple thought experiments as an aid to fixing the nature of the problem. In section 2 I distinguish universalist responses from those of a more extreme form, and indicate why universalist responses are preferable. In section 3 I suggest that the problem is a strictly normative one rather than a strictly moral one. In section 4 I point out the difficulties in some recent universalist theories. In section 5 I propose a universalist theory based on the materiality of human beings.

1. The pluralist context
In order to see why normative argumentation becomes problematic in a pluralist world, it is useful to conduct the following three thought experiments.
1. Imagine that the world contains only two human communities. They are geographically separated and their members never come into contact or even know of one another’s existence. Community A is deeply religious, and its members observe a strict sabbatarianism. They also believe that it is natural for women to be the subordinates of men, so that obedience is regarded as an appropriate relation between a woman and her husband, and women are barred from the same kind of participation in public life as men. Finally, they regard abortion as one form of murder, and treat it as such. Community B is wholly secular. Its members believe that they have a right to dispose of their leisure time as they see fit as long as they do not infringe the right of others to act similarly. They believe that women and men are equal and strive to ensure that women are represented in public office in just the same way as men. They believe that a woman has a right to control over her own body, and regard the choice of abortion at will as one manifestation of that right.
2. Imagine now that members of A and B do come into contact, but in a peripheral way. Perhaps they have occasion to trade and in that way they come to learn about their differing views about the world, but otherwise they continue to live their lives separately from one another.
3. Imagine finally that there continue to be A persons and B persons but that there are no longer two separated communities. There is just one geographical area, and A persons may live next door to B persons.

In example (1) there is, in one clear sense, disagreement between communities A and B. Their respective members hold beliefs which are the contradictories of one another. In another clear sense there is no disagreement. Since they do not even know of one another’s existence, there is no occasion when an A person makes a claim which a B person then goes on to deny.
In example (2) there is liable to be disagreement in the second sense as well as the first. A persons and B persons may well take issue with one another where they differ, so that one will deny what the other asserts. But if we imagine that contact between the communities is minimal, the disagreement may not issue in conflict of any further kind.
In example (3) there will not merely be disagreement in the two senses distinguished. There will be practical difficulties directly connected with the beliefs of A persons and B persons. In acting on the respective beliefs they hold, A persons and B persons will come into conflict. They will be respectively committed to realising states of their world which cannot jointly be realised, and those commitments will arise directly from their beliefs. Read more

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