ISSA Proceedings 1998 – A General Theory Of Public Argumentation: Death And Rebirth?

• by: Bruce E. Gronbeck - The University of Iowa

For some time, coteries of philosophers, rhetoricians, social theorists, and various other students of public reasoning have thought and written about the possibility of resurrecting the presumably dead practice of rational public argumentation. They have sought, in the words of James Crosswhite (1996: 70), “not to expose [public arguments] for the wretched things they are, but to reveal the intrinsic hopes carried by the practice of argument.” They have pursued optimistic answers to questions that Michel Foucault (1993:18-19, qted. in Crosswaite 1996:13) asserts have been central to philosophy and critical thought since the eighteenth century: “What is this Reason that we use? What are its historical effects?
What are its limits, and what are its dangers? How can we exist as rational beings, fortunately committed to practicing a rationality that is unfortunately crisscrossed by intrinsic dangers?” More specifically, I have argued (1998) that most western general theories of argumentation have been grounded in understandings of specific relationships between knowers and the known:
* ideas as the contents of minds
* evidence as external to minds
* inference as grounded in both mental and linguistic operations, that is, as reflective of mental activity yet materialized in particular kinds of language use.
Those three epistemological assumptions were the foundations of the philosophy of science and then public argument theory that grew up in the nineteenth century (see Fuller 1993: esp. ch. 1), making argumentative discourse – a kind of logical talk – the link between the knower and the known, and hence the mechanism for reasoned decision making as it ought to occur in the worlds of all knowers from all eras of human existence.
Such assumptions have been under attack at least since Kant sought to collapse the Cartesian dichtomy between knowing and being and since Nietzsche declared the end of philosophy. Following World War I, there were concerted drives to save public, rational argumentation by eliminating fallacious reasoning (Lasswell 1928), by neutralizing and concretizing interpersonal talk[i], and by making the verifiability principle a weapon for distinguishing between sense and non-sense in all arenas of human affairs (e.g., Ayer 1936/1962). Read more

ISSA Proceedings 1998 – Innocence By Dissociation. A Pragma-Dialectical Analysis Of The Fallacy Of Incorrect Dissociation In The Vatican Document ‘We Remember: A Reflection On The Shoah’

• by: Rob Grootendorst - University of Amsterdam

1. Introduction
The Vatican document ‘We remember: A reflection on the Shoah’, (issued on March 16, 1998) has led to many critical reactions throughout the world. The main reason for this is that it did not contain the generally expected apology to the Jewish people for the Roman Catholic Church’s complicity in the Holocaust but, instead, turned out to be an apologia in which the Church pleads not guilty. The apologia is based on a twofold distinction:
(1) between the Church as an institution and its individual members, and
(2) between anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism.

In this paper, I argue that these distinctions both constitute the fallacy of incorrect dissociation. The concept of dissociation was introduced by Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca. It is one of the two main principles of argumentation they discuss – the other one being association. In pragma-dialectical terms, dissociation aims at changing one of the the protagonist and the antagonist’s common starting points. If this is not done properly, the dissociation constitutes a violation of one of the rules for critical discussion. In this case, I contend that Rule 6 has been broken because the document presents the distinctions as self-evident and is therefore guilty of begging the question.
In Section 2, I describe the historical background of the document and sketch its outlines. In Section 3, I summarize the main reactions to it. In Section 4, I explain why the two distinctions made in the document can be analysed as dissociations in the Perelmanian sense. In Section 5, I argue that these dissociations violate Rule 6 of pragma-dialectics and constitute the fallacy of ‘innocence by dissociation’, being a special case of the fallacy of incorrect dissociation. Finally, in Section 6, I conclude that this fallacy is the terminological counterpart of the well-known fallacy of ‘guilt by association’.

2. Background and outline of ‘We remember: A reflection on the Shoah’
‘We Remember: A reflection on the Shoah’ is a 14-page document issued by the Vatican Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews on March 16, 1998.[i] It is a long-awaited document because it addresses the role of the Roman Catholic Church in the Holocaust during the Second World War. The document acknowledges that individual Catholics did things that were wrong or even sinful in their support of anti-Semitism and of Nazi persecution of Jews, and it repents for this – using the Hebrew word teshuvah. But it also absolves the Church as such from complicity in the Holocaust. It even warmly praises the controversial wartime Pope Pius XII (who has long been accused of remaining silent in the face of Nazi genocide and even of pro-German tendencies) for saving hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives ‘personally or through his representatives’.
The Vatican commission took up the task of creating this document at Pope John Paul II’s request eleven years ago, in 1987 – a year after the pope had a historic meeting with Rome Chief Rabbi Elio Toaff in Rome’s central synagogue. It is the third formal document prepared by the commission, following the landmark Nostra Aetate declaration of 1965, which marked the first official gesture of reconciliation by the Church to the Jews by repudiating the concept of Jewish guilt for Jesus’ death and by calling for mutual respect and dialogue between Catholics and Jews. By the way, it was not until 1965 that the Vatican eliminated the phrase ‘perfidious Jews’ from the liturgy of the Holy Week service.
The Vatican statement takes pains to distinguish anti-Judaism from anti-Semitism, suggesting that only the Nazis were guilty of anti-Semitism. It also stops far short of taking responsiblity as a religious institution from promulgating the tenets of anti-Judaism, in particular the teaching that the Jews killed Jesus. The widely accepted view is that this central Christian teaching provided the theological foundation for the anti-Semitism of the Nazi years that culminated in the murder of six million Jews by the Nazis. Instead, the Vatican’s document distances Christianity from the Holocaust. ‘The Shoah was the work of a thoroughly modern neo-pagan regime,’ it says. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 1998 – Greek Mythic Conceptions Of Persuasion

• by: Mark H. Wright - Embry-Riddle University

In his provocative work, Protagoras and Logos, Edward Schiappa (1991) suggests that the Presocratics, the Sophists and Plato shared a different approach to language and communication. Still constrained to varying degrees by their primarily oral culture, they nevertheless offered prose as an alternative to poetry, and “treated language itself as an object of analysis for the first time in Greek history” (31). While Schiappa treats the definition and historical manifestations of logos with great care, he fails to do the same with mythos; presumably the Presocratics, the Sophists and Plato offered an alternative not only to “poetry as a vehicle of wisdom and entertainment,” but also to mythic accounts and conceptions of persuasion (31). Hence it is possible to better understand the contributions of early theorists of logos by better understanding the mythic understanding of persuasion that was available to the Greeks. In this essay I will explore the Greek mythic beliefs that persuasion took place through the action of the deities Hermes, Peitho, and the Charites (Barthell 1971: 152). After considering the range of meanings that each represents, I will consider the meanings represented by various combinations of them. In pursuing these meanings, I’m attempting to understand what a Greek, especially an Athenian, would gain by asking, “How can I persuade x?” and receiving the answer, “By considering Peitho, the Charites, and Hermes.” This question would have acquired more urgency around 500 BC, after Kleisthenes’ reforms, when the Athenian Pnyx was reinforced and dressed for the first time, hence dominating the approach to the marketplace (Kournouniotes and Thompson 1932: 216). After considering likely answers to the question, I will return to Schiappa’s argument, and maintain that Protagoras and later theorists where not as revolutionary as Schiappa portrays them, when one treats the mythic-poetic tradition as more than a preference for poetry.
In the discussions of deities that follows, it would be well to keep in mind the following chronology. The Iliad and the Odyssey date from the eighth century BC; Hesiod’s poems date from the seventh century BC; and the Homeric Hymns date from the sixth and fifth centuries BC. The Homeric Hymn to Hermes is from the sixth, probably late sixth century BC. Protagoras arrived in Athens around 450 BC.

1. Analysis of deities associated with persuasion
1.1 Hermes
Hermes probably originally arose as a god of the stone heaps that marked property boundaries (Farnell 1909: 7; Brown 1917/1990: 32). Hermes was the power found in the heap (Burkert 156). Because many tribal activities took place at the boundary between tribal territories, Hermes took on a range of associated meanings. Trading took place at the boundaries, so Hermes became a god of the marketplace, which later moved into the center of towns (Brown 1917/1990: 37). At first the stone heaps marked a neutral and sacred spot where trading could be safely conducted by traveling tradesmen and tribal groups with surplus goods (Farnell 1909: 26). Later, trading could safely be conducted in towns themselves. For example, in archaic Athens, the marketplace was on the northwest slope of the Acropolis, but was moved further north by Solon to a more central, level location (Travlos 1971: 2). At the symbolic center of the new agora was the altar of the Twelve Gods, and a Stoa of large herms (21). From that center, beginning around 520 BC, distances were measured and marked with herms at halfway points along all the major roads leading to the city (Brown 1917/1990: 107). The herms were inscribed with a statement of ownership by the tyrant Hipparchus, and a maxim such as “Think just thoughts as you journey” (Brown 1917/1990: 111; Parker 1996: 80). In this aspect Hermes implies that persuasion was a key to the success of the marketplace. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 1998 – Constitutive Rules And Rules Of Inference

• by: Jaap Hage - Maastricht University

1. Introduction
The notion of a constitutive rule was placed on the philosophical agenda by John Searle who opposed constitutive rules to regulative rules. Where ‘regulative rules regulate antecedently or independently existing forms of behaviour ….. constitutive rules do not merely regulate, they create or define new forms of behaviour. The rules of football or chess, for example, do not merely regulate playing football or chess, but as it were they create the very possibility of playing such games.’ (Searle 1969: 33).
If we take the notion of behaviour rather broad, to make it include not only physical, but also mental behaviour such as believing and making inferences, rules of inference can be considered as a kind of regulative rules. Rules of inference indicate what we are allowed to infer, and, in an epistemological context, what we are justified to believe, given our other beliefs. On this view, the distinction between constitutive rules and rules of inference is a special case of the distinction between constitutive rules and regulative rules.
In this paper I want to explore the distinction and the relations between constitutive rules and rules of inference. In section 2 I elaborate on the distinction between these two. In section 3 the distinction is exploited to explain the defeasibility of reasoning with rules of inference. In section 4 I will argue for the surprising view that propositional logic is in the first place an ontological theory, and only in the second place a theory of valid reasoning. The argument of section 4 is supported in section 5 with a sketch of the outlines of a general theory of valid reasoning. The paper is summarised in section 6.

2. Constitutive rules and rules of inference
The distinction between constitutive rules and rules of inference is based on another distinction, that is the distinction between the world and our beliefs about it. Let us follow Wittgenstein (1922, 1.1) in defining the world as the set of all facts. Facts are what corresponds in the world to true sentences. Since sentences are language-dependent, facts are also language-dependent. And so is the world, because the world is the set of all facts.
This view does not imply that the world depends completely on human culture, but rather that the world is captured by means of concepts that depend on human culture. The conceptual framework in terms of which the world is captured is a cultural phenomenon. That does not preclude the possibility that this conceptual framework has been adapted in time, e.g. through both physical and cultural evolution, to capture the world as well as possible.
The facts in the world are not independent of each other. There are physical laws that create law-like connections between facts of certain types. Physical laws should be distinguished from human attempts to describe them. These attempts form hypotheses that may be true or false. The laws themselves are not true or false, but exist or not. An example of a physical law is the law of gravitation. This law creates a connection between the facts that body 1 has mass m1, body 2 has mass m2, and that the distance between them is d, and the fact that between the bodies 1 and 2 there exists a gravitational force that equals _m1m2/d2, where _ is the gravitational constant. That the law of gravitation holds seems to be a fact about the world. This fact brings with it that other facts in the world are related in the way indicated in the law. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 1998 – Pragma-Dialectical Analysis Of The Inquisition

• by: Dale Hample - Western Illinois University

Throughout the High Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, the Inquisition was a continuing feature of the Christian world. To speak of the Inquisition as a singular institution is misleading, since inquisitions were undertaken by various authorities, episcopal or papal, working under varying legal systems and constraints. On its face an effort to ensure religious orthodoxy, it was from time to time overtaken by political concerns, both local and international; nor were purely personal vendettas completely irrelevant. Concerned at first with dualist heresies in southern France, it expanded its interests to cover witchcraft and Judiazing Christians, and later was an important front in the Catholic battle against Protestantism. The Protestants also had their inquisitions, though these were not as famous or institutionally developed as the Catholic ones.
But I will leave to others (e.g., Peters 1988; Lea 1955) the task of differentiating among the inquisitions of different times, places, and objectives. My purpose here is general enough that the more or less continuing features of the inquisitorial mode of jurisprudence will serve as a suitable basis for study. I intend to examine inquisitorial practices in the context of pragma-dialectics (van Eemeren & Grootendorst 1984; 1992; van Eemeren, Grootendorst, Jackson, & Jacobs 1993). Though I will say little that is new in detail about the Inquisition, my approach may possibly provide a coherent perspective on how the Inquisition accomplished what it did. My main purpose, however, is to illuminate an under-developed topic in the study of argumentation, disagreement space.

1. Disagreement Space
The idea of disagreement space appears as part of the project of reconstructing arguments (van Eemeren, Grootendorst, Jackson, & Jacobs 1993: esp. 95-102). The general task of reconstruction is to take what people actually say, and to “reconstruct” it, or understand it in an analytical way, for purposes of description and criticism.
People do not say everything they mean, and do not comment on everything they understand. By a close and disciplined examination of actual utterances, and what had to have been understood or meant for the statements to have served the communicative functions they did, analysts can specify the domain of interactive meaning, including all those background assumptions. As an example, three pages of conversation are expanded into about twenty pages of reconstruction, capturing understandings taken for granted, unstated connections among premises, implicit refutations, and so forth (van Eemeren, Grootendorst, Jackson, & Jacobs 1993: ch. 4).
Roughly speaking, disagreement space refers to all that could be argued about, all that needs to be filled in for a full analysis. Here is the defining passage:
Among the materials available to a participant in an argumentative discussion are the discourse itself and the surrounding context of practical activity. From these two components it will always be possible to infer an indefinitely large and complex set of beliefs, wants, and intentions that jointly compose the perspective of one’s partner. Any component of this perspective may be “called out” and made problematic within the discourse, if it has any sort of relevance to the underlying purpose of the exchange. When this occurs, the problematized element functions as a “virtual standpoint” in need of defense. Any reconstructible commitment associated with the performance of a speech act can function as a virtual standpoint when it is in fact reconstructed and challenged by an interlocutor. The entire complex of reconstructible commitments can be considered as a “disagreement space,” a structured set of opportunities for argument (van Eemeren, Grootendorst, Jackson, & Jacobs 1993: 95). Read more

ISSA Proceedings 1998 – Partial Quotes In Headlines And Subheads In Le Monde. An Exploration In Polyphonic Journalistic Writing And Opinion Forming

• by: Danièle Torck - Vrije Universiteit

‘Reported speech’ (RS) in journalistic texts has been the object of linguistic investigations in the last decade. It has taken place in the greater frame of studies of speech and thought presentation (Slembrouck, 1992, Waugh, 1995, Semino et al., 1997), or approached from a more (journalistic) discourse point of view (Geiss, 1987, Zelizer, 1989), with a special interest for the speech-act verb introducing the reported speech (Geiss, 1987, Gruber, 1993, May, 1995).
In an often quoted study of French journalistic discourse, Waugh (1995) highlights the presence of what she calls a combined form of ‘indirect-direct’ speech, of high frequency in the French press, and particularly in Le Monde. Example (1), taken from another broadsheet Le Figaro, is illustrative of such a form:
(1)
Il avait demandé au premier ministre <au nom de la transparence>, de lever le secret-défense, et expliqué, évoquant François Mitterrand, que cette <triste histoire> ne correspondait pas <à l’idée> qu’il se faisait <de lui sur ce plan> (Le Figaro, 9 avril 1997, ‘Les écoutes brouillent les socialistes’)
The relative sizes of indirect and direct stretches may vary considerably from case to case; furthermore, this ‘partial quoting’ procedure is not restricted to an indirect speech frame, but is also frequent with forms of NRSA (Narrative Report of Speech Act), as pointed out by Semino et al. (1997) for English reporting. Semino et al. pay special attention to these small stretches of direct quotation, which they call ‘Q-forms of speech presentation’[ii], and stress on the one hand their importance and convenience in journalistic writing, on the other their potential to lead to bias:
‘They allow the reporter to foreground selected parts of the original utterance without having to provide a lengthy quotation. They achieve vividness and precision without sacrificing the need for brevity. Clearly, such forms also lend themselves to partial or slanted representations of other people’s voices, since the original speaker’s words are embedded, both grammatically and semantically, within the reporter’s own discourse.’ (31)
This grammatical and semantical dependency, combined with the limited length of discourse, makes it difficult to refer to these forms as direct speech. I will argue that it also does not do credit to the special function these partial quotes often have. Looking back at example (1), we see that quotations in the French press are marked by low, double quotation marks and  italics.

In headlines, subheadings and introductory paragraphs no italics are used, which leads to a potential ambiguity. The quotation marks could then refer to either a real quote or to a special use or meaning attached or given to the words quoted. In the last case, they would be so-called ‘scare quotes’. This potential ambiguity is essentially present when the quote is limited to one or two words:
(2)
[h23] Soupçonné de <favoritisme>, le maire de Nantes et président du groupe PS à l’Assemblée plaide la <bonne foi>
(3)
(sh26) Le président sud-africain critique le <gendarme du monde> qui <n’a pas de morale>

In (2), only the second fragment of discourse between Q-marks was confirmed as a real quote. In (3) ‘Gendarme du monde’, referring to the United States, is used by the journalist in the text of the article between quotation marks but without italics. It is also used by Nelson Mandela in his declaration (or at least translated as such), so that it could be given both functions. Read more