The single most important thing to know about the pragmatics of argumentation is that argumentation is a kind of conversational expansion, a form of repair that kicks in when triggered by a special sort of event. Discourse occurs before a very dense backdrop of assumptions, assertions, and implications, not all of which can be examined for their acceptability or justifiability. Whenever any of us speaks, we evoke for our hearers an indefinitely expandable context of belief and claim, any part of which may be called out and made arguable. Most of what we say, and especially most of what we evoke, passes without close examination.
This willingness to let things pass without examination, though essential to the organization of conversation, is antithetical to what is commonly called “critical thinking.” In educational contexts, at least, we might suppose that what we want is for students to be constantly engaged in reviewing each proposition advanced and considering whether it is to be believed or not. Realizing, however, that a speaker’s “standpoint” is not simply what is asserted but also what must be believed in order to have made that assertion and to have made it in the circumstances in which it was made, we see that it is not in fact possible for students to inspect everything. Like all of us in all contexts, they must pick and choose among propositions to examine. In the classroom as in conversation, most statements pass without inspection.
This paper is about designing discourse for the support of argumentation, both in the sense of stimulating its occurrence and in the sense of regulating its conduct. Argumentation is valuable in educational contexts, and although I do not expect this point to be controversial, I will begin by reviewing in the first section some of what is known about the relationship between argumentation and learning. Unfortunately, however valuable argumentation may be, it is also interpersonally complex, implicating not just our beliefs about impersonal things but also our “standing concerns” for identity, status, and relationship (Jacobs, Jackson, Stearns & Hall 1991). In status-marked settings like the classroom, these interpersonal complexities can create intractable dilemmas for the structuring of argumentation, a point to be elaborated briefly in the second section of the paper. Employing a design methodology described briefly in the third section of the paper, I will describe several explicitly theorized plans for the incorporation of argumentation into teaching and learning. In this respect, the present paper is an instance of the form of practical research my colleagues and I championed in Reconstructing Argumentative Discourse (van Eemeren, Grootendorst, Jackson & Jacobs 1993): research organized by the search for argumentation procedures that take into account the situation of argumentation within real-world constraints and limitations.

1. Contributions of Argumentation to Learning
Argumentation here refers not to preparation of an essay or speech that makes a case for a proposition, but to critical engagement in dialogue or dialectic – an interactive, collaborative process. Since the publication of Toulmin’s landmark study The Uses of Argument (1958) theorists have recognized that argumentation unfolds as an answer to questioning, doubt, or contradiction. In contemporary argumentation theory (van Eemeren & Grootendorst 1983; Willard 1989), central importance is assigned to interaction and to the social context in which it occurs. Argumentation’s interactional function – the resolution of disagreement – demands discourse forms in which anything that might be contested can be “externalized” and addressed (van Eemeren, Grootendorst, Jackson & Jacobs 1993). Argumentation expands around disagreement (Jackson 1987; Jackson & Jacobs 1980).
Argumentation is known to contribute to learning across a broad spectrum of educational levels and subjects (Bruffee 1992; Kuhn 1993; Kuhn, Shaw & Felton 1997; Pontecorvo 1993; Meyer & Woodruff 1997; Voss 1991; Zeidler 1997). Argumentation stimulates deeper processing and more critical thinking, and when it is incorporated into instruction it helps students learn. For example, Kuhn, Shaw, and Felton (1997) developed a teaching/learning design in which students met and engaged in discussion on a single topic with peers holding diverse positions over a 5-week test period. As compared with a control group that only had to state an opinion on the topic and write a justification of their opinions at the beginning and at the end of the experimental period, the group engaging in argumentation with others achieved superior topical insight and superior argument quality.

What accounts for the difference in learning? More is involved than the effect of thinking about the topic and writing about it. All students went through these processes. Kuhn et al. did not simply sort students into random pairs but arranged the dyads so as to guarantee encounter with a wide range of discrepant and congruent positions, so that students would be sure of meeting disagreement. Other designs that putatively rely on argumentation, but that fail to ensure controversy, have not had the same effect on learning. For example, Marttunen (1992) found instruction organized around comment on written argumentation to be less effective than “traditional” instruction, but since no mechanism was provided to assure clash of viewpoints, the argumentation design may have omitted its active ingredient.
We know that encountering disagreement stimulates the search for fallacy and other weakness in argumentation, that people are much more competent at evaluating arguments for conclusions they disagree with than at evaluating arguments for conclusions they agree with. Experimental research on “biases” in reasoning (Klaczynski 1996, 1997) has shown that the quality of reasoning and evidence is unlikely to be thoroughly evaluated if the conclusion happens to be congruent with one’s own beliefs. By contrast, disagreement stimulates the search for what is wrong in others’ reasoning and what is needed to bolster one’s own reasoning against challenge (Jackson 1996).
Ideal models of argumentation (e.g., van Eemeren, Grootendorst, Jackson & Jacobs 1993) treat the externalization of contradiction and the expansion of discussion around points of contention as fundamental to rationality. To encourage pervasive occurrence of argumentation, our first requirement is to provide for externalization of disagreement. Contradiction and confrontation should be emphasized and exploration of the grounds for belief and disbelief should be expanded. Externalization is not simply a matter of requiring that students write position statements of their own, but a matter of guaranteeing that each student wrestle with positions discrepant from their own. This will be a key feature of every successful design for argumentation in learning.

2. The Interpersonal Complexity of Argumentation
So why not simply contradict everything students say in the style of Monty Python? Unfortunately, merely confronting speakers with contradictions does not assure critical discussion. (Yes it does. No it doesn’t.) The possibility of critical discussion is also known to rest on various levels of preconditions, including most obviously the abilities and motivations of the arguers and the social and political circumstances surrounding the argument.
Conditions known to threaten critical discussion include artificial limitations on participation, limitations in individual ability, personal identity concerns, and hierarchical social relationships-all of which play prominent roles in classrooom communication. Participation in classroom discussion is generally infrequent and uneven at the postsecondary level (Karp & Yoel 1976; Nunn 1996), with a few individuals accounting for the bulk of student contributions. While the overall level of student participation is linked to instructional design decisions, which individuals in a group participate is linked to gender, self-confidence, and other individual difference variables (Fassinger 1995). Social norms may inhibit expression of controversial opinions or extended argumentation (Fassinger 1995; Lusk 1994), while deference to the authority of the teacher may suppress the occurrence of disagreement or lead to premature closure of debate.
In other words, argumentation is interpersonally complex, having not only intellectual dimensions but also highly-charged relational dimensions. Disagreement is often experienced as threatening, especially under conditions of unequal power or authority; contradiction or challenge by authority figures often simply closes down discussion. Among peers, argumentative exchange has a competititive quality that can make it difficult for arguers to change their minds once committed to a position.
Some of these threats can be handled through sensible design decisions, whether in traditional classrooms or in virtual environments. For example, the dyadic argumentation procedure developed by Kuhn et al. was designed to guarantee controversy by pairing students with others holding discrepant views, and it was further designed to minimize deference by forming peer dyads rather than teacher-student dyads. Knowing that specifiable characteristics of the social situation may suppress argumentation, we can design those characteristics out of the interaction, using whatever resources come to hand. To the extent that interpersonal complexity threatens the occurrence or quality of argumentation, the successful integration of argumentation into teaching and learning will depend on management of its interpersonal complexity.

3. Design Methodology within Normative Pragmatics
We might or might not be able to make students indifferent to authority, identity, and peer pressure. Normative pragmatics accepts the circumstances of ordinary discourse and searches for ways to regulate their impact on argumentation, employing a design methodology adapted to its general theoretical program (van Eemeren, Grootendorst, Jackson & Jacobs 1993). Normative pragmatics approaches the study of argumentation empirically, but with questions motivated by normative considerations and with analytic tools tailored to criticism and intervention. Argumentative practices are examined with an eye to their improvement. The blending of empirical and normative considerations is made explicit in our design methodology.
This design methodology has four components: an empirical examination of discourse practices, a critical analysis based on comparison of practices with an ideal model, a specification of designable features, and a proposed redesign.
Empirical analysis of discourse practices is aimed at developing conjectures about participant goals and about the obstacles participants face in accomplishing these goals. Often this analysis involves direct inspection of records of interaction, but empirical analysis may also extend to experimental investigation of communication behavior and outcomes. In the present case, our focus is on the occurrence of argumentation and on the impact of its occurrence on learning. This being a topic of very active concern, there is a rich literature that documents such facts as the uneven application of critical standards to congruent and discrepant positions, the general social inhibitions against disagreeing, especially with authority, and the unevenness of participation from student to student. In other contexts our central concern might be for management of relevance or for regulation of the impact of authority; in the discourse of teaching and learning, our first concern is for conditions that limit the very occurrence of argumentation.
Neither our participants (teachers and students) nor the conditions under which they interact are ideal. In ideal critical discussion (van Eemeren, Grootendorst, Jackson & Jacobs 1993), arguers engage in full, free, and impersonal exploration of potential disagreement without limitations on either total talk time or rights to speak. In ideal critical discussion, the contestability of every proposition is fundamental and participants are expected to shoulder a “burden of rebuttal” rather than to let potentially controversial points pass. Not all classroom discussion falls far short of this ideal, but much does.
A specification of potentially designable features will normally be grounded in comparison of actual empirical circumstances with conditions defined by ideal models. Against an ideal standard of full, free, impersonal explorations of ideas, certain features of the classroom situation present themselves as possible “culprits”: finite talk time, unequally distributed speaking rights, unequally distributed authority, identity-relevance of speech, and so on. From these noticed features we begin the process of designing discourse to encourage rather than discourage argumentation. To the extent that they are malleable, we can alter them through design and document the result.
Gaps between ideal models and actual practices present opportunities for engineering of argument. We search for ways to eliminate, compensate, or work around design features that promote bad practices and to inject or emulate design features that promote good practices. In the discourse of teaching and learning, with a first objective of simply increasing the occurrence of argumentation, we must find ways to minimize the impact of authority and identity, and also, of course, scarcity. One of many ways to do this is through invention of what we are calling ‘discussion protocols.’

4. Argumentation Protocols for Teaching and Learning
The trick in designing plans for argumentation in instruction is to preserve argumentation’s cognitive advantages while managing its interpersonal complexities. Let’s begin by trying to devise an all-purpose argumentation protocol to use in teaching physics. The role of argumentation will not be to arrive at resolution of disagreement, but to exploit disagreement to induce deeper thinking about problems whose answers are known. So presumably what is wanted is a method for moving a student from a wrong answer to a right answer through exposure of incorrect assumptions or faulty reasoning.
A useful device that meets this challenge is the ‘confrontation sequence’ in which less sophisticated ways of thinking are brought into confrontation with predicaments that call for more sophisticated reasoning. In a confrontation sequence (Bleiberg & Churchill 1975; Jacobs 1986), one speaker (the confronter) helps another (the confronted) to recognize weaknesses or self-contradictions by calling out commitments one at a time and juxtaposing those that are in contradiction – a straightforward dialectical structure. The confrontation sequence has three ‘stages’: an opening in which some statement triggers a decision to confront; an exploration in which question/answer pairs or challenge/response pairs establish commitments; and a punchline or predicament in which the confronter draws out the contradiction or inconsistency in the confronted’s various commitments.
1. Statement
2. Exploration (Challenge/Response, Refutation/Concession, Question/Answer)
3. Predicament

Confrontation might prove very useful in teaching if deployed in such a way as to bring less sophisticated ways of thinking into dilemmas that motivate progression to more sophisticated reasoning. However, by its very design the confrontation sequence exacerbates the conditions that seem to suppress the occurrence of argumentation in the classroom. Its oppositional structure is corrective rather than collaborative, and the final predicament, the punch line, puts the confronted ‘on the spot,’ compelled to respond and unable to do so without repudiating something previously asserted. The classic confrontation subjects a student’s reasoning to public critique and potential loss of face.
The feature we want is opposition. The features we don’t want are the face implications associated with being in the public role of the confronted – what an interaction analyst might call a ‘one-down’ position. A skillful teacher can find ad hoc strategic solutions to how to confront without face threat, but it is also possible to design structures of this kind that are independent of the skill of the confronter.
My own design work has depended heavily on computer mediation of dialogue. Computer mediation allows for asynchrony in interaction (meaning that people can engage in conversational exchanges without being in the same place at the same time) and for a high degree of individualization (meaning that what a teacher says to students can be tailored differently to each one). However, for purposes of managing the interpersonal complexity of argumentation, the most important attribute of computer mediated communication is that it allows for anonymity. Students can be engaged, through interactive computer technology, in argumentation with anonymous others whose characteristics are known only through what they write or through what is written about them.

One of my tasks at the University of Arizona over the past several years has been to design tools to support instruction on the worldwide web, and in particular to design tools that allow for incorporation of argumentation into web-based instruction.  I’ve createdand implemented a web course authoring system known as POLIS, most of whose capabilities are not relevant to the present discussion. What is relevant within POLIS is the repertoire of argumentation protocols offered to instructors to assist them in using argumentation effectively. Instructors in any subject use POLIS to create online argumentative dialogues for students to use as “lessons.” Shortly I’ll have to produce evidence that the POLIS repertoire has measurable impact on learning; POLIS is collecting data on itself every time an instructor creates an online lesson or a student submits a response to it. What I can give so far is a progress report on the creation of the learning protocols themselves.
Unlike otherwise comparable systems of web authoring tools, POLIS is highly theorized. Its protocols can be described structurally in terms of speech act sequences, and the structures it generates are heavily influenced not only by speech acts theory but also by those strands of discourse analysis that have been concerned with conversational sequencing and conversational expansion. I want to describe and contrast three POLIS protocols (Recitation, Adversary, and Virtual Peer) to illustrate the way in which features known to affect argumentation can be managed at a structural level. (The entire web kit is open to public examination at http://emma.comm.arizona.edu.)
Standard classroom recitations have three moves: question, candidate answer, and assessment. The teacher poses a question, a student answers, and the teacher either affirms the answer or, if it is incorrect, offers a correction. The most interesting answers are the wrong ones; those are the opportunities a teacher could use to initiate confrontations or other more obviously argumentative processes. POLIS makes a very slight improvement over the standard form of recitation, presenting not an authoritative assessment but a “model answer” which the student uses to make a self-assessment. So the POLIS Recitation have four moves: question, candidate answer, model answer, and self-assessment. Notice how this minor variation affects the overall quality of the exchange: the standard recitation closes the sequence with assertion of an authoritative answer, while the POLIS Recitation invites expansion around any difference between the submitted answer and the model answer. Though not designed specifically for argumentation, the POLIS Recitation illustrates an important point about protocol design, that the interactional sequence and the framing of contributions might matter.

POLIS offers a much more explicitly argumentative protocol, known simply as Adversary. Adversary builds and conducts online debates with students. It has a minimum of six moves:
1. Statement of controversy (by teacher, via POLIS)
2. Statement and defense of [initial] standpoint (by student)
3. Statement and defense of opposing standpoint (by POLIS)
4. Rebuttal of opposing standpoint (by student)
5. Invitation to reconsider (by POLIS)
6. Statement and defense of [terminal] standpoint (by student)

The two middle turns, a counterargument/rebuttal pair, can be repeated for additional counterarguments. POLIS selects what to present at that step using the student’s initial position as data. Adversary is an automated system and (because it is built to deal with any subject, not with some fixed body of content) it has no knowledge base to use in planning its contributions. Its opposing arguments are chosen from a store supplied by the teacher or by previous students. However, it allows for an online simulation of the sort of experience students might have had in the Kuhn et al. experiment reviewed earlier. Students are presented with one or more arguments against their own initial positions and must answer these before making a final decision on the controversy. Important features to notice are the open-endedness of the sequence (no suggestion that the controversy is in fact settled) and the use of disagreement per se to motivate deeper reflection on the controversy.
In use, Adversary appears to function also as a kind of modelling exercise for students; their defenses of their initial positions frequently give elaborations of their personal beliefs rather than justfications for those beliefs, but when presented with models of argumentation in the counterargument passages they quickly accommodate to the normative requirements of the exchange.
The last of the three protocols considered here is modelled after a very sophisticated design used in physics instruction (Mazur 1997). In its classroom version, argumentation takes place synchronously between peer dyads within a large group. The teacher presents a problem, each student develops an individual answer and then tries to persuade a neighbor that their answer is correct, and then the correct answer is shown and explained.

The online version within POLIS, known as Virtual Peer, differs from both Recitation and Adversary in terminating with a correct answer to a question. It has a minimum of seven moves:
1. Statement of problem (by teacher, via POLIS)
2. Candidate answer and explanation (by student)
3. Proffering of alternative answer/explanation (by POLIS, presented as peer reasoning)
4. Response to peer reasoning (by student)
5. Invitation to reconsider (by POLIS)
6. Final answer and explanation (by student)
7. Presentation of correct answer and explanation (by POLIS)

Again, the middle subsequence is selected for discrepancy with student’s own position, and it can be repeated as many times as necessary to work through all of the alternative positions presented to students at the first step. Virtual Peer is explicitly argumentative, despite the existence of a correct answer known in advance. This protocol more than any other draws attention to the role argumentation can play in teaching and learning, forcing deeper examination of the reasoning behind even correct answers. Students who get the problem right on the first try have the same sequence of argumentative tasks as students who get the problem wrong on the first try. And importantly, this is framed in such a way as to carry no implication that the counterconsiderations are reasonable: Students get discrepant positions represented as what another classmate argued. (Compare this with another common strategy for probing the reasoning behind a correct response: Devil’s advocacy by the teacher.)
Even in online protocols, it should be noticed that interpersonal considerations must be managed. Recitation and Virtual Peer differ most significantly in the framing of counterconsiderations presented to the student. Recitation presents a model answer to be used by the student as a standard for his or her own writing. Virtual Peer presents alternative answers treated as equal competitors to the student’s own answer, enjoying no presumption grounded in the teacher’s authority. Empirically, students write more in response to the counterconsiderations of Virtual Peer than they do in response to the model answer of Recitation. The pragmatics of Recitation favor narrow self-assessment (“My answer did not mention conditional probability”) while the pragmatics of Virtual Peer favor argument criticism (“This answer looks reasonable at first, but …”).
Argumentation protocols of these kinds appear to be effective in both promoting more argumentation and in leading students to think more critically about their own reasoning. Since POLIS captures student responses pervasively, it is possible to review the arguments students make at the beginning and end of an argumentation sequence and to note the quality of argumentation offered. Although in any given online debate, relatively few students change their positions, many show progression toward more critical examination of evidence. For example, in one application of the Adversary protocol, students were asked to use statistical summaries of their classmates’ codings of a presidential address to decide whether the speech was or was not ‘liberal.’ Initial responses tended to treat the statistical material uncritically: some students argued that the speech was liberal because over half of its paragraphs contained liberal themes, while others argued that the speech was not liberal because the split between liberal paragraphs and neutral/conservative paragraphs was too even. However, after being presented with arguments that challenged the validity and interpretability of the coding, many students wrote position statements that dealt explicitly with the quality of evidence and offered independent grounds for an overall judgment of the speech. At the low end of sophistication, these responses simply exhibited awareness that seemingly scientific evidence might or might not be trustworthy, as in these unedited examples:
1. the speech is liberal. however, if there is confussion in the coding of the document then the results are not reliable. if there is no confussion then the results are correct and the majority of the speech is liberal.
2. I changed my mined because of the last argument concerning the point that there are no reliable grounds because of the statistics about the coding of everyone’s opinions. It is too hard to determine what type of speech it reflected because the results were all so different. At the high end, students were able to transcend the original terms of the problem and challenge the relevance of the evidence given, as in the following excerpt from a student answer:
3. This speech cannot be deemed liberal, as it has the presence of strong conservative assertions as well as weak, or rather, mild liberal statements. While one many deem this liberal using only the micro and statistical view, I believe strongly that one must take the text as a whole into account. The overall essence of teh text is …

Only with accumulation of more data for other uses of these advanced protocols will we be able to thoroughly analyze their impacts on learner outcomes, but the promise in both protocols is clear. Our limited experience to date shows that it is possible to create challenging online dialogues with the capacity to engage students in higher-order reasoning, especially self-criticism and critical evaluation of evidence and reasoning for a position.

5. Conclusion
Individuals vary greatly in their tendency to examine what is said and in their willingness to call out potential arguable threads. This tendency is variously described in terms of “critical thinking ability,” “need for cognition,” or plain “argumentativeness.” At least the first of these is often considered an important intellectual skill, something to be cultivated through education. Important in and of itself, critical thinking is also the means by which students come to deep understandings of any subject.
However, critical thinking needs cultivation in argumentative practice. It might be better to say that critical thinking is itself a form of argumentative practice. Encountering disagreement and interacting with an informed antagonist is the surest way to trigger “central processing.” For this reason, it is worthwhile to build designs that inject disconfirmation, contradiction, and confrontation into teaching and learning dialogues and that do this in a fashion that limits the interpersonal consequences of disagreeing.
In experience to date with online argumentation protocols, we have found it useful to differentiate designs in terms of their capacity to expand around disagreement and in terms of the distribution of authority they presume. While computer technology is in no way essential to the incorporation of argumentation into teaching and learning, it does provide very convenient means for managing these important design features. In particular, it solves in a very generic way many of the dilemmas associated with the interpersonal complexity of argumentation.

REFERENCES
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Bruffee, K. (1992). Science in a postmodern world. Change, 24(5),18-26.
Eemeren, F. H. van & R. Grootendorst (1984). Speech Acts in Argumentative Discussion. Dordrechts-Holland: Foris.
Eemeren, F. H. van, R. Grootendorst, S. Jackson & S. Jacobs (1993). Reconstructing Argumentative Discourse. Tuscaloosa, AL: U. of Alabama Press.
Fassinger, P. A. (1995). Understanding classroom interaction: Students’ and professors’ contributions to students’ silence. Journal of Higher Education 66, 82-96.
Jackson, S. (1987). Rational and pragmatic aspects of argumentation. In: F. H. van Eemeren, R. Grootendorst, J. A. Blair & C. A. Willard (Eds.), Argumentation Illuminated (pp. 260-269), Amsterdam: SICSAT.
Jackson, S. (1996). Fallacies and heuristics. In: J. van Benthem, F. H. van Eemeren, R. Grootendorst & F. Veltman (Eds.), Logic and Argumentation (pp. 101-114), North-Holland: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Jacobs, S., S. Jackson, S. Stearns & B. Hall (1991). Digressions in argumentative discourse: Multiple goals, standing concerns, and implicatures. In: K. Tracy (Ed.), Understanding Face-to-Face Interaction: Issues Linking Goals and Discourse (pp. 43-62, Ch. 3), Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Karp, D. & W. Yoel (1976). The college classroom: Some observations on the meanings of student participation. Sociology and Social Research 60, 421-439.
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Klaczynski, P. A. (1997). Bias in adolescents’ everyday reasoning and its relationship with intellectual ability, personal theories, and self-serving motivation. Developmental Psychology 33, 273-283.
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Kuhn, D., V. Shaw & M. Felton (1997). Effects of dyadic interaction on argumentative reasoning. Cognition and Instruction 15, 287-315.
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Marttunen, M. (1992). Commenting on written arguments as a part of argumentation skills – comparison between students engaged in traditional vs on-line study. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research 36, 289-302.
Mazur, E. (1997). Peer Instruction: A User’s Manual. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.Meyer, K. & E. Woodruff (1997).
Consensually driven explanation in science teaching. Science Education 81, 173-192.
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Toulmin, S. E. (1958). The Uses of Argument. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Zeidler, D. L. (1997). The central role of fallacious thinking in science education. Science Education 81, 483-496.

1. The Problem
My primary goal today is to introduce you to a pioneering project undertaken to see how extensive mapping of arguments can be accomplished and whether such a mapping would be useful to students, teachers, and scholars. Why would you want to map an extensive argument? Let me start with a hypothetical story. In the 1930s Alan Turing, the great British mathematician, invented the ideas on which the modern computer is based. In 1950, he wrote, “I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.” He certainly thought the computers would be able to think. However …. there are less than two years left before the end of the century. Unfortunately, Turing died in 1954 at the age of 42. Suppose he came back from the dead after 44 years to find out whether his prediction had come true. Suppose he asked you, “What’s happened since I died? Was I right? Does everybody agree that computers can think?”

In the first place we could tell him that he certainly should have expected to be contradicted. That almost 400 scholars have engaged in a 48-year argument that he started. That the argument was worldwide. That it has taken place in almost 300 journals and books and consists of more than 800 major “moves” – claims and rebuttals and counterrebuttals. He would find out that some of the greatest physicists, philosophers, computer scientists, and psychologists in the contemporary world have taken part in it.
Suppose Turing said: “Right now I don’t have time to read 300 journals and books. What is the status of the argument? Where does it stand now?” Stop for a moment. How would you give him a serious answer? Suppose you managed to answer his question. Then suppose he asked another: “Where can I get an overview of the history of the arguments so I can decide which I want to read.” Where would you direct him?

2. The Problem As We Saw It
For great debates like this one about machine intelligence, there is:
– no comprehensive map of this major debate
– no way to get an up-to-date briefing on its current status
– no way to link positions to rebuttals (so that proposed refutations of data and positions can be easily compared)
– no efficient way to navigate through the argument
– no way to visually inspect its structure and direction

These are also the problems of every beginning student in any major subject-matter debate. And these problems are not only true of the artificial intelligence debate but also of most of the great discussions in which humanity is involved. While the argumentation maps I will talk about today show the substance of this decades-long, worldwide debate, I will not so much focus on the substance of that particular argument. Rather, I want to discuss with you the argumentation analysis format we developed, the implications that our maps have for the study of argumentation analysis, the problems we encountered, and the kinds of solutions we came up with.
I should add an historical note here. Credit must go to Stephen Toulmin who, as far as I know, developed the modern ideas of argumentation analysis in 1957. I worked in the mid-80s on a variety of graphic approaches to mapping extensive argumentation. A chapter of my 1989 book, Mapping Hypertext, is devoted to the progress I made. But in the end I felt I hadn’t quite got a useful enough approach. Four-and-a- half years ago I took up the problem again when I went to Stanford.We wanted to map a major philosophical argument. The debate Turing started qualifies, as it involves one of the major questions about which human beings puzzle, worry, and debate – our identity. Who are we? While the history of this debate goes back at least to Hobbes, Leibniz, and Descartes, as I said, the modern debate starts with Turing’s 1950 article in the journal Mind.
Our goal was to map a whole argument and a big one, not some little piece of a broader debate. The Turing argument was an ideal choice. It turned out to be an even bigger challenge than I thought. The debate was far more extensive than I knew or than what usual book-length summaries indicated. But it was an ideal testbed for the visual methodology we were developing. And we faced the challenge of designing a useful tool–simple enough to be educationally sound yet detailed enough to help scholars.

What do the maps look like? Figure 1 shows a complete map and figure 2 shows detail.

3. Basic Structure of Argumentation Maps
The basic framework of our mapping generally follows Toulmin.

3a. Major topics of the debate
One of the consequences of our taking on such a large, sprawling argument was that we needed to subdivide it into different issue areas. Debates frequently divide into topic areas which can be shown as regions in the mapping of the debate by putting them all together in one area and giving them a title. The example here shows the initial claims boxes of three regions, identified with the questions in bold face. Table 1 lists the issue areas. It shows the breadth of the more than 50 philosophical issues that have become involved in the debate over Turing’s question. It provides a kind of table of contents or subject index of the issues. Within each issue area, the arguments are presented chronologically.

3b. Focus box
The focus box introduces and summarizes the core dispute of each issue area, sometimes as an assumption and sometimes as a general claim with no particular author. The lowest-numbered box in each issue area is an introductory focus box.

3c. Claims
Debates start with claims, which have been defined by Toulmin as “assertions put forward publicly for general acceptance with the implication that there are underlying ‘reasons’ that could show them to be ‘well founded’ and therefore entitled to be generally accepted.” (Toulmin et. al., l979) Claims as we have written them are brief summaries, often accompanied by explanatory illustrations.
Some readers have been thrown off in expecting the claim boxes to be abstracts of published works. But claims summarize individual arguments. As such, a given published article may be broken down into numerous claims on the maps; alternately, a given claim may draw on information in several published chapters and articles. Each claim is connected to the next by one of three links: supported by, disputed by, or interpreted as.

3d. Supported by
We defined the “supported by” relationship slightly differently than Toulmin. These are arguments that uphold or defend another claim. Examples include: supporting evidence, further argumentation, thought experiments, extensions or qualifications, and implemented models.

3e. Disputed by
These are charges made against another claim. Examples include: logical negations, counterexamples, attacks on an argument’s emphasis, potential dangers an argument might raise, thought experiments, and implemented models.

3f. Support and dispute carry a range of meanings
Support and dispute are used in an argumentative sense rather than in a strict logical or epistemic sense. They structure the map into chains of agreement and disagreement where claimants respond to one another in a variety of affirmative and negative way. As such, the relations of support and dispute cover a wide range of cases, which fall into “fuzzy categories” or “families” of supportive and disputative responses.

3g. Interpreted as
Sometimes an argument is reframed by one of the disputants. If there was a distinctive reconfiguration of an earlier claim, we used this icon.

3h. Anticipated by
Where this phrase appears in a box, it identifies a potential attack on a previous argument that is raised by the author so that it can be disputed.

3i. Links as arrows direct the eye
After experimenting with a number of formats, we decided to use arrows to show the paths of arguments, with icons showing whether the relationship was one of support, dispute, or interpretation. The directionality of a link, represented by an arrow, represents the direction in which the reader should read the claims for maximal effectiveness. The arrows direct the eye. Thus, links do not necessarily correspond to direct evidential support, logical negation, or any more crispy defined logical relation (though in particular cases a link may be any one of these). I should point out that we sometimes include what Toulmin would call grounds, warrants and backing in our claim boxes. We did this primarily to avoid more of a tangle of boxes and arrows than we already had.

3j. Rebuttals and counterrebuttals
The rebuttal presents the possible exceptions or objections to the claim. There is no such thing as a debate without at least one rebuttal. And we followed that guideline as a criteria for choosing arguments to map.
Debates then continue through a series of contributions that dispute previous claims and other rebuttals. The counterrebuttals may or may not be made by the original claimant.

4. What’s the Answer? Can Computers Think?
The argumentation maps do not attempt to evaluate the arguments summarized. They map the debate without taking a stand. They are, as much as possible, neutral. It is left to readers to be the jury, to evaluate the “weight” of the arguments and evidence and draw their own conclusions. Many students have been frustrated by this. Indeed many scholars who have seen the maps say, “So, what’s the answer?” The maps do not provide the answer. Hopefully they do not even reveal the mapmakers’ views.
Of course, the maps are to some extent interpretive. In writing and linking arguments, we had to condense incredible amounts of information, often on the basis of highly obscure or technical literature. We also had to make decisions about placement and emphasis. The way these maps organize the debate is not necessarily the only possible organization, but it was carefully considered and weighed against alternatives. The argument summaries themselves, which is where the real dialogue takes place, stick closely to the words of the authors, the better to avoid interpretation.

5. Criteria for Inclusion of Arguments
Over the course of the project, we have developed 11 criteria for deciding whether to include a particular argument.

5a. Use published arguments
Only those arguments were included that have been published in an established print or electronic medium: journals (including reputable electronic journals and white papers), magazines, and books. Arguments made in Usenet newsgroups, electronic forums, e-mail exchanges, or in interpersonal debate were excluded as too ephemeral and as representing positions still in development. Such arguments will be excluded until they appear in a more established medium.

5b. Use arguments that lie within the scope of the map
The major claim – that machines can or will be able to think – determines the scope of these maps. Many threads of argument drift away from the central issue into such related territories as the mind-body problem, functionalism, and the philosophy of science. Such claims were set aside until a chance arises to map neighboring territories with maps of their own.

5c. Seek out the historically earliest or best-known version of an argument
When different authors make similar arguments, we chose the version which was either historically earliest, or the best-known version of the argument. When the best-known version is used, the historically earliest version is usually mentioned in a note. In the few cases in which differing versions of an argument are sufficiently unique or separately disputed, each is summarized separately.

5d. Avoid loosely drawn arguments
Sometimes an author makes an argument loosely, at the end of a paragraph, as an aside, or in a footnote. In general, such arguments are not included unless they are developed further in follow-up articles or are the focus of further debate.

5e. Avoid repetitive, nitpicking, or duplicative arguments
One goal of the maps is facilitation of productive debate. Ad hominem arguments, redundant rounds of back-and-forth, and tediously nitpicky arguments were left out.

5f. Avoid forbiddingly technical discussion
Highly technical arguments, which are based on extensive symbolic notation and formalisms, could not be represented with the cartographic conventions we developed, or at the scale we chose to work at. However, summaries of many technical and symbolic discussions were included. Only the most forbidding had to be excluded.

5g. Summarize the author’s published claim
Many authors hold views today that are different from those they expressed at the time they entered into the debate. We include authors’ claims as published. If an author later changed his or her position, and published the change, the new claim was included and the change of position was noted. But if no new contribution has been made, then the original published view stands.

5h. Avoid tentative arguments
It became clear as we wrote the summaries of the arguments that one current, tentative style of academic writing made it extremely difficult to understand exactly what was being argued. In some way, authors had to be definitive in their arguments to qualify for a spot on the map. To use a geographical analogy, a road or a lake or a mountain that “may exist” is rarely mapped.

5i. Include some historical arguments
In order to properly situate the debate in its historical context, we included a sampling of notable historical supports of contemporary arguments.

5j. Include some experimental results
To situate the debate in a context of concrete experimental and computational results, we included some implemented systems and empirical results. Again, we only included a small sample of such results, sticking to famous and notable computer models and experiments.

5k. Include a small sample of outrageous and humorous arguments
Some of the stronger and stranger claims were worth including just to liven things up and have some fun. Such claims also provide “targets” for what we anticipate will be lively threads of response.

6. Why are argumentation maps important to teaching?
The biologist Lewis Thomas has written, “College students, and for that matter high school students, should be exposed very early, perhaps at the outset, to the big arguments currently going on among scientists. Big arguments stimulate their interest, and with luck engage their absorbed attention… But the young students are told very little about the major disagreements of the day; they may be taught something about the arguments between Darwinians and their opponents a century ago, but they do not realize that similar disputes about other matters, many of them touching profound issues for our understanding of nature, are still going on, and, indeed are an essential feature of the scientific process.”

This is the overarching reason that we created these maps – to illustrate for students the dynamic nature of a debate that is active today.

6a. Watching Contemporary, Interdisciplinary, Global Debates Unfold
The intelligent machines debate is a prime example of the type of argument that benefits particularly well from argumentation mapping. From its beginning, the debate has been a truly interdisciplinary and global discussion, with philosophers, cognitive scientists, artificial intelligence researchers, and others joining in, from around the world. Nevertheless, great parts of the debate have taken place in journals that are isolated by the boundaries of particular academic disciplines. As a result, it has been difficult until now to see the structure of the debate as it unfolds.
Argumentation maps provide a picture, more detailed than previously available, of how such a vast debate can take place across disciplinary and geographic distances. By creating an accessible map of the conceptual territory our hope is to facilitate more global interdisciplinary debate, to bring the various sources to light, and to illuminate how the pieces of the puzzle fit together. Perhaps the very existence of the maps will provide incentive and opportunity for more interdisciplinary and international discussion.
In a world of global interdisciplinary discussion, effective communication and productive dialectical exchange are key. We need to elevate the coffee-house discussions and the Usenet dialogues into cooperative and productive exchanges that push our understanding forward. It is all too easy to repeat an argument that has already been made in a distant or obscure location, to talk past one another in the heat of conflict, or to ignore important context. Moving a serious debate forward requires a disciplined interdisciplinary and international dialectic.

6b. Work with Great Minds
It is of benefit to students to observe and engage with great minds at work. The Can Computers Think? arguments have attracted some of the greatest and most subtle minds of the 20th century. I could mention Herbert Simon, Nobel Prize–winning economist; Kurt Gödel, who with Turing was among the greatest mathematical minds of all time; Roger Penrose the great physicist; John Searle, former president of the American Philosophical Association; Herbert Dreyfus, one of the world’s leading Heidegger scholars; John McCarthy, who named the field artificial intelligence; and many more whom I don’t have time to list here.

6c. Learning philosophy dialectically
Argumentation maps illustrate the value of learning philosophy dialectically. Individual arguments are presented in clear summary form and are followed by chains, or threads, of dispute and support. By watching philosophers lock horns and wrestle in an interdisciplinary arena of open debate, readers can better appreciate the subtlety and complexity of the issues they themselves are struggling with.
The dialectical method has ancient roots and remains valuable today. Thousands of years ago Socrates grappled with the best minds of Athens in public debate, and Plato recorded those dialogues as a means of teaching philosophical concepts. Today, contemporary issues are battled out in televised forums and in Internet newsgroups, where everyone from big-name pundits to coffee-shop philosophers chew through issues in round after round of back-and-forth. Argumentation maps harness the full communicative and instructional power of dialectical exchange.

7. More specific educational possibilities
How can these maps aid education and, in particular, education in argumentation analysis? I am sure that many of you will come up with creative uses that we on the project have never thought of. But here are a few possibilities, using the Can Computers Think? series as an example, that we would offer for your consideration.

7a. Excellent hook for student interest
It is easier to get into a subject that has some connection to currently hot topics in the culture. The maps can be used to introduce questions of philosophy in a way that is attractive and compelling. Many students will have heard of the IBM computer Deep Blue that recently beat the human grandmaster champion at chess. The chess-playing arguments are represented appear on Map 3, Can Physical Symbol Systems Think?

7b. Touches many subjects
One of the important things about the Can Computers Think? debate is that it touches on so many of the ongoing topics in philosophy : the mind-body problem, consciousness, free will, etc. This permits the instructor to show how one set of arguments relate to other sets of arguments in related areas.

7c. Provide project opportunities in creative argumentation
Since the maps provide the thread of existing arguments and also show where they have ended (as of now), they provide the opportunity for assigning students to select one thread or topic of an argument and try to add to it with an original argument, or write a critical essay about it, or read the original sources of one or more issue areas and critique them. Since the maps clearly mark the frontiers of arguments, students have a chance to engage in real debates and contribute their critical assessments as well as new arguments.

7d. Save time and provide context
One graduate student in the philosophy of mind said to us: “These maps would have saved me 500 hours of time my first year in graduate school. For almost two semesters, I had to keep reading article after article without enough context to see how they fit in to the bigger picture. The maps would have made my whole experience a much more rewarding one.”

8. Other Topics
We are proceeding on maps of several other major debates and have proposals out for still others. We believe that this mapping approach will serve education by providing a general methodological tool and by providing authoritative maps in substantive areas.

REFERENCES
Horn, R.E. (1989). Mapping Hypertext: Analysis, Linkage, and Display of Knowledge for the Next Generation of On-line Text and Graphics. Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Institute.
Thomas, L. (1981). Debating the unknowable. Atlantic Monthly, July, 49-50.
Toulmin, S. (1958). The Uses of Argument, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Toulmin, S., R. Rieke, & A. Janik. (1979). An Introduction to Reasoning. New York: Macmillan.
Turing, A. (1950). Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind 59, 434-460.

Introduction
No, at the moment there is no such thing as a sociology of argumentation; but it would be nice to have one. The aim of this paper is to show how a sociological approach could possibly enrich our understanding of argumentation.
This is the fourth Amsterdam conference on argumentation, but sociology is still missing from the wide range of disciplines present in argumentation studies. There is a whole branch of sociology, the sociology of knowledge, which should have been interested in argumentation studies from the very beginning – but it was not. Habermas’ landmark work, The Theory of Communicative Action, should have drawn a crowd of sociologists into argumentation theory – but it did not. I think this is an unfortunate situation but one that will change soon. Sociologists are already active in such neighboring fields as discourse analysis, conversation analysis – even rhetorical studies. It is only a matter of time that they discover the importance of argumentation.
We cannot foresee how a future sociology of argumentation will look like, but we can be pretty sure that it will be organized around two main questions: first, how social reality shapes argumentation; and second, how argumentation shapes social reality.

The first question is easier to answer. The unequal distribution of knowledge and skills is a commonplace in sociology. It would be easy to show that the willingness to argue and the skills of arguing as well as the types of arguments actually used are unequally distributed in society and depend on social factors like the gender, the educational level and other social characteristics of the arguers. Standard statistical methods can be used to show the correlation between the social characteristics of the arguers and their arguments.
The second part of this paper will present some exercises of this kind. I will analyze the responses given to an open-ended why-question in a survey on political opinions conducted recently in Hungary. The question first asks whether the 1992 decision of Hungary to abandon the building of the Danube Dam – a huge and environmentally risky barrage system on the border river, a ìjoint investmentî with former Czechoslovakia – was good or bad, and then asks why the respondent thinks so.
This question was recently discussed in the Hague International Court of Justice by experts of international law. The negotiations between the two countries were unfruitful, so they opted for the judgment of this supranational institution. The judgment came out last year and was solomonic. It said that Hungary was not right when it abandoned the project unilaterally, but Czechoslovakia was not right either when it continued it unilaterally.
The mere fact that there is an international court of justice and that the controversy between Hungary and Slovakia had a happy ending, that the end of the conflict was not a bloody war, but a scholarly dispute between polite lawyers, brings us back to the second main question of the sociology of argumentation: how argumentation shapes social reality. I will address this question in the first part of my paper. Taking the decade-long debate on the building of the Danube Dam as a historical example, I will show why the use of arguments (instead of force) was one of the most important stakes of the debate.

1. How argumentation shapes social reality
The Case
In 1977 the Hungarian and the Czechoslovakian government signed an agreement on the joint construction of a river barrage and hydroelectric station on the Danube, between Gabcikovo and Nagymaros, where the river forms the common border of the two countries. The plan was a typical example of those gigantic industrial projects that have been built in the socialist countries since the Stalinist era. There is no need to tell here the whole history of the project. It is a long and sometimes boring history, with lot of dates and names and technical details. However, I have to tell the beginning of the story to show how an economic issue became first an environmental and then a political one. The following narrative is based on an excellent political science article (Galambos, 1992), which summarizes the history of the debate well.

Czechoslovakia started construction already in April 1978, two months before official ratification. The Hungarians were less enthusiastic: shortly after work began on the Hungarian side, public debates over the project began, first in professional associations.
In November 1981, an article harshly criticizing the project was published by a biologist, Janos Vargha, who later became a leading figure of the environmental movement in Hungary. Czechoslovakia resented that the publication of such an article was allowed in Hungary. The nervousness of the Czechoslovakian government was understandable. Two months earlier, the two countries agreed to suspend construction work, because of lack of necessary financing. The Hungarian government unilaterally decided to postpone all work until 1990, and initiated a study on the ecological consequences of the dam system. However, in the several expert committees that were formed, dam engineers managed to assert their point of view.
The Hungarian state and party leaders were more concerned about th Therefore they proposed that Czechoslovakia should build the whole project alone – in exchange Hungary would pay off half of the investment costs with electric energy.
The Hungarian state and party leaders were more concerned about the lack of investment capital than about ecological consequences. Therefore they proposed that Czechoslovakia should build the whole project alone – in exchange Hungary would pay off half of the investment costs with electric energy.
The Hungarians did not manage to “escape” from the project – Czechoslovakia only agreed to take over some of the work. In October 1983 the prime ministers of the two countries signed a modification of the 1977 treaty, according to which the completion of the project was postponed by five years. The Hungarian Politburo had already made a secret decision in favor of project  completion in June.
In December of 1983 the Hungarian Academy of Science completed a report, according to which construction should not be continued until an environmental impact assessment is prepared. In the spring of 1984 public debates were held in university clubs and professional associations.
The first grass-root environmental group in Hungary, the Danube Committee, was established in January 1984. The movement collected more than 10,000 signatures in support of a petition, addressed to the Parliament and government, demanding a halt to the construction. The movement grew in size but was not structured. It was therefore sought – unsuccessfully – to found an official association.
But the political leadership toughened its position, prohibiting public discussion and publications against the dam system. Finding itself unable to be registered as an association, the movement founded the unofficial Danube Circle.[i] The Danube Circle broke the ban on public discussion of the dam system by publishing the News of the Danube Circle in samizdat. The bulletin contained documents of debates, information on the historical and political background of the project, and an account of the debate in Austria on the Hainburg hydroelectric plant. In December 1985 the Danube Circle received the Right Livelihood Award (the so-called Alternative Nobel Prize).

Three other movements appeared for a short period: one gathered signatures, demanding a referendum; the Blues demanded that Parliament should discuss the case and decide on it; the Friends of the Danube demanded that at least the construction of the dam at Nagymaros should be stopped. In January 1986, a letter with 2,500 signatures, protesting the project and calling for a referendum, was submitted to the Hungarian Presidential Council (a body which exercised the functions of the head of state.)
Negotiations between Hungary and Austria for a credit agreement were underway. The government would not have been able to continue the construction without finding a solution for the financial problems: it came from Austria, where the construction of the Hainburg water power station had failed to materialize due to the citizens’ protest.[ii]

In January 1986 the Danube Circle, together with Austrian and German environmentalists, held a press conference, protesting against the Austrian financing of the project. The Danube Circle also sent a petition to the Austrian Parliament. In February a “Danube Walk” was organized by the Danube Circle and the Austrian Greens, which was violently disrupted by the Hungarian police. The governmentís action was internationally condemned and the European Parliament passed a protest resolution.
In April prominent Hungarian intellectuals published an advertisement in an Austrian daily, Die Presse, asking the Austrians to protest against their governmentís involvement in the dam system. However, the agreement between Austria and Hungary was signed in May 1986. Austrian banks were to supply loans for the construction of the project, and Austrian companies were to be given 70% of all building contracts; Hungary was to repay the loans by delivering electric energy to Austria, from 1996. Two thirds of Hungary’s share of electricity produced by dam system was to be paid to Austria over a period of 20 years, mainly during the winter months, when the level and the flow of the Danube are at its lowest, therefore the dam system alone could not have provided the required amount of electricity, and new Hungarian power stations would have had to be built in order to amortize the energy debt. The Austrian companies began construction at Nagymaros in August 1988.

I stop the story at this point. Now we are in 1998. Ten years after the construction began at Nagymaros, and half a year after the decision of the Hague International Court of Justice, the debate still goes on. This year, the liberal-socialist coalition has lost the elections – partly because some leaders of the Socialist Party and some bosses of the water-management bureaucracy had the bad idea that it was time to return to the project and realize it. It is not without symbolic significance that one of the first moves of the new government was to nominate Janos Vargha as chief adviser in environmental issues.
Before analyzing the debate, we should have a look at the arguments themselves.

The Arguments[iii]
With the exception of the argument of waste, all other arguments are strictly professional. It is difficult to asses their respective strength, but some of the counter-arguments are definitely stronger than the corresponding pro-arguments and in general the counter- argumentation as a whole seems to be stronger. This is probably so because the opponents can propose cheaper and safer alternatives while the supporters must defend an obviously costly and risky project. An other advantage of the opponents is the possibility to use irony and paradox: for instance in showing that the benefits are actually harmful, that the proposed good thing is actually a bad thing.

As expected, and as it is indicated by the number of arguments, the two critical points are the environmental risks and the financial losses. We find here the weakest pro-arguments and the strongest counter-arguments.[iv] The weakest point of the supporter side is the financial one. It is significant that besides the argument of waste, they do not have any financial argument to defend the project. In fact, they can not have any: profitability was out of question from the beginning.
However, in spite of these weaknesses on the supporter side, the two sides were in equilibrium. The arguments on the opponent were somewhat stronger, but this was balanced by the power position of the other side: the dam builders had all the support of the State and the Party.

A Note on the Argument of Waste
It is interesting to note that the argument of waste has two forms: it can be used as a pro-argument and as a counter-argument as well. As a pro-argument, it says that if you have already invested in a project, you have to continue, because abandoning it means losing money and losing money is bad. But, with a little modification, by adding the choice between more and less, the same argument can be used as a counter-argument. If losing money is bad, then losing less is better than losing more. So, if we must choose between losing less and losing more, we have to choose losing less. Note that the use of the modified form presupposes that in any case, there will be no returns, only losses.
Actually, when the Hungarian government had to decide about the eventual abandonment of the project, an independent expert committee made a cost-benefit analysis. They found that both continuing the project and abandoning it will cause economic losses, but the highest losses would be caused by delaying the decision. On the short run it is more advantageous to abandon the project, on the long run there is no significant difference between its continuation and halting.

If this analysis was correct, the use of both forms of the argument of waste was right, although, again, the counter-argument seems slightly better grounded. The moral of this case is that expert opinions are not always better than those of lay people. In this case, scientific expertise could not really help the politicians, who, not surprisingly, opted for the worst alternative, that of delaying the decision. That was certainly wrong from a financial point of view, but politics has its own priorities. Hungary did not abandon the project until 1992.

Weapons and Reasons
Saying that argumentation shapes social reality may mean many things. It is clear for instance, that public debates can have great influence, but this is trivial. In this trivial sense the debate on the Dam shaped social reality because a little group of concerned scientists, ecologically minded people and political dissidents succeeded to build a strong opposition movement and to activate the public opinion against the project.

What is perhaps more interesting from a sociological point of view is the interplay between the use of power and the use of arguments in society.
In our case it is clear for instance, that the possibility of resolving a major conflict between states with arguments, that is without weapons, was not always granted in history. International law is a relatively recent invention (a Dutch invention, by the way), the Court of Hague is only ninety years old and its real working only started after WW2. Nevertheless, it seems to be a general characteristic of modern societies that they tend to resolve all kind of conflicts in a peaceful way, that is by negotiations. We have got diplomacy and international law to prevent war, parliamentary debates to prevent revolution and civil war, collective bargaining to prevent industrial conflicts, and family therapy to prevent indoor killing, that is, domestic violence. The substitution of weapons with reasons can be viewed as part of this general tendency of rationalization already familiar from Max Weber. The success of these nonviolent solutions, and the fact that they are a lot cheaper than the violent versions, has surely contributed to their diffusion.
However, in spite of this general tendency of rationalization, our society is still very violent. The use of arguments is still an exception, the use of weapons being the rule. Considering argumentation from this point of view, it seems that the most interesting things happen not inside the argumentative framework, but rather on the unsure frontier between the peaceful oasis of argumentation and the large outside world of violence. The most interesting moves, at least from a sociological point of view, are those the aim of which is to force the opponent into the oasis, that is, to transform the bloody war into a rational discussion – where, in principle at least, only the force of arguments counts. This is always difficult, because the opponent has other choices, for instance he/she can use his/her weapons instead.

Now this is America: everybody has weapons, but some people have more powerful weapons than others. We live in a social world where power is unevenly distributed. In this hierarchy of power positions, each of us, even those on the top of the top, can find him/herself in an underdog position if his/her opponent has more power than he/she has. And this is our luck, because as an underdog, we are more interested in rational discussion than in war-making. So we propose cease-fire and rational discussion. The problem is that our opponent, being more powerful than we are, has the opposite interest: he/she is more interested in war-making than in rational discussion. What can we do in this situation? We have three choices:
1. We can try to persuade him/her that rational discussion is a much better solution. This is pure argumentation. It works in the textbooks, but rarely in real life.
2. We can try to force him/her into a rational discussion by using non-argumentative means: this is not argumentation, but it works. The only problem is that, as Habermas says, a constrained consensus does not count as consensus.
3. We can use a mixture of argument and force to drive him/her into a rational discussion. I call this dirty argumentation. It has the best results.

Anyway, in the first and third cases, we use arguments – exclusively or in a combination with other, non-argumentative means – to persuade. This means that arguments are used not only inside but outside the oasis as well.
In fact, we have three concentric circles. Forget the oasis; imagine instead a hotel where the mafia bosses have their annual meeting. They are sitting in a big conference room, where weapons are not allowed. Here argument rules. Anyone who wants to enter the room, has to leave his weapons in the lobby. Outside, in the street, there is war. There are no arguments here, only weapons against weapons. And between the two, the lobby. Here we find weapons and arguments as well: armed gorillas try to persuade mafia bosses to leave their weapons outside. They use arguments to persuade them, but they can use their weapons, if necessary.
In fact, reality is a little bit more complex, because sometimes there are shootings in the conference room and rational discussions take place in the street; but these are exceptions and we do not have to deal with them here. What is important for us is that we are all members of the mafia and spend most of our life in the street and in the lobby. Occasionally, we enter the conference room and spend there some time, but not very often.
Now Argumentation Theory, as far as I can see, spends most of its time in the conference room. This is OK, since most pure argumentation occurs there. There is nothing wrong with this choice: if you want to study pure argumentation, this is the right place for you. Even if some interesting dirty argumentation occurs in the lobby, Argumentation Theory has all the right to say: there is nothing wrong with me; it is true that I am sitting in the conference room, but I can see very well from here what happens in the lobby.
Well, maybe it can. But my point is just this: Argumentation Theory observes the whole world from the conference room. That is, the whole world of argumentation from the point of view of pure argumentation. I am afraid this is not the best perspective, since in real life, most argumentation belongs to the dirty type. I accept that pure argumentation is an important subject and even that dirty argumentation can be studied – maybe with some extra work – from the perspective of pure argumentation. The problem is that things look different from this conference room perspective; I mean different from what they really are.

I take the example of pragma-dialectics, the version of Argumentation Theory I know the best, and I like the best. In pragma-dialectics the world of argumentation looks as if scientific discussion was the dominant type of argumentation. For this clean world of pure argumentation to exist, the whole problem of violence and power must be eliminated at the very beginning. And in fact, it is. The only place where this world of violence is mentioned at all is in the first rule of the “Ten Commandments” where it is treated as the ad baculum fallacy (van Eemeren and Grootendorst, 1992: 107-110).
Of course, if the use of force makes any kind of rational discussion impossible, the appeal to force is a fallacy of the worst kind and must be treated as one. However, eliminating it analytically will not resolve the problem. The problem is that the possibility of using force instead of arguments is always present in real life situations and its presence influences argumentation to a great extent. Even in a real conference room, the persuasive force of an argument depends not only on its inherent quality, but also on the real life power of the arguer. Everybody is aware that life continues after the end of the discussion and arguments are evaluated in the light of this knowledge. Arguments tend to be perceived as strong if they are advanced by someone who has power and weak if they are advanced by someone who has not.
Social life is a power game and argumentation is only a remarkably nonviolent variety of it.[v] Sometimes we opt for the nonviolent variety and it can be very consequential what happens in these short argumentative interludes. This is why the study of pure argumentation is so important.

However, these episodes of pure argumentation are always embedded in and preceded by vast bodies of dirty argumentation. Perhaps we should pay more attention to dirty argumentation and to these rare but critical moments when the rules of the game suddenly and unexpectedly become more powerful then the most powerful of the players; when those who are armed put aside, for some reason, their arms and accept to fight with naked hands; when the players, even those who could do otherwise, really give a chance to the best argument to win. They may have many reasons to do this: to save their face, their dignity, to show their talents, their ability, to gain popularity – or simply because they are too stupid to recognize the danger. Anyway, these are great moments, because they let us pass in a different world where we are all equals, there is no violence and the best argument wins.
After this short theoretical introduction, we will see in a different light what happened in the debate about the Dam.

Dirty Moves: Case Analysis
Perhaps the most important observation we can make is that the conference room situation is characteristically absent from the public debate. It appears only outside the debate, as the working of the Hague International Court of Justice for example, or in its pores, as the expert discussions in the committees of the Academy of Sciences. But the debate as a whole was not a rational discussion. It was about the need and the possibility of a rational discussion, but it was a lobby debate. The protest movement people tried to persuade the public and the decision-makers that there is a risk situation and that is good reason enough to begin a rational discussion about the project. On the other side, the decision-makers tried to persuade the public that there is no risk and persuade the protest people that, even in a soft dictatorship, they have much to lose.
The most important consequence of the first few moves of the protest group was the politicization of the debate, something what probably was not intended by the group. At the beginning, the group was composed of concerned scientists and a few green activists, but members of the democratic opposition were absent yet.
The group desperately needed freedom of press and freedom of expression as means to realize its main goal, the activation of the general public. Now freedom of press and freedom in general were the main goals of the democratic opposition, so environmentalists and dissidents discovered that they share some important common goals. This made the partial fusion of the two movements possible.

One of the consequences of this fusion was the activation of quite large fractions of the civil society. People who sympathized with the democratic opposition but did not manifest these sympathies because they were afraid to lose their job or to be harassed by the police, now recognized the opportunity and became followers of the movement. They exploited the opportunity that now they could be proud members of the opposition without taking too much risk. After all, protection of the environment is a non-political issue, and every concerned citizen has the right to express his anxiety if the environment is in danger. Both the environmentalist and the political dissident wings of the movement were happy with this reaction because the growth of the movement was their common interest.
However, the Politburo and the government were not so stupid to believe that this suddenly discovered concern for the environment was without political motives. They perceived the growth of the movement as a politically dangerous development and wanted to react accordingly. Nevertheless, their situation was delicate. On the one hand, the movement was politically dangerous, but it seemed even more dangerous to ban every manifestation. After all, it was not an outright political movement. Persecuting it would mean to recognize it as an authentic political opposition movement, and to declare war. Now the government was not interested in making war because the image of the late Kadar era was that of a tolerant, laissez-faire reform regime. On the other hand, the government realized that the movement could be used as an argument, together with the reports of the expert committees, in its discussions with Czechoslovakia. The government was not concerned by the ecological risks of the Dam, but it was concerned by an eventual financial crisis, and wanted to abandon this costly project. Nevertheless, it desperately needed good arguments, so it made some concessions to the opposition in order to gain popularity and be able to use the ecological argument in its discussions with Czechoslovakia. It was in this complex situation that the opposition succeeded to force the government to enter into a dialogue with the movement and with the civil society.
Both sides used dirty argumentation in this dialogue, because it was a real life, public debate with great risks, so they could not permit the luxury of a fair and rational discussion. Arguments and force were equally used, and most of the arguments were fallacious.

There is no need here to discuss the use of force. It is evident that both sides used non-argumentative means, the most spectacular examples being the violent dissolution of the ìDanube Walkî by the police and the prohibition of public discussions and publications against the Dam. There is a difference, though: the protest movement has never used violence. The non-argumentative means used by them consisted almost exclusively of the force of public sphere: collecting signatures in support of a petition, founding an unofficial pressure group (the Danube Circle), or publishing samizdat literature, etc., they used and at the same time created their only “weapon”: the activation of the general public. Ironically, however, their use of non-argumentative means threatened the government more, than the use of violence by the government threatened them.

Now let us see the basic argumentation of the two parties. Although ad hominem and ad baculum arguments were abundantly and routinely used, I will focus here on the appeal to expertise.
At the beginning, the protest movement is powerless, so their main strategy is to challenge the government. The implicit but unmistakable challenge behind their actions reads something like this: “Let us talk about your project! If it is really good, you do not have to be afraid of discussing it.”
At first sight, it seems that the government must face a dilemma. If it does not accept the challenge, this is a proof that the project is not good enough; but accepting it may also suggest that the project is not good enough, and, in addition, proves the weakness of the government. Moreover, accepting the challenge and entering into a discussion may lead to a disastrous defeat.

However, the government does not have to face the dilemma: it has other choices as well. One of its possible responses is this: “The project is good, and we are not afraid of discussing it. But this is experts’ business and you are not experts. So we will not discuss it with you.” This is the classical form of evading a challenge without losing face. It is very common, even young children use it: “You are not strong enough to fight with me.” Basically, this is an appeal to equality and fairness: only equals can have a fair fight; we are not equals; so we will not fight. If the challenged uses it well, he/she can save his/her own dignity without insulting the other, but it can be used as an insult or as a face saving device as well.
The appeal to expertise is frequently used in public debates. It has formally the same structure as the appeal to equality and fairness, but it is applied usually as a face saving device. Ironically enough, the appeal to equality is used here to make the transition into a rational discussion impossible. The invitation of the weaker party to fight with naked hands, that is, with arguments, so that both parties have equal chances to win, is rejected by the stronger on the ground that the weaker party lacks the necessary expertise.
The appeal to expertise used by the government was really a combination of an ad hominem and an appeal to authority: This combination of the two arguments seems to be strong, but it has five premises, which gives five points of attack to the opponents.
In fact, the protest movement attacked all five premises. First, by recruiting a large number of scientists from a great variety of specialties, they succesfully refuted (5). Second, by introducing the environmental issue, they refuted (1) and (4) on the ground that the protection of the environment is everybody’s business. Finally, by pointing out the contradictions and the divergences between various expert opinions, they discredited (2) and (3).
As the image of the protest movement changed, the government also changed its strategy. For example, when the expertise of the opponents could not be denied any more, the government used a slightly modified version of the appeal to expertise: “Yes, you are experts, but this is a political (a foreign relations) affair and you do not know about politics (foreign relations).” When the movement found an ally in the democratic opposition, the government used a circumstancial ad hominem: “Yes, you are experts, but you have a political interest in the matter.”
Unfortunately, there is no room here to give a more detailed analysis. I hope that I said enough to show the general direction of my argument and to justify my critical position concerning the perspective of Argumentation Theory.

2. How social reality shapes argumentation
The Data
The data I am going to analyze here are from a representative survey made in Hungary, in December 1997. It was conducted by Róbert Angelusz (ELTE University of Budapest, Institute of Sociology) and Róbert Tardos (Academy of Sciences, Communication Theory Research Team).[vi] The sample consisted of thousand persons. The questionnaire consisted of ten parts. Parts G, H and I were about political opinions. Part G asked questions about foreign relations, for example about Hungary’s plans to join the NATO and the EC. At the end of this panel there was a question about the decision of the Hague International Court, and another one about Hungaryís decision to abandon the building of the Dam in 1992.

This second question was open-ended and formulated in these words: What is your opinion about Hungary’s 1992 decision to denounce the treaty with Slovakia; was it right? If the person answered yes or no, he/she was asked to argue in defense of his/her standpoint: Why do you think so?

Among the 995 people who answered the questionnaire, a rather high percentage, 38.5 % did not answer this question or answered by “I do not know.” The rest, 61.5 % answered by yes or no and most of them advanced at least one reason to defend their standpoint. As this was an open-ended question, they were allowed to advance several arguments, but only a minority of them advanced more than one.[vii] The distribution was the following:
14.1 % said only yes or no, but had no arguments;
39.6 % advanced one argument, and
7.8 % advanced two arguments.

The Arguments
During the coding process, the researchers found no less than 17 different types of argument. Here I present only the five most frequently mentioned pro-arguments and the five most frequently mentioned counter-arguments.

The pro-arguments:[viii]
14.8 % said yes, it was a good decision because of ecological reasons;
7.0 % said yes, because it was a bad treaty anyway;
2.6 % said yes, because the project was a waste of money;
1.2 % said yes, because there was no way to negotiate with the Slovaks;
0.6 % said yes, because that was what the opposition was fighting for; and finally 1.8 % advanced other reasons.

On the other side,
10.9 % said no, it was a bad decision because it would have been better to finish the project;
6.8 % said no, because we already invested a lot of money in the project;
3.0 % said no, because we need the electric energy the Dam will produce;
1.7 % advanced the argument of pacta sunt servanda, that is, if you have a contract, you have to observe it;
1.1 % said no, because the Hague decision found that Hungary had no right to abandon the project unilaterally; and finally
2.1 % advanced other arguments.[ix]

The second and third pro-arguments and the first and second counter-arguments are different versions of the argument of waste. (Although the bad treaty and the better to finish arguments can be interpreted as cases of petitio principii as well.) Here too, it is used in both senses: as a pro-argument and as a counter-argument as well.

There are two political arguments on the side of the opponents. We may feel the taste of some ethnic prejudice in one of them, but I think there is no prejudice here: in fact there was no way to find a solution with the Slovak party.[x] The other political argument introduces the role of the opposition: this one is something between a petitio principii and an appeal to authority. (It was good because it was good and it was good because an authority said so.)

It is interesting that on the supporter side there are no less than four arguments appealing to the law. There is only one making explicit reference to the Hague decision, (an appeal to authority and/or to law) but there is the pacta sunt servanda argument and there are two others between the less frequently mentioned arguments that have roughly the same character: one says that it is not good to go to court, the other says that it is better to negotiate. These are what rhetoricians call sententia. The pacta sunt servanda argument makes appeal to an age-old legal principle, the two others are proverb-like principles of common sense, but all three are used here as appeals to common sense.

Finally, we can find here the two most important arguments used by the experts: the appeal to ecological damages on the opponent side and the appeal to energy needs on the supporter side. Strictly speaking, only these two are issue-dependent arguments. If we compare this pattern with that of the expert debate, where only the argument of waste was more or less issue-independent, we can venture the conclusion that lay people are more likely to use issue-independent arguments.

1. This is experts’ business.
2. What experts say in experts’ business is true.
3. Experts say that the project is good.
4. Only experts can have a say in experts’ business.
5. You are not an expert. Therefore it is good. Therefore you cannot have a say in this business.

One more word about the relationship between social characteristics and argument types. Regression analysis has shown that the use of the most frequently mentioned ecological argument is determined by the age of the respondents: young people (under 30) are two times more likely to use the ecological argument than senior citizens (over 60).[xi] However, there is a difference here between men and women: in the case of women, there is no significant relationship between young age and the use of the ecological argument.

Argumentative Skills and the Willingness to Argue
Theoretically, we may suppose that the ability to choose a standpoint and to advance arguments in defense of it depends on certain learned skills, on something we may call argumentative competence. Those who perform well, that is those who have fewer difficulties to choose a standpoint and to advance arguments when they are explicitly asked to do so, can be considered more skilled, more competent. But it is not sure at all that this is really so. We know from sociolinguistical studies – especially important are here the studies of William Labov – that the situation influences enormously the performance of the speakers. (Labov 1972) As a result, there is very little ground to say anything sure on the competence of the speakers on the basis of their performance.
People from lower social strata (or – and this is quite the same – with lower educational level) especially tend to employ risk-evading strategies in situations they feel menacing – for instance in exam situations. Now a survey interview situation is much like an exam situation, at least for some people – again, especially for people from lower social strata. If they feel that a question is “too difficult”, that answering it demands some political knowledge, they are more likely not to answer it at all or to take only minimal risks. The question about the Dam was definitely of this kind, so it is not surprising that the rate of non-answering was high. Those people did not take any risk at all. The same can be said about differences in presenting arguments. Those who opted for minimal risk-taking, advanced a standpoint, but were not willing to advance arguments in defense of it.
That is why I use the expression “the willingness to argue” instead of “argumentative skills.” Argumentative skills can be very good even if the given performance is poor. At other times, at other places, the performance of the same people can be surprisingly good. People who did not answer this question or did only with minimal risk-taking, are perhaps very talkative on the same issue in a pub or between friends. In general, it can be said that survey data give very little ground to evaluate argumentative skills. If we really want to know about skills, direct observation is a much better method.
On the other side, it can be said that people have to use their skills in real, sometimes menacing social situations, so the question of competence is not really important, because in real life, only the performance counts. So survey data are perhaps more informative on real life, then data from direct observation or from laboratory experiments.[xii]
This is only to say that, after all, survey data can be interesting. The only thing I want to show here is that argumentative skills – measured by the willingness to argue – are unevenly distributed in society. I use a very simple indicator for measuring the willingness to argue: I suppose that providing two arguments is better than providing one, one is better than none, and opting for a standpoint is better than saying nothing.

Regression analysis has shown that the willingness to argue depends on three factors: the respondentís gender, educational level and degree of political interest.

Here are some simple tables. They show how the independent variables influence the argumentative performance of the respondents. While the non-response rate of men is less than 30 %, half of the women had no answer to this question. Sixty per cent of the men present one or two arguments, while only 37 % of the women do this. This is not surprising. As Bourdieu says in his famous article “L’opinion publique n’existe pas” (Bourdieu, 1973), if we want to know which questions have political coloring, we only have to examine the response rates of men and women: the bigger the difference between the response rates, the more political a question is.
I have to note that there is no significant difference between men and women at the lowest and highest educational level, which probably means that men with unfinished elementary school behave more like women, that is they are timid, while women with university level behave more like men, that is they feel strong enough to argue, even about politics.
As this is a political question, there is a significant relationship between the level of political interest and the willingness to argue. If the level of political interest is very low, only one quart of the respondents present arguments, if it is moderate, half of them, and if it is very high, three quarts of them presents arguments.
Next comes the influence of schooling (table 4). This is a very clear picture. The big gaps are between “some elementary” and the others and between “university” and the others. Almost seventy percent of those who have not finished elementary school, have no standpoint.
At the other end of the hierarchy, we can note the extremely high percentage of university level respondents who advanced a second argument. There is no need to say that political interest itself is a dependent variable. Regression analysis has shown that it depends on three factors: gender, educational level and age.

Men and educated people are significantly more interested in politics, than women and less educated people. While the percentage of men interested or very interested in politics is 36.2, the same value for women is only 20.5. The following table shows that education has an even stronger influence on the level of political interest: the percentage of people with higher education interested or very interested in politics is 53, while the same value for people with unfinished elementary school is only 5.

Here too, the big gaps are between ìsome elementaryî and the others and between “higher education” and the others.

To summarize: according to our data, argumentative performance – measured here by the willingness to argue – depends on the respondents’ level of political interest, educational level and gender. As political interest itself depends on the respondents’ educational level and gender (the effect of age being negligible), and as gender itself is the product of education (or socialization), the single most important factor determining argumentative performance is education (or socialization).

A Lesson from Simmel
A received view in rhetorical studies is that the ability to use rhetorical devices is evenly distributed among the members of a society. A scholar of rhetoric says somewhere that the language of the fish market is as rich in tropes and other rhetorical devices as the language of the most educated class.
If this is true, and if rhetoric has something to do with argumentation (and we know it has), we should infer that argumentative skills too, are evenly distributed among the members of a society. Unfortunately, this is not so. Sociology can show us that these skills, like most other goods and privileges, are unevenly distributed.
This has clearly to do something with power relationships. Women are more timid than men not by nature: they are socialized this way. Men have more power and so they have more self-confidence, more self-esteem. This is why they are more likely to answer questions, to choose a standpoint, to advance arguments. The same is true for people with higher educational levels or with higher social status.
There is an interesting contradiction here. On the one hand, argumentation presupposes the equality of participants, the neglect of power differentials, the suspension of the use of power and violence. On the other hand, it is clear that the social context is always a power context and that even the ability of arguing is determined by the place of the individual or the group in the hierarchy of power relations.
In his famous study on ‘Sociability’, Simmel analyzes a somewhat analogous situation. A social gathering, just as a rational discussion, presupposes the equality of the participants. Socializing, just like the resolution of differences by using persuasive arguments, has an essentially democratic character. In both cases, one has to leave his/her social status outside to be able to play the game and let the others play. This is a difficult thing to do, and even in the case of socializing, it cannot be done but within certain limits. Here is what Simmel says:

Sociability emerges as a very peculiar sociological structure. The fact is that whatever the participants in the gathering may possess in terms of objective attributes – attributes that are centered outside the particular gathering in question – must not enter it. Wealth, social position, erudition, fame, exceptional capabilities and merits, may not play any part in sociability. (…)

[The principle of sociability] shows the democratic structure of all sociability. Yet, this democratic character can be realized only within a given social stratum: sociability among members of very different social strata often is inconsistent and painful. (…) Yet the democracy of sociability even among social equals is only something played. (…)

Yet, this world of sociability – the only world in which a democracy of the equally privileged is possible without frictions – is an artificial world. (…) Sociability is a game in which one ‘does as if’ all were equal… (Simmel, 1950:45-49) (All emphases from Simmel.)
What Simmel says here about “sociability” is highly relevant for us. One can even replace the word “sociability” with “rational discussion” and reread the citation above. It makes perfectly sense, because a rational discussion must meet the same requirements of equality. Just like socializing, a rational discussion is “a social work of art”, a game in which one does as if all were equal, an artificial world in which the strong makes himself the equal of the weaker.
But the analogy is not perfect. Even sociability, says Simmel, can only be realized within a given social stratum, because to play the game, people must take no notice of the different social status of the participants, which can be difficult if members of very different social strata are present. However, with some extra work, it can be done. Although equality is faked, and each of the participants knows this, they still may want to play the game, because it is rewarding.
In the case of a rational discussion, the name of the game is the same – “we are all equals now” –, but one should be able to leave outside not only his/her social status, but his/her socialized self as well; and this cannot be done. People entering in a rational discussion cannot change themselves for this occasion: they were socialized in a particular way, according to their position in the power hierarchy, and now they act according to their different habitus. It is not surprising then that their argumentative skills are unequal and, consequently, they have unequal chances to participate in the discussion and to advance good arguments. Their current performance in the discussion is limited by their competence, which was forged before and outside the equality conditions of the discussion.

Conclusion
In argumentation studies, it is a common presumption that arguments have some inner persuasive force. Some arguments are strong, some others are weak. Moreover, there are bad and good arguments. Fallacies, for example, are bad arguments. We assume that in a rational discussion, bad arguments are eliminated and the best argument has to win.
This is certainly so in an ideal speech-situation, and I think Habermas is not wrong when he says that even in normal conditions, when the situation is far from the ideal, these expectations work and regulate somehow our behavior. We know how it should be done, even if it cannot be done that way.
This is a great insight, but it does not change the fact that in real life debates, the inner force of arguments is rarely as important as the power position of the arguers. This does not mean that arguments do not have some inherent force; they do, but in real life situations they have this extra force as well. The inner force of arguments can make a difference, but only if certain very special conditions are met.
These conditions are, of course, social conditions. In some cases it is so important to make a distinction between bad and good arguments, that there are a few strictly regulated forms of communication specifically designed for pure argumentation. A few important social activities, like law or sciences, are expressly organized around the requirements of pure argumentation. From time to time, pure argumentation occurs even in everyday life, but only as an exception. Otherwise, we use power, and, at the very best, dirty argumentation.

When, in a discourse on ‘Argumentation and Democracy’, van Eemeren introduces certain “higher order conditions” as preconditions of a rational discussion (the respect of the rules of conduct prescribed in the pragma-dialectical model being a “first order” condition), he implicitly acknowledges that the inner force of arguments makes a difference only if certain very special conditions are met. According to his distinction, “second order” conditions are the “psychological conditions” of the arguers, among them “their ability to reason validly”. “Third order” conditions are the social conditions of the discussion, among them the “socio-political” equality of the arguers. Here is the relevant section of his text:
We can think of the assumed attitudes and intentions of the arguers as ‘second order’ conditions that are preconditions to the ‘first order’ rules of the code of conduct. The ‘second order’ conditions correspond, roughly, to the psychological make-up of the arguer and they are constraints on the way the discourse is conducted. Second order conditions concern the internal states of arguers: their motivations to engage in rational discussion and their dispositional characteristics as to their ability to engage in rational discussion.

Second order conditions require that participants be able to reason validly, to take into account multiple lines of argument, to integrate coordinate sets of arguments, and to balance competing directions of argumentation. The dialectical model assumes skills and competence in the subject matter under discussion and on the issues raised. (…)
But not only must participants be willing and able to enter in a certain attitude, they must be enabled to claim the rights and responsibilities associated with the argumentative roles defined by the dialectical model. To say that in dialectical discourse everyone should have the right to advance his view to the best of his ability is to presuppose a surrounding socio-political context of equality. This means that there are conditions of a still higher order to be fulfilled than second order conditions: ‘third order’ conditions. Third order conditions involve ideals such as non-violence, freedom of speech, and intellectual pluralism. The dialectical model assumes the absence of practical constraints on matters of presumption in standpoints. The goal of resolution of differences ‘on the merits’ is incompatible with situations in which one standpoint or another may enjoy a privileged position by virtue of representing the status quo or being associated with a particular person or group…. [T]he conditions I am referring to are also among the necessary conditions for the operation of the democratic method… (van Eemeren, 1996:13)

Van Eemeren admits that the dialectical approach is “a little bit” – “but not too much” – “Utopian”, but he hopes that with more and better education the idealistic requirements of the pragma-dialectical model can be met (van Eemeren, 1996:14).
It must be clear for now that the author of this paper entertains doubts as to the validity of the above assumptions and the well-foundedness of this hope. We have to realize that these assumptions are really theoretical postulates: they have very little to do with the reality of social life. For it is simply not true that people are equally motivated and able to engage in rational discussion; that they are equally able to reason validly, to take into account multiple lines of argument, and so on; that they all have the assumed skills and competence; that they always have the right to advance their view to the best of their ability – and so on.
What Argumentation Theory presupposes – equality – Sociology has to deny. Society – and there is countless empirical evidence for this – is a system of inequalities. The real question, for Sociology, is the following: How in this system of inequalities argumentation is possible at all? As I see it, this question can only be answered from a power perspective. Interestingly enough, what makes dirty argumentation possible or frequent is the same thing what makes pure argumentation impossible or, at least, rare and limited, namely, the unequal distribution of power in society.
The Sociology of Argumentation has to begin its work where Argumentation Theory abandons it: at the frontier of pure and dirty argumentations. In this way, with the cooperation of Argumentation Theory and the Sociology of Argumentation, a coherent and tenable theory of argumentation can be built, based on more realistic assumptions.

For this future Sociology of Argumentation, I propose the following theses to consider:
1. The ability to reason validly is in a great measure socially determined. Social inequalities (reproduced first by primary socialization, then by the educational system) make the distribution of reasoning abilities uneven, which
2. makes the equality of the participants of most discussions illusory, and, as a result,
3. makes the problem solving capacity of most discussions limited.
4. However, the same social inequalities – especially the uneven distribution of power in society – make the use of arguments (instead of power) necessary and desirable for the powerless (that is, for each of us), while, on the other hand,
5. the uneven distribution of power in society makes the practice of resolving disputes by means of pure argumentation socially limited.

NOTES
[i] It only became a registered organization in 1988.
[ii] The Austrian companies were looking for new opportunities after the construction of the Hainburg hydroelectric plant had been stopped by popular protest in 1984. The well-established Austrian dam-building industry, facing a decreasing selection of new sites and growing public opposition at home, became a major dam-builder abroad, especially in the Third World and in Eastern Europe. Several controversial hydropower projects have been built with the contribution of Austrian money and technology all over the world. Dam-builders had to face fewer obstacles in countries where public protest was illegal, decision-making was done in secrecy, and economic and ecological considerations were overrun by political ones.
[iii] This presentation of arguments is also based on (Galambos, 1992).
[iv] To evaluate the strength of ecological counter-argument #1, one have to know that the underground fresh water reserve in question is the largest in Europe, and that the expected climatic changes caused by the greenhouse effect make water a strategic asset.
[v] In a way, and paraphrasing Clausewitz, argumentation is nothing but the continuation of war with other means. This is why we talk about arguments in terms of war. “We can actually win or lose arguments. We see the person we are arguing with as an opponent. We attack his positions and we defend our own. We gain and lose ground. We plan and use strategies. If we find a position indefensible, we can abandon it and take a new line of attack. Many of the things we do in arguing are partially structured by the concept of war.” (Lakoff, 1980 : 4) On the other hand, and this is one of the main points of this paper, argumentation is just the cessation of war.
[vi] I would like to thank Robert Angelusz and Maria Szekelyi for their invaluable help in writing this part of the paper.
[vii] Maybe some of them advanced more than two, but only the first and second arguments were coded.
[viii] Here, the pro-arguments are those in favor of the decision, that is those of the opponents of the project.
[ix] Namely, that it is not good go to court; that it is better to negotiate; that it would be better for the environment to continue the project; that we lost the Danube; that we lost workplaces; and so on.
[x] The argument was used by a few people with some elementary education. I have no room here to argue in defense of my opinion that there is no prejudice here, but I have some, well, rather weak, arguments.
[xi] Ecology response contra others in different age groups (in percentage):

[xii] This is a difficult question, because we have to deal here with two kinds of ‘reality’. Both are social, but in a way different. One can say that we have to observe argumentation in a pub, because the real argumentative competence of people appears only there. In a sense, this is true, but this is a different kind of reality. No doubt, this is real life, too, but has very little to do with this other ‘real life’ outside the pub, where we have exams sometimes. Let me use an analogy: a survey on party preferences may say very little about ‘real preferences,’ because some people do not want to talk about their preferences. But the survey can give a pretty good prognosis on the results of the next elections, because most of these people will be absent, and most of the other people will vote for the party they preferred. And what is more real then the results of an election?

REFERENCES
Bourdieu P. (1973) L’Opinion publique n’existe pas. Les Temps Modernes, Janvier 1973. 1292-1309.
van Eemeren F.H. and Grootendorst R. (1992). Argumentation, Communication and Fallacies. A Pragma-Dialectical Perspective (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, Hove and London).
van Eemeren F.H. (1996). Argumentation and Democracy. Speech Communication and Argumentation 2, 4-19.
Galambos J. (1992). Political Aspects of an Environmental Conflict: The Case of the Gabcicovo-Nagymaros Dam System. In:
Perspectives on Environmental Conflict and International Relations. Kaukúnen J., ed. (Pinter Publishers, London and New
York).
Labov W. (1972). The Logic of Nonstandard English. In Language and Social Context. Giglioli P.P., ed. (Penguin Books, New
York).
Lakoff G.J. and Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphores We Live By. (University of Chicago Press, Chicago).
Simmel G. (1950) The Sociology of Georg Simmel. (The Free Press, Glencoe, Illinois).

In 1984, radio personality and author Studs Terkel wrote The Good  War. Designed as a history of World War II, Terkel selected and edited oral testimonies and narratives to combat the “disremembrance of World War Two.” He begins the book with his observations of a thirty-something woman he met in 1982. She said, “I can’t relate to World War Two. It’s in schoolbook texts, that’s all. Battles that were won, battles that were lost. Or costume dramas you see on TV. It’s just a story in the past. It’s so distant, so abstract. I don’t get myself up in a bunch about it” (Terkel 1984: 3).
The terror of forgetting is often juxtaposed to the nobility of remembering. Especially in holocaust literature, the epithet that we must never forget our memory (a rhetorical move suggestive of Paix La Chapelle, the Alamo or the Maine in United States’ history) acts a bulwark against the rising tide of revisionism (Schudson 1993: 5).
Here I am interested in the dynamics of the collective memory. I take collective memory in the sense of Annales School sociologist Maurice Halbwachs or American sociologist Barry Schwartz as a socially constructed past composed of persistence and change, continuity and newness (Schwartz 1982: Halbwachs 1992). Most importantly, it is held by a living community as a part of its constitution. However, while most collective memory scholarship has emphasized the living and socially constructed part of memory, my interest is in turning this concept on its head and look at the social past as a constraint on historical interpretation. IN this sense, memory and history are opposed. Generally, we have accepted that the factual quality of the historical (as practiced by historians) past constrains our ability to interpret the past. However, the social past, itself is prehistorical and has a predictable inertial quality that prevents us from using the past at our own will.
This paper progresses in three parts. First, I will discuss the nature of public memory as it has been studied. In the second part I will use the controversy involving the presentation of the Enola Gay at the Smithsonian as a case study. Finally, I will draw out some implications of this controversy for the study of America’s past.

1. Memory’s Revisionist Potential
I take revisionism to be an alteration in the fabric of a memory. Sometimes revisionism is passive, as in the instance of Terkel’s forgetful thirty-something. Sometimes, however, revisionism is intentional, as in the sense that George Orwell used it in his book 1984. There, memory is flexible and pliable; it takes on different texture based on a point or angle of view. It is a function of politics or interest. Recent studies of collective memory have engaged memory primarily as a conception of the past that is under construction and can be too readily changed. For example, historian Merrill Peterson writes:
But memory fades and, as everyone knows, it is subject to tricks: of vanity and conceit, of partial error, and displacement. In a literate culture, reading corrupts or displaces memory. . . . Reminiscence is like storytelling; it goes on more or less continually and changes with the telling. One reminiscence triggers another, and so the process feeds upon itself. Reminiscence, as the product of memory, is not simply imprinted but constructed by the mind. In it truth and error dwell so closely together than one seems lost without the other. Reminiscence is the opposite of inquiry. One professes through memory to recover something once present in the mind; the other professes through knowledge to validate the past (Peterson 1994: 83-84).
For Americans, notes historian Michael Kammen, the capacity for amnesia or forgetting is greater than most because our inclination is “to depoliticize the past in order to minimize memories (and causes) of conflict” (Kammen 1993; Frisch 1990). Communication studies scholars and sociologists have been as interested as historians in the political and strategic ramifications of public memory.[i] Media critic Barbie Zelizer, for example, has written that:
While traditional scholarship on memory presumed that memories were at some point authentic, credible recountings of events of the past, we do not regard this as necessarily the case. In distancing themselves from personal recall, collective memories help us fabricate, rearrange, or omit details from the past as we thought we knew it. Issues of historical accuracy and authenticity are pushed aside to accommodate other issues such as those surrounding the establishment of social identity, authority, solidarity, political affiliation (Zelizer 1995: 217).
Memory in this case is pliable, allowing play between the present and the past. As a series of arguments strategically constructed and deployed, popular memory is of particular interest to communication scholars. Typically, the strategic orientation encourages scholars to construct memories in opposition to history – which is perceived as more stable, factual and less political.[ii]
However, while collective memories are sometime presentist, they also, contradictorily, serve a conservative function. They slow change by gripping and holding a public. For all of their divergence with history, oftentimes collective memories are the ones that hang on (Schwartz 1992). In recent years there has been no better an example of this than the controversy that set veterans against the Smithsonian and its attempts to display the B-29 Enola Gay.

2. The Enola Gay Controversy
The Enola Gay’s fifteen minutes of fame came on 6 August 1945 when the strategic bomber piloted by Paul Tibbets dropped its atomic payload on Hiroshima, Japan. The reasons for the noteriety of this event are debatable, as we shall see. However, for the next fifteen years the Enola Gay moved from runway to runway finally settling at Andrews Air Force Base where it was stored outside. In 1960 it was dismantled and moved to an indoor storage facility where it sat until 1984 when, under pressure from 509th Composite Alumni Association, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (NASM) began the long process of restoring the aircraft.
Events involved with the process of restoration and display are disputed. Veterans groups claim that the Smithsonian accepted the task in bad faith. They argued that the Smithsonian had purposely slowed the process of restoration. Their motive, veterans argued, lay with the staff’s basic anti-nuclear orientation (Neufeld and Linenthal 1996: 13; Batzli 1990: 835).
On the other hand, representatives of the Smithsonian argued that the process of restoration was a slow and involved one; that it would take time and resources that they did not possess. After all, it was a large and complex plane (Harwit 1996: 90-92). They continually argued that the project was under control, and that it would certainly be completed in time for the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing.
Reflecting a new emphasis on scholarship that came with a new director, the Smithsonian decided in 1988 that it would offer an exhibit on strategic bombing. When pressure to display the Enola Gay arose, they attempted to integrate the large aircraft into the show. By 1993, the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Advisory Board had grown uneasy about the strategic bombing exhibit but agreed that the Enola Gay should be displayed as part of a more limited exhibition dealing with the atomic bomb and the genesis of the Cold War (Linenthal 1996: 23).

In early 1993, NASM completed a draft script. They sent a copy to their review board and began collecting materials for the show. Representatives went to Nagasaki and Hiroshima to acquire artifacts and videotaped messages to appear at the end of the display. However, while the NASM’s plans for the show were on schedule, rumblings of discontent began to arise. In late 1993, the Air Force Association (AFA), a group of Air Force Veterans and Air Force supporters already angered by the Smithsonian’s deliberately slow pace, began to complain of the exhibit’s perceived political content. In March 1994, the AFA took their case public. In a seminal article published in Air Force Magazine, John Correll, it’s editor wrote:
The ultimate effect of the exhibition will depend, of course, on how the words are blended with the artifacts and audiovisual elements. And despite the balancing material added, the curators still make some curious calls. “For most Americans,” the script says, “it was a war of vengeance. For most Japanese, it was a war to defend their unique culture against Western imperialism.” Women, children, and mutilated religious objects are strongly emphasized in the “ground zero” scenes from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The museum says this is “happenstance,” not a deliberate ideological twist. The Air and Space Museum is also taking flack from the other side. A prominent historian serving on an advisory group for the exhibition, for example, objects to the “celebratory” treatment of the Enola Gay and complains that the crew showed “no remorse” for the mission (Correll 1994).

Correll’s initial fusillade set the stage for controversy. In particular, the quotation from the script that juxtaposed vengeful Americans with anti-imperialist Japanese and his opposition of historians with the AFA found their way into the papers. The effect of this one article was so great that the American Journalism Review noted that “it was those two sentences, endlessly repeated by the media outside of their original context, that did the most damage to the museum’s credibility”(Carpaccio and Mohan 1995: 19).
When arguing with the Smithsonian, the AFA had two advantages. First, it was more organized than the hapless museum which was slow and unskilled in their response to the crisis. To anyone interested, the AFA quickly and efficiently dispatched packets of materials criticizing the Smithsonian (Flint 1995: 1). In fact, most of the material is still available through the AFA Homepage, which indexes all Enola Gay related materials, offering full-text examples of many (AFA 1998). Second, the AFA mobilized the full strength of American veterans and veterans organizations. While the Smithsonian attempted to include the input of well-known military historians, they failed to get them to publicly endorse the project. Consequently, veterans used the episode as a demonstration of Smithsonian disrespect for veterans and their sacrifices. This storyline, in retrospect, tapped into something very primal in American cultural life.
Disaster ensued. The Smithsonian invited representatives of the influential Veterans of Foreign Wars to review the script after the AFA complained. They planned to co-opt their complaints, but it had the opposite effect of unifying veterans groups in opposition. In October the Smithsonian got a new director, I. Michael Heyman, who attempted to appease veterans groups. It soon appeared that they would not be appeased and the American Legion National Commander declared that the American Legion would actively protest the exhibit and would petition Congress for hearings regarding Smithsonian management. By 30 January 1995, I Michael Heyman canceled the original exhibit and offered a radically simplified display of the Enola Gay. In May, after 81 members of the House of Representatives called for his resignation, Martin Harwit resigned from the NASM (Correll 1996: 38). Senate hearings ensued, and the controversy continued well after the cancellation of the original exhibit.
The modified exhibit, which has now closed until 2001 when it will be reopened at their new Dulles extension, was very popular (Kopecki 1998: B-9). In its first year the exhibit drew more than 1.5 million visitors. In the whole two and a half year run, it received more than 3 million visitors (Lopez 1997: 12-A). However, while it was one of the most visited sites in Washington, it received mixed reviews. The Times Union characterized it as a “strikingly incomplete exhibition that leaves visitors totally in the dark about how a decision was reached to use the bomb, and the aftermath of the most militarily decisive and horrific mission in the history of air war”(“Enola Gay Exhibit Crowded” 1995: G-12) Another review noted that the exhibit did “its best to skirt the enormity of what the shiny B-29 did 50 years ago. . . ”(Eisman 1995: A-6).

3. History and Memory in the Real World
While the final exhibit did its best to avoid controversy, the same can not be said of historians involved in the exhibit. They were screaming mad. While they entered the fray late, they continued the debate in print. Reviewer Linda Rothstein noted in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “writing about the exhibit-that-never-was has become a minor industry” (Rothstein 1997: 55). Since 1995, five or more books have been written with the Enola Gay incident as a theme, three of them by parties to the events.[iii] 245 Additionally, both the AFA and the American Legion have made all of their documents and letters available to the public via the internet.
In response to the academic writings, newspapers and radio talk shows were filled with critiques of the Smithsonian in particular and historians in general. Playing upon a sometimes appropriated and sometimes authentic veteran voice located firmly in personal understandings of the past, proclaimed representatives attempted to delegitimate the voices of historians. Primarily, the juxtaposed the collective memories of veterans, the need for commemoration and a fear of being forgotten with historians’ political “revisionism”(Schuman and Scott 1989).

Barbara Biesecker, in a recent Lacanian reading of the Enola Gay exhibit noted that:
What I want to suggest at this point is that it is no accident that the Enola Gay exhibit has appeared “now” – a moment suspended between two eves, between the twilight of the twentieth century and the dawn of the next millennium, i.e., postmodernity. . . the most significant implication of that passage [of the old age] is the lack of a symbolic mandate and, thus, the erosion of identity and demise of desire. This is, of course, Lacan’s very definition of anxiety and, I want to suggest, the rhetorical exigence to which the Enola Gay exhibit is a symbolic response (Biesecker 1998: 238).

The appraisal of the Enola Gay incident as a response to an anxiety or an emptiness seems correct. However, the emptiness is probably not the consequence of a general/cultural anomie involved in moving from one era to another. Instead, it is more likely a very particular anxiety (remember, the exhibit has been dismantled until 2001) rooted in the material experience of World War II veterans and their nostalgic spokespersons (Harden 1995: A-10). In response to the Smithsonian, one of the dominant themes veterans’ voices express is a fear of forgetting. When talking about the Enola Gay, a “generation gap” opens between those that celebrate the bomb as a deliverance and those that view the bomb as the start of the Cold War (Benke 1997; Thomas 1995: 22). Ron Grossman from the Chicago Tribune wrote: “Veterans seem poignantly aware that, when they are gone, their war might be misconstrued by an MTV generation.” He continues, “The [Enola Gay] episode demonstrated to veterans of World War II a crucial point: The final battle of their war may be to just survive contemporary mentalities” (Grossman 1997: C-1). Another reported a Terkelesque encounter with a college student. Talking of the U.S. Arizona memorial at Pearl Harbor he asks a student what she thinks. She notes that the memorial seems one-sided and he asks how it may be improved. She says, “How about Hiroshima?” but Hiroshima came after Pearl Harbor, I said which stopped her for a moment. A product of modern education, she’d thought that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor as punishment for the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A punishment we fully deserved she explained”(Geneier 1997: A-23).

Mike Taugher from the Albuquerque Journal found similar outrage among mission veterans. “’The support of the younger generation is very important to us,” said Frederick Bock. . . . “What’s going to happen when we’re gone?” Nelson said. He said he wonders who will tell “the true history of what happened with the bomb. They’ll just have the revisionists”(Taugher 1995: A-1).

While veterans desire to educate youth about their past, old rivalries die hard. Veterans juxtapose the courageousness of World War II veterans with the cowardice of Vietnam War protesters (Washburn 1995: 40). Veteran James S. Steiner wrote the Los Angeles Times: “The 1960’s then brought forth the anti-status-quo forces as a byproduct of a controversial war. This later group has taken on the aura of elitism, and indeed seems to have found abundant nutrients in academia, with the latter’s just license for extrapolated thought and inherent insulation from the pragmatism for life outside the ivory tower”(Steiner 1995: B-8). Similarly, columnist Cal Thomas vented:
Those “heroes” and “heroines” of the ‘60s never saw a cause worth fighting for or a war worth winning. They now have delivered the final insult. . . they are demeaning their parents’ sacrifice, patriotism and decisiveness, saying there was no excuse for dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Thomas 1995a: A-7).
He continued in another article, “this is a view held by some Americans who see no evil, will fight for no good, and whose cowardice ought to qualify them to do nothing more than keep their mouths shut when they are confronted by some of the greatest heroes who every lived – the veterans of World War II and a courageous president who knew what it meant to lead”(Thomas 1995b: J-5). Likewise, Mike Rosen commented that the “whole tone of the exhibit was so blatantly self-hating that it generated a revolt from mainstream Americans and veterans’ groups, resulting in its cancellation. Pacifist and anti-nuke types backing it were crestfallen”(Rosen 1995: B-7).

Commentators oppose daring, courageous, patriotic, and self-sacrificing veterans to their negative: academic historians. Academic historians of the baby-boomer type are generally lumped together under the heading of “revisionists” and are closely associated with the leftist anti-Vietnam movement (Kilian 1996: 1). In his book, Remaking America, John Bodnar has noted the tensions between official and vernacular expressions as constitutive elements of public memorials. Official commemorations tend to be unitary and abstract; they tend to downplay difference in pursuit of a common interpretation. Vernacular commemorations, on the other hand, are very particular (Bodnar 1992: 246). They reflect the interests of a particular community and are often in conflict with official interpretations.
The Enola Gay controversy turns Bodnar’s official/vernacular distinction on its head. The Smithsonian, traditional arbiters of national commemoration, take the vernacular role interested in maintaining difference while participants, in the form of veterans organization, become the arbiters of an official, abstract, and unitary narrative.
Veterans pair the Smithsonian’s history with baby-boomers and the politically charged anti-Vietnam war movement that initially rejected their parents’ memories of the depression and World War II as “nostalgia”(Whalen 1995: D-7; Lewis 1995: A-1; Smith 1995: B-5; Flint 1995: C-1; McClay 1995). They label most academic histories “revisionist” because they threaten the fabric of the collective memory.
Regarding historians, the charge of flexibility is probably accurate. Demonstrating the typical attitude of historians toward the past, American University history professor Anna Kasten Nelson, noted that: “The American people aren’t really sure of who they are right now. . . . It’s a post-Vietnam, post-Cold War lack of consensus.” Martin Sherwin of Tuft’s University notes that: “It’s no surprise that great debates are erupting over important historical issues. With the end of the Cold War, the country is adrift and this type of situation always produces a reassessment of the past”(qtd in Flint 1995: C-1).

While social flux is generally accepted as constitutive of the historical project, it opens academic historians to charges of political interest. This is particularly true in the Enola Gay case. While the Smithsonian was working out their final script in 1994 and 1995, the Republican party took control of both houses of the American Congress. The controversy at the Smithsonian and its resurrection of the generation gap, anti-communism, and the anti-war counterculture proved good political copy. Several politicians used the controversy as a synecdoche for other cultural controversies. Because of his poor relations with veterans groups, Bill Clinton appointed Vice President and Vietnam vet Al Gore his front man. House Speaker Newt Gingrich pointed to the Enola Gay controversy as the first victory of a new culture war. “You are seeing a reassertion and a renewal of American civilization,” he told the National Governors’ Association “The Enola Gay fight was a fight, in effect, over the reassertion by most Americans that they’re sick and tired of being told by some cultural elite that they ought to be ashamed of their country”(qtd in Budiansky 1995: 73). Bob Dole also used the Enola Gay controversy as a foundation pier for his bridge theme during the 1996 Presidential Election. To the American Legion Convention he said: “There is no bridge to the future not built on their [the values of World War II veterans] foundation. They do not change – when we respect them, they change us and our nation instead. . . . Some historians, it is clear, want to define World War II and all of American history entirely in terms of American crimes and American repression. And what they’re really saying, when you boil it all down, is that honor is a fraud and patriotism is ploy. But honor is not fraud and patriotism is not a ploy”(Dole 1996).
Dole’s generation gap theme is representative of veterans’ discourse. As World War II veterans thin out, they fear their sacrifices will be forgotten (Rapp 1995). Veteran, Cornelius O’Neill observed “a definite movement in the U.S. intellectual community to change American World War II history. The sad thing about these attempts at revisionism is that the revisionists will probably win, because those who experience first-hand or were witness to the events of World War II, like old soldiers, are fading away.” Intellectuals, “besides the desire to reap revenue from sensationalistic writing, must possess a hatred of all things patriotic, noble, and uplifting, especially the American military”(O’Neill 1995).
The antipathy between veterans and intellectuals plays itself out in the conflict with the Smithsonian. Vets portray baby-boomer intellectuals, personified in NASM director Martin Harwit, as contemptuous of veterans (Correll 1996: 38; Thomas, H 1995). Harwit is variously described as “being deceived by the lies of the radical curators and professors, in order to smear the honor of veterans who fought and died for their country against the fascist, Imperialist Japanese war machine,” and as participating in a “deliberate attempt to falsify and distort the record of history to fit left-wing anti-American biases”(Greybrier 1997: X-14).
In addition to the personal focus on Harwit, attacks also focus on history’s abstractness. Milton Stern writes to the editors of the New York Times, “we might as well put history on the shelf and publish nothing until 2045. At the centenary, when all historians will never have been there, they can fight a bloodless academic war without the intrusive oversight of those of us who were”(Stern 1995: A-12). Often, veterans make references to the “Ivy League” as a way of pointing toward the separation between veterans and academics. Rowan Scarborough says of the Smithsonian: “They never hire the authorities. . . they hire academics instead of curators. They’re not treating it like a museum. They’re treating it like an Ivy League College”(Scarborough 1996: A-1). Similarly, Blackie Sherrod writes ironically: “It may come as a surprise to you that I have not always been wise, or even smarter than the average frog. This is not an easy admission, what with all these Vaunted Experts currently permeating the media. In these twilight years, I yearn for the mantelletta of a pundit in an ivory tower, writing with great authority on topics other than red-eye gravy and Babe Ruth. . . . Apparently it requires wisdom far beyond my ken to understand all this pompous second-guessing about the atomic bomb a half-century ago. The 50th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing has lured countless gurus from their mountaintops to pass ponderous judgment in retrospect”(Sherrod 1995: A-25).
A third association involves a conspiracy. In 1994 the phrase “culture war” was used to identify the gulf between liberal values associated with the “counterculture” and more traditional and established (nostalgic) values. Attacks on the left are familiar and extend themes from the Cold War (Gailey 1995: D-3). Many veteran responses integrate this thinking in criticism of the Smithsonian. They identify the Smithsonian as a tool for the “multicultural left” that participates in “an entire academic industry dedicated to the production of distorted history largely intended to be put to work in the service of left-wing political objectives”(Billingsley 1996: A-19: “An Infamy” 1997). Other criticism are even more harsh. Nagasaki pilot Chuck Sweeney notes that the “Smithsonian exhibition of the Enola Gay as originally planned was ‘simply un-American, it might be close to treason’”(“The A-Bomb” 1995: A-16). Noting a conspiracy, Al Featherston wrote in The Durham Herald-Sun that “a band of revisionist historians has attempted another coup. They are trying to kidnap history – to revise the record in such a manner to convince the public that it was unnecessary and wrong to use the atomic bomb”(Featherston 1995: A-15).

Often the conspiracy takes “political correctness” as its goal (“An Institution With” 1996: C-8). Editorialist Wood West wrote that “the banal brand of revisionism that characterized the Enola Gay episode is embedded in many of America’s cultural institutions, colleges and universities. A prime target is the American past – the traditional perspectives and the mythology, if you will, of our history. . . . We are being reminded by the national press too, that the notion of a unified America during World War II denies the persistence of racial discrimination and bitter labor battles throughout the war”(West 1995: 40; Meyer 1994: 4). Columnist Thomas Sowell was more to the point:
Ultimately, however, this whole Smithsonian episode was not about military history. It was about anti-American propaganda, which has become the norm among the leftist intelligentsia, whether in the academic world, the arts, or the national government’s own cultural agencies. . . For much of this century, the leftist intelligentsia in the West has kissed the behinds of mass murderers from Stalin and Mao, so long as they were anti-American. They have sneered at “the so-called Free World,” even as millions of people in the unfree world risked their lives in desperate attempts to get here. . . . In these campaigns, the very notion of truth is treated as a quaint prejudice of a bygone era. Those who are politically correct are never discredited, no matter how often their statements collapse in the face of facts. . . . The controversy at the Smithsonian Institution was not about an airplane exhibit. It was about the values of a society and a civilization – and about people who feel that they have a right to use taxpayers’ money to fight their own ideological wars, and a right to be tenured guerrillas with pensions (Sowell 1995: 74).
Smithsonian curators accept the familiar and negative characterization. They are enemies of the nation, and probably Communist. They want to deny America’s victory and diminish the real sacrifices of American citizens. They are in league with a host of prototypical American conspirators: university professors, agitators, war protesters, Communist sympathizers and fascists. In essence, they are all the opposite of World War II veterans, and as unified in their action.

The collapse and appropriation of the Enola Gay controversy into other lingering ideological arguments meant that it also spilled over onto other controversies. It acts as a type of synecdoche. In the shadow of the Enola Gay episode, the phrase to be “Enola Gayed” the “Enola Gay Syndrome” or to get the “Enola Gay treatment” came to be used by museum curators to explain the risks of exhibiting controversial material (Lipman 1998: A-7). Many curators reported that the Enola Gay event made them think twice before they created exhibits (Shapiro 1996: D-1). For example, historian Barton Bernstein noted that “The Air and Space debacle has had a chilling effect. Basically museums are very political agents. . . They are in need of funding and consequently, deeply vulnerable to pressure”(qtd in Otto 1998: A-18). When Ilse Metchek, executive director of the California Fashion Association, noted that he desired to turn a Smithsonian exhibition on sweat shops into “another Enola Gay,” Edward Linenthal commented on NPR that, “a number of us who were involved in the incredibly ugly controversy over the Enola Gay exhibition were worried that the cancellation and the political pressure put on the Smithsonian to cancel would become a kind of model for how people would then choose to begin to censor and cancel museum exhibitions that they weren’t comfortable with for one reason or another. Here is an example of someone using the Enola Gay model consciously to try and cancel an exhibit that they don’t like”(qtd in Zengerle 1997: 18; Linenthal 1997).
If nothing else, the Enola Gay controversy brought attention to the workings of the Smithsonian and other state institutions, causing many exhibits to get the “Enola Gay treatment.” Interest groups brought pressure to cancel exhibits on oil prospecting in Alaska, an essay on meat carried by Smithsonian Magazine, on proposed changes to military history exhibits, on garment manufacturing, and brought attention to a particularly ugly episode where Boy Scouts were prohibited from using the auditorium at the National Zoo for a ceremony because they refused to admit atheists (Dear 1997: B-1; Giorello and Bacque 1997: D-1; Ramey 1997: 4; Witham 1997: A-9). Outside the Smithsonian, the event was equally influential. The Library of Congress canceled exhibits on Sigmund Freud and Slavery (“Staff Closes Library” 1995: A-15). In New Jersey, veterans protested the opening of a Vietnam education center, and in South Carolina the Enola Gay incident was used as an argument to keep the Federal Government from taking ownership of a Civil War era submarine (Berry 1998: A-3; Kropf 1996: B-1).
For their part, defenders of the Smithsonian collected at a couple of nodes. Mostly , defenders complained about the lack of public examination of the events that surrounded Hiroshima – pointing toward a national psychosis that kept Americans from participating in any type of moral debate over the issue; as though it were lost in a national amnesia from which we chose not to awaken. William Sloane noted that amnesia explains “why no president, while in office has publicly questioned dropping the bomb. That’s why it was inevitable that the proposed Smithsonian exhibit of the Enola Gay would cause such an uproar. When it comes to the bombing of Hiroshima, we Americans want no debate. For most of us the book is closed”(Sloane 1995: 772). Similarly, Charles Biro noted in The Chicago Tribune that an anti flag burning amendment, “like the flap over the Enola Gay display in the Smithsonian, is a dangerous and frightening attempt to narrow the parameters of legitimate political discourse”(Biro 1997: 20).
Hiroshimic amnesia has been the subject of at least two books, Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell’s Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial and Michael J. Hogan’s Hiroshima in History and Memory. Both books take as their themes the cultural invisibility of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the United States and Japan. In both instances, parties have remembered events to support their own ideal visions. In either instance, selective forgetting denies the truth of events as they occurred and fails to gain the lessons that historical events offer up (Kramer 1995: B-7). In this sense, historical analysis is a mirror image of veterans’ memories: it claims a truth that transcends political utility. Demonstrating this attitude, Marjorie Smith wrote The Dayton Dailey News that “accepting responsibility would empower us to deal constructively with the lingering presence of nuclear bombs (Smith 1995: A-14).”
Central to the academic understanding of the truth is an avowed appreciation for complexity. Linda Wurtz writes that “we have also become fearful of acknowledging controversy in American history, e.g. mellowing the Smithsonian Enola Gay exhibit and firing House historian Christina Jeffrey. Controversy isn’t a bad thing; it simply means that there is more than one viewpoint. A critical look at historical events means considering all viewpoints”(Wurtz 1995: A-4). The ambiguity that historians point toward as a sign of complexity, however, serves to water down the memories of veterans.

4. Lessons and Conclusions
Edward Linenthal wrote in the aftermath of the exhibit that it had been “caught between memory and history”(Linenthal 1995: B-1). Linenthal notes that the past is spoken in different voices. He identifies a “commemorative voice – I was there, I know because I saw and felt what happened – and a historical one that speaks of complicated motives and of actions and consequences often hardly considered at the moment of the event itself”(Linenthal 1996: 9-10; Kohn 1995: 1041). For Linenthal, the Enola Gay controversy is an example of the commemorative voice trumping the historical voice. While this is technically true, the social dynamics are more complex than this.
The Enola Gay exhibit was born into a world of social conflict. It not only marks the World War II generation’s ebb, but also the nexis of other social movements rooted in a general feeling of fiftieth anniversary nostalgia, the rise of a conservative mood in the United States, Japan’s growing role as a trade competitor, and some lingering baggage from the Vietnam and the Cold Wars. While World War II veterans took the point for much of the initial response to the Smithsonian, they were not the only actors. Instead, one finds a coalition of military supporters and conservatives that came to the defense of elderly World War II veterans. It is not as simple as a reaction of veterans to their diminished status.
Much of the commentary about the War and memory of it appear vicariously. Through the voices of reporters, columnists, and actual veterans a unified story of the war emerges. Commentators report an empathy with veterans, living and dead, that remember the war in a particularly unitary way.
The unity of memories of the war illustrate some interesting qualities that distinguish history and memory. While collective memories are personal, although not necessarily the consequence of personal experience, history is global and critical. It’s claims to  independent reality and desire to offer judgment make it difficult for memory and history to interact. While memory can contribute to history, history is unlikely to do much to legitimate memory (Sherwin 1995: 1091). This is especially true when memories dominate the political scene.
If anything, the Enola Gay controversy points out that not every event is ready for history. Instead, there seems to be a progressive development. Events begin as the subject of journalism, which is a very local and partial rendering of an event. After the event, it transitions to memory where it is codified, personalized, and unified. Finally, an event becomes the subject of history which claims universality, but is distanced and abstract. The Enola Gay’s past seems poised at the point where memory becomes history. While the story is unified, neither participants nor vicarious participants do not yet enjoy a critical distance. Attempts by historians to close events to add critical distance are thwarted by the closeness of the event. In the future, this is likely to change.
For argument, the interesting point is that the past is not an open field for revisionism. Instead, it constrains by memory or evidence what can legitimately be said about the past. Even if it is not the actual generation that fought, others are willing to take up the flag. In this instance, vernacular stories are more coherent and universal and, consequently, have more political weight than official ones. For argument, this is an important point – there are extra – argumentative circumstances that prevent the past from opening to any interpretation.

NOTES
i. The idea that the past exists in individuals and that this past is socially powerful has placed studies of the collective memory at the center of several important studies. In general, however, the primary focus has been on the function of the past in the present. The classic study was performed by Annales School historian, Maurice Halbwachs in On Collective Memory. Additional studies include: Lynne Cheney’s American Memory: A Report on the Humanities in the Public Schools, Harold Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind, or E.D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy for critiques regarding the inadequacy of the American public memory. Other studies of the relationship between nationalism and public memory include, John Bodnar’s Remaking America, David Lowenthal’s The Past as a Foreign Country, Edward Shills and Michael Young’s classic “The Meaning of the Coronation,” Barry Schwartz et. al. “The Recovery of Masada,” and Terrance Ranger and Eric Hobsbawm’s The Invention of Tradition. In Communication studies, there have been several recent studies of the collective memory. For example, Stephen Brown’s “Reading, Rhetoric and the Texture of Public Memory” in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, John Nerone and Ellen Wartella’s “The Study of Collective Memory,” from Communication, J. Robert Cox’s memory study, “Memory and Critical Theory, and the Argument from History,” in Argumentation and Advocacy, a nd Barbie Zelizer’s “Reading the Past Against the Grain: The Shape of Memory Studies,” from Critical Studies in Mass Communication.
ii. Stephen Browne. 1993. “Reading Public Memory in Daniel Webster’s Plymouth Rock Oration.” Western Journal of Communciation 67 (1993): 464-477; J. Robert Cox. “Memory, Critical Theory, and the Argument From History.” Argumentation and Advocacy 27 (1990): 1-13; George Dionisopoulos and Steven Goldzwig. “The Meaning of Vietnam: Polical Rhetoric as Revisionist Cultural History.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 78 (1992): 61-79; Bruce Gronbeck. 1995. “The Rhetorics of the Past: History, Arguemnt, and Collective Memory.” Paper Presented to the Greenspun conference on Rhetorical History: “Rhetoric, History, and Critical Interpretation: The Recovery of the Historical-Critical Praxis,” UNLV; John Nerone. “Professional History and Social Memory.” Communication 11 (1989): 89-104; John Nerone and Ellen Wartella. “the Study of Collective Memory.” Communciation 11 (1989): 85-88; Barbie Zelizer. 1992. Covering the Body: The Kennedy Assassination, the Media, and the Shaping of Collective Memory. Chicago: U. Chicago P.
iii. Harwit, An Exhibit Denied (New York: Copernicus, 1996); Michael J Hogan. Hiroshima in History and Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996); David Thelen, Ed. “History after the Enola Gay Controversy: An Introduction to a Special Edition.” Journal of American Hisotry (December 1995): 1029; Philip Nobile, Ed. Judgment at the Smithsonian (New York: Marlow & Company, 1995); Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell. Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial (New York: Putnam, 1995); Edward Linenthal and Tom Englehardt. History Wars (New York: Henry Holt, 1996).

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Actual act-performing thinking is an emotional volitional thinking, a thinking that intonates, and this intonation permeates in an essential manner all moments of a thought’s content.  – Mikhail Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy of the Act.

“The twentieth century has been a time of extraordinary change in every branch of philosophy and the social sciences, above all epistemology,” Stephen Toulmin writes in a recent essay (1995: ix). This change, he goes on to say, amounts to the “abandonment” and even “death” of the “Cartesian program of ‘modern philosophy’” that influenced our understanding of knowledge from, roughly, 1650 to 1950, and was marked by “excess individualism” (1995: xiii, xv).
Toulmin’s work, I believe, has contributed much to bringing about that change, for his reconception of reasoning offers an alternative to the “three underlying assumptions” that he identifies as supporting the Cartesian “research program.” These are:
1. the certainty axiom, which holds that knowing is building “demonstrably certain” systems;
2. the representation axiom, which holds that knowing begins in the “inner theater” called “the mind”; and
3. the individualism axiom, which holds that knowing is a “personal and individual accomplishment” (1995: x).

In this paper I propose that these three assumptions work to suppress a tacit dimension of argumentation that is crucial for developing a post-Cartesian understanding of rationality. This tacit dimension is acknowledged by Toulmin, Rieke and Janik (1984) as “the general body of information, or backing, that is presupposed by the warrant appealed to in the argument” (1984: 26). The source of this information, they go on to say, is the “culture that forms our initial values, attitudes, and expectations” and thereby “equips us. . .with ways of thinking and reasoning whose underlying basis or backing is not always made explicit” (1984: 66). Typically, these implicit contributions are presumed to be less rational than the explicit information, evidence, testimony, principles and rules which provide the data, claim, and warrant of an argument. This paper is part of a larger project which argues, contrary to that presumption, that both tacit and explicit contributions be evaluated without hierarchical preference in argument analysis.
A crucial step toward doing so is showing how factors that often are dismissed as less rational (or even irrational) function as the Backing component of an argument as analyzed by the Toulmin Model. Both Toulmin in The Uses of Argument (1958) and Toulmin, Rieke, and Janik in An Introduction to Reasoning (1984) say relatively little about Backing. This neglect, I believe, enables the survival of a crucial building-block of the Cartesian program – the dichotomy of fact and value – within Toulmin’s influential and on-going rethinking of reasoning. My aim here is to contribute to the development of a post-Cartesian understanding of rationality that was initiated by Toulmin, Chaim Perelman and others, by explicating and respecifying the nature and role of Backing as the tacit dimension of argumentation. [i]

This dimension provides the cultural, emotional, and volitional impetus for everyday argumentation. These factors are often dismissed as merely incidental to the setting of an argument – which is to say, they are all too easily categorized as outside of rationality.
Acknowledging them as the content of Backing enables us, instead, to identify and evaluate them as providing (in Bakhtin’s words) an “intonation that permeates in an essential manner all moments of a thought’s content” (1993: 34). Correlatively, this recognition of Backing as the tacit dimension requires respecifying Warrant as the explicit rules and procedures that justify connections among elements within an argument.[ii]
I begin with a brief consideration of the first and second axioms that Toulmin identifies as underlying the Cartesian program. I find that the Toulmin model provides powerful alternatives to both of these “underlying assumptions.” I then look more closely at the third (“individualism”) axiom, and find remnants of this assumption remaining within Toulmin’s reconception. It’s present in relation to that aspect of the Toulmin model – Backing – which typically creates particular difficulties in explication and application.
My hope, then, is that explicating and respecifying both Backing and Warrant will offer the positive side effect of making the Toulmin Model an even more useful means for argument analysis.

1. The Certainty and Representation Assumptions
The Cartesian axiom that’s most evidently rejected in Toulmin’s understanding of reasoning is the assumption that “’knowledge’ ideally takes the form of a deductive system” with “demonstrably certain” components. In his words, this axiom declares that if ‘knowledge’ is to have any claim on our intellectual loyalty or attention, its building blocks (at least) must be demonstrably certain, so that, for Descartes as for Plato, ‘knowledge’ ideally takes the form of a deductive system, such as the classical Greeks created for geometry (1995: x).

Early in An Introduction to Reasoning we read that “the critical study of argumentation or reasoning, with which this book is concerned” requires that we “see what kinds of features make some arguments strong, well founded, and persuasive, while others are weak, unconvincing, or baseless” (1984: 11). The focus in this work on diverse features that move us toward the goal of strength and persuasiveness, and correlative disinterest in deductive systems that guarantee certainty, is quite in keeping with Toulmin’s reflection in The Uses of Argument on the “the ideal of deduction” as containing a “conflict of usage” between “customary idiom” and “the professional usage of logicians” (1958: 122). Should we (he asks there) accept customary usage that speaks of Sherlock Holmes’ reasoning as deductive? Toulmin is willing to leave that question as one that he “is not yet ready to determine,” and to do so on the basis of “the conviction that a radical re-ordering of logical theory is needed in order to bring it more nearly into line with critical >practice” (1958: 122, 253).
This “radical re-ordering” of theory turns our attention from the interconnected set of dualisms (deduction/induction, certain/undecidable, professional/customary, theory/practice) that underlie the certainty axiom. Instead, it calls us to attend to “certain conditions” within which arguments are “strong, well founded, and “persuasive” (1984: 82, 11). In effect, Toulmin changes the question rather than attempting to introduce new directions from within an entrenched conversation. This reorientation replaces “professional” logic’s valorizing of deductive certainty without denying the appeal of that ideal. It is important to appreciate that Toulmin offers us an alternative to a tradition – one that dominated thinking about reasoning from Plato to Descartes, although it has been attacked in diverse ways within our century – rather than proposing an overall refusal of the claims of certainty, or a reversed hierarchy that sends epistemic anarchy to the head of the table previously occupied by deductive certainty. In so doing, he allows for a value that can be acounted for within an argument’s Backing.
The second axiom Toulmin identifies as underlying the Cartesian program has been taken up extensively by other theorists who, in diverse ways, reject a representational conception of knowing.
In his words, this second axiom decrees that Any account. . .of ‘knowledge’ must accommodate itself to accepted ideas about the physiological mechanisms in the knower’s sensory nerves and brain. So, most plainly in John Locke’s writing, the picture took hold of the Mind as. . .’inner theater’. . .(1995: x).
Toulmin explicitly rejects this second assumption, which I call the “representation axiom,” in the course of presenting his case for the “re-ordering” of both logic and epistemology. Here again, his strategy is one of changing the question. Understanding reasoning as a “critical practice,” he maintains, makes “mechanisms” for reproducing a theoretically-posited external world in a likewise theoretically-posited ‘inner theater’ irrelevant. He proposes this alternative question as a replacement of the tradition originating in Locke (and retained, I would argue in contemporary cognitive science):
The question ‘How does our cognitive equipment (our understanding) function?’ must be treated. . .as equivalent to. . .’What sorts of arguments could be produced for the things we claim to know?’ – so leaving aside the associated psychological and physiological questions” (1958: 254).
This shift from reproductive “equipment” to a particular sort of productive activity (“critical practice”) prompts a shift away from scholarly traditions that explain events in terms of causal (physiological) or perhaps semi-causal (psychological) mechanisms. These modes of analysis are replaced, in The Uses of Argument, by “the reintroduction of historical, empirical and even – in a sense – anthropological considerations into the subject [logic] which philosophers had prided themselves on purifying. . .of any but a priori arguments” (1958: 254). In comparison to his extensive development of an alternative to the “certainty axiom,” however, Toulmin has done relatively little in the way of developing an alternative to the “representation axiom.”

The first step toward doing so would be recognizing that this axiom, along with the “certainty” axiom, typically is present as part of the Backing of everyday (mundane) arguments, despite the efforts of contemporary theory to discount it. This direction for respecifying the representation assumption is suggested by Toulmin’s recognition that “a reasonableness may be generated. . . .in a communicative environment” that relies upon “procedures of reasoning [which] are inherently embedded in particular cultures” (1984: 209-210). Because of this “inherently embedded” quality, we can (and even, should) question the extent to which useful analysis can be achieved through extracting arguments from their “practical situation,” translating them into “the logician’s abstract symbols,” and then returning them to their origins for “a final judgment of the validity or invalidity of the argument” (1984: 210). That three-stage process of extraction, translation, and return was needed for a particular division of scholarly labor in which “epistemology was thought of as including both psychological questions. . .and physiological questions. . .as well as questions of a logical kind” (1958: 254). Within that conception, intellectual labor on logical questions had to be “purified” of a posteriori elements endemic to psychology and physiology.
But Toulmin’s “radical re-ordering of logical theory. . .to bring it more nearly into line with critical practice” (1958: 253) redistributes the intellectual property of those labors: “Epistemology can divorce itself from psychology and physiology, and logic can divorce itself from pure mathematics: the proper business of both is to study the structures of our arguments” (1958: 257). The “avalanche of changes” set off, says Toulmin, by Dewey, Mead, Vygotsky, Bakhtin, Collingwood and Wittgenstein all support just such a relocation of efforts.
For these theorists understand all knowledge as socially and culturally situated. . .So everything to do with knowledge.
. .has to be understood as acquiring its ‘meaning’ in the public domain. . .Correspondingly, in the analysis of communication and argumentation, the barriers that the seventeenth-century philosophers had erected to separate logic from rhetoric were at last dismantled. So, patterns of communication. . .took their place alongside the structure of formal scientific inferences, as topics of epistemological inquiry (1995: xi-xii; Toulmin’s emphasis).

Perhaps the proper conceptual space for both epistemology and logic, then, is not psychology, physiology, or mathematics – scholarly territories for the study of psyche/mind, the physical functions of living organisms, or formal systems– but disciplines that study the “communicative environment” in which arguments, “inherently embedded in particular cultures,” originate?
Rhetoric, for instance, has always situated its study of persuasive argumentation in “the public domain.” Does this dismantling of seventeenth-century barriers enable philosophy to relocate there and add a distinctive voice to that often disorderly discourse? Could philosophers choose that rather busy neighborhood, rather than becoming “kibitzers” in conversations conducted in more secluded literary environs? Perhaps back-fence (and even, front yard) conversation with rhetoricians who study argumentation provide alternative assumptions for conceptions of reasoning other than those of the “Cartesian program of ‘modern philosophy’” – the abandonment and death of which should not, many of us believe, mean the abandonment and death of all and any conceptions of reasoned action and thought.

Critically analyzing and disowning the “certainty” and “representation” assumptions are conditions for relocating our epistemic labors in a communicative “public domain.” But there is a another assumption which is more subtly pervasive in both mundane and scholarly thinking, has received far less attention from argumentation theorists, whether domiciled in philosophy or rhetoric, and which may well provide the most persuasive source of resistance against relocating philosophy within “the public domain.” I find that this third assumption remains entrenched in Toulmin’s work.
We need now to consider it, both it itself and as it remains effective within his reconception of argument.

2. The Individualism Assumption
The assumption that I call the individualism axiom is, I believe, far more ingrained in our thinking and acting than is believing that what we know is, or even could be, a representation of what is the case – much less, a representation that can be counted on with certainty.
Thus, this is the most difficult axiom to criticize. In Toulmin’s words, this axiom is: The true locus of ‘knowledge’ is personal and individual, not public or collective: The possibility of knowledge is intelligible to Descartes (say) only insofar as he can recognize what is ‘known’ as part of his own knowledge (1995: x).
This assumption within mundane reasoning is inadequately addressed by Toulmin’s references to theory (such as developed by Mead and Wittgenstein) that “treats all knowledge as socially and culturally situated”; as having a “primary locus [that] must be collective, not individual” (1995: xii). Nor is it rejected (as are the representation and certainty axioms) as he draws upon those theorists in developing his reconception of reasoning. Rather, this assumption remains effective within Toulmin’s “radical re-ordering of logical theory” (1958: 253) as a remnant of the Cartesian program, and may well be responsible for certain difficulties we have in using and teaching that “overall pattern for use in the analysis of arguments” (1984: 40) that we commonly call the Toulmin Model.
These difficulties instigate the respecification effort that I undertake here.
A closer look at the individualism axiom reveals four subsidiary assumptions, only some of which are rejected in Toulmin’s
reconception:
a. the private-public dichotomy assumption, which retains modern culture’s separation between matters that are taken to be “personal and individual” in contrast to “public or collective”;
b. the explicitness assumption, which implies that intelligibility requires knowers to “recognize” all of what is known, so as to claim “what is ‘known’” as what is owned by that knower;
c. the possession assumption, which holds that knowledge is a possession;something which that knowing subject “has”; and
d. the subject-based assumption, which incorporates a priority of knowing subject in relation to known object and so continues the implicit and subtle analogy to “owner” and “owned” patterns within the culture’s economic life.
The first of these aspects (the private-public dichotomy) may be the most attacked aspect of contemporary theorizing. The conviction that “the personal is political” is both a political rallying call and the core of a good deal of sociopolitical theory that relies on that major thesis of feminist theorizing. Dividing “private” and “public” spheres can support a neo-conservatism that limits reasoned change to the “public” domain while reserving the “private” for more aesthetic and even playful endeavors, as in, for instance, the work of Rorty and Derrida. That same division also supports efforts to limit the incursion of “public” structures of domination into “private” areas of freedom; Habermas’ work would be an example.

In all of these manifestations, the legitimacy of a public-private dichotomy is problematic. Fortunately, then, this component of the individualism axiom isn’t present in Toulmin’s general analysis of the structure and use of argument. Despite his advocacy of topic-specific reasoning, Toulmin does not impose a public-private dichotomy upon the multiple subject areas he discusses. Nor does he specify that argumentation partners exemplify either “private” or “public” qualities.
Neither the “possession” nor the “subject-based” components of the individualism axiom are evident in Toulmin’s explication of an argument’s Claim or Grounds. Certainly, argumentation requires arguers; which is to say, people engaged in particular sorts of dialogical interaction. But these dialogical subjects bear little resemblance to Cartesian egos whose existence is affirmed on the basis of the knowing (i.e., doubting) that they do. Toulmin analyzes the uses of argument and the nature of reasoning without attention to the origins or existential status of the “who” that’s engaged in dialogue.
If he, or we, wished to extend what he says about the activity of argumentation into proposals about the nature of arguers, those proposals would proceed more coherently and plausibly along lines set out (say) by George Herbert Mead, than along those of Rene Descartes. For Mead, there is interaction among the entities, human and otherwise, that populate the world; society forms on the basis of certain sorts of interactions; mind develops as social interaction is reflected upon in symbolic form; and the self who is the subject – or more accurately, the agent of knowledge – emerges from that process.
Rather than knowledge being a possession of a subject (self), Mead’s analysis takes the self to be a by-product (so to speak) of particular kinds of social activity. We are closer, in this analysis, to the deconstructionist claim that “language speaks man,” than we are to construing language or knowledge within a framework of “possessive individualism” (to borrow C.B. Macpherson’s phrase), which has its philosophical roots in a Cartesian or Lockean conception of the thinking subject. This is not to say that Toulmin gives any support to contemporary theorists who reduce the (human) subject to a construct of language. But it is to say that Toulmin’s “radical re-ordering of logical theory” (1958: 253), in relation to the Grounds and Claim of an argument, isn’t vulnerable to contemporary criticism of any and all conceptions of rationality as dependent upon a Cartesian ego.

Matters are more difficult when we consider that criticism in relation to Warrants. Subject-specificity here takes on a dual sense of being specific to both subject-matter, and to subjects/selves who are lawyers, judges, scientists, artists, or managers – that is, who are what they are by virtue of possessing particular knowledge.
“Field-dependence,” after all, means restriction to those who reside in that field, by virtue of possessing specific knowledge. Yet, this possession isn’t (in the words of the public-private axiom) “personal and individual.” It is, rather, “collective,” and thus “public.”
It allows for normed discourse within particular, limited universes of discourse, and thus enables such discussion to appear to be more orderly than mundane discourse. Warrants are generally available to all members of the community (collective) which forms a specialized “public domain.” Indeed, one of the contributions of Kuhn’s work was to make us aware of the extent to which education, and especially graduate education, is at least as much a matter of informing new members of a community of what “counts” as a Warrant, within that scholarly neighborhood, as it is a matter of handing over parcels of knowledge to each neophyte.
Perhaps more importantly, insofar as the members of a specialized community speak, reason, and argue as members of that limited population – that is, within the subject-specific boundaries of the law, the arts, the sciences, or management – the ideal of reasoning embedded in modern culture decrees that they set aside their interests in, and reliance upon, membership in other collectives. For instance, structural engineers in discussion (even, argument) about the relative strength, durability, or economy of particular building materials do not, typically, apply Warrants that speak to aesthetic or (non-mandated) ecological considerations. This “typically” is an important Qualifier, for it serves to remind us that what counts as a Warrant, even in normed discourse communities, is a dynamic (rather than fixed) matter. There is a sense, then, in which
Toulmin’s analysis of reasoning, at the level of Warrants, presumes a knowing subject who possesses knowledge. Yet the extent to which Toulmin’s theory is “subject-based,” and takes knowledge to be a “possession” of those subjects, falls far short of what is assumed in the axioms that support the “Cartesian program of ‘modern’ philosophy.”
Thus far, I would argue that the Toulmin Model provides an understanding of reasoning at work in argumentation that withstands contemporary criticism which focuses on a Cartesian model of reasoning.

This defense of Toulmin’s alternative is weakened, however, when we turn to the “explicitness” assumption. Warrants must be explicit, in that statements of them must be recognized by discourse partners as justifying a proposed connection between some Grounds and a Conclusion. Warrant, Toulmin emphasizes, “is more than a repetition of. . .facts: it is a general moral of a practical character, about the ways in which we can safely argue” in regard to particular facts (1958: 106). He also explicates Data (Grounds) and Conclusions as argument elements that must be explicitly recognized.
Only one element in Toulmin’s analysis of an argument can function without the arguing subject’s explicit recognition of it as knowledge that he or she possesses: . . .a bare conclusion, without any data produced in its support, is no argument. But the backing of the warrants we invoke need not be made explicit – at any rate, to begin with: the warrants may be conceded without challenge, and their backing left understood (1958: 106).

Toulmin goes on to discuss various situations in which Backing must be explicitly recognized as knowledge that the arguing subject possesses, (e.g. 1958: 111-12, 116-17). Yet he does not retract his acknowledgment that Backing, insofar as it functions effectively yet implicitly – which is to say, insofar as it enables us (or perhaps leads us) to accept a Warrant “without challenge” – resists the individualism axiom. More precisely, it resists the assumption that intelligibility requires knowers to “recognize what is ‘known’ as a part of his [or her] own knowledge” [1995: x; quoted in context earlier), with the implication that all of what is known must be so recognized – “owned up to,” as we often say.
This acknowledgment that Backing can function implicitly and differently than Warrant enables us to understand how it is that the participants can accept the Grounds and Warrants of an argument, without accepting its proposed Conclusion – and yet, not be charged with failure in their commitment to reasoning. Understanding Backing in this way surely goes beyond Toulmin’s explication – although it does so in a direction that, I’d argue, is grounded in his admission that Backing can remain implicit, although Warrants must be explicit.
An Introduction to Reasoning provides support for this notion of implicit Backing that functions differently from explicit Warrants. “Our first task” in analyzing the structure of arguments, Toulmin, Rieke, and Janik tell us, “is to recognize how arguments, or trains of reasoning, are constructed out of their constituent parts: claims, reasons, and the rest” (1984: 12). Then they say, in relation to their example of a mundane conversation about the likely winner of the Super Bowl: When we analyze a conversation. . .as an exchange of opinions accompanied by a probing of the foundations of those opinions. . .we are able to scrutinize and criticize the rational merits of the arguments presented. . .[which] have to do with the reliability and trustworthiness both of the facts, grounds, evidence, testimony, and so on put forward as contributions to the argument and also of the links between the different elements in the argument” (1984: 13).

The respecification that I advocate here takes this “and so on” be Backing, while Warrant does the explicit work of substantiating “the links between the different elements.” If that is an acceptable interpretation, then Backing (the “and so on”) provides implicit support for the “reliability and trustworthiness” of the elements that are linked by Warrant, rather than supporting Warrant. In other words, Backing functions in conjunction with, “presupposed by,” but differently from an argument’s Warrant: Aside from the particular facts that serve as grounds in any given argument, we. . .need to find out the general body of information, or backing, that is presupposed by the warrant appealed to in the argument (1984: 26).
Warrants, on the other hand, range from descriptive statements to normative rules: the questioner asks for warrants, that is, statements indicating how the facts on which we agree are connected to the claim or conclusion
now being offered. . .and so are implicitly relied on as ones whose trustworthiness is well established. . . .a general, step-authorizing statement is called a warrant (1984: 45-46).
This relatively clear delineation is muddied, however, when Toulmin, Rieke, and Janik note that Warrants in some fields are “exact and reliable decision procedures,” while in others, “it may be harder to articulate all the warrants employed in argument, in the form of explicit laws, rules, or principles”; rather, the warrants may be a matter of a specialist’s “own accumulated but inarticulate ‘experience’” (1984: 52-53).

Indeed, throughout An Introduction to Reasoning, we are given characterizations of the Warrant and Backing that continue, and I would argue even intensify, the difficulties for understanding these concepts that are posed by their introduction in The Uses of Argument.
Backing and Warrant are composed across a spectrum of human activity: from inarticulate experience, to cultural values, to traditional practices, to implicit norms, to explicit rules, to facts stated in propositional form. Often, deciding which is doing what is perilously close to an arbitrary labeling. The result is that these crucially innovative aspects of Toulmin’s conception of reasoning are burdened with too broad a range of tasks and too indistinct a division of labor, combined with an apparent reluctance to recognize and explore the extent to which the Backing comprises domains of human activity that exceed the philosophical agendas of most modern
philosophical thinking about epistemology and logic.
Various remarks about Backing suggest a similar range of possibilities from explicit to implicit support. In the interests of brevity, I’ll quote only one passage that’s especially suggestive for the conception of Backing I want to propose:
We grow up in a culture that forms our initial values, attitudes, and expectations. It equips us also with ways of thinking and reasoning whose underlying basis or backing is not always made explicit. . . Each side takes it for granted that the other party understands words and phrases in the same sense. . . An important part of sound reasoning therefore consists of ‘critical thinking’ and this involves being prepared to ask questions about the underlying backing for those ways of thinking and reasoning our culture has drilled into us and normally takes for granted (1984: 66-67).

3. Directions for Respecification
My response to the difficulties posed by too broad a range of tasks and too indistinct a division of labor, then, is to respecify Warrant and Backing in accord with a very suggestive analogy given early  on in An Introduction to Reasoning: . . .if a complete argument is designed to produce a particular result, then the facts or grounds which go into the argument are like the ingredients of a cake or casserole. The warrant is then the general recipe used to combine those ingredients into the finished product (1984: 47).
Correlatively, Backing would be the already effective practices that instigate choice of the particular “ingredients” (“facts or grounds”), the combination of which is justified by Warrant, toward particular ends.
More directly stated, my proposal is to respecify Warrant as those explicit “statutes, precedents, and rules,” “general laws of nature,” and “general statements” which “authorize the inferences by which different collections of specific information. . .are put forward as rational support for claims” (1984: 56). These must be field-dependent: the bread bakers’ rule of a tablespoon of yeast to a pound of flour will not authorize anything in regard to brewing coffee, composing music, choosing structural materials, or voting for a president. Moreover, Warrants may be limited to only some situations within a field: the rule for yeast in breads will not help us to know the proper proportion of baking powder to flour in a cake, or salt to water in a pickle brine.

Respecifying Backing is a more difficult task, for doing so means acknowledging that it encompasses domains of human activity that exceed the philosophical agendas of most modern philosophical thinking about epistemology and logic. In terms of the recipe analogy: there’s no need to argue that cooking requires both ingredients and recipes, and there’s little need to argue that explicit recipes are preferable to implicit recipes if we value a high probability of accomplishing palatable results. However, issues of how we choose certain foods and certain ways of eating, rather than others, typically are not considered part of the cook’s business. Yet these choices are the implicit foundation of any cooking activity, and remain as an “intonation” within that activity.
In other words: Grounds there must be, whether we’re making arguments or coffee. But there must be something else also: an impetus and exigency for making either, and that isn’t a matter of information/ingredients, or rule/recipe, or argument/product. Explicating that impetus or exigency takes us into a largely inarticulate domain – which is to say, beyond the explicit ingredients of the situation in which reasoning occurs, and into an inexplicit, nonlinguistic, and yet indigenous context of traditions, values, customs,habits, emotions, needs. . .and so on.

This is a domain that has been investigated extensively by a multitude of critics of the Cartesian program: Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, Wittgenstein, Polanyi, and MacIntyre come particularly to mind in that connection. Without minimizing the diverse and distinct value of each of those inquiries, I want to emphasize one common characteristic: they resist the “individualism axiom,” and in particular, the assumption that explicit knowledge, possessed by individuals, is all that is, or should be, relevant to the analysis and evaluation of arguments. There are many clues and hints throughout what Toulmin has to say about reasoning’s Backing that, if followed out, would lead him to join in that resistance. But he pulls back, so to speak, at the very brink of the tacit dimension of the “and so on.” In terms of the recipe analogy, Toulmin’s reconception of reasoning stops short of investigating the cultural exigencies for choosing particular ingredients and ways of engaging in culinary culinary activity, in order to produce particular products and results rather than others.

The domain of retreat is most clearly indicated when we read in An Introduction to Reasoning that evidently reasoning could not exist in the absence of language. Both claims and all the considerations used to support them must be expressed by some kind of linguistic symbol system” (1984:201). Respecifying Warrant and Backing as explicit and tacit components of argumentation enables argument analysis to recognize the vital contributions of both explicit, linguistically-expressed “claims and considerations,” and the tacit dimension of cultural exigencies that provide the impetus for argumentation and remain within any instance
of argument as a persistent “intonation” of what is implicitly common among the participants. We cannot translate this inherently implicit, inarticulate, and pervasive body of “what everybody knows” into explicit linguistically formulated information and rules without distorting mundane argumentation into the purified domain of formal logic.[iii] Acknowledging that this body of knowledge functions as Backing resists that distortion, and furthers Toulmin’s contribution to a post-Cartesian conception of reasoning.

NOTES
[i] This respecification endeavor takes its impetus from Harold Garfinkel’s focus on everyday reasoning as embodying a rationality that is pragmatically effective, although resistant to formalization. See, e.g. Garfinkel (1967) and Pollner (1987). Garfinkel’s insight is that people are not ‘judgmental dopes.’ Subsequent ethnomethodological studies (i.e., empirical studies of the methods used in actual instances of reasoning as it occurs in various contexts) reveal that our pragmatic reasoning enables communicative negotiation of the complex decisions that must be made in everyday situations. In so doing, we rely on ‘what everybody knows’ about the practices endemic to mundane reasoning. Although much of that knowledge can be linguistically formulated, representational language cannot encapsulate the complexity with which we negotiate the adjustment of general practices to particular situations. In other words, language functions indexically to invoke domains of pragmatic competence, rather than functioning referentially (representationally) to designate particular information. For further work that develops this conception of communicative reasoning, see (e.g.) Langsdorf (1993), (1995), (1998).
[ii] The recognition of Backing as a tacit dimension of cultural values takes up certain implications of Toulmin’s characterization. But it is an interpretation (rather than explication) of Toulmin’s reconception, which relies upon certain commonalities in Husserl’s project of tracing logic to the ‘life-world,’ Heidegger’s identification of the ‘forestructure’ that informs situated knowing, Gadamer’s account of ‘prejudice,’ Wittgenstein’s attention to the ‘forms of life’ that supply an ‘inherited background’ of implicit rules for our practical activity, MacIntyre’s identification of experiental traditions and communal narratives as supporting situated practice, and Polanyi’s conception of tacit knowing. It is offered in order to extend Toulmin’s work (in Toulmin (1958) and Toulmin, Rieke & Janik (1993)) in a direction that I believe is compatible with his later work on moral reasoning and that clarifies and reinforces the value of the Toulmin Model for argument analysis.
[iii] In speaking here of ‘distortion’ I do not mean to imply that information is altered, either carelessly or unethically. Rather, the issue is that failing to recognize the distinctive nature and role of affective, cognitive, valuational, and volitional components that dynamically inform (i.e., ongoingly constitute and are constituted by) the context of argumentation in contrast to informational components composing the Data, Claims, and Warrants of an argument encourages understanding the former as cognitively inferior to the latter; as less rational or even irrational. In other words, habits congenial to ‘the Cartesian program of modern philosophy’ encourage reducing the former dimension to the latter and this, I propose, is a distortion of the former’s character.

REFERENCES
Bakhtin, M. (1993). Toward a Philosophy of the Act. V. Liapunov
(Trans.), M. Holquist and V. Liapunov (Eds.). Austin: University
of Texas Press.
Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood
Cliffs NJ: Prentice Hall.
Langsdorf, L. (1993). Words of Others and Sightings/Citings/-
Sitings of Self. In: I. Angus & L. Langsdorf (Eds.), The Critical
Turn: Rhetoric and Philosophy in Postmodern Discourse, Carbondale:
SIU Press.
Langsdorf, L. (1995). Philosophy of Language and Philosophy of
Communication: Poiesis and Praxis in Classical Pragmatism. In:
L. Langsdorf and A.R. Smith, (Eds.), Recovering Pragmatism’s
Voice: The Classical Tradition, Rorty, and the Philosophy of
Communication. Albany: SUNY Press.
Langsdorf, L. (1998). Refusing Individuality: How Subjects Are
Made Into Selves. Communication Theory 10, 322-346.
Pollner, Melvin (1987). Mundane Reason: Reality in Everyday and
Sociological Discourse. NY: Cambridge University Press.
Toulmin, S.E. (1958). The Uses of Argument. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Toulmin, S.E. (1995). Foreword, in Rethinking Knowledge, ed. R.F.
Goodman & W.R. Fisher. Albany NY: SUNY Press.
Toulmin, S.E., R. Rieke & A. Janik (1984). An Introduction to Reasoning,
2d. ed. NY: Macmillan.

1. Question
Human arguments (‘interlocked claims and reasons’, Toulmin, Rieke, & Janik, 1979: 13) are not neat packages that materialize in fully structured and explicit forms. Instead, human arguments are often informal and thus involve both implicit and explicit elements. Aristotle recognized this when he discussed the ideas of the enthymeme and the example as arguments used in everyday discourse based on the interaction between explicit message and thought process (1954: 28). Everyday human arguments are therefore usually a mixture of the explicit and the implicit, the said and the unsaid, and discourse and thought.
The resulting incompleteness of everyday argument historically has plagued the study of argument. Incomplete arguments, which are assumed to be those where part of the argument is not explicitly stated but is implicitly understood by the arguers, present a major problem for translating argumentation theory to the level of practical discourse and for using practical discourse in theory building. The problem, quite simply, is how to make incomplete arguments complete so as to insure comparability between their implicit and explicit forms.

Aristotle addressed this distinction by dealing with everyday incomplete arguments in such works as the Rhetoric and with complete arguments in such works as the Prior Analytics and the Posterior Analytics. The connection for Aristotle was the idea that argument forms were the same, differing only in their completeness, their degree of certainty, and their interaction with the receiver. After Aristotle, theorists came to emphasize the explicit nature of argument, which eventually solidified into formal logic with its focus on the explicit presentation of all parts of an argument (Kneale & Kneale, 1984).
The rediscovery of everyday argument in the twentieth century has again raised the question of the role of incomplete arguments. Theorists in the informal logic and in the rhetorical traditions have placed a premium on examining arguments that are usually in incomplete forms because of a concern for the way everyday human argument functions. Furthermore, at the end of the twentieth century, as the analysis of everyday argument has moved into intercultural settings, the problem of incomplete arguments has become even greater. For example, in cultures such as Japan, implicit and incomplete communication is even more of a norm than in the West.

2. Review of Literature
Several approaches have developed for dealing with the problem of explicating incomplete arguments. The most prominent approach has been for a theorist to reconstruct an incomplete argument so that it appears in complete form. This is usually done in terms of what van Eemeren, Grootendorst, Jackson, & Jacobs (1993) call the normative approach; i.e. the incomplete argument is reconstructed on the normative basis of what argument should look like. Formal logicians on the basis of models of formal logic patterns sometimes carry out this process. More contemporary theorists such as van Eemeren, Grootendorst, Jackson, & Jacobs (1993) have developed elaborate normative models based on what the process of argument should look like. Their model seeks to reconstruct an argumentative discourse “as if it were a critical discussion. That is, textual structure,propositional content, pragmatic functions, and so on are all imputed to the discourse with reference to what would be relevant to the resolution of the dispute” (38). However all of these normative approaches attempt to solve the problem of incompleteness by having the theorist reconstruct missing parts of the argument through an elaboration process. In theory, there should be some correlation between the normatively constructed arguments of the theorists and a descriptively constructed argument.

This paper proposes another approach to the completeness problem by having people, instead of theorists, supply the missing parts of arguments. Few studies exist which attempt to have arguers reconstruct their own arguments in some fashion. Those that do solicit communicator reconstructions include thought-listing approaches in memory studies (Bates, Masling, & Kintsch, 1978) and in some reasoning studies (Stafford and Daly, 1984). For example, Hazen and Inoue (1990) and Hazen (1991) had US and Japanese students reconstruct newspaper articles and television shows by listing remembered information from the messages. This process provides an indirect reconstruction filtered through the memory processes. In both cases, the participants were interacting with mediated messages and not participating in interpersonal exchanges.
The problem with such thought listing approaches is their dependence on memory processes that are often unreliable (Daly, Vangelisti & Weber, 1995).

This study explores alternative methods for eliciting arguers’ reconstruction of arguments. The methods examined are variations of the protocol procedures developed by Ericsson and Simon (1993). Protocol analysis is a series of methods designed to “use verbal data to study cognitive processes” (Ericsson & Simon 1993: xi). Most of the work has been done on “sequences of thoughts generated by subjects themselves while solving problems, performing actions, and making evaluations and decisions” (xiv). The most common form of protocol analysis is concurrent verbalization where a person ‘thinks aloud’ while they are solving a problem.
The other common form is known as retrospective verbalization where persons retrieve their thoughts from memory to “think aloud” after the behavior is performed. As was stated earlier, almost all of the work on protocol analysis has been directed toward situations that are not interactive by nature. As Ericsson and Simon argue, “social verbalizations may be quite different from the sequences of thoughts generated by subjects while solving problems, performing actions, and making evaluations and decisions” (1993: xiv). Concurrent verbalization would probably work quite well in its original form for studies of reasoning processes and logic puzzles that are not necessarily interactive. However, to use these methods in studies of argumentative interaction requires adaptations.
There have been two notable lines of research that have adapted protocol analysis to the study of communication. Daly, Vangelisti, and Weber (1995) used concurrent verbalization to study speech anxiety in the speech production process. This approach focused on using protocol analysis in the preparation stages for interaction not during actual interaction. Daly, Weber, Vangelisti, Maxwell, and Neel (1989) used concurrent verbalization and computer mediated communication to study conversational processes such as inferencing, planning, and coping with maxim violation. This study’s approach is promising but it did not focus on argument processes. We have attempted to develop methods for the analysis of arguments in communicative interaction.
The general procedure is based on the use of protocols for participants’ reflection on their behavior as it unfolds or soon after it occurs. In our case, we attempted to find a viable procedure for getting arguers to provide information about parts of arguments that they are filling in or assuming from what another person has said.

The fundamental problem with protocol analysis and communication is that protocol analysis is based on ‘thinking outloud’ which requires verbalization, and so is itself communication. If we are to address this fundamental problem of communicating about communication, retrospective verbalizations represent the easiest adaptation of protocol analysis to argumentative interaction. By asking a person to verbalize about a conversation retrospectively we gain the ability to verbalize about verbalizations (communication). Ericsson and Simon (1993) argue that retrospective verbalization would seem to make the most sense for tasks of short duration and for perceptual-motor tasks with severe real-time constraints. This is because according to their theory “a subset of the sequence of thoughts occurring during performance of a task is stored in long-term memory. Immediately after the task is completed, there remain retrieval cues in short-term memory that allow effective retrieval of the sequence of thoughts” (xvi) but the longer the time periods involved the less cues remain in short-term memory.
They also report the concern that in retrospective reports people will elaborate on the information and include rationalizations and justifications. While retrospective verbalization seems a workable way of  ‘thinking aloud’ about communication, the above mentioned concerns appear to make retrospective verbalization less than desirable. The problem of short-term memory loss would seem to be a major problem for retrospective verbalization about communication because the time frames would rarely be short enough and if they were, the communication would be non-typical (i.e., the communication would be so short that it would not imitate normal conversational statements). However, by providing some stimulus to recall such as a videotape, audiotape, or written transcript, the memory processes can be stimulated and refreshed by providing retrieval cues. If subjects were to view a videotape of their conversation, they might be able to re-live the conversation and ‘think aloud’ about it in a fashion similar to their first experience.
The second problem of elaboration and rationalizations is only a problem if the retrospective process leads to elaborations and rationalizations that are not part of the original argument process. If such a problem does exist it can also be dealt with in a couple of ways. The use of videotape can focus subjects on their actual experience and lead them away from elaborations that might occur without any conversational anchor to guide what might occur in recall situations. In addition, Ericsson and Simon (1993) suggest that people can be focused on the process and guided away from elaborations by the use of explicit instructions which focus subjects on the relevant ‘thinking aloud’ (xvi-xvii).
Concurrent verbalization seems to present more intractable problems for communication and thinking aloud. Because we cannot really maintain two sets of verbalization processes at the same time, this process would not seem workable for the study of interaction. However, if we use different modes of communication, it may become possible to use concurrent verbalization. The easiest way to make an adaptation would be to conduct the interaction in a mode other than oral verbalization (such as writing, computer-mediated communication, or nonverbal communication) thus leaving verbalization for the thinking aloud process. For example, we might ask two people to communicate via computers and then provide them with the means to verbalize about the communication as it occurs. Of course, this adaptation could be reversed and they could use the computer for ‘thinking aloud’ about an oral conversation The only necessity for adaptation is that the communication and thinking aloud be done in different modalities.

Thus, with modifications the processes of retrospective verbalization and concurrent verbalization represent possible ways of bridging the gap between explicit and implicit parts of arguments. They may allow us to build unified pictures of everyday arguments that exhibit full theoretical import. Therefore this paper seeks to explore the following question: Do methods of protocol analysis (concurrent verbalization and/or retrospective verbalization) provide satisfactory information about the implicit parts of arguments?

3. Methodology
This study explores the efficacy of two methods of protocol analysis in making explicit the implicit parts of arguments. The first method, concurrent verbalization, involves people in making verbal statements about communicative interactions through the process of  ‘thinking aloud’ about the communication. As pointed out above, it is necessary to use two different modalities of communication to make this method work for interaction processes. Therefore, we asked participants to verbalize about computer mediated communication.
We chose to leave the ‘thinking aloud’ in the verbal mode because the original work of Ericsson and Simon is based on this modality. We chose computer mediated communication because it is written rather than oral, yet retains some of the characteristics of oral interaction, namely fairly rapid interchange and informality. In addition, it represents an increasingly important and common form of interaction, especially for younger people.
The second method of protocol analysis, retrospective verbalization, requires that people ‘think aloud’ about a recent task. In our case, the recent task is a communicative interaction and the ‘thinking aloud’ is done orally. The problem of inaccessible short-term memory is addressed by a videotape of the interaction that provides a means of refreshing people’s memories as they ‘think aloud’ about the interaction. We believe that videotape provides as faithful a stimulus to thinking about the original interaction as possible and having people watch it almost immediately after interaction helps minimize memory problems.

The question of how to judge whether a particular method is successful in making explicit the implicit parts of an argument is a difficult one. Judgements could be made in terms of a number of criteria ranging from simple counts of the parts of arguments made explicit, to measures of coherence between explicit and implicit parts of the argument, to the degree to which the implicit parts of the argument advance the on-going clash and resolution of the differences. Since this study is a first step in testing the adequacy of these methods, we shall focus on simple analyses of the number and types of information generated. That is does the method seem to generate explicit arguments that can be considered part of the explicit structure of the argument. In addition, the type of information generated and what role it might have in an argument is analyzed.
In operationalizing the two types of protocol analyses, a decision must be made whether to focus on the creation of arguments or on the interpretation of arguments. Both are valid parts of understanding the argument process and are necessary for a full picture of arguments. However, again because this is an exploratory study and because of the need for simplicity, we limited our study to the interpretation of arguments. In many ways the ultimate outcome of argumentation, at least in terms of convincing and persuading, lies in the intersection between the explicit message and the receiver’s cognitive interactions with that message. Therefore, we asked participants to make explicit their implicit interaction with the arguments made by the other person.
For purposes of this study, the arguments of five subjects using concurrent verbalization and five subjects using retrospective verbalization were analyzed. The subjects were drawn from introductory classes at a private liberal arts university in the southeastern part of the United States. Subjects participated in this study as one means of earning extra credit in their class and therefore were volunteers.

Pairs of subjects were asked to report to the study site at a particular time for a one half-hour session. All subjects were initially asked to sign an informed consent form, which outlined the general goals of the study, the benefits and risks of the study, and the rights of the subjects. In the concurrent verbalization condition, the subjects were told that: “In this study we are interested in what you think another person is saying when they communicate with you. What point of view are they taking and why are they saying what they say. We want to know what kind of sense you make out of what they say.” The process of ‘thinking aloud’ was then explained to them as talking “aloud CONSTANTLY from the time you receive a message from the other person until you begin to send your message back.” It was emphasized that they were not to plan out what they said. After explaining the ‘thinking aloud’ process, several examples were provided. Two were newspaper cartoons where the characters were shown thinking about elements of what another character said. Also, two interactive example were provided, e.g. if you received “a message from the other person that says that ‘we are spending too much on taxes,’ you might conclude that the person believes that ‘government should cut taxes.’” After this introductory process, subjects were placed in different rooms and asked to engage in a short ‘get acquainted’  interaction with program which allowed the messages from the other person to appear on one half of the screen and the person’s own messages to appear on the other half of the screen. The subjects were seated at a table facing the computer with a microphone in front of them that was hooked to a videocamera, which recorded the computer screen over the subject’s shoulder. After the introductory conversation, which lasted about seven minutes, the subjects were asked to discuss the question of whether marijuana should be legalized for medical uses. It was emphasized to subjects that it was okay to disagree. After fifteen minutes of interaction and verbalization, the conversations were ended and the subjects were released from the study.

In the retrospective verbalization condition, the pairs of subjects went through the same initial process involving informed consent and were then told that they would be asked to hold a conversation on the legalization of marijuana for medical uses which would be videotaped and viewed later on. These conversations lasted about seven minutes. Then subjects were briefed on the nature of the ‘thinking aloud’ process in the same way that the concurrent verbalization subjects were. They were then asked to view a videotape of the initial conversation in separate rooms. When the other person said something in the conversation, the subject was asked to stop the tape and ‘think aloud’ about what was said. Then they were asked to start the tape again until the other person said something else and the process was repeated. The subjects were seated at tables with video monitors, video players and microphones in front of them and a video camera behind them filming the video monitor over the subject’s shoulder. The process of thinking aloud lasted about fifteen minutes.

4. Results
To facilitate analysis, we focused on what we call ‘response units’ in the conversations. A response unit is an utterance by the other person and all of the responses that the subject makes to it through their ‘thinking aloud’ process. In some cases the original utterances were parts of sentences and in other cases were full sentences or multiple sentences. Fundamentally, the subjects phenomenologically defined the utterances when they singled out something to respond to. In a similar sense, the responses ranged from short utterances to multiple sentences. It was presumed that the responses were related in some fashion to the original utterance of the other person. Sometimes an utterance stimulated a single response and other times multiple responses.
Initial analysis focused on the number of response units created in each condition. In theory, every time the other person said something, a response unit should be created, however this was not always the case due to two factors: 1) sometimes subjects failed to respond to the other person’s statements and 2) sometimes subjects broke up another person’s statements into multiple parts for purposes of response.
The average number of responses for the concurrent verbalization condition was 13.6 and the average number of responses for the retrospective condition was 9.6. It should be emphasized that both conditions showed a high degree of variability between subjects, but the concurrent verbalization seemed to generate higher response rates for both low responding subjects and high responding subjects.
Due to the differences in the ways responses were generated in the two conditions, the question arises whether the numbers of possible responses are comparable between the two conditions. We examined this question in two ways. First, we looked at the mean number of turns statements (a turn is the utterance between when a person starts speaking and when the other person takes over speaking) available in the conversations for subjects to respond to. The concurrent verbalization condition had a mean of 17.8 turns to respond to and the retrospective condition had a mean of 16.6 turns to respond to. Thus, there were a slightly larger number of turns to respond to in the concurrent verbalization condition but the differences were not large. Second, we looked at a ratio of the number of responses made by the subjects to the number of turns available. In the concurrent condition, subjects responded 79% of the time to a turn and in the retrospective condition, the subjects responded 57% of the time to a turn. Thus, subjects in the concurrent condition responded more often to the number of turns available.
Therefore, we can conclude from our first analysis that the concurrent verbalization condition lead to a higher rate of response than did the retrospective verbalization condition.

In our second analysis, we look at the types of responses generated in each condition. Responses are identified in terms of standard parts of an argument. Four kinds of standpoints are identified. In a ‘Standpoint-Restated’ the respondent simply restates the standpoint of the other person whereas in a ‘Standpoint-Agree’ the person agrees with the position taken by the other person. In the ‘Standpoint-Responder’, the respondent states their own standpoint and in the ‘Standpoint-About Other’, the respondent takes some standpoint about the other person’s position without agreeing with it. In addition to standpoints, reasons were often inferred by the respondent (‘Inferred Reasons’) for the position taken by the other person. ‘Conclusions’ represent positions drawn from what the other person says but not necessarily representing the responder’s point of view about the other person. ‘Other information’ was related to the topic under consideration but did not seem to fit the argument while ‘Irrelevant’ referred to information that was not related to the topic under consideration. The results are summarized in Table 1:

Table 1. Means and Percentages for Categories of Responses in Protocol Conditions

An analysis of this data leads to several conclusions. First, concurrent verbalizations were more likely to lead to the restating of standpoints and agreeing with standpoints than were retrospective verbalizations. This is a low level activity that reflects an orienting behavior on the part of the participant and not a more complex interaction.

Second, retrospective verbalizations were more likely to lead to the statement of standpoints by the responder (different from the other person) than were concurrent verbalizations. This type of activity moves beyond orienting behavior to open disagreement, be it discordant or subtle. Third, retrospective verbalizations were more likely to lead to inferences about reasons for the other’s standpoints than were concurrent verbalizations. In this type of response, the respondent is involved in reasoning and is clearly going beyond the information given. Fourth, retrospective verbalizations were more likely to lead to further conclusions by the responder from the standpoints of the other. This type of response is another example of moving beyond the information given in the fashion of  ‘inferred reasons’. The difference is the direction the chain of reasoning is going. In ‘inferred reasons’ the respondent is going behind the position taken by the other to infer reasons for the position taken while in ‘conclusions’  the respondent is looking for what is implied by what the other person says. Fifth, concurrent verbalizations were more likely to lead to the mentioning of background information related to the topic, but not to the direct argument, than were retrospective verbalizations. This information is best thought of as orienting information but information that is not yet directly applied to the argument at hand. And finally, concurrent verbalizations were more likely to lead to irrelevant information than were retrospective verbalizations.

To return to our original question, about which method of reconstructing arguments would provide the most satisfactory information about the implicit parts of an argument, the answer appears to be mixed. The concurrent verbalization method seems to be superior in generating more responses and responses of a certain kind (restated standpoints, agreements with standpoints, background information, and irrelevant information) while the retrospective verbalization method seems to be more satisfactory in providing other kinds of information (the responder’s standpoint, inferred reasons for standpoints, and conclusions from standpoints). At the moment, there seems to be no clear answer to the question because both kinds of information are probably necessary for making explicit the implicit parts of arguments. However, it should be clear that while there are some differences between the two methods, both seem to be capable of generating all kinds of necessary information for making the implicit parts of arguments explicit.

5. Conclusions
How might we explain the differences that we have found? There are some differences in the situations faced by participants in the two conditions. Participants in the concurrent verbalization condition are being asked to respond immediately to what the other person communicates. It is the first time they have encountered the other’s statements and there are time constraints on the response in that new statements can come from the other person at any time.
Furthermore, the participant has two ways of responding to the other person, their verbalization (implicit) and their computer response (explicit). On the other hand, participants in the retrospective verbalization condition are responding in a delayed fashion after hearing the other person’s statements for a second time. Furthermore, there are no time constraints on the response and the ‘thinking outloud’  response is divorced from real time explicit response to the other person. The result is that the participant can respond in a much more relaxed, thoughtful manner.

The results seem to indicate that the concurrent verbalization condition (as operationalized with computer-mediated communication and verbal ‘thinking aloud’) produces higher rates of response but that the responses are simpler in nature. By simpler responses we mean that subjects were more likely (than retrospective verbalization subjects) to express standpoints that were restatements of the other person’s standpoint or an agreement with that standpoint or provide background information (‘other information’). Retrospective subjects while responding less often provided more complex responses (80% of retrospective subject’s responses were the responder’s standpoint, standpoints about the other, inferred reasons or conclusions versus 54% for concurrent subjects). It may be that the ‘real time’ nature of the concurrent verbalization gets subjects in the habit of responding, but they do not always have time to respond in any fashion that requires thinking or detailed explanation (this does not mean that such behavior does not happen, only that subjects do not have time to verbalize it). On the other hand, retrospective subjects are not under real time constraints because they have shut off the video recorder and have the time to express more complex thoughts. The question is whether one method or the other is a truer indicator of the way people really interact with other people’s arguments or whether the truth lies in the middle. To examine this problem, it may be necessary to find ways to relax the real time constraints of the concurrent situation and increase the real time constraints of the retrospective situation.

Further refining of both methods may alleviate some of the shortcomings of each. For example, the concurrent verbalization method preserves more of the elements of thinking that actually occurs in an interaction by putting everything in real time, but it also does not allow as much time for verbalizations as the other method because of the constant need to move with the conversation. It is possible that more explicit training for subjects in the ‘thinking aloud’ process as practiced in the constraints of this method will improve the efficiency of the verbalizations. Retrospective verbalizations, on the other hand, do not have the real time constraints of concurrent verbalizations but they may allow the subjects to make more reasoned responses than they are making in real time interactions. More emphasis on the spontaneous nature of the ‘thinking aloud’ process may help deal with this problem.

There are also several practical limitations to this study. First, the subject pool was limited in size, which means that the conclusions can only be treated as indicative of what we might find with a large sample size (preferably 10 to 20 subjects in each condition).
Second, the limited sample size meant that realistic statistical tests could not be run on the data. Only differences of a large size are discussed in the paper but we cannot be totally sure that they reflect real differences without a larger sample size and appropriate statistical tests. Third, we will also want to refine the nature of the subject pool to systematically look at differences in the way groups of people make explicit their arguments. This study used a subject pool that was equally split between white American male and female college students. There is evidence that males and females utilize explicitness and implicitness differently (Tannen 1994) and there is also evidence that norms vary across cultures (Hazen 1989). Thus, differences between subjects are a fruitful future ground to explore. Finally, the data needs more complex analysis.
We limited ourselves to an analysis of frequency of response and types of response. Further analysis of how these types of responses related to the rest of the argument is needed. For example, how did the verbalized implicit parts of the argument made by one person relate to the explicit parts of the argument also made by that person? Also, how did the responses made by subjects relate to the arguments of the other person both prior and posterior?
In conclusion, both methods hold promise for making explicit the implicit parts of arguments and therefore providing a unified picture of arguments in everyday discourse.

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