1. Introduction
Literal quotations can be used by reviewers to substantiate their value judgements on the novel[i] they discuss. Quoting is one of the four ways of presenting data that support these judgements. Besides quotations, reviewers can also use non-literal examples, such as ‘The characters are stereotypical’ to argue that the book is not very original (stereotypical characters being an example of an unoriginal book). A summary of the story is another way of supporting the judgement. Showing that a book is not very original can also be done by paraphrasing and thus summarising the story; the same story which may have been used in other novels. A fourth kind of data reviewers can present, is an ‘abstracted summary’. In that case reviewers abstract from what is going on in the novel to what the novel is about. They focus on themes and motives: ‘The novel is about personal freedom, conflicting with social norm and values”.
Quotations can be seen as the ‘purest’ kind of data that can be used to substantiate the judgement in literary reviews because they are the most factual and less interpreted. Therefore, theoretically, quotations are ‘necessary’ for resolving the dispute between reviewers and the readers of their article. The reason for this necessity is that the readers do not know anything about the object being judged (a new novel). Therefore, reviewers should present the data on which they base their judgement. Otherwise, readers cannot adopt a critical attitude towards the arguments that reviewers present to support their value judgements, nor can they decide whether they accept the reviewer’s argumentation, disagree with reviewers, or form their own opinion about the reviewed novel. In addition, reviewers cannot make their standpoint acceptable if their discussion partners do not know the data on which the judgement on the novel is based.
According to F.H. van Eemeren and R. Grootendorst it is essential for resolving a dispute that the discussion partners share common starting-points: jointly accepted propositions or propositions which can be made acceptable by testing them, for example by consulting an encyclopedia or a dictionary. Without these common starting-points it will not be possible to decide when the antagonist is obliged to accept the argumentation of the protagonist, and thus the protagonist will not be able to defend her/his standpoint successfully and the dispute cannot be resolved.
“If applying this procedure (intersubjective identification procedure or intersubjective testing procedure, TU) produces a positive result, the antagonist is obliged to accept the propositional content of the illocutionary act complex argumentation performed by the protagonist. If on the other hand it produces a negative result, then the protagonist is obliged to retract his illocutionary act complex” (Van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 1984: 165-168).
Quotations can also be used purely informative, and interpretative. For example, a reviewer may quote a passage to give the reader an impression of the style of the book. Informative quotations characterise of the book without judging it. Quotations can also be used to support an interpretation. In that case a quotation is an argument that substantiates a claim about a characteristic which does not clearly appear from the novel, without judging it. Interpretative quotations are presented to show that the interpretation is correct, that it is allowed to characterise the (aspect or part of the) book in this way.

In this paper I restrict myself to data supporting a judgement on the novel, which are essential for resolving the dispute between reviewer and reader. Therefore, I shall focus on argumentative quotations. Argumentation by quotations is a form of argumentation by example (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1969: 352). However, in contrast to the descriptions and definitions of argumentation by example in most theoretical overviews of argumentation types, argumentation by quotation is not a form of inductive reasoning, in which the example is one of the many observations that leads to a certain standpoint.
Hastings, Schellens, Kienpointner, Kelley and Reinard typify argumentation by example as inductive argumentation. I do not think that argumentation by example necessarily has to be inductive. An example can be used as an argument to answer implicit questions such as ‘What makes you think that?’, ‘What have you got to go on?’ and ‘Could you give an example?’
The value judgements in literary reviews are not based on several examples from the reviewed book. Reviewers make up their minds about the book while reading, or sometimes even while writing the review. The general claims are not based upon random taken examples from the book but on the whole book. Of course, reviewers mark parts of the book while reading and make notes, but their value judgement on the novel is not derived at several random taken quotations. Quotations are used to justify claims. Reviewers pick them out after they have decided what they will write about the book, or while writing. The quotations are presented as answers to the implicit question of a critical antagonist ‘Could you give an example?’. In terms of S. Toulmin an answer to the question ‘What have you got to go on’(Toulmin, 1969: 98). Quotations as arguments are not examples in a ‘context of discovery’ but in a ‘context of justification’.

2. Critical questions for argumentation based on quotations
Quotations can easily be ‘abused’. It is possible for a reviewer to quote the only awful sentence to substantiate a negative judgement. A reviewer could also change the content of a text fragment by taking the quotation out of context. On the basis of the ‘norms’ for argumentation by example that Ch. Perelman & L. Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969), A.C. Hastings (1962), P.J. Schellens (1985), M. Kienpointner (1992), D. Kelley (1988) and J.C. Reinard (1991) present in their theories, I’ve formulated four critical question for the correctness of argumentation by quotation.

Is the quotation
1. correct?
2. representative?
3. sufficient?
4. relevant?

2.1 Preliminary question
Before I deal with these four questions, I shall briefly discuss one preliminary: Is it possible to substantiate all evaluative claims on novels by means of quotations? Actually, all judgements in literary reviews, on the novel as a whole as well as on specific features of a novel, should in the end be supported by data taken from the book that is being reviewed. Ideally, the evaluative claims should be supported by means of quotations, because, as I have mentioned, they are the ‘purest kind’ of data. The question is whether it is possible to realize this ideal. It is interesting to know which types of evaluative claims can be substantiated by quotations.
In literary reviews the value judgement on a novel is, in general, supported by various so-called sub-standpoints: evaluative claims about features of novels such as style, originality, comprehensibility and moral values. My survey of about 500 literary reviews shows that all 22 types of sub-standpoints[ii] that reviewers use to support the main value judgement, are substantiated by means of quotations.

In the following example, the reviewer uses a combination of an argument from reality and an argument from economy. She states that the author, Maarten ’t Hart, has used too many words, sentences and chapters in his novel. (The last part of the claim, “the novel contains too many chapters”, could never be substantiated by the quotation.) This claim is an argument from economy. However, by expressing that the Red Hot Chili Peppers are not as bad as the author suggests, the reviewer turns her argument at the same time to an argument from reality. According to her, the author does not correctly represent reality. As an argument for these claims, the reviewer has quoted the fragment in which the author writes about the Red Hot Chili Peppers. This quotation should show the lack of economy and the lack of reality of the description.
And as always there is to much. Too many words, too many sentences, too many chapters. Where economy would really be a virtue, there is a lack of it. Maarten ’t Hart suffers from what the English call ‘overkill’. I am not particularly a lover of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, but they are not as bad as he suggests. “Then, through the speakers in the car something could be heard, for which the word ‘roaring’ was definitely an understatement. It was not human anymore, it was frightening, appalling, it seemed to come from cellars where hungry deceased after an atomic war go for each other with cannibalistic intentions.“ (Luis, 1991).

Quotations are being used to substantiate all the 22 types of sub-standpoints. However, this does not mean that reviewers could always easily present quotations to support all these evaluative claims. The frequency of the use of quotations as arguments for these 22 types differs tremendously per type of sub-standpoint. Reviewers rarely present quotations to substantiate sub-standpoints about the social engagement of the author, the moral values of the book, the authors poetics, the degree of identification of the reader, the relative value of the novel considering other books of the author, the fantasy in the novel, the theme of the book or the value of the novel considering that it is part of a trend. On the other hand, quotations as arguments for a sub-standpoint about the style of the novel appear very often. In almost every review that I have examined, the argument from style was being supported by one or more quotations.
Sub-standpoints about autonomous, immanent characteristics of the novel, such as style, composition and ‘para-aesthetic value’ (for example humour), are often supported by quotations. Those sub-standpoints relate only to the book itself and can therefore only be justified with data taken from this book. Abstract characteristics that reviewers ascribe to novels, such as the social engagement of the author or the moral values of the book, do not easily show from quotations. When reviewers use data to support sub-standpoints about these types of abstract characteristics, they often present an ‘abstracted summary’[iii].
There is another, more simple reason why quotations are frequently being used to support sub-standpoints about characteristics like style, and are rarely being used to support sub-standpoints about characteristics like moral values. Reviewers use certain types of sub-standpoints more frequently than others. Sub-standpoints about the degree of realism, the emotional effect on the reader, the originality and the composition often appear in the reviews that I have examined. The sub-standpoint about style can be found in almost all literary reviews.

2.2 Is the quotation correct?
A quotation is, in the first place, only a correct argument if the text that is being quoted is in accordance with the text in the book. The quotation must be correct: the text must be verbatim. All kinds of changes, like inversion, must be specified and should not change the nature or meaning of the quotation.

2.3 Is the quotation representative?
Secondly, a quotation is only a correct argument if it is representative of (the parts of) the book that is being reviewed. If a quotation is not representative, the range of the claim is, in general, wider than the range that is being justified by the quotation. A non-representative quotation only justifies an evaluative claim on itself, not on the novel in general.
However, M. Kienpointner’s examples of holiday and restaurant experiences show that a non-representative example can also justify a judgement. On the basis of the rule that certain things are not allowed even once (lousy dinners in a restaurant), one exception (one lousy dinner) can be sufficient ground for a negative judgement (the dinners in this restaurant are lousy, therefore I am not going there anymore) (Kienpointner, 1992: 366-367).
On the basis of the rule that in a novel not one cliché passage may occur, one quotation of a cliché passage could be sufficient to justify a negative judgement on the originality of the novel. One awful sentence, one grammatical mistake or one ugly metaphor can, on the basis of such rules, be quoted to substantiate a negative claim on the style.

2.4 Is the quotation sufficient?
Thirdly, a quotation (or quotations) is only a correct argument if it is a sufficient argument. However, the number of quotations that is required to support a claim sufficiently, cannot be determined. In general, one quotation, either as a representative example, or as an exception, will be sufficient to justify a judgement on a feature of the book.

2.5 Is the quotation relevant?
Fourth, a quotation is only a correct argument if it is typical. The question whether the quotation is a relevant example, depends on two sub-questions. First, is the quotation typical for the evaluated characteristic of which it is an example? When a quotation sub-stantiates a sub-standpoint on the social engagement of the author, the social engagement should appear from the quotation. There should be a plausible relation between the quotation and the characteristic. Second, the suggested relation between the quotation and the judgement on the characteristic should be plausible. The question is whether the quotation is justifying the evaluation. Is quotation X an example of a beautiful style? Is the quotation that is supposed to show how cliché the book is, really cliché?
When the reviewer presents a quotation to substantiate the claim that the style is beautiful, the readers can decide themselves whether the quotation supports this claim, whether a beautiful style does appear from the quotation. It should therefore be clear what is supposed to appear from the quotation. However, quotations do not always speak for themselves. The reviewer will sometimes have to make the relation between the quotation and the claim explicitly clear. That can be done by commenting on the quotation. In a comment reviewers can, for example, make clear how the social engagement of the author shows from the quotation or they can indicate the awfulness of the quotation that supports the negative evaluation of style.
Whether the quotation really shows what it is supposed to show, is related to what Quiroz and others call the ‘argumentative direction’ of an argument. One could question the ‘argumentative direction’ of an argument and state that the argument is actually substantiating the opposite conclusion (Quiroz, ea., 1992: 174-175).
When the reader finds a quotation an example of beautiful style, when the reviewer meant it as an example of awful style, the argumentative direction of this quotation is opposite. The argumentative direction is also opposite when the reviewer finds a quotation extremely funny and the reader does not. This difference has got to do with the subjective criteria for judging novels and with taste. However, it could also be a consequence of misunderstanding if the reviewer does not make clear what is so funny about the quotation.
I assume that quotations in literary reviews are correct and representative. I have made this assumption not only because it is impossible to answer these two questions without analysing the novels that are reviewed, but also because the readers assume the quotations to be correct and representative. Readers trust reviewers. Reviewers are not supposed to mislead their readers. It can be seen as a kind of Gricean sincerity condition that reviewers present correct and representative quotations.

3. Difficulties in using quotations as arguments
3.1 Sufficiency
Quotations cannot always sufficiently justify the claim they are supporting. In the first place, some sub-standpoints cannot be totally justified by quotations because they do not only relate to features of the novel. For example, the quotation that substantiates the claim that the Red Hot Chili Peppers are not as bad as the author Maarten ’t Hart suggests, only shows that the author presents an exaggerated description of this music. A quotation could never show what this music is really like. Secondly, the range of the claim can be so wide, that it cannot be supported by quotations. For example, it cannot show from quotations that a novel contains too many chapters. Thirdly, some claims can only be substantiated by more than one quotation. One quotation does not suffice, for example, to show that a certain phenomenon occurs ‘repeatedly’ in the book.
The quotation in the next example is supposed to show that the story is continuously being interrupted by turns from the third person singular to the second person singular, a case of excess. However, it does not appear from this short quotation that the story is continuously interrupted by turns from the third person singular to the second, and that excess is the case. In addition, this quotation only shows that the second person singular is used in the book, not that also the third person singular is used, nor that there are turns from the third to second person.
Perhaps the text should have it from its structure? The story is continuously being interrupted by turns from the third person to the second person, which addressed Hanna as it appears: “You had a clear desire to grow up, you were looking forward to that time, you were not afraid of it“. But also in this case: you can have to much of a good thing (Schouten, 1990).
It is impossible to determine, in general as well as in a specific case, how many quoted words are necessary to support a claim sufficiently. Due to lack of space it is not always possible to present as many quotations as needed to justify a claim sufficiently. There is always a lot of argumentation ad verecundiam in reviews, even if the reviewer quotes. The readers will have to trust the reviewers and will have to assume that they have sufficient grounds for their claims. “That is true: everybody who reads a review knows it, and the demand for thousand-and-one arguments is an absurd demand, because not even endless space will be enough to remove distrust of the judgement of the reviewer“ (Van Deel, 1982: 22).

3.2 Relevance
In some cases, it could be unclear what a quotation is supposed to show or a quotation may not show what it is supposed to show. For example, a quotation that is used by the reviewer to show that a book is funny, may not be funny to the reader. The reader does not understand what is so funny about it.
A quotation can also not show what it is supposed to show because the argumentative direction is called in question. In that case the reader understands why the quotation is funny, but (s)he thinks the quotation is not funny, but silly or dull. In this case, the opposite of what the reviewer meant appears from the quotation.
For example, the last quotation in the next fragment is supposed to show the ‘irony of the stopgaps’. However, this does not appear from the quotation. It is unclear which word is the stopgap because all of the words in the quotation only occur once, and it is unclear what is so ironic about these words.
Everything in this novel is ‘in a manner of speaking’: the childish and distant way of narrating, the old-fashioned chapter titles (…), as well as the irony of the stopgaps (“All men only think about one thing: sleeping“) (Goedegebuure, 1991).

4. Conclusion
In literary reviews, evaluative claims are presented about books which are unknown to the readers. To substantiate and justify the evaluative claim on the novel and to resolve the dispute with the readers, reviewers should present data from the novel that is being reviewed. Literary reviewers can provide factual data because books consist of words. They can copy material from the book into their reviews by quoting. Quotations, as a mean of presenting factual data, can only be used in book reviews. In reviews about theatre, sculpture or painting, no factual material from the work of art that is reviewed can be added. After all, a picture of a painting is not the painting itself.

NOTES
i. I have restricted my research on quotations as arguments to Dutch reviews on Dutch novels from 1990 until 1997 in daily and weekly newspapers.
ii. Argument from reality, abstraction, engagement, moral, expressive, intentional, authors poetics, composition, stylistic, emotional, identification, didactic, originality, tradition, relativity, fantasy, comprehensibility, development, economy, theme, ‘para-aesthetic value’ and trend (Boonstra, 1979 & Praamstra, 1984).
iii. Reviewers could support these kinds of arguments of course also by summarising (retelling) the story of the novel or by non-literal examples. However, I have seen very often that an ‘abstracted summary’ is presented as an argument in these cases.

REFERENCES
Boonstra, H.T. (1979). Van waardeoordeel tot literatuuropvatting. De Gids, 243-253.
Deel, T. van (1982). Over recenseren. Voorburg: Protestantse Stichting tot bevordering van het Bibliotheekwezen en de Lectuurvoorlichting in Nederland.
Eemeren, F.H. van & R. Grootendorst (1984). Speech acts in argumentative discussions. Dordrecht: Foris Publications.
Goedegebuure, J. (1991). Gewapende vrede. HP / De Tijd, 18-01-1991.
Hastings, A.C. (1962). A reformulation of the modes of reasoning in argumentation. Evanston: unpubl. diss. Kelley, D. (1988). The art of reasoning. New York / London: W.W. Norton & Company.
Kienpointner, M. (1992). Alltagslogik. Struktur und Funktion von Argumentationsmustern. Stuttgart – Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog.
Luis, J. (1991). De vorstelijke geur van natta jassen. NRC Handelsblad, 01-11-1991.
Perelman, Ch. & L. Olbrechts- Tyteca (1969). The New Rhetoric. A Treatise on Argumentation. London: University of Notre Dame Press.
Praamstra, O. (1984). De analyse van kritieken. Voortgang. Jaarboek voor de Neerlandistiek 5, 241-264.
Quiroz, G., D. Apothéloz & P.Y. Brandt (1992). How counter-argumentation works. In: F.H. van Eemeren e.a (eds.): Argumentation Illuminated. Amsterdam: SicSat, pp. 172-178.
Reinard, J.C. (1991). Foundations of argument. Effective communication for critical thinking. Dubuque: W.C. Brown Publishers.
Schellens, P.J. (1985). Redelijke argumenten. Een onderzoek naar normen voor kritische lezers. Dordrecht: Foris Publications.
Schouten, R. (1990). Godsdienst en hitte op het platteland. Trouw, 29-03-1990.
Toulmin, S. (1969). The Uses of Argument. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

In this paper I discuss what I believe to be a serious problem in our understanding of conductive arguments. This is the problem of deep disagreement. I then consider, only to reject, the proposal that we handle deep disagreement by means of Conversational Constraint. A better title for my paper would have been “Against Conversational Constraint”.
Conductive argument is now recognised as a separate kind of argument, distinct from deductive, inductive and analogical arguments. We have a good account of the structure of conductive arguments and helpful suggestions as to how they should be evaluated. Anyone who has tried to teach the analysis and evaluation of arguments to students will admit that this is progress. We can now actually say something about a simple argument like the following: “Hume is not a sceptic, for although he argues that our basic beliefs are not rationally justified, he rails against classical sceptics, and he maintains that we are as much determined to believe as we are to think and feel.” This example of a conductive argument is due to Trudy Govier, who has done a splendid job of rescuing Carl Wellman’s “unreceived view” on conductive argument. Wellman gave his account of conductive argument in the early 1970s. (Wellman 1971). Somehow, it never caught on. In her 1985 paper “Two Unreceived Views About Reasoning And Argument” Govier introduced conductive argument to informal logicians. (Govier 1987). Subsequently she developed and refined our understanding of conductive argument well beyond Wellman’s original efforts. Obviously, Wellman and Govier – and some others – did not discover or invent a new kind of argument: conductive arguments have always been around, in the guise of “good reasons arguments” or “pros and cons arguments”, but they were just not given the attention they deserved.
What, then, is a conductive argument? My brief sketch is based on Govier’s discussion in her A Practical Study of Argument. (Govier 1996: 388-408) The salient points are:
Firstly, a conductive argument has a convergent – as opposed to a linked – support pattern. This means that each premise supports the conclusion on its own and independently of any other premises. Removal of a supporting premise, however, weakens the argument; addition of supporting premises strengthens the argument. The question may be raised why we should regard a convergent argument as a single argument rather than as two separate arguments for the same conclusion. One answer is that in fact the two premises are offered jointly. A better answer, though, is to point out that when we want to decide whether the premises indeed support the conclusion we cannot but consider them jointly. Although independent, the premises somehow add up.
Secondly, the premises of a conductive argument do not entail the conclusion. This should be apparent from my Hume example. The premises could be true and the conclusion unacceptable or false. However, the premises are relevant to the conclusion; and the premises certainly make the conclusion plausible. A good conductive argument is not – this should be stressed – a valid argument in disguise.
Thirdly, conductive arguments often include as premises not only considerations supporting the conclusion but also counterconsiderations. For instance, the Hume argument has two considerations as well as one counterconsideration. The arguer acknowledged that there is a counterconsideration that is both relevant to her conclusion and counts against it. Nevertheless, she discounted it. Counterconsiderations can be acknowledged explicitly or they can lurk implicitly. Govier rightly makes much of explicit counterconsiderations. She writes that “[I]t’s important to recognize that acknowledging counterconsiderations does not necessarily weaken your case. Often it strengthens it, because in understanding the counterconsiderations and reflecting on how well your premises support your conclusion, despite these factors, you can gain a more accurate understanding of the issue. Also, you may improve your credibility, showing your audience that you are broad-minded and flexible enough to understand some of the objections to your view, and that you have taken these into account in making up your mind and formulating your argument.” (Govier 1996: 392)
Finally, conductive arguments occur commonly in practical and interpretive contexts. When we deliberate rationally about what to do (some action, plan or policy) or about what to make of something (human behaviour or a text, say) we often use conductive arguments. In both contexts – practical and interpretive – the structure of conductive arguments nicely models the fact that several distinct considerations or pieces of evidence can have a bearing on the decision or interpretation.

The beauty of Govier’s account is that it does not allow only description and analysis, but also suggests guidelines for the evaluation of conductive arguments. Very briefly, evaluation goes as follows: assess all premises – considerations as well as counterconsiderations – for acceptability and relevance to the conclusion; try to articulate additional lurking counterconsiderations; assess and articulate the relative importance of the considerations taken together as opposed to the counterconsiderations. If the premises are acceptable and relevant to the conclusion, and if the considerations are more important than the counterconsiderations (both explicit and implicit), then the conclusion is plausible, and you have a good conductive argument.
I believe that the Govier account of conductive argument faces two problems. These are gaps rather than errors. However, if these gaps cannot be filled, it might be that the account is less useful than we thought at first. Because, conductive arguments would play a much more limited role in deliberation and interpretation, and our evaluation of conductive arguments would be uselessly vague and intuitive. Whether a particular conductive argument is good or bad would itself depend on nothing more than an arbitrary decision. The first problem for the Govier account is that a crucial step in the evaluation of conductive argument is left as a metaphor.
Govier is well aware of this. She writes: ”A person who acknowledges counterconsiderations and nevertheless still wishes to put forward the argument that his conclusion is supported by positively relevant premises is committed to the judgment that the supporting premises outweigh the counterconsiderations. To speak of ‘outweighing’ is, of course, metaphorical. We cannot literally measure, or quantify, the strength or merits of the various premises against counterconsiderations.” (Govier 1996: ibid.) Govier is wise to leave the metaphor as a metaphor. Others have been more rash. Benjamin Franklin famously attempted to cash the metaphor when he described his “moral or prudential algebra” in a letter to Joseph Priestly in 1772. And subjective expected utility theory, currently the dominant decision-making strategy in economics, is merely the most recent attempt at weighing what cannot be weighed. I won’t discuss this problem. However, unless we can do better, we are only pretending to offer evaluations of conductive arguments. We can either try to refine the metaphor or we can drop it altogether. I would urge, but not argue for, the latter. Perhaps comparing and contrasting considerations and counterconsiderations has precious little to do with balances and weights.

My focus in this paper is on the other problem. I want to introduce it by means of a real case. We need the briefest of introductions to the so-called “Battle Over Bones”. During the summer of 1996 human remains were discovered by chance at the edge of the Columbia River in Kennewick, Washington. Police forensic experts, anthropologists and archaeologists studied the almost complete skeleton. Kennewick Man – as he was soon dubbed – turned out to be male, between 40 and 55 years old at death, extremely ancient (he died roughly 8,400 years ago according to both carbon dating tests and stylistic analysis of a projectile point embedded in his pelvis), and, surprisingly, Caucasian (the skeleton cannot be anatomically assigned to any existing Native American tribe in the area nor to the western Native American type in general, according to an analysis of the bones). From the scientific point of view, Kennewick Man was sheer good luck, a rare opportunity to add yet another piece to the puzzle of how people came to populate the Americas. This scientist’s dream was shattered when the US Army Corps of Engineers, as custodians of the waterways, confiscated Kennewick Man and barred access to him, in terms of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Because of his age and since his remains were found within the traditional territory of the Umatilla Tribes, Kennewick Man was deemed to fall under the provisions of the Act. Towards the end of 1996 a group of scientists filed suit against the Corps of Engineers to allow scientific study of the remains.(Slayman 1997)

This is the background to an interesting conductive argument advanced by the Umatilla Tribes. (Minthorn 1996) Lightly edited, it goes as follows:
“Kennewick Man must be reburied immediately. Why? Because our religious beliefs, culture, and our adopted policies and procedures tell us that this individual must be reburied as soon as possible. Our Elders have taught us that once a body goes into the ground, it is meant to stay there until the end of time. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act and Archaeological Resources Protection Act, as well as other federal and state laws, are in place to prevent the destruction of, and to protect, human burials and cultural resources. Our tribe has filed a claim for this individual under these acts. In filing this claim we have the support of other tribes who potentially have ties to Kennewick Man. From our oral histories we know that our people have been part of this land since the beginning of time. We do not believe that our people migrated here from another continent, as the scientists do. We also do not agree with the notion that this individual is Caucasian. Scientists say that because the individual’s head measurement does not match ours, he is not Native American. We believe that humans and animals change over time to adapt to their environment. And, our elders have told us that Indian people did not always look the way we look today. Some scientists say that if this individual is not studied further, we, as Indians, will be destroying evidence of our own history. We already know our history. It is passed on to us through our elders and through our religious practices. Scientists have dug up and studied Native Americans for decades. We view this practice as desecration of the body and a violation of our most deeply-held religious beliefs. Today thousands of Native American remains sit on the shelves of museums and institutions, waiting for the day when they can return to the earth, and waiting for the day that scientists and others pay them the respect they are due. Our religion and our elders have taught us that we have an inherent responsibility to care for those who are no longer with us. We have a responsibility to protect all human burials, regardless of race. We are taught to treat them all with the same respect. Kennewick Man must be reburied immediately. No compromise is possible on this matter.”

This is clearly a conductive argument in terms of the criteria listed earlier. Or is it? The troubling aspect of this argument – as a conductive argument – is the way in which the counterconsiderations are handled. Scientific objections and counterconsiderations are indeed mentioned, but they are hardly acknowledged. What I have in mind is that the mere possibility that they could be relevant to the conclusion is not even entertained. The Umatilla Tribes’ attitude towards the scientists’ case reminds me of the physicist, Wolfgang Pauli’s response to a rival’s view: “… his theory is not even wrong.”  The scientists’ counterconsiderations cannot be assessed for acceptability and (to use the unfortunate metaphor again) for weight, since their relevance is not up for consideration. Another troubling aspect of this example is that it is hardly an isolated case, conductive arguments quite often show this feature.
This, then, is the second problem for the Govier account. What do we say? Have the Umatilla Tribes offered a bad conductive argument? Or, have we rather come up against a limit of conductive argument? We can call this phenomenon – when counter-considerations are not even acknowledged – deep disagreement. (For the moment, we need only accept that deep disagreement occurs, without attempting to explain what it is.) The Govier account seems to lack guidelines on the conditions under which conductive argument is possible. For instance, is conductive argument even possible, given a situation of deep disagreement? Perhaps the Umatilla Tribes’ argument is not bad, but futile. How could they possibly persuade the scientists of their case? And, obviously, how could the scientists persuade the Native Americans?

I want to look at the political philosopher, Bruce Ackerman’s proposal on this issue. Ackerman accepts deep disagreement and offers a way of handling it. We can label his proposal “Conversational Constraint”. Can Conversational Constraint fill the gap in the Govier account of conductive argument? I will give two arguments why it cannot, why Conversational Constraint is not a good idea. Firstly, Conversational Constraint is undesirable. Secondly, Conversational Constraint is unnecessary.
The most accessible version of Ackerman’s proposal is his short paper “Why Dialogue?”. (Ackerman 1989) He asks what role dialogue (and thus, presumably argument) plays in the life of a reflective person. Say, for instance, such a person wants to pursue the truth on a moral issue? Ackerman gives an anti-Socratic answer: what matters is the truth or the value of the view eventually arrived at; it does not matter that the view is the conclusion of an argument. Dialogue – argument – has an instrumental role, and therefore, is optional. Privately, the reflective individual need not enter into dialogue with others or with himself. The situation is very different when we shift from the private to the public or political sphere. Here Ackerman’s Supreme Pragmatic Imperative holds: “If you and I disagree about the moral truth, the only way we stand half a chance of solving our problems of coexistence in a way both of us find reasonable is by talking to one another about them.” (Ackerman 1989: 10) We have an asymmetry between the private and the public case: in both cases dialogue is instrumental, public dialogue, however, is not optional. How, then, is public dialogue possible, given that the starting-point is disagreement, and I take it, that Ackerman has deep disagreement in mind? In the following quote Ackerman first carefully eliminates other options and then states his own proposal, Conversational Constraint: “The basic idea is very simple. When you and I learn that we disagree on some dimension of the moral truth, we should not search for some common value that will trump this disagreement; nor should we try to translate it into some putatively neutral framework; nor should we seek to transcend it by talking about how some unearthly creature might resolve it. We should simply say nothing at all about this disagreement and put the moral ideals that divide us off the conversational agenda …” (Ackerman 1989: 16) What is the scope of Conversational Constraint? Ackerman insists that he is not advocating a Gagging Rule, since Conversational does not limit the questions that can be asked, only the answers that can be given. He also points out that the aim of Conversational Constraint is to change the character of the constrained argument subtly: reasonable coexistence, not moral truth, is what we want to achieve. Conversational Constraint is obviously a burden, a frustration, and it carries emotional costs, since we cannot express our deepest beliefs and commitments. But Ackerman argues that it is no more burdensome than the demands of the ordinary role-playing we have to engage in in our social lives.

What should we make of this? I believe that Conversational Constraint is an important proposal. Stripped of its specifically liberal political philosophical assumptions – if that is possible – it should be seriously considered by anyone who reflects on argument. It is a radical proposal. For instance, it is unclear what premise would survive in the Umatilla Tribes’ conductive argument if they were slapped with Conversational Constraint.
The immediate objection to Conversational Constraint is that it clashes with one of the central (and ancient) tenets of dialogue, dialectic or argument. Frans van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst stated this as Rule 1 for a critical discussion: “Parties (to a dispute) must not prevent each other from advancing standpoints or casting doubt on standpoints.” (Van Eemeren and Grootendorst 1992: 108) Violations of this rule include banning standpoints or declaring standpoints sacrosanct. Van Eemeren and Grootendorst’s Rule 1 is one version – formulated as a prohibition – of the second element in Paul Grice’s more general and abstract Principle of Communication: “Be clear, honest, efficient and to the point.” (Grice 1989) However, merely citing Rule 1 in response to Ackerman’s proposal would surely be begging the question. No doubt Ackerman is aware of such a requirement or tenet. After all, he carefully lists the circumstances under which Rule 1 should be overridden: firstly, it must be a public or political dispute; secondly, there must be deep disagreement between the parties. So, we need an argument why Rule 1 cannot be overridden. This is my first argument against Conversational Constraint. I hope to show that Conversational Constraint is undesirable, because it undermines the very idea of (conductive) argument.
I believe that Kant offers exactly the argument we need. That section of The Transcendental Doctrine of Method titled “The Discipline of Pure Reason in Respect of its Polemical Employment” in the Critique of Pure Reason is crucial reading for the student of argument. Kant writes: “Reason must in all its undertakings subject itself to criticism; should it limit freedom of criticism by any prohibition, it must harm itself, drawing upon itself a damaging suspicion. Nothing is so important through its usefulness, nothing so sacred, that it may be exempted from this searching examination, which knows no respect for persons. Reason depends on this freedom for its very existence. For reason has no dictatorial authority; its verdict is always simply the agreement of free citizens, of whom each one must be permitted to express, without let or hindrance, his objections or even his veto.” (A739/B767) Onora O’Neill has helped me to make sense of this. I use her paper “The Public Use of Reason”. (O’Neill 1989)

To begin with, though Kant and Ackerman both advocate toleration, the implications they draw are totally opposed: dialogue, debate and argument must be free, for Kant; it must be constrained, according to Ackerman. How can this be? The explanation lies in the distinction between expression and communication. Although I mostly express my feelings or beliefs in order to communicate them, this need not be so. Communication requires some form of recognition by others – what Govier calls “acknowledgement” – some understanding of what is being communicated and why it is communicated. The notion of solitary communication does not make any sense at all; the notion of solitary expression does. We can tolerate somebody else’s (self)-expression by ignoring it, by remaining passive and not interfering. We cannot tolerate someone else’s communication in this way. For Ackerman, argument is a matter of expressing ourselves and Conversational Constraint is called for if the expression gets in the way of cooperation. This is toleration according to Ackerman. Kant, in contrast, takes argument to be fundamentally communicative, toleration has to be active. We must actively strive to understand – to engage with the other view – though we need not endorse it, nor even fully comprehend it. Obviously, this is not possible unless the other view is freely available, tolerated, in other words.

The paragraph from the Critique of Pure Reason I quoted above is slightly misleading in that it seems to demand blanket toleration (“Reason must in all its undertakings subject itself to criticism …”) This is not Kant’s view. Kant insists only that the public use of reason be free. In the essay What is Enlightenment? he attributes, with approval, the following disconcerting principle to Frederick the Great: “Argue as much as you like about whatever you like, but obey!” We need to understand Kant’s idiosyncratic but sensible contrast between the public and the private use of reason. “Private” does not mean “personal” or “individual”. Instead it refers to arguments aimed at a restricted audience, defined by and circumscribed by, say, a particular role or function. When a postmaster argues qua civil servant, he is engaged, strangely enough, in the private use of reason. By contrast, when this same postmaster argues qua individual person or private citizen, when he, as Kant puts it “… speaks in his own person” and addresses the world at large, then we have the public use of reason. I trust that this elucidates Frederick the Great’s rule of thumb: the king allowed intellectual dissent; he demanded, or rather, commanded bureaucratic obedience.
Kant’s way of looking at things nicely exposes the predicament the spokespersons of the Umatilla Tribes find themselves in: they are arguing privately, whereas public argument is called for.

Public reason has a general, undefined, audience. This has deep implications for the public use of reason as communication. Few assumptions can be made as to what would be comprehensible or acceptable to the audience. Above all, no authority or set of rules can be taken for granted. Reason has to establish its own authority by a practical process of bootstrapping. And this is possible only if freedom is tolerated. Kant says, I repeat, that reason depends on this freedom for its very existence. To state the Kantian argument against Ackerman’s Conversational Constraint rather bluntly: if people cannot argue about what they are most committed to and what most deeply divide them, why accept argument at all? Only that which survives rigorous argument can have authority. Annette Baier remarked, in a different context, that “[U]ntil we can trust those with whom we are talking to be doing with words what the form of their words suggests (proposing, counterproposing, raising serious objections, seriously considering the merits of a proposal), no justificatory discourse can be sustained, no principles get ratified or vetoed.” (Baier 1994:173) I take this to be an elegant way of putting Kant’s point. Van Eemeren and Grootendorst’s First Rule of critical discussion should not be overridden by Conversational Constraint. Ackerman’s way of handling deep disagreement in conductive arguments is undesirable.

Nevertheless, Conversational Constraint may be undesirable but unavoidable, a necessary evil. We need a second argument to show that Conversational Constraint is unnecessary. This argument will depend on a clearer understanding of deep disagreement. Earlier I described the disagreement between the Umatilla Tribes, and the archaeologists and anthropologists as deep. I now ask: what does this mean? Clearly we have another metaphor that needs unpacking. This turns out to be more difficult than it might seem. The difficulty arises when we attempt to hold the notions of depth and disagreement together. Let me explain. In order to disagree, we need to disagree about something. There must be some single question to which we offer different answers. Bernard Williams, whose idea this is, calls this question the “locus of exclusivity”. (Williams 1981) An Aristotelian philosopher and a quantum physicist do not disagree: their answers differ because their questions do; they lack a locus of exclusivity. By contrast, I think that the Umatilla Tribes and the scientists do have such a question (“Should Kennewick Man be buried immediately?”) to which they give conflicting answers (“Yes, as soon as possible” and “No, perhaps never”). And the answers conflict in the sense that they cannot be acted upon jointly. Is there anything deeper to the conflict than this? It does not look terribly deep – about as deep as the perennial conflict about the only remaining slice of cake. We can now add depth by pointing at the lack of mutual acknowledgement of considerations supporting the conflicting answers. How deep can we go before the locus of exclusivity disappears, before the disagreement collapses into a situation where the two parties merely talk past each other? Indeed, does this situation of total mutual incomprehension even make sense? Such a situation is called conceptual incommensurability. Two conceptual schemes would be incommensurable in case no comparison is possible between the beliefs and values of the respective schemes. I take Ackerman to understand deep disagreement as conceptual incommensurability. He urges us to Conversational Constraint, since communication in cases of deep disagreement is impossible and pointless. Ackerman is, as it were, Wittgenstein in his Tractatus mood: “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.”

If I understand Ackerman correctly, then it is easy to dispose of his view that Conversational Constraint is necessary in situations of deep disagreement, since deep disagreement is conceptual incommensurability. Donald Davidson remarks, in his paper “On the Very Idea of A Conceptual Scheme”, that “[C]onceptual relativism is a heady and exotic doctrine, or would be if we could make good sense of it. The trouble is, as so often happens in philosophy, it is hard to improve intelligibility while retaining excitement.” (Davidson 1984: 184) He then goes on to dispose of conceptual relativism or conceptual incommensurability: his argument is that there is no such thing as conceptual incommensurability because the very idea is nonsensical. (I have to skip the details of this subtle argument.) If we are persuaded by Davidson and if we understand deep disagreement as conceptual incommensurability (as Ackerman does), then we should also concede that Conversational Constraint would never be called for.

My own view is that deep disagreement is real; that it should not be confused with conceptual incommensurability; and that often conductive argument in a situation of deep disagreement is possible without resorting to Conversational Constraint. The metaphor of depth in the notion of deep disagreement is elusive and tricky to unpack, mainly because deep disagreement itself is a complex, even messy, phenomenon. There is no single factor underlying deep disagreement. Henry Richardson gives the beginnings of a very promising account of deep disagreement in his subtle book, Practical Reasoning About Final Ends. His ideas are a reworking of familiar themes from Thomas Kuhn and Wittgenstein. Richardson focuses on the barriers to mutual understanding, what prevents us from acknowledging other people’s views. Hopefully we can ignore the most obvious barriers such as stupidity and ignorance, obstinacy and arrogance, bias and prejudice. It would be an interesting exercise to look and see whether the Umatilla Tribes’ failure to acknowledge counterconsiderations could be attributed to any of these immediate barriers. The interesting barriers, those that take more effort to identify and possibly remove, are due to the following facts according to Richardson:
“(1) much learning is tacit, (2) much of what is learned is seemingly a priori or definitional, and (3) inculcation of a form of life or a set of specialized practices typically takes for granted a rough characterization of the ends that are treated as final within that endeavor.” (Richardson 1994: 260)

The barriers, then, are: tacit exemplars, hardened propositions (to use a Wittgensteinian term) and divergent (final) ends. We can illustrate these barriers from our example. Native Americans would have as a tacit exemplar of a scientist not the standard Western exemplars of, say, a wise Einstein or a benign Pasteur, but rather of the US Surgeon-General in the 1870s who encouraged the Cavalry to collect Indian skulls in order to prove the racial inferiority of indigenous people. The imperative to return someone who died to the earth would be a hardened proposition in the moral sphere, allowing no exceptions or qualifications, resistant to revision as if it were a definition or some a priori necessary truth. Compare this with our (?) recent abhorrence of cruelty and torture. And tribal harmony, not neutral perhaps disruptive and deflating truth, might be a final cognitive end. A configuration of such barriers is what we should understand deep disagreement to be. This opens the possibility of handling these barriers – if need to handle them – by the ordinary tools of dialectic and argument. These tools need hardly be listed: articulation and analysis; abstraction, specification and qualification; analogy and distinction. In fact, in Chapter 11 of A Practical Study of Argument Trudy Govier (following a suggestion of David Hitchcock’s) takes students through the process of softening hardened propositions by pointing out that they are in reality all qualified by ceteris paribus clauses. Thus, the phenomenon of deep disagreement, properly understood, does not force us to desperate measures such as Conversational Constraint. Unconstrained conductive argument is probably the best bet we have to overcome deep disagreement.
I trust that by examining and rejecting a misguided idea I might have suggested some fruitful avenues to enrich and improve the account of conductive argument that we have at present.

REFERENCES
Ackerman, B. (1989). Why Dialogue? The Journal of Philosophy 86(1):5-22.
Baier, A. (1994). Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Davidson, D. (1984). Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Govier, T. (1987). Problems in Argument Analysis and Evaluation. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Foris.
Govier, T. (1996). A Practical Study of Argument. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth; 4th Edition.
Grice, P. (1989). Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Minthorn, A. (1996). Human Remains Should Be Reburied. http://www.ucinet.com/~umatribe/kennman
O’Neill, O. (1989). Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant’s Practical Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Richardson, H.S. (1995). Practical Reasoning About Final Ends. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Slayman, A.L. (1997). A Battle Over Bones. Archaeology. 50(1).
Van Eemeren, F. and Grootendorst, R. (1992). Argumentation, Communication, and Fallacies: A Pragma-Dialectical Perspective. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Wellman, C. (1971). Challenge and Response: Justification in Ethics. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

The goal of this paper is to sketch a new method of analytical comprehension of theoretical texts in humanitarian sciences. The proposed method of research is based on semiological principles of text comprehension. Both content and form are essential for comprehending argumentative texts. A text recipient is viewed as a rational subject trying to detect all the components of the argument he/she considers and thus to see if the argument is logically consistent. Elementary and higher level argumentative units of the text are discovered by applying a modified S.Toulmin’s model of argumentative functions (Toulmin, 1958).
Studying the problem of understanding depends on a method accepted, on a researcher’s background, and on a field of research. Thus, approaches in psycholinguistics can differ from those in hermeneutics, literary criticism or philosophy. Scientific method is not the only one to be applied in solving the problem of the essence and mechanisms of understanding; it can be supplemented by other methods. All that means that both the topic and the object of research matter in studying understanding. By the topic I mean a particular kind of message for understanding. By the object I mean a chosen method and particular aspects of the message to be studied.
The topic of my study is a research text in humanitarian sciences. The object of my study is a problem of understanding a research monologue text. By text I mean the written form of discourse, as opposed to speech as its oral form. A research text is organically argumentative, i.e. constructed on the basis of certain principles of reasoning (irrespective of the field it belongs to). That is why research text understanding is essentially understanding of the text argumentation. By argumentation I mean reasoning, both in its formal-logical and informal-logical aspects (rhetoric is thus excluded from argumentation, which is conditioned by the specific topic under consideration). Argumentation is viewed here as a social symbolic sub-system, with the system being a language – natural or artificial, depending on which version of argumentation is chosen for consideration. Like any human knowledge, argumentation as a symbolic sub-system is generated by the power of human mind. Constructive sign-forming abilities of cogitant individuals are unitary. This, however, does not mean that all cogitant individuals create identical cognitive structures: variety of constructs at an abstract level reflects specific categories managing the process; these categories can be purely logical or argumentative.

An important factor in producing or changing symbolic systems is acceptance or refutation of a knowledge structure, respectively. If an old system of knowledge is refuted or is found inapplicable for describing or explaining an object, it is substituted by a new or a modified one. Being social (inter-personal), such competitive cognitive systems are applicable for describing and explaining phenomena. Therefore it is possible to postulate coexistence of competitive cognitive structures/systems, none of which, as a product of human mind and interaction, can be absolutely true. Consequently, argumentation theories can be object-oriented and object-specific; they can also be competitive and differently plausible/valid for a specific object (some of them can be better, others worse).
A modification of rationalism is taken as a basis of method here. The modification states that though there is truth, it is practically unattainable. The theories can and must be discussed and refuted since any of them is only a further step to attaining the truth. Falsifiability of theories leads to falsifiability of particular claims and judgments. Taking into account the unique character of personal experience, we can state the uniqueness of scholars’ theories.

Therefore truth of judgments is viewed here as always relative to a particular cognitive system. The common ground for comprehension here is conventions about the principal axioms and the meaning of terms (such as Argument, Premise etc.). The conventional character of terms can be stronger or weaker: cf. Informal Logic, Pragmadialectics, Deduction, Induction as examples of the latter). No doubt, conventional force can depend on linguistic clarity and the skill to formulate one’s ideas.
A recipient of an argumentative text is viewed here as a “rational subject”, or an analyzer of reasoning in the text. He/she uses a certain model of analysis to understand the author’s reasoning. The model is stored in the recipient’s memory and is based on logical laws of thinking. Criteria of logical correctness (relative truth of premises + validity of reasoning) must correspond to the standards of rationality that are used by both the author and the recipient of the text. Supposedly, such criteria exist. The standards are manifested in a specific argumentative model because a theoretical text is based on a logic of reasoning.

Argumentation can be represented by various approaches. Still, to have even minimal explanatory force any approach must be based on principles of construction and analysis of reasoning. Rational attitude helps us to choose out of many logical systems a basic one maximally corresponding to the goal and the object of our research.
Since an argumentative text is regarded here as a theoretical text based on reasoning, it must correspond to the principle of strictness which can be deductive validity. Taking into consideration the sign nature of a text, we should choose a logical system oriented (at least partly) on semiological processes. Such a system must be intensional because theoretical texts are themselves intensional. If we have a suitable logical system applicable in all respects but the intensional one, the system can be extended thus having an opportunity to describe both form and content.
Since a theoretical text is a natural language phenomenon, it is necessary to pay attention to linguistic categories proper, i.e. meaning, exponential and contentive parts of the sign. These factors can be covered by a modified version of traditional syllogistic. Taking into account the specificity of the type of a theoretical text taken as the object, namely, a text in humanities that does not have a strict formal organization, it is necessary to apply an informal logical system to text analysis. Such a system could demonstrate that being non-rigid, the text is still logically organized, i.e. constructed in accordance with a scheme of reasoning representing a tactico-strategic aspect of argumentation. For that purpose an argumentative-functional model as a version of sentential logic is used.
Comprehension is understanding another person through a discourse; it is thus not only subject-oriented, but also object-oriented. The object-oriented principle of understanding presupposes specific treatment of happiness conditions of reasoning and comprehension of argumentation in monological texts. The happiness conditions are divided into general argumentative and specific argumentative conditions. This differentiation is based on the dichotomy between pan-systemic and mono-systemic levels in argumentative analysis.

General argumentative conditions comprise Principles of Generosity (described in detail in works on argumentation), of Argumentativity, and of Symbiosis of Systems of Reasoning. The Principle of Argumentativity presupposes co-direction of premises of an argument so that their use could not contradict to a claim being proved, and the combination of the premises makes the argument stronger. This principle does not apply to syllogistic because premises in a syllogism are interrelative with its conclusion and thus always “work in the same direction”; it is also important that the notion of strength of the syllogism is inapplicable to syllogistic as a deductive system.

The Principle of Symbiosis of Systems of Reasoning presupposes division of application of systems of logical analysis in accordance with a strategic and a tactical approach to the text. There are two levels of argumentation in the text. The strategic level is responsible for description of the principal (general) organization of the text. For strategic analysis argumentative-functional model is used. The tactical level in the proposed theory is the level of the argumentative elementary unit; this intra-argument level is used here for analysis of logical correctness of the unit of argumentation.
Since the recipient has nothing but text as objective data for analysis, he can establish its logical correctness basing on the degree of its optimality of encoding. In other words, not only the contentive, but also the exponential part of the text matters for establishing its logical correctness as viewed by the recipient. For this level a new version of syllogistic is applied; its syllogisms are sensitive both to the form and to the content. The syllogistic operating on the structures resulting from argumentative-functional analysis of the text. These structures are argumentative units.
Specific argumentative conditions are Principles of Maximalism and of Discretion. Being both applicable to the intra-argumentative level of analysis, these principles are differently oriented. According to the Principle of Maximalism, if there is no explicit quantifier (which is most often the case) in the Claim judgment of an enthymeme and, consequently, the scope of the Claim can be either universal or particular (with different modes of syllogisms taken for restoration), the recipient should choose the universal option out of the alternative “universal vs. particular”. It is thus presupposed that the author of the text made the stronger (universal) statement. The Principle of Discretion is quite the opposite and is oriented at choosing a particular statement. Maximalism works in accordance with the Principle of Generosity: it is oriented on a greater scope (and, hence, greater force) of the author’s argument. Discretion is oriented at “saving face” of the author if his/her claim only turns out to be a particular (as opposed to a supposedly intended universal) statement as a less commitant one, i.e. having less force than it could have had. Discretion is also oriented at the recipient – it insures it from possible blame of making a quantitatively too strong conclusion.
Argumentative analysis based on the two systems of reasoning operates on specific units of argumentation. The minimal unit is an Argumentation Step, composed of elements of argumentation – statements having specific argumentative functions: Claim, Data and Warrant. Nominal composition of a unit is co-occurrence of the three elements; relatively minimal is presence of Claim and Data; absolutely minimal is occurrence of Claim only. Argumentative elements do not necessarily correspond to separate statements in size and can be manifested as a combination of statements, particularly when the statements do not have a form of a standard judgment. The maximal unit of argumentation, to which both systems of reasoning (i.e. the argumentative-functional model and the syllogistic) are applicable, is an Argumentation Move; it is a unit of textual level composed of several Steps (it can also coincide in size with one Step). A formal border of the Move is the border of its respective paragraph.
At the local level (the level of Argumentation Step) use of both mentioned systems of reasoning is most efficient. The result of using the syllogistic method is a parallel argumentative structure composed of one (in a relatively minimal argument) or two convergently combined syllogisms (in a nominal argument). That is a “syllogistic portrait” of an Argumentation Step; it has the properties of provability and of unconditioned relevance of argumentation at the local argumentative level. Such “portrait’ is not regarded as a separate argumentative unit here, because only one system of reasoning (but not both) is applied to it; rather, it is a result of analytic understanding of the Argumentation Step. The applicability of the method presented above has certain
limitations because it was developed for specific types of discourse – written argumentative monologue with a non-rigid structure. Other types of discourse can be analyzed from different positions.

REFERENCES
Toulmin S.E. (1958). The Uses of Argument. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

In this paper I intend to argue that teacher training in the Philosophy for Children Program can be significantly improved through the Pragma Dialectical Approach. For that purpose, I will first make a brief and necessarily sketchy presentation of the fundamentals of the Philosophy for Children Program. Then I will make a few comments on its potential for an education for democracy, making specific reference to the Chilean experience. Next I intend to discuss the concept of a “Community of Inquiry”, central to the Philosophy for Children Program , in order to show 1) how the building of such a community can contribute to the development of reasoning skills and democratic attitudes in the participants and 2) what is expected from the Philosophy for Children teacher.
Based on this discussion, I intend to reflect on what I see as some shortcomings, as far as helping teachers meet those expectations, in the presentation of the formal and informal logic contents of the novels and teacher manuals, which are the standard materials used for teacher training in the Program. I shall also comment on the bearing that the usual structure and length of the Workshops may have on the results of that training.
Finally, I intend to show how the Pragma Dialectical Approach can help overcome the difficulties and contribute to improve the teachers’ training. For this purpose, I shall discuss some features of the Pragma Dialectical Approach such as the formulation of a code of conduct for rational discussants and the analysis and evaluation of various types of argument attempting to show how these can help the teachers in training become the kind of model of reasonableness that the Philosophy for Children Program expects them to be.

1. The Philosophy for Children Program
The Philosophy for Children Program is deservedly renown and appreciated worldwide for its merits in helping to develop reasoning skills and reasonableness in children through philosophical dialogue. Using philosophical novels for children, the teachers trained in the Program are able to organize lively discussions in the classroom about things that matter to the students, thus breaking the monotony and lack of meaning of which traditional education, through the imposition of an “Adult Agenda”, is usually accused.
As Matthew Lipman, creator of the Philosophy for Children Program explains, the main purpose of the Program is “to help children learn how to think for themselves” (Lipman, Sharp & Oscanyan,198O: 53). Rather than aiming at teaching philosophical topics to children, the Program aims at helping them “to think philosophically” (Bosch,1992:18).
According to Lipman (Lipman, Sharp & Oscanyan,1980: 22), the most adequate means for stimulating thinking is dialogue. When we are intensely engaged in dialogue about things that matter to us vitally, says Lipman, we perform a number of mental activities such as listening attentively, considering carefully, rehearsing what we might say next, establishing connections with what others have said or written on the topic earlier or somewhere else, trying to figure out what the speaker is aiming at and what the assumptions are from which he or she is starting, etc. In other words, although we may not be aware of that, we are exercising our reasoning skills and thus stimulating their development. The same applies to children. Therefore, if we manage to engage them in dialogues that are meaningful for them, Lipman argues, we will contribute to develop their reasoning skills. If we help them, in this process, to become  more sensitive to the variety of perspectives and the complexity of the problems involved, we will contribute to develop their reasonableness.

The role of Philosophy in this endeavour is twofold:
1. to maintain or repair the connection with the children’s curiosity making it possible “to elicit from them the wondering and questioning characteristic of philosophical behavior at any age” (Lipman, Sharp & Oscanyan, 198O:1O3), and
2. to give dialogue the necessary structure and rigour that makes of it an effective tool for the development of reasoning skills.

The first is taken care of by the novels and by the methodology. The novels cover a great variety of topics from the philosophical tradition. The methodology stimulates children to ask and wonder about anything that the readings may prompt them to ask and guides them in following the inquiry where it leads.
The second is covered by Logic, both formal and informal. Lipman says that there are three meanings of Logic in Philosophy for Children: Formal Logic, Giving Reasons and Acting Rationally.
Formal Logic’s main purpose in the Program is “to help children discover that they can think about their thinking in an organized way” (Lipman, Sharp & Oscanyan,198O:131). Giving Reasons or “The Good Reasons Approach” emphasizes seeking reasons and assessing reasons given by others. Its main purpose in the Program is to help children “discover the broad range of applications of structured, deliberate thinking” (Lipman, Sharp & Oscanyan, 198O:139).
Acting Rationally designates the kind of Logic whose purpose it is “to encourage children to use reflective thinking actively in their lives”(Lipman, Sharp & Oscanyan, 198O:146). Neither the philosophical questions and ideas nor the logical notions are contents or subject matter that the students are expected to learn as that. The teacher’s role is to promote among the children a philosophical discussion of the highest level, using the novels’ contents to stimulate them to discuss those issues that really interest them, and to become him or herself an arbiter that guarantees the discussion’s impartiality. Therefore, Philosophy and Logic are blended, so to speak, in the activities the students and the teacher perform and it is rather artificially that one separates them for the purpose of analysis.
For my present purposes in this paper, it is important to note that the teacher not only is expected to know and to be sensitive to an enormous amount of philosophical material, but also is supposed to be aware of the rules of good reasoning and to be able to point them out to students as needed during the discussion and to help them apply those rules to their reflection and everyday experience.

2. Education for Democracy
Beside its remarkable results in improving children’s reasoning and reading comprehension, the Philosophy for Children Program is also known for its impact on the development of other areas of the child’s personality, such as creativity, dedication to work and what in the Program is referred to as “personal and interpersonal growth”(Lipman, Sharp & Oscanyan, 198O:65). This expression refers to an increased awareness of the own personal value and the value of others and an increased sensitivity to one another’s personalities that emerges as a result of being engaged in the common venture of philosophical inquiry. Learning to think together respecting rules of thinking and discovering different and unthought of ways of thinking and looking at things helps develop a special sensitivity for what it means to belong to a community. This will become more clear later when we discuss the concept of a “Community of Inquiry”. For the moment, it is enough to say that in the very conception of Philosophy for Children is the seed of an education that is both democratic and for democracy.

In a research project ( Fondecyt[i] Project O7O3-91), conducted for four years in a suburban area of Santiago, Chile, in a school that serves a population of extremely socially deprived children, my husband, Celso López, and I were able to show that the Progam can be an effective tool for educating for democracy in Chile.( Cf. Vicuña,1991).
What we did was to work with the children from 4th to 7th grade using the philosophy for Children materials, train the teachers so that they could do the same, and observe and register in every session the “democratic behaviours” that were being developed. For this we used an observation chart in which we included fourteen democratic behaviours. The research assistants, all university students majoring in philosophy, were in charge of this task. We also measured the development of reasoning skills in the children and contrasted it with a control group. The results showed significant improvement in the experimental group.( Cf. Vicuña & López, 1994).
I think that the Program’s enormous potential for an education for democracy is obvious to those who know and reflect on its foundations and methodology. The only merit of what we did resides in showing that these ideas really could work in Chile, and in the most difficult setting. Now that we have shown it, we must be able to prepare teachers that can replicate the experience. Hence the importance of improving the quality of teacher training, especially in places like Chile where democracy is still quite far from being completely realized.

3. The Concept of a Community of Inquiry
According to Lipman, the expression “Community of Inquiry” was presumably coined by Charles Sanders Peirce and was originally “restricted to the practitioners of scientific inquiry, all of whom could be considered to form a community in that they were similarly dedicated to the use of like procedures in the pursuit of identical goals”(Lipman, 1991:15).
Applied to the field of Philosophy for Children, the expression designates a group of persons (the children and the teacher) who are engaged in a common search that is both cooperative and mutually challenging. In Lipman’s conception, whenever children are stimulated to think philosophically following the inquiry where it leads and submitting themselves to the procedures that are proper to that inquiry, the classroom is converted into a community of inquiry. This means that “students listen to one another with respect, build on one another’s ideas, challenge one another to supply reasons for otherwise unsupported opinions, assist each other in drawing inferences from what has been said, and seek to identify one another’s assumptions” (Lipman, 1991:15).
The repetition of the reciprocal expression “one another” in the above characterization is indicative of the communitary and cooperative aspect of this endeavor, also present in the words “build” and “assist”. But there is also reciprocity in the mutual challenge to be critical, to supply reasons, to draw inferences, to identify assumptions. What becomes manifest, then, in this characterization are the two aspects that ought to be part of the community of inquiry: the communitary and the logical.
Some images that Lipman uses may serve to explain what the community of inquiry is all about. I consider the following four images to be the most suggestive and therefore I propose to elaborate on them in order to get a better grasp of the concept and especially of the teacher’s role.

1. The kittens and the ball of yarn.
“Under suitable circumstances, says Lipman, a room full of children will pounce on an idea in the way a litter of kittens will pounce on a ball of yarn thrown in their direction. The children will kick the idea around until it has been developed, elaborated upon, and even in some instances applied to life situations, although the latter is seldom achieved without the teacher’s artful guidance.” (Lipman, Sharp & Oscanyan, 198O:1O4).
Doing philosophy with children is inviting them to play with ideas, to make them roll around, to take them apart, and to take out the different threads until they apparently make a big entanglement. They may think that they are just playing and that what they are doing does not have much sense, but a skilled teacher will be able to help them find sense in that apparent entanglement, what the lines of convergence and divergence are, and how to go about to clarify the issue.

2. The human pyramid (Lipman, Sharp & Oscanyan, 198O:105).
Doing philosophy with children is also similar to the building of a human pyramid by the children in the school yard. They are all necessary in order for the construction not to fall and each one contributes in a different way to the balance of the whole. It belongs to the teacher’s role to show where there is need of support and where of counterbalance.

3. The construction of bricks (Lipman, Sharp & Oscanyan, 198O).
The way in which all children participate in the discussion and contribute to bring about clarity and to make sense of the problems at issue is similar to a construction made of bricks in which everyone is placing his or her own brick making it fit in harmoniously in the whole. The teacher should be able to point out where there is a brick lacking and how to make the building become more stable and more harmonious.

4. The boat tacking into the wind (Lipman,1991:16).
When the children and the teacher are committed to this kind of inqury, the whole group advances like a boat that goes into the sea following the wind’s impulse that sometimes pushes in one direction and sometimes in another. The wisdom of the teacher, as that of an expert sailor, lies in knowing how to benefit from the favorable wind and how to resist the adverse one, when to unfurl the sails and when to pick them up.

Through this last image Lipman intends to show the most significant feature of the community of inquiry: that the progress of the group resembles the process of thinking itself. “Consequently, when this process is internalized or introjected by the participants, they come to think in ”moves” that resemble its procedures. They come to think as the process thinks” (Lipman,1991:16). By means of these four images I have attempted to make understandable in a few words a concept that is rather difficult to explain to someone who hasn’t lived through the experience. What is important to note for my present purpose is that the communitary aspect and the aspect concerned with the development of reasoning skills are intertwined. Therefore, in the process of building such a community the teacher has to attend to both.

Through participating in such a community, students become aware of the diversity of perspectives and the diversity of thinking styles from which an issue can be looked at and are willing to examine rigorously all possible alternatives. In the process, they learn how to think better because they are enriched by the different perspectives and learn to correct their thinking in the light of the other participants’ objections or suggestions. In order for them to be able to come to this ideal situation, they need to be guided by a teacher that helps them learn to respect each other, to become aware of one another’s thinking processes and to develop a sense of what thinking rigorously entails.
According to Lipman, the conditions required to build a Community of Inquiry are intrinsic to philosophy itself (Lipman, Sharp & Oscanyan, 1980:45), therefore doing philosophy with the children is the best way of fostering its development.
What is needed, says Lipman, is “a teacher who is provocative, inquisitive, impatient of mental slovenliness and a classroom of students eager to engage in dialogue that challenges them to think and to produce ideas” (Lipman, Sharp & Oscanyan, 1980:102). The model for this ideal teacher is Socrates. In Lipman’s view, Socrates’ most remarkable features, as he is portrayed in Plato’s dialogues, are his ability to question, his rigurosity and his belief that knowledge is not something that one transmits to other, but something that one helps the other to elicit from himself.
The Philosophy for Children teacher is expected to emulate Socrates, becoming for his/her students a model of inquisitiveness, rigurosity, openness, intelectual honesty and humility. He or she must be someone who challenges the students to think and who is able to show them how to think well and how to improve the quality of their thinking. The most important of the teacher’s abilities should be the ability to foster and to guide a philosophical discussion, representing for their students an impartial arbiter and a challenging, inquisitive, open minded facilitator of it. There are a number of skills that the teacher should master for this purpose.
Among the ones mentioned and analyzed by Lipman are the following (Lipman, Sharp & Oscanyan, 198O:1O2-128): the teacher must be able to elicit from the students their views or opinions, to help them express themselves more clearly, restating, explicating or interpreting what the children say when necessary, to request definitions, to point out to fallacies, to indicate underlying assumptions, to maintain the relevance, to center the discussion, to examine alternatives, to request reasons, to request evidence and to orchestrate the discussion conducting it to a higher level of generality.
It becomes clear from this that the teacher is expected not only to think philosophically but also to be able to analyze and appraise all the children’ s contributions, to show how they relate to one another and to help the discussion grow and become a meaningful experience to all participants.
The question, of course, is how to train a teacher in order that he or she develops these features.

4. Some shortcomings in teacher training
To train a teacher in Philosophy for Children is no easy task. It is necessary to help them develop a genuine curiosity, a commitment to philosophical inquiry, an abilty to question, a sensitivity both to rules of rigorous thinking and to different thinking styles, and the skills required for conducting a philosophical discussion mentioned above. In relation to this, Lipman says:
“No explanation of the art of teaching philosophy can be adequate for the teacher-in-training. First, it must be admitted that philosophers themselves have never been very clear about what they do when they teach philosophy. We therefore lack a complete understanding on which an adequate explanation could be based. Second, even if we had such an explanation, it would be insufficient without a competent modelling by the philosopher coupled with the teacher’s experiencing what it is to engage in philosophical dialogue. These three components– -explanation, modelling, and experiencing- are indispensable in preparing teachers to teach philosophy on the elementary grade level.”(Lipman, Sharp & Oscanyan, 1980:125).

In consequence, in the Philosophy for Children practice everywhere the teachers are trained in workshops where they are expected to experience in themselves what it is like to be a participant in the building of a community of inquiry. Using the same materials that they will later use with the students, i.e. the novels and teacher’s manuals, they are guided by an Instructor or teacher trainer in building a community of inquiry with their colleagues in training.
True to its Deweyan origins, the Program provides each of the teachers in training the opportunity of “learning by doing” through the experience of guiding at least one of the sessions. This and being a participant in the building of a community of inquiry constitute the “experiencing component”. The “modelling component” is provided by the Instructor, a philosopher trained by Lipman himself. The “explanation component”, however, is less visible in the workshops. What is usually done is giving the teachers to read “Guiding a Philosophical Discussion” (Chapter 7 of Lipman’s “Philosophy in the Classroom”: Lipman, Sharp & Oscanyan, 1980:102-128). In this text they will find very clear and practical explanations on how to do their work. But, even in this text, there are things that a teacher with no background in logic will find hard to understand or to apply in practice, for instance, inferring logical implications, seeking consistency, indicating fallacies, etc.

As I see it, the explanation component doesn’t seem to be sufficiently accounted for in the workshops, especially in what regards to the logic contents of the Program. This also hinders the exercise by the teachers of the experiencing component in this matter. There are several reasons for this:
1. The logic contents included are not the same in all the novels. Therefore, the teachers trained in “Pixie”, for instance, will not have the same opportunity of being exposed to some logical contents as the ones trained in “Harry”.
2. The logic contents of the Program do not include a thorough treatment of the fallacies. Although many excellent exercises on faulty reasononing are provided in the teacher’s manuals, there is no systematic treatment that may ensure that the teachers will be able to use them profitably.
3. The logic contents of the Program do not include as a topic the procedural aspects that the teachers are expected to be able to point out to the students when guiding the philosophical discussion, like going to the point, avoiding personal attacks, providing reasons, avoiding contradiction, maintaining relevance, etc.
4. Due to the methodology of the Program, one only gets to discuss what the group chooses to discuss in every session. Therefore, it is quite possible that the logical aspects are not discussed, just because they are never chosen to be discussed. Of course, the teacher, being a member of the community of inquiry, can always propose to discuss logical topics, but he or she cannot impose them. This should never be a problem with the children, because the teacher has countless opportunities and ways during the school year to introduce the issues that have been left aside. However, given the length (usually 60 hours distributed in an intensive week) and the somewhat artificial nature of the workshops, the teacher trainer does not have this luxury, but has to move on in order to cover all the ground assigned to that workshop.

As stated before, there are many excellent exercises in the teacher’s manuals, e.g. on analogical reasoning, part-whole relationships, syllogistic reasoning, inductive reasoning, and so on. But, if they do not come up during the training period, it is very unlikely that the teachers will attempt to use them later on with their students.
In our experience in teacher training in Chile, we have seen that teachers do, in fact, avoid discussing logical subjects. In so doing, they fail to get the necessary experience to work these subjects later on with their students and they are deprived of discussing the theoretical explanations that may help them understand how these logical aspects can be introduced in the practice of successfully guiding a philosophical discussion.
The explanation and the experiencing components being absent, the only way that is left for the teachers to learn is by imitating the Instructor’s modelling. This is hardly sufficient, for excellent that the Instructor may be.
What we often see is that the teachers “learn the music but don’t learn the words”, as we say in Chile. That is, they go through the stages of reading, inviting the students to formulate questions, helping them find relationships between the different contributions and grouping them. They are also able to create an open, inviting atmosphere, promoting questioning and discussion. But, when it comes to providing the necessary help to center the dicussion, or to pointing out to some fallacy that has been committed, or to showing that some contribution is not relevant to the issue at hand, they simply fail to do it.
In order to counter this deficiency in the explanation component, we have intoduced in the structure of our workshops in Chile some short lectures followed by discussion. One of the subjects of these lectures is the role of logic in Philosophy for Children. Although this helps, it is by no means enough. What is needed is a basic and systematic treatment of the logic involved in the Program.

5. The Pragma Dialectical Approach
I think that the Pragma Dialectical Approach could help to overcome some of the difficulties just mentioned and contribute to the improvement of teacher training in Philosophy for Children I shall limit myself to pointing out to four features of the Pragma Dialectic Approach that make of it a useful tool for helping teachers meet the challenges outlined above.

1. The Pragma Dialectic Approach formulates a code of conduct for rational discussants and gives ten rules to be observed in a critical discussion (van Eemeren & Grootendorst 1992: 208-209). These rules are to some extent equivalent, yet much more precisely expressed than the Philosophy for Children requirements for the building of a community of inquiry. For example, the building of a community of inquiry requires from the participants:
a. mutual respect and mutual challenging.
This could be expressed by
rule 1: “Parties should not prevent each other from advancing standpoints or casting doubt on standpoints”, and
rule 2: “A party that advances a standpoint is obliged to defend it if the other party asks him to do so”.
b. openness.
This, again, could be expressed by rule 1.
c. intellectual honesty.
This is expressed by rule 5: “A party may not falsely present something as a premise that has been left unexpressed by the other party or deny a premise that he himself has left implicit”, rule 6: “A party may not falsely present a premise as an accepted starting point nor deny a premise representing an accepted starting point” and rule 9: “A failed defense of a standpoint must result in the party that put forward the standpoint retracting it and a conclusive defense in the other party retracting his doubt about the standpoint”.
d. rigurosity.
This is expressed by rule 3: “A party’s attack on a standpoint must relate to the standpoint that has indeed been advanced by the other party”, rule 4: “A party may defend his standpoint only by advancing argumentation related to that standpoint”, rule 7: “A party may not regard a standpoint as conclusively defended if the defense does not take place by means of an appropriate argumentation scheme that is correctly applied”, rule 8: “In his argumentation a party may only use arguments that are logically valid or capable of being validated by making explicit one or more unexpressed premises”, and rule 10: “A party must not use formulations that are insufficiently clear or confusingly ambiguous and he must interpret the other party’s formulations as carefully and accurately as possible”. Although these rules are formulated for discussions between two parties and not for group discussions such as the ones that take place in the community of inquiry, being aware of these rules may be of great help for the teachers in their role of arbiters of the discussions. For this purpose, of course, they must understand what lies behind each rule and have had the opportunity of discussing them. From a pedagogical point of view, being able to summarize this information in these Pragma Dialectical ten rules is most advantageous.

2. The Pragma Dialectic Approach explains the fallacies as violations of the rules for a critical discussion. Therefore, knowing the rules may help the teachers get a better understanding of the fallacies. Since, as stated before, the training workshops’ structure makes it difficult to take up the logical issues in a thorough and organized way, the summarizing and comprehensive vision that the Pragma Dialectic treatment of the fallacies offer, represent a significant improvement for the teachers.
This is not to say that this will replace the necessary experience that ought to be acquired through time and practice, but I think that it will hepl the teachers in gaining confidence in their handling of the logical aspects.

3. Through the analysis of various types of argument the Pragma Dialectic Approach provides the teachers in training with different models to evaluate different situations. Particularly helpful in this context are the “argumentation schemes” that the Pragma Dialectical Approach distinguishes. According to van Eemeren and Grootendorst, arguers usually rely on ready made argumentation schemes : “a more or less conventionalized way of representing the relation between what is stated in the argument and what is stated in the standpoint” (Eemeren van, & Grootendorst 1992:96). Therefore, arguments can be analyzed as belonging to one of the three following categories ot types. The arguer may try to convince his interlocutor by pointing out that something is “symptomatic” of something else, or something is “similar” to something else, or that something is “instrumental” to something else. Of course, there are many subcategories of argumentation schemes that the teachers should be made aware of, but there is a great advantage for them in knowing and learning to identify these main types, because this will help them to better understand and evaluate the children’s contributions.

4. Through the acquisition of the skills for dialectical analysis and normative reconstruction the teacher can be helped in developing an ability for better guiding the children during the different stages of the building of their discussion.

The brief mention of these Pragma Dialectical features may serve to indicate how this approach can help improve the quality of teacher training in the Philosophy for Children Program.
During the last three months a special course on the logical aspects of the Program has been offered to public school teachers already trained in one of the novels. For this purpose the Pragma Dialectical Approach is being used. We do not have results yet, but the teachers report that they are extremely pleased with the course and that it has helped them greatly in their work with the children.

NOTES
i. Fondecyt is the Chilean National Fund for the development of Science and Technology.

REFERENCES
Lipman, M., Sharp, A.M. & Oscanyan, F. (198O) Philosophy in the Classrooom. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Bosch, E. (1992) Entrevista con Matthew Lipman. Cuadernos de Pedagogía. 2O5, 18-2O.
Vicuña,A. M. (1991) Filosofía para Niños y Educación para la Democracia. Revista de Educación 184,41-44 &185, 33-37.
Lipman, M. (1991) Thinking in Education. Philadelphia: Cambridge University Press.
Vicuña, A. M. (1994) Filosofía para Niños: Algo más que Desarrollar Habilidades de Razonamiento. Pensamiento Educativo 15,177-195.
Vicuña, A. M. & López, C. (1994) “Informe Final del Proyecto Fondecyt 0703-91″ ( Final Report on the Fondecyt Research Proyect) (Unpublished).
Eemeren, F. H. van & R. Grootendorst (1992). Argumentation, Communication and Fallacies. A Pragma Dialectical Perspective. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.

Advertisers are often creating a certain kind of argument called sales argument. Sales arguments are published in numerous media. Some are directly adressed to custumers, others to sales persons, who can use them to motivate their customers to buy. In common these arguments are ‘good arguments’ if they are persuasive.
But if one asks whether they are valide, this question turns back to the theory of argumentative valitiy one is using. In pragmatic theories of argumentation, sales arguments can be reconstructed as argumentative moves with at least some charity by means of adding premises, reformulating theses and giving usage declarations. Arguments put forward as speech acts do also deserve some charity. But the question is in general: Are we right in reconstructing sales arguments as related to validity?
Before returning to this question I want to sketch out the positions of a virtual theorist and an advertiser who is willing to use argumentative rules. It is a narrative fiction about possible interactions of positions. The concept of position will then link up to a validity-related ‘dynamic’ approach to Argumentation Theory. The central issue of this paper will be a case-based discussion of the validity of sales arguments as analogies. Before I will mention briefly how sales arguments are missing the requirements of some other approaches to Argumentation Theory.

1. The positions of the advertiser and the argumentation-scholar
Do Advertisers Argue in their Campains?
It depends. This is the answer of a scholar. It depends on the concept of argumentation which is preferred and on the corresponding analysis of advertising.
Of course. This is the answer of an advertiser. Argumentation is one of the strongest instruments to force rational adressees to accept an opinion and to act accordingly.
Each position includes aspects of the other: From the scholar’s vievpoint the advertiser will be successful in applying a practical theory of argumentation that stresses the rational aspect of Argumentation. Argumentation is perceived as a rule-guided practice.[i]
From the advertiser’s perspective the scholar’s efforts maybe regarded as support in advance of the advertiser. The scholar seems to be engaged in strenthening the rational believes of the adressees so that they will understand themselves more and more as being committed to accept any thesis that can be arrived at by correctly applying the scholar’s rational rules of argumentation.
This position may be regarded as a rethorical or even sophisticated[ii] standpoint that describes rationality as a means of persuasion.[iii] It is an “enlightend” position as far as it delegates any ethical questions to the Indiviual. Relativistic consequenses seem to be inevitable.
Nevertheless it provides the impression of usefulness towards the scholar who is not reflecting the values his work may be serving. The outcomes of his work are designed as unbiased scientific results.
Both viewpoints are strengthening each other, the one in applying the other’s results, the other in being esteemated by the first. None of them is independent. None is disinterested.

2. Relativism and Positivism of Positions
Both positions are roughly scetched out, so that nobody is forced to identify himself with any of them. But nevertheless everybody is free to take up the position he wants.
What is of interest in this place is the concept of position which belongs to comprehensive concept of argumentation. Therefore we can take this reflexion as a starting point for further considerations. ‘Position’ means the circumstance, that an opinion is always stated somewhere and very often powered in favour or against something.
That means, that a position is situated in a virtual area of tension. Where do positions get their power from? Many strong positions are composed of arguments. At least there is only one demand to a position: It must hold. Good arguments do. Their steps are constructive in a way that each is posed on it’s precedessor. Gaps and circles must be evaded.
This is not a mere methaphor. It is the easiest way to demonstrate how argumentative positions are ‘positive’. Every position depends on being posed and internally being built up by someone. It needs a platform it can stand on. And it needs an architecture. Every demonstration, that it has no reliable ‘static’ creates an objection. The ‘bricks’, argumentative positions are built of, are oral platforms. Their ‘way of speaking’ is reliable. Objects can be identified, predications and intentions can be understood and propositions can be checked. To use another metaphor: The ways towards their positive theses can be followed up, if the construction is methodologically consistent.[iv] To demonstrate the reliability the adressee must be willing to go this ways towards the theses. Literally spoken this means that without ongoing dialogic inquiry the positions cannot be hold, because the only way to find out the reliability of a manner (‘way’) of speaking is the adressee’s critique.
Therefore argumentative positions are relative. They are relative to objections, to disputes and to the lifes they are embedded in.[v] They are also relative to concurring positions.

3. Case one
The DSDS bulb campagne 1997 used a surprising similarity between a pregnant woman’s and and a bulb’s silhouette. (Lürzer’s Archive ’98 I, 82)
As all ads do, the campagne aims at the observer’s attention. At first glance a process of perception, deception and reflexion is initiated. The very familiar and emotional impression of a pregnant woman’s stomach is supported by the Headline: “We will call her Narcis.” Pregnancy is indeed a good reason to decide about the name of a newcomer. This impression will be falsified by reading the pay-off Line: “Bulbs. Again it’s time to plant.”
To better understand the interrelations the observer then will take a closer look. She will recognise the pictured bulb and the following new interpretation of the headline may amuse her: ‘Narcis’ is called the flower one can receive some month after planting the bulb.
The ad’s strategy is successful if the observer has transferred her positive emotion from the first glance to the second. The deep structure might be the following syllogism:

Every matter of fertility is lovely. Planting (and buying) bulbs is a matter of fertility. Therefore planting bulbs is lovely. The conclusion is true if the premises are true. Obviously it is a syllogism, but it can’t serve as a good argumentation because of the weekness of at least one premis. It is a structure of belief. The whole structure can be the result of an argumentative process as well as the outcome of an aesthetic perception of advertisements. Surprisingly it has a logical structure[vi] although it cannot be justified: Sentences like ‘every matter of fertility is lovely’ can be shown to be wrong by numerous ugly couterexamples, nearly everybody will agree to. Of course argumentation is not impossible in this case. The problem is with the pros: There is seemingly no way of approving a general premis that attributes ‘lovelyness’ to a set of objects, situations or even people. Seemingly it is a matter of taste.
Some say: Taste cannot be argued. I’m not so shure about that. Obviously the opposite can also be hold: Taste can be argued excellently. Both sentences are commonplaces used in aesthetic discourses. The differenciation needed to resolve the paradox does not regard the usage of the term ‘taste’. The paradox depends on the aequivocal usage of ‘argumentation’:
Argumentation (1) has to meet the requirement of directing to truth. It ends up with truth. It’s paradigm is proof: deriving truth from premisses to conclusions using valide logical structures and meaningful expressions, some kind of logical syntax and semantics. Theses, that are worth to be argued, must be formulated in clearly defined terms. Otherwise “… one must remain silent.” (Wittgenstein 1988: 85)
From this view, discussing the question wether something is lovely or not – or even causing pain – is not a way of talking about the world. It is a more or less civilised way of replacing expressive shouts and gestures. (cf: Wittgenstein 1984) Ethics and Aesthetics remain inexpressible.

Argumentation (2) is a social pracise, guided by the ideal of providing the participants with reliable orientations. Orientations are complex schemes of conduct. They are containing situation schemes, action schemes, ends and means-end structures. Feelings, sensations and impressions are part of situation schemes. Situations are ‘by definition’ not exactly definable. Each one is an original. Therefore situation schemes are focussing on some relevant aspects of them. This way they become managable. The more distance that can be established, the more individual differences can be ignored. Following this tendency (Wohlrapp 1990), the ability of controlling situations increases and validity of orientations can be established.
From this point of view, discussions about taste are not to be excluded from Argumentation. What kind of taste will be agreeable, and which one will be found ideosyncratic is a decision that depends on the corresponding argumentation. The decision on what can be attributed to be ‘lovely’ e.g. would be embedded into a range of paradigmatic cases (Govier 1985: 55ff) instead of stipulating a generalisation.

While Argumentation (1) postulates definite meanings and extensions of the used expressions, Argumentation (2) includes the development of concepts as well as dynamic moves of the whole structure: A starting-thesis T1 will be attacked by objections stating contradictions or gaps in the supposed chain of reasoning. In consequence the proponent of T1 has at least 3 options: He can
1. add some reasons, explicitising more backgrounds,
2. make some semantic shifts, that are also affecting the theses, so that he reaches T1‘
3. or make the shift explicit ending up with the follower-thesis T2

Again this is a very rough sketch of theoretical approaches towards non-theoretical argumentation. But I think the problem of aesthetical and practical reasoning is well-known. It is recognized in many other approaches:

Discourse Theory e.g. has developed different kinds of claims to validity: Truth, rightness, adequacy of evaluative standards and veracity. Each of them is related to a selfstanding realm of discourse marked as: theoretical, ethical or aesthectical. (Habermas 1981: 65ff) In this context Discourse Theory has realized the pragmatic turn: The paradigm of argumentative validity in Discourse Theory isn’t any more a theoretical model of structure but a practical normative ideal taken from forensic debate.
The pragmadialectic approach also realizes this kantian primate of practise. It’s rule guided code of conduct (Eemeren, Grootendorst 1984: 151ff) delegates different claims to different argumentative stages. Explication of terminological usages e.g. has it’s place in the preparatory stage.

I don’t want to mention these aproaches here. As fas as I can see they don’t give enough attention to the peculiar argumentation related character of aesthetics as they appear especially in advertisings. Nevertheless they give an answer to whether ads are argumentative or not. To be acknowledged as argumentations fitting into one of these approaches advertisements are missing several necessary conditions:
From the viewpoint of Discourse Theory one will find a lack of equalty in the participant’s chances. Pragmadialecticians will find a lack of intersubjectivity and sincerity. And they also won’t be pepared to reconstruct advertisements as sequences of illocutionary and perlocutionary acts. Even a dispute in a tv spot won’t be acknowledged being more but a fictional argumentation consisting of fictitious speech acts.
Other approaches to Argumentation Theory don’t see the case much better. Wohlrapp’s dynamic and reflexive approach (Wohlrapp 1995) e.g. doesn’t provide the analyst with normative tools. The analyst’s evaluation is at the same time to be regarded as a move of a participant. It is situated inside of a complex transsubjective activity called ‘argumentative tendency’. Therein argumentation tends to evaluate itself. The tendency depends on the participants growing ability of ‘distanciating’ personally hold opinions and to transform them into ‘theses’ that are relative to given reasons.
In opposition to this, advertisements, placed in public media, are tending in the opposite direction: Reasons are put forward, objections sometimes mentioned, but the moves are always directed towards individual feelings, and personally held opinions of the form: For me as an individual it is worth to prefer A in case of B. Such opinions are to be distinguished from argumentative theses. They are not at anybodies disposal. They are seldom explicitly expressed, and they are – ideally – beyond question because they are designed as implantes to the adressee’s selfunderstanding and orientation system.

So advertisements are not argumentative? Here I can’t state a conclusion like this, because this would presuppose a justification from an external standpoint which has no place in this approach. As we can describe a tendency as a more or less dense sequence of moves, motivated by different or even opposing forces, we can speak now of a ‘discoursive’ and an ‘antidiscoursive tendency’.
Indeed this description does not leave advertisement as a disinterested object which does not effect argumentative validity. But I dont think, that this is the place to start a normative oriented criticism of antidiscoursive activities. Before taking a closer look to the example I only want to mention here that there are two opposed possible operations in the tendency: Wohlrapp’s ‘distanciation’ is paired by an opposit move I will call: ‘approximation’.

4. A dynamic approach to the argumentative force of advertisements
Analogies in general are not well reputated as arguments relating to valitity. As Mengel shows they nevertheless are doing their job in cases of insufficient theoretical bases. (Mengel 1995: 191) As already mentioned theses are validated by forwarding reasons against objections. Their ability to support a thesis in question depends on their supposed theoretical basis. An insufficient basis can be (re)constructed methodically step by step. But this may be a long and sometimes impassable way, e.g. in questions of taste.
In this case analogies can be useful. They can generate new viewpoints establishing new and surprising similarities between cases of different fields. Although they are not controllable like methodical procedures, they can be reconstructed by explicitising an underlying abstraction that makes their viewpoint plausible. For this purpose Mengel introduces the concept of an abstractor. The abstractor’s function is to designate an equivalence between the cases of the analogy. But the equivalence is not expressible before the analogy has created the new share viewpoint. There cannot be a term before because there is no theoretical basis until this moment. Only the analogy itself is bridging the gap.
With this analytical tool I will return to the initial example:
The virtual abstractor may be the following: ‘equally sacrifice/benefit related’. The relation between pregnancy’s hardships and the luck of having children is the same as the relation of the costs of buying and planting bulbs in expectation of getting beautiful flowers. After establishing this analogy in advance of the discoursive tendency one may discuss the relation in detail: Isn’t the sacrifice/benefit relation in the case of planting bulbs more advantageos? Are we right to compare the fertility of our own families with the fertility of some other species, however beautyful? Aren’t we confusing symbolic reality with social reality? Aren’t flowers only substitutes?
In this direction one may proceed in developing absurd theories e.g. of how to evaluate aesthetic epiphenomena of fertility. The discoursive tendency is leading and the motivation of buying bulbs is dimished.

The advertisement is aiming at the other extreme: For the sake of commercial advantages the analogy is not worked out. The sacrifice/benefit relation remains unspoken. Instead the advertisingstragegy tries to transfer the stong emotional associatons of human reproduction into the contexts of of buying behaviour. Instead of ‘distanciating’ motivations to create discoursive values, the motivations are ‘approximated’ for effecting an inclination to buy. As stated in the beginning this shopping motivation may also be caused by argumentative means. The form is the following:
P1: You have the problem N.
P2: Everybody who has the problem N, will get the best solution of N in respect of price and performance by taking the Q we are offering.
C: Therefore you are best adviced to buy our Q.

If the members of the target group T(N) believe that P2 is true, this is a very strong sales argument. P2 expresses the so called unique selling proposition (USP) which is one of the essentials of every marketing plan and a central issue of advertising campagnes. Nevertheless in many cases the product benefit is not that clear. In this case the problems of customers and USPs have to be designed by the advertisers. Analogies are helpful in this situation.
The equivalence that is used by Mengel as an abstractor for analysing common viewpoints in regard of analysing seemingly different cases is not restricted to the analytical usage. It can also be used as a creative tool in finding analogies. An essential role plays the sacrifice/benefit equivalence:
In contradiction to other analogies this abstractor isn’t that artificial. It has a very common synonym: It is called ‘value’. The value transfer from paradigmatic cases with intensive sacrifice/benefit relation to others with less sacrifice/benefit relation but commercial interest is a central means of advertisements.
Mengel mentions the surprising effect as a central feature of analogies. Cases, where equal properties are listed and inductive inferences are drawn from the paradigmatic case to the case in question are fallacious and do not fulfil the peculiar task of analogies: improving insufficient theoretical bases. This kind of analogies are typically used in advertisements. The abstractor ‘value’ does not establish new viewpoints. The same commercial viewpoints are always iterated and the impression of originality is not due to innovation but to the enigmatic structure of many ads. Value transfer, openly handled, can easyly be criticised and would be too obvious to be fascinating. Nevertheless advertisements are cultivating the ‘field’ of values, so that one can make up her decisions in respect of what is hold to be valuable. And value related argumentations can take it up.

5. Case two
The second example seems to form an objection against the analysis of advertising analogies as being plainly value related. Obviously it is also surprising:
The american sports wear brand IN EXCESS portays victims of violence with a bloody nose or a shiner next to a neatly drapped trikot in the same color. (Lürzer’s Archive ’98, III 162) The copy is: “color coordinate.”

At first glance a new and surprising viewpoint is offered to the reader. The abstractor of the analogy may be reconstructed as “has the same color”. The reader is invited to lock at violations by leaving out the common contexts of harm, fear and humiliation. The relevant aspect is ‘color’. But the relation of phoros and theme of the analogy is inverted. The property of the product serves as phoros. Paradigmatic is the color of the tricot. The case of violence, which represents the theme is seen from the aspect of the phoros. Violence is reduced to color.
In effect attention to the Brand is certain. But is attention enough for a product to become a seller? The suggested abstraction is obviously inhuman and cynical. The image of the brand is in danger to get damaged like the images of the victims. Therefore the reader is invoked to try another interpretation.

Supposed that the IN EXCESS campaign is designed to increase the sales of the tricots, it is useful to present them as valueable as possible. The sacrifice/benefit relation can lead the interpretation to other paradigmatic valuable cases. Sportswear as IN EXCESS is adressed to people with certain values: They want to exceed their limits. Enormous sacrifices are tolerated in prospect of becoming the best in contest. Especially in team sports there are high risks of being injured. They are tolerated in favour of the team. The color of the trikots is a symbol of the team. The trikots are uniforms that fit into the world of team sports. The ultimate motivation of the members of the team is transferred to the customer, who can buy a symbol. This way they are becoming members of a community that shares certain values. The sacrifices, in this case the expenses are justifyied by the benefit: being a member of a highly motivated team.
Apparently the two cases are not so far from each other. And the usage of the abstractor does not produce a surprising new viewpoint. The interrelation of the violations and the colored sport dress is much too conventional to be able to serve as an analogy. It isn’t more but a common metaphor.

6. Conclusion
These interpretations don’t prove anything beause this is not an empirical inquiry. It is an attempt to come to grips with the apparently strong opinion-forming features of advertisement from the perspective of argumentation theory. At least I think there are good reasons to insist on the difference of Argumentation and Advertisement. The ends are too different. But these ends are extremes on the same scale. Both are competing for the adressee’s orientations. In some cases the distinction is difficult to make. Value-oriented discussions can be very persuasive. And benefit-oriented advertisings do indeed present arguments. I hope that we can at least discern two polar tendencies in many cases: The production of insight stands in opposition to production of emotion.

NOTES
i. The epistemological theory of Cristoph Lumer is a good example of such a perspective.
ii. Can’t Sophists be understood as early advertisers?
iii. The pragmadialectical position sometimes looks like.
iv. Logical consistency is not presupposed in this place. Methodological consistency is a pracical ideal guiding practical activities toward practical ends. Nevertheless the reflection on methodlogical consistency can be used to reconstruct the meaning of logical consistency. Cf. ‘Konstruktive Logik, Praxis und Wissenschaftstheorie’ and many other publications of the ‘Erlangen School’.
v. Can’t they also be relative towards the concepts of rationality?
vi. There may be pychological reasons to prefer a logical structured self. Always being prepared to give reasons for motivations, feelings etc. seems to be advantageos.

REFERENCES
Eemeren, F.H. van & R. Grootendorst (1984). Speech Acts in Argumentative Discussions. Dordrecht/ Cinnamison: Foris Publications.
Govier, T. (1987). Problems in Argument Analysis and Evaluation. Dordrecht/ Providence: Foris Publications.
Habermas, J. (1981). Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Mengel, P. (1995). Analogien als Argumente. Frankfurt am Main: Lang.
Wittgenstein L. (1984). Tractatus logico-philosohicus. Werkausgabe Bd. 1. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Wittgenstein L. (1984). Über Gewißheit. Werkausgabe Bd. 8. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Wohlrapp. H. (1995). Die diskursive Tendenz. In: H. Wohlrapp (Edt.), Wege der Argumentationsforschung. (pp. 395-415), Stuttgart – Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog.

Narrativity
A narrative is an account typically consisting of a temporal sequence of events that is focused upon characters, their actions, and the outcomes of such actions. In recent decades the narrative has been the object of much analysis, study, and debate. Psychological research on narratives has involved the study of story grammars, syntactic-like structures that describe the generic elements of narratives (e.g., Stein & Glenn, 1979). Other psychological research of narratives has included the study of causal structure (e.g., Trabasso, van den Broek, & Suh, 1989), and inference generation (e.g., Graesser, Singer, & Trabasso, 1994). Narratives also have received considerable attention in relation to their role and importance in the study of history (e.g., White, 1987).
Narratives have also been examined with respect to the purposes they serve. According to Focault (1969, 1972), narrative is used by those in power as a means of maintaining power while the alternative narratives of those out of power are suppressed by those in power. Narrative is also used to delineate official and unofficial history (Wertsch & Rozin, 1998). In the Soviet Union the official history was a Marxian account of the 1917 Revolution and post-Revolution period. Unofficial history, however, embraced a narrative that was historically Russian, extending farther into the post than the 1917 Revolution. Similarly, Epstein (1996) has shown that European American eleventh graders provide a narrative of U.S. history that follows the traditional colonization, French and Indian War, Revolutionary War, Civil War, and into the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries format, while Afro-American students provide a narrative emphasizing racial inequality. Narratives held thus relate to belief and experience, and indeed, the historian Mink (1987) has indicated that narratives provide information about the past, and the background of the narrator needs to be taken into account to understand the narrative. Narratives also have been viewed as deceptive, as White (1987) has stated, “narrative discourse …. endows events with illusory coherence” (p. ix). In any event, the narrative is used to provide continuity to a series of linear events and is the subject of this paper, a topic, incidentally, which is not new.

Narrative and Argument
The present paper is concerned with narrative as argument. Relating narrative to argument is not new, as Aristotle spoke of it as one of two types of argument within rhetoric, the other being the enthymeme. Probably the two most obvious contexts for the use of narrative as argument are those of history and of law. The study discussed here is in the jurisprudence context, primarily because of the likely greater difficulty in conducting the equivalent experiment in the context of history. Consider the statement “Capital punishment should be abolished because it is cruel and inhumane treatment.” In the Toulmin (1958) model, “Capital punishment should be abolished” is the claim and “because it is cruel and inhumane punishment” is the datum or grounds.
Let us assume that we maintain some claim such as “Capital punishment should be abolished” but to support this claim we do not provide the a supportive reason in the usual sense but we provide the statement “Because of the following story,” and then proceed to tell a narrative which has the point of showing that capital punishment be abolished. In this case the support is a narrative. This use of narrative, incidentally, is quite close to what Deanna Kuhn (1991) described in her book on argumentation as
pseudo-evidence.
Let us now imagine that we are in a courtroom and a prosecuting attorney makes the statement “This person, the defendant, is guilty,” and then supports this claim by providing a narrative describing what happened leading to the crime, the defendant’s presumed role in it, and how and why the defendant committed the crime.
A narrative supporting the attorney’s claim of the defendant’s guilt such as that just described is likely to have two components. One is the so-called “facts” of the case. This category consists of the statements of witnesses and exhibits of the case, which essentially constitute a list of information. The second component is the narrative, the story or account that the prosecuting attorney weaves and develops that has the goal of supporting the claim of the defendant’s guilt. The two components then are the “facts” of the case and the narrative, which integrates the “facts” into a story. The use of the narrative to support a claim and the two-component distinction just made leads to the possibility that the narrative can play a role in the judgment of the jury. It may be that a good narrative, with the “facts” included, will be more likely to produce a “guilty” judgment than a poor narrative, even with the same “facts” included.

A question then raised by this analysis is how may narrative quality be defined? Fortunately, Leinhardt, Stainton, Virji, and Odoroff (1994) asked a number of historians to indicate what they thought to be the qualities of a good narrative. Five attributes were noted, namely, coherence, causality, chronology, completion, and colligation or, more or less, contextualization. Coherence refers to the narrative having a coherent whole. Causation to the narrative’s need to show causal relations. Chronology is that the events of the narrative follow in a chronological order. Completion refers to whether the historians used all available information, and colligation to the narrative occurring in the appropriate historical context. Pennington and Hastie (1993), in their work on jury decision making, also considered narrativity, and emphasized the importance of coherence, coverage (similar to completeness), uniqueness (the most appropriate narrative), and (being psychologists) they included the goodness-of-fit of the narrative.

The rationale of the study was as follows. The first hypothesis was that if a hypothetical prosecuting attorney states the defendant is guilty and provides a narrative in support of this claim, ratings of the quality of the narrative are a function of the extent to which the narrative maintains the criteria of good narrativity. If, for example, a narrative is made less coherent, the quality of the narrative will be rated lower than the original narrative, before it was made less coherent. The second hypothesis is that if a narrative is degraded, the ratings of the defendant’s guilt are lower than guilty ratings provided for the original narrative. In other words, with a narrative having less coherence than the standard, both ratings of narrative quality and ratings of guilt would be lower than found for the standard narrative. The reason guilty ratings are likely to be lower is that a poor narrative presumably acts to hurt the prosecuting attorney’s case. In the experiment conducted there were four narrative conditions. One was a standard narrative. One contained the identical sentences as the standard narrative but the sentence order was changed. This version maintained local coherence. This was called the coherence/chronology condition because it decreased the narrative’s coherence and the chronological order. A third condition, the causal condition, decreased the causality stated in the standard condition. The fourth condition, the completion condition, deleted some of the information in the standard narrative but did not delete any of the “facts.” It should be especially noted that in all four conditions the “facts” of the case were included, thus making the design one of holding the “facts” constant and varying the narrative, modifying the standard narrative in three conditions to lower its quality according to the previously mentioned criteria.

Four texts were employed, each being a murder case. Each text had four versions, each version of each text corresponding to the four types of narratives. Participants were 64 college students, with 16 serving in each row of a greco-latin square, that is, each participant read each of the four texts once, also serving one time in each of the four narrative conditions.
The baseline or standard condition for one of the texts, “The Car Accident” follows. Participants were told that they were to consider the text to be the prosecuting attorney’s summary statement.
The victim, Roger Wilson, had dropped off his co-worker, Susan Walker, at her home. He then was driving on Crawford Street in order to get to the freeway. As he was driving, a six year old girl, Marjorie Moran, ran out from behind a parked car. Before Roger could stop, his right fender hit her and she fell to the ground. He quickly got out of his car to check on her and found that she was not seriously injured. Despite this fact, a number of neighborhood teenagers, who were standing nearby, began to push him around, saying things such as “Don’t you know how to drive?” Then someone from the crowd took a baseball bat and hit Roger in the head, killing him. This action was seen by a resident living across the street from the altercation, but he was unable to identify who had used the bat. When the police got to the scene of the crime, they took statements form several witnesses, and looked for the bat. In a few minutes, they found a baseball bat in the back seat of a car that was parked nearby. The car belonged to Matthew Moran, the girl’s older brother. Matthew Moran had been among the crowd that attacked Roger Wilson. He was very protective of his younger sister, and sometimes got into fights with people he determined were trying to hurt her. Analyses later revealed that the victim’s blood and hair were on the baseball bat. This evidence indicated that Matthew Moran’s bat must have been the bat used to hit Roger Wilson. Furthermore, Matthew’s were the only fingerprints found on the bat.
Matthew Moran claimed that his fingerprints were on the bat because he had used it earlier in the day to play baseball, but playing baseball could not have placed the victim’s blood and hair on the bat. The evidence indicates that Matthew Moran’s bat must have been used to hit Roger Wilson, and since there were no fingerprints on the bat besides those of Matthew Moran, he must have been the person who hit Roger Wilson with that bat. Matthew Moran, who had the motive, the means, and the opportunity, is guilty of killing Roger Wilson.

In the causation condition the following changes were made. (Text prior to arrows was in the standard text and changed to the material found after the arrows.)
– He quickly got out of his car to check on her and found that she was not seriously injured. -> He quickly stepped out to check on his car and found that it was not damaged.
– Despite this fact, a number of neighborhood…. -> A number of neighborhood….
– This evidence indicated that Matthew Moran’s bat … -> Matthew Moran’s bat….
– Matthew Moran’s bat must have been the bat used to hit Roger Wilson… -> Matthew Moran’s bat must have come into contact in some way with Roger Wilson….
– Matthew’s were the only fingerprints found on the bat… -> Matthew’s were the only fingerprints found on the bat, indicating that he had touched it and, that no one else could have touched it, unless they were wearing gloves…
– … had used it earlier in the day to play baseball, but playing baseball could not have placed the victim’s blood and hair on the bat -> … had used it earlier in the day to play baseball.
– bat must have been used… must have been the person… -> bat was probably used… he was probably the person…

In the incomplete condition, the following deletions were made:
– his co-worker
– He quickly got out of his car to check on her and
– but he was unable to identity who had used the bat.
– When the police got to the scene of the crime, they took statements from several witnesses, and looked for the bat.
– In a few minutes, they found a baseball bat in the back seat of a car that was parked nearby.
– The car belonged to Matthew Moran, the girl’s older brother.
– Matthew Moran claimed that his fingerprints were on the bat because he had used it earlier in the day to play baseball.

The order of sentences in the coherence/chronology condition, of the sentence in the standard narrative, were: 7, second half of 17, 4, 3, 1, 5, 11, 13, 15, 14, first half of 17, 9, 10, 12, 16, 8, 6, 18, 19.

Participants, after reading each narrative, provided 1-10 ratings for each of five questions and then subsequently answered these questions. The five rating scale questions were: “Do you think the accused is guilty?” “How confident are you in your decision?” “Please rate the overall quality of the summary statement.” “How convincing or persuasive was the statement?” “How good an argument did the lawyer make for the case?” “The three open-ended questions were ”What was good about the argument?” “What was missing?” “How could the statement be improved?”

The results indicated that the mean guilty rating (1=definitely not guilty, 10=definitely guilty) was 7.5, 7.5, and 7.4 for three of the texts. The fourth text, however, provided both a considerably different mean of guilt ratings and a quite different distribution of ratings. Only the three consistent texts were therefore used in the analyses. The mean guilty rating for the baseline condition was 8.0 and for the completeness condition was 7.9. However, for the causation condition the mean guilty rating was 7.0 and for the coherence/chronology condition was 6.9, the latter two means being statistically significantly lower from the first two. The confidence rating means were 8.0, 7.4, 7.6, and 7.8 for the four respective conditions, as listed in the order of the preceding sentence. The only significant difference was that the baseline condition yielded more confidence than the causation condition.
The three ratings of narrative quality yielded highly similar results. The means for the respective baseline, causation, completeness, and coherence/chronology conditions for overall quality of the narrative were 7.8, 6.9, 7.8, and 4.9; for convincingness, 7.6, 6.9, 7.9, and 5.3; for the argument stated 7.6, 6.9, 7.9, and 5.1. For all three narrative measures, the standard condition yielded significantly higher narrativity ratings than the causality and the coherence/chronology conditions, but not the completeness ratings.
The data show both hypotheses to be supported for the causality and coherence/chronology condition. Specifically, modifying either the causal or the coherence/chronology narrative structure produced lower judgments than the standard condition for narrativity and for the guilt ratings. With respect to the completeness condition, the deletion of information that did not involve the “facts” of the case likely produced little description in the participants’ consideration of the narrative.
The results of the present study indicate that under particular circumstances, the narrative may be considered as a component of argument, a statement that supports a claim. Furthermore, the results indicate that if the narrative is of relatively low quality, as determined either by the causality it states or by the lack of coherence and chronology, the persuasiveness of the argument will suffer. Another interpretation of the results, although not mutually exclusive, is that the presenting attorney may have lost his ethos, that is, by presenting a relatively poor narrative, professional respect for lives as are authority may have diminished. The present data do not, however, provide evidence regarding this notion.
Possibly the most interesting result involves the causation condition. Why does making some statements probabilistic, statements that do not involve the critical events, produce lower narrativity and guilt ratings? One possible explanation is that the probabilistic wording generalizes to the entire paragraph, giving the participant a sense of relative uncertainty for all paragraph events.
Performance in the coherence/chronology condition suggests that individuals are quite sensitive to the need for coherence and chronology in the narrative. In reply to an open-ended question, there were 23 comments that the text “made little sense,” “jumped around,” or were “mixed up,” as compared to such statements in the other narrative conditions.
There are a number of questions raised by the present findings, such as how would the guilt judgments be related to narrative judgments when both the presenting and defense attorney cases are presented as alternative narratives. More broadly, there is the question of how beliefs about the structure of a narrative play a role in guilt ratings and whether it is possible that an excellent narrative could be constructed with few facts that would provide a relatively high guilty rating. In other words, could under appropriate conditions, narrativity dominate the factual evidence.

In conclusion, the study indicates that narrative, when used as support for a claim, may be judged for its quality and that judgment is related to the convincingness of the argument presented. Finally, it needs to be mentioned that in the case of the enthymeme, the two primary criteria of support are that the reason is acceptable and that the reason provides support for the claim. The present results suggest the narrative quality influences the acceptability of the reason, and with less acceptability, less support may be provided and the proposed strength of the argument is diminished.

REFERENCES
Epstein, T. L. (1996). Urban adolescents’ historical understanding: Differences in Black and White. Theory and Research in Social Education, 26, 399-402.
Foucault, M. (1969, 1972). The archeology of knowledge. Trans. by A. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon.
Graesser, A. C., Singer, M., & Trabasso, T. (1994). A constructionist theory of inference generation during narrative text comprehension. Psychological Review, 101, 371-395.
Kuhn, D. (1991). The skills of argument. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Leinhardt, G., Stainton, C., Virji, S. M., & Odoroff, E. (1994). Learning to reason in history: Mindlessness to mindfulness. In: M. Carretero and J. F. Voss (Eds.), Cognitive and Instructional Processes in History and the Social Sciences. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Pp. 131-158.
Mink, L. O. (1987). Historical Understanding. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Pennington, N., & Hastie, R (1993). The story model for juror decision making. In: R. Hastie (Ed.), Inside the Juror. The Psychology of Juror Decision Making. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp. 192-221.
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Toulmin, S. E. (1958). The uses of argument. (2nd ed.). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Trabasso, T., van den Broek, P., & Suh, S. (1989). Logical necessity and transitivity of causal relations in stories. Discourse Processes, 12, 1-25.
Wertsch, J. V., & Rozin, M. (in press). The Russian Revolution: Official and unofficial accounts. In: J. F. Voss and M. Carretero (Eds.), Learning and Understanding in History. London: Woburn.
White, H. (1987). The Content of the Form. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.