Abstract: This paper presents and discusses a lecture hall experiment concerning the rhetorical impact of different media. The experiment brings out notable differences in the effects of persuasion and argument embedded in the same set of words – in this case an extract from a historic speech – when presented respectively in writing, as speech, and on film.

Keywords: argument, experiment, film, mountaintop, persuasiveness, rhetoric, soundtrack, text, visual, voice.

1. Introduction
For a number of semesters I have conducted a lecture hall experiment with international university students about persuasion and argument and how they appear to differ in their impact, dependent on whether they are presented in writing, as speech or on film.

It is hardly surprising that the medium used to present a text can influence how its message is perceived by an audience, but the eye-opening trick of this experiment is that I present my students with exactly the same “text” or “content” in each case, first in writing, then as a voice recording, and finally on film. The students’ conceptions and evaluations of each type of presentation of the “text” alter dramatically as it changes from reading mode to listening mode and then to film-viewing mode. Naturally film-viewing here includes the sound track with its associated background sounds and voices heard among the audience.

2. Persuasive features of the text
The piece of text that I use is taken from a fairly well known speech, but I have deliberately chosen a part of it that does not give the orator, the context or the situation away too obviously. I want the students to focus first on the text as written material, tell me what it says, how it is structured and styled, and how it affects them. I also ask them not to let it be known, at this point, if they have recognized the text or are able to make an intelligent guess either as to its origin or who wrote it. I then ask them whether they have found any sound arguments in the text and whether, and in what manner, they find it persuasive. The text runs as shown in figure 1:

Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!
And so I’m happy, tonight.
I’m not worried about anything.
I’m not fearing any man!
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!!
(Figure 1: This is the text image that I project on the screen in the lecture hall[i])

At first the students often hesitate, probably because they suspect that I am setting some sort of trap or test, and also because they do not find the text particularly clear or easy to categorize. I often have to help a little with getting them started on what could be called a common pragmatic analysis, or an analysis of the content and form of the text. For example, I may ask them what sort of text it seems to be: is it like a love letter? Is it perhaps more like a note from one’s bank about some problem with an account? Or is it perhaps an announcement from their university about upcoming exams?

At this point the students often say that the text looks more like part of a speech or perhaps a sermon. I ask them what the indications of that are, and they will then say that there are a number of short sentences, such as are to be found in an oral presentation, and also that there are some religious references such as “God” and “the Promised Land”, the latter referring to the story from the bible about Moses leading the Jews to the ‘Promised land’ or to “what they considered” the ‘Promised Land’ (International students in my classes are often very cautious when it comes to matters touching on political correctness!).

When asked for more comment about the style of the text they note points such as the clause “I’m not” as opposed to “I am not” as further indications that it is a transcript of a speech. The speaker’s use of the phrase “Mine eyes” instead of “My eyes” seems to make the mood of the text rather solemn, as do the words about doing “God’s will”.

Further encouraged, the students may also mention the alliteration in “Like to Live a Long Life”, and also how many phrases start with the same first word “And” (anaphora).

When asked about possible arguments in the text the students are as a general rule unable to identify any, but with a little help they can reconstruct at least an example of an incomplete one: “I have seen the Promised Land, because I have gone up to the mountain” (the unstated but implied second premise – the “warrant” in Toulmin’s terminology – would be something like: “From the mountain you can see very far/ see the Promised Land”). However they find this unclear, and consequently unconvincing as an argument. All in all the students do not seem to feel that the text has convinced them, or to put it another way they do not see that it has any significance for them: they do not feel moved or touched by it. Once a student went so far as to say that it was just a lot of egotistical religious nonsense that ‘left him cold’.

3. Persuasive features of the voice
I then tell the class that I am, so to speak, going to add a voice to the text – in the form of a soundtrack – while the same text is still projected onto the screen. I further ask them to reflect while they listen, and consider whether the voice in any way changes their perception of the text, especially with regard to its argumentative or persuasive qualities.

Figure 2: This pictogram is added next to the text in figure 1, and in the experiment this enables the soundtrack to be played.[ii]

As I play the soundtrack it is usual for quite a few students to ‘light up’ as they recognize the voice, but again I ask them not to mention the fact or name the speaker and remind them to try to characterize the voice.

That sometimes appears to be rather difficult for them, until I point out that obvious features, such as whether it sounds like a male or female voice, would be relevant. ‘Of course, it is a male voice’, they say, and add that it has an American accent. Some even identify it as being spoken in a Southern dialect and add that it sounds like a black preacher from the 1960’s.

And indeed it is, namely Martin Luther King. By now most of them have guessed that, and that in turn seems to make it easier for them to characterize the voice. But I then ask them to consider in principle just the voice that lies before them, by trying to abstract from background knowledge and simply focusing on such qualities as they can detect in the voice itself.

They mention that the speaker sounds very dedicated and sincere, and that he has a peculiar way of enhancing, or prolonging, certain words and vowels, almost as though he is singing or chanting.

We can then agree that hearing the speaker’s voice adds quite a lot of “information” (or one could say in terms of rhetoric that it adds heavily to the ethos of the text), i.e. in this case we are convinced that it is a man speaking, but also that he is very engaged and eager to convince his audience. When I ask them how exactly it is that they have received this impression – which qualities or features of the soundtrack reveal this “dedication”, they may answer that they just feel it very clearly: there is something compelling about the speaker’s intonation, the modulation of his voice, and its loud, stentorian quality.

We can also agree that while it is quite difficult to describe a voice in detail – and we are not used to doing so – we are nevertheless very good at recognizing different voices. We do not need to listen for many seconds in order to identify the voice of a friend or family member, or of someone who often appears in the media: we can do it in a split second, and can often, just as instantly, recognize the mood or emotion of the person speaking, even though we may not have much by way of analytical tools, precise concepts or academic terminology at our disposal.

And the qualities of the voice directly affect our own moods, perceptions and attitudes. We do not have to wait for a careful analysis or a “reading of the whole text” in order to take away an impression and be influenced by the voice: it makes its impact immediately.

Pushed for more information from the soundtrack in question, the students add that they can clearly hear the response of the audience in the room where the speech is being given, – and from it get the impression of a very enthusiastic interaction between the speaker and the audience, something quite absent in the written text.

Of course a careful transcript could have added notes about applause from the audience and the several cries of “yes!” from within the room, but again such a transcript could never describe the actual audio experience and might well be felt to be inauthentic. The written text cannot deliver the “live” experience, whereas the soundtrack feels immediate and has “presence”. The text, as text, can be read either slowly or fast, and can be repeated, broken up and analyzed; the soundtrack, however, flows in a sequence that normally takes the natural pace of the events it records. We can of course break it up, change the speed and manipulate it, just as we can manipulate and edit a written text or a film. But in listening we experience the feeling of something happening “right now”, even though what the listener is hearing may be a historical recording.

A written text can to some extent come to life as we read it, but that requires a special type of imaginary activity on the part of the reader. Half an empty page and a word in capital letters will seldom cause a reader to jump from his seat, whereas a long pause or a sudden loud sound on a soundtrack would normally cause an immediate physical reaction of surprise or shock among an audience.

Anyway, at this point I can agree with the students that the soundtrack, to a much greater extent than the written text, gives us a feeling of being present and of participating in an event with other people. The speaker seems in a sense to include us in his audience, even though we realize full well that we were not present when he was speaking. The voice reaches out to us, trying to convince us of something.

This may not be the case with another voice. As an illustration I sometimes read the text out loud, and my voice sounds very flat, monotonous and unenthusiastic compared with Martin Luther King’s. And the students agree that my reading of the text has quite a different, even ridiculous, effect. It is in no way convincing; it presents the listener with quite a different type of speaker, one whose voice does little by way of communicating either the message or its appeal.

4. Persuasive features of the film
I then ask the students to observe how their experience and evaluation changes when I project a film clip that covers the same text (including naturally the soundtrack they have already heard).

Figure 3: Still picture from the film displayed in the experiment.[iii]

While projecting the film I can see quite clearly that the students become much more attentive and emotionally involved than when they were simply reading the text or listening to the sound track. When interviewed about their experience they readily admit this, and lay stress on his eyes and his very intense eye contact with the audience. His eyes seem to shine brilliantly, almost superhumanly, almost as if he were about to burst into tears. They also mention his energetic gestures and commanding posture.

When pushed a little further they tell me that his formal black and white clothing add to the mood of the film clip, as do the dark back ground and the spot light on the speaker. Sometimes I can even nudge them into noticing the angle from which he is being filmed, with the camera ‘looking up’ at him, emphasizing his appearance as a preacher, or father figure.

When I ask what more information or “material” they can get from viewing the film (besides what they have already mentioned about the speaker being a black male, dressed in such and such a fashion and looking thus and so), the students may recall that there are also a few short shots that include the audience. If I then search out one of these shots and pause the film there they tell me that they get the impression, even more so than from the sound track, of an enthusiastic audience; and note that it was a mixed audience of men and women, black and white, old and young. And from the clothes and the setting we get an idea of when and where the speech was given (some decades ago in America).

Figure 4: The film clip gives us more information about the audience and the setting.

At the very end of the film clip we get a shot that is almost ‘backstage’: the camera has zoomed out, and in this shot we see the speaker leaving the podium and being greeted or thanked, by his friends or staff.

Figure 5: Here the camera shows us what happens ‘backstage’.

So when asked to comment on this, my students – being well versed in the academic slang of our Communication department – can tell me that the film clip offers us more information about the context and setting of the speech, elements that were missing in the written text – and some explanatory notes would be needed if one were to evaluate the written text properly. But even so the film clip still appears to offer us, in a much more realistic sense than the other types of presentation, the historical and cultural circumstances; and most notably, a sense of almost being present.

I then ask my students whether the camera is merely registering everything that is there, or if it is playing an active role in portraying the speech. This may of course lead to a long discussion about the nature of film and the genres of reportage and documentary, but I try to keep such digressions short. I often get the answer that certain camera angles have been chosen for effect and that not everything relevant to the occasion is shown, and that one can conclude therefore that the camera and film editing have a certain rhetorical power in shaping our perception and understanding of the event. And that certain things are missing on the film: if you had actually been in the room you would have had a direct sensation of the atmosphere; e.g. the smoke, the smell of the room, the temperature, the roughness and texture of the floor and of the seat you were sitting on.

As I show the film clip again I ask the students to pay special attention to what is happening towards the end of it. This time they notice a limited, rather shaky, amount of zoom-in onto the face of the speaker. This reveals of course the hand of the filmmaker making an adjustment to the camera – and could be seen either as a sign of poor practice, or else as an attempt by an experienced filmmaker to highlight what he feels to be the approaching climax of the speech. Very often when filming one moves in closer with the camera when the most intense moment arrives – or alternatively, by “moving in closer” one actually helps to create an important moment in the film.

Figure 6: This illustrates the framing of the subject and the camera’s distance from it during most of the speech.
Figure 7: Towards the (anticipated) climax of the speech the camera tries to move in a little closer; the result is neither particularly smooth nor steady but that in itself seems to add to the effect of a climax. It is a feature seldom noticed by the students during the first run of the film clip.

5. The historical speech event
At this point I tell the students – if it has not been revealed before – a little more about the speaker and the context: that it is indeed Dr. Martin Luther King, and that the quoted text is from his last speech, (now known as the “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech), given on April 3rd, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee; and I remind them that in 1964 King had become the youngest person to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his work towards ending racial segregation and discrimination through civil disobedience and other nonviolent means. To younger generations, and because it has often been quoted from and reported on film and TV, King is nowadays perhaps best known for his “I have a dream” speech of August 28, 1963, given at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington. He was assassinated the day after the ‘Mountaintop’ speech, on April 4, 1968, in Memphis.

This background information adds of course to the experience, to our emotional response to the words as well as to the film as a whole. Some students argue that it seems obvious now that he actually knew that some ‘bad guys’ were out to kill him and that this is revealed both by his words “I may not get there with you”, and by his eyes and whole appearance. Others will say that it is easy to over-interpret and read things into a text or a film when you already know the chain of events and the historical circumstances.

At this point it usually becomes clear that we are talking about four different things here: the written text we saw first, the soundtrack of Dr. King’s voice, the film clip recording his speech, and the 1968 event itself.

The students and I are now agreed that in this case going from the written text to the soundtrack and then on to the film clip greatly increases the persuasiveness and impact of the speech, and at this point it would be tempting to ask the students if they feel that being present at the actual speech event would have left an even stronger impression on them. But that, of course, would be inviting speculation about what could well become a very muddy case, so I usually refrain from it.

But I might add a comment that one’s actual presence at the historical event in that room should not be considered critical or decisive when it comes to making an assessment of the persuasiveness of the speech, as in that case one’s assessment would depend, naturally enough, on whether one was there as a black boy in the front row, a sleepy old woman at the back, a white policeman on duty, or a member of the organizing committee worrying about possible riots. And one’s individual perception and appreciation of the performance of the speaker, his gestures and his words, would depend on a number of other factors. But as a point of departure for an academic content analysis we have to look at those features that are actually there and that we can agree upon are there (as belonging to the written text, the voice recording, and to the presented film). The next step will then be to try to come up with a reasonable interpretation that others will accept too.

6. Conclusion
The whole lecture hall experiment described above is actually meant as a warm up exercise for students about to engage in further studies of Print Media production, Speech, and Video Production, as well as further studies in the analysis of Communication and Rhetoric. As such it leaves many aspects unexplored, but it may also give a certain overview of some constituent persuasive features in different media:

First of all an actual (unmediated) speech event is dependent – as we already know from Cicero’s pentagon – on certain complex interwoven features if it is to be apt and persuasive: the speaker, the audience, the situation, the subject and the language. In this case what stands out is of course Martin Luther King as an eminent speaker, but then again it can be argued that he is also speaking at a crucial moment to a highly motivated audience. It can be described as an almost paradigmatic rhetorical situation.

The film reporting from that speech event is in a sense missing something: it is restricted to only two senses, the eyes and ears, and it has to employ specific camera angles and camera framing, specific microphone distance and quality, and typically the film last for a shorter time span than the actual event. So the film media seem to give us a “thinner” experience than that of being actually present. But then again, the features of camera and editing techniques can provide a degree of enhancement and dramatic dynamics to the event. It is not just ‘representing’ in the sense of duplicating, but actually arranging, stressing, explaining, condensing, pointing and offering the event to a new audience. The film maker’s work can to a large extent be understood as an extra layer of rhetoric on top of what is already supplied by the speaker – as when the camera zooms in to “highlight” the climax of the speech, or what is happening backstage.

The soundtrack played alone without projecting the film reveals the quality of the speakers voice as well as the background noise in the room. This gives “more” information and appeal than we get from just reading the transcript, but it can also in some cases even emphasize and enhance the purely ‘audio’ qualities of the speech to a greater extent than what we usually experience when perceiving the complete film clip. Sound is very important to film, as we all know, and sometimes a soundtrack can become even more impressive when the images are not seen.

A written text may seem to come out of this experiment as a very weak medium in terms of persuasion and appeal. But that would be a misleading generalization. Written texts can be persuasive and moving in their own way. Certainly there are beautiful poems and novels that are hard to transform into films of equal beauty or impact, and some argumentative texts are better understood and appreciated when they can be read and re-read than when they have simply been heard. Written texts have features such as layout, fonts, and punctuation that may also enhance their meaning, and possibly also their persuasiveness.

So the conclusion I pass to my students is that the casual ranking of the various media in terms of how effective they appear to be in their ability to persuade, to convince, to argue and to communicate, is a mistake that should be avoided. Rather I encourage them to investigate very closely all of the different persuasive aspects of the particular medium they chose to explore in their upcoming workshops in media production and analysis.

Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank the bachelor and master students, semesters 2010 – 2014, on the International Track of Communications Studies at Roskilde University, Denmark, for having endured this lecture hall exercise and for contributing valuable comments. The author further wishes to thank Rae Duxbury for advice concerning the formulations in English.

NOTES
i. This text is a transcript of the last part of the speech that is presented more fully on the following pages and in the notes. In order to give a fairly realistic presentation of the lecture hall experiment the origin of the text is not revealed at this point even though it would be the usual correct academic practice.
ii. The soundtrack is not embedded in the text here, but it can be played by using the video-link in the following notes – and to be realistic in terms of the lecture hall experiment one should not look at the video while playing, but only listen to the sound while looking at the quoted text above.
iii. The film clip can be seen at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oehry1JC9Rk

References:
Juel, H. (2004). The Ethos and the Framing – a Study in the Rhetoric of the TV camera. An essay on the author’s web-page: http://akira.ruc.dk/~hjuel/.
Juel, H. (2006). Defining Documentary Film, “p.o.v.”. Number 22. A Danish Journal of Film Studies, University of Aarhus.

Abstract: This paper outlines how classical propositional logic, particularly the notion of ‘obtaining a classically-valid logical proof’, can be understood as the outcome of an argumentation-game. We adopt two game-rules from dialogical logic under which obtaining such as proof is a matter of due course, as both rules together guarantee a winning-strategy for one player when logical consequence holds. We then show how these rules can arise from players’ preferences, rather than be imposed externally, and can hence count as ‘player self-imposable’. Subsequently, this game is shown to comply with the Pragma-dialectical Code of Conduct, while some of the Code’s rules become gratuitous as their content arises directly from player’s preferences instead. Our discussion is oriented towards future inquiries into how logics other than its classical variant can be similarly “naturalized.”
Keywords: game theory, classical logic, proof, proponent, opponent, winning-strategy, pragma-dialectical code of conduct rules.

1. Introduction
Viewing logic as one language game among many, Ludwig Wittgenstein had offered an analogy between having a proof and winning a game (Wittgenstein, 1953). The formal details of this analogy have been mostly studied by formal logicians who, in viewing logical proofs as regimented argumentation-procedures, sought to give an argumentative characterization of logic.[i] Game-theory in particular became a natural framework to model episodes of natural language argumentation that characterizes logical inference, giving rise to game-theoretic semantics (GTS) (Hintikka & Sandu, 1997) and dialogical logic (DL) (Rahman & Keiff, 2005) as the two main approaches.

GTS and DL partially reduce logic to argumentation-procedures by restricting players’ strategies so that games realize the model-checking procedures and proof procedures typical of logical inference. The motivation for such restrictions, however, remains internal[ii] to the model, receiving primarily pragmatic justification through successfully recovering logical inference formally from particular constraints on argumentation. This article shows DL-restrictions that are imposed to recover first-order logical consequence from argumentation to be instead forthcoming from preference-profiles of boundedly rational players. Such players, we take it, cannot optimize their strategies because they lack the ability to compute complete representations of a game, while we understand constraints on such a game to be player-self-imposable through strategic reasoning (provably) equivalent to the elimination of dominated strategies.

The following outlines how classical propositional logic, particularly the notion of ‘obtaining a classically-valid logical proof’, can be understood as the outcome of an argumentation-game (2.1), and introduce two game-rules under which obtaining it is a matter of due course, for both rules together guarantee a winning-strategy (2.2), then raise the claim that the strategies adopted by players in this game are ‘player self-imposable’, because these same strategies may be inferred from players’ preferences by (reasoning employing) a maximin-principle (Sect. 2.3 to 2.5). Subsequently, this game is shown to comply with the Pragma-dialectical Code of Conduct (3.1), but that some among the Code’s rules are gratuitous, so to speak, whenever normative content already arises from player’s preferences (3.2). Our discussion, in Sect. 4, is oriented towards future inquiries into how logics other than its classical variant might similarly be “naturalized.” We close with brief conclusions in Sect. 5.

2. The game-theoretic apparatus
To start, we will sketch the elements of an argumentation-game as they appear from a game-theoretic perspective, introducing further relevant notions as we go along.

2.1. Logic as an argumentative game
The players’ choice of a language, L, is a preliminary step to any language game. Agreement on the language in which the argumentation will be couched determines the actions arguers can take (e.g., how to attack and defend complex sentences; how to assess an atoms’ truth value). We restrict L to a propositional language corresponding to a fragment of vernacular English where basic sentences (aka atoms) contain a subject phrase referring to individuals, a verb phrase, and terms referring to individuals, e.g. “The cat is on the mat”; “Alice is taller than Bob.” Complex L-sentences combine atoms through connectives (and, or, if… then…), and locutions equivalent to negation (is not, or it is not the case that), or locutions that combine such complex sentences, collectively called operators.

Given a language L, a proof demonstrates that a conclusion C follows from a set P of premises. We will here be mostly concerned with the semantic view, where P collects situations where the set’s members are true, and to prove C is to demonstrate that C is true in every situation.[iii] In a DL game, the proponent (PRO) is committed that C is true if P is assumed, while the opponent (OPP) is committed that C may be false in at least one case where all members of P are true. In order to prove C, PRO must demonstrate that, once OPP concedes P explicitly, C is conceded implicitly. Players’ legitimate moves are attacks, which ask for explicit commitment to the consequences of a statement, and defenses, which incur commitments. A move’s legitimacy is partly determined by L; both players are allowed the same moves. Independently of the PRO or OPP role, for instance, if player X states “A and B” then player Y can constrain her to commit to A, to commit to B, or to both. If player X states “A or B,” then player Y can only constrain her to commit to (at least) one of the disjuncts, while X retains the option to commit to A, or to B, or to both. In tree form, Table 1 provides the complete set of attacks and defenses. Atoms are noted ‘ψ’ and are indexed by 1 or 2 when these occur in complex sentences; the prefix ‘Y?’ indicates an attack, followed by the specific sentence it targets, where some attacks allow to ask for a commitment that, when relevant, is specified after a forward-slash (‘/’). These rules can be applied systematically to any sentence player X has stated, eventually forcing X to commit to a basic sentence or its negation.

Table 1. Attacks and defenses for a propositional language L in tree form.

2.2 Structural rules that guarantee a winning-strategy
Provided the conclusion, C, is a finite statement, OPP is restricted to a finite number of genuine attacks, i.e., excluding repetitions. As we saw above, asking PRO to commit to complex expressions eventually brings it about that OPP asks PRO to commit to a literal, i.e., an atom, or its negation. (By convention, negated atoms cannot be attacked.) The first of the two structural rules, the Structural Rule for Literals (abbreviated SR-L), amounts to PRO having the last say in a play, only if she can, using merely the premises, P, defend C in that play. SR-L restricts only PRO’s strategies.

Structural Rule for Literals (SR-L): Unless OPP has previously stated the literal A, PRO cannot defend herself against an attack that requires of her to state A.

The second, the Structural Rule for Repetitions (SR-R), prevents delay-tactics. After all, by repeating a genuine attack, one player could keep denying the other player’s win, and so (forever) delay reaching the play’s end-state.

Structural Rule for Repetitions (SR-R): Should player X have previously attacked statement A of player Y to which player Y has responded, then X cannot repeat this attack.

Together with agreement on the meaning of L’s logical terms laid out in the attack and defense-rules in Sect. 2.1, these two rules suffice for representing argumentative games in tree form. The analogy between proving and winning a game thus gains precision. We now turn to the strategic reasoning of the players.

2.3 Strategy selection
Game theory generally explains strategy-selection by an inference called ‘elimination of dominated strategies’. This inference considers all strategies available to players, ranks these on an outcome-ordered ordinal scale, and eliminates all strategies but that, or those, at the highest rank. (Once eliminated, the succession of moves such strategies consists of is not played.) Leaving implicit those preferences that are instrumental in generating the outcome-ordered strategy ranking has, in our opinion, prevented argumentative approaches to logic from becoming genuinely game-theoretic treatments. As we now argue, these shortcomings prevent DL from describing genuine language games, which thus fails to resonate with its self-professed Wittgensteinian origins. As we also argue, however, DL semantics can be suitably “fixed.”[iv] The required modifications apply at each of the following steps:

At step (1), each player must be provided with a preference-profile over the game’s outcomes. From it, one may infer players’ preferences over all possible moves of a play, thus postulating an inference from outcome-preferences to move-preferences. A genuine import from game-theory would otherwise be hard to discern.

At step (2), the rules SR-L and SR-R are promoted from being reasonable game-rules to the status of player-self-imposed restrictions. Here, one might postulate another inference that derives both rules from players’ preference-profiles. But players might as well agree upon these restrictions explicitly, making them non-inferred game-rules that promote players’ interests (see the next section).

At step (3), one requires some explanation on how players can each prefer selecting a strategy that, in combination with the other player’s strategy, gives rise to a pair – called a ‘strategy-profile’ – which would be mapped to a semantic proof obtained when implementing mechanical constructions that guarantee this proof to terminate if and only if C follows from P.

As we show in the next section, comparatively weak assumptions suffice to equip players with suitable preferences.

2.4 Preferences
Being rather natural ones, our assumptions seemingly describe but mildly idealized arguers. Furthermore, a single inference-principle – called ‘Harsanyi-Maximin’, introduced below – apparently suffices to let players
(i) individually select move-preferences,
(ii) jointly self-impose the game-restricting rules SR-L and SR-R, and
(iii) jointly select only strategy-profiles that generate the equivalent of systematic tableaux proofs. These assumptions have been formalized in Genot & Jacot (2014). The following provides an informal version:

A1 – Meaning Coordination
Players have coordinated on the meaning of logical operators, and have the means for disambiguating non-logical terms.[v]

A2 – Asymmetric Burden
Players agree that, to win the game, PRO must meet every challenge raised by OPP, and so must win every play; OPP may challenge PRO by raising all alternatives compatible with the common ground, and OPP subsequently wins the game as soon as he has won a play.

A3 – Comparative Efficiency
Both players prefer games with fewer to those with more moves.

A4 – Termination over Frustration
Both players prefer losing a play, or a game, over playing indefinitely long.

A5 – Imperfect Foresight
Both players’ ability to anticipate the other’s moves is limited.

A6 – Common Knowledge[vi]
Both players know A1 to A5 to be the case.

As sketched in Sect. 2.1, A1 can be satisfied by players agreeing on rules for attacks and defenses for connectives, and by their referencing atoms ostensibly (i.e., pointing to a term’s referent).[vii] A2 is equivalent to having agreed on semantic consequence,[viii] while an explicit notion thereof remains gratuitous as long as it is well-defined how a play is won (which occurs by agreement on L). A3 is immediate whenever playing is costly, for instance time-wise. A4 is reasonable whenever players can contemplate the prospects of winning future games, while they might lose the present one. A5 typically holds for boundedly rational self-knowledgeable players unable to grasp the game’s full combinatorial structure, and assuming as much of the other player. A6 holds whenever players explicitly agree to A1 to A5, in the sense that each then knows that the other does, too.

As a consequence of assuming bounded rationality, players cannot be meaningfully said to distribute probabilities over alternative courses of the game, and so cannot form rational expectations based on these. They can, however, always apply the rationality principle that Harsanyi (1977) proposed for reasoning in games where (probabilistic) expectations are not well-defined:
Harsanyi Maximin (HM): If player X cannot form rational expectations about the probability that Y will not select the strategy leading to X’s least preferred outcome, then X should play the strategy that best responds to Y’s most detrimental strategy for X.[ix]

The rationale for HM consists in a simple consequentialist consideration: acting as HM prescribes guarantees minimizing losses that are incurred in worst case scenarios. Hence, for HM to be applied, it must be clear what the most detrimental strategy is. Together with A1 to A4, HM suffices in DL-games to vindicate informal arguments that are typically provided for the collapse of symmetrical options in dialogical games to the asymmetrical rules of semantic tableaux. More importantly, as is shown in the next sub-section, from HM, together with A1 to A4, SR-L and SR-R can be obtained as self-imposed strategic principles. Finally, if players agree to sequentially conduct all plays necessary to demonstrate whether PRO has a winning-strategy, or not, then this sequence simulates a tree proof. As noted above, when L is a first-order language, the possibility of infinite plays arises, and consensus can therefore only be found in the limit, by assuming that infinite plays are won by OPP.

2.5 Structural rules as self-imposed constraints
Formal proofs are given in Genot & Jacot (2014) that HM suffices to (i) collapse the best options for PRO and OPP to tree-building rules, (ii) obtain SR-L and SR-R as self-imposed restrictions, and (iii) lead players to realize proofs. We point readers to this paper for the third claim and will not separately treat the first claim here, either, as particle rules depend on the language L and thus on the pre-play agreement. But the second claim concerns structural rules which are in force in any DL-game, and for any language. How boundedly rational arguers can self-impose the structural rules SR-L and SR-R should therefore be relevant to the reduction of logical reasoning, classical or other, to argumentation. We now sketch how SR-L and SR-R can be justified argumentatively.

As for SR-L, the strongest position for the proponent of a thesis C in a pro and contra argumentation entails the ability to always support C ex concessis, i.e., through arguments raised by the opponent. In PRO’s case, then, supporting C comes down to supporting those literals for which PRO has incurred commitments as a consequence of upholding a commitment to C vis-à-vis OPP’s doubt about C. PRO can maintain the strongest position only if these same literals have previously been stated by OPP. And were PRO about to state a literal A that OPP had not yet stated, then PRO’s worst case would consists in OPP systematically avoiding to state A. Since, qua A4, PRO cannot form a rational expectation as to the probability of OPP avoiding to state A, qua HM, PRO should never state literals, unless these had first been stated by OPP.

Turning now to SR-R, consider cases where PRO might want to repeat an attack, because PRO’s previous attempt to obtain a suitable literal A from OPP had failed, while PRO could possibly obtain a better response through repetition. PRO’s worst case here consists in OPP repeating the response that had already proved non-suitable to PRO. Qua HM, PRO should therefore not repeat the attack. Doing so would merely extend the play, but bring no further benefits, an option that is ruled out by the preference expressed in A3.

OPP’s reasons to enforce the content of SR-R are symmetrical to PRO’s reasons, as the only situation where an attack-repetition is plausible is exactly that where PRO has answered all previous attacks. And even here, OPP could at best hope, but not rationally expect that PRO might, upon OPP’s repetition of the attack, give responses that PRO cannot defend. The worst case for OPP, then, is that course of the game where PRO selects the same responses that PRO had previously managed to defend. Qua HM, as above, therefore also OPP should not repeat the attack.

3. Comparison with the code of conduct
Players’ choices with respect to L, and with respect to preferences, may yield argumentation-games that instantiate different systems of logical inference. In particular, starting from an impoverished L, characterizing players’ preferences through the assumptions A1 to A6, and using the Harsanyi Maximin principle (HM) suffice in order to obtain classical logic, modulo quantifiers. On these, see Genot & Jacot (2014). Classical logic is therefore said to result from self-imposed restrictions when argumentation is treated as a game that to win presupposes the existence of a winning-strategy, but not knowledge of its existence. This provides a formally precise sense in which logic can in principle emerge from arguers’ preferences, thus clarifying the Wittgensteinian analogy mentioned in the introduction.

Were the formal relation between logic and arguer-preferences more fully understood, then one might perhaps obtain one from, and in terms of, the other. Until future research has shown as much, a modest but no less important insight is that classical logic needs no mentioning in normative argumentation-rules for it to nevertheless dictate the game’s winner, because the constraints that make classical logic “the ruler” can arise from arguers’ preferences, and so need not be explicit.

In the remainder, we argue that reaching a consensus on the kind of logical consequence that shall apply for some argumentation-game, amounts to endorsing a particular specification of the Code of Conduct in the Pragma-dialectical theory (PD), and so may be viewed as a special case thereof. Sect. 3.1 compares the fifteen PD-rules to our structural rules. SR-L and SL-R are said to be specifications of PD-rules whenever the Code does not prevent participants from specifying its content in this way. We moreover discuss the assumptions A1 to A6 vis-à-vis PD’s higher-order conditions that are placed on arguers seeking to settle a difference of opinion on the merits, and provide a brief discussion of the HM-principle (Sect. 3.2).

3.1 Comparison of Structural Rules with PD-rules
We assume familiarity with the fifteen Pragma-dialectical discussion-rules, aka the Code of Conduct. Its latest version is found in Van Eemeren & Grootendorst (2004), 123-157; Zenker (2007a) compares it to the Code’s 1984 version. We refer to the Code’s n-th rule as PD-n.

The structural rule for repetitions (SR-R) is a near-verbatim copy of PD-13, serving the same function: preventing delays. In contrast, the content of the structural rule for literals (SR-L) specifies more than one PD-rule. Moreover, some specifications of the Code arising from SR-L do so in combination with the assumptions A1 to A6, as will be discussed further below.

SR-L distributes the proponent and opponent rules, which remain the same throughout the game, thus specifying PD-4. Moreover, SR-L specifies the right to challenge, thus specifying PD-2, assigning it to OPP, and the obligation to respond to a challenge, thus specifying PD-3, assigning it to PRO. This allocation, in turn, implies a corresponding distribution of the burden of proof, regulated likewise through mutual implication in PD-3. Provided that player’s agree on the circumstances of winning qua accepting SR-L, this also specifies PD-5, for players now agree on a successful attack, and a successful defense, in this discussion. (Recall that, per SR-R, a successful attack – of the claim that C follows from P – must not have been used already in the same discussion; and that a successful defense of that claim may not recur to material other than that conceded by OPP.)

PD-6 demands that players attack and defend only by argumentation. We do not so much take PD-6 to be specified, but to be implied by SR-L and SR-R. After all, neither SR-L nor SR-R leave room for moves other than argumentative attacks and defenses. Thus, one may not strictly need PD-6 in the sense of a necessary condition for the resolution of a difference on opinion, provided certain preferences. Similarly, for a critical discussion the rules PD-7, PD-8, and PD-9 demand that participant-agreement is reached on a successful attack and defense of a propositional content and of its justificatory potential, and on a conclusive defense. Such definitions are effectively provided by SR-L, along with Asymmetric Burden (A2), to which we return below. Moreover, if we view the defense of a sub-standpoint, regulated in PD-9, to amount to winning a play, as opposed to winning a game, then SR-L and A2 jointly imply the content of PD-9.

PD-10 and PD-11 assign the right to attack and to defend undefended standpoints to the proponent and the opponent, respectively. We had only introduced a single standpoint, expressed as: C follows from P. Therefore, neither PD-10 and PD-11, nor their negations, apply to our argumentation-game; hence these rules cannot be violated, either; a fortiori they cannot be meaningfully called necessary. Having discussed PD-13 above, PD-14, which assigns an obligation to retract upon a conclusive defense, is implied by SR-L. Finally, PD-15 states an unconditional right to demand usage-declaratives. This is either not needed (when stipulating players to assign truth values without analyzing the meaning of literals) or assumption A1 states as much, but also more (see Sect. 3.2). Finally, PD-1, which denies special preparatory conditions on arguers or their arguments, can be viewed as being fulfilled, but has no direct or indirect counterpart in the assumptions A1 to A6.

In sum, the Code of Conduct does not bar logical argumentation from occurring as a result of playing, with suitable preferences, according to PD-rules. This being so is far from incidental, and should rather be viewed as a desired consequence of the PD model. At any rate, our rules and assumptions yield a limiting case of the Code, while it also became clear that the content of PD-rules that regulate agreement on a conclusive attack and defense are not needed as explicit rules. In Sect. 2, players’ preferences as to how the game should be played were shown to arise on the assumptions A1 to A6. We now turn to these.

3.2 The assumptions A1 to A6, and the HM rationality-principle
Immediately above, Meaning Coordination (A1) was seen to be slightly stronger than PD-15, for A1 assumes players to coordinate successfully, while the Code merely reserves the right to demand usage declaratives, without stipulating semantic success. Asymmetric Burden (A2) amounts to a definition of winning a play, and thus the game, for both PRO and OPP. It hence specifies PD-7 to PD-9, along with both of our structural rules, as discussed above. Comparative Efficiency (A3) spells out an assumption that seemingly fails to correspond to any PD-rule, but neither is A3 in violation of the Code. The same holds for the remaining three assumptions: Termination over Frustration (A4), Imperfect Foresight (A5), and Common Knowledge (A6). As stated, A4 characterizes a preference of players to rather seek playing the argumentation-game, while the constraint A5 mirrors players’ cognitive limitation, of which A6 says that players know it. All assumptions are compatible with the Code.

Further, in PD, so-called higher-order conditions spell out additional features on arguers, for instance, their willingness to settle a dispute. See Zenker (2007b)for a non-exhaustive list of such conditions. We find it plausible to view A4 to A6 as higher-order conditions that describe what one might reasonably expect on behalf of boundedly rational players and their cognitive states. Also, endorsing HM as a rationality principle may be understood as a higher order condition. As we saw, HM ensures that, if an argumentation-game has a winning-strategy, then PRO or OPP will find it. Recognition of HM, or a principle similar to it, bars player X from assuming that Y plays anything but that strategy, or those strategies, on which Y eventually wins the game, if Y could win, and vice versa. Therefore, as HM states, the best response to any such Y-strategy is for player X to pursue a strategy that does not in principle fail to reach the same goal, so both players are kept from playing in ways that lead nowhere near the desired result anytime soon.

While HM amounts to a generalized form of pessimism, nothing in the Code keeps HM from applying to players or to their game. For idealized arguers – idealized with respect to possessing sophisticated game-theoretic knowledge – HM is clearly a reasonable choice. But we cannot find that HM would even be questionable for boundedly rational arguers. After all, when properly understood, the content of HM is hardly more complex than the final sentence of the previous paragraph. Put differently, failure to understand, or to endorse, HM would arise from cognitive, emotional, or perhaps ecological boundaries outside the normal range of boundedly rational agents. All the same, HM remains a genuinely game-theoretic principle of rational interaction. Its acceptance by players, as a rationality principle, cannot be motivated other than by explicitly viewing argumentation as a game whose outcome depends on the way in which a strategy-profile, i.e., the particular pair of strategies chosen by X and Y, generates the game’s outcome.

4. Discussion
The Code of Conduct provided by the Pragma-dialectical theory (PD) normatively governs attacks and defenses of a standpoint in a merit-based critical discussion aimed at a resolution of a difference of opinion, or consensus, where arguers assume the dialectical roles of proponent and opponent. This framework was seen to be consonant with attempts at capturing logic as formal argumentation, understood as a Wittgensteinian language game, as currently implemented in dialogical logic (DL) and game-theoretic semantics (GTS). All three approaches view natural language argumentation as an interactive process between a proponent, who states and argumentatively supports a thesis, and an opponent attacking it.

Logic is regularly equated with the rules one should apply to implement logical reasoning, thereby deriving a valid consequence from the premises; DL and GTS make no exception to this, as both represent logic in a game by imposing logical rules onto its players. Equating logic with its rules, however, is in conflict with the view ascribed to Wittgenstein, above: what matters in a language game are not the rules, but the players’ goals and preferences. For players who self-regulate their argumentative conduct, the status of logical rules was consequently seen to be demoted to that of a description, useful for instance when instructing newcomers pursuing the same goals. Wittgenstein’s view being in principle vindicated by the theory of games that DL and GTS build on, players can therefore dispense with such rules altogether, at least as primitive notions. Embracing this demotion of logical rules brings DL and GTS closer to their professed philosophical and methodological sources. So far, however, both DL and GTS do not yet characterize players who meaningfully prefer arguing logically, as opposed to being forced to do so.

We have indicated how to tell a different story: take a fragment of natural language (restricted to noun phrases, verb phrases, and any complements needed) no more expressive than a formal propositional language; then understand logical argumentation taking place between a proponent and an opponent as the outcome of a particular type of argumentation-game; finally, provide sufficient conditions under which players’ preferences and abilities restrict their argumentative moves to logically valid inferences. In this way, enforcing the consensus through the imposition of logical rules becomes superfluous, for logical rules now emerge from a game where well-defined preferences are ascribed to players who achieve meaning-coordination. Importantly, our assumptions about players’ preferences and abilities were said to characterize boundedly rational agents, thus remaining much closer to human reasoners than to the ideal reasoners typically assumed in DL and GTS approaches.

Comparing what such assumptions induce with the Pragma-dialectical Code of Conduct, we observed a similarity between natural-language argumentation and logical argumentation that is far from incidental. Some of our assumptions on players’ abilities and preferences were seen to be specifications of the Code’s rules, or its higher order conditions, while assumptions that remained unrelated to the Code did not violate its normative content. Hence, logical argumentation can arise within the Pragma-dialectical framework for a critical discussion among boundedly rational players without assuming prior knowledge of, or explicit agreement on, the norms of logic. This being as it should be, we hope to have made understandable how logic can systematically emerge from natural language argumentative practice.

5. Conclusion
While our story here had ended with classical propositional logic, the main result presented in the present paper has been successfully extended to full classical first-order logic (Genot & Jacot, 2014). Consistent with the conjecture that a similar story can be told for logic’s ontogenesis, only a natural language and boundedly rational players were taken to be necessary to make a first step towards a naturalization of logic. To carry this naturalization-attempt further, future research should be conducted in a theoretical and in an empirical manner. Similar argumentative accounts of logic should be extended to non-classical logics, by considering richer natural language fragments, for instance, as well as different goals and preferences. Moreover, assumptions that constrain players’ preferences and abilities should be validated, e.g., in focus interviews, but also through systematic experimental work.

Acknowledgements
For comments and useful criticism, we thank the audience at the 2014 ISSA conference, 1-4 July, 2014, Amsterdam, as well as Jeroen Smid, John Woods, Maurice Finocchiaro, and Erik Krabbe. The authors gratefully acknowledge funding from the Swedish Research Council (VR) and the Lund University Information Quality Research Group (LUIQ) led by Erik J. Olsson. For an extended manuscript that significantly extends Sect. 2 and 4 of the present paper, please contact the first author.

NOTES
i. Logic had thus returned to its origins in argumentation, if one views Aristotelian logic to emerge from the argumentative practices in the Academy and the Lyceum (Robinson, 1971), being proceeded by the Socratic elenchus, among others. For a brief historical overview, see Dipert, Hintikka, & Spade (2014), and Hintikka (1996).
ii. Our use of ‘internal’ and ‘external’ breaks with standard game-theory where preferences are part of the definition of a game set-up, and in this sense internal to the game, while restrictions imposed on players’ strategies to guarantee a proof are called externalities whenever being independent of such preferences.
iii. Viewed syntactically, P is a set of grammatically well-formed L-sentences, so to prove C is to demonstrate that, using only the grammatical rules of L, C can be obtained by a transformation and a combination of P-members.
iv. A tentative explanation why this option had not been considered much earlier, crucially in the Erlangen school (see Krabbe (2006)), is that the requisite reasoning had (falsely) been viewed to demand of players abilities that are equivalent to mathematical induction. After all, in logic and proof theory, it is mathematical induction that is normally used to reason about logical proofs (aka meta-logic or meta-mathematics). However, mathematical induction is here required only to prove that a given proof strategy will be successful, but is not required to implement a proof strategy. So a game-theoretic approach to logic could well have internalized reasoning-about-proofs within a given proof, and thus strictly subordinate logical reasoning to meta-logical, or meta-.
v. Non-logical terms comprise noun-phrases, verb-phrases, etc.; disambiguating these is understood to be part of linguistic competence.
vi. Unlike A1 to A5, which are both necessary conditions to obtain proofs from games, A6 is sufficient but not necessary. Also a weaker assumption may do, such as a belief in the other player’s rationality (see Genot & Jacot (2014)).
vii. Genot & Jacot (2014) use pointing to abstract representations such as vertices and edges of a graph to disambiguate atoms, where a vertex represents an individual, and a labeled path of length n represents an n-ary predicate. The representations are motivated cognitively, as they share properties of perceptual representation.
viii. Agreement to consider some, but not all possibilities compatible with P yields a non-monotonic logic where, once drawn, a previously agreed-upon conclusion can nevertheless be retracted if this agreement is subsequently revised, for instance upon taking into consideration additional possibilities, including counterexamples formerly disregarded. Such agreement is independent of the player’s agreement on L, and so depends on their preferences.
ix. The most detrimental strategy, aka the worst case, for X is not always the best case for Y. In our games, the worst case for either player is to be denied victory in a play through the other player’s use of a delaying tactic. But this tactic is never the best one for any player using it. After all, the outcome of the game would be unnecessarily delayed, so both players would incur a loss, and so both players’ preferences (as expressed in A3 and A4) would be satisfied to a lesser degree.

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Abstract: We compared recent historical debates from the U.S., Great Britain, and Egypt using politeness theory to determine if there were significant cultural differences and/or similarities in the way candidates argued for high office. The transcripts from these debates were coded using a schema based on face threats used in debates. Results indicate some differences between the way U.S. presidential candidates, British leaders, and Egyptian leaders initiate and manage face threats on leadership and competence.

Keywords: Campaign debates, culture, politeness.

1. Introduction
This paper explores cultural differences and similarities in argumentation strategies used by candidates in debates for high office. Recent historical campaign debates in Britain and Egypt offer an opportunity to examine cultural differences in reasoning about public affairs. Debates for the office of British Prime Minister were held for the first time in 2010 between Gordon Brown, David Cameron, and Nick Clegg. Similarly, Egypt held the first debate between Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh and Amr Moussa. To date, limited amount of work has been done on these historic events (see Benoit & Benoit-Bryan, 2013) and less is known about cultural differences in arguing for office.

Our interest is in the ways candidates manage face concerns in the potentially threatening encounters of campaign debates. These events are held in front of audiences who watch and deliberate over candidates’ political skills. Previous work has examined politeness strategies used by U.S. candidates for the presidency from 1960-2008 (Dailey, Hinck, & Hinck, 2008) and found a trend of declining reasoned exchanges over policy difference while direct attacks on character increased. Comparing the language strategies of the candidates representing different political cultures of the United States, Great Britain, and Egypt will allow us to explore trends in international campaign debate discourse.

2. The debates in context
On April 6, 2010 British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced that dissolution of parliament and general election would take place in one month, May 6, 2010. At that time, power was relatively evenly divided between Gordon Brown’s Labour party and David Cameron’s Conservatives (Shirbon, 6 April 2010). The Liberal Democrats had a new leader in Nick Clegg. The campaign was significant in the sense that it was one of the few times that the politics of the time might result in a hung parliament, where three leading candidates running for office had not been the situation since 1979 (when Margaret Thatcher led the Conservatives, James Callaghan represented Labour, and David Steel was the candidate advanced by the Liberal party), where all three parties featured new leaders, and where debates were featured for the first time.

Three debates were held about one week apart in the one-month campaign. The first debate concerned domestic policy, the second international policy, and the third economic policy. Although a variety of issues were addressed under each of those subject areas, two main issues were of concern at the time (Shirbon, 6 April 2010). First, Britain was facing an economic crisis much like the U.S. was in the wake of the 2008 recession. Looming before the British government was a huge budget deficit and markets wanted a clear sense of direction regarding how the government would go about responding to the problem. Second, the outgoing parliament had been tarnished with an expenses scandal where one hundred and forty-five members of parliament were accused of inappropriate expenses while serving in office.

The format of the debate featured opening statements lasting one minute for each leader. After the three opening statements, the moderator would then take the first question on the agreed theme. Each leader was given one minute to respond to the question and then each leader had one minute to respond to the answers. The moderator was then allowed to open up the discussion for free debate for up to four minutes. Each leader was then given ninety seconds for a closing statement (BBC, 2010). According to the Select Committee on Communications’ Report (13 May 2014), the debates were a success: “the average viewing figures for each of the debates was 9.4 million (ITV), 4 million (Sky), and 8.1 million (BBC)” p. 12.

2.1 The 2012 Egyptian debate
The Moussa-Fotouh debate was the first and only political debate to have occurred in Egypt, at least at this point in time; thus, it was an important experiment in democratic practices for the Egyptian people in the immediate post-Mubarak political climate. The presidential debate between Amr Moussa and Abdel Moneim Abul Fotouh took place in Egypt May 10, 2012 and was sponsored by several media organizations. Moussa was the former foreign minister and former head of the Arab League, has also served as Ambassador of Egypt to the United Nations in New York, as Ambassador to India and to Switzerland. Abul Fotouh, is a medical doctor who was politically active since his college days. He was also a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamic opposition party founded in 1928. The candidates had a very different relationship with the former regime under Hosni Mubarak. Moussa’s political career took place under Mubarak and Abul Fotouh was imprisoned for five years from 1996 to 2001. Despite the fact that these two candidates did not make the final election ballot, the selection of the candidates for that debate reflected the two leading candidates according to polls at that point in the campaign.

The Moussa-Fotouh debate structure was based on American presidential debates. Amr Khafaga, editor in chief of Al Shurouk newspaper, one of the sponsors of the debate said that, “there is no precedent for such an event in Egypt so they’ve borrowed the debate rules from the U.S. Egyptianizing it a bit” (The Guardian, 2012). The Christian Science Monitor reported that, “in the hour-long run-up, hosts explained that the format was based on US presidential debates, and broadcast part of the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy debate.” Mona el-Shazly, a talk show host and Yusri Fouda, a former Al-Jazeera journalist moderated the debate. The debate was divided into two parts consisting of 12 questions. The first half of the debate focused on the constitution and presidential powers and the second half focused on the candidates’ platforms, the judiciary and security. Each candidate was given two minutes to answer each question and was allowed to comment on the other’s responses. In addition, the candidates were permitted to ask each other one question at the end of each half of the debate. Each candidate had two minutes for closing remarks. We were unable to locate exact numbers for viewership but one estimate described viewership as reflecting a high rate of interest (Hope, 2012).

2.2 The 2012 U.S. presidential debates
President Barack Obama debated former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney three times during the 2012 presidential campaign. The record of the Obama administration’s first term included steering the country out of the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression, sweeping new regulations of Wall Street, health care reform, ending American involvement in Iraq, beginning to draw down American forces in Afghanistan, and more (Glastris, 2012). Still, 52% of Americans polled during the 2012 campaign believed that the president had accomplished “not very much” or “little or nothing.” The economy was weak during the campaign and despite some promising news of job growth many Americans were open to the possibility of new leadership.

Mitt Romney had a successful record as a businessman and Governor. At Bain Capital he led the investment company to highly profitable ventures and then served as the CEO of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee for the 2002 Winter Olympics. In 2002 he was elected Governor of Massachusetts and passed health care reform at the state level. He campaigned vigorously for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008 but lost to John McCain. That campaign experience prepared him well for the 2012 campaign and in a long series of primary debates won the presidential nomination. During the primary campaign his communication strategy was to appeal to the base of the Republican party. In a leaked video of a private campaign speech Romney claimed that 47% of Americans pay no income taxes.

The fact that Bain Capital had made money by taking companies over to sell their assets with the result in some instances of eliminating jobs, that Romney had been opposed to bailing out the U.S. automobile industry while Obama had offered loans to save it, that Romney was opposed to health care reform on a national level when he had been in favor of it at the state level, and the 47% comment hurt Romney going into the last seven weeks of the campaign. According to Richard Wolffe (2013) “what had been a 4-to-5 point race in the battlegrounds became a 6-to-7 point race” (p. 204).

The debates provided Romney with an opportunity to change the dynamic of the campaign. Beth Myers (Myers & Dunn, 2013) who served as Romney’s Campaign Manager indicated there were three goals for the first debate: “create a credible vision for job creation and economic growth,” “present the case against Obama as a choice,” and “speak to women” (p. 101). Given the lead that Obama had developed in the battleground states, Obama’s advisers believed that he did not “need to be aggressive anymore because it’s kind of baked in there” (Wolffe, 2013, p. 210). However, Obama became “caught between what he wanted to say on stage and what his agreed strategy was. He couldn’t attack in case it destroyed his own popularity. But he needed to attack to show he had some backbone” (Wolffe, 2013, p. 213). The conflict resulted in a poor performance that energized the Romney camp. Viewership for the first debate was over 67 million (Voth, 2014), 65.6 million for the second debate (Stelter, 17 October 2012) and 59.2 million for the third debate (Stelter, 23 October 2012).

We compared the debates using Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory. This approach to the study of political debates has been described elsewhere (Dailey, Hinck, & Hinck, 2008; Hinck & Hinck, 2002). For the purposes of this study we examined the degree of direct threats on candidates’ positive face across the debates in order to answer the following research question.

RQ: Are there differences between face threat strategies in U.S., Great Britain, and Egyptian debates?

3. Method

3.1 Selection of debates and the acquisition of primary texts
Seven debates were coded and analyzed for this study. The texts of the three 2012 United States Presidential Debates featuring Governor Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama were found on the website of the Commission on Presidential Debates. The text of the three 2010 British Prime Minister Debates involving, Nick Clegg, David Cameron, and Gordon Brown were found on the BBC website (news.bbc.co.uk.). Finally, the text of the May 10, 2010 Egyptian Debate between Moussa and Abul Fotouh was created from a You Tube video of the event (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrbkI1fkZFM&feature=player_embedded). An Egyptian native translated the debate transcript used for analysis from Arabic into English.

Unitizing the debates:

3.2 Unitizing and coding the debates
Two individuals served as coders of the transcripts. The coding process involved three decisions. First, the coders divided the transcripts into thought units. Hatfield and Weider-Hatfield (1978, p. 46) define a thought unit as “the minimum meaningful utterance having a beginning and end, typically operationalized as a simple sentence.” Since viewers of televised debates are interested in how candidates construct their messages unitizing the transcripts into statements of complete thoughts seemed most appropriate for this study.

Second, the thought units were coded according to Dailey, Hinck, and Hinck’s (2008) coding schema. The coding schema is an extension of Kline’s (1984) social face coding system. Kline’s coding schema notes that positive politeness and autonomy granting/negative politeness are two separate dimensions of face support. Positive politeness is defined as the desire to be included and the want that one’s abilities will be respected. Negative politeness is defined as the want to be unimpeded by others. Positive face is supported by expressions of understanding solidarity, and/or positive evaluation; it is threatened by expressions of contradiction, noncooperation, disagreement, or disapproval. Since political debates are primarily concerned with a candidate’s ability to demonstrate his/her ability to lead, and to offer and explain policies and plans important to the well-being of the country, our analysis and coding schema focused on the positive face of the candidates. The coding schema is composed of three major levels. Statements at the first major level of the system are those that threaten the positive face of the candidates. Statements at this level of the system are further differentiated concerning the directness of the positive face attack (levels 1 and 2). Statements at the next major level of the system balance both threatening and supportive evaluative implications for the other’s face (level 3). Finally, statements at the final major level explicitly support the positive face of the candidates. Statements at this level of the coding system are further differentiated in terms of the directness of the positive support exhibited by the candidates (levels 4 and 5).

The third decision made by the coders focused on the topic of the action identified in the coded thought unit. Topics such as leadership/character, policy/plan, consequences of the plan, use of data, differences and/or disagreement between the candidates, campaign tactics, ridicule were identified.

3.3 Reliability
To determine intercoder reliability the two coders both coded the first quarter of the first 2012 Presidential debate, the first quarter of the first Prime Minister Debate, and the first quarter of the Egyptian debate. There was 92% agreement on the thought unit designation, and Cohen’s Kappa of inter rater agreement of .86 on the coding schema for the different content elements of the debate.

4. Results
The sample for this particular study included seven debates (three U.S. Presidential debates in 2012, three Prime Minister debates in 2010, one Egyptian Presidential debate in 2012). Tables 1 through 4 contain the results of the coding of face threat in these debates according to the system we have developed and adapted over the last 12 years as was laid out in the Methods section.

Table 1 has the raw percentage of thought units that were coded into one of the many categories of the coding scheme. For the U.S. and U.K. debates, these would be totals summed across the three debates. Also, included in all the tables are the averages for the coding categories for the debates from the 10 U.S. Presidential Campaigns we have coded before the 2012 debates.

Table 2 looks at combined categories of face threat according to directness of that threat. Over the program of research, we have found interesting information when we sum across the direct face threat and indirect face threat categories. This table also reveals a new way to look at the summed types by providing a ratio of the direct to indirect face threat. As a rough basis of comparison, in the 1960 U.S. Debates, this ratio was about 1.5, and in 2004 it was about 8.6. Generally, the preference for direct face attack has increased markedly across time, though the trend has been far from consistent. On the other hand, the decline in the use of indirect face threat has been fairly consistent starting at about 15% in 1960 and now hovering around 5% for the last three American campaigns.

Table 3 presents what we consider a disturbing trend in modern debates. Among the categories of face threat, we regard the roughest as the personal attack on the opponent’s character and leadership competence. In essence, “nasty” debates would tend to have more of this personal attack on character and competence and less of a focus on plans, policies, and ideas. In 1960, around 3% of the face threat thought units were made up of this personal and direct attack on character and leadership competence. Even the proportion of direct face threat thought units spent on attacking the opponent’s character and leadership competence was only 4%. The highest proportions occurred in the 2012 debates, and those numbers are listed in Table 3. This is to say that more than a third of direct face threats in the debate were attacks on the opponent’s character and leadership competence.

Table 4 takes a look at the categories of face threat if we combine the direct and indirect face threat forms of those categories. Again, to place the values in some context across the U.S. Presidential debates, 2012 had the second highest percentage use of attacks of character and leadership competence and second lowest percentage of attacks on ideas, plans and policies.

The purpose of this particular study was mainly to uncover differences and similarities across the three cultures’ debates. We think it is useful to draw attention to five different outcomes we see from these recent debates. These are the use of direct face threat, the use of indirect threat, the use of attacks on character and leadership competence, use of attacks on plans, policies and proposals, and the use of attacks on the manipulation of data.

4.1 Direct face threat
A direct face threat is an attack on something about the opponent personally. For example, were Romney criticizing the Affordable Care Act, that would be an indirect face threat, but if he were criticizing “Obamacare,” then it would be a direct face threat as the plan is now personally linked to Barak Obama. What we see across the three sets of debates in this study is a remarkable consistency in the use of direct face threat, and percentages that mirror the U.S. average (see Table 2). This leads us to say that there appears to be a “natural” sort of direct face threat for these sorts of debates. The way that the different sets of debates arrived at this median value were very different and will be discussed below, but from a macro view, debates that vary, approximately 10% over this 25% value may be excessively rough, while debates that fall 10% below seem “quiet” and lack vigor.

4.2 Indirect face threat
In contrast to the overall level of direct face threat, the overall level of indirect face threat does vary across the three debate samples we use here. The U.S. debates show the very low level of indirect face threat that reflects a generally consistent decline across the American debates; both the British and the Egyptian debates show a high use of indirect face threat. Indeed, the British and Egyptian debate values for indirect face threat are just what would have been common in the early American debates, those that are held up as models for useful and healthy political discourse. Even in the ratio of direct to indirect face threat, the low values for the British and the Egyptians are on par with the low values from the early American debates. We view the American experience here as an indicator of the decline in the quality of debates, while the British and the Egyptians seem to have taken a better tact,.

4.3 Attacks on character and leadership competence
A disturbing trend in American political discourse is the vilification and demonization of opponents and enemies. This would include direct attacks centered on tearing down the nature, personality, abilities, and leadership of opponents. In American debates, up to 2000, the average percentage of direct attack on character and leadership competence was about 3.5%. After, 2000, the average percentage was 9.5%. Looking across the debates for this study, we see that higher level of direct attack on character and leadership competence in the British and Egyptian debates. When we look at the proportion of face threat expended in this type of personal attack, it is also quite high among each of our samples (see Table 3). Indeed, as noted above, the proportion of direct face threat focusing on direct attack on character and leadership competence in the 2012 American debates was the highest for any American debate, and the British exceeded even that number. Just as we are not encouraged by this trend in the American debates, we find it equally disturbing that the British and Egyptian debates also relied heavily on this rough form of campaign dialogue.

4.4 Attacks on ideas, positions, and plans
The proportion of thought units used to criticize the other’s plans and policies has remained fairly consistent over time for the American debates, more so in the case of direct attacks on the opponent’s plans and policies. In the results for this study (see Table 4), the Americans and the British debaters used about the same amount of direct attacks in this category as is the American average. The Egyptians, however, showed virtually no criticism or attack on the other’s plans and policies. Looking at the indirect attacks, such as criticism of a plan without also threatening the face of the opponent personally, the Americans show a small proportion of thought units, Egyptians show no thought units in the category, and the British show a very high level. Indeed, the American proportion is the lowest among the 11 American campaigns we have studied, while the British proportion is equal to the highest level among the American debates. In essence, the British candidates were behaving as the Americans did in the early days of televised debates. We think this form of attack in the debates, especially attacks and criticisms that don’t focus on a person as much as a plan, is one of the best practices for debates. Unfortunately, the Americans do not tend to use this form of debate behavior any more, and it appears in the case of this one Egyptian debate, there is also a lack of focus on plans and policies.

4.5 Attacks on use of data
Finally, one thing we found very striking about the comparisons here was the high percentage of thought units used to attack the opponent’s use of data in the Egyptian debate (see Tables 1 and 3). Basically this category includes those claims that the opponent (of the opponent’s administration or party) is using data in a biased and possible incorrect way. One may claim the other side isn’t revealing the whole picture of information that is available, that the other side was wrong in what it proposed was the other’s record on activities and statements, that the other side is not interpreting data as it should be, etc. We are used to seeing a prevalence of this type of argument or attack when the parties are claiming the other’s proposals and plans won’t work and are misguided. The attacked party might rebut saying the opponent’s criticism lacks merit due to a biased or incorrect interpretation of the data.

This was clearly not the case in the Egyptian debates. Even though the amount of attacks on data use far exceeded any American debate, the amount of attack on the opponent’s plans and policies was virtually nil. Upon examining the transcripts, we found the claims about inappropriate use of data were to rebut the opponent’s claims about one’s character and leadership. For example, if one party claimed (or implied as it turns out) that his opponent failed to resign from the Mubarak government after a certain incident, the other would claim that the accuser did not have the record of events correct or failed in his interpretation of the what actions the other did take. Indeed, the major portion of face threat in the Egyptian debate was about 1) the opponents’ character and leadership competence and then 2) the inappropriate way the would-be slanderer was using incorrect data in order to make the claim about deficient character or leadership.

5. Discussion
In looking at the aggregate results of direct and indirect face threats, the results indicating some similarities across the three campaigns. It was interesting to find that the amount of direct face threat across the sample mirrored the U.S. average of direct threat. This might be some indication of a cultural similarity. The fact that debates call for criticism of opposing candidates’ programs and records, and that the amount of direct face threat was similar in this sample suggests that more work might be done to assess standards of direct threat in other nations’ leader debates. However, these findings are limited to just the most recent campaigns and only one Egyptian debate. A larger, more comprehensive sample of debates from other countries might yield a different finding on the question of overall use of direct threats.

When we turn to a consideration of indirect face threat some interesting differences appear. The fact that U.S. indirect threats were low suggests a concern with U.S. presidential candidates reliance on direct attacks. We wonder whether the decreasing use of indirect attacks reflects a misguided assumption on the part of candidates and advisers that respect for the opponent’s face should be abandoned in the hope of generating an impression of a strong candidate. However, the fact the U.K. debates and the Egyptian debate showed higher levels of indirect face threat reveals a potential cultural difference between the state of U.S. debates and those of these other two countries.

Looking at specific content dimensions of the coding schema, the results concerning attacks on character and competence revealed a similarity between the three campaigns in terms of higher levels of direct face threats in the U.K. and Egyptians debates. However, it is interesting to note that with the U.K. this was a well established democracy while Egypt was attempting to model western democratic practices in their historic first experiment with a political debate. The uniqueness of the events might have accounted for the intense nature of attacks on character and competence. The debates in the U.K. took place in the context of three person race, a situation that had rarely occurred in the past. Egypt had never held debates before and the candidates had limited experience to draw on in preparing for the debates. Thus the high degree of direct attack on character and competence might have meant that the candidates and their advisers saw little value in balancing concerns for the face of the opponent with the need to advocate for office. This, however, does not explain the intensity of the U.S. debates. In the 2012 campaign, the direct attacks on character and competence were the highest for American debates since 1960. Also, however, the British debates exceeded even that number. We can only speculate that as the British campaign tightened up in the last few days, the candidates increased the intensity of their attacks in the hope of drawing distinctions between themselves in ways that might win over voters.

The last two findings raise some interesting topics regarding Egypt’s attempt to break free of authoritarian rule and move to a more democratic system of government. In terms of attacks on ideas, positions, and plans, American and British debates featured about the same amount of direct attacks, However, the Egyptian debate showed almost no instances where the candidates argued about ideas, positions, and plans. This finding by itself, suggests that the Egyptian candidates were less prepared to advance and test ideas, positions, and plans, and more predisposed to attack character and competence and to attack each other on the use of data. In fact, there was a high percentage of thought units devoted to attacking each person’s use of data in the Egyptian debate. When we looked more closely at the messages dealing with the use of data in the Egyptian debate, we realized that what we coded as arguments over the use of data could also be interpreted by an Egyptian as an attack on character or competence. For example, to say to your opponent that, “you must be using wrong information to come to such a conclusion as you have,” is considered to be an attack on a person’s capacity to see an issue in the same way that others do, that the opponent lacks the ability to make sense out of the social reality in the same way as most others do. Within this kind of a statement is an implied presumption for the candidate who utters such a comment and calls into question the opposing candidate’s ability to use information in the same way that others do. Thus, it might be the case that to be sensitive to the different ways in which individuals from other cultures engage in argument over political issues in debates, some revision might be necessary to account for the differences in the way that communities engage in political argument.

Last, we think that it is interesting that the Egyptian debate featured so few exchanges over ideas, positions, and plans. We think it might be the case that when a nation attempts to move away from authoritarian forms of rule, democratic traditions and practices need to be cultivated over longer periods and institutionalized as political traditions before they can achieve the promise of informing the electorate. Even after attempting to model the debate on the classic 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debates, the candidates did not engage in substantive exchanges over differences in ideas, positions, and plans. In conclusion, the results of the study indicate interesting differences between these debates and warrant further exploration of cultural differences in political debates.

6. Conclusion
To summarize our findings as we look across the intercultural sample of campaign debates, we found both similarities and differences. The similarities include the amount of direct face threat used, a level that has actually been fairly consistent across the American debates as well as the use of direct face threat used to attack the character and leadership competence of the opponent. The differences include the relatively low level of indirect face threat used by the Americans, the extremely low use of any criticism of plans and policies in the Egyptian debate as well as extremely high use of criticism of the manner in which an opponent has used or manipulated data.

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Abstract: There is no clear consensus about a difference between explanation and argument. After having explained why traditional points of view of informal logic raise a problem, I’ll argue for a linguistic point of view on this question and show how rhetorical strategic moves can exploit the blurry frontier between explanation and argumentation. A third category seems necessary to introduce – “apparent explanation” – and two French connectives – “car” and “parce que” – will be used to describe differences.
Keywords: Explanation, argument, informal logic, linguistics, connectives, car, parce que.

1. Introduction
The aim of this paper is to highlight some linguistic insights on the difference between explanation and argument in order to make apparent some rhetorical strategic moves that exploit the blurry frontier between both them. In order to achieve that objective, French connectives “car” and “parce que” will be used at the end of the paper – but the main ideas should remain clear for non-French speakers.

I would like here to offer a slightly new point of view on a very old and common problem: how to distinguish between explanation and argumentation? I will offer here a linguist’s point of view on this problem, which is often tackled by philosophers and critical thinkers. After having explained the linguistic clues I use to distinguish explanation and argument, I will discuss rhetorical strategies that exploit the appearance of an explanation to fulfil argumentative purposes. During this examination, I will need to speak about the French connectives “car” and “parce que”, but non-French speakers will be able to understand what I would like to underline.
Broadly speaking, two points of view on a difference between explanation and argumentation can be found in the literature. The first one comes from a philosophical side – mainly informal logic and critical thinking – and a second one comes from a linguistic side, which is perhaps less known outside French tradition on argumentation. There are problems within each of these sides: the old issue of differences between explanation and argumentation is still not resolved. Recently, McKeon (2013) argued for example that explanations should be considered as arguments. On the other side, Trudy Govier (Govier, 2005) has written that explanation and arguments are different, but some explanations can nevertheless be seen as arguments within different contexts.

Now the French linguist Jean-Michel Adam considers that explanations and arguments have different patterns, called sequences. He argued in a seminal book that argumentative sequence (inspired from Toulmin’s model) differs from an explicative sequence by the explicit presence of a problem and a solution. Thus, example 1 must be seen as an explanation:
(1) Why should I stop smoking ? Because, as soon as I run, I have difficulties to breathe.

An explanation, according to Adam (Adam, 2011), ties together four “propositions” (not in a logical sense): P. exp. 0: Introduction; P. exp 1: Problem or Question (Why P ? How P?); P. exp 2: Solution or Answer (Because Q) and P. exp. 3: Conclusion – Evaluation. The presence of an explicit question and its immediate answer introduced by because seems to be the criteria to distinguish explanation and argumentation. But the example (2) would probably be seen as an argumentative move in Adam’s viewpoint.

(2) I should stop smoking, because as soon as I run, I have difficulties to breathe.

The problem of these two similar examples is that a conclusion can be an explanandum and that premises can function as an explanans, just because of the presence of a why-question. This sudden change of nature of the sequence seems unsatisfactory, since the semantic point of view within these clauses seems untouched.

On the philosophical side, problems arise because of several difficulties rightfully underlined by Govier (1987):
1. In this example, ‘thus’ is used is the pardigmatic logical role, preceding the conclusion in an argument. But in other cases, ‘thus’ functions just as naturally in an explanation.
2. According to the classic deductive-nomological account, explanation is one type of argument. Although this account is now widely criticized, it was dominant in the philosophy of science for several decades and still enjoys influence.
3. As many informal logic teachers have observed for their displeasure, it is very difficult to teach students the distinction between explanation and argument. They find it hard to grasp in theory and still more difficult to apply in practice.
4. Even when the distinction is grasped in theory, many passages, real or invented, can be interpreted as either explanation or argument. (Govier 1987, p. 159 – 160)

The first quotation illustrates that the same connectives can be used in argumentation and explanation; this is also the case in French. The second one points out that, historically, explanation was just an argument scheme; thus explanation was seen as a category inside argument. The third one illustrates a very common pedagogical problem: a lot of people, including students but not excluding teachers, do not understand the difference between explanation and argumentation. The last one, finally, emphasizes either an empirical problem of some unclassified examples or an insufficiency of theory that prevails to distinguishing explanation and argument. Why is this so difficult to grasp a difference between these two types of reasoning? Answering this question needs to understand first how they are both defined.

To sum up the general frame in which explanations and arguments are distinguished, a good starting point is the following one: “Arguments offer justifications; explanations offer understanding” (Govier, 2005, p. 21). In another way:
In order for a collection C of propositions to represent one’s evidential reasons for a proposition P, one must be more certain of the propositions in C than one is of P. (2) In order for a collection C of propositions to represent one’s explanatory reasons for a proposition P, one needn’t be more certain of the propositions in C than one if of P (McKeon, 2013, pp. 286–287)

This leads to consider that “(P) Carole is the best math student in the class, (Q) because she is the only student in the class who is going to a special program for gifted students” (Govier, 2005, p. 22) may be interpreted as an explanation if everyone knows (P) but as an argument if the addressee must be convinced that (Q) is true. Hence, the difference between argumentation and explanation depends on addressee’s knowledge.

But this view, which is presented as unstable as Govier’s example of Carole reveals (“Even when the distinction is grasped in theory, many passages, real or invented, can be interpreted as either explanation or argument” (1987: 159)) may also be unsatisfactory. I would like to highlight three obstacles of the philosophical approach in the next sections.

2. Philosophical obstacles
The first obstacle is that certainty is viewed as an evaluation by the addressee. McKeon argues against Govier’s premise that “one must be more certain of the propositions in C than one is of P” (McKeon 2013: 286), writing: “[Govier’s premise] is false. […] I am certain of A and B, but not of C. I come to see that A and B are evidential reasons for C and as a consequence I become equally certain of C […]” (McKeon 2013, p. 287).

This counter-argument exhibits the pronoun “I”, which is clearly the addressee’s epistemic evaluation of C, between uncertainty or certainty. Thus, certainty appears to be a cognitive reality and not a linguistic feature. It raises a problem of access to an evaluation of certainty for any analyst. This absence of a clear-cut criterion about addressee’s evaluation prevents any analyst to settle between explanation and argument in ambiguous cases.

As a linguist, my solution is not to evaluate cognitive certainty but to describe how it is linguistically encoded. Works on epistemic modality[i] epitomizes this view on certainty to the extent that “manually annotate and consequently automate identification of statements with an explicitly expressed certainty or doubt, or shades of epistemic qualifications in between” (Rubin, 2010, p. 535) can now be done. It means that a discourse analyst interested in evaluating whether a statement is an explanation or an argument should focus on certainty encoded by the speaker’s rather than addressee’s evaluation. In this frame, only absolute certainty (the highest of the five levels described by (Rubin, Liddy, & Kando, 2006; Rubin, 2010)) is a relevant category for explanation.

The second obstacle is also tied with cognitive contingencies. Context-dependency is quite an hurdle in this case. These two quotations illustrate the problem [italics are mine]:
Passages that appear to be arguments are sometimes not arguments but explanations. The appearance of words that are common indicators […] cannot settle the matter, because those words are used in both explanations and arguments. We need to know the intention of the author” (Copi & Cohen, 2008, p. 19).

In such a context, there would be no point in arguing for that claim, because there is no need to try to rationally persuade anyone that it is true; the people spoken to already believe it (Govier, 1987, p. 23).

My view, as a linguist and discourse analyst, is that we can only infer relevant intentions from what is said and make assumptions about the addressee’s mental states (beliefs, desires, intentions, etc.) from a contextual point of view. Works by Grice (1975) or Sperber & Wilson (1996) are typically used to calculate meaning from what has been said. On the other side, rhetoric is first defined by making adjustments with addressee’s beliefs and desires (Herman & Oswald, 2014). Knowing intentions and beliefs is quite an impossible task, but a discourse analyst should make assumptions or hypotheses about these mental states and estimate their probability within a given context of communication.

The third philosophical obstacle is linked with a strong vision of truth. “Explaining why C [I should stop smoking] is true is the very same thing as giving a reason to think C is true” (Wright, 2002, p. 37) is a typical quotation that illustrates how evaluating truth is unavoidable in these matter or in order to settle the question. Linguists, on the other side, aren’t generally interested in knowing the truth, but they are interested in showing how reality is represented.

(3) (P) Joe took the time machine, (A) because he needed digital pictures of Napoleon during the battle of Waterloo.

(3) will be seen as an explanation even if (P) is very likely to be false in 2014, because (P) is represented as real. Linguistic markers underline it: use of the simple past; act of an assertion; no doubt mentioned on an epistemic level. This utterance appears to be true and is intended to appear so for the addressee independently of our knowledge of the state of the world.

So, if we accept to get around those obstacles as I do with the linguist’s points of view I’ve just underlined, we can define explanation like this:

Explanation of a proposition (p) by a proposition or a set of propositions (q) implies that (p) is linguistically presented as indisputable, i.e. represented as true or as certain
This leads of course to another difficulty: what is linguistically indisputable? The key criterion I shall use here is linguistic modalities.

3. Using linguistic modalities
I’ll use the most thorough book on the subject in French, Laurent Gosselin’s book published in 2010 (Gosselin, 2010) in which he detailed six types of modalities: alethic, epistemic, appreciative, axiological, boulomaïc and deontic modalities. It is important to underline that we will not use logical modalities like necessity or contingency. Of course, the modalities that are tied with the question of explanation are essentially alethic modalities (truth represented) and epistemic modalities on certitude. Let’s see those two cases.

“Alethic modality characterizes fundamentally descriptive judgments [they are supposing preexisting facts and report them] that refer to an existing reality, independently of judgments passed on it”(Gosselin 2010 : 314), my translation). Statements expressing alethic modality are not considered as standpoints, but as facts which cannot be presented with “I guess that” or “I find that” – see example 4. This is quite a good test to identify modalities.

(4) Joan is a widower → ?? I guess that Joan is a widower / It is a fact that Joan is a widower

Conversely, epistemic modalities are linked with subjectivity. Gosselin talked about “subjective truth”. It is difficult to insert a circumlocution like “It’s a fact that” before an epistemic utterance – see example 5 – without a sort of power grab on this utterance. There’s no problem however to insert “I guess that”

(5) My computer is too old → ? It is a fact that my computer is too old / I guess that my computer is too old

Alethic modality is quite clear: it is the only modality that necessarily leads to an explanation. Those statements are linguistically represented as true. Hence, any causal conjunction following an alethic statement A is designed to offer an explanation of it (why A? or How A?).

Dealing with epistemic modality is a bitt more complex and confusing. Epistemic modality concerns “subjective truths”, beliefs on objects of this world, “descriptive judgments which do not constitute value judgments, but which do not also put back to an autonomous reality” (Gosselin, 2010, p. 325). With epistemic modality, what is represented is not a matter of truth but a matter of certainty and a matter of degrees of certainty.

In principle, epistemic modality expressed in (6) leads to argumentation, since the conclusion is a standpoint and following arguments give reasons to justify beliefs.

(6) My computer may be too old now.

But there is a major problem with epistemic modality when the epistemic value is absolute certainty (e.g.: “My computer is too old”). Here, the subjective part of the clause, which was inherent in the modal verb “may”, seems erased by the certitude of the modal verb “to be”. This is a strong rhetorical move when epistemic modalities appear to be transformed into alethic ones – see the move between (7) and (8).

(7) “It is estimated that there are 2 million weapons in Switzerland” → (8) “There are 2 million weapons in Switzerland” (and it’s a fact)

With this kind of move, an evaluation of reality appears to be encoded as something which is imposed as true. In this case, when reasons are provided, they appear as explanations. (8) is not expected to be contradicted or called into question. This strategy offers a crucial advantage for the speaker, which is pointed out by Aristotle in Topics:
Not every problem, nor every thesis, should be examined, but only one which might puzzle one of those who need argument […]. For people who are puzzled […] to know whether snow is white or not need perception. (Aristotle, 2014)

This move – transforming epistemic clauses into alethic utterances – uses what Danblon (2001) calls obviousness effect. A consequence of this effect is to let appear some premises or conclusions as not open to discussion or to justification or not expecting to be discussed – as some linguistic presuppositions do.

4. Pseudo-explanations
There are also moves in which the speaker can exploit the blurring lines between explanation and argument without transforming modalities. In order to analyze such moves, one must decide if the conclusion of an argument or an explanation is represented as admitted. In other words, the analyst must evaluate if the speaker commits the audience to believe the reality described in the conclusive clause. This evaluation, founded on linguistic clues, leads me to conclude that we need a third category between argument and explanation: a kind of pseudo-explanation where (p) is considered as admitted and takes advantage of the certainty expressed to appear as explicative but, as these statements remain non-alethic, they may be disputed like an argument. Here are some cases of apparent explanations or pseudo-explanations:

The first case exploits the “invisible” epistemicity of non-axiologic evaluative terms: “Philip is tall”, “Taxis are expensive”. This move counts clearly on a supposed common ground, or a doxa, between speaker and audience. If Philip is a classic European basketball player, probably no one will contest (P) “Philip is tall”; if he is a grown-up French man whose height is about 1m80 (5.91 feet), (P) will probably be more disputable. If, finally, his height is about 1m55 with the same contextual data, (P) will probably be considered as ironic. Because the speaker counts on a collective acceptance on his/her claim, “Philip is tall, because he ate a lot of soup” can be counted as an explanation. Still, the “conclusion” part of it remains intrinsically epistemic and cannot be considered as “pure” explanation.

The second case is an echo of the first one. Doxa and stereotypes taken for granted – e.g. “French people are eating cheese after the main course, because…” – offer also apparent explanations. In this example, the speaker gives no linguistic clue that “French eating cheese after the main course” is a disputable generalization. It is assessed as a monolithic truth. Hence, the audience is invited to consider it as true and non-disputable.

The third and last case I see – without aiming at completeness of these observations – can be called a gamble on certainty. The future tense, even if it is inherently unknown and disputable, may encode a virtual certainty. “John will arrive at noon: he told me that he caught the 11:00 am train” offers an example where future can be taken for granted and represented as certain.

These cases have one common trait: they count on audience’s acceptance. Now, in contrast, we may find alethic clauses that are in fact linked with argument and not explanation or pseudo-explanation. Inference to best explanation is, despite its name, an argumentative move. If (9) is alethic, (p), in example 10, becomes epistemic, because (q) is used to establish the truth represented in (p).

(9) John has left the party

(10) (p) John has left the party, (q) because no one has seen him for an hour

Yet, alethic form of (p) conceals the intrinsically uncertain conclusion. Note that “I am certain that John has left the party” is completely epistemic and appears paradoxically less certain than (2). In these cases, the process of establishing a conclusion implies in retrospect that (p) cannot be considered as true or certain. Hence, it cannot be an explanation. It is important to see that alethic nature of (p) disappears when it becomes clear that (p) is inferred and not stated.

Table 1: Explanation, apparent explanation and argumentation

Finally, axiological or evaluative modalities (“I love it”) are not represented as true nor admitted because of the speaker’s commitment in evaluative terms and deontic modalities (“we should do that”) are intrinsically tied with a possible disagreement. These cases are open to disputation, which is a key criterion to identify an argumentative process. Even when appreciative modalities are generalized, for instance “This is a great movie”, the subjective adjective “great” is intrinsically representing a subjective evaluative standpoint that isn’t cancelled in generalization. Let’s sum up our position, before seeing how connectives can interact with this table.
5. French connectives in interaction with explanation and argument
Because can be translated in French either by “parce que” or “car” (see Zufferey, 2012). The main difference is the following one: “Parce que” is generally and quite often connected to an explicative move:
“Affirmation that p has a cause q, in the phrase p parce que q always takes for granted truth of p. We start with p, considered as undisputed and then we present its origin q”. (Groupe Lambda-l, 1975, p. 59, my translation)

This quotation of the seminal article on differences between those French connectives highlights that q can be taken for granted, even if q is open to discussion. Hence, using “parce que” is a possible rhetorical strategy in order to make an argument appear as an explanation:
(11) According to Samy Chaar, who has met her some time ago, this nomination “is good news, because [parce que] we have avoided a war of succession” (Le Temps, October 10 2013, my translation).

Example (11) illustrates that the speaker seems to “forget” the evaluative modality contained in “good news” and offers this argumentative move as an explanation. The obviousness effect of “good news” included in an explicative move is an interesting power grab: the audience is supposed to accept the idea of “good news”. This strategic move can be illustrated in table 1 from case C to case A and B. Unlike “parce que”, “car” is exclusively argumentative:
Enunciation of q is represented as being intended for justification of the enunciation of p (groupe lambda-l 1975 : 259, my translation)

“Car” illustrates a double meta-discursive move: “I’ve said p and I justify p by saying q”. “Car” doesn’t directly give a cause of (p) but a reason that justifies saying (p). This presupposes that (p) can be disputed. Therefore, “car” is strictly an argumentative indicator. Hence, when “car” is used with apparent explanations, it reveals inherently greater expectations to be called into question than with “parce que” and gives up “explicative appearance” to exhibit an argumentative nature. This move from case B in table 1 to case C can be illustrated by (example 12)

(12) (p) The conference fee is expensive, (q) because (CAR) organizing committee must pay many students to do the job

The use of “car” instead of “parce que” reveals that (p) may already be a disputed issue in a community that leads the speaker to a justification. The speaker acknowledges that (p) is a matter of concern or may lead to an open debate. Thus, the pseudo-explanation is in fact embedded in a real or potential argumentative situation. Some examples are even stranger. In principle, if “car” is strictly argumentative, one shouldn’t find “car” with alethic modality. It’s not the case. Examples (13) and (14) show it:
(13) (p) Noël Mamère : “I’m leaving the Green Party, (q) because [car] the party is captive of its factions” (Le Monde, September 26, 2013, p. 10, my translation).

(14) (p) Nelson Mandela’s agony goes on (q) because [car] “his soul isn’t in peace”, according to traditional chiefs who estimate that Mandela’s ancestors are irritated by family quarrels (Tribune de Genève, June 30, 2013, my translation)

In those examples, (p) are undisputed statements of fact. So, what are the effects of this move from case A in table 1 to case C ?

From a contextual point of view, Noël Mamère’s and Nelson Mandela’s cases are clearly moving from a non-polemic linguistic explanation taking place in a polemic context. Even if truth of (p) isn’t called into question, the causes in (q) are expected to be disputed. “Car”, in these situations, reveals the speaker’s self-consciousness that his/her explanation will almost certainly create a dispute or arouse an opposition: disagreements about offered causes or about the link between (p) and (q) are now expected.

This… explanation may let us understand an empirical test lead by Sandrine Zufferey (2012). In this test, participants were asked to fill a blank within two clauses with either “parce que”, “car” or “puisque” (since). Example (15) has delivered rather unexpected results.

(15) John laughed _ Peter stumbled

Indeed, 72,5% of participants put “parce que” (72,5%) as a connective between these clauses whereas 27,5% participants prefer “car” (27,5%). It is perfectly standard and expected to see a massive preference for “parce que” because of the alethic nature of “John laughed”. But how to explain that more than a quarter of tested people prefer “car”? It is difficult to answer, because there wasn’t any situational context in this test. But in order to understand that “car” is still perceived as possible, one must probably admit that “car” shows a readiness for a discussion. To be more precise, “car” indicates that “Peter stumbled” may be disputed as the true or the only cause of John’s laughter.

6. Conclusion
We wanted to highlight in this paper that, in a linguistic perspective, two criteria must be used to make fruitful distinction between explanation and argument: one is a semantico-enunciative analysis of proposition (p) which may be done with linguistic modalities; the second one is pragmatic expectations to be eventually called into question a in a real or potential context. These two criteria lead to distinguish in fact three categories: explanations, apparent explanations and arguments. We defined apparent or pseudo-explanations as non-alethic clauses explained or justified by some reason if and only if these non-alethic clauses are expressed with an absolute certainty, i.e. taken for granted by the speaker.

Strategic moves to open or to close a possible disputation must be analysed within this frame. We may find at least two cases: non-certainty bound modalities (deontic or evaluative modalities for example) may be linguistically encoded as generalized (“This is a wonderful movie”). In this case, it seems that the evaluative nature of this clause will remain as argumentative. But in the second case (“John is rich”), erasing the epistemic nature of this clause (“I think that John is rich”) leads in fact to turn an argumentative move into an explanation. Finally, the dynamics of some connectives (at least in French) is a way to analyse rhetorical and strategic moves: adding a layer of explanation on intrinsic argument (some uses of parce que) or expressing in an explanation an expectation of plausible future argument (some rare cases of car).

Acknowledgements
Thanks to Steve Oswald for the precious help in Amsterdam, to Jérôme Jacquin for the motivating moral support and to Thierry Raeber for his enthusiasm and nice ideas of linguistic tests.

NOTE
i. “Epistemic modality, or certainty, concerns a linguistic expression of an estimation of the likelihood that a certain hypothetical state of affairs is, has been, or will be true (Nuyts, 2001). Subtle linguistic clues, or markers, contribute toward the user’s understanding of how much credibility can be attached to individual propositions and whether the information comes from the first-hand or second-hand sources” (Rubin, 2010, p. 535)

References
Adam, J.-M. (2011). Les textes: types et prototypes. Paris: A. Colin.
Aristotle. (2014). Complete works of Aristotle, Volume 1: The revised Oxford translation. Princeton University Press.
Copi, I. M., & Cohen, C. (2008). Introduction to logic (13 edition.). Upper Saddle River, N.J: Prentice Hall.
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Zufferey, S. (2012). “Car, parce que, puisque” revisited: Three empirical studies on French causal connectives. Journal of Pragmatics, 44(2), 138–153.

Abstract: During an international conflict, even otherwise objective journalists frequently display a strong emotional commitment to their government’s stance in the crisis. This commitment may cloud rational judgment, turning journalism into propaganda. A journalist’s choice to abandon truth-seeking in favor of persuasion makes the journalist a party to the conflict and transforms a critical discussion, based on a cooperative approach, into a persuasion dialogue, based on an adversarial approach.
Keywords: emotion, fallacy, journalism, persuasion, propaganda, reason.

1. Introduction
During an international conflict, even otherwise objective journalists frequently display a strong emotional commitment to the stance of their own country in the crisis. This commitment may cloud rational judgment, turning journalism into propaganda. The paper is an attempt to show that if a journalist chooses to abandon truth-seeking in favor of persuasion as his primary communication objective he immediately becomes a party to the conflict he is supposed to be observing impartially. In the end, such a journalist can turn into a propagandist. Abandoning truth-seeking transforms a critical discussion, based on a cooperative approach, into a persuasion dialogue, based on an adversarial approach. The persuasion dialogue, in turn, can further escalate a quarrel.
To provide answers as to how this transformation occurs in global journalism, this paper examines interplay between propaganda and journalism by delineating persuasion and truth-seeking in American and Russian media coverage of the Ukrainian crisis. The paper seeks to examine American and Russian media coverage of the Ukrainian crisis and show the nature of propaganda as fallacious emotional appeals, defined as those that supplant rational appeals.

2. Discussion
Propaganda is an elusive topic to describe using verifiable criteria. The challenge is all the more fascinating given that we are currently experiencing an all-out propaganda war between Russia and the West in a completely new context. Unlike the Second World War, this is a local conflict, and unlike during the Cold War, people on both sides have full access to the other side’s media discourse if they so wish (the question is how many people wish to make that effort rather than stay within the comfort zone of their own country’s media narrative – a condition for propaganda to thrive). Richard Alan Nelson defines propaganda as follows:
Propaganda is neutrally defined as a systematic form of purposeful persuasion that attempts to influence the emotions, attitudes, opinions, and actions of specified target audiences for ideological, political or commercial purposes through the controlled transmission of one-sided messages (which may or may not be factual) via mass and direct media channels. (Nelson, 1996, pp. 232–233)

Another interpretation is that propagandists present their facts selectively (thus possibly lying by omission) and use loaded messages to produce an emotional rather than rational response to the information presented (Denish, 2012, p.1).

There are studies concerning principles and responsibilities of journalism as an antidote to propaganda, written by journalism practitioners and critics. In their prominent book, Director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, Tom Rosenstiel and his co-author Bill Kovach (Rosenstiel & Kovach, 2001), present ethical guidelines to journalists based on the common conceptions about the press, such as neutrality, fairness, and balance. They argue that journalism’ first obligation is to the truth, its essence is a discipline of verification and that its practitioners must maintain an independence from those they cover.
The paper presents argumentation discourse analysis of the Ukraine-related media content of two American mainstream TV channels: CNN (as an example of a broadcaster with an international focus) and Fox News (a broadcaster targeting primarily a domestic audience) and their Russian counterparts: RT (formerly Russia Today), which broadcasts for an international audience, and the All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company (referred to as the Russia Channel), which is mainly a domestic broadcaster. This is done because propaganda for the domestic consumption is quite different from international propaganda. The choice of channels is also determined by the similarity of the pairs in terms of political affiliation: the more liberal (CNN and RT) vs. the more conservative TV channels (Fox News and Russia Channel). This juxtaposition will increase the validity of the comparative study and raise the likelihood of interesting findings.

Appeals to emotions, such as fear, pity and compassion, are not necessarily wrong; they used legitimately and effectively in public awareness and charity campaigns. The problem is that while appeals to emotion have a legitimate, even important, place as arguments in persuasion dialogue, they need to be treated with caution because they can also be used fallaciously when they supplant rational arguments.
But how do we decide which emotional appeal is fallacious and which is not? The paper is based on the presumption that certain types of emotional appeals are very powerful as arguments in themselves, but they may have a much greater impact on an audience than is warranted in the case argued (Walton, 1992, p. 1).

There are three main emotional appeals that supplant reason:
Argumentum ad populum or mob appeal invite “people’s unthinking acceptance of ideas which are presented in a strong, theatrical manner and appeal to our lowest instincts” (Engel, 1976, pp. 113-114). The Russian takeover of the Crimea has been presented by the Russian mainstream media as liberation, reunification of the Russians living there with their homeland, akin to their return from captivity. According to this line, it was a legitimate restoration of historical truth: an act of saving Sebastopol, a city of Russian naval glory, for which so much Russian blood has been spilt, from becoming a NATO naval base. The images showed Crimeans dancing in the street with tears of joy in their eyes.

The story “Ukraine and EU sign free trade zone deal” published on the RT website (http://rt.com) on June 27, 2014, says:
Georgia and Moldova also signed both political and economic parts of the Association Agreement. Ukraine signed a political part of the agreement in March, shortly after Crimea rejoined Russia.

Note the clause Crimea rejoined Russia: the actor is Crimea not Russia who is the recipient of the action which is described by a verb with a clearly positive connotation conveying a sense of restoration of something that has been broken. The style of the story is markedly neutral; it is presented as a mere narrative of events that happened in and around Ukraine. Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine signed the Association Agreement while Crimea rejoined Russia. Everyone is happy; they have got what they wanted.

The Culture Channel which is part of the Russian State Television Holding Company hosted two cultural historians on the Power of the Fact show as far back as 2012. The summary of the episode, published on the Culture Channel website (http://tvkultura.ru/), describes the program as follows:
One of the most ancient inscriptions in Russian dating back to the 11th century talks about the Crimea: “Prince Gleb measured the sea on ice from Tmutarakan to Korchev to be 14,000 sazhen.” (Sazhen is a measure equaling approximately 2 meters. Korchev is the modern Crimean city of Kerch). Later the histories of Russia and Crimea have been so intertwined that the Crimean context has become part of Russian consciousness, and a significant part of Crimean cultural heritage has become part of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union – Crimea as a unique mixture of civilizations from the Hellenic to the Soviet. What is the Crimean myth, does Crimea hold the same cultural appeal today as it did one hundred years ago, at the time of the Silver Age? Are there any people in Crimea continuing the Russian cultural tradition?

In this discussion, again, the sense of a lost and regained part of Russia was the core of the persuasive thrust.
Another RT story “Who undermines the Budapest Memorandum on Ukraine?”, contributed by Dr Alexander Yakovenko, Russian Ambassador to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Deputy foreign minister (2005-2011), published on May 29, 2014, contains a picture of a poster in Russian with the following caption: “Children walk past a billboard sign in Sevastopol on March 13, 2014, reading “On March 18 we will choose either … or…” and depicting Crimea in red with swastika and covered in barbed wire (L) and Crimea with the colours of the Russian flag (R) (AFP Photo/Victor Drachev)”. Note the hidden juxtaposition of innocent children (a girl and a boy for balance) signifying peace and security for the children and a need to protect them from a clear threat represented by a neo-Nazi Ukraine. This powerful visual is an example of appeal to fear in a theatrical manner. It is also an argumentum ad hominem described below in that it demonizes the opposing side (see Fig.1)

Argumentum as mesirecordiam is fallacious when one tries to persuade someone to accept a popular view by arousing his sympathy or compassion (Michalos, 1970, p. 51). American mainstream media used very strong vocabulary, such as “aggression”, ‘annexation” and “occupation”. They compared the Russian involvement in the Crimea and Ukrainian eastern provinces with Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland in March 1938 (under the pretext of the alleged privations suffered by the ethnic German population living in those regions). This was meant to mobilize American government and society for a rescue mission to protect Ukraine from a Russian bully. On the other hand, the Russian media discourse also centered on protecting the Ukraine’s Russian-speaking population from neo-Nazi groups from Western Ukraine. The culmination of this appeal was the coverage of the Odessa tragedy in which over 40 pro-Russian protesters were killed.

As the genre of news is supposed to be objective, we often find opinion in the concluding part of a news story meant to put the news in perspective. The nature of a background setting is that it calls for a concise summary of the events leading up to the situation described in the story. This compactness leaves very little room for a two-sided approach to the news. It is in that part that we see opinion clearly stated. The story titled “Ukraine signed a trade and political deal with the EU last week, the one that Yanukovych had rejected. Ukrainian, Russian leaders agree to work on ceasefire”, published on June 30, 2014, on the Fox News website (http://foxnews.com), states:
The conflict in eastern Ukraine began after a protest movement among those seeking closer ties with the EU prompted President Viktor Yanukovych to flee in February. Calling it an illegal coup, Russia seized and annexed Ukraine’s Crimea region in March, saying it was protecting Russian speakers. The insurrection in the east began shortly afterward.” The authors openly blame Russia for seizing and annexing one Ukrainian region and indirectly for igniting an insurrection in another, whereas President Yanukovich had to flee from protesters merely seeking closer ties with the EU.

The story “Ukraine cries ‘robbery’ as Russia annexes Crimea”, published on March 18, 2014 on the CNN website (http://cnn.com), is supplied with this opening summary “Cheers in Moscow. Outrage in Kiev. Bloodshed in Simferopol.” Description of the bloodshed is found in the middle part of the story:
Masked gunmen killed a member of Ukraine’s military, wounded another and arrested the remaining staff of Ukraine’s military topographic and navigation directorate at Simferopol, Defense Ministry spokesman Vladislav Seleznyov told CNN.

While the loss of even a single life is a tragedy, the use of the word bloodshed is a clear overuse of emotional appeal and is an example of argumentum ad misericordiam.

Argumentum ad hominem is an argument that uses a personal attack against an opposing arguer to support the conclusion that the opposing argument is wrong. Character assassination is evident in American media demonizing Putin, who is often described as a former KGB spy and a dictator with Soviet imperialistic ambitions. Character assassination, however, is such a powerful tactic in argumentation that it is difficult to resist using it, and it is then difficult to prevent the argument from denigrating into a personal quarrel.

The story “Putin calls for compromise in Ukraine,” published on the Fox News website on June 22, 2014, says:
Separatists in the eastern Donetsk and Lubansk regions have declared independence and asked to join Russia. Moscow has rebuffed their appeals, but is seen by Ukraine and the West as actively supporting the insurgency. Putin’s conciliatory words came as Russia began large-scale military exercises and after NATO accused Russia of moving troops back toward the Ukrainian border.

A circumstantial variant of an ad hominem attack on Putin is evident in the juxtaposition of Putin’s words and actions: his conciliatory words and his rebuffing of the separatists’ appeals come at the background of Russia’s large-scale military exercises.

3. Conclusion
To sum up, these emotional arguments all play upon the prejudices in an audience. To bring these prejudices to the fore, the speaker directs an argument at what he or she takes to be the deeply held emotional commitments of the audience. Such tactics exploit the bias of an audience toward its own interests – whether it is a financial interest, a social interest in belonging to a certain group (including a nation or a group of nations, such as membership of the European Union for the Ukraine), or an interest in avoiding harm or danger (e.g. a Ukrainian nationalist threat for eastern Ukrainians).
A well-known 17th-century political maxim said that interests never lie. People lie, nations lie, but interests never lie. The primary interest of a journalist turned propagandist is to resolve a difference of opinion by defeating his opponent, while an objective journalist’s goal is to find the common truth of the matter.

Plato’s Socrates advocated dialectic aimed at establishing the truth through reasoned arguments, based on a cooperative view of argument. Sophists taught rhetoric aimed at persuasion, based on an adversarial approach to dispute. Plato’s dialectician considered his opponent a partner in discussion while a Sophist saw an adversary in his interlocutor. While both bore their audience in mind when arguing their points, the latter viewed the audience as his main target of persuasion, since it was the audience that ultimately chose the winner.

References
Denish, N.A. (2012). The desired result of attitude toward the subject in the target audience of propaganda. In The Journal of Historical Research, (p.1) www.ssresearcher.com
Engel, M.S. (1976). With Good Reason: An Introduction to Informal Fallacies. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s.
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Michalos, A.C. (1970). Improving Your Reasoning. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.
Nelson, R.A. (1996). A Chronology and Glossary of Propaganda in the United States. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Walton D.N. (1992). The Place of Emotion in Argument. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Abstract: Empirical tests of the dialogue types developed by informal logicians have been conducted recently. In this paper, we further advance this line of research by connecting dialogue types with several well-established measures in argumentation research: argument frames, argument beliefs, argument competence, argumentativeness, and verbal aggressiveness. Results indicate participants prefer the persuasive dialogue to the other types, and dialogues are well predicted by argument competence as well as the pro-social component of verbal aggressiveness.

Keywords: dialogue types, interpersonal arguments, Walton.

1. Introduction
The study of dialogues as normative frameworks has primarily been undertaken by informal logicians (e.g., Walton, 1998; Walton & Krabbe, 1995). Walton (1998) proposed a new approach to studying propositional commitments and turn-taking moves that occur during a dialogue. He argued that the concept of dialogue must be tailored so that it can accommodate (and explain) how individuals argue in their everyday exchanges. It should prescribe how arguments ought to occur and develop and it should provide criteria for assessing whether an argument has been used correctly (Walton, 1998).

Walton and Krabbe (1995) and Walton (1998) developed and detailed six main types of dialogues: persuasion, inquiry, information seeking, negotiation, deliberation and eristic. These dialogues differ depending on the initial situation that sparks argumentation and the main goal of engaging in a specific type. Persuasion stems from an open conflict that parties seek to resolve. Negotiation and the eristic dialogue also stem from an open conflict, but their goals are different; parties seek a practical settlement in a negotiation but only a provisional accommodation in an eristic dialogue. Inquiry and deliberation both stem from an open problem but differ in their main goal: inquiry seeks a stable resolution, whereas deliberation seeks a practical settlement. Finally, information seeking stems from an unsatisfactory spread of information and seeks to reach a stable resolution of the situation[i].

There is little research that examines these dialogues empirically. Cionea (2011) made a case that examining these dialogue types in interpersonal relationships can enhance our understanding of how, when, or why people employ each dialogue in their argumentative exchanges. Later, Cionea (2013) developed self-report measurement scales and tested four of the dialogues in the context of romantic relationships. In this paper, we propose developing measurement scales for the remaining two dialogue types and examining the associations (if any) that dialogue types may have with other argumentation variables. In addition, we propose that a seventh dialogue type may be feasibly added to the list developed by Walton (1998) and Walton and Krabbe (1995): information giving. Dialogues are a give and take process in which arguers seek information but also give information to the other party. Thus, we conceptualize this dialogue type as the reverse of information seeking; instead of trying to seek information from the other person, the arguer offers information to the other person. The goal of the dialogue and the initial situation that triggers it are the same as for information seeking.

In what follows we present the results of two studies examining dialogues as individual preferences that people tend to adopt in their arguments. We describe the goals of each study, the method we have employed, and our results. We conclude with a general discussion of what our research unveils about dialogue types and the potential future directions in which this line of research can be expanded.

2. Study 1
The goal of this study was to develop measures for the two dialogue types (inquiry and deliberation) not previously examined by Cionea (2013) and for the dialogue type that we propose should be added – information giving. To accomplish this goal, we created items for these three dialogues and assessed their reliability and factor structure.

2.1 Participants
Participants in the study were 189 individuals recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk in the United States. One hundred and twenty one participants were male and 68 were female, with ages between 18 and 62 years old (M = 31.66, SD = 10.41). Participants were mostly White (n = 134), followed by Asian (n = 26), African American (n = 13), Hispanic and/or Latino/Latina (n = 11), and other ethnicities or combinations of the previous ones. Participants came from all regions of the United States, with the highest numbers from the Pacific (n = 42), Middle (n = 32) and South Atlantic (n = 34) regions. Most participants had a college degree (n = 59) or some college (n = 69).

2.2 Procedures
Participants completed an online questionnaire in which they provided consent and demographic information. They were then asked to think about what they do when they discuss, argue, or have any dialogue with another person and rate statements measuring dialogue types on a scale from 0 (absolute disagreement) to 100 (absolute agreement). Participants were compensated 50 US cents for their participation. The research was approved by the Institutional Review Board at a West South Central university in the United States.

2.3 Measures
Persuasion, negotiation, information seeking, and the eristic dialogue were measured with items developed by Cionea (2013). Persuasion dialogue was measured with six items (e.g., “I try to explain my position to the other person” or “I try to give the other person reasons for my position”), as was the negotiation dialogue (e.g., “I try to make a deal with the other person” or “I try to come up with an agreement that we can both live with”). Information seeking dialogue was measured with four items, such as “I try to find out more information from the other person” and “I try to ask the other person for the whole story.” The eristic dialogue was measured with six items, too (e.g., “I try to vent” or “I try to take the opposite position from the other person”).

Seven items for inquiry and seven items for deliberation were developed for this study. Examples include “I try to decide with the other person how we should proceed,” “I try to analyze with the other person the consequences of our plan(s),” and “I try to weigh the options with the other person” for deliberation and “I try to find the truth,” “I try to insist that we draw logical conclusions” and “I try to analyze how we move from facts to the conclusion(s)” for inquiry. Four items for information giving were rephrased from the items for information seeking (e.g., “I try to let the other person know more information” or “I try to offer the other person the whole story”).

2.4 Results
The reliability of each scale was examined based on Cronbach’s alpha. The factor structure for each scale was examined based on confirmatory factor analyses. We relied on LISREL 9.10 and the maximum likelihood estimation method to assess the model fit for each dialogue type. We also examined an overall measurement model of all seven dialogues together. Results are presented in Table 1 below. Based on the corroborated evidence from these analyses, we eliminated two items: one from the deliberation dialogue (“I try to deliberate with the other person to reach a decision”) and one from the inquiry dialogue (“I try to scrutinize all available evidence prior to drawing any conclusions”) which had lower reliability and in which their respective latent factors did not explain as much variance as they did in the other items.

The results of Study 1 indicate that the scales proposed for measuring people’s orientation towards the seven dialogue types are reliable and unidimensional. Therefore, we conducted a second study in which we examined these dialogue orientations in connection with other argumentative inclinations and behaviors widely used in previous argumentation literature.

3. Study 2
Our main goal in this paper was to examine the dialogue orientations in more depth and situate them in the argumentation literature. First, we were interested in whether people show preference for any of the dialogue types. Cionea (2013) found that individuals who argued about a relational transgression in their romantic relationships tended not to use two of the dialogues: deliberation and inquiry. Is that the case in other contexts? Additionally, the eristic dialogue may elicit different behavioral responses than persuasion or negotiation. Cionea, Hopârtean, Hoelscher, Ileş, and Straub (2013) found that people perceived persuasion could be accomplished by discussing things with the other person, not by quarrelling with others. However, individuals did not perceived debates and quarrels as significantly different in respect to their roles in people’s lives and in American society. They also engaged in both when addressing a variety of topics, such as socio-political issues or entertainment, and they indicated both forms could be appropriate when arguing with others. These results suggest that people may prefer one dialogue orientation to another depending on what function they perceive arguing serves in their lives. So, we investigate this possibility by asking,

RQ1: Do people prefer a dialogue type to others?

A second aspect we were interested in is the relationship between dialogue types. Cionea’s (2013) studies revealed that persuasion, negotiation, and information seeking tended to be associated with more positive goals, whereas the eristic dialogue was used to give voice to frustrations and dominance. Cionea, Hample, and Fink (2014) pointed out the high correlations between persuasion, negotiation, and the information seeking dialogue, questioning whether people are able to distinguish them in everyday arguments. Thus, we ask the following:

RQ2: What is the relationship between the seven dialogues?

Finally, our third and main area of interest was to examine the relationship between dialogue types and other variables studied in the argumentation literature. We decided to focus on four main areas we believe are pertinent to dialogues. The first one is argument competence. Initially operationalized by Trapp, Yingling, and Warner (1987), argument competence captures whether arguers have the appropriate knowledge and skills to engage others in interpersonal exchanges successfully. The concept has two dimensions: an effectiveness dimension and an (in)appropriateness dimension. Competence could be a good indicator of what dialogue type an arguer may choose. Competent and appropriate arguers are likely to rely on constructive dialogues, such as persuasion and negotiation, whereas incompetent arguers may rely more on eristic approaches in which they could enact inappropriate argumentative moves, such as ad hominem attacks or fallacious reasoning.

Table 1 – Study 1 Reliabilities and Confirmatory Factor Analyses Fit Indices Note: N = 305
a. Revised model without items 5 and 6 and with an error covariance permitted between items 1 and 2.
b. Revised model with errors covariances permitted between items 1 and 6 and 2 and 4.
c. Revised model with an error covariance permitted between items 1 and 2.
d. Revised model with an error covariance permitted between items 2 and 3.
e. Revised model with errors covariances permitted between items 2 and 4 and items 5 and 6.
f. Revised model without item 2.
g. Revised model without item 1 and with error covariances permitted between items 2 and 3 and items 5 and 6.
h. Measurement model with all dialogue types and previously implemented modifications for each scale included.

The second area we focused on is argument beliefs, initially operationalized by Rancer, Kosberg, and Baukus, (1992) and further refined by Johnson (2002). Beliefs about arguing represent cognitive representations of the attitudes and predispositions that people have in respect to arguing (Rancer, Baukus, & Infante, 1985). For example, if arguing is believed to be a means of solving conflict, individuals may engage in arguments with others when trying to address incompatible goals. We propose that beliefs about arguing offer useful information about people’s tendencies to select specific dialogue types when arguing with others; what one believes about arguing can predict what strategies one will adopt when arguing. For example, if arguing is believed to have dysfunctional outcomes, then individuals may be tempted to rely on an equally destructive dialogue approach, engaging in the eristic dialogue. We examine the list of beliefs that Johnson (2002) refined: pragmatic outcomes (i.e., arguing has pragmatic outcomes, such as resolving conflict), dysfunctional outcomes (i.e., arguing has dysfunctional outcomes, such as increasing tension), enjoyment (i.e., arguing is a fun experience), self-concept (i.e., arguing enhances one’s self concept, making a person feel positive), and ego-involvement (i.e., one argues because the topic is important to the person).

A third area we believed would be relevant to predicting what dialogue orientation people may take is argument frames (Hample, 2003). Frames are somewhat similar to beliefs; they reveal what people believe they are doing when they argue with others. Hample (2005) explained that frames are the initial expectations people have about arguing and, therefore, they affect the beginning stages of arguing (changes being possible as an argument progresses). We argue here that these beginning stages are captured by the dialogue type one is inclined to choose. In other words, frames capture expectations about arguing that are translated into a specific dialogue orientation to be enacted in the actual dialogue. We rely here on a revised version of the frames measure from Hample and Irions (2014) that identifies seven aspects:

– identity (i.e., arguing permits displaying one’s identity)
– play (i.e., arguing is a way to have fun with others)
– dominance (i.e., arguing is used to enact dominance or gain power)
– cooperation (i.e., arguing is a collaborative enterprise)
– utility (i.e., arguing serves a utilitarian purpose, allowing one to achieve what one wants)
– blurting (i.e., arguing permits people to say what is on their mind, without filters) and
– civility (i.e., arguing is a calm, civilized exchange).

Finally, a fourth area we propose can shed some light on people’s reliance on specific dialogue orientations consists of two trait variables that have been studied extensively in argumentation: argumentativeness (Infante & Rancer, 1982) and verbal aggressiveness (Infante & Wigley, 1986). Argumentativeness is the positive trait, indicating one’s ability to attack others’ ideas, whereas verbal aggressiveness is the negative trait, indicating one’s tendency to attack other people’s self-concept. Our reasoning here is that the tendency to approach arguments may lead people to engage in dialogues that enable them to cultivate this appreciation for arguments, such as persuasion, whereas the tendency to avoid arguments will be reflected by less arguing, perhaps even reliance on degenerated forms of arguing, such as quarrels. In terms of verbal aggressiveness, the pro-social dimension may connect to dialogues that enable this supportive communication style – negotiation or information giving – whereas the anti-social dimension may lead individuals to rely on the eristic dialogue. In light of all the considerations explained, we ask:

RQ3: Do competence, beliefs about arguing, argument frames, argumentativeness, and verbal aggressiveness predict each of the dialogues?

In what follows, we describe the method of our study and the answers to each of these three research questions.

3.1. Method

3.1.1 Participants.
Participants in the study were 286 undergraduate students at a large West South Central university in the United States. Participants ranged in age from 18 to 33 years old, M = 19.71, SD = 1.96. One hundred and three of them were male and 183 were female. Most participants were White (n = 223), followed by Hispanic or Latina/Latina (n = 19), African-American (n = 14), American-Indian or Alaska Native (n = 11), and some other ethnicities (n = 19). Most participants were freshmen (n = 101), followed by sophomores (n = 90), juniors (n = 52), and seniors (n = 40), while three individuals indicated another class standing. Students came from a variety of majors, including accounting, business, communication, energy management, health and exercise science, marketing, and public relations.

3.1.2 Procedures.
Participants were recruited from the departmental research pool, completed an online questionnaire, and received extra credit for their participation. The online questionnaire asked participants to provide consent for the research, provide demographic information, and then answer questions measuring dialogue orientations, argument competence, argument frames, beliefs about arguing, and argument traits. The research was approved by the Institutional Review Board of a West South Central university in the United States.

3.1.3 Measures.
The variables of interest were measured using a scale from 0 (absolute disagreement) to 100 (absolute agreement). Dialogue orientations were measured using the same scales as in Study 1. Argument competence was measured with 20 items (ten items measuring effectiveness and ten items measuring inappropriateness) from Trapp et al. (1987). Beliefs about arguing were measured with 24 items from Johnson (2002): four items measured pragmatic items, six items measured dysfunctional outcomes, six items measured enjoyment, four items measured self-concept, and four items measured ego-involvement[ii]. Argument frames were measured with 54 items from Hample and Irions (2014): eight items for identity, four items for play, six items for dominance, eight items for competition-cooperation, eight items for utility, ten items for blurt, and ten items for civility. Argumentativeness was measured with 20 items (ten items measuring the tendency to approach arguments and ten items measuring the tendency to avoid arguments) from Infante and Rancer (1982). Finally, verbal aggressiveness was measured with 20 items as well (ten items measuring the pro-social dimension and ten items measuring the anti-social dimension) from Infante and Wigley (1986). Reliabilities for all scales are presented below.

Table 2 – Study 2 Means, Standard Deviations, and Final Cronbach Reliability Estimates
Notes: N = 286.
Decision to omit items made after confirmatory factor analyses were conducted on each scale.

3.2 Results and Discussion
Our initial interest was to assess whether our respondents preferred one dialogue orientation to others (RQ1). We conducted a series of within-sample t-tests to compare adjacent means. Persuasion dialogue, with a mean of 82.39, was the clear preference, differing from the orientation with the next highest mean at p < .001. That dialogue type, information giving, was in turn significantly higher (p < .05) than interest in deliberation dialogues. The deliberation, inquiry, negotiation, and information seeking dialogues were not different from one another. The lowest mean of these (for information seeking) was significantly higher than that for the eristic dialogue (p < .001). So, our respondents clearly preferred to take a persuasion orientation; followed by information giving; followed by deliberation, inquiry, negotiation, and information-seeking; and the least preferred was eristic dialogue. This result provides some support for Walton and Krabbe’s (1995) claim that “the critical discussion (what we call persuasive dialogue) is the most fundamental context of dialogue needed as a normative structure” for analyzing arguments (p. 7). We also notice that this order roughly corresponds to the order one might supply if ranking the orientations on the basis of social desirability in Western cultures.

A second obvious matter of interest is the relationship among the dialogue types. To answer RQ2, we correlated the dialogue orientations. The eristic dialogue was essentially uncorrelated with the other orientations except for deliberation. This suggests that eristic and deliberative dialogues may not have been sharply distinct for our respondents, or perhaps that they saw the differences but assumed that deliberation leads to intemperate confrontation. Information seeking and information giving were substantially associated (r = .49), indicating that these were conceptually paired for respondents, as they ought to have been, given that one of them is simply a rephrased form of the other. Information seeking and information giving were both strongly associated with negotiation, deliberation, and inquiry. This is a reasonably perceptive understanding of the importance of evidence (information) to these constructive sorts of interactions. The relationship of the two informational orientations to persuasion was also positive but noticeably weaker than for the other constructive dialogues. A possible implication is that respondents felt that persuasion might also be undertaken by means of non-evidential resources (although we have no data on this point, such resources might include power, status, forcefulness, and so forth).

Table 3 – Study 2 Dialogue Types Correlations * p < .05, ** p < .01, *** p < .001

The final key issue concerns the relationships among dialogue orientations and the other variables that we believed might be explanatory. To answer RQ3, we conducted multiple regressions in which we predicted each dialogue orientation by the other variables in Table 2. Here we report only the statistically significant predictors in equation form, using standardized regression weights. All the multiple regression models were statistically significant at p < .001.

* Persuasion dialogue = .20 Competence effectiveness – .20 Argumentativeness avoid + .16 Verbal aggressiveness pro-social (adj. R2 = .10)
* Negotiation dialogue = .18 Competence effectiveness + .22 Verbal aggressiveness pro-social – .21 Play + .14 Cooperation (adj. R2 = .27)
* Information-seeking dialogue = .27 Competence effectiveness + .23 Verbal aggressiveness pro-social -.22 Dominance (adj. R2 = .22)
* Information-giving dialogue = .27 Competence effectiveness + .26 Cooperation -.14 Blurting (adj. R2 = .20)
* Eristic dialogue = .47 Competence inappropriateness + .15 Argumentativeness avoid + .22 Verbal aggressiveness anti-social -.18 Dominance + .19 Blurting (adj. R2 = .43)
* Inquiry dialogue = .37 Competence effectiveness + .17 Verbal aggressiveness pro-social (adj. R2 = .31)
* Deliberation dialogue = .26 Competence effectiveness + .31 Verbal aggressiveness pro-social + .13 Cooperation + .15 Utility (adj. R2 = .36)

The predictions varied in the degree to which the dialogue orientations were predicted, ranging from adjusted R2s of .10 to .43. Even 10% of the variance in a dialogue orientation was a substantial result, and some of the other adjusted R2s were very encouraging, considering that no correction for measurement unreliability was made.

Competence and the pro-social dimension of verbal aggressiveness significantly predicted several dialogue types (persuasion, negotiation, information seeking, inquiry, and deliberation). Some other variables added to the individual predictions for each dialogue. For example, the tendency to avoid arguments negatively affected one’s intent to engage in persuasion, which is a reasonable result given that persuasion would involve actually engaging with the other person. Negotiation presupposed cooperation, working with the other person as the frame of mind with which arguers approached it, again a reasonable expectation. So did deliberation, which suggests this dialogue is also perceived as a cooperative endeavour, and information giving, which implies a desire to work with the other person if one is to provide information. In addition, deliberation has a utilitarian frame associated with it, potentially due to its desired outcome of reaching a settlement. Interestingly, information giving was positively associated with blurting, suggesting some information sharing may be spontaneous, unfiltered, and unplanned. These results point to the importance that other-oriented variables (such as effectiveness, inappropriateness, or cooperation) have in the selection of dialogue types that involve the other person as well, such as negotiation or deliberation.

The eristic dialogue was strongly predicted by a self-report of inappropriateness in arguing, a preference to avoid arguing, an interest in being antisocial, and a willingness to blurt. It was contraindicated by an interest in asserting dominance. The avoidance impulse might be explained by a recent finding of Wright and Roloff (2014) that defensiveness and rumination about conflict were associated with both avoidance impulses and the desire to exact revenge on the other person.

4. Conclusions
This paper examined dialogue types in an effort to expand knowledge about the ways in which individuals use these argumentative strategies in their everyday exchanges. We tested self-report measures for each of the seven dialogues, and establish some needed connections with other argumentation variables. We conclude that dialogue types can be reliably measured based on the scales proposed by Cionea (2013) and the scales we have proposed here. More important though, we have found interesting associations with other variables that can help predict what dialogue orientation(s) people may prefer or rely on when they argue with others.

In general, individuals seem to prefer some dialogue types over others, with persuasion being the clearly preferred one. Several argumentation views and behaviors are important in predicting constructive dialogues. People’s self-report of their effectiveness in argumentation was a positive predictor for every dialogue type except the eristic one. The pro-social subscale of the verbal aggressiveness instrument also contributed positively to people’s attraction towards most of the constructive dialogue types. These two findings suggest that self-confidence and a set of appropriate argumentative intentions were fundamental to preference for the constructive dialogue types. The negative regression weights for argument avoidance, playfulness, dominance, and blurting reinforce this conclusion, as do the positive weights for cooperation and utility. The eristic orientation was predicted by a contrasting set of variables, one that is a conceptual fit to eristic interaction: it is inappropriate, antisocial, and undisciplined. Thus, our results identify suggest clear patterns exist in individuals’ argumentative behaviors, patterns that consist of related variables and inclinations.

Our study is not without limitations. First, our Study 2 population consisted of undergraduate students, which means results should be interpreted with this sample in mind. The relationships identified may or may not be replicable with other populations, but that is an area of research that future studies should pursue. Second, we asked participants to indicate what dialogue orientations they adopted in general when arguing. Participants’ responses may reflect general tendencies that people develop, but there may also be differences in the immediate orientations that people adopt in a specific circumstance, depending on a variety of factors, such as the topic of argument, the other person, and the environment in which arguers are. Such possibilities should be examined further. Finally, these dialogue orientations may constitute only the initial approaches that individuals have but that change as an argumentative exchange evolves. Future research should specifically focus on actual interactions between people and mapping out not only opening moves, but also shifts in dialogues and mixed dialogues.

NOTES
i. We have used here the exact terms that Walton and Krabbe (1995) use when describing the initial situation and main goal of each of the six dialogue types.
ii. Due to poor reliability and factor structure problems, self-concept and ego-involvement were dropped from further analyses.

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