It is said that the Greek philosopher Diogenes once sought to prove that the apparently unique capacity of humans to engage in logical reasoning was not really special to humans alone. His proof relied on an observation about hunting dogs. On the hunt, such dogs may have occasion to come to a fork in the road. When they do, they stop and sniff one of the two paths in the road. If they do not pick up the scent on that path, they immediately turn and run down the other path, without stopping to sniff it. Diogenes asserted that these beasts were “reasoning” as follows:
P or Q
not P
therefore Q

Dogs may indeed have a rudimentary capacity to engage in what we call logical reasoning – even if they could not recognize the above case as an example of modus tollendo ponens. But that, pace Diogenes, is really the point. No animal other than humans can engage in abstract logical reasoning. No animal other than humans can think in terms of Ps and Qs, or conditionals, or negations, or inference rules. Until recently, it was assumed that when humans engaged in logical reasoning, we were engaging that specific part of the brain that enables us to solve abstract logic problems like the ones found in textbooks on formal logic. To be sure, emotions or passions surrounding a particular situation might “cloud” our logical reasoning processes and make it difficult for us to come to a logical conclusion about a particular matter. But neither the emotions surrounding a situation, nor any other concrete aspect of the situation, could change the actual reasoning process that we used. In short, it was assumed that humans come equipped with one all-purpose reasoning mechanism in our brain, and that we utilize only that particular mechanism when we reason about anything.
But that may be wrong. Recent research by evolutionary psychologists seems to indicate that humans “reason” dramatically differently – and better – when we are “processing” a social exchange situation that is open to the possibility of cheating (see Cosmides and Tooby 1992a). The point is not that the rules of formal logic do not apply to such situations. The point is that humans do not automatically apply the rules of formal logic to such situations. Indeed, we automatically apply other rules – probably located in another part of our brains – to those situations alone. This is fortunate however, because the human capacity to reason in general is (as I said) relatively poor when compared to our capacity to “reason” about social exchange situations in which we ourselves or others can be cheated.

The explanation that evolutionary psychologists give for this is simple. When the human mind evolved, several hundred-thousand years ago, humans did not need to be able to reason about Ps and Qs. Nor did we really need to be able to reason in the abstract. But we did need to be able to figure out when we were being cheated in a social exchange situation. Thus we evolved a narrowly tailored capacity to enable us to do just this. Such a capacity is, in effect, a cheater-detector. It seems that humans have an extraordinarily well-developed cheater-detector mechanism.
The implications of this research for scholars of logic and rhetoric are enormous. If humans really do “process” logical arguments differently based solely on the content of those arguments, then this might help us to understand better why some arguments seem “naturally” more persuasive – or at least more salient – than others. I deal extensively with this research and its implications for communication in chapter ten of my book The Return of Human Nature, published by Johns Hopkins University Press. (Gander 2002). What follows is a condensed version of that analysis. I begin with a brief discussion of evolutionary psychology. Next, I discuss precisely how our cheater-detector might work. Finally, I conclude with some thoughts about what this means for scholars of logic and rhetoric.

1. Evolutionary Psychology and the Return of Human Nature
If you have even a passing familiarity with the recent torrent of articles and best-selling books written by scientists and targeted toward an audience of educated non-scientists, you cannot help noticing it: Human nature is back. At least by those who remain up-to-date on such matters, the thinking now seems to be that a complex and richly detailed human nature really does exist, that it is to a very large degree scientifically knowable, that it differs markedly between the sexes, that it delimits a set of viable human cultures, and that, because of all this, it makes a big difference when we set out to discuss moral, ethical, and political questions.
The return of human nature has been facilitated, in no small part, by the emergence of a branch of science that has come to be known as evolutionary psychology. Succinctly put, evolutionary psychology can be defined as an interdisciplinary science that attempts to understand how the human mind works by viewing the mind as – in the words of Steven Pinker, a leading evolutionary psychologist – “a system of organs of computation, designed by natural selection to solve the kinds of problems our ancestors faced in their foraging way of life, in particular, understanding and outmaneuvering objects, animals, plants, and other people” (21). The systems of organs of computation to which Pinker refers are sometimes called mental modules by evolutionary psychologists. Apparently we have mental modules that enable us to perform an enormously wide variety of tasks, including: keeping track of degrees and types of relatedness among our kin; selecting a mate; deciding what amount of resources to invest in our various children; understanding how the minds of other individuals work; recognizing faces; rotating images in our minds; detecting when someone is trying to cheat us; and executing numerous other mental operations (see ibid.).

To the extent that culture is created by collections of evolved individual minds working in some degree of unison, evolutionary psychologists claim special insight not only into how cultures are generated, but also into which cultures are humanly possible. The phrase evolutionary psychology itself came into widespread use as the result of an enormously influential volume of essays entitled The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture edited by Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby. As the editors of that volume explain:
Evolutionary psychology is simply psychology that is informed by the additional knowledge that evolutionary biology has to offer, in the expectation that understanding the process that designed the human mind will advance the discovery of its architecture. It unites modern evolutionary biology with the cognitive revolution in a way that has the potential to draw together all of the disparate branches of psychology into a single organized system of knowledge. (1992b: 3)
The critical point here is that evolutionary psychology understands the human mind not as an essentially blank slate upon which culture writes its various dictates, nor as a mysterious vessel that now contains the essence of our humanity (an essence that may once have been thought to reside in the soul). Rather, evolutionary psychology understands the mind as simply another part of the human body, albeit an especially complex part. Still, like all parts of body the mind has a specific function. Its function, according to evolutionary psychologists, is information-processing or computation. The mind runs “algorithms” that have been programmed into it by nature. Also, according to evolutionary psychologists, like the human body the human mind must have evolved over the course of the last two-million or so years of humanoid evolution.
This understanding of the mind is simultaneously appealing and distressing. It is appealing because it seems to argue for the overall psychic unity of mankind and womankind. It seems to suggest that underneath the outwardly different and sometimes bizarre cultures that anthropologists tell us exist and have existed on the planet earth, men and women are now, and have been for at least the past one-hundred thousand years, pretty much the same everywhere. Each sex shares basically the same pattern of emotional reactions, the same reasoning processes, the same desires for the same types of physical and social rewards, the same attitudes toward others and toward the physical world, and so forth. The hundred thousand year figure, by the way, comes from the fact that given the glacially slow pace of humanoid evolution, the human mind itself has not changed appreciably from what it was structurally one-hundred thousand years ago.

But this understanding of the human mind is also distressing because it seems strongly to suggest that the human mind as it exists today may be tragically ill-equipped to deal with the problems faced by modern humans. After all, our hunter-gatherer ancestors of one million, or even one-hundred thousand, years ago never faced the problems attendant to noisy, overcrowded urban population centers. Additionally, they never needed to compute probabilities concerning situations that occurred much beyond the realm of their small foraging group, nor could they even have known that such situations occurred. And they certainly never needed to negotiate the complex demands of a modern workplace in which men and women cooperate and compete side by side very often within a cultural and legal framework governed by the strictures of political correctness, the explicit requirements that equality be maintained between the sexes, and the ever-present threat of sexual harassment lawsuits.
So life was different for our hunter-gatherer ancestors. No big news there. But in some respects life was also very much the same. Humans are amazingly social. Indeed, that is surely one of the defining characteristics of our species. A large part of that sociability involves exchange with other humans. Of course, you don’t have to be a free-trade fanatic to see that individuals have an obvious incentive to engage in mutually beneficial trades. Such trades can actually produce more resources for all, resulting in a type of non-zero sum environment that is the very definition of progress.
On the other hand, you don’t have to be a cynic like Diogenes to see that, while mutually beneficial trades may be best for society as a whole, for any given trade, each individual involved has the incentive to benefit himself at the expense of his trading partner. If I agree to give you some meat from a hunt in exchange for some water you have drawn from a lake some distance away, and if I get the water from you without giving the meat in exchange – perhaps because you lack the mental capacity to see that you are paying a cost (water) without receiving a benefit (meat) – then I may survive while you perish. Eventually, the mental mechanism that helped me to survive – a mechanism that assessed costs and benefits, and enabled me to see when I might be coming out behind on any given exchange – would come to predominate in the species. That, at any rate, is the story of how we might have come to possess a specific cheater-detector mechanism. But do humans have such a mechanism, and if so, how does it work?

2. Cheater-Detectors and Logical Minds
To begin this discussion, I invite the reader to answer the two questions that appear below. (These questions were adapted from the work of Leda Cosmides and John Tooby 1992a.)

Suppose you are in charge of hospitality at the ISSA conference. You know that various conference members will be attending various receptions. You have developed a system of keeping track of the various conference members and the receptions they will be attending. Your system is complex, but it includes the following rule:
Rule 1: If a conference member is attending the reception at the Park Plaza, then he or she must be in Group 3.
Your assistant has been working hard all day to sort conference members and the receptions they will be attending based solely on the above rule. But you suspect your assistant is suffering from jet-lag and may therefore have become confused. Below are four cards (Figure 1). Each card corresponds to one conference member. One side of the card indicates a reception that the member will be attending, the other side indicates the one group the member is in. Here is your first question: Which one(s), if any, of these cards must you turn over to be absolutely certain that rule 1 has been followed?

Figure One

After answering that question, consider another very similar situation. Suppose you are in charge of hospitality at the ISSA conference. You know that various conference members will be attending various receptions. You also know that, because it has an open bar, many conference members want to attend the reception at the Park Plaza. Unfortunately, that location is relatively small. Hence you establish the following rule:
Rule 2: If a conference member is attending the reception at the Park Plaza, then he or she must have paid a special registration fee.
Your assistant has been working hard all day to sort conference members and the receptions they will be attending based solely on the above rule. But you suspect your assistant is suffering from jet-lag and may therefore have become confused. Below are four cards (Figure 2). Each card corresponds to one conference member. One side of the card indicates a reception that the member will be attending, the other side indicates whether the member has paid the special registration fee. Here is your second question: Which one(s), if any, of these cards must you turn over to be absolutely certain that rule 2 has been followed?

Figure 2

After answering these questions, you may notice that they both have exactly the same logical form – If P then Q – where P corresponds to a conference member is attending the reception at the Park Plaza and Q corresponds either to he or she must be in Group 3 or he or she must have paid a special registration fee. The negation of an If-then statement of this form is: P and not Q. Hence, for both questions above, the correct answer is that you would need to turn over only the first card and the last card, because only on those cards could you possibly encounter a case of P and not Q on the same card.

You might think that individuals would get the correct answer to each of these questions as often as they got the incorrect answers since both questions have exactly the same form. Only their content is different. But strikingly this does not seem to be the case. In fact, individuals do dramatically better in correctly answering the second question, by a ratio of about 3 to 1 (see Cosmides and Tooby 1992a: 187). Just because both of these questions take the same form, the observed discrepancy must therefore have something to do with the content of each question. Look again at the second question. In that question P can be understood as a “benefit.” We know that going to the Park Plaza reception is something that many people want to do, presumably because they see it as in some way beneficial. Similarly, in the second question Q can be understood as a cost. One needs to pay a special fee to be able to go to the Park Plaza reception. Now, a person who takes a benefit without paying the requisite cost (P and not Q) is a cheater.

This little example – and the very significant experimental research on which it is based – seems to show that humans have a specific mental ability to detect cheating in social exchange situations, and that this ability operates independently of our ability to carry out logical reasoning. This mechanism is (as the above example shows) better at detecting cheaters than our “logical reasoning” “module” is at detecting violators of simple descriptive rules like: if a conference member is attending the reception at the Park Plaza, then he or she must be in Group 3. Perhaps even more interestingly, when the rules of formal logic differ from the “rules” or “algorithms” used by our cheater detectors we are better able to detect cheaters by using the cheater detector than we would be by using the rules of formal logic. The evolutionary psychologists Cosmides and Tooby argue, correctly I think, that the following two rules are logically different, but equivalent from the perspective of a social exchange (ibid. 188).

Rule 3: If you give me your watch, I’ll give you $20.
Rule 4: If I give you $20, you give me your watch.

Notice that the formulation of Rule 3 is identical to the formulation of the above Rules 1 and 2. Thus in Rule 3 P – always the first clause in the conditional statement – corresponds to the phrase if you give me your watch while Q – always the second clause in the conditional statement – corresponds to the phrase I’ll give you $20. Notice also that in Rule 3 P is the benefit (to me) and Q is the cost (to me) in the exchange.
But for Rule 4 P corresponds to the phrase I give you $20 while Q corresponds to the phrase you give me your watch. Thus for Rule 4 P is the cost (to me) and Q is the benefit (to me) in the social exchange. But, as Cosmides and Tooby write, “No matter how the contract is expressed, I will have cheated you if I accept your watch but do not offer you the $20, that is, if I accept a benefit from you without paying the required cost.”
Now suppose you show two groups of individuals the following sets of cards (Figure 3).

Figure 3

Suppose further that you gave one group Rule 3 and asked that group which cards would need to be turned over to detect violators of that rule, while you gave a second group Rule 4 and asked that group which cards would need to be turned over to detect violators of that rule. If we approach social exchange situations that implicate the possibility of cheating logically, we would expect that the first group would do substantially better at the assigned task than the second group. This is because the first group was working from a rule that was logically equivalent to the conditional If P then Q, and could thus be negated by P and not Q. But if those in the second group used the negation P and not Q as applied to their “switched” formulation of the rule, they would turn over the third card P and the second card not Q – exactly the wrong two cards. Remarkably, both groups do equally well at detecting cheaters and, again, much better than they do at detecting violations of simple descriptive rules (ibid. 188-9). It seems, then, that when we “reason” about social exchange situations that might involve cheating we turn “off” our logical reasoning module and turn “on” our cheater detection module. This result also seems to show that humans are able to reason equally well from the perspective of either individual in a social exchange situation.
Further, there is evidence suggesting that the content specific nature of the cheater detector module is extremely fine tuned. It appears that the module gets turned on only when we reason about a social exchange situation that involves the possibility of cheating, but also, that the module gets turned on in these situations even if we do not understand the cultural context of the social exchange. For example, most Americans would doubtless understand the following statement

Rule 5: If you vote in a federal election then you must be a U.S. citizen as a type of social exchange situation open to the possibility of cheating. An individual may try to vote without being a citizen. Thus if you were to show Americans the following four cards (Figure 4)

Figure 4

you probably would not be surprised if they were good at detecting violators of this rule. You might suspect that their success came not from the use of any cheater detection module, nor even from the use of any reasoning process, but rather from the fact that Americans are simply familiar with this aspect of their culture. But this appears not to be the case. When subjects were given a simple descriptive rule with which they could be expected to be familiar – such as, If one goes to Boston, one takes the subway – they were no where near as good at detecting violations of this culturally familiar rule as they were at detecting violators of a culturally familiar rule that implicated the possibility of cheating in a social exchange situation (see ibid.).

But what clinches this point is an examination of how well people do detecting violators of rules when they have absolutely no familiarity with the cultural context in which the rule is embedded. Two groups of people were given the following rule:
Rule 6: If a man eats cassava root then he must have a tattoo on his face
They were then shown the following cards (Figure 5):

Figure 5

Notice, first, that this rule does not correspond to any cultural practice with which any subject would likely be familiar, because it was simply made up by the researchers. Notice also that this rule need not necessarily implicate a social exchange situation involving the possibility of cheating. In fact, one group was told that in the particular culture from which this statement was drawn, having a tattoo on one’s face meant that one was married, and all married men just happened to live on the side of the island on which only cassava root grows. This explanation makes the above rule a simple descriptive rule, similar to the rule that if one eats sauerkraut then he must be German. The other group, however, was told that cassava root is a delicacy that not everyone is allowed to eat. It was explained that one requirement of eating this was having a tattoo. Remarkably, the second group did dramatically better, by a margin of three to one, in detecting violators of the rule than the first group, even though the rule and the cards were exactly the same for both groups (see ibid. 186; 196-7; but see also Miller: 302-3). The almost inescapable conclusion is that the second group had their cheater detectors activated. Also, in general, individuals do better at detecting violators of culturally unfamiliar rules that implicate the possibility of cheating in a social exchange situation than they do at detecting violations of culturally familiar rules that are merely descriptive but do not implicate the possibility of cheating (Cosmides and Tooby 1992a: 184-187).
Finally, consider this. If you were designing a mental module to be used by ancestral humans for whom social exchange was a vital part of life, and if efficiency were a critical concern – remember any module eats metabolic energy and takes up brain space – what would be the minimum requirements for this module? Obviously, you would want it to be good at detecting cheaters. But would you necessary want it to be good at detecting altruists? Probably not, since altruists pose no threat to society. And, indeed, it appears that while we do have a mental module for detecting cheaters, neither that module, nor any other module we may have, works very well at detecting altruists. Subjects were given many of the same rules and cards I have been discussing above, and asked which cards they would need to turn over to determine who had “violated” the rule by being altruistic – that is, by paying a cost but not taking a benefit. Subjects did no better at this task then they did at determining violations of simple descriptive rules (see ibid. 193-95).

3. Some Implications for Logic and Rhetoric
The evidence presented above, and more, seems to suggest strongly that we do have a specific mental module for cheater-detection, and that this module is not a by-product of our general ability to reason. It is a hardwired, “dedicated” module designed to focus specifically on one set of “inputs” (the possibility of cheating in a social exchange situation) and return one set of “outputs” (the benefit-cost structures that are necessary to evaluate whether one has been cheated). Perhaps the most significant implication of this research is that the process of human reasoning – a process that is still thought to be so insensitive to content that the premises of arguments can be represented in the formal logic as merely letters like “P” or “Q” – is itself different depending upon the content of those Ps and Qs. If this is true, we may need to rethink, for example, the way in which we administer intelligence tests – specifically tests which purport to measure an individual’s skill at inferential reasoning. From now on, we may need to specify which inferential reasoning skills – for example, ones about social exchange or ones about descriptions of the world – that we are attempting to measure, and we may need to formulate the content of the questions accordingly. Cosmides and Tooby also note that if their findings hold up, we may be justified in looking for different reasoning processes in other areas of life including: the evaluation of threats; the benefits associated with joining certain “coalitions” of other humans; and of course mate choice (see ibid. 166). Finally, the existence of a cheater detector fits perfectly with a kind of urethics that foregrounds fundamental fairness, as opposed (say) to one that foregrounds blind altruism. The point is that humans naturally compare costs and benefits, and look for cheaters in any social exchange situation. Thus from a rhetorical perspective, arguments that suggest that individuals may be taken advantage of by cheaters in their midst could seem especially persuasive.
Consider, in this regard, the fairly recent history of the whole welfare reform debate in America. During the 1980s – the so-called decade of greed – president Reagan went a long way in laying the groundwork for dismantling the federal welfare bureaucracy, and curtailing the overall amount of welfare payments to individuals, by explicitly arguing that large numbers of individuals were abusing the welfare system. “Welfare queens,” as they came to be known, were supposedly everywhere, driving Cadillacs and wearing expensive clothes. Interestingly, Reagan himself did not coin that term “welfare queen.” The term was invented by Chicago newspaper writers to refer to one Linda Taylor who, in 1976, was charged with defrauding the federal government by, among other things, using several aliases to collect more welfare than that to which she was legally entitled (see Zucchino, 65).

In the 1990s Bill Clinton then went on to complete the welfare revolution by restructuring the system along lines that were not all that different from those laid down by Reagan. Significantly, Clinton did this in part by relying on a very similar, though perhaps a gentler, version of Reagan’s arguments. Recall Clinton’s pledge in his 1992 acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention to “end welfare as we know it,” and his promise to say to those on welfare: “You will have, and you deserve, the opportunity through training and education, through child care and medical coverage, to liberate yourself. But then, when you can, you must work, because welfare should be a second chance, not a way of life.” From a rhetorical perspective that is also informed by evolutionary psychology, the public policy debate surrounding welfare unfolded in ways that seem quite consistent with what we have theorized about the natural tendency of humans to foreground the potential for cheating in a social exchange situation.
Notice, for example, that both Clinton and Reagan saw that what disturbed most Americans was not the existence of welfare as such, but rather, the potential for cheating the system, and, more importantly, the inability of individual Americans directly to detect such cheating. Huge welfare bureaucracies may be good at taking advantage of economies of scale when delivering their “product,” but they wildly set off our initiate cheater-detectors. Yet, because of their very size, welfare bureaucracies prevent individual taxpayers from effectively monitoring the system. This helps to explain an aspect of the welfare debate that bedeviled Ted Kennedy liberals, and also that probably caused them to think badly of their fellow citizens. Throughout the 1980s, and especially in the early 1990s, liberals were saying, quite correctly, that the whole welfare debate was grossly out of proportion to the amount of money that welfare payments themselves represented as a percentage of the overall federal budget. Liberals wondered how average Americans could be so exercised over so trivial a percentage of the federal budget, especially when other areas of the budget – defense spending, for example – went seemingly unscrutinized. Liberals concluded that Americans must be greedy and selfish. But this conclusion was simply wrong, for it failed to take account of precisely how our cheater-detection mechanism works. Welfare is a particularly salient example of social exchange. Thus, as I have said, it immediately sets off our cheater-detectors. Hence, it may not be that the average American is greedy and selfish. It may rather be that the average American has a natural impulse not to “define deviance down,” especially with respect to social exchange situations. This impulse was reflected everywhere in the welfare debates of the 1990s, including especially in the title of the very bill that was being debated. Although it is sometimes called the “welfare reform” act for short, we should not forget that on August 22, 1996 President Clinton signed what is formally known as the “Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act.”

Notice also that the welfare debate has seemed to come full circle, back to explicit questions concerning who deserves welfare and by whom (federal or state governments) the benefits are to be distributed. In their 1971 book The “Deserving Poor,” Joel Handler and Ellen Hollingsworth note that as far back as the English Poor Laws of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, governments have sought to determine who is poor through no fault of his or her own (as might be the case if poverty results from blindness or other physical handicap, or from widowhood) and who is poor because he (the male pronoun is appropriate here) is just lazy. Handler and Hollingsworth also note that from its inception in 1935 to roughly the mid 1960s, Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), a federal program for “deserving” poor, relied heavily for its rhetorical appeal on the perception that benefits went to mothers who were widows. That appeal may have lost a good deal of its utility in the early and mid sixties as welfare rolls, which had remained fairly steady for the previous thirty years, shot up dramatically. There is a huge literature devoted solely to answering the vexing question of exactly why we saw such a dramatic raise in welfare recipients beginning in the early sixties (see, for example, Murray). At least one explanation ties the raise in both welfare recipients and in overall welfare payments to a rise in illegitimate births which began during this period. This is usually regarded as a “conservative” explanation for the problem. But even as early as 1962 liberals may have sensed the danger that this explanation posed to a continuation of a federally funded welfare system. It cannot be a coincidence that in 1962 the Kennedy administration successfully fought to rename ADC by inserting the critical word “Families,” thus rechristening the major federal welfare program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). Liberals know about the rhetorical power of naming, just as do conservatives. If renaming AFDC happened to give the impression to most taxpaying Americans that welfare payments were going to what those taxpaying Americans probably defined as families – i.e., to households with a father, a mother, and children – this would surely not be the first time that a noble lie was used in the service of what many thought to be a worthy purpose. The point I want to emphasize, however, is that the rhetorical appeals used by all sides in the various economic policy debates of the last one hundred years or so seemed consistent with a social ethics that is deeply concerned about the possibility of cheaters in our midst.

I hope to have shown that there is some evidence that the argumentation patterns humans use today bear some resemblance to the types of arguments that may have been “adaptive” in our hunter-gatherer past, and that these argumentative patterns may, in some colloquial sense, be “hardwired” into our brains. At the very least, there is fruitful potential for collaboration in this area between evolutionary psychologists and scholars of logic and argumentation.

REFERENCES
Barkow, J. H., Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (Eds.) 1992. The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture. New York: Oxford University Press.
Clinton, W. J. 1992. Acceptance address at the Democratic National Convention. New York Times, July 17, 1992, A. 14.
Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. 1992a. Cognitive adaptations for social exchange. In Barkow, Cosmides & Tooby, 1992.
Cosmides, L., et. al. 1992b. Introduction: Evolutionary psychology and conceptual integration. In Barkow, Cosmides & Tooby, 1992.
Gander, E. 2002. The Return of Human Nature: How Evolutionary Psychology is Changing the Way Talk About Ourselves. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Miller, G. 2000. The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature. New York: Anchor Books.
Murray, C. 1984. Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980. New York: Basic Books.
Pinker, S. 1997. How the Mind Works. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Zucchino, D. 1997. The Myth of the Welfare Queen. New York: Simon & Schuster.

This paper is part of a large project about cultural identity runned by the Laboratorio de Actividad Humana (Universidad de Sevilla).
Before presenting our position about cultural identity, we are going to describe briefly the Social Psychology perspective about this concept. Social Psychology is the most influent perspective in the study of cultural identity in the psychological discipline.  We are going to talk about this tradition as the “alter” in front of which we are constructing our theoretical and methodological approach to identity from an argumentative point of view.
Social Psychology considers self-concept as the element that articulates and integrates the person’s different social identities. The self-concept is conceptualized as a complex scheme organized in categories and classifications. Then, the research planed in this tradition have the aim of searching and reflecting that organized scheme. To get that information, researchers study social identities in artificial laboratory environments, where the subject has to answer questions about his/her social adscriptions in a categorical fashion.
The main problem with that method is that when understanding social identity as a categorically structured entity, these researchers search for categories, and by doing that they do not allow subjects to express themselves about their identities as they would do in their everyday life. Everyday expressions of cultural identity do not fit the researcher’s theoretical criteria and methods. The consequence of this is a disintegrated and fragmented idea of identity.

We think that other ways of studying identity are possible without renouncing to empirical research. Showing that is the main goal of this presentation.
We are going to propose an approach to cultural identity from a cultural-historical perspective. From this point of view we understand that:
a. Identity is created through social interactions. We must search for identity mechanisms and construction processes (not only identity contents) in the social processes where they are originated.
b. Identity is mediated by cultural tools. The construction of cultural identity, as other superior psychological functions, is mediated by cultural tools, mainly by semiotic tools (Wertsch, 1998). The use of a given set of instruments not only will configure identity itself, but also the nature of its trigger functions.
c. Identity is situated (linked to institution of practice/ cultural activity settings). Cultural identity is a socially situated process. To understand that process, we should analyze the social settings where it takes place.

Considering the cultural setting as an essential piece in this comprehension process means accepting something more than recognizing the influence of social variables in the individual psychological processes. It means mostly to accept that it’s in these institutions where not only contents, but the functional organization of cultural identity, are created, regulated and transformed.
d. Identity must be studied through genetic analysis. Identity processes will be studied through a genetic analysis. The evolution of the identity construction must be studied. Then we’ll be able to analyse how a person acquires new mediational tools, following the track of these instruments from their social origin, in the interpsychological level, to the person’s mastering of them, by their appropiatrion in a intrapsychological level.
e. Action can be used as unity of analysis. We understand identity as an action that aims to define or characterize, in some way, one’s belonging to a group. Action is an unit of analysis which allows the inclusion and coordination of both individual and social factors. Action, understood from a historical-cultural psychology, becomes in this sense, a powerful analytic tool since action does not conclude at the individual level but transcends it allowing us to analyse identity at the social level. This concept of action facilitates the study of cultural identity construction, as they can be examined at the interpsychological level.

We can regard cultural identity as a psychological function as well as memory or thought, and thus it is sensitive to be studied with the same analytical tools as other psychological functions, that is, by means of the actions or acts of identity.

Acts of identity can be understand in three different ways: identity as communicative action, identity as rhetoric action and identity as mediated action.
a. Identity as communicative action (inspired in Habermas (1987) theory of action). Identity acts can be understood as communicative actions. According to Habermas, we can talk about three kinds of action that coordinated jointly conform the communicative action: teleological, dramaturgic, and normative ones.
– Teleological action: Strategic/directed to some objectives and goals. When a person performs a cultural identification act has the aim of reflecting about the traits that define him/herself in relation to his/her cultural belonging group in front of other people.
– Dramaturgical action. Strategic access to speaker subjectivity. The second kind of action that Habermas described is the dramaturgical action. The agent tries, intentionally or not, to make the audience identify with his/her state of consciousness, his/her private world. The dramaturgical action takes an special value when we talk about cultural identity, since it is part of the tapestry that, together with other identities, constitute our private personal world. Then, when we talk about our cultural identity we are performing a manifestation of our thinking that has as referent a part of ourselves, a part of how we perceive ourselves, and in sum, a part of our subjective world.
– Rule-governed action (linked to social-cultural settings of practice). This kind of action points on the socially situated component of cultural identity. In this sense, a social group can demand a given actor to behave in a given way depending on the agreements that regulate interpersonal relations in that social group.

b. Identity as a rhetoric action. Also we can approach identity as a rhetoric action. Identity is not mere informative action. We have regarded cultural identity as actions generated in communicative social interactions. However, we can not understand these actions as simply informative ones. Identity acts are arguments created to persuade and convince our audience about which are the traits that define ourselves  in relation to our cultural group. In this sense we could talk of identity as rhetoric actions. We cannot consider cultural identity as a kind of internal representations as it is understood from traditional social psychology. Contrarily, cultural identity is configured and developed in the rhetorical act. In fact, many times we get conscious of how our cultural identity is when we expose it in front of  the “other”, an audience.

Rhetoric action is addressed to the others and to oneself; Identity implies to argue about one-self or about a perceived belonging group (cultural, ethnic, professional,…). The acts of identity can also be considered as rhetorical actions aimed to persuade the audience in the framework of a communicative event. We regard rhetoric as a moral instrument. The basic idea of this notion implies that with the accomplishment of the acts of identity, the agent presents an argument in order to persuade his/her audience, and also an argument influencing and modifying his/her own point of view. As Billig (1987) points in his works on argumentation: “the structure of the way we argue reveals the structure of our thought”. In the process of individual deliberation, we use the same arguments that we employ when we try to persuade others.

c. Identity as mediated action. Mediated action is usually understood as an irreducible tension between cultural tools and agent. That allows us to examine how different tools get dynamically integrated to explain processes as cultural identity in the sociocultural and individual frames. This characteristic makes action-mediated-by-tools a resource that allows overcoming the methodological individualism spread in many of human sciences works in the western tradition. By definition, action allows considering simultaneously the agent that performs it and the cultural instruments that he/she uses. Mediational instruments configure acts of identification of subjects. We can suppose that studying the mediational means the individuals use to build their arguments, we can study the way they build their identity.
Taking into account the theoretical position we are defending in this paper, we propose discussion group as an scenario for the study of cultural identity.

Discussion group. An ideal setting to study acts of cultural identity.
The discussion group has a special psychological significance for researches precisely because of its interactive nature it allows the study of cultural identity in formation. The discussion group requires and permits exposition, conflict and negotiation of points of view and experience meaning, involving an effort of behalf of the participants to create shared realities (communicative action). It permits access to new ideas, the search of agreements, the possibility of arguing and counterarguing to expound own opinions and to try to persuade the others, features that finally redound to new ways of understanding the others and ourselves (rhetoric action).
Since negotiation in an interpsychological plane is explicit, a discussion group facilitates observation of the process of individual appropriation of ways of argumentation and reflection about him/her self, or about his/her belonging group, that are initially found on a social plan. Therefore the discussion group gives us a setting to study how the acquisition and mastering of new forms of thought and speech genres are used to construct personal or cultural identity. In a discussion group, we can examine how individuals’ acts of identification try to create a common opinion in audience, at the same time that they show the own image, but we can also observe how that personal image is being reconstructed externally and internally in the course of discussion.
From the approach we have defended in this paper cultural identity can be considered as a rhetorical discourse that develops in the frame of a communicative event. But: how can we analyze this discourse?
We will use Bakhtin´s theory to differentiate several aspects of discourse:
– Utterance as empirical unit of analysis (Bakthin 1981).

First of all, we have to establish an unit of analysis. As Bakthin points, discourse does unly takes reallity in the concrete moment and context it is performed. That is, in the concrete utterances that people use to talk. Then utterances are the real unit of analysis of communication. In our study the utterance as unit of analysis can be understood as each participant’s turn-taking, each participant’s talk without being interrupted.
We can study different dimensions of utterances:
– We can study the generic form of utterance. This refers to the utterance’s formal aspects, that is, its compositive structure. In this sense, we can distinguish two different elements:
In one hand, the dimension particularization-generalization. Billig’s (1987) contributions about two opposite processes such as particularization and generalization seems very useful from a rhetoric perspective.
On the other hand, from psycholinguistic contributions we can establish different discursive styles: explicative, expositive and narrative.
– Semantic referential content: all utterances are constructed from elements that participants use to construct their act of identity, and in front of which they take a position. In this sense, we are interested on analyzing these topics used to construct the acts of identification and the position the speaker takes referring to it, that is, the utterance’s orientation. In the case of cultural identity, the orientation shows if the person considers or not the trait characterized in the utterance about a cultural group’s identity a differential trait from this group.
– Finally, the notion of voice. With that notion we study the perspective adopted by the subject when constructing the act of identity.
From this methodological perspective different empirical research can be carried out. We can ask or not how our participation in different sceneries or from some experiences, we get new mediated tools that will shape new acts of identity. In this sense, we have studied the influence of several experiences and social settings in the development of cultural identity. These are:
– Literacy practice.
– Emigrant experience
– Historical experience

In these empirical studies we analyze how different practices or experiences are related to different ways or arguing.
As a final comment we can say that our methodological proposal is studying cultural identity through the acts of identification that people perform to define themselves. These acts are communicative, rhetoric and mediated, as we have developed in this paper.

REFERENCES
Bakhtin, M. (1981), The dialogic imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, comp. M. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Billig, M. (1987),  Arguing and Thinking. A Rhetorical Approach to Social Psychology.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Habermas, J. (1987), Teoría de la acción comunicativa. Vol I: Racionalidad de la acción y racionalización social. Madrid: Taurus.
Wertsch, J.V. (1998),  Mind as action. New York: Oxford University Press.

1. Introduction
The purpose of this paper is to continue my programme of making space within the major argumentative theories for human emotion (Gilbert 1997, 1997a, 2001, 2002). I believe that there is, in fact, no argument, no disagreement, perhaps even no communication without at least a minimal emotional component. At the least, writers such as Damasio (1994) see emotion in the form of preference, choice and concern as necessary conditions for caring enough to take up a position. Still, it is not an essential hypothesis of this programme that there exist no argumentative interactions that are devoid of emotion. Moreover, there may be ideal critical discussions as envisaged in the Pragma-Dialectic (PD) model that are wholly rational and disinterested. It is sufficient for my concerns that the vast majority of human dissensual communications contain at least a modest element of emotional commitment.
While the fact that emotion plays some role in most argumentative interactions is sufficient to make its study important, the real key is that in many such interactions the role played by emotions is crucial. Emotional attachment explains why we hold on to a position that is clearly untenable, or defend a view that is indefensible. But even when such extremes are not at issue, the understanding of why a position appeals to a proponent is often part and parcel of the reasons for the its maintenance. Moreover, in a significant number of arguments, the real issues are not those discursive matters initially raised, but rather the feelings of the proponent who raised them. In the majority, however, there is an integration between the emotional and logical, an intermixing that is frequently so thorough that separation is difficult if not impossible. (This, of course, supposes that such a separation is philosophically comprehensible in the first place).
As human communicators we are attuned to the emotional communications being transmitted by our dispute partners. We are aware of and constantly process messages for their sincerity, truth, and the feelings, such as anger, love and fear, embedded in them. These aspects of a message, whether explicit or implicit, frequently direct or inform our subsequent moves within the interaction. Understanding what someone means or intends, whether referring to logical or emotional content is always a matter of interpretation and processing (Gilbert, 2002). Language, as Wittgenstein showed us, is rarely so simple as to be incapable of misinterpretation; no message is so straightforward as to be impossible to misunderstand. More, it is often necessary to be familiar with the language and social customs of particular sub groups in order to be able to truly follow the implicit meanings and references in their communications (Willard, 1989).

I have argued elsewhere (2001) that the Pragma-Dialectic model is susceptible to reinterpretation in emotional terms provided certain changes are made. This is not a question of “adding emotion and stirring,” but of using the core model as a guideline for the enterprise of guiding and understanding emotional communication. Toward this end I examined the four foundations of Pragma-Dialectics and demonstrated how the pillars of externalization, functionalization, and socialization can be straightforwardly amended to apply to emotional content. It is only the foundation of dialectification that requires major change. This was accomplished by the introduction of the notion of “Emotionalization,” and the Principle of Pragmatic Emotionalization [PPE] (op. cit.). The heart of the matter as expressed in the PPE is that we sometimes identify a dissonance between a logical discursive message and the emotional content or context of that same message. The classic example is the dispute partner who says, angrily, “I’m not angry.” We all know which aspect of the communication will have greater sway; no sensible communicator familiar with the language and culture would ignore the underlying inconsistency between the words and the message.
In what follows I want to examine another aspect of the PD programme in order to further investigate the impact of the inclusion of emotional aspects of a disagreement. In particular, I will map the stages of a dispute into the emotional arena. Toward this end I will focus on the descriptions offered in Reconstructing Argumentative Discourse [RSA], (Eemeren, et al, 1993,) as I believe the recommendation and strictures there are among the most liberal provided. In turn the stages of confrontation, opening, argumentation, and resolution shall be discussed.

2. Confrontation
It is very interesting that the ways we recognize disagreement frequently involve non-discursive messages. Often a look or the tone of a comment are the clearest signals that a partner is not in accord or not wholly in accord. What is interesting in the emotional arena is that when the disagreement is not explicit, there are two separate options. The first is to acknowledge the emotional message and inquire as to the disagreement, and the second is to ignore the non-discursive component and follow the discursive. In the latter case you are usually offered a verbal agreement or assent, but the concomitant emotional message differs. That is, the literal message is agreement, but the implicit message is not. In Example (1) the words signal assent, but the way they are offered and the intonation indicate the agreement is forced or superficial.

1. Emma shrugs, grimaces, looks away, and says, “Sure, whatever you want.”
Now, without the non-discursive signals, we might take Emma as agreeing to whatever was at stake, but given those cues she is, we can assume, not enthralled with the conclusion to which she is assenting. The proponent now has two choices. First, he can inquire as to whether or not Emma really agrees or is just being nice or avoiding the issue, etc. On the other hand, he might simply take her “at her word” and say, “Great, thanks.” In other words, the implicit disagreement can be acknowledged or ignored. If it is ignored, then the confrontation stage of this sub-argument does not get started. If it is acknowledged, then a further discussion will ensue.
What is interesting is that there is a striking similarity between the emotional and logical situations. If someone produces an utterance with which I disagree, then I must make the choice as to whether or not I will pursue the disagreement. Sometimes it is not worth it: insufficiently important, a dead horse, or I am just not in the mood. But the logical, discursive does require that move to pursue as much as any other. Consider example (2).

2. Jean-Paul says, “Take the Laurier bridge, it’s faster this time of day.”
I may well disagree with Jean-Paul, but decide not to follow through on that disagreement for any number of reasons. So, when I answer, “Sure,” I keep my tone even to avoid further discussion. That is, I am careful not to signal a non-discursive disagreement as we well know that emotional reactions can as easily instigate a confrontation as any method. The difference, and it is significant, is that in some instances the emotional message at odds with the logical message can be ignored, because the logical is explicit. That is, when Emma says that it’s all right, I can take that as sincere even though I am perfectly aware that it is not. This leads us to a suggestion that in good emotional argumentation, such signals would not be ignored. As it is, most arguers are perfectly aware that one ignore the emotional level at one’s peril.

3. The Opening Stage
The opening stage of an emotional argument is very important because it is at that point that the emotional level of the argumentation is laid out, at least for that part of the argument. The question for the opening stage in an emotional argument is just how emotional it is going to be. Are we going to talk about the emotions we are experiencing? Are we going to explore the emotional aspects of the logical issues? Are we going to express our emotions, discuss them, investigate their impact? These are all ways in which we can proceed.
Confusion and difficulties can enter a discussion when there are different assumptions being made about the level of emotional input and its centrality to the subject. In fact, a great number of arguments that go awry do so because of differing expectations regarding what is being discussed. When the differing expectations concern the emotional versus the logical subject matter, the results can be severe. This is compounded by the fact that we are, ourselves, not always clear just what we expect or want.
Sometimes the emotional temperature of a discussion can change, even suddenly. In this case it is best if the opening stage is re-negotiated. But that may not happen, in no small part, because we are conditioned to ignore the emotional aspects, to pretend they are not there or are peripheral to the real activity of the discussion. In reality our feelings are crucial in explaining how and why we do things, what decisions we make and why we hold the beliefs we do (Vide, for example, Damasio, 1994). What is needed is just more direct emphasis on the emotional level and its importance. We do sometimes assert that, we do or do not want to “get emotional.” Statements such as the following address the matter and may lead to a re-negotiation of the opening stage.
3. Let’s not get emotional
4. You’re getting too emotional.
5. What’s wrong with getting emotional?

These, and others like them, can act as catalysts for an opening stage negotiation. One of the most important points in considering emotion in argumentation is to be prepared to re-negotiate the opening stage so that the degree of emotional communication can be established and set to the satisfaction of all parties. Doing so increases the likelihood that the partners to the disagreement are in accord as to the degree of emotional information that is being exchanged, and, importantly, the extent to which the emotional issues are the actual subject matter of the discussion.

4. The Argumentation Stage
Needless to say, the argumentation stage is at the heart of the Pragma-Dialectic programme insofar as it is in that stage where the actual persuasive and argumentative acts take place. This is as true of emotional argumentation as it is of logical arguments. There is a common view of emotional argumentation that involves raw emotional expression, usually anger, spewed forth in uncontrolled and frequently damaging ways. Such quarrels do occur, and can even have positive consequences (cf. Walton, 1992). However, the best emotional arguments deal less confrontationally with the feelings we have about the issue at hand and about the person with whom we are communicating. The difficulty is that many avenues of inquiry that touch upon emotional aspects of a position are traditionally excluded from discussion. There are two reasons behind this thinking. The first is that emotional interaction will get out of hand and deteriorate the quality of the argument. The second is that emotional considerations are irrelevant to standpoints.
The idea that any argument occurs without emotional content or an emotional aspect is hard to fathom. This means that the majority of arguments do contain emotion and do, at the same time, proceed within reasonable parameters of civility. What is needed is an exhaustive examination of the rules for proceeding within an emotional milieu while at the same time focusing on a mutually acknowledged standpoint. There has been a fair amount of discussion of this objective from the point of view of specifically relational arguments, mostly within psychology, but more is needed from the point of view of Argumentation Theory. That is to say, we acknowledge that arguments contain an emotional element, and we also acknowledge that the emotional aspects can become more central as the argument progresses. Beginning from this, it follows that in (virtually) all arguments we need to be able to manage the emotional temperature as well as discuss and argue about the emotional components. Rules for the handling and use of emotions in argumentation are required, and this includes rules that go beyond the relational arena into the argumentative realm (This is the next major objective of my own research).

Some emotional arguments go beyond the ability of the protagonists to work out the details. Such intractable arguments are discussed in the ongoing work of Friemann (2002) and require, he argues, third party intervention. He is correct, insofar as emotional arguments can become entrenched and responses become automatic in various ways. In such instances professional assistance in the form of therapists, mediators, or other experts are properly called for.
It is not only emotional argumentation that can go awry, logical arguments can go wrong as well. Irrelevancies, faulty information, loss of topic, and bad logic can lead perfectly non-emotional people into errors and blind alleys. There is nothing about being logical that makes an argument a good one. Beginning from wrong or evil first principles, one can continue in a perfectly logical way to dreadful results. Often it is just the emotional input that is needed to humanize the argumentative process. So the answer is quite straightforward: Yes, emotional arguments can get out of hand, and when they do it can be unpleasant, but any argument in any communication mode can go awry, and there is nothing special about the logical discursive form that privileges it.

Emotional considerations are relevant to standpoints. Why someone holds a position, what goals are involved, what their objectives are, are all aspects of a position that can be considered in order to reach agreement and concord. As I have argued extensively (1996, 1997), goals are crucial to a good dispute because they allow us to explore alternative answers, solve problems, and examine positions in a rich way. Exploring motivation is not an instance of the genetic fallacy, but a way in which avenues of communication can be opened for mutual benefit. In fact, when arguments do not proceed well, examination of the goals and needs and desires of one’s partner can lead to an opening up of possibilities previously not considered. Far from being irrelevant to the standpoints at issue, emotions can be the most central items considered.

5. Resolution
One of the difficulties we face with emotional argumentation is deciding just when an argument with strong emotional content is over. Moreover, when an argument is strongly emotional, the idea of determining which of the initial standpoints has been successful may not appropriately apply. This can be seen to pose difficulties for using the Pragma-Dialectic model, (vide Gilbert, 2000), unless a fairly liberal interpretation of the notion of “resolution-centred system” is used. Fortunately, there is warrant for this in RSA where such a system is described as one where “there is no other judge than the participants themselves” (25). One can argue that the resolution of an emotional argument that does not stand on clear standpoints cannot meet the requirement that “the settlement is one recognized by both parties as correct, justified, and rational” (25). But I believe that, if this requirement is taken to mean that an emotional argument cannot, ipso facto, be “correct, justified, and rational,” then the very question is begged. I also believe that the inclusion of emotional arguments as possibly resolved or conjointly settled, does not do disservice to the thrust of the Pragma-Dialectic programme.

When we apply Argumentation Theory, in whatever form, to actual argumentation, then various concepts we would like to be clear necessarily become fuzzy. One such concept is resolution, and especially in the context of agreement, the idea becomes less clear. As I have argued elsewhere (Gilbert, 1995) the concept of agreement is one that has many subtle meanings and shades of emphasis. In the conservative interpretation of PD, resolution occurs when either you or I withdraw opposition to a standpoint. In the liberal interpretation, it seems we can end up with a third alternative so long as we both agree completely with the result. It is this latter interpretation that is important to the resolution of emotional arguments. Furthermore, “settlement” in RSA is something that is imposed from the outside as opposed to the joint agreement of a resolution.

The resolution of an emotional argument, it is important to remember, might occur as a sub argument within a larger process. Furthermore, it may or may not end that larger process. Consider two examples.
6. Ralph and Tony are arguing about how the examples need to be changed for the Esperanto edition of their book. Ralph suddenly looks upset.
Tony: What’s wrong.
Ralph: You’re not paying attention.
Tony: Of course I am.
Ralph: No, you’re not listening to my points at all.
Tony: But I am, you just said, …
Ralph: Well, all right then, but it looked as if you weren’t paying attention.

In (6) there is an emotional aside that must be dealt with before the main discussion can get back on track. Ralph’s feeling that Tony was not paying attention prevented the central standpoints from being discussed.

In the following, the central standpoint becomes irrelevant once the underlying emotional issue arises.
7. Karen and Artie have been arguing about the new work assignments. Artie has been claiming that Charles is not sufficiently experienced to take up the assignment Karen has given him.
“Frankly,’ Karen says, “you’re not making a lot of sense. Do you really think he’s incompetent.”
“No, I wouldn’t say that. Do you really think he can do my job?”
“No, of course not!”
“Then why,” Artie have you given him the assignments I was hoping for.”
“Why? Because you’ve been killing yourself, and you’re too important for me to let you burn out, that’s why!”
“Burning myself out?”
“Exactly. You’ve been looking exhausted, and…”
“Oh, hell, Karen, I thought you weren’t happy with my work.”
“Not happy… That’s crazy.”
“Well, in that case…”

The question of resolution in this example is interesting. The original standpoint concerned the competence of Charles, but the real issue pertained to Artie’s notion of how Karen thought of him. Once this emotional issue was resolved, the superficial logical issue disappeared. So, yes, the original standpoint was resolved insofar as Artie came to agree with Karen, but the real resolution was for the sub-argument concerning why the assignments were made the way they were. So long as we are not tied to the original standpoint in some sort of fixed way, then the resolution is acceptable. That is, both parties have come to agree that a particular standpoint is acceptable (There is another issue here about the nature of standpoints and positions, and whether they can be isolated in simple discursive terms. See Gilbert 1997, 2000).

6. Conclusions
The stages of argument are intended, I believe, to act as a heuristic device for the analysis of arguments. The fact is that argumentation is a process that involves the starting, ending, cessation and re-commencement of a number of sub-arguments, some of which may be in different modes from the original starting standpoint. Sometimes one of the sub-arguments can become more central and crucial to the matters at hand than the initial issue. The sub-argument may be an emotional one that is what is “really” going on, or it might be a logical matter, e.g., a “fact.” In the former case we might be dealing with hurt feelings, a sense of neglect, or any one of a million emotional issues that arise daily in human interactions. In the latter case, a disagreement might be founded on a false belief, and once that is cleared up, the path to agreement and resolution is simple.
Once we stop thinking of arguing about emotions as inherently different from arguing about anything else, the path to understanding them, creating models and moving forward becomes manageable. Emotional arguments, like all other arguments come in various styles, and degrees of complexity and difficulty. Our attraction to dealing with the “concrete” makes it seem as if words are easier to understand than expressions of emotion, but, in reality, we invariably trust of emotional instincts over discursive encounters (Gilbert, 2002). That is why it is no uncommon for an emotional argument to rear itself at any stage of an argumentative interaction, and when it does we will do best if we are prepared for it.

REFERENCES
Damasio, Antonio. 1994. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. NY: Avon Books.
Eemeren, Frans van, & Grootendorst, Rob. 1984. Speech Acts In Argumentative Discourse. Dordrecht, Holland: Foris.
Eemeren, Frans van, & Grootendorst, Rob, & Jackson, Sally, & Jacobs, Scott. 1993. Reconstructing Argumentative Discourse. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
Friemann, Richard. 2001. “Reducing Conflict Between Ordinary People by Third Party Interventions.” Presented at the 4th International Conference of the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation. Windsor, Ontario.
Gilbert, Michael A. 1996. “Goals In Argumentation.” Proceedings of the conference on Formal and Applied Practical Reasoning: Bonn, Germany. June 1996.
Gilbert, Michael A. 1997. Coalescent Argumentation. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Gilbert, Michael A. 1997a. “Prolegomenon to a Pragmatics of Emotion.” Proceedings of the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation, Brock University, St. Catherine’s.
Gilbert, Michael A. 2000. “Agreement/Disagreement.” Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference of the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation. Hans Hansen & Chris Tindale, Eds.
Gilbert, Michael A. 2001. “Emotional Messages.” 15:3. Argumentation.
Gilbert, Michael A. 2002. “Effing the Ineffable: The Logocentric Fallacy in Argumentation.” Argumentation. 16:1:21-32.
Walton, Douglas N. 1992. The Place of Emotion in Argument. The Pennsylvania S.U.P., University Park, PA.
Willard, C.A. 1989. A Theory Of Argumentation. Tuscaloosa: U. Alabama Press.

1. Toumlin’s Fields: An Interpretative Conundrum
Perhaps one of the most significant contributions to the study of argument and applied epistemology since Aristotle’s Topics was the introduction of the concept of a field of argument. Together with his Data-Warrant-Claim [D-W-C] model of argument, argument fields were Toulmin’s principal theoretical device in the constructive program he launched against the formal model of argument analysis and evaluation. The problem for the contemporary argumentation theorist is: How ought Toulmin’s concept of argument field to be interpreted, operationalized and applied in the projects of argument analysis and evaluation.
Willard has mused that the concept’s “most attractive feature … [is] that it can be made to say virtually anything” (1981: 21). To this, Zarefsky, has, more solemnly, added “there are so many different notions of fields that the result is conceptual confusion” (1982: 191). Before attempting to fathom this interpretive conundrum, it is perhaps best to situate the discussion by observing the significance and function of the concept of field in Toulmin’s overall theory of argument.

1.1 The Field-Dependency Thesis
Certainly, the most significant feature of argument fields is the thesis of field-dependency. Toulmin introduced the concept of field in answer to the question: “How far can justifcatory arguments take one and the same form, or involve appeal to one and the same standards, in all the different kinds of case which we have occasion to consider” (1958: 14)? On Toulmin’s account, there can be no single, abstract model that successfully captures the rational structure of all argument. Instead, while some features of arguments are field-invariant, others vary according to the field to which an argument belongs. For Toulmin, then, the first reason, that fields are significant to the study of argument is that theorists will be unable to create accurate models of argument unless we appreciate the nature, boundaries, and inner structure of argument fields. In fact, by failing to appreciate the field-dependency of certain features of argument, theorists fail to appreciate something fundamental about the very nature of justification.
What, then, is field-dependent? It is perhaps easier to ask what is not field-dependent. Because the structure of the D-W-C model is meant to capture “certain basic similarities of pattern and procedure [which] can be recognized … among justificatory arguments in general” (1958: 17), about the only thing does not vary according to an argument’s field is the overall D-W-C structure itself (1958: 175; 103; 119). By contrast, everything from an argument’s evidence (or data) (1958: 16), to warrants (1958: 100), to its backing (1958: 104) is field-dependent. Further, while the force of certain logical terms (e.g., modal terms and quantifiers) is field-invariant, the criteria according to which these terms are employed is field-dependent (1958: 29-35, 111-112)(i).

Now, the question is, what is radical about the thesis of field-dependency? Certainly, it is not revolutionary to claim that the data, evidence, or premises required of an argument will vary from one argument to the next. So, if Toulmin’s only claim is that the level of acceptability of a conclusion is, in part, a function of the level of acceptability of the premises, and that the considerations the will establish the truth or acceptability of particular premises need not be (and often are not) purely formal considerations, he will have no objection from the formalist.
Rather, the real bite of field-dependency is that argument features like warrant, backing and the criteria used to employ logical terms are irreducibly normative features of argument. They capture the evidentiary and justificatory relations constitutive of ‘good reasons’ and in so doing, embody the canons and standards by which arguments are properly evaluated(ii).
Yet, these are the very features of argument which vary from one field to the next. So, the more radical aspect of the field-dependency thesis is normative pluralism. Contrary to the aspirations of the formal logicians, there cannot be a single, universal and abstract model of all justification and hence of (good) arguments. Thus, one key thesis of theoretical import in Toulmin’s program is the claim that “we must judge each field of substantial arguments by its own relevant standards” (1958: 234). It is because arguments cannot all be evaluated by the same set of standards and norms that the theorist must appreciate the nature, boundaries, and inner structure of argument fields. Fields are, as it were, the natural kinds of evidentiary relations, and it is for this reason that fields capture something fundamental about the very nature of justification.

1.2 The Nature of Fields
The issue then of the nature of a field becomes a crucial question of Toulmin interpretation, and for any argumentation theorist seeking to present a model of argument informed by Toulmin’s views. Yet, as I mentioned earlier, there is hardly a consensus in the literature concerning field-theory. Any “conceptual confusion” surrounding the notion of a field is not helped by the fact that Toulmin himself seems to have actively resisted any rigorous attempt to operationalize the term. In fact, it would seem that each time Toulmin approached the topic of field is his own writing he gave his reader a different version of the concept.
For example, in The Uses of Argument, Toulmin defines “field” in two different ways. When Toulmin introduces the term in his first essay, he defines it as follows: “Two arguments will be said to belong to the same field when the data and conclusions in each of the two arguments are, respectively, of the same logical type: they will be said to come from different fields when the backing of the conclusions in each of the two arguments are not of the same logical type” (1958: 14)(iii). Yet, in the fourth essay of the book, Toulmin writes: “we introduced the notion of a field of arguments by referring to the different sorts of problem to which arguments can be addressed. If fields of argument are different, that is because they are addressed to different sorts of problems” (1958: 167). In the first case, “fields” are defined with reference to logical types, while in the second, fields are defined in terms of the sorts of problem to which arguments are addressed; yet, it is by no means apparent that these two defining concepts are synonymous. The two definitions are not obviously co-extensive, let alone intensionally equivalent, and Toulmin makes no effort to clarify his meaning.

Nor is this the extent of the interpretative problem.Toulmin first uses the term “field” in his doctoral thesis, The Place of Reason in Ethics, where he identifies fields with modes of reasoning (1953: 83; see also sects. 6.3, 6.7 and 13.7). Later, in An Introduction to Reasoning (the critical reasoning textbook written with Richard Rieke and Allan Janik) Toulmin seems to link fields of argument to the “locations or forums” in which arguments occur (Toulmin, Rieke and Janik 1979: 14). Variations in forum are themselves “a direct consequence of the functional differences between the needs of the enterprises concerned” (Toulmin, Rieke and Janik 1979: 15).Similarly, in Human Understanding, Toulmin seems to link fields with intellectual enterprises (1972: 85) and rational disciplines.
Any ambiguities (latent or manifest) in Toulmin’s own writing are only amplified and multiplied when one turns to the secondary literature for guidance. Given the context of this paper, I will not attempt here a review of the secondary literature(iv). Instead, I will only gesture in the direction of this body of secondary literature, noting that the debate surrounding field theory seems to have reached its peak more than two decades ago, when it was the central topic of the “Second Summer Conference of Argumentation” (sponsored by Speech Communication Association and the American Forensic Association). This was followed a year later by a special issue of the Journal of the American Forensic Association (edited by Charles Willard), devoted to the topic of argument fields. Suffice it to say, for present purposes, that, outside of a few basic features which are accepted by all models, the discussions captured in these volumes present a diversity rather than a consensus of opinion, and the conversational momentum seems to be that of divergence rather than convergence.
Finally, it is interesting that, ten years ago, when Toulmin himself had the occasion to address this audience (the 1992 ISSA Conference) he specifically did not speak to the notion of a field in an effort to clarify what he meant. About the closest Toulmin came in that talk to any discussing the notion of fields was his remark that “If I were writing the book [The Uses of Argument] today, I would broaden the context, and show that it is not just the ‘warrants’ and ‘backing’ that vary from field to field: even more, it is the forums of argumentation, the stakes, and the contextual details of ‘arguing’ as an activity” (1992: 9).

2. The Wittgenstein Connection
In this paper, I hope to reinvigorate the discussion surrounding Toulmin’s notion of fields. I hope to do so by exploring a provocative (if not lucrative) connection between Toulmin’s fields and Wittgenstein’s language-games. I shall try to show that these two theoretical constructs have at least enough superficial similarities as to make a thorough comparison a theoretically interesting endeavour. Further, I hope show how allowing Wittgenstein’s later views on logic to inform our approach to fields, some resolution may be cast upon the conundrums surrounding Toulmin interpretation and field theory itself.

First, though, what are some of the prima facie reasons that the theorist hoping to understand Toulmin might be tempted to turn to Wittgenstein as an interpretative guide?
I would certainly not be the first in observing a similarity, if not attributing an influence between Wittgenstein and Toulmin. At times, Toulmin has suffered criticism just because he came across as Wittgenstenian. O’Conner, for instance, wrote that The Uses of Argument “is novel in deriving its attitude from the later work of Wittgenstein rather than from better known sources of irrationalism” (1959: 244). But, there are other, perhaps better, reasons for examining the relationship between the thoughts of these two ‘unhappy logicians’.
In the first place, we know that Toulmin was attending Wittgenstein’s lectures while Toulmin was at Cambridge. Toulmin writes that he began his thesis work in the summer of 1946, and that the thesis was finished in February 1948 (1953: viii). Wittgenstein, on the other hand, stopped lecturing when he returned from Vienna in April of 1947 (Monk 1990: 518). Monk, in his biography of Wittgenstein The Duty of Genius, informs us that Wittgenstein had finished the Philosophical Investigations in 1945-46 (1990: 483), so we may assume that Wittgenstein would have been working this material into his lectures during this period. While Wittgenstein was lecturing primarily on the philosophy of psychology at the time, Monk writes that Wittgenstein “devoted a good deal of time in these lectures to an attempt to describe his philosophical method” (Monk 1990: 501).
Secondly, throughout his various works, Toulmin makes several acknowledgements to Wittgenstein, as well as other Cambridge professors. In the acknowledgements to The Place of reason in Ethics Toulmin writes that “many of the problems [dealt with in the book] would have been beyond my power but for the light which I derived from the lectures of Dr. Ludwig Wittgenstein” (1953: xiii). It should be mentioned, though, that Toulmin does not make an acknowledgement to Wittgenstein in either The Uses of Argument, or Human Understanding.
Finally, there are unmistakable similarities between the methods employed by Toulmin, especially in his earlier works, and those espoused by Wittgenstein. To cite just one example, Toulmin has continually advocated a methodology by which arguments are considered in the context of their human situation. As early as The Place of Reason in Ethics, Toulmin asserts an “intimate connection between the logic of a mode of reasoning and the activities in which the reasoning plays its primary part” (1953: 81). This is resonant with Wittgenstein’s claim that “Language-games are a clue to the understanding of logic” (1979: 12). Yet, by starting with language in use, Toulmin has raised the ire of some of his more unsympathetic commentators. O’Conner, for instance, remarked on Toulmin’s “inordinate regard for vulgar usage” (1959: 244), while Sikora remarked that “his [Toulmin’s] ‘logic’ is essentially a phenomenology of acceptable arguments without explanation as to why these are acceptable” (1959: 374).
Having touched upon some of the circumstances that brought Wittgenstein and Toulmin together, let us proceed to the proximity of their ideas. To do so, we must explore some of the features of Wittgenstein’s later views on logic.

3. Wittgenstein’s Later Views on Logic(v)
When Wittgenstein finished the Tractatus, he brazenly proclaimed that “the problems [occupying philosophy] have in essentials been finally solved” (1922: 29). Thereupon, he abandoned philosophical inquiry until 1927-28 when took up discussions with members of the Vienna Circle he and attended a lecture by the intuitionist mathematician Brouwer (Monk 1990: 241-251). By 1929 Wittgenstein had returned to Cambridge, and philosophy. Over the course of the development of his later philosophy, Wittgenstein came to believe that a number of views he espoused in the Tractatus, a number of the assumptions traditionally underpinning a rigorous, formalist approach to logic (as espoused by, e.g., Frege and Russell) were either false or untenable.
Specifically, Witgenstein came to reject the view that logic was a single, universal and abstract model of all justification and hence of (good) arguments. At one point in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein spoke of “the all-embracing logic” which is “an infinitely fine network” and “the great mirror [of the world” (1922: 5.511). Yet, by 1932, Wittgenstein would tell his class in Cambridge that “Russsell’s calculus is one calculus among others” (1979: 13). By the time Wittgenstein wrote On Certainty he would go so far as to claim that “everything descriptive of a language-game is part of logic” (1969: §55). So, what changed?

3.1 The Logic of the Tractatus
In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein held what has been called the ‘picture theory’ of language: “A proposition is a picture of reality” (1922: 4.01). On this account, language is given the job of representing or picturing reality. Language is, as it were, a picturing of facts (1922: 2.1, 2.141), and “a proposition is the description of a fact” (1922: 4.023).
Logical form is a property that is shared by all propositions and reality (1922: 2.1514), that allows any proposition to represent reality (1922: 2.16, 2.161) either correctly or incorrectly (1922: 2.17, 2.171). It is through this property that language is attached directly to reality (1922: 2.1511).
Facts are the natural kinds of the logical universe, and are those things into which the world divides (1922: 1.2). Moreover, they are logically (or metaphysically) independent. “Any one can either be the case or not be the case and everything else will remain the same” (1922: 1.21). “Atomic facts are independent of one another” (1922: 2.061, 2.062).

The independence of atomic facts has a profound technical significance for the logical calculus. Since propositions are descriptions of facts, the truth or falsity of a proposition is tied directly to the obtaining or non-obtaining (existence or non-existence) of the corresponding fact (1922: 4.25). As such, “the truth possibilities of the elementary propositions mean the possibilities of the existence and non-existence of the atomic facts” (1922: 4.3). On the basis of this insight, Wittgenstein invented the “truth-table” schemata for representing not only the possibilities of the logical combinations of propositions (and their corresponding facts) (1922: 4.31), but also for the truth-functional semantics of the logical operators (1922: 4.431 – 5.132).

3.2 The Problem of Determinate Exclusion
The problem with the Tractarian picture of logic that Wittgenstein discovered in 1929 was the following: Since atomic propositions ascribe properties that admit of degree, and this feature that cannot be removed by any symbolism, atomic propositions cannot be logically independent of each other. This, Wittgenstein realized, quickly brought down significant structural features of the Tractarian edifice.
It is integral to the Tractarian picture that the semantics for the truth-functional operators (i.e., “not,” “or,” “and,” “if … then,” and their stylistic variants) are given by the truth-tables, and that these truth-tables accurately capture all and only the logical possibilities pertaining to the propositions involved. As such, it is necessary that these truth-functional operators be able to combine any two well-formed formulae (we will deal here exclusively with atomic propositions) and that the truth-tables, in giving the semantics for the truth-functional operator, give the truth-functional result of the combination of the propositions.Yet, if atomic propositions are not logically independent, this cannot be.
Let us consider the same example that Wittgenstein presents in Some Remarks on Logical Form (RLF). Consider the truth-table for “and” (“&”):

Wittgenstein observes that, while the thesis that the above truth table gives the proper semantics for “and” requires that the propositional variables A and E  be able to take any proposition as their argument, in actual fact, they cannot. In RLF, Wittgenstein considers the examples of two propositions, each of which asserts the existence of a different colour at single place in our visual field at the same time (1929:168). (Following Wittgenstein, I will call these two propositions ‘RPT’ for “the colour R is in the place P at time T” and ‘BPT’ for “the colour B is in the place P ant time T” (ibid.).) As Wittgenstein notes, “it is a characteristic of these properties that one degree of them excludes any other” (1929: 167).

That is, with the two propositions ‘RPT’ and ‘BPT’, “the top line [ valuation 1 of the truth-table] ‘TTT’ must disappear, as it represents an impossible combination” (1929: 170). Moreover, it is of no help to attempt to ‘patch’ the system, by trying to amend the truth-value of “RPT & BPT” on valuation 1 from “T” to “F”. Wittgenstein claims that such an amended truth-table is not merely incorrect, but that it is “nonsense, as the top line [i.e., valuation 1], ‘T T F,’ gives the proposition [i.e.,“RPT & BPT”] a greater logical multiplicity than that of the actual possibilities” (ibid.)(vi). Importantly, Wittgenstein argues that the relationship of determinate exclusion that obtains between the two propositions RPT and BPT is a logical and not a contingent feature. “It is a characteristic of these properties that one degree of them excludes any other. One shade of colour cannot simultaneously have two different degrees of brightness or redness, a tone not two different strengths, etc. And the important point here is that these remarks do not express an experience but are in some sense tautologies” (1929: 167). For example, when we consider the formuale “RPT  ¬BPT” or “¬ (RPT & BPT)” these expressions are true on every (logically) possible valuation, and as such, are tautologies (1922: 4.46). As such, the logical character of relations like determinate exclusion is equivalent (e.g., in terms of necessity or impossibility) with formal logical relations. That is, relations like that of determinate exclusion are a kind of logical relation arising, not from the meanings of the logical operators, but from the meanings of non-logical terms.

This, in turn, dramatically alters the general nature of inference as it is conceived on a formalist model. As Wittgenstein told Waismann and Schlick, “All this I did not yet know when I was writing my work [the Tractatus]: at that time I thought that all inference was based on tautological form. At that time I had not yet seen that an inference can also have the form: This man is 2m tall, therefore he is not 3m tall” (Waismann 1979: 63; see also Shanker 1984, 57). Yet, as Wittgenstein quickly saw, there is no way to capture all such inferences in a single calculus, let alone a practical or axiomatizable one.

3.3 From Propositional Systems to Language Games
The immediate consequences of determinate exclusion are striking. Not only do examples such as this defeat the thesis of the independence of atomic propositions. But with the fall of the independence thesis, any aspiration of a single, unified calculus capable of capturing all justificatory relationships, and based solely on the semantics of purely logical terms is also dashed. The logician finds not a single, rarified abstract and universal calculus, but instead a series of local logical relations which hold between whole sets of concepts which come, as it were, pre-packaged.
This realization, for Wittgenstein marked the birth of the concept of a ‘system of propositions’ (satzsysteme). In his discussing this point with Waismann and Schlick in 1929, Wittgenstein said:
“Once I wrote, ‘A proposition is laid against reality like a ruler. Only the end-points of the graduating lines actually touch the object that is being measured.’ [TLP, 2.1512-2.15121] I now prefer to say that a system of propositions is laid against reality like a ruler. What I mean is the following. If I lay a ruler against a spatial object, I lay all the graduating lines against it at the same time. … It is not the individual graduating lines that are laid against it, but the entire scale. If I know that the object extends to graduating line 10, I also know immediately that it does not extend to graduating lines 11, 12, and so forth. The statements describing for me the length of an object form a system, a system of propositions. Now, it is such an entire system of propositions that is compared with reality, not a single proposition. If I say, for example, that this or that point in the visual field is blue, then I know not merely that, but also that this point is not green, nor red, nor yellow, etc. I have laid the entire colour scale against it at one go. This is also the reason why a point cannot have different colours at the same time. For when I lay a system of propositions against reality, this means that in each case there is only one state of affairs that can exist, not several – just as in the spatial case” (Waismann 1979: 64; see also Shanker 1984: 57).
Wittgenstein here realized two things: First, the meanings of the constituents of a system of propositions are inter-related in unique ways as compared with the propositions of a different system. Second, within a single natural language, there are many different and independent systems of propositions. It is for this reason that “Russell’s calculus is one calculus among others” (1979: 13).
The relations that hold between the propositions of a single system Wittgenstein came to call ‘grammatical’ (or sometimes ‘internal’) relations, and they are a species of fully-fledged logical relations. Given that grammatical relations arise out of, and are grounded in the meanings of the terms and propositions which they relate, the proper study of logic becomes a study of meaning.

While Wittgenstein was developing these views on the relationship between the study and domain of logic and the semantics of non-logical terms, he was simultaneously developing his views that the semantics of our language can be properly given only when we consider language in use. In 1932, Wittgenstein would introduce his students to his thesis that “the meaning of a word is its use in the language” (1958: § 43) saying “ ‘How is a word used?’ and ‘What is the grammar of the word?’ I shall take to be the same question” (1979: 3). Finally, it must be remembered that Wittgenstein introduced the methodological device of ‘language-games’ in this same series of 1932 lectures (Monk 1990: 330). Language-games are a device by which we may both properly situate and fully isolate the normal use of a single expression in a language, and, by so doing, may properly study its logical grammar – i.e., the grammatical relations governing its use and so constituting its meaning. As such, “Language-games are a clue to the understanding of logic. Since what we call a proposition is more or less arbitrary, what we call logic plays a different role from that which Russell and Frege supposed” (Wittgenstein1979: 12-13). Moreover, it is for this reason that “everything descriptive of a language-game is part of logic” (Wittgenstein 1969: §56, see also §82).
Now, the picture that we have been left with should appear vaguely familiar. Wittgenstein’s position regarding normative pluralism is rather comparable to Toulmin’s own. Not only is there no single calculus capable of modeling all justificatory relations, but there is a plurality of ‘logical regions’ (for lack of a better term), each of which are governed by their own set of norms and standards. These standards not only form the canons of rational evaluation for the region, but are based on some kind of internal properties or relations that obtain between the constituents of the region itself. That is, both fields and language-games appear to be the natural kinds of the justificatory world

4. Field Theory: The Conundrum Revisited
So, in light of the above considerations, how might we benefit from an approach to field-theory that is informed by Wittgenstein’s later views on logic?
If I am right in an unreserved and unqualified way, then we may have a solution to the interpretative conundrum surrounding field theory. After all, if I am right, then questions concerning the nature, boundaries and inner structure of fields may be simply reduced to similar questions concerning language-games.
People familiar with the discussion on this latter set of questions may not think that my solution does them any favours! In the first place, logic will remain a messy business. As Russell remarked about Wittgenstein’s later views (again in the 1930 letter to G.E. Moore) “His [Wittgenstein’s] theories are certainly important and certainly very original. Whether they are true, I do not know; I devoutly hope they are not, as they make mathematics and logic almost incredibly difficult.” (1967: 297-98). What Russell neglected to mention is the fact that Wittgenstein’s later views on logic effectively leave the old, formal structure both in place and operational. Neither the foundation nor the effectiveness of the formal calculus is challenged by Wittgenstein’s later views – only its comprehensiveness, and its exclusive entitlement to the endorsement of ‘logical certainty’.
Further, on the good side, Wittgenstein seems to give the theorist a much more definite and consistent account of language-games than what Toulmin has provided when it comes to fields. Admittedly, both start from a consideration of the situated use of language in a normal circumstance. But, Wittgenstein’s account seems to provide, additionally, that the nature, boundaries and inner structure of language-games are logical in character, and are determined according to the meanings –  the grammatical relations – of the non-logical terms employed within the language-game.

Next, if consensus is some reason to think that my reading of Toulmin is not far from the mark, then I have at least some support from the secondary literature. One of Toulmin’s earliest commentators, Otto Bird, made a similar observation in his review of The Uses of Argument. Bird wrote:
“The examples make it clear that Toulmin is primarily concerned with arguments which derive at lease some of their argumentative force from relations of meaning among non-logical words… This is to say, in terms of the medieval logical analysis, that he is concerned with material rather than with formal consequence. ‘Formal’ in this connection has to do with the syncategorematic terms, such as the connectives, ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘if … then’, ‘not’, and the quantifiers ‘all’ and ‘some’, whereas ‘material’ refers to the categorematic terms. The logical study of material consequence, i.e., of logical consequence that depends in some way upon the categorematic terms, was for medieval formal logic primarily the study of the Topics” (1959: 536).

It is, perhaps, no small coincidence that one of the examples Toulmin uses is making his case for the field-variability of warrants is the argument “Harry’s hair is red, so it is not black” (1958: 97). Nor was Bird the only reviewer to comment on this feature. Sikora, writing for New Scholasticism, wrote that “The chief significance of …[The Uses of Argument] is in its return to the problems, often greatly neglected in modern logic, of material logic” (1959: 374).
In fact, it was Bird who first characterized Toulmin’s work as “The Re-discovery of the Topics” – a characterization which Tolmin has later taken as his own. In 1982, speaking at the University of Michigan on the topic of “Logic and the Criticism of Arguments,” Toulmin said the following:
“By the time I wrote The Uses of Argument,… logic had been completely identified with ‘analytics,’ and Aristotle’s Topics was totally forgotten: so much so that, when I wrote the book, nobody realized that it bore the same relation to the Topics that Russell and Frege’s work bore to the traditional ‘analytic’ and ‘syllogistic.’ Only in retrospect is it apparent that – even though sleepwalkingly – I had rediscovered the topics of the Topics” (1989 [1982]: 380).
Regrettably, though, this endorsement from Toulmin may not be sufficient to secure my interpretive strategy. Problematically, Toulmin disavows the thesis that the only justificatory cement of fields is the semantic relationships of non-logical terms. Instead, Toulmin claims that, “For, in the case of genuinely substantial arguments, probability depends on quite other things than semantic relations” (1958: 153).

So, as I began this talk with a problem, I shall now close it with a different one. Toulmin devised his D-W-C model and the notion of argument fields to provide an account of how arguments may be analysed and evaluated so as to capture those arguments whose evidentiary structure and justificatory success does not reside in their formal properties. Wittgenstein has provided an additional layer to the logical analysis that may be applied to arguments. By directing us, with Toulmin, back to the Topics and the study of material implication, Wittgenstein invites us to consider arguments whose justification relies on the meaning of the non-logical terms employed in the argument. The question then remains, what other fields of justificatory argument are there, and by what means shall we approach their study so as to determine their nature, boundaries and inner structure.

NOTES
i. Toulmin explains the force / criteria distinction as follows: “The meaning of a modal term … has two aspects: … the force of the term and the criteria for its use. By the ‘force’ of a modal term I mean the practical implications of its use … This force can be contrasted with the criteria, standards, grounds and reasons, by reference to which we decide in any context that the use of a particular term is appropriate” (1958: 30).
ii. Take warrants for instance. Toulmin asserts that warrants “correspond to the practical standards or canons of argument” (1958: 98).
iii. It should be observed that Toulmin’s definition of “field” in terms of logical type is notoriously problematic. Willard as argued that “type theories are inappropriate analytical tools for argumentation and unsuitable bases for defining argument fields” (1981: 144). Earlier, O’Conner made a more general criticism of Toulmin’s move here, saying that “He [Toulmin] explains it [the notion of ‘field’] by reference to the concept of ‘logical type’. But if ‘type’ is used here in an untechnical sense, it is unexplanatory (and unexplained). And, if the use is technical, it is surprising to find one of Toulmin’s crucial concepts resting on a technicality of the formal logic that he believes to be quite irrelevant to serious argument” (1959: 244).
iv. I have, though, included as comprehensive a bibliography as my current research has produced.
v. I first became aware of Wittgenstein’s position as it is presented and discussed throughout section 3 on reading S.G. Shanker (1984).
vi. Instead of saying that the expression “RPT & BPT” is false, one might want to say that it is senseless (in that it does not represent any logical combination of possibilities), just as Wittgenstein would call a contradiction senseless. Importantly, Wittgenstein would not want to say that the expression “RPT & BPT” is a contradiction – rather, the two expressions “RPT” and “BPT” exclude each other. Wittgenstein introduces this distinction to mark the difference that atomic propositions cannot contradict each other (in the usual sense), although they can exclude each other. So, Wittgenstein calls the (amended) truth-table for “RPT & BPT” nonsense, and not the expression “RPT & BPT” itself. I would like to acknowledge the observations of Eric Krabbe, Daniel Cohen and Michael Gilbert who pointed out this correction to me in the discussion following my paper presentation.

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Does the correct evaluation of an argument depend on the context of the argument? Many might consider the answer to this question is obviously ‘no’ while others that it is obviously ‘yes’. One should most likely conclude that the answer is not yet obvious. In this paper I shall explore in more detail whether argument evaluation is context dependent. In section one, I shall provide and discuss some preliminary definitions and reduce the original question to the following: is it context dependent whether or not the premises adequately support the conclusion? In section two, I will explore this latter question and conclude that the correct evaluation of an argument does depend on the context of the argument. In section three, I shall conclude by making some brief comments about the nature of contexts.

1. Preliminaries
Does the correct evaluation of an argument depend on the context of the argument? In order to answer one might wish to know:
a. what is an argument?
b. what is involved in correctly evaluating an argument?
c. what is context dependence or independence? and
d. what exactly is the context of an argument?

For the purposes of this paper, I define ‘argument’ as follows:
An argument is a group of statements, one of which is designated the conclusion.

This definition is minimal in that it does not explicitly include clauses common to many, though certainly not all, definitions of argument. Typically, ‘argument’ has been defined such that to be an argument the conclusion must be claimed to follow from or affirmed on the basis of the premises or the premises must be taken to support the conclusion. Consider, for example, Copi and Cohen’s definition:
An argument is any group of propositions of which one is claimed to follow from the others, which are regarded as providing support or grounds for the truth of that one. [Copi and Cohen, 1998, 7]

Elsewhere [Goddu, Forthcoming] I have argued for my minimal definition and I will not repeat those arguments here.
As it stands, my definition certainly requires further explication in order to be universally applied. For example, without further information about how one statement can get designated as the conclusion we might not know whether certain groups of statements are arguments or not. Regardless, I assume that from a passage such as:
1.
All emeralds examined up until now are green, so the next emerald examined will be green,

most of us would have no difficulty in extracting the argument comprised of the statements ‘all emeralds examined up until now are green’ and ‘the next emerald examined will be green’ with the latter designated the conclusion. Given then groups of statements that are clearly arguments, we want to know whether the correct evaluation of them is context dependent or not.
But perhaps some will argue that the argument expressed by passage 1. is not simply:

1a.
All emeralds examined up until now are green.
The next emerald examined will be green.

but rather something more like one of the following:
1b.
All emeralds examined up until now are green.
There is no other relevant information.
The next emerald examined will be green. [Sellars, 1970, 85]

1c.
All emeralds examined up until now are green.
R (all the relevant background facts).
The next emerald examined will be green. [Pargetter and Bigelow, 1997, 68]

1d.
All emeralds examined up until now are green.
All emeralds are like the ones so far examined.
The next emerald examined will be green. [Groarke, 1999, 7]

In other words, some might argue that (1) has a suppressed premise, though there seems to be little agreement on what this suppressed premise (or premises) might be. What then to say about this multiplicity of arguments?

According to my definition, all four are indeed arguments. Hence, the problem is not that (1) is failing to express an argument at all, but rather that it is not agreed upon which, if any, of the four arguments passage (1) really expresses. But the latter is not necessarily a problem for my project. My project is to determine, once the target argument has been identified, whether the context plays any role in the correct evaluation of the argument. In the meantime, I will certainly grant that what the argument itself is may depend upon contextual factors, i.e. factors that are ultimately not themselves part of the argument in question. In other words, determining such things as (i) exactly what the group of statements comprising the argument in question is and (ii) which of the group of statements is the conclusion may involve appeal to contextual factors. So, it could be that in one context (1) expresses, say (1a), but in another, it expresses (1d). Regardless, once we have, in a certain context, determined or decided that the argument in question is, say (1a), the issue is whether any further appeal to the context need be made in order to successfully evaluate the argument.
What goes into the correct evaluation of an argument? At a minimum, we want to know: (i) do the premises adequately support the conclusion and (ii) are the premises adequate. Some might also want to know if the premises are relevant to the conclusion or if the argument is circular or begs the question, etc., but for this paper I am going to ignore these additional possible adequacy conditions. After all, if one holds that only (i) and (ii) are relevant to the correct evaluation of an argument, then showing that some other property such as circularity or premise is context dependent will be unconvincing. So the question is whether either adequate support or premise adequacy is context dependent.
But what is it for some feature of an argument to be context dependent or independent? I define context independence as follows:
Feature F of argument A made in context C is context independent if alterations to C do not change either A’s having F or the degree to which A has F.

An alleged example of context dependence is the ‘fragility’ or ‘defeasibility’ of induction. Consider, for example, the following argument:
2.
Ninety-one percent of Americans watch more than fifteen hours of television per week.
George is an American.
George watches more than fifteen hours of television per week.

While this argument seems initially quite strong, its strength can be affected by changes in the situation in which the argument is made or evaluated. For example, if the situation is such that George has no television and never leaves the house, then the strength of the argument drops dramatically. If instead the situation is such that George has televisions in every room in his house, then (2) may strike many as even stronger than it did initially. Of course, if we learn that even though George has televisions in every room in his house, none work, then the strength again drops significantly. Change the backdrop in which (2) is made or evaluated and the strength of (2) changes, so strength, many argue, is context dependent.

So is either premise adequacy or adequate support context dependent? Let us consider premise adequacy first. There are, unfortunately, numerous adequacy conditions that have been placed on premise-acceptability, plausibility, truth, necessary-truth, to name a few. Even without knowing definitively what contexts of arguments are, adequacy conditions such as acceptability, plausibility, and the like seem prime candidates for context dependent features. I suspect that given this audience, the premise that the Earth is round would be generally deemed acceptable, whereas the same premise used in a talk to the Flat Earth Society would not. Plausibility and acceptability and the like depend on the attitudes of individuals and those attitudes change from context to context and so the plausibility or acceptability of premises changes from context to context.

One response is to argue that a more stringent standard such as truth is required for the correct evaluation of arguments. At the same time, one might attempt to assuage the advocates of acceptability or plausibility by distinguishing two evaluative properties of argument – success and goodness. An argument is successful if the target audience comes to accept the conclusion because of the premises, whereas an argument is good if the premises are true and adequately support the conclusion. Clearly throughout the ages some very bad arguments have been successful and I do not doubt that some good ones continue to be unsuccessful. Regardless, since, presumably, the premises need to be acceptable to the target audience in order for the audience to accept the conclusion because of them, properties like acceptability and plausibility are relevant to determining the success of an argument. At the same time acceptability and plausibility are not relevant to the goodness of the argument.
Suppose then that it is goodness and not success that is at issue. Is the truth of the premises context dependent? In some imaginable universe all swans are white, though in this one some are black. Hence, the statement ‘all swans are white’ is false in the actual situations, but true in some hypothetical ones. If contexts are like this, then alterations in the context can change the truth of the premises.
But suppose we are interested in knowing whether the actual goodness of an argument is context dependent or not. The fact that if the universe had been different an argument such as:
3.
All swans are white.
Herbert is a swan.
Herbert is white.

would have been good is irrelevant. So if we are interested in the actual goodness of an argument, then the contexts in question must all be consistent with the way the universe actually is. Since moving from England to Australia does not make “all swans are white” change its truth value and “all swans are white” is false regardless of what one believes, intends, hypothesizes, etc., one can plausibly maintain that the truth or falsity of the premises is context independent.

Clearly much more could be (and has been) said on this last point, but so far I have been charting a course for someone who wishes to maintain that argument evaluation is context independent. To do this one may well have to (i) be a minimalist about evaluation, i.e. maintain that the only relevant properties are adequate support and premise adequacy, (ii) distinguish the success of an argument from the traditional goodness of an argument, (iii) mandate that the context of an argument and any alterations made to it must be consistent with the way the world actually is, and (iv) be a non-relativist about truth. If someone holds to (i)-(iv), then the question that remains
is whether or not adequate support is context dependent. I turn to that question now.

2. Adequate Support and Context
Is adequate support context dependent? On one standard view the answer is ‘no’. On this view the only adequate support premises can provide conclusions is that of validity, i.e. it is impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion false. Put another way, there is no case in which the premises are true and the conclusion false. Hence, validity is context independent for if there is no case in which the premises are true and the conclusion false, then no alteration to the context, which at best merely generates alternate cases, can alter the strength by which the premises support the conclusion.
On the other hand, if there are adequacy standards less stringent than validity one most likely holds that adequate support is, at least in some cases, context dependent. After all, it is commonly held that the inductive strength of an argument can change as a result in changes in the available evidence or background information. The ‘fragility of induction’ example mentioned earlier is meant to show this.

Put this way, and given our current assumption that the truth of the premises is context independent, the question concerning the context dependence of evaluation is little more than asking whether deductivism, i.e., all arguments are to be evaluated by the standard of validity[i], is true or false. If deductivism is true, then since validity is context independent, argument evaluation is context independent. If, on the other hand, deductivism is false and there are arguments properly evaluated using standards other than validity and at least some of these standards are context dependent, then argument evaluation is context dependent.

While the deductivism/non-deductivism debate might account for much of the disparity of opinion concerning the context dependence of evaluation, we should separate this question out from the confines of that debate. On the one hand, deductivists could reject at least one of (i)- (iv) from the previous section. So, for example, a deductivist might not be a minimalist about evaluation and hold that certain sorts of circularity are both to be avoided and context dependent. Or a deductivist could deny (ii) and hold that good arguments need merely acceptable premises. [Groarke, 1999, 5, 9] More significantly however, even if one holds to (i)-(iv), one could be a deductivist and admit context dependence or be a non-deductivist and deny context dependence. Concerning the former, JC Beall and Greg Restall have raised an interesting challenge to the context independence of validity itself. Concerning the latter option, I.T. Oakley has argued that cogency (Oakley’s term for inductive strength) is, like validity, not context dependent. I shall briefly discuss in turn each of these options next.

Beall and Restall advocate Logical Pluralism – for some arguments there is more than one correct answer as to whether the argument is valid. [Beall and Restall, 2000] According to Beall and Restall, validity is truth-preservation in all cases, but there is no canonical account of cases. There are multiple acceptable, yet distinct, specifications of cases such as possible worlds, situations, and construction. These different cases give, for at least some arguments, different answers as to whether or not the arguments are valid. But which set of cases is appropriate cannot be determined by examining the argument alone but rather is a matter of the context in which the argument is made. Hence, a deductivist, who is also a pluralist about validity, would maintain that argument evaluation is context dependent because validity itself is context dependent.
If Beall’s and Restall’s arguments for Logical Pluralism are successful, then necessary truth, i.e. truth in all cases, would also turn out to be a matter of context. Additionally, similar arguments could be made for standards other than validity. For example, if one is a pluralist about probability (which is less controversial than pluralism with respect to validity), then whether or not the premises make it 95% probable that the conclusion is true is a contextual matter. What is 95% probable according to one set of cases may not be 95% probable according to a different set. Donald Gilles, for one, argues for three distinct kinds of probability and explicitly argues that which probability is appropriate in a particular situation is a matter of context. [Gilles, 2000, 169-186]
In order to know whether the support the premises provide the conclusion is adequate we need to know what that support is. Beall’s and Restall’s challenge is that what the support itself is may be context dependent. The support provided might be validity because it is embedded in a particular context, i.e. a context that dictates a particular sort of cases. If the argument were embedded in a different context, one with a different sort of cases, then the support provided might not to be validity.

Elsewhere, I have argued that Beall and Restall have not conclusively made their case for Logical Pluralism and that whether pluralism with respect to validity is true remains an open question. [Goddu, 2002] Regardless, Logical Pluralism could turn out to be correct, in which case what validity and other adequacy levels in fact are, is a contextual matter. This suggests another assumption that one must make if one wishes to claim that argument evaluation is context independent, viz. (v) for each kind of adequate support, there is no pluralism within that kind. Hence, if the only kind of adequate support one countenances is validity, then (v) just amounts to denying that there is more than one real validity. If one also countenances various degrees of inductive strength, then denying pluralism is to deny that there is more than one of each degree of inductive strength

Suppose one is a non-deductivist who denies pluralism. Must such an individual accept the context dependence of argument evaluation? Oakley suggests not.
Oakley argues that the ‘fragility’ of induction does not demonstrate that inductive strength or cogency is context dependent, but rather that arguments do not retain their identity upon certain changes in context. [Oakley, 1998, 459] For example, if we were to learn that a process for artificially generating red emeralds has just been developed, we might no longer think (1) is a cogent argument. Oakley, however, accounts for the fragility of (1), not by a change in cogency, but rather by a change in the argument. He suggests that in the new situation the argument under consideration will not be (1), but rather:
4.
All emeralds examined up until now are green and there now exists a process for artificially generating red emeralds, so the next emerald examined will be green.

As a result Oakley maintains that ‘[a]rguments are best treated as fixed sets of related propositions and if …[(1)] is cogent, then it is cogent come what extra information may. Similarly, a given argument is valid (or invalid) period.’ [Oakley, 1998, 459]

An initial problem for Oakley is that his position seems contradictory. Oakley maintains that arguments, if cogent, are cogent come what extra information may, which suggests that arguments can be evaluated in contexts involving additional information. Oakley also suggests that arguments do not retain their identity in the face of additions of information. But if arguments do not survive such context change, then arguments cannot be evaluated across such contexts for their very identity changes as one moves from one context to another.
Perhaps Oakley can be salvaged as follows: suppose that Oakley holds that when fully unpacked all arguments are of the form:
P and there exists no further relevant information, so C.

So (1b), all emeralds examined until now are green and there is no further relevant information, so the next emerald examined will be green, is the argument expressed by (1). (1b) can be evaluated in any context, including the context in which there now exists a method for producing red emeralds. Oakley could even plausibly maintain that the degree of support that the premises of (1b) give to the conclusion does not change from context to context. At the same time, Oakley might claim that when we explicitly add the information that there now exists a method for creating red emeralds, we are no longer evaluating (1b) but rather:
4a.
All emeralds examined until now are green.
There now exists a method for creating red emeralds.
There is no further relevant information.
The next emerald examined will be green.

4a.
like (1b), can be evaluated in any context, and again Oakley can plausibly maintain that the strength of the connection between the premises and the conclusion remains unchanged from context to context.
This strategy may allow a non-deductivist such as Oakley to maintain that cogency is context independent, but only at the price of making the truth or falsity of the premises context dependent. Consider (1b). The premise ‘there exists no further relevant information’ may be true in some contexts, but is false in the context in which there now exists a method for creating red emeralds. Hence, (1b) will be correctly judged a good argument in some contexts, but a bad argument in others. Hence, the correct evaluation of arguments is context dependent.
Suppose instead that Oakley abandons the claim that arguments can be evaluated across contexts. Perhaps the general form of arguments is:
P and R (all other relevant information), so C.

Since what the relevant information is will change from context to context, arguments in general do not survive context change and so cannot be evaluated across contexts.
Unfortunately, while this fix avoids the problem of making the truth of the premises context dependent, it does not solve a different problem. Not all context changes involve changes in the available information or evidence. To see this consider the following case:
Yesterday, Arthur accepted Descartes’ goal of rejecting whatever admits of the least doubt, and so rejected the argument:
5.
I see my hand attached, so my hand is attached.

Today, Arthur no longer accepts Descartes’ goal and instead desires to proceed through everyday life as efficiently as possible. Arthur reconsiders (5) and judges it a good argument.

Let us suppose the premise is true. The premise remains true whether Arthur accepts Descartes’ goal or not. Whether or not there is any other relevant information remains unchanged whether Arthur accepts Descartes’ goal or not. The actual support the premise gives to the conclusion remains unchanged whether Arthur accepts Descartes’ goal or not. But if Arthur accepts Descartes’ goal, then he is right to reject (5) as a bad argument. On the other hand, if Arthur merely wishes to carry on with everyday life, then Arthur is right to accept (5) as a good argument. Hence, even if the actual support that the premise gives the conclusion remains unchanged from context to context, whether this amount of support is enough can change.
Oakley claims, perhaps correctly, that the fragility of induction can be accounted for in terms of a change in the argument as we shift from context to context, rather than a shift in the cogency of one particular argument. But the case presented above is not a case in which the information available changes or even a case in which the degree of support the premise provides the conclusion changes, but rather a case in which what constitutes enough support changes. Oakley seems to focus solely on the degree of support that the premises actually provide the conclusion. He well may be right that the degree of actual support is context independent. But in order to determine whether the premises adequately support the conclusion, one also needs to know whether the degree of support the premises actually provide is sufficient and what constitutes sufficient support is a matter of context. For example, in a criminal trial the evidence needs to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that the accused is guilty. In a civil trial however the very same evidence need only establish by a preponderance of the evidence that the accused is guilty.
In some cases a non-deductivist must determine how much support is sufficient for an argument to be cogent. Hence, a non-deductivist must maintain that argument evaluation is context dependent, for sufficient support is context dependent. Put another way, some evaluations will involve a determination of which of the various kinds of support is sufficient and which one is sufficient will depend on the context in which the argument is made. But if a non-deductivist must hold to the context dependence of evaluation, then the issue of the context independence of argument evaluation is once again part and parcel of the deductivist/non-deductivist debate. While the context dependence may be forced on the non-deductivist, it is not forced on the deductivist, for the deductivist maintains that validity is the only appropriate kind of adequate support. As we have already seen, as long as the deductivist maintains claims (i)- (v), he or she can hold to the context independence of argument evaluation.

I conclude this section by making a highly controversial claim. Deductivism is false. Hence, since non-deductivism is true and non-deductivism requires argument evaluation to be context dependent, argument evaluation is context dependent.
Why is deductivism false? Because there are good arguments which are not valid.
(1) and (2), as they currently read, are, say I, in many contexts invalid but good. (5) is good in even more contexts. The following, what John Fox calls an epistemic syllogism, [Fox, 1999, 451] is good in almost all contexts.

6.
It is reasonable for me to accept that I am talking, so I am talking.

Fox defends the invalidity and goodness of arguments like (6) at length, so I shall limit myself to a brief discussion of (5)-I see my hand attached, so my hand is attached. This is exactly the sort of argument that Descartes can be viewed as having rejected as invalid on the grounds that my senses cannot always be trusted. At the same time, after a frightfully close call with a chainsaw, I might really look to see if my hand is still attached and be properly content when I saw that is was.
Given the long-standing debate on deductivism, I doubt that my very brief comments have swayed any hard-core deductivists. Regardless, a deductivist must hold that no invalid argument is good, and yet there seem to be plenty of examples of arguments that we recognize as both good and invalid. In some cases we deliberately advance these arguments even though we hold them to be invalid. Why? Precisely because we think they are good as they stand. We are not even attempting to put forward a valid argument, merely an argument that is good enough. But, if deductivism is indeed false, then the correct evaluation of an argument does depend upon the context in which the argument is advanced.

3. Concluding Remarks
I argued that the correct evaluation of an argument is context dependent because in any situation we need to know what constitutes sufficient support and sufficient support is context dependent. Notice that I reached this conclusion without ever answering question (d), what exactly is the context of an argument. Of course, answering (d) cannot be put off indefinitely, for if it is true that argument evaluation is context dependent, then if we want to know the extent to which contextual factors influence argument identity and evaluation, we will need to determine what contexts in fact are.
So far at least, whatever contexts are, it seems they must at least do the following work – they must provide enough information to determine what the argument in fact is. If one is trying to be a deductivist this feature of contexts must do a tremendous amount of work, for any argument that on its face is plausible but invalid must, according to the deductivist, have some suppressed premises, which, when added, will make the argument valid, if the argument is truly a good one. In other words, if the context does not plausibly dictate enough suppressed premises to make the argument valid, then no matter how plausible the argument may seem, the deductivist must conclude that the argument is not a good argument. If one is a non-deductivist, one has more leeway for taking arguments as they are explicitly stated, and instead allowing the context to provide information about what background knowledge is being assumed of held constant as part of the determination of the actual strength of the argument.

For example, given passage (1), a deductivist might argue that the context dictates that the implicit claim that the laws of physics are temporally constant is a suppressed premise of the argument. A non-deductivist, however, has a choice. The non-deductivist can argue either that the implicit claim is indeed a suppressed premise or that the implicit claim is an essential part of the context in which (1) is to be evaluated. In fact a non-deductivist could agree with the deductivist concerning which suppressed premises the context dictates or merits adding, but then argue that at least some of the arguments which could not be plausibly be made valid are, contra the deductivist, good because the premises provide sufficient support to the conclusion.
For the non-deductivist then an essential job of contexts is to provide information for determining how much support is required in a particular context. The information may include the arguer’s desires and goals and the norms of the discipline or community to which the arguer is a part. Roughly speaking, one might hold that the required support will be determined by an interplay of (i) the goal of accepting truths and rejecting falsehoods and (ii) the cost of rejecting what turn out to be truths and (iii) the cost of accepting what turn out to be falsehoods(ii). As a result, we reject Descartes’ demands for absolute certainty concerning matters of fact, for it accepts so few, if any, matters of fact as true that we could not function in the world. On the other hand, we accept pure mathematics’ demands for absolute certainty, because there is little, if any, cost to rejecting what turn out to be truths.

Clearly these comments are preliminary at best and much more work needs to be done on the nature of contexts and sufficient support. Regardless, knowing whether the premises sufficiently support the conclusion is necessary for the correct evaluation of an argument and sufficient support is context dependent. Hence, the correct evaluation of an argument is context dependent.

NOTES
[i] Deductivism is standardly defined in terms of whether there are only deductive arguments or whether inductive arguments also exist. Elsewhere [Goddu, Forthcoming] I reject distinguishing arguments into deductive/inductive classes and so the standard definition.
[ii] R. Rudner, for example, makes this suggestion for accepting and rejecting scientific hypotheses. [Rudner, 1953]

REFERENCES
Beall, JC, & Restall, G. (2000). Logical Pluralism. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 78, 475-493.
Copi, I. M. & Cohen, C. (1998). Introduction to Logic, 10th ed. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall.
Fox, J. (1999). Deductivism Surpassed. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 77, 447-464.
Gilles, D. (2000). Philosophical Theories of Probability. London: Routledge.
Goddu, G.C. (Forthcoming). The ‘Most Important and Fundamental’ Distinction in Logic? Informal Logic.
Goddu, G.C. (2002). What Exactly Is Logical Pluralism? Australasian Journal of Philosophy 80, 218-230.
Groarke, L. (1999). Deductivism Within Pragma-Dialectics. Argumentation, 13, 1-16.
Oakley, I.T. (1998). The Invalidation of Induction: A Reply to Pargetter and Bigelow. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 76, 452-463.
Pargetter, R. & Bigelow, J. (1997). The Validation of Induction. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 75, 62-76.
Pollock, J. (1974). Knowledge and Justification. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Rudner, R. (1953) The Scientist Qua Scientist Makes Value Judgements. Philosophy of Science 20, 1-6.
Sellars, W. (1970). Are There Non-Deductive Logics? In N. Rescher et al, (Eds), Essays in Honor of Carl G. Hempel ( pp. 83-103). Dordrecht: D. Reidel.

“Rhetoric, in the most general sense, is the energy inherent in emotion and thought, transmitted through a system of signs, including language, to others to influence their decisions or actions” (Kennedy, 1991, 7). In Rhetoric 1.3 Aristotle identifies a powerful form of advancing interests, political deliberation. Such argumentation is directed toward “future action in best interests of a state” (7). Aristotle believes that this form of discourse has a distinctive temporal quality, which “for the deliberative speaker [is] the future (for whether exhorting or dissuading he advises about future events).” A rhetor connects present to future through weighing excess and deficiency in alternatives. Public policy is tested by estimating its future consequences for advantage and justice. Similarly, personal decisions of “what ought to be done or not to be done,” he tells us in the Nichomachean Ethics, may be so informed by practical reasoning (Ross, 1988/1925, vi.10). Whether public or private, all deliberation is “reasoning involved in choice,” “a kind of seeking – into what action both is possible in the circumstance and will lead to the goal in question” (Bostock, 2000, 79).
Aristotle’s outlook on deliberation appears appropriate to peacetime circumstance with its plans for progressive reform, support for engaged scientific inquiry, and rising prestige in foreign policy. Of course, the deliberations of a post-war period are somewhat distinct. Such an era cannot rely upon commonly shared connections between past and future. As the lives of ordinary citizens and ruling classes are affected differentially by concerted violence, the processes of social legitimation are thrown into question. Whether prewar goals can flourish in postwar society is always an open question. The duration recedes to a distant past for the fortunate, but for the still grieving its effect remains. Some move on; others cannot. A culture languishes in between times, knowing neither the untroubled, irenic diversions of peace nor the desperate unity of sacrifice. The past – the war that framed deliberative argument in a singular, urgent, and mounting discourses of bloody struggle – is over; and, yet, its business is not finished.

This essay analyzes the protodeliberations of the Odyssey as the rhetoric of an archaic, postwar rhetorical culture. Throughout history, the remaindered trauma of war, with its memories of individual and collective destruction, periodically disrupts lives, alters politics, and unhinges communicative norms. A postwar culture can neither dwell entirely in its losses, nor easily move on to a future; so events drift; issues fail to statiate, if they are raised at all; and reasons tangle in cross-expectations. Who will or will not return? How can men of violence reenter a society based on norms of civility? How is lost time made up or forgotten? Was it worth it after all? Answers to these questions play out controversially in intimate family relations and across the landscape of Attic politics in Homer’s comic epic of return and renewal.

The essay proceeds to reconstruct varied norms of archaic communicative reasoning in order to examine the qualities of deliberation in a moment of cultural trauma. It undertakes this task by reading Homer’s modeling of argument within and against Aristotle’s more streamlined theory of deliberation. Generally, Aristotle’s holds, “Deliberative advice is either protreptic [‘exhortation’] or apotreptic [‘dissuasion’]; for both those advising in private and those speaking in public always do one or the other of these” (Rhetoric 1.3, 48). When the disappointments of violence render norms of communication problematic, if not entirely suspect, the relationships within which practical reasoning can comfortably offer or evaluate proper advice becomes difficult to know in the specific and the general cases. So it would appear that in such circumstances practical reasoning – if it is to be recovered at all – must be played out or tested against others, as well as one’s self, in inventive, if not openly cunning ways.

Characters in the Odyssey do deliberate in Aristotle’s advisory sense, it will be shown. At the same time, their arguments also constitute a multi-layered invitation to test communicative norms of reasoning. The Odyssey enacts unruly encounters through a doubling discursive sensibility: first, interlocutors deliberate choices while testing relational grounds; second, just as norm testing is undertaken by the characters in the work, so a bard’s own performance puts his guest status on the line. Performed fictional deliberations may be applauded because they daringly surface unspoken uncertainties and ambivalences – voicing the uncomfortable silences of postwar society. They could also be flatly offensive. Homer’s masterpiece has an edge: just how visible to reflection does audience and artist agree the seams of a culture should become? For instance, as shall be argued, the limits of heroic prudence – even as exhibited even by the cleverest of the Greeks – are pushed to the surface by Homer’s epic. Indeed, Books V and VI appear to constitute and put at issue a host of communicative norms in archaic society generally. Therein, through literary enactment of conversational argument, Homer dramatizes issues of communicative relations among men and women, the older and younger generations, and the universality of discourse norms for his postwar world – and ours.

Book V  begins with a scene outside of time. No longer a brilliant young warrior on the planes of Troy – nor an available father, husband or king – the long-absent Ithacan is introduced in tears on a foreign shore. It has been seven years that Odysseus has been living in temporal limbo, whiling away time not unpleasantly on Kalypso’s island – Ogygia, a place remote to the gods and mortals alike.

1. “A Lovely Goddess and a Dangerous One”
Dawn, with lord Tithonos by her side, rises to cast “fresh light” for gods and men, opening a scene that suggests the theme of sexual politics. Dawn a goddess has taken a mortal only to have him turned into a grasshopper – ouble standard given the capricious couplings reserved to be a privilege of male gods. However, in the heavens Athena opens up another argument by importuning Zeus to release her favorite from the “thralldom of the nymph,” where he “cannot stir” and return home. She argues that mortals might as well rule with injustice since the just king Odysseus is kept from his land while a murder plot is hatched against his son. Zeus does not take issue, but consoles Athena by reminding her that the return is foreordained, hence her impatience premature and complaint groundless. Hermes is sent to deliver the message.
Kalypso is startled by the wing-sandled arrival, and guesses something is up. Rather than offer hospitality, she breaches communicative norms that required her to first offer the resources of the house, and unceremoniously challenges Hermes to state his business: “Now tell me what request you have in mind; for I desire to do it, if I can and if it is the proper thing to do” (5.94-95). Note at one in the same time, the “hidden one” assents to authority while opening a space for disagreement by conditioning assent. Like Athena’s complaint to Zeus, the exchange reflects a constrained objection, approaching a deliberative challenge; but she tempers opposition at the same time. Hermes both notes and ignores the discourtesy, and orders Kalypso to send the Greek “back in haste.” Not concealing a visible shudder, Kalypso criticizes the double standard of the gods “who hate it” when a goddess takes a mortal. “But it was I who saved him,” when Zeus sank the returning warriors’ boat. “I fed him, loved him, sang that he should not die nor grow old, ever, in all the days to come.” Not only is the order unfair, she says, it is impractical for there are no boats available on the island; nevertheless she agrees to comply. Like Athena’s complaint, Kalypso’s objection amounts to naught as she concludes: “My counsel he shall have, and nothing hidden [emphasis added],” mysteriously punning on her own name. The pun splits the gifts of her given counsel from the gift her self and seems to tear apart a relationship and signal an attenuation of deliberation.

Kalypso finds Odysseus on the beach in tears and says gently: “O forlorn man, be still. Here you need grieve no more; you need not feel your life consumed here; I have pondered it, and I shall help you go” (5.169-171). The statement is a half-truth; Kalypso has indeed pondered and indeed decided, but it is Hermes who prompted release not her own choice. Some read this passage as a wily persuasive argument, for the only chance Kalypso has to keep her love is to show unselfishness, giving him what she thinks he most desires: freedom. There is scant evidence for this reading; rather, it makes more dramatic sense to see Kalypso as doing the only thing one can when one’s life is so shattered: save some dignity. Startled, and suspecting something more, her paramour responds: “After these years, a helping hand? O goddess, what guile is hidden here?” You want me to go into the ocean on a raft under the protection of the same gods who shipwrecked me here! Odysseus asks for an oath that this is not trickery. Kalypso so swears, and states a grounding norm of deliberative argument, if not all communicative rationality: “What I shall devise, and what I tell you will be the same as if your need were mine” (5.198-199). Yet, the future of the relationship remains unsatisfactory and unsettled.

After an evening’s nectar and ambrosia, the two settle down to converse. Kalypso asks why the Greek captain wishes to go to sea and face adversity rather than enjoy her gifts. Why does he pine so for his for his Penelope? “Can I be less desirable than she is? Less interesting? Less beautiful? Can mortals compare with goddesses in grace and form? (5.220-3). The questions pose a dilemma, of course. If Odysseus answers no, then he has no reason to leave. If he answers yes, then the goddess is insulted, justifiably angry, and, well, a raft is not a steady craft in an open sea. Faced with this gambit from the enchanting Kalypso, what does this hero of Troy, inventor of the Trojan horse, this most intelligent and cunning of the Greeks, warrior, master of estates, polymentis, and king do? He buckles. He admits that Penelope “would seem a shade before your majesty,” but confesses “each day I long for home,” and further allows as how he is not afraid of whatever trials the gods will send his way because he has overcome adversity before. Hexter calls Odysseus’s failure to address Kalypso’s supposition a classic “petitio principii”, and one might add the bravado expressed at facing hardship is an irrelevant reason (Hexter, 1993, 76). It would seem, contra Thomas and Webb (1994) who put the origins of rhetoric in the 5th century, that just as rhetorical theorists are not necessary to compose wily speeches, an organon is not necessary to depart from valid reasoning. Thus, issues of sexual politics and personal relations are raised by Kalypso, but the arguments are left unresolved, even as the issues are opened publicly by the poet. While most commentators focus on Odysseus’s skill in persuasion, even while admitting that women play a more significant role than in the Odyssey than the Iliad, the obvious deserves to be noted. The many characters of the epic – god and mortal, rich and destitute, noble and common, young and old, male and female, indigenous and foreign, sympathetic and un – match wits in every argument. All conversation appears open to deliberation, at least in principle. Status is important to the arts of discourse, but it is wit within role, not mere assertion of station, that marks each exchange, and arguments build relational entanglements across episodes of encounter. Bowing to the consensus of the gods, Kalypso provides the tools for Odysseus to build a raft and even gives him a departing gift – her warm cloak, ostensibly as protection from the cold seasonal storms.

2. The Storm
Depart the hero does, on a raft of his own making, choosing the world of mortality for which commentators give the Odyssey credit as a humanizing work (Thalman, 1992, 11). At this point, deliberation moves from conversational encounter to internal decision-making as the sailor faces, after seven years and seventeen days of drift, that most strident of survival tests, a storm at sea. The ocean seethes with turbulence, which leaves Odysseus little choice but to act; and his prodigious albeit rusty decision-making skills are sorely tested. The raft is not doing well, but swimming seems an unappealing choice. “Rag of a man that I am, is this the end of me? (5. 30), he cries hurling a plaint at the gods. A decent death and a land-burial would have been kinder than to perish anonymously in the proverbial watery grave. No one listens. Knocked off the boat by a wave, Kalypso’s cloak drags him under. He recovers and does the only thing he can: huddle. Ino, a minor goddess of the sea, intervenes and offers the hopefully-attributed “clear-headed” sailor a plan. Leave the raft, tie yourself to a plank with my scarf, and swim. Unable to choose between raft and wave, Odysseus’s suspicion turns toward Poseidon who he thinks through Ino may be trying to send him to his final death. “O damned confusion! he explodes. “Can this be a ruse to trick me from the boat for some god’s pleasure” (5.379). Events overtake importuning the gods and chewing over alternatives, as a wave smashes the raft. Its sink or swim, and Ino’s newer advice of tying a scarf to a log seems more sensible than keeping Kalypso’s coat. Two days swimming and a rocky coast line rises into view, but our hero sees no way to come ashore; at this point anxiety trumps prudence. Indeed, it is the discursive habit of weighing both sides of an argument that spins decision-making out of control. Odysseus imagines that should he swim down the coast, looking for a place to land, another gale will blow and he’ll meet his end in a shark’s gullet. There is no evidence of a brooding storm, of course, nor are there sharks about, and it is clear he will either be drowned or dashed to pieces if he stays where he is. Athena intervenes to restore self-possession. Pulled by the surf, Odysseus is advised to follow the example of the octopus whose flexible arms hold onto rocks when torn from its home. The polytropic hero follows the model, seizes and holds on painfully to temporary ground; and, even though the backwash carries him out with torn hands, the gesture of holding restores enough self-possession that he can make a constructive choice, to swim along the coast toward a river inlet. To get a favorable current, he needs another intervention and simply asks for a break from whatever river god holds local dominion. Fortune smiles, as they say. Finally, exhausted he reaches the beach but has enough sense left to weigh the consequences of sleeping near the water with its certainty of exposure or in the forest with the possibility of succumbing to a dining denizen, and selects the latter. Odysseus builds a bed of leaves in a guarded site and sleeps.

The sort of dire deliberation necessary to move the ex-veteran from his suspended, death-like state on Ogygia, to the shores of a social world is a crisis that exposes the limits of verbal facility, concentrated analysis, cleverness, even the capacity to weigh options. All these fine deliberative strategies articulated in Aristotle’s Ethics are found insufficient, even counterproductive in the storm. In the end, Odysseus discovers the bottom of practical wisdom by basically holding on to reason until reasonable options appear. Perhaps, this is why Homer celebrates the returning warrior with the epithet, “the enduring one.”

3. Nausikaa
Book VI features Odysseus in the land of mortals, the Phaiakians, a people untouched by war and made prosperous by trade. They are an ideal audience for Odysseus’s tales of wandering, and in a later chapter offer him a vehicle for his smooth return to Ithaca. The fortunes of the hero of Troy, however, first turn on the deliberative capacity and judgment of a young woman, princess of the realm, and dreamy teenager, Nausikaa.
The chapter opens. Like teenagers everywhere, Nausikaa has gone to sleep leaving her clothes scattered about her room. Her dreams are woven from associations based on items from the day-before’s world: clothes tossed about her bedroom. The reasoning inspired by Athena’s nighttime visit is associative: get your clothes washed in the morning so “wedding chests will brim by evening. Maidenhood must end!” (6.37-38) To this is added the reason that the “noblest” court thee, which may be true, but washing clothes does not a proposal make. The purpose of a trip to the washing pool is ulterior, of course, as the detail is added that she should take a mule cart – narratively presupposing Odysseus’s appearance and transport needs. The dream-reasons serve the logic of the situation and make sense by turning wishes to symbols to visualized action, which while not constituting a plan based on sound instrumental reasoning, none the less characterize the self-deliberation of dreams.
Nausikaa requests from her dad, Alkinoos, permission to take the mule-cart out for a washing party, on the prudent claims that he needs clean laundry for counsel and her brothers, for dancing. She says no word of her own wedding plans. Like Kalypso, she marshals good reasons on behalf of her request, but does not tell the whole story. Beye says that this is typical of dialogue found in “a comedy of manners, in which persons say one thing and mean another” (151). Nausikaa’s father, sees through the pretext (because washing all the family clothes is a sign of getting ready for a wedding), but loves his daughter and doesn’t take exception: “No mules would I deny you, child, nor anything” (6.75). As in the Hermes/Kalypso and Zeus/Athena exchanges the reasoning of the advocate does not alter opinion, though this conversation ends in an indulged request rather than a dismissed complaint.

Nausikaa and her party arrive at the river, and commence washing. On break, they begin a game of catch. Eros is tossed into play. An errant throw plops in a nearby stream. The girls cry out. The sleeping veteran awakes but knows not from whence the awakening cry. “Now, by my life, mankind again! But who? Savages are they, strangers to courtesy? Or gentle folk, who know and fear the gods?… Or am I amid people of human speech? Up again, man, and let me see for myself” (6.129f). These are the central questions throughout Homer’s epic, and their episodically modeled answers challenge the boundaries of postwar practical reasoning. To what extent are the rules of civilization honored here? If norms are strong, deliberation is prudently collaborative; if not heroic prudence requires reasons to be properly concealed even as conversation concocts cooperation. Or, alternatively, is this a situation which can be encompassed by human deliberation at all? If not, the forces of enchantment and monstrosity must be countered by the resources of reasons and words. In these first moments of a return to human deliberation, Odysseus’s world is again at stake.

The story that plays out is characteristic of the dramatic enactment of human relationships in the epic. “Almost every episode… is a variation on the typical scene of arrival and hosting,” Beye concludes (1993,154; also Stewart, 1976, 77). Murnaghan observes that, the “Odyssey’s plot also establishes a positive connection between recognition and the observance of hospitality” as “codes of hospitality … are … highly valued in the Homeric world” (1987, 94). Recognition “consists fundamentally of the mutual acknowledgement of reciprocal relationships” (91) and is achieved through risking conversation, initially as a gambit – for the possibility of false self-representation on the part of the potential supplicant or host is always lurking. Gradually, hospitality grows into a deliberated bond between guest and host. Deliberation depends upon realizing a shared ethos that is reciprocally constructed, and prospers or declines over the course of a relationship. In some places, far off and familiar, deliberation is not possible at all. Of the great many deliberative involvements throughout the epic, Stanford concludes this initial encounter offers “the severest test of tact and resourcefulness” (1963, 20).
The initial meeting holds little promising. Odysseus emerges from the bushes, covered with brine, leaves, bloated, sporting but a branch to preserve modesty. Aware that his presumption of hospitality has been attenuated – since his sight has caused the washing party to flee – he nonetheless approaches Nausikaa who “boldly” stands her ground. “Debating inwardly” what he should do “embrace this beauty’s knees in supplication? or stand apart using honeyed speech,” he comes to a swift conclusion and decides “to trust in words” (6.160).

“Mistress: please: are you divine, or mortal?” and so with the first question, the honey loosens and a words begins to flow. Actually, the speech is a deftly structured, reasonable appeal that takes shape as a narrative locating speaker and listener in a productive relationship. The speech has four parts. The first recognizes the young princess’s family station and makes inference that she has been a joy to the household, suggesting the speaker to be a person of discerning judgment to the listener. The second explains Odysseus’s own rather dire appearance as accidental, rather than an essential attribute, the fault of circumstances, not his character; it also cleverly excuses his initial tactical choice as he claims that he was too much in “awe” to supplicate abjectly. The third forwards a minimal request, especially in light of the circumstances, for directions and a rag for covering. The fourth expresses well-wishes for the future, a blessing: “may the gods accomplish your desire: a home, a husband, and harmonious converse with him – the best thing in the world being a strong house held in serenity where man and wife agree. Woe to their enemies, joy to their friends! But all this they know best.” Woodhouse calls these “the most beautiful words, surely, ever spoken about wedded life, by anybody, in any age, or in any language” (1930, 57).

Whether one agrees, the speech is certainly a timeless model of building ethos from the scant visible resources. Toohey claims that Homer’s speeches do not reflect a sophisticated model of rhetoric (1994,153). To the contrary, this address constitutes a marvelous paradigm of an ethos-originating deliberation. Indeed, speeches of request-and-reply throughout the work exhibit a remarkable range of sophistication by testing how people initiate, reconstitute, or sustain a relationship in deliberation under the sign of hospitality. While not naively open, such deliberations do spark a relational ethos – that is an invested, bi-directional bond which (re)constitutes one’s self in articulating mutual regard and obligation. For instance, the ex-officer ingeniously tells the princess of a fragmentary memory – a slim palm tree he saw at Delos when returning with his troops, a tree that “filled my heart with wonder,” a symbol of hospitality, like Nausikaa. The simile flatters the listener, but achieves much more. Odysseus’s recovery of a slip of memory as a base for present judgment enables him to begin to connect past and present, thereby uniting great temporal distances. So, the formerly storm-tossed, at-a-loss skeptic takes a tremendous stride. From that moment, his piquant longing for home turns increasingly toward the directed action and an end to the postwar world.
Dialogically, the narrative works because its utterance argues that, contrary to appearances, Odysseus is neither a “predatory animal” nor “a rapacious god,” and so “he can claim to be a civilized member of human society,” one who anticipates a relation within the ambit of social values and cultural institutions. When a speech of request succeeds, a supplicant can expect the things that typically accompany hospitality, “meals, changes of clothing, baths, conveyance home, guest-gifts” and the like (Murnaghan, 1987, 91). The narrative is a famous instance of doubling in performance for, like Odysseus, the archaic story teller prompts his own hosts enthymematically to honor the gods by according him hospitality for a tale well told. Of course, Nausikaa’s reply does full justice to the request(s).

An address of request offers a number of choices, including the most basic as to whether to acknowledge the request as satisfactory. Nausikaa so recognizes the speech and states her duty: “Stranger, there is no quirk or evil in you that I can see. You know Zeus metes out fortune to good and bad men as it pleases him. Hardship he sent to you, and you must bear it. But now that you have taken refuge here you shall not lack for clothing, or any other comfort due to a poor man in distress”(6.201-204). Note that such a judgment requires appraisal, the capacity to resolve contrasting words and appearances. Note also, that the relationship is frankly stipulated as time-bound, for the other must bear one’s own burdens. In each host-guest relation, the question of departure is implicitly deliberated in the grant of hospitality. The law of hosting according to Menelaos says, “It is equally bad when one speeds on the guest unwilling to go, and when he holds back one who is hastening” (Hohendahl-Zoetelief, 1980, 177). Guest laws would appear the reverse. Deliberative arrangements have a half-life within which the relationship continually calibrates available resources to ostensible needs among all parties. Recognition is not the end of a relation, it is only a threshold and an ever present backdrop against which actions and events confirm and disconfirm initial judgments while the potentialities of the situation continue to unfold.

Nausikaa admonishes the maids not to be afraid, reasoning that her land is under the protection of the gods and that Zeus, the god of “strangers and beggars,” has sent a “small gift.” Odysseus turns down Nausikaa’s offer to have the party bathe him, as do Nausikaa’s friends who hand over the necessary oil and clothes. Apparently, the code of hospitality does not extend to obedience; prudence on both man and women’s parts regulate the relationship here. Odysseus performs his own makeover in private. Then as now, clothes make the man, and he emerges from the river with appearance so changed the washing party swoons. “The spectator has become the spectacle,” Hexter says (1993, 92). Arresting appearance creates a reversal, from: What is that? to Who is he?
Nausikaa’s judgment is confirmed by Odysseus new, handsome appearance, and the form of the ancient folk tale fulfilled. The shipwrecked frog turns out to be a proper prince, but Homer reworks the cultural material to usher in another foray into sexual politics. A complication slips into Nausikaa’s mind, as she plots how to affect a means to satisfy her guest’s need for transport. She tells the stranger to get up on the mule cart for a ride to town, but before he can do so she halts to deliberate a plan (an ingenious variance from her dream logic of the night before). If she is to meet the obligation of hospitality and find transportation for the stranger, a means must be contrived to introduce him successfully at court; and she must persuade the stranger to follow the plan. “You have good sense, I think; here’s how to do it” she says – like Ino taking the lead in a collaborative moment.

The argument to convince Odysseus involves two hypothetical scenarios. The first is a procataleptic excursus into what Nausikaa imagines gossips might say should she enter into town, back from the beach, with an older man. She anticipates the effect of a malicious rumor on the probability of Odysseus’s success at court. The second is the better plan, which involves Odysseus less honorably traveling behind and making a clandestine entrance to town, an act that would cast him temporarily outside the safe perimeter of hospitality. This risk is acceptable because – according to Nausikaa – an untarnished appearance would improve the chances of winning approval. The teenager’s deliberative assumption appears sound: just as the stranger made the best of surprise and was able to convince her of his character, likely he could do just as well with her mother, the powerful queen Arete.

Some scholars have claimed that the first scenario constitutes a self-serving half-truth, not unlike Kalypso’s offer of help. Consider the princess’s imagined gossip by insolent sea-dogs: “Some might say….”

Who is this handsome stranger trailing Nausikaa?
Where did she find him? Will he be her husband?
Or is she being hospitable to some rover … A god maybe?
descending now – to make her his forever.
Better, if she’s roamed and found a husband
somewhere else: none of our own will suit her,
though many come to court her, and those the best! (6.294-300)

In a short span, Nausikaa reveals her name; conveys that she thinks highly of the stranger, even a god; dubs him marriage material; and specifies that not only is she popular, but that she is courted by the best. Could prudential reasoning be serving a non-ostensible set of interests? The wiles of argument may turn Nausikaa’s earnest thinking into “broad hints” of an imagined liaison (Woodhouse, 1930, 58); however, the text suggests more interestingly, I think, that the ingenium of argument here relates to the field of associations begun in the dream work of the previous evening, sustained in the morning wedding similes, and amplified by the stranger’s altered appearance. The wiles of argument create affiliations because thought filters into deliberation out of the imagination of a present, metaphorically unified. Nausikaa’s courtship imagery performs a role similar that of the octopus and the palm tree in previous episodes. It serves as a basis of shared invention and self-affiliation in the argument. Her adolescent field of personal-political associations does brush the scene with comic danger, but her reasoning is sound, if her address is not wholly prudent (Tracy, 1990, 43).
Just as with Kalypso, Ino, and Athena, the Greek captain follows the plans of Nausikaa. Judging from these scenes, prudent choice is more a matter of making the better plan, rather than insisting on any prerogatives of status, experience, age or gender. Mature goddess, minor deity, or young woman, all, successfully deliberate plans of action that set Odysseus, themselves, and the postwar world on its way.

4. Deliberations in a Comic World
The Odyssey invites us to conjecture on the practices of deliberation in an archaic, postwar rhetorical culture. Gods deliberate apart in a time of their own, while mortals appear usually startled, impelled, or allured into reasoning. Whether god or mortal, the move toward deliberation would appear to begin in a plaint that marks some injustice. We first encounter this in Athena’s ironic twist, contrasting Zeus’ piety and Odysseus’s condition; its counterpart, the consolation, may resolve the injustice by diminishing a plaint’s significance, as Athena’s complaint is dismissed but not ignored by Zeus. When disruption and complaint are not followed by consolation, resentment swells and deliberative relations may fracture. Kalypso’s arguments (whose psychology commentators note resembles more that of a human than a folk-figure) against Hermes’ injunction give rise to a split between the consensus of the gods and her own estimations of justice, and so she raises objections indirectly, through variations in formalities, and withdraws agreement even as she assures compliance. The resentment spirals into open confrontation as Kalypso traps Odysseus in a dilemma; and while she lovingly capitulates in the breakup, Homer leaves ambiguous the intent of her gift, a heavy cloak for a sailor embarked on autumnal seas.

Second, the depiction of Odysseus at sea illustrates that the resources of internal deliberation in dire circumstances become greatly tested and may be for a time wholly insufficient to circumstances. The hero’s capacity to weigh arguments is undercut when the contexts within which choices are made are eroded by doubt, as he knows not whom to trust, Kalypso or Ino or any of the gods. Further, while slow deliberation is ordinarily prudent, events do overtake thought. Excess and defect cannot be balanced when its sink or swim. Serial crises propel estimations of risk into a self-feeding hyperbolic trajectory. Common sense is restored by taking hold of whatever is available, like the effort of the octopus to retain its home. In tight spots, a little luck is needed, too. Once restored, prudence recovers quickly and even on a barren unknown foreign shore, the exhausted Odysseus is able to weigh alternatives. This model of self-deliberation would seem appropriate for a time in a culture when social and personal alternatives are unclear but choice imminent, transitions mandatory but unmapped, and the available resources of prudence, its habits, propensities, and directions, in need of reconstitution – the blank horizons of a postwar culture.

Third, in initiating a relationship, dream memory or image recollection may play a role, preparing a metaphorical field for argument invention. While it would be useful on such occasions for appears to conform to words, words can trump appearances if they invest a relationship with ethos, articulating the possibilities of trust, good-will, and sense. The host-guest relation once established is tested by weighing resources and needs within a negotiated common time. Entering into a deliberative space is always risky. For Nausikaa, the relationship turns out happily. Not so for everyone. The Phaiakians receive Odysseus, just as Nausikaa plans, and become charmed by Odysseus’s tales, but eventually are punished by Poesidon for helping the Ithacan return. In retrospect, Alkinoos appears to take in one guest too many, just as later on the suitors stay one night too long. From a comic perspective, tragedy depends upon where one sits – when the music stops.

Across all three episodes, deliberation roils against and within a partially articulated world; Athena’s complaint of the not yet, impatient to wait for the fullness of human time, Kalypso’s anguished compliance and ironic invocation of the norms of cooperation, Odysseus loss and recovery of compass during a storm, Ino’s bracing advice, Nausikaa’s bold stance and sound plan spun from dreams, Alkinoos’ willing complicity in his daughter’s schemes – all these elements show that persuasion is gathered from a field where common cause, not common grounds, are sufficient to release action; cross-expectations are the rule, not the exception, in the transitional worlds of departures, arrivals, and relationships for now – the deliberations of a postwar culture. It’s not that such a culture is necessarily cynical or that its deliberations are mere displays of distrust, manipulation, and deception. While commentators have been charmed by Odysseus tactical brilliance, basically lies, into concluding that “Odysseus trusts no one” (Beye, 1993, 149) and by extension rework skepticism into every character, this alternative reading shows that trust like candor is not an absolute, but a matter of degree and circumstance. Thus, communicative encounters can exhibit intelligence and concern in the face of trauma, even if understanding of issues are not exactly comparable between interlocutors nor full disclosure available in such conversations. So visited the text, Homer’s epic shines as a great gift, modeling for humankind the breathtaking variety of communication rendered possible by deliberative sensibility.

At the end of the Poetics, while confessing admiration for Homer, Aristotle defends the development of a younger, sleeker art, tragedy. He elevates tragedy over the ancient epic because of the latter’s elegant efficiency. An epic may “furnish subject for several tragedies,” he notes (16.6), whereas a tragedy is more pleasurable because of a highly unified “concentrated effect” which is “not spread over a long time and so diluted” (16.5). One wonders if Aristotle would have held the same developmental judgment for comedy. The Odyssey fashions an epic with numerous comedies, though at times approaches tragic recognition. To me, its complicated, polyepisodic quality seems more pleasurable than could any “compact comedy” – a term that is something of an oxymoron in any case, like “a limited sense of humor.” Tragic form is undoubtedly powerful because its relentless, unrelieved focus leading to a necessary recognition, reversal and climax. While understandably a mainstay of postwar culture, tragedy offers necessarily fewer opportunities for connecting with varied events and attitudes of a world renewed. A comic epic veritably disgorges a sprawling flow of personal and public dust-ups and set-tos thereby offering opportunities for audiences to recognize multiple reconnections and transitions in deliberating a postwar world. Had Aristotle held that the value of an art hinged, at least in part, upon the temporal fractures or ambiguities throughout its audience, what would have followed for the West’s understanding of deliberation? At a minimum, could deliberation be doubly constructed, premised in some times as a continuous path of present to future and at others on the need to build new or reconstruct old linkages once assumed in place and available? What difference would such a double grounding make to deliberative possibilities and practices?

One difference surely would have been to expand the place of narrative in the deliberative art. “Narrative is least common in deliberative oratory, because no one narrates future events,” Aristotle tells us. However, “if there is narrative,” he reports, “it is of events in the past, in order that by being reminded of those things the audience will take better counsel about what is to come (either criticizing or praising)” (Rhetoric, Book 3.10). For the characters and audiences of the Odyssey, narrative is more than a historical yardstick yielding relevant examples to measure prudential choices. Narratives announce, stress, test, and confirm the relational contexts within and through which deliberation is released. Without coming to terms with time as enveloped in renewed or initiated human relationships, the context necessary to formulate a reciprocal exchange in the present remains unreleased from the past. Only as guest and host exchange parts of the story – as they are differentially impacted and framed by the tendrils of war and return – can plans of action be crafted, communicated and enacted. Thus, guests and hosts are narratively enabled into motion by the appearance of common cause, even while testing common grounds as actions unfold (Thornton, 1970, 38-51).

Aristotle’s deliberative sensibility seems to be constrained understandably by an anxiety over ambiguous temporal contexts that might engender political extremes. Truly, the modeled outcomes of Aeschylus, while cathartic for the audience, are not politic for the people. So, he moves temporal dislocation entirely out of the deliberative realm and places it into the aesthetic form of tragedy, where dynastic disasters are transmuted more safely into an aesthetic pleasure or moral admonition. The Odyssey suggests that misrecognitions need not turn out badly. One imagines bardic performances as initially loosening strictures on personal and public talk by aesthetically transmuting frozen, possibly unspoken social questions into a cultural form where relationships are modeled and given room for play.
There is a price to be paid, of course, one must be willing to endure or accept the indignities of turn-about in argument, with laughter or without. Then, however, the deliberations of gods and mortals, men and women, the older and younger generations, living and the dead may be performed with urgency and uncertainty, disguise and recognition, warm hospitality and harsh endurance, in isolation and in the company of fellows – all the deliberations of a rhetorical culture come alive with style, mindfulness, wit and action. The scenes of contest and encounter from the Odyssey deserve to be so appreciated and explored as they underwrite a refreshed and refreshing deliberative sensibility. Only then will Aristotle’s comedy appear to us as something other than a lost work.

5. Coda
As I conclude this paper, another return of sorts plays out on the public scene, on an island made remote by the distances affected in Soviet-US confrontation, a war that supposedly ended a decade or so ago. Former President Jimmy Carter arrived on a Sunday in Cuba – the first former or current U.S. chief executive to set foot on the Caribbean island since Calvin Coolidge in 1928. The press report reads: “Carter, 77, plans to stay in Cuba through Friday. He is expected to meet with Cuban President Fidel Castro, 75, at least twice, including an official dinner Sunday night.” “We welcome you with warm and sincere friendship,” Castro said upon Carter’s arrival …. And we honestly hope that your visit to Cuba is not used by anyone to question your patriotism, to diminish your merits or to affect the assistance that your foundation provides to so many poor, neglected and forsaken people as there are in the world today.” With a faint echo of the classics, the press dubs the visit an effort to “jump-start a dialogue between the two nations.” Carter’s excoriation of Castro’s human rights policy in the late 1970s, matched by Castro’s subsequent admiration for Carter’s “moral and religious values,” cross expectations, as does Carter’s repudiation of Bush’s naming of Cuba as part of the axis of evil. Come see for yourself, Carter jibes. “A good neighbor policy” is anticipated in spite of those who say that Castro the dictator will “last forever.” If the relation of hospitality cannot guarantee universal deliberation, at least it puts a ball in the air, and we may soon begin to recognize human voices of complaint and consolation. The visit creates a new wrinkle in a joint narrative of relations between two men and possibly a new chapter in the story of two nations. How else do fresh deliberations start and a new era begin?

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