ISSA Proceedings 2002 – Improvisation In Organizations: Rhetorical Logic And Rhetorical Skill

• by: Joy L. Hart, Shirley C. Willihnganz &, Charles A. Willard - Department of Communication, University of Louisville

What do you want? Everything we’ve learned
has become false. We have to relearn our calling
from top to bottom (Colonel Pétain, 1914)

“Everything we have learned has become false” has the ring of a eureka moment, of an organizational actor in situ suddenly seeing the need to think outside the proverbial box, and an illustration of Stephen Toulmin’s (1964) view that we show our rationality by how we change our minds. It seems like an unusually startling argument, enthymematically presupposing as it does, the evidence of recent events, the Battle of the Frontiers in Alsace-Lorraine (August 14-22, 1914) which had been an unmitigated French disaster. But for Pétain, this famous quotation was a rhetorical move aimed at subordinates and superiors alike; it was his distinctive way of arguing, the “we” being his alternative to “I told you so.”

Henri Philippe Pétain (1856-1951) was something of a maverick, the sort of organizational actor likeliest to see the need “to relearn our calling from top to bottom,” and thus a powerful case-in-point of why organizations should value their dissenters (Willard, 1987; Willihnganz, Hart, and Willard, 1993; Hart, Willihnganz, and Willard, 1995; Willihnganz, Hart, and Willard, in press). Unlike most French and British generals, long before the Great War, Pétain understood the implications of the second wave of the industrial revolution that had blossomed around the army; he appreciated the new firepower of the modern battlefield, the new artillery and machine guns. He rejected the crown jewel of French military wisdom, the offensive à outrance, “offensive to the limit,” in which elan and guts were expected to prevail over firepower. His heretical view was that “artillery conquers, infantry occupies” (Pétain, 1930), an obdurate truth of the Western Front that most Great War generals would never grasp. As Mary Douglas (1986) might say, they were imps of their institutions, compelled to think in deep ruts, thus lending to the First World War its unsavory reputation for mindless slaughter.

The pre-war French army treated Pétain the way organizations often treat their mavericks. Someone wrote in his personnel file that he should never be promoted above the rank of brigadier general; he was tolerated but stigmatized in the military schools; he was banished to a small coterie of renegade “firepower fetishists,” a label that was not meant as a compliment. And he seemed destined to be a permanent colonel (King, 1951).
But even the most hidebound organizations can be battered into change. French military operations of 1914 and 1915 were catastrophes. Even 1914’s fabled “Miracle of the Marne” owed more to German timidity than French flexibility. And by 1917 the offensive à outrance mind-set had buried more than 1.3 million French soldiers. Amid this train of disasters Pétain’s star glittered. He was the only French general (1914-1917) who succeeded with every task assigned him with minimal casualties (Carré, 1962). To higher commanders minimal casualties were objects of suspicion. It was the surreal logic of the day that commanders with the highest casualties were the most competent because they were pressing the offensive à outrance (Lottman, 1985; Ryan, 1969). Yet despite his low casualties, Pétain’s successes couldn’t be challenged. So at 58 in 1914, about to retire as a colonel, he rose to full general in eight months, the most meteoric rise in the history of the French army. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2002 – Postmodern Memorializing And Peace Rhetoric: Case Study of ‘The Cornerstone of Peace’, Memorial Of The Battle Of Okinawa

• by: Kato, Takayuki - University of Northern Iowa

The Cornerstone of Peace is a monument which the Okinawa prefecture dedicated at the 50th anniversary of the end of the Pacific War and the Battle of Okinawa on July 23, 1995. According to its official pamphlet “The Cornerstone of Peace,” the memorial is “to remember and honor” all the dead from the Battle of Okinawa. Unlike most war memorials, it lists names regardless of the side on which they fought and their status as either combatant or noncombatant. Up to June 23, 2000, 237,969 names are inscribed on the wall, including 148,289 from Okinawa, 75,219 from mainland Japan, 14,006 from the U.S., 82 from U.K., 28 from Taiwan, 82 from North Korea, and 263 from South Korea. More are added as the war dead continue to be identified. With this materialized monument as a subject of rhetorical criticism, I will explore how the Cornerstone was intended to remember the battle in the unique postwar condition of this island

The Battle of Okinawa was one of the bloodiest ground campaigns by the U.S. army during World War II, causing over 200,000 casualties in total. In this battle, the Japanese imperial government used Okinawa as a seawall to hold American Army personnel outside the mainland (Himeyuri Peace Museum, 1990). Under this policy, the Japanese Army deployed in Okinawa virtually abandoned the defense of the island. Instead, with all the islanders, they had to endure the attacks of the U.S. troops to the last person in order to do maximum damage to the enemy’s forces and to buy as much time as possible for the central government (Himeyuri Peace Museum, 1990). This suicidal order massively expanded Okinawan civilian toll up to over 100,000, nearly one-third of Okinawa’s population then.
Although it was apparent that the cause of the massive civilian casualties was the Japanese imperial army among Okinawans, this was not recognized as a national memory. Oshiro (1999) explained the reason of the different remembrances between Okinawans and mainlanders was that Japanese mainlanders tended to remember the Pacific war in the ideological framework of victimization symbolized by Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings so not to often estrange their own army.

Besides the wartime period, the abandonment of Okinawa again occurred after the Pacific war. George Feifer (2000) offers accounts of the postwar condition of Okinawa as a product of scapegoat policy. Shortly after the war, the Japanese government sacrificed the island this time as an outpost for the U.S. forces to be stationed. Some 75% of U.S. bases in Japan were concentrated on this island, which accounted for less than 1% of the Japan’s landmass. This disproportionate amount of the U.S. military presence formed Okinawans’ economic dependency on the bases-related business like “ground rents, bar sales, and retail income” (38), while those military personnel “committed nearly 5,000 crimes – including mugging, molestation, and murder” since the end of the war (36). Thus, local economic profit was used in a primary rhetorical strategy to support the bases on the island in addition to the national security of Japan. On the contrary, those crimes stirred up Okinawans’ resentment toward the U.S. bases and it would peak at the rape of 12-year-old schoolgirl by three U.S. Marines in September 1995, around five weeks after the dedication of the Cornerstone of Peace. Okinawans’ discontents toward the U.S. bases and the Japanese government, which militarized the island, was the unique context of the Okinawa memorial construction. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2002 – Aesthetic Arguments And Civil Society

• by: Gerard A. Hauser - University of Colorado at Boulder

The Public and its Problems, John Dewey (1927/1954) wrestles with the difficulty of a public forming an adequate opinion about its members’ shared interests. American journalist Walter Lippmann (1922/1949) had argued that the complexity of the modern age, coupled with the average citizens’ disinterest in reading and learning the results of accurate investigation, condemned them to a vulnerable state of disarray. Dewey allows that Lippmann’s point is well taken, save its oversight of the potency of art. “Presentation is fundamentally important,” he writes, “and presentation is a question of art… Artists have always been the real purveyors of news, for it is not the outward happening in itself which is new, but the kindling by it of emotion, perception and appreciation” (p. 183).

Dewey recognized art’s relationship to the publicity principle, which lies at the heart of informed citizen participation in the political process of the modern state. The conditions of modernity – the invention of mass and instant means of communication, the rise of mass transportation and increased mobility, universal dependence on mass manufacturing, and concentration of population in urban centers – led to the eclipse of the public, he argued (pp. 110-42). The era of politics conducted under the Aristotelian assumption of prerequisite leisure had passed. Democracy’s new realities were connected to the conditions of civil society: the network of associations existing outside the state and regulative of it through the force of publicly formed and communicated opinion on duly elected and appointed representatives. The need to participate in civil society, along with the conditions that fragment and isolate citizens, led Dewey to raise a different point than the connection of art to life. His regarded artists as the purveyors of news because art maximizes the publicity principle. It brings issues to those whose interests are at stake, raises their awareness, and shapes their political thoughts. His point is not about culture but about communication and specifically deliberation that lies at the center of civil society’s political function.
At the conclusion of his analysis of why “the public” is in eclipse, as he considers the consequences of rapidly changing conditions of economy, work, travel, and information transfer on human association, he notes that desires and purposes created by the machine age are disconnected from the ideals of tradition. He concludes, “Our Babel is not one of tongues but of the signs and symbols without which shared experience is impossible” (p. 142). More important than the information content of a literary work is the artist’s power to bond strangers in shared experience through portraits constructed with signs and symbols that evoke deeper reflection.
The freeing of the artist in literary presentation, in other words, is as much a precondition of the desirable creation of adequate opinion on public matters as is the freeing of social inquiry. Men’s conscious life of opinion and judgment often proceeds on a superficial and trivial plane. But their lives reach a deeper level. The function of art has always been to break through the crust of conventionalized and routine consciousness. Common things, a flower, a gleam of moonlight, the song of a bird, not things rare and remote, are means with which the deeper levels of life are touched so that they spring up as desire and thought (pp. 183-84). Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2002 – The Ordinary Practice Of Presuming And Presumption With Special Attention To Veracity And The Burden Of Proof

• by: Fred J. Kauffeld - Edgewood College

1. Introduction.
This paper offers an analysis of our ordinary concepts of presuming and presumption and of their corresponding everyday practices. Scholars encounter ‘presumption’ in several contexts: the lexicon of the law, as a term of art in studies of argumentation and rhetoric, and occasionally in philosophical discussions. In addition to these technical ideas of presumption, as ordinary persons we share plain senses for these terms, and we commonly engage in practices which can truthfully be reported using ‘presuming’ and ‘presumption’ in their everyday meaning. This essay concerns the commonsense concepts which ordinary language attaches to these terms.
Scholars agree that presumptions figure importantly in thought and speech, and many have called for further study of the topic (Blair, 1980, 2-3; Cronkhite, 1966, 270; Flew, 1976, 16-23; Rescher, 1977, 28-36; Ullmann-Margalit, 1983, 43; Walton, 1996, 17-18). However, few have investigated presumption from the vantage afforded by our ordinary concepts. Presumption was initially introduced into argumentation and communication theory by Richard Whately as a concept borrowed from the vocabulary of jurists (1963, 112-13). Subsequent scholarship has favored his approach. Ullmann-Margalit is representative.

Explication is usually guided by the pre-systematic, everyday usages of the notion under consideration. In the present instance, however, it seems to me that the ordinary-language analysis of the notion of presumption … will not get us very far. Guidance in the present case is to be sought rather in the realm of the law (1983, 144).
While granting priority to analysis of ordinary concepts, this philosopher nevertheless develops an account of presumption based on technical legal concepts, without a glance in the direction of plain understanding and practice.
Jurists have made critically important contributions to our understanding of the work presumptions can do in argumentation, but our studies ought also be informed by an understanding of the ordinary act of presuming. To develop this theme, I will first critically examine the conception of presumption scholars have constructed by borrowing from the law; I will then offer an analysis of presumption as plainly understood; and, finally, I will indicate some light which ordinary conceptions throw on problems of continuing interest to students of argumentation. Ordinary ideas about presumption may well need improvement, but they arise at a rich nexus in our day-to-day affairs, and, as J. L. Austin famously taught, they comprise an indispensable starting point for inquiry (1961, 133). Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2002 – Consensus And Power. The Facts Of Democracy

• by: Tim Heysse - K.U. Brussel / Vlaams Parlement

In a democracy, Hannah Arendt writes, “the people are supposed to rule those who govern them” (Arendt, 1986, 62). The meaning of this phrase may not be entirely clear at once, as happens often with such platitudes. Nevertheless, it is instructive for three reasons.
Firstly, by explicitly talking about “ruling” and “governing”, Arendt leaves no room for doubt concerning the fact that, in the words of John Rawls, even in democratic societies, “the fundamental relation of citizenship includes among other things the relation between free and equal citizens who exercise ultimate political power as a collective body” (Rawls, 1996, xlv).
Secondly, by distinguishing between “the people who rule” and “those who govern”, Arendt suggests that the citizens in a democracy cannot or ought not to take power in their own hands directly. In order to understand what it means to be a citizen in a contemporary democratic society – one way of formulating the aim of this paper – we must therefore study not only the mutual relations between the citizens, but also the relationship between the citizens and those who exercise power.
Thirdly, since in a democracy the people are supposed to rule, political power in a democracy is supposed to be “ultimately the power of the public, that is the power of free and equal citizens as a collective body” (Rawls, 1996, 136, 38), as Rawls puts it (quite rightly replacing the chimerical notion of ‘the people’ with the legal notion of ‘the citizens’).

In this paper I will investigate whether these three features of a democracy may be the starting point for an interpretation of public reason in democratic societies that does not reduce, cynically, all (democratic) politics to the conquest and the exercise of power, but that doesn’t start directly from moral principles either. We may see this intermediate way, if we pay close attention to the role of public argumentation and discussion in a democracy. For, if power is supposed to be ultimately power of the citizens considered as free and equal, the stable exercise of power in a democracy presupposes that the general structure of political authority and (at least a great number of) the actual political decisions and actions “are justified by reasons which are acceptable to many citizens” (Rawls, 1996, 136, 38). And precisely in and through public argumentation and discussion that such reasons may be discovered. The suggestion is that the term ‘democracy’ refers to specific conditions or rules for the conquest and the exercise of power and that these conditions or rules create a particular balance of power that confers a form of reasonableness to the exercise of power.
The purpose of this essay is therefore to explain how political power in a democracy can acquire a form of reasonableness, what sense of ‘reasonableness’ is meant here and what the role of public argumentation and discussion is in creating such a ‘public reason’. I will focus on the interpretations of public reason that have been presented by John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas[i]. Rawls and Habermas are not only the most influential political philosophers of the moment[ii], but their interpretations may also be considered as the extremes of a spectrum in which the different interpretations of public reason can be arranged that are currently being proposed under the general label of ‘deliberative democracy’[iii]. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2002 – Toulmin’s Warrants

• by: David Hitchcock - McMaster University

In The Uses of Argument (1958), Stephen Toulmin proposed a new, dialectically grounded structure for the layout of arguments, replacing the old terminology of “premiss” and “conclusion” with a new set of terms: claim, data (later “grounds”), warrant, modal qualifier, rebuttal, backing. Toulmin’s scheme has been widely adopted in the discipline of speech communication, especially in the United States. In this paper I focus on one component of the scheme, the concept of a warrant. I argue that those who have adopted Toulmin’s scheme have often distorted the concept of warrant in a way which destroys what is distinctive and worthwhile about it. And I respond to criticisms of the concept by van Eemeren, Grootendorst & Kruiger (1984), Johnson (1996) and Freeman (1991). Their criticisms show the need for some revision of Toulmin’s position, but his basic concept of warrant, I shall argue, should be retained as a central concept for the evaluation of arguments.

1. Toulmin’s conception
Despite the pluralism implicit in his title, Toulmin articulated his proposal for the layout of arguments in the context of a single use of argument, that of justifying one’s assertion in response to a challenge (Toulmin, 1958, 12). The proposed layout emerges from consideration of the questions that could arise in such a challenge. Prior to the challenge, there must be an assertion, in which there is involved a claim, by which Toulmin appears to mean the proposition asserted. A challenger’s first question in response to such an assertion is something like, “What do you have to go on?”, to which the answer will be data (Toulmin, 1958, 97) or grounds (Toulmin, Rieke & Janik, 1984, 38). But a challenger who accepts as correct the information given in answer to such a question can still ask a further question: “How do you get there?”, to which the answer will be the warrant (Toulmin, 1958, 98; Toulmin, Rieke & Janik, 1984, 46). Whereas the data or grounds are the basis of the person’s claim, the warrant is the person’s justification for inferring the claim from those grounds. Justifying a step from grounds to claim, according to Toulmin, requires appeal to general considerations: “What are needed are general, hypothetical statements, which can act as bridges, and authorise the sort of step to which our argument commits us.” (Toulmin, 1958, 98; italics added) Warrants may be qualified by such modal qualifiers as “probably” or “generally” or “necessarily” or “presumably”, a fact generally reflected by qualifying the claim; if the warrant is defeasible, then conditions of exception or rebuttal may be mentioned. Finally, a challenger may ask for justification of the warrant, to which the answer will be a proposed backing for the warrant.

To repeat Toulmin’s hackneyed and familiar example, suppose someone asserts, “Harry is a British subject.” A challenger requests justification of this claim, to which the reply is, “Harry was born in Bermuda.” The challenger further asks how this ground supports the claim, to which the reply is, “A man born in Bermuda is generally a British subject.” As a defeasible warrant, this assertion has conditions of rebuttal, which could be made explicit: “unless neither of his parents is of British nationality or he has changed his nationality”. Asked to justify the warrant, the author of the claim will cite the British Nationality Acts, where these rules for determining nationality are set out. (Toulmin, 1958, 99-102) Read more