1. Indicators of argumentative moves
In order to investigate which types of words and expressions can be helpful in analyzing argumentative discourse, we started a research project at the University of Amsterdam that concentrates on verbal indicators provided by the Dutch language of the communicative and interactional functions of argumentative moves. Our project aims at making an inventory of potential indicators, classifying their indicative force in terms of the pragma-dialectical model for critical discussion, and describing the conditions that need to be fulfilled for a certain verbal expression to serve as an indicator of a specific argumentative move. The scope of the project is not restricted to indicators of arguments and standpoints, but extends to indicators of all speech acts that can play a part in resolving a dispute.
In carrying out our research, we make use of pragma-linguistic descriptions of connectives and other linguistic elements that can be indicative of aspects of argumentative discourse that are indispensable for an adequate evaluation. In our attempt to apply linguistic descriptions of markers of various kinds of textual relations in the analysis of argumentative discourse, we have encountered a number of obstacles. A major cause of this is that the most prominent approaches of indicators of textual relations are developed from a metatheoretical perspective that is crucially different from the functionalizing and externalizing approach favoured in pragma-dialectics. In addition, there is usually a difference of purpose: linguists are not particularly interested in analyzing argumentative discourse; their distinctions are therefore not geared to solving our problems of analysis.
In this paper, I shall begin by explaining the starting-points of our own pragma-dialectical approach to argumentative indicators. Next, I shall discuss the main problems we have with the relevant linguistic literature. Finally, I shall attempt to demonstrate the fruitfulness of our approach to the analysis of argumentative discourse. In this endeavour, I shall concentrate on the problem of distinguishing arguments from explanations.

2. A pragma-dialectical perspective on the analysis of argumentation
In the pragma-dialectical research programme, argumentation is approached from four basic meta-theoretical starting-points: the subject matter under investigation is to be ‘externalized’, ‘socialized’, ‘functionalized’, and ‘dialectified’ (Van Eemeren et al. 1996: 276-280). What are the implications of these starting-points when applied to the problem of analysing argumentative discourse?
First, functionalization. When analyzing argumentation, the purpose for which the argumentation is put forward is to be duly taken into account. Functionalization can be realized by making use of theoretical instruments from speech act theory, making the speech act the basic unit of analysis, with the propositional and the illocutionary level as its sublevels. By making use of pragmatic insights, the functions and structures of the speech acts performed in argumentative discourse can be adequately described.
Second, socialization. When analyzing argumentation, one should realize that argumentation does not consist in one single individual privately drawing a conclusion, but takes place in the context of a process of joint problem solving. In order to do justice to the fundamentally dialogical character of argumentative discourse, the analysis should be aimed at elucidating the collaborative way in which the protagonist and the antagonist respond to each other’s – real or projected – questions, doubts and objections.
Third, externalization. The analysis should not focus on psychological dispositions or internal thought processes of the people involved in an argument, but on the externalizable commitments created by their performance of speech acts.
Fourth, dialectification. Dialectification is achieved by regimenting the exchange of speech acts directed at resolving a difference of opinion in an ideal model for critical discussion. When analyzing argumentative discourse, this model serves as a point of reference: it clearly indicates what to look for in the analysis. Of course, the analysis must be further justified by referring to the details of the presentation and the context.

Starting from these metatheoretical premises, a pragma-dialectical analysis of an argumentative text aims at identifying all elements that are relevant to the resolution of the dispute and therefore to the evaluation of the discourse. The selection criterion for including elements in the analysis is thus functionality in resolving the dispute. Not all speech acts, however, can be directly related to the overall aim of a critical discussion. In many cases, it needs first to be determined whether there exists a functional relation between certain speech acts before their exact contribution to resolving the dispute can be determined. In such cases, the local relevance of the speech act is to be considered first, before its overall relevance can be at issue.
The reason for this is twofold. First, some speech acts, for example the speech act of argumentation and that of explanation, cannot stand by themselves; they must be in a particular way connected to another speech act by the same speaker. In the case of argumentation, there should exist a relation of support between the argument and a standpoint; in the case of explanation, there is to be an explanatory relation between the explanation and the assertion that expresses the state of affairs that is to be explained (Van Eemeren & Grootendorst 1992: 29). Both argumentation and explanation are complex speech acts, which maintain at a higher textual level a relation with another speech act (Van Eemeren & Grootendorst 1984: 109).
Second, due to the dialogical character of a critical discussion, many speech acts are only relevant in connection with the speech act to which they react. This is, for instance, the case with speech acts by means of which standpoints and arguments are accepted, agreements are reached on the allocation of the burden of proof, or concessions or criticism are expressed.

According to Van Eemeren and Grootendorst’s definition (1994: 52), an element of discourse is relevant to another element of discourse ‘if an interactional relation can be envisaged between these elements that is functional in the light of a certain objective’. The relevance of an argument to a standpoint consists in it serving as a means to make a standpoint acceptable to the other party, thus making it possible to achieve the interactional aim of convincing the other party. The relevance of an explanation to the state of affairs to be explained is that the explanation makes it understandable for the listener how this state of affairs has come into being.[i]
In the case of reactions to speech acts performed by another party, the relevant connection between the speech acts may be that the one speech act gives an indication as to whether or not the communicative or interactional aim of the other speech act has been achieved – or to what extent. This is, for instance, the case if the second speaker indicates that he accepts – or does not accept – a speech act by the first speaker, or if he indicates that he understands – or fails to understand – a speech act performed by the other speaker. A reaction may also be relevant because it is an attempt to make another speech act acceptable, thus removing the other party’s criticism or doubt, or because it is an attempt to make another speech act understandable, thus solving the other party’s comprehension problems.

Figure 1 Types of textual relations

In the pragma-dialectical approach, the notion of relevance is seen as three-dimensional. So far I have only taken account of the domain dimension: to what kind of unit (speech event, stage or other speech act) is a speech act relevant, and of the aspect dimension: what form of relevance is at stake (are the speech acts connected for comprehensibility or acceptability reasons). In considering the relevance of a speech act, justice should also be done to the third dimension, the object dimension. In this endeavour, it is to be established which component of the speech acts is at issue: do we concentrate on the relevance of the propositional content, or of the communicative force? On both these levels, relevance relations may exist. In combination, the metatheoretical starting-points and the ideal speech act model make it possible to give a definition of analytically relevant speech acts and analytically relevant relations between speech acts. Figure 1 gives an overview of the various ways in which elements of an argumentative text may be related to each other.
As far as the indicators of argumentative moves are concerned, it is clear that the clues for analysis should include both indicators of the illocutionary force of individual speech acts and indicators of relations between speech acts. In the linguistic literature, until now the major focus has been on discourse connectives and other indicators of textual relations. What do these linguistic approaches have to offer for the analysis of argumentative discourse?

3. Other perspectives

Research concerned with textual relations and relation-indicating devices is primarily undertaken in the field of text linguistics and discourse analysis. Broadly speaking, two major types of approach to indicators of textual relations can be distinguished. First, top-down approaches, in which textual relations are classified in terms of a limited number of theoretical notions (‘primitives’), and subsequently an attempt is made to determine which connectives can be used to mark these relations. Among the representatives of this approach are Mann and Thompson (1988), Sweetser (1990) and Sanders (1992, 1997). In the second type of approach, the bottum-up approach, first an inventory of indicators is made and then it is attempted to find out (in a pretheoretical way), by analysing texts or by using substitution tests, how these indicators can be used. As a result, a set of features comes up ‘inductively’ that is necessary for giving a systematic description of the various indication devices. Representatives of this type of approach are Knott and Mellish (1996) and Schiffrin (1987).[ii]
In our attempt to make use of the semantic and pragmatic descriptions of argumentative and other types of connectives, we encountered two major types of problem: incompatibilities with the pragma-dialectical meta-theoretical premises and lack of relevance of the distinctions to problems of analysis. Let me briefly illustrate these problems.

Many of the prominent approaches to textual relations are only partly functionalized, for example, Mann & Thompson’s, Sanders’ and Sweetser’s approach. In principle, these authors do all make use of concepts from speech act theory and they seem to favour a functional approach. Seen from a pragmatic perspective, their approaches suffer nonetheless from a number of inconsistencies. They all make a distinction between relations between states of affairs in reality, and pragmatic or illocutionary relations. They do not make a hierarchical distinction between relations at the propositional and relations at the illocutionary level. Relations between states of affairs, which in a speech act perspective would be regarded as propositional relations, are treated as functioning on a par with illocutionary relations. For this reason, it often goes unnoticed that relations between two speech acts can exist on two levels at the same time. This is, for instance, the case in an argument-standpoint relation at the illocutionary level that is based on a causal relationship at the propositional level.[iii]

I shall illustrate the problem by discussing some distinctions made in the Rhetorical Structure Theory of Mann and Thompson (1988). At first sight, this theory seems to correspond nicely with the pragma-dialectical approach. Mann and Thompson consider their theory to be a functional theory of text structure and they think that it can be used as a tool for the analysis of a wide range of text types. They distinguish a large number of textual relations varying in the effect they intend to achieve in the reader. For each relation between two text spans, called the ‘nucleus’ and the ‘satelite’, they formulate a number of constraints reminiscant of the felicity conditions for speech acts.[iv] The textual relations are divided into two groups, ‘subject matter’ relations and ‘presentational’ relations:
Subject matter relations are those whose intended effect is that the reader recognizes the relation in question; presentational relations are those whose intended effect is to increase some inclination in the reader, such as the desire to act or the degree of positive regard for, belief in, or acceptance of the nucleus (1988: 257).

In their definition of subject matter relations, the only intended effect Mann and Thompson mention is the communicative effect of recognizing the relation between the propositional contents of the related speech acts. They do not give an account of the illocutionary purpose, or interactional goal, for which a propositional relation is employed by the writer. This means that the analyses offered by Mann and Thompson are only partially functional.
In other approaches, the lack of externalization is problematic. Sweetser’s (1990) multiple-domains theory, currently popular among pragma-linguists, is a good example. According to Sweetser, sentences that contain ‘causal’ conjunctions, such as ‘therefore’, ‘since’ and ‘so’, can be given different readings, depending on the type of causality that is at issue. The relationship between the conjoined clauses can be based on
(a) real-world causality,
(b) epistemic causality or
(c) speech act causality. Sweetser (1990: 77) gives the following examples:

(1a) Real-world causality: John came back because he loved her
(1b) Epistemic causality: John loved her, because he came back.
(1c) Speech act causality: What are you doing tonight, because there’s a good movie on.

From Sweetser’s examples, it becomes clear that the relation of epistemic causality must be similar to the relation between a standpoint and an argument for the truth or acceptability of its propositional content. The problem is, however, that Sweetser gives an internalizing definition of the epistemic relation which creates a fundamental difference between the epistemic causal relation and the argumentative relation.[v] Sweetser does not situate the epistemic relation at the speech act level, but at the level of the speaker’s thought processes. In her analysis, example 1b is seen as a statement about the writer’s conclusions and how they were reached. Knott and Mellish (1996: 153) point out that ‘an account is missing of how an argumentative text […] achieves a rhetorical effect on the reader – how it persuades the reader’ of the conclusion that is presented by the writer. They concede that there may be contexts where Sweetser’s analysis of epistemic relations is preferable, for instance when dealing with writers who are simply expressing their own chain of reasoning out loud for scrutiny by a reader whose authority they accept, but they do not consider this a prototypical use of argumentative relations (Knott & Mellish 1996: 154).

The internalizing approach underlying the concept of epistemic causality runs counter to the pragma-dialectical starting-point of externalization, which requires the argumentation theorist to concentrate on the speech acts performed and the externalized or externalizable commitments of the arguer rather than on the beliefs and inferences involved in the reasoning process of drawing a conclusion. A different type of problem concerns the applicability of the distinctions made in the linguistic literature to the analysis of argumentation. Sometimes the definitions of textual relations are not differentiated enough for practical purposes. Often all inference-relations are brought together under the general heading of ‘causal relation’. Then it is not possible to make a distinction between establishing a causal connection, describing a causal relation, and making use of a causal relation in an explanation or in an argument.
There are authors who make all kinds of subdistinctions, but it is often not obvious that they are relevant for analytical purposes. Sometimes it is even difficult to discover to which subcategory or subcategories the argumentative relation belongs. In the Rhetorical Structure Theory by Mann and Thompson, for instance, it is hard to determine which relations are to be regarded as argumentative. Apart from obvious candidates, such as the presentational relations ‘Motivation’, ‘Evidence’ and ‘Justify’, there are subject-matter relations such as ‘Cause’ that could or could not be used argumentatively. The same is true of ‘Solutionhood’: the intended effect of this relation is that the reader recognizes that one part of the text presents a solution to a problem presented elsewhere. Such a solution, however, can be presented for descriptive purposes, but also for argumentative purposes, as in pragmatic argumentation.

4. Distinguishing arguments from explanations
The distinctions made in the linguistic literature are not a good starting-point for solving problems of analysis of argumentative discourse such as distinguishing arguments from explanations. Due to the failure to distinguish systematically between relations at the propositional level and relations at the illocutionary level, an important source of clues is disregarded. By linking relations at the propositional level systematically with relations at the illocutionary level, as propagated in the pragma-dialectical approach, it is possible to obtain information that is crucial to the identification of the speech acts of arguing and explaining.
Whereas there are no restrictions on the propositional content of a standpoint supported by an argument, both the propositional content of the explained statement and that of the explaining statements are bound to certain conditions. These conditions can be deduced from the characteristics of the speech act of explaining.[vi]  They make clear that a piece of reasoned discourse can only be an explanation if the reasoning is at the propositional level based on a causal relation, not on a symptomatic relation or an analogy. Moreover, the causal relation should be construed in such a way that the  effect is mentioned in the explained statement and the cause in the explaining statement, instead of the other way around. In addition, the explained statement should contain a descriptive proposition, not an evaluative or inciting one. This proposition should refer to a factual state of affairs, not to a state of affairs that is still to be realized. Since an explanation must be based on a causal relation, identifying the type of relation the reasoning is based on at the propositional level is a crucial step in the analysis. Indicators of propositional relations are therefore an important source of clues for distinguishing arguments from explanations.[vii]
My conclusion is that the functionalizing speech act perspective inherent in the pragma-dialectical approach creates a better starting point for making a systematic inventory of linguistic clues at the different hierarchical levels of argumentative discourse than the pragma-linguistic approaches proposed by others. Particularly, by combining pragmatic analyses of the contextual preconditions for performing the speech acts of arguing and explaining with the use of pragma-dialectical analytical instruments, a sound basis can be created for using linguistic insight in a well-founded and systematic way.

NOTES
i. In the context of a critical discussion, realizing the communicative aim of making it understandable for the listener how a certain state of affairs came into being, can be a means to further the achievement of an interactional aim that is associated with one or more other illocutionary acts performed in the discussion.
ii. In principle, the top-down approaches are more closely related to the pragma-dialectical approach to argumentation analysis in that they start from a theoretical stance taken toward the phenomena, and thus can be seen as ‘a priori’ approaches instead of inductive a posteriori apporaches. The pragma-dialectical approach is a priori in the sense that it begins with a model of critical discussion (Van Eemeren et al. 1993: 52-52). Nonetheless, the bottum-up approaches are also relevant to our research, since they often provide detailed descriptions of the ways in which various types of indicators may be used.
iii. Sanders (1997: 123) does acknowledge that a propositional and and illocutionary relation may exist at the same time, but he claims this is not necessarily the case, and regards the propositional relation as of secondary importance.
iv. Apart from relations consisting of a nucleus and a satelite, Mann and Thompson also distinguish ‘multinuclear’ relations (1988: 247). The large majority of relations, however, holds between a nucleus and a satellite.
v. Even if Sweetser’s epistemic causal relation were to be reinterpreted as a relation between speech acts, it would still not fully satisfy the concept of argumentation. Sweetser’s epistemic causal-conjunctions always have factual conclusions: certain knowledge ‘causes’ the speaker to conclude that something is true. There is no place for argumentation in support of evaluative or inciting conclusions.
vi. My overview of distinguishing features of arguing and explaining is based on Houtlosser’s (1995: 226-227) analysis of the speech act complex of giving an explanation and van Eemeren and Grootendorst’s (1984: 44-45, 1992: 31) analysis of the complex speech act of argumentation.
vii. In the case of argumentation, indicators of propositional relations are called ‘indicators of the argumentation scheme’.

REFERENCES
Eemeren, F.H. van & R. Grootendorst (1984). Speech acts in argumentative discussions. A theoretical model for the analysis of discussions directed towards solving conflicts of opinion. Dordrecht/Cinnaminson: Foris Publications, PDA 1.
Eemeren, F.H. van & R. Grootendorst (1992). Argumentation, communication and fallacies. A pragma-dialectical perspective. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Eemeren, F.H. van & R. Grootendorst (1994). Relevance reviewed: the case of argumentum ad hominem. In: F.H. van Eemeren & R. Grootendorst (Eds.), Studies in pragma-dialectics (pp. 51-68, Ch. 5). Amsterdam: Sic Sat.
Eemeren, F.H. van, et al. (1993). Reconstructing argumentative discourse. Tuscaloosa/London: University of Alabama Press.
Eemeren, F.H. van, et al. (1996). Fundamentals of argumentation theory. A handbook of historical backgrounds and contemporary developments. Mahwah (N.J): Lawrence Erlbaum.
Houtlosser, P. (1995). Standpunten in een kritische discussie. Een pragma-dialectisch perspectief op de identificatie en reconstructie van standpunten. Ifott: Amsterdam [Standpoints in a critical discussion. A pragma-dialectical perspective on the identification and reconstruction of standpoints (with a summary in English)].
Knott, A. & C. Mellish (1996). A feature-based account of the relations signalled by sentence and clause connectives. Language and Speech, 39, 143-183.
Mann, W.C. & S.A. Thompson (1988). Rhetorical structure theory: toward a functional theory of text organization. Text, 8, 243-281.
Sanders, T. (1992). Discourse structure and coherence. Aspects of a cognitive theory of discourse representation. Diss. Katholieke Universiteit Brabant.
Sanders, T. (1997). Semantic and pragmatic sources of coherence: On the categorization of coherence relations in context. Discourse Processes, 24, 119-147.
Schiffrin, D. (1987). Discourse markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sweetser, E.E. (1990). From etymology to pragmatics. Metaphorical and cultural aspects of semantic structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

1. Introduction
Women’s magazines, understood as a popular feminine genre (Marshment 1993) and a form of self-help (Cameron 1995), aim at instructing and entertaining women (Ballaster et al 1991; McCracken 1993). Women’s world as portrayed in these publications is related to feminine social values, norms, problems, doubts and expectations within a personal, private sphere. These publications became a ‘feminised space’, with contradictions, asymmetry of gender differences and issues of sexuality constantly being re-worked (Beetham 1996).
Among the different genres and types of discourse found in women’s magazines are the editorials, also known as editors’ letters, comments or columns. These texts constitute a significant instance of advertising of the magazines, an example of ‘hybrid information-and-publicity (or ‘selling and telling’) discourse’ (Fairclough 1992:115). They are an amalgam of advertising and editorial material (McCracken 1993), since they provide information about sections of the issue but they do so stressing the wonderfully useful (from a Cosmopolitan editorial) features in the issue.
My investigation is based on principles of critical discourse analysis (CDA) which allow for the study of the bidirectional link between language use and context. Critical discourse analysis as a multidisciplinary field focuses on the complex relations between macro and micro linguistic features and different social issues, especially those concerned with ethnic, socio-economic, political or cultural inequalities. I specifically draw on Fairclough’s (1989; 1992; 1995) social theory of discourse with its three interdependent levels of analysis: text (lexicogrammatical features), discourse practice (analysis of the processes of text production and interpretation); and social practice (institutional, societal issues; power and ideology). Halliday’s (1978; 1985; 1994) systemic-functional grammar is considered an insightful linguistic tool for CDA studies, to analyze textual and contextual features.
An important aspect of discursive practices in contemporary society concerns the conversational, promotional (Wernick 1991) and confessional nature of discourse. Giddens’ (1984) concept of modernity is also useful to perceive globalized discursive practices in contemporary society, with local and global habits and customs, individual and collective aims put together.
As a researcher of a text aimed at women, I also found it necessary to investigate studies on language and gender which have proved insightful for the link between the contextual features and the text analysis.

An important theoretical perspective to discourse analysis concerns studies on argumentation, since these two areas investigate aspects of discourse. In the present paper, argumentation is seen as a particular kind of social interaction, an action that tends to modify the pre-existing state of affairs (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca 1970). There is a relation of power between the writer and the reader, as the former tries to persuade the latter about a point of view. These power relations are linked to the discourse and semantic aspects of the text. As to argue is to try to influence the interlocutor to, for instance, reinforce convictions, dissipate doubts, persuade someone to act in a certain way, the writer, then, does establish a power relation with his/her receiver (Oliveira 1989).
Argumentation is presently understood as a dialectal engagement between a protagonist (who makes the claim) and an antagonist (who ‘doubts that claim, contradicts it, or withholds assent’) and its main function is ‘to convince others of the truth, or acceptability, of what one says’ (van Eemeren et al 1997:209, 210). In argumentation reactions are anticipated and addressed and some set of tacitly shared beliefs and meanings are taken for granted in building the arguments.
For discourse analysts the study of argumentation especially within the pragmadialectical view (van Eemeren & Grootendorst 1992; van Eemeren et al 1997) can be very fruitful to perceive the tactics used by text producers, or the construction of the engagement between the interlocutors. As the analyzed corpus in this paper are written texts and a kind of media discourse, the argumentation is unilateral. Argumentation in written texts differs from spoken discourse, as the protagonist must presuppose certain elements of context, anticipate counter argurments, and communicate in monologue with readers, who, in turn, do not engage in conversation the case of editorials in women’s magazines, the antagonist is an imagined audience which needs to be convinced of the argument.
The theoretical rationale with which I study, briefly outlined above, consists of a composite theoretical construct drawing on CDA and Fairclough, Halliday’s functional grammar and studies on argumentation, from the pragma-dialectical view. I discuss two kinds of argument used in editorials of women’s magazines to attract readers’ attention and win readers’ approval: the argumentum ad populum and hasty generalizations. My analysis is based on editorials of women’s magazines published in England and in Brazil[i] (Heberle 1997). I attempt to show that, appealing to women’s emotions, the editors, as protagonists of argumentation, attempt to advertise the magazine, to arouse women’s enthusiasm and desires, to win women’s approval of that particular issue of the magazine and of the magazine as a whole (see Willard 1989; Walton 1992). At the same time, editors make use of generalizations regarding what women feel or want. By asserting that, for example, Every woman knows, women don’t know or There are three things every woman wants, editors attempt to make the statements self-evident and commonsensical, implying that that should be the case with readers too. The generalizations are, thus, part of the editors’ standpoint (Van Eemeren & Grootendorst 1992). The analysis of these forms of argumentation in the selected texts is relevant to understand the interaction between language use and contemporary social practice.

2. Features of women’s magazines
Women’s magazines are a very significant form of mass/popular culture, as they are ‘an attractive form of commercial culture’ and a ‘multi-million dollar business which presents pleasurable, value-laden semiotic systems to immense numbers of women’, according to McCracken (1993:1). In the Western world there are many different magazines aimed directly or indirectly at women and new titles are constantly launched. In England, the weekly magazines appeal to readers mostly as domestic consumers, whereas the monthly ones are seen as more narcissistic and individualistic, according to Ballaster et al (1991).
Women’s magazines have also become an interesting object of critical sociological and/or cultural investigation (Ferguson 1983; Ballaster et al 1991; Winship 1987; McCracken 1993), as they teach women how to engage in various social processes, offering helpful suggestions and advice related to different aspects of their personal life, and providing ‘recipes, patterns, narratives and models of the self’ (Beetham 1996:36).
In these publications, the pictures, the colors, the sequence and combination of articles and advertisements, all comprise a semiotic system to attract women. The two main kinds of text, advertising and editoriaI texts, together form a blurred ‘cultural continuum’ (McCracken 1993). The topics covered are guided by the ideology of advice, beauty and information, with a superordinate form of ideology: the ideology of consumption. Women’s magazines are considered ‘bearers of pleasure’ as well as ‘purveyors of oppressive ideologies of sex, class and race difference’ (Ballaster et al 1991:2).
Ballaster et al focus on these two prevailing viewpoints regarding women’s magazines, showing the multiple contradictions in the representation of femininity through a historical background of these publications since the late seventeenth century. Some of the contradictory views present in women’s magazines refer to women being subordinate to men, either as their partners, secretaries, mothers, cooks or wives. At the same time, the magazines tend to motivate women to be financially and emotionally independent. In their research, these authors see that:
Women’s concern, according to most magazines, is with personal and emotional relationships, with husbands or partners, but also with children, family and friends. The work of maintaining healthy relationships is women’s work (Ballaster et al 1991: 137).

Women’s magazines appeal to readers by combining entertainment and advice, offering women survival skills to deal with feminine issues (Winship 1987). Femininity is seen as a difficult situation or condition, and women’s magazines help women to solve the innumerable problems which they face in their everyday life. However, the solutions are usually based on individual effort and commitment, since these publications generally tend not to make women aware of their social conditions. The magazines invoke a world of fantasy, of a better life.
Women’s magazines have also deserved attention in critical discourse analysis by Brazilian researchers focusing on language and gender, including studies such as those by Caldas-Coulthard (1994, 1996), Figueiredo (1994; 1995), Heberle (1994; 1996; 1997) and Ostermann (1994). As a research group, we were concerned with the construction of identities in women’s magazines and analyzed specific linguistic realizations in different sections of these magazines, showing how particular lexicogrammatical items evince contradictory values of femininity and convey ideological meanings which position women mostly within the private sphere. To illustrate, here is an editorial from the Brazilian magazine Nova (Jan 1993), where the editor explains that the editors of Cosmopolitan got together in London to discuss issues related to readershipall over the world.
Translated version: We got together in London, at the end of last year, to discuss what is happening to our readers all over the world. Do you know what we found out? That whether in Australia, in the States, in Germany or in Hong Kong, all that women want is to have success in their careers, emotional balance, lots of love, a happy family. Just like all of us here in Brazil.
In terms of critical discourse analysis, this excerpt exemplifies the fact that language use reflects, shapes and at the same time constructs, constitutes social entities and relations (Fairclough 1995).
By means of discourse, the editor of the Brazilian publication is telling her readers that the editors of Cosmopolitan from different parts of the world see women as having similar wishes. Even if women wish to have other plans, these become explicitly mentioned as the ones women should strive for.
I believe this seems to be the trend in Western societies, where women’s magazines portray experiences shared by millions of readers, who have to cope with conflicting ideological positions in contemporary society.

3. Characteristics of editorials in women’s magazines (EWM)
The main characteristics of editors’ letters/comments or editorials in women’s magazines are:
l. These texts are a mainstream popular culture form, representing one of the several different genres within women’s magazines, which are part of one of the most powerful institutions of contemporary world, the media. This specific text type, found in the initial pages of the magazines, either focus on one topic only or on several topics;
2. They form an integral part of a broader master narrative, the magazine, in a close intertextual link with the front page and/or other texts in the magazine.
3. They are hortatory/persuasive texts which express a corporate, institutional view. EWM reflect the publishing company’s ideology. The events, which refer to women’s personal circumstances, are problematized. These texts have the function of persuading readers to read the magazine, to call their attention to what will be discussed in the issue.
4. They also function as promotional discourse, a form of advertising, signaling ahead, pointing to subsequent pages of the issue where women will find answers to their affective and personal problems.
5. They are usually written by women addressed to all women, but more specifically to white, middle-class, heterosexual women. In women’s magazines, women and men are ‘eternally in opposition, always in struggle, but always in pursuit of each other’ (Ballaster et al 1991: 83).
6. EWM have a definite, explicit authorship: they contain the editor’s name and/or signature and often display a picture of the editor. Readers know who the writer is. The editors speak directly to readers, as if they were talking to friends or close acquaintances.

With the contextual configuration outlined above regarding the corpus of this study, I proceed to the discussion and analysis of the ad populum argument and hasty generalizations in the texts.

4. The use of the argumentum ad populum in editorials of women’s magazines: some contributing elements
The argumentum ad populum is an appeal to emotions, to popular feelings, being ‘a powerful technique of argumentation… based on the speaker’s capability to rouse and exploit the sentiments and prejudices of a target audience’ (Walton 1992:2). Used in argumentation theory, this kind of argument is understood as ‘any attempt to use ‘emotively based’ persuasive techniques to arouse the enthusiasm, approval, and desires of a multitude’ (Ballard, in Willard 1989:230).
Van Eemeren et al (1996:69) explain that the ‘argumentum ad populum’, also known as mob appeal usually contrast we (the speaker and his/her audience) and they (those against whom the appeal is directed) and the rhetorical purpose of argumentation is to make a specific opinion (more) acceptable to an audience. According to Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, in the New Rhetoric, sound argumentation demands rapport between the speaker and his/her audience. The argumentum ad populum can be effective in the sense that it is meant to persuade a particular target audience, and as such, it is valid. As Walton (1992:70) explains, ‘With an ad populum argument, what matters is not whether the premises are true, or based on good, objective evidence, but whether the audience to whom the argument is directed accepts these premises enthusiastically’.
This kind of argument invites people to accept ideas by means of emotions, by exploiting ‘the bias of an audience toward its own interests’ (Walton 1992:3-4; Woods & Walton 1989).

I suggest that in editorials of women’s magazines, editors, as protagonists of argumentation, use argumentum ad populum, as a reasonable argument, a form of practical reasoning, as they appeal to women’s feelings and thoughts, in order to win women’s approval of what is being argued for. The argumentum ad populum contributes to create a positive image of not only specific features of that particular issue but also of the magazine as a whole. In these texts, thus, this kind of argument functions as a powerful mechanism of advertisement, as a way to promote the magazine, as I have already pointed out.
By means of this kind of argument, the protagonists of argumentation, the editors, appeal to women’s private affairs, to their personal and affective issues, where women are allowed to say, to think, to feel, to perceive things, to behave in certain ways, and to relate to other human beings. As a discourse analyst, I see four lexicogrammatical elements which contribute to form the ad populum argument in EWM: 1. the use of mental process verbs following Halliday (1985; 1994); 2. the use of the personal pronoun we; 3. the use of specific lexical items denoting evaluation and/or emotions; and 4. the use of mini-dramas, or personal narratives. I will refer to each of these cases now.

The category of mental verb processes is taken from Halliday’s (1978, 1985, 1994) lexicogrammatical system of transitivity. Halliday (1985:101) explains that our ‘conception of reality consists of ‘goings-on’: of doing, happening, feeling, being’ and mental processes constitute verbs of sensing, that is, verbs of feeling, thinking and perceiving, such as know, think, believe, love, feel, need, want. The semantic concept of transitivity in Hallidayan grammar has become an important linguistic tool for the observationof ‘speakers’ classification of experience’ (Fowler 1986: 146) and for the analysis of ‘the representation and signification of the world and experience’ (Fairclough 1993:136). It is generally used by critical discourse analysts to interpret and criticize the ideological implications of discursive events in relation to the linguistic choices. Fowler (1991:25) has pointed out that representation in all kinds of discourse is ‘a constructive practice’ and the structural features used to represent events and ideas are ‘impregnated with social values’ and ideological choices, constituting only one possible alternative to the representation. What is written in any text, thus, represents one side of the story, one possible portrait of reality. Some instances of mental processes in the selected editorials include:
1. Would you like to go through puberty all over again? Didn’t think so. An adolescent milestone for all women (and men) is ‘losing’ their virginity. So why on earth would any woman want to lose her virginity for a second time? (New Woman – May 1994)
2. We feel our Great Sex supplement provides the most honest, most helpful and most relevant guide to this, the most intimate and sensitive of subjects. I know you’ll love it! (Company August,1993).
3. The whole area of dating (no, I don’t like the word either, but what else do you call it?) is so tricky. It seems that no matter how successful, intelligent or confident people are in other areas of their lives, everyone is uncertain about this. Men don’t know how to behave. Women don’t know how to act or react (Cosmopolitan – July1993).

In EWM. the Sensers, the conscious and emotional beings, ‘endowed with consciousness’ (Halliday, 1985:108), that is, the beings who perform mental processes, know, feel, like, and want different things, related to women/men relationship, sexual topics and activities related to women’s roles in society. In the world projected in editorials in women’s magazines, women’s actions of sensing and of relating or classifying the world are very common. Women feel concerned about their problems, wishes, doubts; they feel society’s contradictory views regarding their role. The use of mental processes, as the excerpts above show, contributes to the editors’ argumentum ad populum, as they appeal to women’s psychological events or states of mind. Women, thus, become members of a large discourse community, who interact with each other and become emotionally involved.
Another lexicogrammatical item which may contribute to form the ad populum argument concerns the use of the pronoun we, a subject which has deserved attention in critical discourse analysis (Fowler et al 1979; Fairclough 1989). We as a grammatica! participant represents different kinds of social participants, always referring to the editor and other people. Here is an example where women in general are represented by the pronoun we:
4. … Literally thrown on to the streets by the people they loved and trusted – and not, as we‘re led to believe, homeless of their own free will (Company – September, 1993).
In this case, the form we suggests intimacy, solidarity and involvement – a case of inclusive we (Fowler & Kress 1979; Talbot 1992): readers, the editorial staff, everyone who shares these views is included as Sensers of believe here. Here we, implying all women homogeneously united, is an effective discursive and argumentative strategy for it suggests a united group against another one, probably they. As Fowler & Kress (1979:204) say, this use of we may be ‘coercively eliminating any potential antagonism between speaker and addressee’.

We as Sensers of believe can also encapsulate editors and members of the editorial staff, as in:
5. We [here at She] look at men with affection, wry humour and sometimes anger, but always in the hope of gaining greater understanding of those with whom we share our lives. We believe in talking with men – not at them and listening to what they have to say (She– March, 1993).

The editor here is trying to create an image that her staff favors understanding between men and women, as if men were a homogeneous.group (which, obviously, they are not), in opposition to women, also seen here as a homogeneous group. We in this case represents a form of corporate, exclusive we (Fowler & Kress 1979): the editor is talking on her behalf and on the behalf of other members of her staff, not including the readers. In this group of participants, the members of the staff are presented as a unified whole, evoking an atmosphere of companionship, of staff members and editor belonging to a very interesting and close social group.
Ballaster et al (1991: 9) explain that even though women’s magazines simulate a shared experience between women, creating an intimate tone, as with the use of we, ‘such inclusivity is patently false’. In these publications, we generally refers to white, middle-class, heterosexual women, not to all other groups of women. I suggest that the apparent involvement implied by the use of we constitutes part of the ad populum argument, for it is mystified as not all women may accept what is being said. The use of this pronoun provides ‘an intimate tone’, ‘the cosy invocation of a known commonality between we women’ (Ballaster et al 1991:9).
Another lexicogrammatical aspect of the ad populum argument used in EWM concerns vocabulary, as it influences and indicates people’s experience and the way they classify the world (Fowler 1986). The study of vocabulary plays a crucial role in discourse, since it reveals world’s views, values and systems of beliefs of the participants in discourse. It is considered a fundamental tool to observe ideological, social or political issues in any given text (Mc-Carthy, 1990, Carter, 1987; Montgomery, 1986, and Fairclough, 1989, 1995).
Vocabulary concerns the ‘encoding of ideas or experience’ (Fowler 1986:151); it maps out ‘the conceptual repertoire’ (Fowler 1986:151) of a discourse community. It has to do with classification, which is basic for language and thought (Hodge & Kress 1993). The study of vocabulary needs to be carried out taking into account the specific context where the text is produced, how and in what circumstances specific words are used: their social and ideological signification in the particular text being analyzed (Fairclough 1992). As Montgomery (1986:176) puts it, there is no absolutely neutral and disinterested way of apprehending and representing the world. Language always helps to select, arrange, organize, and evaluate experience, even when we are least conscious of it doing so.

Evaluative adjectives and adverbs constitute an important element in advertising in women’s magazines, as they help to ‘present the product in very positive terms’ (Simpson 1993:152), in order to win women’s approval or enthusiasm. Adjectives and adverbs are ‘key parts of speech for advertisers’ and ‘they trigger words because they can stimulate envy, dreams and desires by evoking looks, touch, taste, smell and sounds without actually misrepresenting a product’ (Dyer 1982:149). EWM contain several adjectives and adverbs which appeal to emotions and may contribute to form an ad populum argument.
One category of these lexical items concerns the superlative form of comparison, used to persuade readers of the benefits of what is being described, such as a specific guide or piece of advice on sex, fashion, beauty, a special course for readers, or a particular feature in the magazine. For instance:
6. Who is the most successful woman you know? (Options – April, 1993)
7. our Great Sex supplement provides the most honest, most helpful and most relevant guide to this, the most intimate and sensitive of subjects (Company– August, 1993).
8. one of the most important and prestigious events of the beauty year (New Woman – January, 1994).

The use of evaluative adjectives in these excerpts exemplifies the hortatory/persuasive aspect of EWM. Readers have no means of verifying whether what is being said is true; however, these forms become part of the argument favoring what is advertised.

Nouns appealing to positive feelings in EWM also function as part of the argumentum ad populum, again with the purpose of advertising parts of the issue and arousing readers’ interest. Examples include: a fabulous makeover, a long-lasting relationship with you, great bodies, sylphlike shape, boundless energy, and tireless enthusiasm. These nominal groups appear to create a special bonding with readers, for they mark involvement and produce a positive communicative effect.
Readers’ stories, personal narratives, ‘testimonials’ (Dyer l982) or mini dramas are typical in many ads (Cook 1992:47). These narratives form a kind of bonding with readers and help create what Meurer (1998) has explored as a community-building device. Readers, thus, become acquainted with these different personal histories and become part of the wider community comprehending editors, their editorial staff and other readers in a friendly atmosphere. For example,
9. We all know someone who has suffered some awful personal tragedy. But what makes Hilda and June’s story on page 6 so appalling is that their evil father managed to terrorise his wife and daughters for over 30 years. And none of the neighbours had an inkling. I find that absolutely terrifying (Chat– 13 November 1993).
10. We all hear stories about youngsters who get in with a bad crowd and end up in trouble…and we always think it will never happen to our kids. But what if it does? How would you feel if you saw your son joy-riding in a stolen car? … and ask the experts if parents are to blame for their criminal kids (Woman’s Own – October 11, 1993).
11.This week’s issue also has another riveting and extraordinary read (and so it should!). It’s the story on page 12 of a young mother who didn’t know that she was expecting a baby. You may think you’ve read stories like this before, but this particular one, I promise, is quite different. My advice is to go straight to it (once you’ve finished reading this, of course) (Woman – November 1, 1993).

Found especially in the weekly magazines, these narratives function as a form of the ad populum argument, for the editors are exploiting the feelings of the readers to persuade them to read a specific piece from the issue. In the editorials, these dramatic narratives are only hinted at, and the full stories are to be found in subsequent pages, in the articles. Notice that in the examples above, the emotional, sensational aspect is complemented with the editors’ comments (terrifying, riveting and extraordinary) .
The lexicogrammatical aspects briefly discussed above function as part of argumentum ad populum used in EWM, as these cases appeal to readers’ emotions. Even though I have presented specific lexicogrammatical elements, the ad populum argument can only be seen if the global effect with all the features is taken into account.

5. Hasty generalizations
Hasty generalizations, considered a modern version of secundum quid (‘in a certain respect’), are based on observations which are insufficient or not representative (van Eemeren et al 1996). Hasty generalizations, also known as overgeneralization or sweeping generalization, are a form of presumptive reasoning; they are generic statements applied to insufficient statistics, to few samples (Walton 1992:37). In terms of argumentation, hasty generalizations constitute a form of fallacy, considered a ‘doubtful persuasive strategy’ (Willard, 1989:232), that is, any ‘moral, procedural, and interactional failings’ in argumentation (Willard, 1989:221). Van Eemeren & Grootendorst (1992:118) suggest that such generalizations contribute to emphasize the ‘indisputability of the standpoint’.
They say:
The suggestion made by such phrasing [such as Every woman knows, as found in EWM] is that someone who fails to see immediately the self-evidence of the standpoint must be incredibly stupid, whereas, in fact, the words may only be a smokescreen designed to conceal the weakness of the standpoint. Whoever allows himself (sic) to be overwhelmed by it may well drop his (sic) doubt. That, at any rate, is what the protagonist in such a situation is hoping for.

By using generalizations, the editor attempts to create the effect of making readers accept what is being said. For example:
12. Every woman knows how it feels to have her worth measured purely by the way she looks, but very few of us have ever tried to calculate that worth and actually put a price on it (Options – November, 1993).
13. Everyone knows it’s a nightmare to lose weight. But not any more. This week we’re giving away a free 16-page booklet – The Target Diet – which makes shedding those extra pounds a cinch (Woman’s Own – October 18, 1993).
14. It’s a truth that women cease to be thrilled by attention that is mostly sexual if they feel deprived of love and understanding. But men are thrilled throughout their whole lives by sexual attention, whatever the reason (Cosmopolitan – Jan, 1994).
15. Turning 30 is a major landmark in a woman’s life – one of those meaningful birthdays that signifies more than just the passing of another year (Options – October, 1992).
16. There are three things every woman wants: to feel good, to look good, and a stonkingly good sex life. Just as well you bought this issue of New Woman then (New Woman – Jan 1994).

This form of standpoint with the use of generalizations is commonly used in the EWM. The effect is that readers are impelled to agree with what is said about women or men or at least plausibly accept those statements as being true.
The use of the generalized group (such as the underlined cases above) forms a kind of ‘immunization strategy, that is, a sophisticated way of ‘evading the burden of truth’, where the protagonist attempts to become immune to criticism (van Eemeren & Grootendorst 1992:119). Using general formulations is, thus, understood as referring to the ‘essence’ of women or men, and arguments against these statements are considered irrelevant.
In the selected data, generalizations occur with mental process verbs (see above), relational processes (verbs of being, that is, those which establish a relation between two entities or which identify an entity, (as example (15) above), and existential processes (with There is/are, as in the last example). The generalizations used with different processes in the present tense, for example, create frames of reference, a kind of routinization (Giddens 1984). These mental representations, these frames created by the generalizations, are eventually incorporated into society and shared by members of a certain discourse community, becoming part of social cognition (van Dijk 1993, 1996). This way such frames of reference become
naturalized and seen as commonsense, as reality itself, which as such is not to be questioned or challenged, reproducing common sense knowledge and influencing readers’ conduct to accept them.

6. Concluding remarks
In women’s magazines, women’s world is represented linguistically mainly as pertaining to the private sphere of personal and domestic issues. In establishing a degree of intimacy with women readers, editors conform their discourse to an ideology of consumption, of advice and of femininity that responds to the current hegemonic social structure. From these publications women read and share ideas about their love affairs, careers, families, health, plans, relationship with men and consequently become part of a wider more globalized discourse community.
These publications, which comprise several kinds of genres, are a form of promotional and hortatory discourse, constituting a unified whole with the headline, the covers, the attractive pictures, the other advertisements, the written genres, in other words, all the verbal and photographic texts and their special sequence, as well as color are important communicators in women’s magazines. Editorials in women’s magazines, as previews of the features in each issue, contribute to reinforce the belief that women have to learn how to cope with different problems in their lives.
In this paper I have briefly discussed lexicogrammatical elements in EWM which contribute to form the argumentum ad populum (mentaI process verbs, the use of we, evaluative lexical choices and personal narratives). I also looked at hasty generalizations. I consider the interdisciplinary link between discourse analysis and argumentation very important for all researchers of language to see the pervasive link between language and society and the way that discourses determine and are determined by social values and conventions. Only then can we effectively contribute to social change.

NOTES
i. 115 editorials from 14 different women’s magazines published in Britain were selected for the textual and social analysis. I randomly collected these texts frorn weekly and monthly publications from 1992, 1993, 1994 end one from 1995. The selected editorials were taken from the weekly magazines Best, Chat, Woman’s Own, Woman’s Realm, Woman, Woman’s Weekly and Me as well as from the monthly magazines Cosmopolitan, Company, Essentials, Options, New Woman and More. For comparison I selected 14 editorials from Brazilian women’s magazines (Claudia, Criativa Nova, Maxima, Mulher de Hoje and Corpo a Corpo), one from an Italian magazine (Pratica! and editorials from different types of magazines published in Britain and in Brazil (such as Focus, Isto, and Skopia Médica). The comparison with other publications offered subsidies for a verification of globalized discursive tendencies in contemporary society.

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1. Introduction
My point of departure will be several related articles and a review published recently in the journal Argumentation and Advocacy that focus renewed attention on the question of whether visual images can be understood as arguments. And if so, then how? Should logic, rhetoric, or aesthetics be taken as the foundation upon which images can be understood as depicting an argument? Indeed, is a conceptual approach alone sufficient, or satisfactory?
These recent position papers review many a traditional answer; the conflict between image and concept is as old as the rivalry between rhetoric and philosophy. Some of these articles advocate taking one side of this relentless antagonism against the other. For example, J. Anthony Blair (1996) and David Fleming (1996) doubt that images can be understood as arguments unless and until their (manifest and latent) content is reconstructed into propositional terms, thus repeating the familiar subordination of aesthetics, literature, and rhetoric to the perspective of logic as the proper and sole critical method in the field of argument studies.
Gretchen Barbatsis (1996) takes the opposite approach and imports critical methods from literature, aesthetics, and media criticism to show precisely how much the reduction of an image to a proposition is a misreading that fails to understand the potential for manipulation in modern mediated forms of communication. And a recent collection of articles reviewed by Lenore Langsdorf advocates ‘visual literacy’ and a “recognition that a visual argument is, despite appearances of spontaneity, in fact being made by an unacknowledged argument partner, for less than evident purposes, and culminating in other than obvious conclusions” (1996: 50).
In many ways, the dispute over critical methods in the analysis of images raises two additional theoretical issues. The first is whether a descriptive or a normative model is the most appropriate for understanding the image as communicative form. The second is whether ‘argumentation studies’ as a discursive field should welcome or resist this importation of analytical models and critical methods from disciplines other than logic. Fleming resists just these centrifugal tendencies and wonders, rhetorically, if we now are to recognize pictures as arguments, “do we risk losing something important in our conventional understanding of argument?” (1996: 11). But whose ‘conventional understanding’ is at stake?: his restrictive sense of ‘argument fields’ limits debate by accepting only those definitions of argumentation already advanced by recognized authors in the same scholarly journals that promote a limited (and primarily deductive) definition of argument. This is a legitimate, but ultimately sterile move, although in extreme cases it raises the specter of a possible incommensurability of assumptions when these move across divergent disciplines. Yet since most argument scholars accept the norm that narrowing differences of opinion should count as the operative definition of the purpose of argumentation, this should not pose a real danger (except in cases of unsuccessful argument). Finally, as David Birdsell and Leo Groarke remind us: “Most scholars who study argumentation theory are… preoccupied with methods of analyzing arguments which emphasize verbal elements and show little or no recognition of other possibilities, or even the relationship between words and other symbolic forms” (1996: 1).

This paper will sketch a response to this antagonism between descriptive and normative models by attempting a reciprocity of perspectives. This reciprocity is enthymematic; no one field can supply sufficient premises alone, and so must invite participation by another in a dialogic attempt to address whether images are arguments.
Thus, I propose to use the idea of an argumentative or dialectical reciprocity of concept and image to address the issues. I then will raise the issue of recognition as a key to unlock this door of dialectical reciprocity. Behind that door we will come face to ace, in spirit at least, with Herr Professor G. W. F. Hegel and address selective issues in the infamous Phenomenology of Spirit (1977). My secondary purpose is to move the field of argument studies away from reiterating such ad hominems (abusive) about Hegel as we find in Charles Willard (1996), for instance, and recognize the value of the Phenomenology of Spirit as a masterwork of argument that integrates rhetoric and philosophy, image and concept (Verene 1985). This paper will focus these concerns by raising the possibility, actuality, and limitations of using informal logic and deductive analysis in the interpretation of images.

2. Recognizing the Enthymeme
Most textbook definitions of the enthymeme, and they are profuse, compare it to the syllogism and so emphasize the enthymeme’s abbreviated form. Again, most theorists approach the enthymeme as a deductive, one-premise, and thus incomplete argument that invites an average audience or learned logician to supply the missing links in the chain of reasoning. The exceptions to this procedure are few yet noteworthy: Francesca Piazza (1995) claims this traditional account is itself incomplete because it ignores (or suppresses) the larger ‘rhetorical situation’ of antiquity. Instead of restricting our premises a priori, Piazza proposes a more encompassing, even symbolic reading of the enthymeme that recognizes the practical, persuasive, and hence the public aspects of this popular form of argumentation. The public in the ancient world was not an abstract concept (as theorists today prefer to reconstruct it), but an immediate interpersonal encounter in the agora, theatre, courtroom, legislative assembly, and even the household. The public itself was constituted symbolically through the interplay of words and images presented in just such places. The ‘Athenians,’ for example, would associate commonly held images and entertain commonplaces of experience by using their most familiar form of reasoning: the enthymeme was a primary vehicle that allowed the ancients to recognize who they were, as sophistic rhetoric well understood.
In contrast to the restrictive deductivist account, Piazza suggests a more complete and systematic reconstruction of enthymematic argument that recognizes at least six distinctive features of the natural logic of debate. This “wider conception,” she writes, “takes into account not only the formal characteristics of enthymeme but also the contents, the aims and the conditions in which it is used” (1995: 146). Her insightful historical reconstruction deserves a wider audience.

Traditional accounts start with Aristotle’s theory as presented in On Rhetoric and elsewhere, but those usually fail to recognize that even here the “enthymeme is more complex that its interpretation as an imperfect or incomplete argument” (Piazza 1995: 146). Piazza notes two striking deficiencies. First, traditional accounts fail to recognize the earlier pre-Socratic use of the word by such orators as Isocrates and Alcidamas to indicate the general public reflection that precedes an emotional decision. In sophistic rhetoric enthymema aimed “at the emotional and intellectual involvement of the audience, using suitable language” (147). When Aristotle later offers the first conceptual definition of the enthymeme in On Rhetoric, the real novelty lies in “reconstructing the rhetorical issue from a logical point of view, to the extent that rhetoric becomes the ‘antistrophos’ of dialectic” (147). As elsewhere in the text, Aristotle’s famous opening definition of rhetoric (dialectically) blends image and concept, thus helping the reader visualize the placement of these two arts of language by borrowing an image from tragedy.

Antistrophos indicates the dramatic countermovement of the chorus across the stage, and by analogy, situates the analytic syntax of these emotional and intellectual counterparts before our eyes (Heeney 1997).
Regretfully, space permits only a listing of Piazza’s six reconstructive characteristics of the body of the enthymeme:
1. Nature of the contents
2. Nature of the premises
3. The relation between premises and conclusion
4. The role of the interlocutor
5. Way of expression (style)
6. The complexity of reasoning

I will examine and extend her arguments only for the second aspect; this alone will offer a telling contrast with the predominantly deductive accounts of enthymeme that suppress the larger semantic field of terms Aristotle actually used, and his audience would recognize. Piazza reminds us that Aristotle says enthymemes start with premises that are either eikota or semeia, usually translated as probabilities or signs respectively. Both Greek terms operate in the larger semantic field of visual associations: classical philosophers used eikasia to denote (and often demean) the activity of perceiving mere images and reflections (Peters 1967: 51). In Plato, eikon names the visible image taken as a sign of the intelligible but invisible Forms – we must start with only probable and perceptible images to reach, in dialogue with the philosopher, the ultimate in abstract thought, the concept of Truth. Probabilities and signs function by creating an intermediary place between knowledge and ignorance, just as in ancient Greek itself the ‘middle voice’ was used primarily in their verbs that associate seeing and thinking – the visual aspect of experience semantically shaped the terms used to refer to thought and recognition (Prier 1989). And ‘signs’ are notoriously visual phenomena, in both ancient literature and common speech (Auerbach 1953).
So, ‘probabilities’ invoke semantic associations in popular language and natural logic that remind us of publicly held images – I suggest that ‘probabilities’ can call forth visual commonplaces in the mind of the audience. As a technical term among philosophers, a ‘probability’ now functions as a imagistic starting point for reflection. We must ‘recognize’ (anagnorisis in Aristotle’s Poetics) that before one can theorize or make conceptual distinctions – both highly literate operations – one must be able to decode or read the written characters placed before our eyes (Heeney 1997). Thus, if enthymemes start with probabilities or signs that carry visual associations, we can say they also represent the visually-oriented thought processes typical or common among a particular group. One of the most common public spaces where an audience would likely hear enthymemes was the theatre, the ancient theatron or ‘seeing-place’ (Staub 1997). And in antiquity, thought is associated lexically with the power of visualization (Jay 1995). An enthymeme, in short, unifies an immediate and often dramatically sensuous image (as content) already found in the popular mind or memory with the more abstract forms of reasoning scholars will later investigate as argumentation. This ‘wider conception’ of the enthymeme does justice to the natural logic of actual historical, not idealized audiences.

Working backward from the use and abuse of visual images today in our media-saturated environment to the concepts that will describe them, scholars have noted how political campaign commercials, and even graphic cartoons, naturally assume enthymematic form. In practice, public ‘intermediated’ argument is less rational, and more highly visual and incomplete, than a cognitivist or deductivist would prefer; enthymematic interaction is often quite pictorial and so will “intermediate with words and participate in the arguments they rehearse” (Birdsell 1995: 159). Kathleen Hall Jamieson’s work on political advertising is perhaps the most well known and carefully documented; the “complicitous audience” participates by supplying the suppressed premise through visual association. Indeed, “some of the classics in political advertising function enthymematically” (1992: 61).
Returning to the articles and question that inspired this investigation – ’can images be arguments’ – we are now better prepared to sketch an answer. Analyzing the visual production techniques common to television, for instance, Barbatsis describes how negative political advertising in particular is self-conscious about ‘sightedness’: “Each [ad] uses what we see in the literal act of enhanced viewing for background evidence against which it scrutinizes how we see” (1996: 77). This deliberate (and reflexive) visual reference to the camera as conscious viewpoint is called “direct viewer address,” and through this rhetorical mode of audience engagement we “can enter into a communication transaction not unlike an interpersonal face-to-face encounter” (77). Thus, the staged visuals of television can remind viewers of their actual interpersonal encounters.

3. Visualizing Recognition
The problem of recognition is best situated as part of the turn toward a practical theory of argument that encompasses the ethical aspects of social reasoning. Contemporary theorists of argument will recognize affinities with the theory of communicative rationality advanced by Jurgen Habermas. Lately, Habermas’s interest in the role of argument and social praxis is linked to an engagement with his critics and contemporaries; critical theory now raises the issue of modernity, and with it, recovery of the traditional rivalry between rhetoric and philosophy (Habermas 1987).
Habermas’s critique of modernity is focused on revising the classical philosophy of the subject we inherit from the Enlightenment. Specifically, Habermas joins many others and attacks the notion of an isolated, liberal individual as possessor of rights, and one who yet also maintains legal relations with others and the state. Habermas appreciates that Hegel’s idea of recognition offers an important counterdiscourse against this modernist fixation on the formalist (and thus empty) philosophy of the subject. This turn toward understanding the pragmatics of actual social reasoning is also part of a growing disenchantment with formal logic as at all helpful in understanding the self; here Henry Johnstone’s recent revision of his previous commitment to formal logic is indicative of this shift of critical attention (Johnstone 1983, and Heeney 1995).
A major reason the analysis of visual meaning must build upon our everyday experience, and not just isolated sentences understood as propositions, is that form and content cannot be separated if we hope to understand what we see. Formal logic presupposes precisely the opposite, and proceeds on the assumption that “form and content are unrelated and mutually independent, which is itself a metaphysical assumption” (Harris 1987: 24). The philosopher Errol Harris continues his explication of the often disguised or hidden metaphysical presuppositions of formal logic with the generally accepted observation that “validity in reasoning is what guarantees true conclusions from true premises, and that can be ensured only on the ground of some real connection in the content.” Visual inference as a form of reasoning offers just such an analogical and internal connection between reality and the content of experience. Harris summarizes these thoughts: “Principles of valid inference, therefore, can hardly be independent entirely of the nature of the subject matter, unless they are to be altogether trivial and ineffectual” (24).

J. Anthony Blair (1996) offers a fairly Standard Treatment of how concepts and images are interrelated. His strategy is one of containment in the double sense of limiting the scope of the issue, and also of incorporating or subsuming the visual within the logical aspects of argumentation. Blair attempts to contain the notorious ambiguity of visual images by reformulating their meaning as a question of how well the image can mimic the traditional logical form of propositional reasoning. Semantic inference, and hence argumentative function, are essentially and equally abstract for Blair whether conducted in images or words:
Visual arguments are to be understood as propositional arguments in which the propositions and their argumentative function and roles are expressed visually, for example by painting and drawings, photographs, sculpture, film or video images, cartoons, animations, or computer-designed visuals. Is it possible to express argumentation visually?

To answer this key rhetorical question, Blair suggests that all explicitly spoken or written use of language (absent counter-indications) can be taken as asserting a propositional content. The mere form of this assertoric statement, whether verbalized or written, nevertheless invokes what Blair characterizes (without argument) as the “default function” of language per se, thus implying a logical claim that can be analyzed explicitly. Everyday speech, whether it recognizes it or not, implies a logically explicable inference.
Not so with visual expression (and by implication most non-verbal communication); without a “default function” for such expressive forms of communication, this content cannot be analyzed on the earlier model of the propositional statement. Blair’s argument, therefore, turns on maintaining a rigid and fairly standard distinction between expression as a form of showing, and saying as a form of asserting. This reproduces the classic dichotomy of image and word, thus containing (or ignoring) the threat and implications of expressivity (Taylor 1989). Recognition is a central concept at issue in the analysis of literature, art history, and criticism generally (Bal 1991). The issue of recognition is raised explicitly if briefly by Blair only in the case of expressive and artistic form, and ignored in the instance of assertoric implicature; this is a telling omission as we shall see.
At a crucial point in the exposition of his argument – significantly at the only point he actually reproduces any visual images in the text – Blair invokes three static but nonetheless compelling frames from a quite innovative and prominent 1996 print advertising campaign by the socially-conscious Bennetton clothing company. Since I cannot replicate the images here, I will rely on the rhetorical gesture of ecphrasis to evoke the images before the mind’s eye.

In the first of three reproduced illustrations, the ad shows a closeup of three human hearts simply labeled “white,” “black,” and “yellow” together with an adjacent box containing the trademark phrase – “United Colors of Bennetton” (1996: 30). Blair reduces the propositional content of this ‘visual argument’ to the inference that humans are all alike under the skin. The second image is a closely-cropped frame depicting the head and shoulders of two nicely-adorned and stylishly-coiffured young girls, one white and one black, and the only words this time are the infamous company slogan. This suggests to Blair the visual proposition that children are innocent of adult prejudices like racism. The final ad is a tightly framed midsection image of two similarly clothed males that focuses on their hands, again one white and the other black, handcuffed together.
This last dramatic image of yoked ‘prisoners’ contains no words at all, but suggests to Blair that “we are locked together, white and black… and we are prisoners of our own prejudices” (30). Blair does imply, by the very choice of these commercial images, at least two additional issues left mostly unacknowledged. Considered as advertisements, especially the issue-and culturally-sensitive ones in this infamous Bennetton campaign, we should acknowledge that their target audience will be focused on the politics of esteem. This idea is lost in Blair’s rather flat sense of evocative – he claims only that (presumably sensitive) viewers will identify with the images, and therefore engage in their enthymematic and supplemental reasoning.
Second, Blair’s rather flat logical analysis ignores this larger rhetorical situation. This includes the historically based and culturally attuned notion of a pretext for the ads (the civil rights and current identity campaigns, for instance), as well as the somewhat ambivalent context of their appearance (Bal 1991). In other words, Blair fits the visual storytelling of these ads into the reassuring but empty (ahistorical) context of logical propositions, thus making his act of reading a mere translation from the slavish image to the masterly domain of logic.
The last of the series evokes the following philosophical analogyfrom Blair:
The identical clothing suggests equality. It is possible to find in the photo a reminder of Hegel’s master-slave commentary: the uniformativeness of the picture as to which man is the controller and which is the controlled (if either) reminds us of Hegel’s point that the master is controlled by the relationship by which he supposedly exerts control, and the slave has a measure of control in the relationship whereby he supposedly is denied any control, and that thus freedom for either one entails freedom for the other (30).
Obviously, the average viewer’s first response does not automatically recollect Hegel’s celebrated depiction of the struggle for recognition in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Yet the issue of recognition is central to my argument and invoked implicitly, and sometimes explicitly and in contradictory ways, in Blair. This passing and incomplete reference is important, for other than citing contemporary argument scholars and naming several famous paintings or commercial images, Blair does not mention another philosopher.

4. Recognizing Hegel
Turning Blair’s rhetorical question around (“is it possible to express argumentation visually?”), I now want to inquire – is it possible to visualize recognition? My argument depends on invoking Hegel’s master-slave dialectic as the primary instance of how recognition functions in social interaction, including public argument. The problematic of recognition is found in later works by Hegel as well, but these appearances will not concern us here (see Williams 1997).
The standard treatment of the Phenomenology of Spirit, if such a thing can be summarized, suggests that Hegel wished to trace the unfolding of the idea of Geist (spirit or mind) throughout history as it temporarily inhabits a local culture or individual, then moves on leaving only a memory. For Hegel, recognition operates as the overarching ethical category within which intersubjectivity operates; the dialectic of ‘master and slave’ from the Phenomenology of Spirit is but one instance, albeit one of the most famous along with the fate of ‘unhappy consciousness’ perhaps, of how intersubjective
understanding develops (Butler 1997).
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in notable, even exceptional insofar as the text combines discursive and imaginative aspects in its phenomenological understanding of the journey of consciousness. Donald Phillip Verene’s remarkable analysis of the text shows how Hegel “combines the great discursive power of his thought with an equally great rhetorical power of expression.” Verene rightly suggests that the book’s self-proclaimed “voyage of discovery” introduces a “work of vast imaginative and rational structure, a colossus without equal in modern philosophy” (1985: ix). In brief, Hegel unites content and form within the notion of the concrete concept, meaning the actually realized form thinking must assume in any age. In our modern and mass-mediated age, this concrete form is almost devoid of actual content, yet retains the residual image or ghost of thought when mediated through the ‘consciousness-industry’ that substitutes entertainment for enlightenment. Hence, the question before us – can images be arguments – must now recognize the curious relation mediated modernity itself assumes.
The Phenomenology of Spirit narrates this struggle between imaginative and conceptual forms of thinking, moving from appearance to reality as if through a “picture gallery.” The image (bild) offers us ‘metaphorical speech’ as its proper form, while the concept (Begriff) assumes the form of ‘propositional speech.’ Hegel desires to synthesize both within the idea of the ‘speculative sentence’ (Verene 1985: 3). I want to suggest, quite tentatively here, that the image as ‘enthymematic speech’ becomes our way of recognizing the form this unity (of descriptive and normative) assumes today.

Understanding the form recognition assumes can be raised in two ways; first in the rhetorical and imagistic development of Hegel’s text itself. Next, by suggesting Hegel’s usefulness for understanding the discursive implications of such contemporary normative issues as multiculturalism, feminism, and other such struggles for recognition. Disentangling Hegel’s reputation from the myths and misunderstandings that encumber the reception of his work must wait for another occasion (Stewart 1996). I will only suggest that the ‘pragma-dialectical’ approach (given the tacit Hegelian title especially) should find Hegel particularly useful, but only insofar as the advocates themselves recognize and then distance themselves from the anti-Hegelian bias of Karl Popper, one of their primary original inspirations. Here, Hegel provides all those who want to develop a richer and deeper sense of selfhood with a critique of (metaphysical) assumptions and also with the exemplary arguments needed to confront the ‘atomized subject’ of traditional liberal democratic theory, or supplement the ‘empty subject’ of informal logic.
Hegel’s ambition is as grand as his language notoriously difficult to negotiate: the Phenomenology of Spirit outlines the developmental stages through which all possible forms of consciousness will pass on the way to knowledge of the Absolute. Judith Butler aptly identifies the paradox at the center of the text: since the book is a “Bildungsroman, an optimistic narrative of adventure and edification, a pilgrimage of the spirit… it is unclear how Hegel’s narrative structure argues the metaphysical case he wants to make” (1987: 17).

Neither knowledge nor that most abstract of concepts, the Absolute, are themselves realized or assumed as accomplished totalities; both function as tropes of the process of the journey of consciousness toward self-imposed goals. This journey of consciousness moves outward initially to become aware of external objects, then detours through a struggle with other persons for mutual recognition, before returning inward and back to itself as a newly won self-certainty of reason; since consciousness is now mediated socially, desire enters this primarily interpersonal scheme in the struggle for esteem (Williams 1992, Butler 1997). Hegel’s exposition of the developmental stages on the journey toward certainty starts with the senses, then moves to recognize the agonistic of selfhood, and finally dialectically integrates these outward and inward moments in the question of the actuality of historical reason. Without reproducing all of Hegel’s technical language and intricate argumentation, a few more comments in mostly everyday terms are warranted to help us understand the rhetorical tropes animating the first two stages of this dialectical process, anyway. Hegel’s later focus on Reason’s historical vissisitudes will be addressed another time.
The first and most primitive stage in the formation of consciousness is the basic desire to understand. Our desire to know simply turns outward and so relies on ‘sense-certainty’ to grasp what is before us at any moment. This form of knowledge naively addresses things as they actually appear to our senses. This wordless immediacy is the certainty only of a ‘this’ or ‘that,’ what Hegel calls pure particularity in the here and now. The ‘subject’ as agency has not yet arrived on stage – here we encounter only the deceptions of perceptual immediacy. Hegel hopes that we might conclude that all belief in the determinate or in particularity as an absolute starting point is nothing but misplaced certainty (Butler 1987). These supposedly simple and pure sense reflections are certainly only our projections of the need for our inner reality to assume an external and determinate form. Neither consciousness nor world as starting points alone can offer the certainty we desire.
In his exposition of traditional empirical knowledge claims, Hegel believes he has refuted the idea that we can have knowledge at all, or all at once, without the universality of language-mediated concepts. Thus, the claims for sense-certainty or direct empirical knowledge, taken at face value, refute themselves because we really cannot know pure particularity – even sense experience must employ a conceptual scheme.

In this first stage, and progressively throughout the text, it is fair to say that the Phenomenology of Spirit proceeds enthymematically. It is only through a reader’s encounter with the text, and then his or her incorporation of its phenomenology of the reflexivity of consciousness, that the ‘meaning’ Hegel wants to communicate can enact itself. As an incomplete inference, the enthymeme is a trope of this communicative movement of consciousness that requires we recognize another before we can realize ourself. We are asked to identify with each successive stage in the journey, only to learn that our belief in its reality was misplaced because each episode was partial, incomplete, and implies another: this subversion of misplaced identification allows us to recognize that each scene is itself only a false premise or probable starting point (Butler 1987). Each stage, in other words, is enthymematic, inviting audience (readerly) involvement in the movement of consciousness. Each successive premise is only an eikon or semeia, a probable and partial image or sign along the way to be travelled. Each stage of the journey is only a likely resting point and so infers another as eventual replacement.
The second stage in the journey of consciousness addresses the conditions that make ‘self-certainty’ possible. After we recognize that our language-schemes create some coherence out of otherwise unmediated sense-data, we can then face another, even more symbolically mediated form of recognition. In several metaphorically-charged passages, Hegel suggests that we come to know ourselves (instead of the particularity of sense-experience), only in and through a struggle for recognition by another person. Hegel introduces the celebrated ‘master-slave dialectic’ as a rhetorical figure of thought and dramatic scheme of the agon of understanding itself.
This struggle for mutual recognition is conducted as if it were a life and death battle. What is won is another’s esteem – and thereby a potential mastery of self-identity – yet only when we also recognize that we have lost the ability to know ourselves without mediation through interpersonal struggle. These general assumptions are perhaps more familiar today in the (Hegelian) resources provided by George Herbert Mead’s symbolic interactionism, or in the dialectical thought animating the work of Mikhail Bakhtin.
The desire to ‘know thyself’ must be mediated through this reciprocal engagement of interpersonal communication (Williams 1992). There can be no a priori or even intuitive sense of an independent, purely particular self. Self-understanding is always already dependent upon involvement in the process of desiring another’s acknowledgment and esteem. The turn inward occurs only after we first move outward to confront, and then struggle with another for mutual recognition. We must recognize the world of other subjects as a precondition for self-knowledge. Personal identity is formed, and sometimes malformed, in and through a dialogue with other socially-structured beings. The struggle for recognition suggests that our identity must be negotiated, and can be symbolically withheld or injured by another. Thus, the ‘subject’ is not a thing, but rather has substance only to the degree that we recognize this reflexive structure of reciprocity (Butler 1987: 8)

‘Master’ and ‘slave,’ however, must be understood as figurative descriptions of the unstable and negotiated ‘subject’ positions in any dialectical process. In the battle for esteem, the master appears victorious by having won the recognition of another, just as the loser appears slave of another’s will. Yet Hegel’s famous rhetorical figure of master and slave tropes these roles, turning defeat into partial independence, and victory into unwitting dependence. Whereas esteem and consumption are indeed prerogatives of one who has (temporarily) mastered the struggle for recognition, and just as negotiable tokens often register this same achievement, so to must we recognize this victory as entirely symbolic, hence unstable. The ‘master’ is actually dependent upon another’s recognition, and this interpersonal relation is being renegotiated continually. The symbolic ‘slave,’ however, performs the ‘labor of the negative’ that figures in all such dialectical thought. For in addition to acknowledging another, the ‘slave’ transforms the material world through labor. As Marx would later trope Hegel’s figure of thought, this actually gives ideas real shape and meaningful existence, and this act informs not just nature, but transforms oneself as well in the same process. This makes the symbolic ‘slave,’ ironically speaking, more aware of how consciousness really works because one is now able not just to give or receive another’s esteem (a symbolic gesture), but actually transform themselves through this interpersonal process.
The dialectical movement of Hegel’s text dramatizes just this endlessly figurative aspect of the interplay of substance and subject. Hegel’s agon of recognition also implies that we can never master desire any more than we can stop the flow of experience or ignore the encounter with difference. Knowledge is this movement that requires others as the reflexive moment when we discover another consciousness, and so must recognize ourselves differently.
The subject is this recognition of the necessity of mediation. Hence, as Judith Butler (1987) emphasizes, we also must recognize the residually unformalizable aspect of this interplay of grammer and thought – the ‘subject’ is dramatized dialexically by holding substance in suspension precisely in order to be known. The moment we claim a positive extralinguistic reality for the ‘subject,’ it either becomes our ‘idol’ or else refutes itself.

5. Conclusion
This long excursus through Hegelian metaphors might yet help us visualize the struggle for recognition that images can evoke, at least tacitly. The image as enthymematic reasoning is addressed to a spectator, and enlists the memories commonplace in the public sphere. This reminder or rediscovery of the original ‘rhetorical situation’ of the enthymeme can serve as a prototype of how any public uses (and abuses) words and images to constitute itself, and then recognize variations on this theme of identity.
The modern media spectacle offers the theorist an occasion to speculate on the possibility and actuality of visual arguments. This prospect is both comic and tragic, as Hegel recognized. The symbolic form of visually ‘intermediated’ public argument is enthymematic.
Charles Taylor engages these Hegelian tropes in a thoughtful analysis of the contemporary social debates about the politics of recognition. This current climate of opinion also struggles to reunite the normative and discursive aspects of thought. Taylor argues for two senses of recognition animating our (North-Atlantic) debates about gender, race, and social identity. These debates are (literally) paraded before our eyes in a media spectacle that contests memories, demands recognition of incomplete acceptance in the past, and so visually thematizes the possibility and actuality of public reasoning.
Taylor traces the historical and philosophical development of the concept of recognition, and then distinguishes between (1) a “politics of equal dignity” and (2) a “politics of difference” (1992: 38) The first, the political struggle for the recognition of equal dignity as a person, has been won insofar as states have enacted civil rights laws and courts have recognized entailments that regulate and protect our civil interactions with one another. The second, the currently politicized struggle for the recognition of different socially constituted identities, is ongoing. More symbolically yet, these struggles are in conflict over the principle of what constitutes recognition. Taylor traces the co-evolution of two, potentially conflicting principles of recognition; the first employs a universality, the second a particularized version. Most political theorists define the test of the first, universalist version of equal respect as a difference-blind treatment of individual cases. This recognizes (and blends) the Kantian ethical principle of universalizability with the respect for individually realized human potential we inherit from Herder in particular (Taylor 1989), and the Romantics in general (Klemm 1997). The politics of difference, in contrast, only recognizes the claims for equal dignity of different groups and demands the right to be different be recognized by all. Visualizing recognition reminds us of the need to include actual public images in any analysis of arguments. Otherwise, we talk only amongst ourselves.

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The language of sports permeates public argument in the United States. In his study of the role played by sport and game in American culture, Oriard (1991: ix) suggests that sports metaphors are significant as they contain “American ideas not just about sport and play themselves, but about all the things for which sport and play have become emblems – heroism, success, gender, race, class, the law, religion, salvation; the relations of Humankind, God, and Nature.”
References to sport, either general or specific, are more than linguistic decoration. Invoking a sports metaphor can have profound implications on the discussion of competing policy alternatives. Since it would be impossible to do justice to all sports metaphors in a single work, this essay focuses on a series of sports used in two notable public arguments in America during the early 1990s. By analogizing criminals to baseball players, proponents of “three strikes” legislation have effectively masked underlying social and economic inequities that plague our society. Likewise, by analogizing American military intervention against Iraq to a football game, proponents of intervention in the Persian Gulf justified the use of force and legitimated our grand military strategy and battlefield tactics. While some claim that sports are ideology-free, repeated references to sports metaphors function to reinforce a dominant political ideology and authorize political action. This conclusion is not meant to damn sports, but rather to suggest that seemingly innocuous sports metaphors can, in fact, constitute a subtle, yet powerful form of argument.
This thesis is developed in more detail in the pages that follow. The first two sections of the essay document the use of the “three strikes” metaphor in public argument over criminal justice and a series of football metaphors in the public argument over American intervention in Iraq. Having documented the widespread usage of these metaphors, the next two sections consider how these metaphors functioned as analogic arguments for a particular set of policy options.

1. “Three Strikes and You’re Out”
Americans have grown increasingly concerned about crime over the past decade. According to Wilson (1994: 26), crime “was not a major issue in the 1984 presidential election and had only begun to be one in the 1988 contest; by 1992, it was challenging the economy as a popular concern and today it dominates all other matters. ” In a 1994 survey, Americans listed “crime and violence as the number-one problem facing the nation, far surpassing worries over the economy or health care” (Pettinico 1994: 29). To a large extent, this concern reflected the belief that crime was growing worse. Reports in the popular press, for example, routinely reported on innocent citizens who had fallen prey to career criminals. These horrific narratives take on new meaning when accompanied by statistics showing crime growing ever more violent.
Given the public clamor, it is not surprising that politicians from “both parties, from cities and suburbs, and from all regions of the nation are scrambling to establish a tough position regarding crime” (Pettinico 1994: 32). While some have advocated social programs stressing prevention or rehabilitation, retribution has come to dominate the political debate. National leaders have argued, with considerable eloquence and vigor, that swift and certain punishment is more effective than social programs purporting to target the causes of crime. If a crime is punished by probation, advocates have argued for incarceration; if the sentence for a crime is ten years, advocates have proposed that it be doubled; if the sentence is life, advocates have suggested the death penalty.

Many prominent legislators quickly latched on to the “three strikes” metaphor. By analogizing criminals to baseball players, it was easy to justify the harsh sentence of life in prison for offenders guilty of committing three qualifying crimes. At the same time it justifies punishment, the metaphor also appeals to a fundamental sense of justice as it suggests everyone receives three chances to abide by the law. While there was limited discussion of three strikes in public argument about crime before 1993, the three strikes metaphor became the dominant metaphor in the crime debate of 1994.
One of the first substantive references to the metaphor appeared in the New York Times on 24 October 1993. In an article about Initiative 593 in Washington state, Timothy Egan (1993: 14) described a measure called “Three Strikes and You’re Out.” According to the article, this initiative “would mean that any person convicted of a third felony in a category labeled ‘most serious’ would go to jail for life without chance of parole.” Two months later, the Times reported on an effort to obtain signatures for a similar initiative in California (Gross 1993).
By 25 January 1994, the New York Times was reporting that “3-Strike Sentencing Is a Solid Hit This Season” (Fisher 1994: B1). The same article reported that the idea had been endorsed by Governor Wilson in California, Governor Whitman in New Jersey, and Governor Cuomo in New York. In his 1994 State of the Union address, President Clinton (1994: A16) joined those clamoring for tougher sentences:
First, we must recognize that most violent crimes are committed by a small percentage of criminals, who too often break the laws even when they’re on parole. Now those who commit crimes should be punished. And those who commit repeated violent crimes should be told when you commit a third violent crime you will be put away and put away for good. Three strikes, and you are out.

By May of 1994, three strikes legislation was pending in 30 different states. Meanwhile, the United States Congress, which had already enacted four major bills aimed at reducing the crime rate since 1984, hastily scheduled hearings on a new crime bill. While this measure included more money for police officers and prisons, it also contained a three strikes provision.

A detailed analysis of the arguments advanced on behalf of the crime bill is beyond the scope of this analysis. Nonetheless, it is instructive to briefly consider how the three strikes metaphor was invoked in this debate. From a review of the legislative debate published in the Congressional Record it is clear that the most common argument advanced in support of the crime bill was simply that the legislation was tough on criminals. Time and again, advocates claimed three strikes legislation was an aggressive measure to combat crime. For example, Representative Hoyer (1994: H8994) proclaimed, “I am very pleased that this bill includes the ‘three strikes and you are out’ … provision (that) says to repeat violent offenders that they have forfeited their rights to be members of our society and that they will go to jail forever.” Senator Sarbanes (1994: S12320) observed that the crime bill “has the three strikes-and-you-are-out provision, imposing a life sentence for a third violent felony. So it tightens and makes tougher our punishment system.” According to Representative Hoagland (1994: H8952), “Truth in sentencing, forcing violent offenders to serve at least 85 percent of their sentences, a ban on military-style assault weapons, tough punishment like three strikes and you are out, and other provisions nationally that will help.”
The logic behind such reasoning was simple. As Senator DeConcini (1994: S12138) proclaimed, “The three strikes-and-you’re-out provision will take violent predator criminals off the streets and keep them in prison where they belong.” A more substantive, yet equally representative, explanation was offered by Senator Dorgan (1994: S12240): About two-thirds of all violent crime in America is committed by about 8 percent of the criminals. These are criminals who adopted crime as a career, and they understand and we understand that prison for them has become a revolving door. They are in and they are out and in and out and back on the streets far too quickly – to victimize another innocent American once again. This bill starts to get tough with them and says three strikes and you are out. In the words of Representative Bishop (1994: H2259), three strikes legislation would protect society from “those who repeatedly demonstrate a disregard for the sanctity of human life.”
Even those who opposed the crime bill invoked the three strikes metaphor. Not surprisingly given the political climate, one of the most common criticisms of the crime bill was that the three strikes provision was limited to a small subset of potential criminal acts. For example, Representative Smith (1994: H8947) of Texas this bill is flawed. The third strike must be a Federal crime. Only 5 percent of violent crimes are Federal crimes. So, this bill will only affect a few hundred criminals every year.” For our purposes, even richer imagery was offered by Representative Dornan (1994: H7964).

Another celebrated component of the crime bill is the “three strikes and you’re out” provision. While this may sound tough, it is not. In fact, this sentencing provision will only apply to 1 percent of the crimes that occur throughout the country, since the third crime occurs on federal property for it to be eligible for this new punishment. If baseball adopted a similar rule, you would be out only if the third strike occurred in, say, Fenway Park.
Although many complained that the crime bill was too soft on crime, some liberal legislators objected to the punitive philosophy it embraced. Senator Pell (1994: S12421) claimed that he was troubled by the “endorsement of the three-strikes-and-you’re-out provision in the bill and the heavy emphasis on incarceration and inflexible punishment rather than crime prevention.” This was troublesome as criminals sentenced under three strikes would spend the remainder of their life in prison living at taxpayer expense. Representative Trafficant (1994: H8988) warned “three strikes and you’re out” would require “providing room, board, and free medical care to 70, 80, and 90 year olds who have long since passed their crime committing years will cost the states and the federal government untold amounts of money.”
These objections notwithstanding, different versions of the crime bill were eventually passed by the House of Representatives and the Senate. After extensive discussion about the range of crimes covered by the three strikes clauses, legislators eventually produced compromise legislation that was adopted by both houses and signed by the president. In his 1995 State of the Union Address, President Clinton (1995: 17) used the following language to characterize the final crime bill: “But I remind you that last year we passed a very tough crime bill – longer sentences, three strikes and you’re out, almost 60 new capital punishment offenses, more prisons, more prevention, 100,000 more police …”
Taken together, this discussion illustrates the importance of the three strikes metaphor in the debate over the crime bill. The metaphor was used by the President in his 1994 and 1995 State of the Union Addresses. Prominent politicians of both parties invoked the metaphor to demonstrate their personal resolve to combat crime. Even those who opposed harsher sentences relied on the language of baseball in their discourse. Indeed, the rhetorical appeal of three strikes was so strong that some advocates felt compelled to invoke different metaphors drawn from baseball when discussing crime. In Georgia, Governor Zell Miller thought “three strikes” was too generous to criminals. As an alternative, he proposed a “two strikes and you’re out” crime bill and welfare reform based on “two strikes and you’re off” (“Ever tilting at welfare windmills” 1995: A12).
Another opponent of three strikes legislation, Reverend Jesse Jackson, attempted to argue against three strikes by invoking competing baseball metaphors. Instead of “three strikes,” Jackson said he favored a “four-balls-and-your-on” approach. According to Jackson, ball one would be adequate prenatal care and access to the Head Start program, ball two would be an affordable education, ball three would be job skills, and ball four would be a job. Instead of retribution, Jackson developed the metaphor of the walk to argue for more entitlements (Kilbourne 1994).

2. The Big Game
In the debate over intervention in Iraq, political leaders sought easy ways to characterize political and military events in the Mideast and to justify an aggressive American response. While a review of this discourse suggests a wide range of metaphors, the most common were drawn from the American game of football. By analogizing military intervention in the Mideast to football it was possible to situate the game, identify the competing teams and their star players, discuss strategy and tactics, and even conduct a post-game analysis explaining the decisive coaching moves.
Since multiple football metaphors were invoked in discourse about Desert Storm, it is helpful to integrate the metaphors into a larger story. A good place to begin is with the respective leaders. Both George Bush and Saddam Hussein were repeatedly likened to “coaches preparing for the Super Bowl” (McCarthy 1991: F2). Just as these political leaders were identified as coaches, so too were the leading military commanders. Sometimes the title was assigned by general/coach” Schwarzkopf (Evans 1991: C25). Other times the title was claimed, as when Lieutenant General Calvin A. H. Waller, the second-ranking officer in Operation Desert Shield behind Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, said “I’m like a football coach. I want everything I can possibly get and have at my side of the field when I get ready to go into the Super Bowl” (Ready or not? 1990: A1).

Indeed, those who were critical of national leaders frequently denigrated their coaching skills. Senator Bob Kerry, an early critic of the decision to deploy American forces in the Gulf, accused President Bush of being more of “a little league football coach more than a commander in chief” (Kondracke 1991: 10), while another commentator likened Bush to “a high-school football coach on the eve of the Big Game” (Fineman & Thomas 1991: 37). In an even less flattering comparison, another critic complained that “Listening to the two coaches, Saddam of the Eye Pluckers and Bush of the Butt Kickers, it sounded a lot like the old mine’s-bigger-than-your’s contest” (Anderson 1991: C1).
As every fan knows, an integral part of coaching is the creation of a game plan. Just like a football game, each of the teams in the Gulf War had a different game plan. Coach Bush’s “game plan,” according to the analysts, “If not from the beginning, certainly from very early on was to bring Iraq to its knees by flattening it with overwhelming military force” (Payton 1991: 3A). According to Assistant Coach Colin Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, this game-plan has a “ground component. Despite protestations to the contrary, most observers assume it also envisages a short, violent war – summed up by Mr. Bush’s repeated pledge that ‘this will not be another Vietnam’” (Barber 1991: 2). In sharp contrast, opposing coach “Saddam Hussein’s game plan (is) to drag out the conflict long enough to split up the coalition against him and to inflict enough American casualties to make the American public demand an end to the war” (Greenway 1991: 1).
Once the coach determines the game plan, he needs to name a starting lineup. In this instance, many commentators were more impressed at who was left on the bench. Coach Bush, intent on executing his game plan without delay, intentionally chose to leave Congress “standing on the sidelines” (Scally 1991). Several other key players also languished on the bench for different reasons. “During the current Persian Gulf crisis,” Coach Bush later rationalized, “Israel has been on the sidelines” (Bratman 1990: 11). Further, after the outcome of the game was safely in hand, it was reported that “Saudi Arabia is agreeing to take part on the sidelines because President Bush made it clear that that was the least it could do to thank Washington for saving it from Iraq” (Friedman 1991: A8).

The use of football metaphors went well beyond the talk of coaches and the game plan. All the battles were fought on the playing field with “yard markers and goal posts” (Fineman & Thomas 1991: 37). As in football, the goal was to advance into enemy territory and gain ground. When some commentators questioned whether war could be averted, Coach Bush responded that he was “not moving the goal posts to achieve peace in the region” (Kurkjian 1990: 1). Just as it would be unthinkable to change the length of the playing field after the game started, it was not possible to change policy goals once the game had started.
Having cast the war as a football game, it makes sense to compare the start of hostilities to the start of the game. As game time approached, correspondents prepared for battle, “treating the midnight deadline more as the hour for a scheduled kickoff than as the mark to measure the beginning of Saddam Hussein’s borrowed time” (Pruden 1991: A4). Offering humorous commentary on the kickoff after the game, winning coach Norman Schwarzkopf recalled announcing to his soldiers, “Iraq has won the toss and elected to receive” (Adams 1992). The same message appeared on a sign outside the main American base (Bush 1991), and on the bulletin board in the press hotel in Riyadh (McClellan 1991). Of course, in this case, receiving did not mean receiving the kickoff, but rather referred to receiving an American air attack.
After the game had started, the ensuing battle was often described through football metaphors. Coach Bush, for example, frequently “huddled” with his advisers (Alexander 1992: A1). The allied attack featured a vaunted “ground game” (Freeman 1991: E-6) based on a range of “running plays” (Evans 1991: C25) designed to protect the “ball carrier” (Hanchette 1990). At the same time, the allied defense planned to hold “him (opposing star, Saddam Hussein) to the line” (Dowd 1991: A1). Allied strategy also made use of excellent “special teams, such as the combat engineers who breached Iraqi minefields and the Patriot missileers, to whom the label ‘Scudbusters’ seems to have stuck like Velcro” (Evans 1991: C25).
Other football metaphors abound. President Bush complained about “a total stiff-arm” from Saddam Hussein when describing the failure of diplomacy to prevent conflict (The edge of the abyss 1991: 20). When Congress took up the issue, critics charged that “the first impulse of many Members was to punt” (Madison 1991: 104). Mistakes in policy, such as the ill-fated courtship of Iraq prior to the invasion of Kuwait, were referred to as “fumbles” (Phillips 1990: M1) and much was made of the success of Patriot missiles in “intercepting” Scud missiles thrown by Iraq during the war. (Apple 1991: 1). Finally, after early success, one commentator warned that “Scoring the first touchdown is one thing; having the ingredients to go the distance is quite another. The most difficult plays are yet to come” (Shielding the world from Iraq 1990: 14).
Even after the game was completed, there were even more football metaphors during the ubiquitous post game analysis. The allied victory was so decisive that it “leveled the Arab playing field” (Gelb 1991: A25). Despite the margin of victory, some of the winning players complained about the behavior of their opponents. Some lamented the “cheap shots of Young Republicans against Democrats in Congress who participated in free debate” (Ruthazer 1991: 9A), while others complained about “cheap shots by Republicans against Democrats who voted against the war powers resolution on Iraq” (Shepard 1991: 4). Even in victory, Coach Bush found himself compelled to respond to “Monday morning quarterbacks” who blame him for “Saddam’s continued aggression because the Iraqi dictator wasn’t toppled in the 1991 Persian Gulf War” (Fort Hood troops head for Gulf 1996: 1) and “hindsight quarterbacks who are insisting that allied forces should have acted more decisively in March of 1991″ (Kilpatrick 1992: A12).

There was, however, one football metaphor that dominates all others. It is the characterization of the successful strategy of flanking Iraq’s army as a “Hail Mary” strategy. Those familiar with American football will, of course, recognize the “Hail Mary” as a desperate attempt to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat with a long pass into the opposing endzone as time expires. In retrospect, it may be difficult to understand how this metaphor could have been invoked to describe the complete route of the Iraqi army. To make the image work, Coach Schwarzkopf (1991: A6) created a situation in which his team faced the most desperate of circumstances: Basically, the problem we were faced with was this:…. As far as fighting troops, we were really outnumbered 2 to 1. In addition to that, they had about 4,700 tanks vs. our 3,500 when the buildup was complete, and they had a great deal more artillery than we do. I think any student of military strategy would tell you that in order to attack a position, you should have a ratio of approximately 3 to 1 in favor of the attacker. And in order to attack a position that is heavily dug in and barricaded, such as the one we had here, you should have a ratio of 5 to 1, in the way of troops, in favor of the attacker…. What we did, of course, was start an extensive air campaign…. One of the purposes of that extensive air campaign was to isolate the Kuwaiti theater of operation by taking out all the bridges and supply lines that ran between the North and the southern part of Iraq. We also conducted a very heavy bombing campaign…. It was necessary to reduce these forces down to a strength that…. made them weaker, particularly on the front-line barrier that we had to go through…. Once we had taken out his eyes, we did what could best be described as the “Hail Mary” play in football.
In a vast sweeping motion, the allied army swept around the flank of the Iraqi line. The play, explained by Coach Schwarzkopf with a reference to a “football playbook” (Wickham 1991: 10C), went for a huge gain. After the allied army successfully executed the “end run” (Chamberlain 1991: 76), they found only “second-string” Iraqi players (Davis 1993: C5) and they swept to metaphoric victory.

3. Criminals as Batters
Sports metaphors are powerful rhetorical devices because they translate abstract concepts into vivid images. At the same time, sports metaphors have persuasive power as they draw powerful analogies. By framing an issue, metaphors structure arguments and limit discussion. This is particularly true, it appears, with respects to the baseball and football metaphors discussed in this paper.
“No game in the world,” Paul Gallico has written, “is as tidy and dramatically neat as baseball, with cause and effect, crime and punishment, motive and results so clearly defined” (cited in Skolnik 1994: 192). There is, it seems, considerable truth in this observation as it pertains to the three strikes metaphor. After three strikes, the batter goes to the dugout; after three crimes, the criminal goes to jail. The three strikes metaphor, however, functions as more than an analogy for a particular sentence. Not only does it describe a policy proposal, it also argues criminals have had a fair chance and reasons that their repeated strikes against ordered society justify incarceration for life.
A careful examination of the three strikes metaphor reveals that it is predicated on a series of ideological assumptions drawn from the baseball diamond. First, the three strikes metaphor suggests we live in an idealized world. In baseball, the batter stands in a fixed spot and uses a regulated bat to swing at an official ball thrown from a pitching mound of a prescribed height. While there are other players on the field, the batter alone faces the pitcher and the batter’s success depends largely on the batter’s own talent. If the ball is hit into play, the batter runs a clearly defined course around the bases with the goal of returning to the same spot from whence he started. In this sense, Messenger (1994) has observed that “baseball has a logic that appears almost Newtonian.”
There is, however, a great deal left unsaid in this simple description of America’s past time. The rules of baseball, for example, assume that all players share certain talents. While some might be more gifted than others, all players have an equal chance to hit the ball. No matter how inept, everyone in the game eventually gets their turn at the plate. Moreover, baseball is a team sport. While the batter alone faces the pitcher, all batters are part of a larger team that struggles together toward a common goal. In the interest of winning, individuals frequently sacrifice their place for the greater good. Since everyone on the team benefits when the team wins, players do not seek individual glory at the expense of their teammates. Second, the three strikes metaphor suggests a perfected system of justice based on the assent of the players. The official rules of the game are codified in book form. Balls and strikes are clearly and reasonably defined by an objective set of criteria. In fact, arguing balls and strikes is against the rules and grounds for expulsion from the game. Deviations from these rules required by a particular ball park are communicated by the umpire as ground rules before the game. While the rules of the game must be applied by the umpire to specific situations, the rules themselves are not negotiated before the game or even renegotiated during each game. The rules are sacred and timeless, and therefore, statistics compiled over decades are meaningful.
Not only are the rules of the game objectified, but the rules derive their power entirely from the consent of the participants. Players and managers occasionally protest calls made by the umpire, but even clearly erroneous calls cannot be reversed by an appeal to higher authority except under the most extraordinary of circumstances. The participants freely agree to abide by the decision of the umpire and their acquiescence to the authority of the umpire is necessary to make the game possible. Observing this fact, Novak (1994: 59) suggests “baseball is a Lockean game, a kind of contract theory in ritual form, a set of atomic individuals who assent to patterns of limited cooperation in their mutual interest.”
Finally, the three strikes metaphor suggests minimal, and even transitory, consequences for failure on the diamond. This is not to say that errors in baseball are soon forgotten. Baseball legend and lore abounds with stories involving bad bounces, bad calls, missed opportunities, and the like. So too, failure as a batter is remembered “Every play,” Skolnik (1994: 157) writes, “nearly every move is recorded, then registered, within a host of related categories deemed important for describing action and accounting for the outcome.”
But in baseball, errors in the field or poor hitting are neither unexpected or fatal. Failure is inevitable; salvation is expected. Each time the ball is hit, a fielder has an opportunity to make a play. Poor hitters have been saved by particularly adept fielding. So too, the fallen hitter has another chance for glory the very next time he returns to the plate. As Ted Williams, one of the greatest hitters in the history of the game, sagely observed, baseball is the “only field of endeavor where a man can succeed three times out of ten and be considered a good performer” (quoted in Stinson 1993: B21).

When one considers these assumptions, it becomes readily apparent that advocates who invoke the three strikes metaphor are doing more than simply describing the appropriate sentence for a crime. Under closer examination, it can be seen that the three strikes metaphor constitutes a powerful argument for a particular view of our criminal justice system. By invoking the metaphor, advocates are able to imply that criminals (batters) are responsible for their own behavior. Every criminal (batter) has an equal chance at success as the rules apply to all. Judges (umpires) fairly administer justice, and defendants (batters) are not allowed to contest rulings (balls and strikes). All criminals (batters) will be held strictly accountable for their behavior. The appropriate penalty for striking out is life in prison (returning to the dugout).
When invoked in the crime debate, this metaphor functions to legitimize a conservative judicial system. By citing the three strikes metaphor, advocates invoke imagery that justifies punishment. At the same time, advocates who use the metaphor are able to argue that individuals should be held responsible for their behavior, that the judicial system is fair and equitable, and that criminals deserve their punishment. When understood from this perspective, the three strikes metaphor constitutes a powerful ideological argument. The metaphor not only describes a sentence, it argues for a particular worldview.
Of course, under close scrutiny it becomes readily apparent that the three strikes metaphor has dubious parallels to criminal justice. In fact, each of the aforementioned assumptions might be seriously questioned by an observer of our judicial system. Criminals do not live in an idealized world. We know that a disproportionate amount of crime is committed by the uneducated, the disadvantaged, and the unemployed. Recent research on children has suggested that “temperament, early family experiences, and neighborhood effects” are significant predictors of criminal activity (Wilson 1994: 27). While more might be said, it is readily apparent that many criminals are playing with numerous competitive disadvantages. In the game of life, players who have an education have a better chance of hitting a pitch than those without an education. Children raised in abusive situations, without appropriate parental roles, are far more likely to strike out. In the words of Diggs (1994: 25), “’three strikes and you’re out’ plays ball on a field of dreams, but we live in an America that is undeniably real – a contemporary, largely urban scene of increasing unpleasantness, complexity, diversity, interdependency and, ultimately, of incomparable creativity and resourcefulness.” Given the disparity in opportunity and experience, analogies to the idealized confrontation between the batter and the pitcher on the baseball diamond become increasingly strained.
Finally, criminals are held strictly accountable for their behavior under the new crime legislation. While batters may be redeemed, a criminal convicted of a third qualifying felony will spend the remainder of life in prison. Baseball’s history begins anew each time a game begins; each time a batter assumes a position in the batter’s box. The game is ongoing, hence there is always a chance for salvation. Perhaps this explains why some of base-ball’s greatest hitters are fondly remembered as heroic figures, despite a penchant for striking out on a regular basis. In contrast, under the new crime bill, a criminal convicted of three qualifying crimes is banished from the game and permanently imprisoned. If the life sentence is truly enforced, salvation is impossible as the player has been forever removed from society.

4. War as Football
While football offers a convenient vocabulary for describing different aspects of Desert Storm, it is important to remember that these metaphors also express a particular set of values. Safire (1982: A27) has insightfully observed, “professional football is the central metaphor of our times, combining strategy with power, grace with violence, sportsmanship with brinkmanship.” Recognizing the power of such images, Hardaway (1985: 581) has suggested “that sports metaphors become not merely ways of revealing our adolescent preoccupation with aggressiveness, with winning, with games, but also ways of perpetuating those concerns, of glorifying them, of passing them on unexamined to our children through our national culture.”
Although fundamentally different than baseball, like baseball, football is also a game with formal rules which are enforced by impartial referees. Penalties are clearly defined by an objective set of criteria. While the rules of the game must be applied by the referee to specific situations, the rules themselves are not negotiated before the game or even renegotiated during each game. The rules are sacred and timeless, and therefore, statistics compiled over decades are meaningful. Both teams have the same number of players. Teams alternate possession of the ball, meaning that both teams have an equal number of opportunities to score. With the exception of the point after a touchdown, as soon as one team scores points on the other, it must surrender the ball to the opposing team.
Due to the nature of the sport, football requires an unusual amount of teamwork. To be successful, a large number of people playing different roles, united by a common game plan, are forced to cooperate for the greater good. The athletes are highly skilled, but their individual performances are necessarily subservient to the larger effort. Each player assumes a position, and the team can succeed only if each player sacrifices their own autonomy for the team. This sentiment is perhaps best expressed in words attributed to the late Vince Lombardi, legendary coach of the Green Bay Packers: “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”

While much might be said about the way football metaphors function in the public argument about military intervention against Iraq, there is space to consider but two of the more obvious implications. First, repeated references to football metaphors functioned to idealize war. Unlike football, where each team is of a prescribed size, there was a wide disparity between the competing armies that take the field and there was no limit to the number of players on the field at any given point in time. So too, there are seldom agreed rules for fighting a war. In the case of Desert Storm, for example, there were legitimate questions about the appropriate use of weapons of mass destruction, efforts to destroy the environment, and whether it is ethical to target civilian populations. Even today, there is widespread disagreement whether Desert Storm was a success or a failure. While it is undoubtedly true that the allied forces forced Iraq to surrender, it is no longer clear whether the allies won the war. Given recent events in the Mideast, some critics now complain that the allies lost the war because Saddam Hussein remains in power.
A second implication, perhaps not as obvious, is even more troubling. The use of football metaphors tends to constrain argumentative ground and minimize discussion of policy alternatives. Sports are about winning and losing, not about discussion and debate.
As Balbus (1975: 578) insightfully observes, “The goal of sports activity is always unambiguous and non-controversial; participants do not come together to discuss or debate the ends for which the activity has been established, but rather take this end for granted and apply themselves in a single-minded fashion to the task of developing the most efficient means to achieve the predetermined unchanging and non-controversial end: winning.”
In the case of Desert Storm, the choice of metaphors is crucial as it limits the choice of available policy alternatives. By casting the war as a football game, those offering the metaphor discourage dialogue and preclude criticism. Instead of arguing about whether intervention is appropriate, the metaphor focuses attention on waging war. This shift in focus is significant, for it transforms the discussion from ends to means. At the same time, the emphasis on the team further discourages criticism as everyone knows that teams are not a forum for grievances, but rather groups organized for a specific purpose.

5. Conclusions
The repeated use of the sports metaphors to characterize public policy, generally without explanation or qualification, clearly proves that sports are an integral part of American society. Smith (1973: 39) grasps the obvious when he writes that “One measure of the stature of sports in the American scheme is the extent to which sporting terms are employed away from the playing fields.” The ability of advocates to invoke a sports metaphor without explanation demonstrates that Americans share a collective familiarity with such games and justifies the claim that sports are an essential element of American culture. Recognizing the importance of such usages, Lakoff and Turner (1989: 214) have suggested that “to study metaphor is to be confronted with hidden aspects of one’s own mind and one’s own culture.”
The three strikes legislation widely discussed in America today draws heavily on the idealized world of baseball. While this appeal to baseball explains a penalty, it also rationalizes retribution against criminals. This reasoning is potentially dangerous, as there are profound differences between sports like baseball and the administration of justice. Along the same lines, invoking a football metaphor does more than characterize military action; it legitimates a particular strategy and tactics. While the resulting policies may be reassuring to many Americans, such sports metaphors functions ideologically to justify policy, while simultaneously silencing criticism. If we are to engage in meaningful public argument, we need to be fully cognizant of the ideological blinders imposed by our choice of metaphors.

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In the following paper I focus on some rhetorical practices that are used by interactants in arguments with others. I identify argument criteria interactants refer to and describe how they use them as interactional resources for their argumentation. My considerations are part of a broader study of conversational rhetoric in problem oriented and conflict interaction, conducted at the Institute for German Language in Mannheim, Germany (see Kallmeyer 1996). The main goal of this project is the analysis and description of interactive practices under a functional rhetorical perspective which is derived from an ethnomethodological approach to the study of conversation. Ethnomethodologists have so far mainly looked at the organizational order of interaction (see Garfinkel & Sacks 1970), we also investigate on forms of interactive influence and interactive effects of the participants’ interactive work.

In order to describe a wide range of rhetorical practices we take into account various dimensions of interaction that have been explicated by Kallmeyer and Schütze in a theory of the construction of interaction (Kallmeyer & Schütze 1976). According to this theory interactants have to carry out their conversation by simultaneously dealing with different dimensions of interactional organization (listed in Figure 1):

Organizational structure of talk
Thematical organization
Activity organization
Identity and relationship construction
Modality construction
Reciprocity organization

Figure 1 Dimensions of interaction construction

Concerning rhetorical practices, there are for example different practices of cooperation and constraint that are required due to the organizational structures of talk, or practices of social positioning of the participants due to identity and relationship construction, or practices of setting and blocking perspectives due to reciprocity demands. The context of my argumentation analysis is the dimension of thematical organization in problem and conflict interaction. Argumentation as a whole is seen then as one rhetorical practice for thematical clarification amongst other patterns such as for example story telling, reports, or portraying (see Kallmeyer & Schütze 1978). Thus, first I had to analyze argumentation as a whole and to work out the conditions under which argumentation is established and carried out in interaction.
Briefly put, interactants begin an argumentation when their thematical exchange runs into a deficit. Then they have to explain and give reasons. Typical deficits include dissent or uncertainty. Argumentation, then, is an interactive pattern for explaining a position and for locally clarifying the deficit and for then integrating the solution of the deficit into the „normal“ course of the current interaction. Formally characterized, argumentation has a three part structure consisting of initiating, carrying out and reintegration. I do not want to specify the difficulties of the empirical analysis of the argumentation pattern but to focus on argumentative relevances that interactants deal with during their argumentation. In the course of that I will point out resources of argumentation which are made relevant from the participants themselves in rhetorical argument practices.

Before presenting these resources and practices I will briefly explain the methodology that we have used. First of all, I defined segments of argumentation in about sixty video- or audiotaped and transcribed conversations from a wide range of problem and conflict interaction situations such as mediation talk, mother-daughter or partner-conflict talk, counselling sessions, TV-discussions, and so on.[i] Within these segments I looked for either explicit complaints  or particularly expanded formulations produced by the interactants. These activities were analyzed in a pragma-semantic perspective for criteria that the participants themselves make relevant as argument criteria. They complain about incorrect argumentation moves of their respective partners, or otherwise characterize some of their own activities as particularly important. In this fashion, I use the participants’ perspective in my methodical approach.
In this fashion, I could identify two groups of criteria or resources of argumentation: one group which reflects certain conditions and organizational constraints of conversational argument, and another group where the interactants exchange thematical moves in different modality formats as arguments.

I will now present the criteria in both groups in a synoptical way, and explain them and their relation to the different dimensions of interaction. I will thereby shortly indicate how interactants use these criteria as resources to construct rhetorical practices for their argumentation. After that I will give some examples of some of these practices, their formats, linguistics, and their positive or problematic interactive effects.

The first group, which reflects certain conditions and organizational requirements of conversational argumentation, contains the following five criteria:
1. Interactants demonstrate thematical consistency and consistency of their utterances, they check it, or they complain about inconsistencies of their partners’ argumentation. Consistency refers to contradictions and (in)coherencies and is seen both, locally and globally in the course of argumentation. Dealing with consistency is relevant in the dimension of thematical organization.
2. Interactants demand interactional relevance of the partners’ activity, or they deny it. Relevance is a very strong and often-used argument. Interactants always organize the course of their mutual argumentation by referring to relevance. Relevance as a criterion or an argumentative rhetorical resource belongs to the dimension of activity organization (which includes a wide range of activities from a single speech act to the global activity tasks, such as for example, counselling or mediating).
3. Another criterion operates in the same dimension of activity organization: argumentants make sure that their activities are appropriate and valid in relation to the global activity tasks and to the thematic development oft the argumentation. Otherwise they critizise the inappropriateness and invalidity of the partners’ argument.
4. Argumentants also use qualities of identity as argument criteria. One important criterion then is, whether the partners are competent to deal with the discussed topics or not. In argumentation the partners demonstrate their competence, for example, by deriving it from personal experience, or from professional knowledge; they attribute competence to their partners or they deny their partners’ competence. Discussions of the respective partners’ competence operates in the dimension of identity and relationship construction in interaction.
5. Also in this dimension, a further criterion operates which argumentants take into consideration: argumentative integrity. Interactants demonstrate in argumentation that they are trustworthy and authentic, that they pay attention to the partners’ interactive rights and so on. Or they critizise their partners for ignoring such integrity demands.

The second group of argument criteria is at the heart of argumentation. Interactants exchange thematical activities in different modality formats as arguments. This group of interactive arguments deals with epistemic or deontic modes and therefore operates in the interactive dimension of modality construction.

6. Primarily, argumentants deal with factuality. They claim what they are saying as real or factual. And they sometimes even demonstrate the factuality of their assertions. Otherwise they also deny factuality of their partners’ assertion. And they do so in an epistemic mode of objectivity.
7. In contrast to the presentation of objectivity argumentants also claim a subjective epistemic mode. They characterize what they are saying as subjective, for example, as their personal conviction. They also formulate assumptions and demand their partners’ assumptions.
8. And, finally, argumentants deal in a deontic mode with normativity: while arguing they appeal to social norms, they estimate their own or their partners’ arguments in relation to such norms, or they put in a normative claim regarding their partners’ activities.

The criteria and rhetorical practices that I have mentioned in this synoptical fashion reveal the fundamental characteristics of discursive argumentation. These are not meant as exclusive categories: for example, competence sometimes interferes with integrity or with relevance in such a way that critizising disintegrity also aims at denying competence, or the alleged lack of competence also makes an activity irrelevant – language use is always ambi- or even polyvalent. But in analyzing argumentative discourses you will regularily find these criteria and practices (listed in figure 2) and you can exhaustively analyze with them the argumentative exchange in discourse.

Figure 2 Argument criteria and rhetorical practices

In a discourse analytic perspective you have to bear in mind, however, that argumentants do not really work out what is true or right. None of the above categories has any argumentative ontological state. Argumentants otherwise always do interactively negotiate what is fact, which norm is right, what is relevant for them and so on. Interactively valid is only what argumentants accept by arguing interactively (see Deppermann 1997, Chs. I.2.5 and III.4).

In the following section I will shortly present two of the rhetorical practices of argumentation. As a first rhetorical practice I will explain denying competence. Interactants mutually have to attribute competence for the global tasks of their interaction (see Nothdurft 1994). Competence is on the one hand a logically necessary condition, but on the other hand locally negotiable in detail by the interactants. To demonstrate competence provides validity to the discursive activities while denying competence withdraws trust in the partners’ utterances. By dealing with the criterion of competence speakers claim validity, make the partners’ claims problematic, or even reject them. Competence is seldom a central focus in argumentation but it is an important criterion for judging. Dealing with competence therefore is a referring and a pivotal activity: it refers to an activity of the speaker or his partners, and it regularily paves the way for the speaker’s following own activities.
Denying competence refers to personal qualities like age, job, social role, discursive abilities, and so on. Sometimes interactants critizise problematic, deficient, or irrelevant competences of their partners, sometimes they say that their partners have no competence at all. Problematic or even „wrong“ could be a competence which is related to personal interest (for example, if a manager of the tobacco industry defines the dangers of smoking cigarettes; for the other qualities of incompetence as deficient, irrelevant or not existing you may simply build examples of your own.

A denial of competence is uttered when speakers explicitly reserve some competence only for their own, or if the partner’s arguments implicitly make claims for competence. The rhetorical practice of denying competence is rather seldom in argumentation because it is a face-threatening activity. But sometimes in interactions before an audience, denying competence makes sense for the critic as a demonstrative act directed to the audience.
Denying competence as an argument practice is a powerful resource to block the partner’s move and to establish one’s own activities. It is dysfunctional if the face-threatening aspect overwrites the focal interactive tasks.
As a second example I will explain a practice by which the speaker claims a particular epistemic modality for his own activities: claiming factuality. In argumentation the common view on reality is fragile, there is dissent or uncertainty between the partners. Argumentants then try to reestablish a common perspective by making assertions with which they try to bring about acceptance by their partners. Assertions and their acceptance do oblige the interactants then to a common view.
Presupposing the possibility of such an agreement is a central premise for being able to interact at all. The interactive power of the epistemic mode of factuality is grounded in the assumption that other persons are able to perceive things like I do. Argumentants deal with this, but you have to notice that reality also is a discursively negotiable entity and not an objective entity that one can simply refer to.
The overwhelming part of argument activities in discourse deals with claiming factuality. Speakers regularily use agreements about aspects of reality to make clear and to consolidate their own argumentative positions or otherwise to undermine the partner’s position. The relations of all assertions thereby build up a network of a global position, they help to support other assertions and as a whole they make the discursive presentation itself scrutinizable, for example, via the probe of coherence and contradiction.

By claiming factuality the interactants try to interactively establish the validity of propositions and to push through their interest. Claiming factuality is normally realized by existential propositions. Such utterances are often self-evident and interactively ratified or even accepted in an unproblematic way. However, at the end of longer contributions, especially as conclusions, they are often rejected by partners because they claim global positions. Linguistically, the factuality mode is established by the indicative sentence mode. Lexically, you often find markers like „indeed“, „really“, or „literally“ and so on. Prominent also are some prosodic features which range from unmarked self-evidence to marking certainty by accent, pitch, and rhythm.
Claiming factuality always establishes the necessity to deal with it. Partners are forced to react either by ratifying or accepting, or by rejecting it. Accepting on the one hand then obliges partners for the further discourse while rejecting leads to a – normally dispreferred – expansion.
The interactive constraint to deal with this practice by ratifying, accepting or rejecting produces its own rhetorical power: Every claim stabilizes an argumentative position of the respective speaker. With it, aspects of a supposed reality are interactively publicized and asserted, and the inferential implications produce local and global effects. But the speaker himself is also bound by his or her own statements, and, besides, such assertions and their respective global position always are threatened by contradicting claims of their partners.

NOTES
i. The corpus reperesents a selection from the corpora of the Institute for German Language, which include some hundred natural conversations.

REFERENCES
Deppermann, A. (1997). Glaubwürdigkeit im Konflikt. Rhetorische Techniken in Streitgesprächen. Frankfurt et al.: Peter Lang Verlag.
Garfinkel, H. & H. Sacks (1970). On formal structures of practical actions. In: Y.S. McKinney & E.A. Tiryakian (Eds.), Theoretical sociology. New York: 337-366.
Kallmeyer, W. (Ed.)(1996). Gesprächsrhetorik. Rhetorische Verfahren im Gesprächsprozeß. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag.
Kallmeyer, W. & F. Schütze (1976). Konversationsanalyse. Studium Linguistik 1, 1-28.
Kallmeyer, W. & F. Schütze (1977). Zur Konstitution von Kommunikationsschemata der Sachverhaltsdarstellung. In: D. Wegner (Ed.), Gesprächsanalysen. (pp. 159-274), Hamburg: Buske Verlag.
Nothdurft, W. (1994). Kompetenz und Vertrauen in Beratungsgesprächen. In: W. Nothdurft, U. Reitemeier, P. Schröder (Eds.), Beratungsgespräche. Analyse asymmetrischer Dialoge (pp. 184-229), Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag.
Spranz-Fogasy, T. & T. Fleischmann (1993). Types of dispute courses in familiy interaction. In: Argumentation. An International Journal on Reasoning 7, 221-23.

In this paper I shall discuss a fallacy involving dividing by zero.  And then I shall more briefly discuss fallacies involving misdrawn diagrams and a fallacy involving mathematical induction, I discuss these particular fallacies because each of them seems at first – and seemed to me myself at one time – to be a counterexample to a theory of mine. The One Fallacy Theory says that every real fallacy is a fallacy of equivocation, of playing on some sort of ambiguity. But these particular fallacies do not seem to involve ambiguity, and yet they do seem to be real fallacies.[i] Let me begin with the dividing-by-zero fallacy.

It goes as follows:
1. Let a = b
2. So a2 = ab (multiply each side by a)
3. So a2 – b2 = ab – b2 (subtract b2 from each side)
4. So (a + b)(a – b) = b(a – b) (factoring)
5. So a + b = b (cancelling (a – b) on each side)
6. So 2b = b (since a = b)
7. So 2 = 1 (cancelling b on each side).

Now this argument appears to be a counterexample to my theory. Each step is stated in unambiguous algebraic terminology. The invalid move takes us from an unambiguously true equation 4 to an unambiguously false equation 5 by a move of cancelling a -b which is unambiguously though not obviously a division by zero. There seems to be no ambiguity.

My theory then seems to imply that there is no real fallacy; we do not have an invalid step which appears, by virtue of a covering ambiguity, to be valid, but rather a naked mistake with no appearance of goodness. A naked mistake is not a true fallacy.
But surely, the argument is a real fallacy. For it passes the phenomenological test. The first time I myself saw this argument in a book, I went through it carefully looking for the wrong step. And I could not find it, at least not just by going through the argument step by step. It looked like a proof to me, and at a time when I knew there had to be something wrong and was, in an intellectually serious way, looking for the mistake!
So clearly the argument is a real fallacy. It therefore seems a counterexample to my theory.
Now in trying to defend my theory, I think as follows. If a serious person is taken in by an invalid argument A/ .. B and ‘A’ and ‘B’ are not ambiguous, perhaps there is some other reasoning in the person’s mind. Perhaps he thinks that A implies C and C implies B, and it is the interpolated term C which is ambiguous. Another person who accepts A/ .. B may accept it for a different reason, using a different confusion, say A/ .. D/ .. B.

I therefore ask: Why did I myself think the argument dividing by zero was valid step by step?

It is often said that people divide by zero, as in our example, because you can usually divide and people just forget about the special case of zero. I have never liked this kind of explanation. How can one just forget about special cases? If the rule is that you can always divide unless the would-be divisor is zero, how can one apply this rule without determining whether the would-be divisor is zero?
At any event, the explanation about forgetting the special case did not apply to me. I didn’t forget the special case. I had never heard of any such special case. I learned from studying this very fallacy that one can’t divide by zero. I was astounded to find that one couldn’t always divide! I thought that you could always divide and that I knew you could always divide.

Now here too there is a popular explanation about why people think they can always divide. The explanation is that people overgeneralize: since you can almost always divide, we overgeneralize and thin we can divide in the case of zero also. I do not like this explanation. Such inductive reasoning could easily lead a rational person to think that one can always divide, probably. However, mathematical knowledge is not about what is probably true but about what is proven. I thought I knew that one can always divide, that I had seen a proof of this.
Now after examining the argument and not finding the mistaken step, I substituted the concrete number 5 for a and b. The equations then became: Let 5 = 5. So 25 = 25. So 25 – 25 = 25 – 25. Upon factoring, 10 { 0 = 5 { 0. Cancelling, 10 = 5. So 10 = 5. So 2 = 1. And here it is obvious where the mistake is. The equation 10 { 0 = 5 { 0 balances, but 10 = 5 doesn’t.
And reflecting on this wrong move, we see that its general form is x { 0 = y { 0/ .. x = y. So if we can divide by zero, then all numbers are equal. This proves that we cannot divide by zero. Of course, when I saw this, I distrusted my reasoning and went and looked in a math book to assure myself that it was really true that you can’t divide by zero.

Having thus decided that you can’t divide by zero, I started to consider my reasons for thinking you can divide by zero. How can it be that we can’t divide by zero? After all, I first thought, multiplication is always well-defined. But division is defined as the inverse of multiplication. Doesn’t it follow that division is always well-defined as well? I knew immediately that there was something wrong with this reasoning. In the natural numbers, it is always possible to add but one cannot always subtract, say, 7 from 3. Yet subtraction is defined as the inverse of addition. How then can it be that one can’t always subtract?

To understand this fallacy more clearly, let me state my argument in more sophisticated terminology. In modern logic, definite descriptions are well-formed expressions whether they refer or not. Thus, in a Russellian sense, ‘the king of France’ is a well-defined expression. And so, for any x, is ‘(¡ z)(x = z { 0)’. But the latter is the definition of ‘x/o’, which is thus well-defined, in a Russellian sense. For Frege, however, a referring expression is not well-defined unless it is proven that it actually succeeds in referring to something. Mathematicians speak of functions as being ‘well-defined’ in Frege’s, not Russell’s sense. If x/o were well-defined in Frege’s sense, then division by zero would be possible. So my argument involved an equivocation, on two different meanings of ‘well-defined’.

When, years ago, I fell into the dividing-by-zero fallacy, I found that one can’t divide by zero, and asked myself ‘how can that be?” I then went through the ‘well-defined’ problem as just rehearsed. However, when I saw that there were two different concepts of ‘well-defined’ involved, I did not feel that this point really addressed my perplexity, for I thought I had somewhere seen a proof that division always was well-defined, even in Frege’s sense. Hadn’t I seen a proof that you can always divide? Before looking at the proof I had in mind at that time, it is convenient here to consider another possible supposed proof.
In a book, Lapses in Mathematical Reasoning, the authors, Russian mathematicians, mention fallacies in which a true mathematical law is applied but in the wrong field of numbers. (Brades et. al. 1963: 14) It is interesting that fallacies involving dividing by zero can be thought of as a subclass of those applying a true law in the wrong field of numbers, and these in turn are a subclass of fallacies of ambiguity.
When we learn about numbers in our school years, we learn to use the word ‘number’ ambiguously. At first the teacher says that numbers are those things you count with: 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. So we learn to use ‘number’ to mean a natural or whole number, a positive integer. In this sense of ‘number,’ we learn that we can always add and always multiply, but we cannot always subtract or always divide. For instance, we cannot subtract 7 from 3 or divide 3 into 7. But then later the teacher told us that, after all, we could always divide as well as always add or multiply, though we still could not always subtract. We could now always divide because, the teacher said, “there are more numbers than you yet know about.”
Even as a youngster, I was rather hyper about ambiguity, and I said – though to myself, not out loud – “Come on, teacher, there aren’t more numbers than we know about. The truth is: you’re going to change the meaning of the word ‘number’”. And so it happened. Now ‘number’ meant positive rational, the fractions were numbers, and we could always add, multiply, and divide. With ‘number’ in this meaning, any number whatsoever could be divided by any number whatsoever, without any exception whatsoever.
Later the term ‘number’ will be extended again, from the positive rationals to the rationals generally. Now subtraction will always be possible, as well as addition and multiplication, but division by zero will not be possible.
And so one fallacious way of dividing by zero would be to apply the true law that division is always possible – true in the positive rationals, but to apply this law wrongly to rationals generally. This way of dividing by zero would involve equivocation on the term ‘number’ and so would be in accord with the One Fallacy Theory.

Still, when I myself divided by zero, I did not do it in this way, I believe. I knew that ‘number’ was ambiguous. I knew that when you extend the number system, as from positive rationals to rationals generally, in order to make a new operation, as subtraction, always possible, you have to recheck the previously always possible operations – addition, multiplication, and division – to make sure they are still always possible. But I thought I had seen in my readings just such a rechecking, a proof that these operations were always possible in the rationals generally.
So I recalled the argument in question. Take addition. Addition was always possible in the positive rationals and subtraction is now always possible. So let a and b be positive. Then a + b always exists. But a + (-b) is a – b and also always exists. And (-a) + (+b) is b – a and always exists. And, finally, (-a) + (-b) = -(a + b), a negative, and always exists. So addition is always possible, it seems. But the exact same argument can be given for multiplication and division. So they are all always possible.
Of course, the mistake in this argument becomes clear when we look at the version concerning division. But it is already there in the argument for addition. By considering a and b and -a and -b, I consider the positive numbers and the negative numbers but I forget to consider zero. What about zero!?
But this seems rather embarrassing. I said at the outset that I didn’t like the explanation that people divide by zero because they simply forget the special case of zero. Yet here I seem to have done precisely that! I just forgot about zero. How could I just forget about zero??

If there are three kinds of numbers, the positive, the negative, and zero, then in order to prove something about all numbers, you have to prove it about all three kinds, and not just about two. If there are three people, Arthur, Barbara, and Carl, in a room and I argue that all the people in the room are tall because Arthur is tall and Barbara is tall and I just forget about Carl, who is short, then that argument is not a fallacy; it is just a stupidity. Surely I couldn’t have just forgotten about zero!
Actually, I don’t think I just forgot about zero in the above reasoning, rather I vaguely thought I had covered zero twice over, though in fact my reasoning was not valid for zero. For I tend to use the terms ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ both strictly, excluding zero, and loosely, including it. So by proving something for all positives and negatives, I vaguely felt I had proven it for zero.
First, zero seems positive in some ways. It is a square number, equal to 02. It is its own absolute value. It is the end point of the positive half of the real line. By the familiar end point ambiguity, an end point seems both to be and not to be a point of the line segment whose end point it is. Also the positive and negative segments are two halves of the real line, and two halves seem to complete the whole. And if zero seems to be positive, then -0, which is also 0, seems also to be negative.
Given that 0 seems in some ways to be positive and negative, the basic reason I tend to use these two terms ambiguously is because it is convenient. We wish to prove results about an infinite class of things, the numbers. We cannot prove results about the numbers one by one, so we divide them into large classes, such as the positives and the negatives. If it happens that there are special cases, such as zero, which do not exactly fit into these large classes, we tend to include or exclude the special cases into the large classes. For the purpose of one proof, we think of zero as positive, for another, as negative, for another as both or neither.
We have a tendency to stretch and contract the more general class terms to include and exclude the special cases, as convenience dictates. This, I think, is why the argument that we could always divide in the rationals generally sounded correct to me. As I said, when I proved the result for all positives and all negatives, I vaguely thought I had covered zero twice over. This general sort of fallacy, shuffling the special case in and out of the general classes, I shall call the ‘special case fallacy.’ It turns out that a variant of this fallacy is used in the remaining two fallacies I wish to discuss.
Misdrawn diagram fallacies in geometry seem at first to be counterexamples to my theory. The problem is in the misdrawn diagram, not in any ambiguity in the language used in discussing the diagram. Yet I clearly remember being shown an argument involving a misdrawn diagram and being unable to see the error in it. However I shall I argue that the diagram itself is a representation and therefore can be ambiguous. In other words, the diagrams are not really misdrawn so much as misinterpreted.

In looking over various examples of this sort of fallacy in the Lapses book, I did not find one simple enough to present here in detail. However the ones I looked at generally had a common form. In the givens we are told that there is a point with property P. Call this point A. We are told also that there is a point with property Q. Call this point B. We represent this by drawing two representing points, labelled ‘A’ and ‘B’. In the reasoning which follows, we are asked to consider the line from point A to point B. We show that this line has property X. Then we show it has property not-X. We seem to have proven a contradiction.
The solution is that point A and point B are the same point. So there is not line from A to B. (Brades 1963: 22) The fallacy can be thought of as an example of the special case fallacy. When we originally draw the representing points ‘A’ and ‘B’, these are floating points which may or may not coalesce. They represent that there is an A and a B, which may or may not be identical.
Given A, then B may be the same as A, the special case, or anywhere else, the more general subcase. So the representation assimilates the special case to the general case; the two points, so to speak, may be one. But then, when we agree to draw a line from A to B, we misinterpret the representation as representing that A and B are different, two strictly, the more general subcase excluding the special case.
Therefore it is a fallacy of ambiguity, after all: the ambiguity of the representing diagram.

A very similar analysis can be given for the last fallacy I want to look at. Here we set out to prove that all horses are the same color.373 We ‘prove’ this by ‘proving’ by mathematical induction that, for any n, any n-membered set of horses has the same-color property, namely the property that all its members are the same color. The ‘theorem’ is obvious for n = 1, for any set of only one horse has all its members the same color. So we need to prove the inductive step: if every n membered set has the same-color property, so does any n + 1 membered set. We illustrate the argument for n = 5, n + 1 = 6, but this case is to stand in for general n and n + 1. We have a set of five horses and a sixth horse. All the 5 horses are the same color. Remove the first of the 5 and consider all the remaining horses. These again are 5 horses and all have the same color. Therefore all 6 horses are the same color. QED. So all horses are the same color.

Now the mistake in this ‘proof’ is that the argument for the inductive step works for any n and n + 1 with n more than 1, but does not work when n is 1 and n + 1 is 2. We do not notice this because, I think, we abstract from the 5 and 6 case a mental picture which plays the role of a misleading diagram.

This picture looks like this:

Here the first big dot is the first horse. The second is the n + 1 horse. The three dots represent whatever is left of the n horses, the first excluded. The ambiguity in this representation is in the meaning of the three dots. It originally represents all but the first of the initial n members, if there are any but the first. It is then misinterpreted as meaning that there are such remaining members. Initially the special case of there being no remaining members is included, but then it is excluded. So here again we have a special case fallacy, and we also have a misdrawn – or really misinterpreted – diagram fallacy, although now the diagram is not actually drawn, but is a mental picture.
In this paper, I have considered three mathematical fallacies which at one time I thought were counterexamples to my One Fallacy Theory. In each case, I have argued that these fallacies can be analyzed as fallacies of ambiguity after all.

NOTES
[i] My thanks to R. De Souza, who chided me about holding a theory to which I seemed to know counterexamples. His comments led me to explore these examples more thoroughly.

REFERENCES
Brades, Vm., Minkowski, Vl., Kharchiva, Ak., translated by J. J. Schorr-Kon (1963, originally published 1938). New York: MacMillan.