In the history of the 20-th century totalitarianism has left a deep and bloody trace. It has been connected not only with destroying civil public institutes and different deformations of people’s private and social life. This century totalitarianism turned out to be an Intellect of Devil with a capital letter which forced people to realize the necessity of replacing monistic Ratio by numbers of autonomous and competing with each other intellect instances. The connection between totalitarianism and intellect is paradoxical. Destroying the intellect with a small letter and thus discrediting the great Ratio totalitarianism created special communicative practices.
It’s wrong to believe that the power of totalitarianism can be explained exceptionally by the power of its repressive structures. A great role in its expansion is played by unrepressive mostly [first of all] verbal practices the core of which was an argumentation. “Argumentation is a social, intellectual, verbal activity serving to justify or refute an opinion, consisting of a constellation of statements and directed towards obtaining the approbation of an audience” (Eemeren, Grootendorst, Kruiger 1987:7). Argumentation is a way of human deeds coordination.
As Ch. Perelman says, that activity is the communication of intellects, American philosofer H.W. Yohnstone says, that activity is the most adequate way of realizing the human nature.In connection with totalitarianism argumentation becomes the devil of homo sapiens and needs the most serious attention. Analysing it we may probably come to answer the question inspired by H. Arendt: How a physically normal healthy person may lose the interest to his own beinq to realize himself as a screw, soldier of Totalitarian one. (Arendt 1951) Totalitarianism isn’t the antipode of democracy, but its another genesis, plebiscite-acclamatorian form, as J. Habermas says on the point. Some democracy theorists consider that totalitarianism and democracy are antipodes. There are two forms of democracy: a representative democracy and a democracy of participation “For the survival of democracy in Eastern Europe, where touch economic and social measures are to be taken, participation is a prereguisite. But more participation will also be indispensable in solving some of the problems inherent in the democratic system institutionalised in the West” (Eemeren 1996:9) Only an inaccurate look perceives acclamation as one of false democracy. The estimation of totalitarianism as extermal displaying of dominatuion and as a false arche is also simplified. It’s more realistic without declaring the totalitarianism visibility what is forbidden by the voice of its victims, which is knocking in the contemporaries hearts, to try to understand which properties the argumentation must have to be an effective megaphone ,the way of totalitarianism implementation. These properties were dissolved in communicative practices of totalitarianism and were not recorded by means of language.

On the one hand,we can’t speak about one as totalitarian one without putting it into a complete totalitarian content. The concept of “totalitarian control” will be intelligent if and only if, the control will be really total.
On the other hand, the control can’t be organized. A screw of the totalitarian State isn’t an atom in sense of Epicurus and isn’t capable of self deviation.Totalitarian argumentation must provide forming of a screw, which is capable of self deviation in principle as a screw. We conducted an empirical analysis of totalitarian argumentation features based on the content analysis of the Soviet press, and it enables to note the following features of totalitarian argumentation. Soviet republican and regional newspapers in 1950-s had practically no one issue which didn’t contain a totalitarian argumentation text. Usually, there were two or three messages in one issue which couldn’t be qualified as patterns of the totalitarian argumentation usage.
Studying these messages shows that there were communicative, control and motive-organizing functions of totalitarian argumentation. Any problem discussed in the newspaper’s texts we are interested in was covering in the way to set up an invisible control over intellects and hearts of the readers using its ideology.

An empirical study of structural properties of totalitarian argumentation shows that in the epoch of stalinism the motive – organising function of totalitarian argumentation was not connected with such argumentation elements (according to St. Toulmin) as qualifier and rebuttal. It’s not surprising that almost 80 per cent of odinary totalitarian messages were built with a peripheral course (O’Keefe 1995) of persuasion. They were based on using very simple and primitive arguments oriented on actualization of the masses’ basic instincts. The processual structural properties of totalitarian argumentation were connected with a canon compound (in sense of F. van Eemeren) argumentation.
According to the canon argumentation is the system all elements of which are intelligent only in the totalitarian total message context. We discovered compound argumentation in 60,5 per cent of analyzed totalitarian issues.
One may speak about such property of totalitarian argumentation as strategy of of its claim immunization (Andersen 1995:193). According to the strategy a slight criticism of the claim of totalitarian argumentation is strengthening its persuasiveness and acceptance. That strategy was used in 70 per cent of analyzed totalitarian messages.

Between relatively independent elements of totalitarian argumentation text as something whole such subarguments as arguments to authority, provincialism, death are notable. An argument to the authority (or ad verecundiam) can be effective due to totalitarian power mechanism. A listener is more likely to accept what State says the more he is afraid of it.This argument is a special totalitarian kind of argument ad verecundiam. Even such a statement as “Elephants Fly” backed by the Authority of a Totalitarian State is acceptable to its recipients.
An argument to provincialism was very widespread in the USSR and is used in the CIS. It means that somethiang is unacceptable to an audience if it is connected with a deviation from the general canon of totalitarian ideology. This deviation is special kind of ignorance in sense of once’s unability to accept totalitarian ideas. An argument to provincialism is a totalitarian turned form of the argument ad ignorantiam.
There are three levels of an argument to death: logical, rhetorical and dialectical. Syllogisms: “All humans are mortal; Socrates is a man; Socrates is mortal” is an example of ‘argument to death’ logical version. It illustrates a high level of validity and persuasiveness of a verbal message appealing to limits of life. ‘Argument to death’ rhetorical form appealing to limits of human life may be persuasive not being valid in a logical sense.
What is more this form may be logically contradictory’. The argument to death’ dialectical form illustrates principle impossibility to continue human intercourse after the use of argument to death. This argument shows an unsteady border between totalitarian argumentation as an example of the verbal violence and totalitarian physical repressions as a brutal and bloody force. The most popular for users of totalitarian argumentation were the arguments located in the following order: to[ad] authority, death, provincialism. If the argument to authority in totalitarian argumentation being subargument played a role of support also, the next arguments to provincialism and death, being relatively independent subarguments, were connected with the methods of totalitarian statements backing.
Despite the ordinary structure and organisation of totalitarian argumentation in the epoch of stalinism internally, it was a rather complex formation being very dynamic and relatively independent phenomenon in comparison with its supporting state institutes.

REFERENCES
Eemeren, F.H. van, R.Grootendorst. T.Kruiger (1987) Handbook of Argumentation theory. Dordrecht: Foris Publications.
Arendt, H. (1951) The origins of Totalitarrianism. New York.
Eemeren, F.H. van, Argumentation and Democracy (1996) Speech Communication and argumentation Vol. 2. Sanct-Petersburg.
Anderson St. K.(1995). ‘War propaganda, argumentation, and the public sphere(s)’. Special Fields and Coses-Proceedings of the 3 ISSA Conference on Argumentation. Eemeren F.H. van, R. Grootendorst. Amsterdam Sic Sat. 1995. Vol.IV.

“Bakhtin’s thought is so many-sided and fertile that he is inevitably open to colonization by others.” David Lodge, After Bakhtin.

In a recent paper, J. Anthony Blair (1998) laments a proliferation of terms that appear to be employed without discrimination or distinction: ‘dialogue’, ‘dialogical’, ‘dialectic’, ‘dialectics’, and ‘dialectical’. While he doubts it will occur, Blair proposes that ‘dialectical’ be reserved for “the properties of all arguments related to their involving doubts or disagreements with at least two sides, and the term ‘dialogical’…for those belonging exclusively to turn-taking verbal exchanges.” Setting aside his pessimism, what Blair identifies amounts to a clear trend toward ‘dialectical’ or ‘dialogical’ models of argumentation, a trend that has become more pronounced particularly among informal logicians in the last few years (Cf. Gilbert, 1997; Johnson, 1996; Walton, 1996, 1997).[i]
Of course, emphasizing the two-sidedness or turn-taking nature of argumentation may not amount to very much. Douglas Walton’s centralizing of ‘dialogue’ in his pragmatic account means that the dialogue provides the context which will determine the argument by virtue of telling us how the set of inferences or propositions at its core is being used (1996:40-41). And Ralph Johnson’s recent focus on a dialectical tier exists in relation to an underlying illative tier which is the premise-conclusion part of the argument’s structure (1996:264). But with these senses, it is possible (though not necessarily the case) for dialogue-focussed or dialectical argumentation to involve no more than an exchange of distanced, monological positions (perhaps through turn-taking, perhaps in whole), where each side presents its argument for acceptance or rejection (Shotter, 1997). Were such to occur, the current drive for a more genuinely interactive or ‘involved’ perspective might be lost.[ii]
It is here that the dialogism of Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) seems particularly appropriate and in many ways an anticipation of current trends in argumentation theory (as with so much else). Shotter (1997) turns to Bakhtin’s views for an understanding of dialogical communication and argument within actual communities. I want to take this further and look for an actual perspective on argumentation, one that really captures the interactive nature of dialogue.

While Bakhtin was a philosopher of language and literature, it is primarily the latter that has been championed in the west where his theory of the novel has been particularly influential. But for argumentation theorists, there is much more to be culled from his ideas on language and communication generally. This paper will both explore what ‘arguing’ is for Bakhtin, showing how his general theory of speech and meaning implicates a particular concept of ‘argument’, and argue for Bakhtin’s role as an important figure in argumentation studies. I will approach the first task through paying attention to special features of Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism (here understood provisionally as the relationship of every utterance to other utterances). Extending beyond Shotter (1997), I derive a concept of argument totally embedded in context (no detached reconstruction of premises and conclusions can be true to it), where even the situation itself enters as a constitutive element. Arguments are essentially co-operative enterprises, opening up meanings to mutual (and third party) understanding, exploring others’ positions, and developing consensus.
Limited by the constraints of time and page-length, I illustrate the prospects for success with the second task by exploring ways in which Bakhtin anticipates an important aspect of Perelman’s work. In particular, I discuss Bakhtin’s treatment of audiences and the importance for him of the “hovering presence” behind conversation of a third part “superaddressee” (1986, 126)[iii]. This concept and Bakhtin’s associated discussion has compelling and instructive parallels with the “universal audience” of the New Rhetoric.

1. Dialogism
Let’s begin with the utterance. For Bakhtin the utterance is the basic linguistic act, and utterances acquire their meaning only in a dialogue. Words and sentences are impersonal, belonging to nobody. They can become the tools of the logician who may centre them on a page and look at their relations, the relations of statements. By contrast, an ‘utterance’ is marked by “its quality of being directed to someone, its addressivity” (Bakhtin, 1986:95). An utterance, then, has essentially both an author and an addressee.[iv]
Moreover, the utterance arises within the context of a particular situation. Or, to put it in Bakhtinian terms, the situation is a constitutive element of the utterance. As Todorov (1984) notes, the existence of a nonverbal element to an utterance that corresponds to the context was known prior to Bakhtin. But he treated it not as external to the utterance, but integral to it. The extraverbal does not influence the utterance from the outside. “On the contrary, the situation enters into the utterance as a necessary constitutive element of its semantic structure” (Todorov, 1984:41).
So understood, ‘utterance’ can help us to appreciate how Bakhtin employs the term ‘dialogism’. Enough has been said to indicate that more is at stake than what we might commonly associate with the term ‘dialogue’ or with ‘speaking’. As Michael Holquist (1990) indicates, normally ‘dialogue’ suggests two people in conversation. “But what gives dialogue its central place in dialogism is precisely the kind of relation conversations manifest, the conditions that must be met if any exchange between different speakers is to occur” (1990:40).

Bakhtin himself marvelled at the way that linguistics and the philosophy of discourse had valued an artificial, preconditioned notion of the word, which was lifted out of context and taken as the norm. By contrast, “[t]he word is born in a dialogue as a living rejoinder within it; the word is shaped in dialogic interaction with an alien word that is already in the object” (1981:279). In this dynamic conception the word finds its meaning. Bakhtin continues: But this does not exhaust the internal dialogism of the word. It encounters an alien word not only in the object itself: every word is directed toward an answer and cannot escape the profound influence of the answering word that it anticipates.
The word in living conversation is directly, blatantly, oriented toward a future answer-word: it provokes an answer, anticipates it and structures itself in the answer’s direction… Responsive understanding is a fundamental force, one that participates in the formulation of discourse, and it is moreover an active understanding, one that discourse senses as resistance or support enriching the discourse.
Linguistics and the philosophy of language acknowledge only a passive understanding of discourse, and moreover this takes place by and large on the level of the common language, that is, it is an understanding of an utterance’s neutral signification and not its actual meaning(280-281).
This clarifies, or furthers, the essential notion of addressivity mentioned earlier. The word is directed towards a reply, it “anticipates it and structures itself in the answer’s direction.”

2. Argument
“We learn to cast our speech in generic forms, and, when hearing others’ speech, we guess its genre from the very first words” (1986:79). I want, in these terms, to treat argumentation (broadly conceived here as the activity of arguing) as such a speech genre. A ‘speech genre’, as defined by Bakhtin (1986:60) is a sphere of communication which has its own relatively stable types of utterances. I take is as uncontroversial that ‘argumentation’ fits this description. We can also take confirmation of this judgement from the kinds of things Bakhtin himself includes as speech genres, beyond the frequently studied literary genres . Bakhtin includes the “short rejoinders of daily dialogues…everyday narration, writing (in all of its various forms), the brief standard military command, the elaborate and detailed order, the fairly variegated world of business documents,” (60) as well as scientific statements. The types of utterances specific to arguers, and identifiable as parts of arguments such that “we guess its genre from the very first words,” given the kinds of contextual considerations mentioned earlier, clearly delineate the sphere ‘argumentation’.[v]
This said, I want now to turn to considering what important elements Bakhtin contributes to a model of argument. That is, as a speech genre, argumentation will be characterized by the features common to it. I want to focus upon three specific ideas.
(1) A concept of argument conceived along Bakhtinian lines will not pull discourse from reality and treat it as a series of statements (premises and conclusions) disconnected from arguer and audience/respondent. In this, Bakhtin would not differ from some recent proposals (cf. Gilbert, 1997). But Bakhtin stresses the uniqueness of meaning that a sentence has within an utterance (that rich concept discussed earlier) to the extent of insisting that the repetition of the sentence makes it a new part of the utterance (1986:109). A sentence changes (or adds to) its meaning in the course of an utterance. In fact, Bakhtin specifically excludes logical relations, like negations and deductions, from those relations that are dialogical (Todorov, 1984:61), presumably for reasons noted here. Dialogical relations are “profoundly specific,” (Cited in Todorov, 61) logical relations are not. This sets a Bakhtinian model of argument quite beyond the boundaries of traditional formal deductive logic, a point that cannot be stressed too strongly.

(2) The second thing to note about a Bakhtinian model is that it will be a context-dependent model where the context includes the particular agents involved. Again, this does not at first seem remarkable, but the notion of addressivity brings a very original element to the discussion. Here, we might conceive argumentation as being predicated upon response. “It” is a site of response. And Bakhtin captures this responsiveness. But this is more than the accommodation of a reply, the anticipation of objections to one’s position. Here, “addressivity” captures the way an argument is always addressed to someone, and thus needs to include an understanding of that other (audience/respondent) in its structures or organization.[vi] Hence, the argument while having the arguer as its principal author, can be said on this level to be co-authored by the addressee. Bakhtin suggests more of what I have in mind here when he writes:
“[E]very word is directed toward an answer and cannot escape the profound influence of the answering word that it anticipates. The word in a living conversation is directly, blatantly, oriented toward a future answer-word: it provokes an answer, anticipates it, and structures itself in the answer’s direction” (1981:280). We can imagine here two people in a dialogue (the site Walton envisages for pragmatic argument), anticipating and responding in a way that makes their argument a common discourse, and in a way that precludes the isolation of positions, speaking back and forth across a gulf. This is clearly to bring dialogism to the arena of argument. And in particular, speaks to the trend in argumentation that I identified earlier. It implies the importance to argument that listening must have. It is also a model of argument that aims for agreement.[vii] According to Todorov (1998:7), for Bakhtin “[t]he goal of a human community should be neither silent submission nor chaotic cacophony, but the striving for the infinitely more difficult state: ”agreement.”’ The Russian word used here, soglasie, means, at root, “co-voicing.”
In the first case here we might note that directing a discussion of language or words in terms of voices personalizes it in a way that a traditional model of argument would not. Secondly, it would be important to recognize that agreement, where achieved, does not mean an identity between positions, it does not involve a winner and a loser who gives up her or his position. Rather than the holding of the same position, agreement stresses an understanding of the position involved. As Todorov (1984:22) recognizes, understanding is a type of reply, it is that to which both arguer and respondent move through the utterance. In this sense, understanding is dialogical, and can be seen as a goal of argumentation within the perspective being extrapolated from Bakhtin’s statements.
(3) This last remark leads to a third, briefer, point. And this has to do with the affect that arguing has on the arguer. Typically, in similar kinds of models we might talk about the way the arguer/argument aims to persuade the audience. The movement of change is centrifugal. Where change does take place, it is in the audience. Overlooked is the way in which the act of engaging in argument can change the arguer her or himself. The dialogical argument being discussed here lays stress on the relation between the arguer and respondent in the form of the utterance/argument they co-author and come to understand.
As we might anticipate from what has been said so far, Bakhtin’s work offers a particular notion of the self or I that is not isolated from its context (nothing is anything in itself for Bakhtin). The self arises in relation with others. While there is no room here to pursue this particular notion of the self, it suggests a sense in which we can think about the thought of the self being tied to the thought of the audience. As an arguer, when I consider my audience, I must of necessity consider my self, my beliefs and attitudes. And articulating my position for my audience, I also articulate it for myself. Arguing is self-discovery. And with such insight comes the possibility of change, of development of the person initiating the argument. [viii] This clearly relates to the sense of agreement as understanding expressed above. Accordingly, we will have here a model of argument that eschews the metaphors of war that have been the subject of a number of critiques (Cohen, 1995; Berrill, 1996), and adopts the kinds of metaphors more agreeable to recent feminists critics (Gearhart, 1979; Foss & Griffin, 1995).

3. Bakhtin & Perelman
Enough has been said to show the plausibility of extracting a rich and useful ‘dialogical’ model of argument from Bakhtin’s work. Obviously, such a model needs development, and there is much to be addressed by way of concerns and problems. But I want now to turn to a more explicit way in which Bakhtin anticipates twentieth century argumentation, and to illustrate this through a brief discussion of Perelman’s notion of the universal audience.
There are a number of audiences recognized in Perelman’s texts (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1969:30). But he makes an important distinction between the particular audience being addressed and the universal audience somehow lying within, or framed by, or participating in, that particular audience. The relationship between the two audiences has occasioned considerable debate and several key criticisms have been brought against it. As a concept, it is deemed to be riddled with inconsistencies (Ray, 1978; Ede, 1989), or even unnecessary for Perelman’s (and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s) own project (Johnstone, 1978:105).
To a certain extent, Perelman must share some responsibility for criticisms laid against his notion of the universal audience, insofar as those criticisms may be based on misunderstandings. Perelman is a writer who often discusses ideas or views without clarifying his attitude towards them. Only in a subsequent discussion do we realize that an idea he has been explaining is not one he is endorsing, or at least, not one he is endorsing in the way it has been explained.
Thus, some charges that the universal audience is too ideal or hypothetical a concept (Ray, 1978; Ede, 1989) stem from the following passage:
Argumentation addressed to a universal audience must convince the reader that the reasons adduced are of a compelling character, that they are self-evident, and possess an absolute and timeless validity, independent of local or historical contingencies (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1969:32).

Simply put, the view expressed here is not Perelman’s view. What he is outlining is the traditional conception of a universal audience to which philosophers have long appealed. It is against this conception, and more generally the conception of certitude in philosophy it characterizes, that Perelman’s new rhetoric is reacting. His reason for rejecting the traditional conception is simple: “[It] links importance to previously guaranteed objectivity and not to the adherence of an audience, rejects all rhetoric not based on knowledge of the truth” (Perelman, 1989:244). Elsewhere he calls it a “supraindividual and antihistorical conception of reason” (1967:82). So, we must recognize at least two notions of ‘universal audience’. That employed in the tradition being rejected; and the modification proposed by Perelman.
James Crosswhite (1989), in his apology for Perelman’s concept, distinguishes the universal audience from ideal audiences and criticizes the latter. On Crosswhite’s thinking, argumentation addressed to ideal audiences must be couched in the most abstract and formal terms. “The agreements such audiences are capable of reaching never concern the concrete and substantive kinds of issue such audiences were designed to deal with” (1989:161). This contrasts markedly with Perelman’s universal audience, which is designed to consider concrete issues addressed in arguments directed across times and cultures.
There is an important connection between the immediate, particular audience and the universal model drawn from it. Perelman begins with a particular audience and then looks at its universal features. Constructing these universal audiences involves defending one’s conception of universality. The philosopher addresses the universal audience as he or she conceives it (Perelman, 1989:244).

Perelman likens this universalizing to that of Kant’s categorical imperative (1967:82; 1989:245), and not to the general will of Rousseau’s small political community, as Ray (1978:366) had proposed. The philosopher attempts to universalize the specific features of the situation and solicits general agreement for them in this way. Only arguments which can be universally admitted are judged reasonable. This does not preclude arguments about what constitutes the universal audience for a specific case. Dialectical exchanges may ensue where opponents disagree on this. This is, after all, an essential feature of what is at stake in argumentation. Here agreement on the universal audience must be achieved through dialogue before the stage of appealing to that audience (Perelman 1982:16-17).
The universal audience is not an abstraction, then, but a populated community. It derives from its conceiver, conditioned by her or his milieu (Perelman 1989:248). The universal audience is a concrete audience which changes with time and the speaker’s conception of it (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1969:491). It is far from being a transcendental concept borne out of a rationalism (Ray, 1978). But although the universal audience will change, the test of universality goes on –  it transcends a milieu or a given epoch.
Universal audiences can be constructed from particular ones by universalizing techniques that imaginatively expand audiences across cultures and time and apply notions like competence and rationality. What results is an audience that can assent to concrete propositions and not simply formal proofs and empty platitudes. But the starting point, here and in all argumentation, has been a fully-conceived audience, real or imagined, which listens, reads, and reacts. The universal is fully grounded in the practical requirements of the real. Perelman stresses this when he indicates the need for the philosopher (arguer) to guard against errors in her or his argumentation by testing theses through “submitting them to the actual approval of the members of that audience” (1967:83; my emphasis).

So the universal audience, it transpires, is the distillation of the concrete audience, comprised of the common features as imagined by the arguer (speaker). For an argument to be strong it should elicit the agreement of this universal audience, insofar as the arguer determines it. Put another way, a convincing argument is one whose premises are universalizable (1982:18).
While being a hypothetical construction, the Perelman model is not, on this reading, an ideal model. What this allows us to do is to keep our focus on the immediate audience with its particular cognitive claims, while recognizing a standard of reasonableness which should envelop that audience and which it should acknowledge whenever recourse to the universal audience is required. In this way we can understand Perelman’s repeated insistence that the strength of an argument is a function of the audience, and that in evaluating arguments we must look first and foremost at the audience.
One can appreciate from the preceding discussion of the universal audience why critics might be moved to charge that Perelman espouses a relativism. As van Eemeren and Grootendorst (1995:124) explain it, Perelman reduces the soundness of argumentation to the determinations of the audience. “This means that the standard of reasonableness is extremely relative. Ultimately, there could be just as many definitions of reasonableness as there are audiences.” Introducing the universal audience as the principle of reasonableness to mitigate this problem only shifts the source of the concern to the arguer. Since the universal audience is a mental construct of the arguer, now there will be as many definitions of reasonableness as there are arguers.
Turning back to Bakhtin, let us recall that the utterance is a contextually-grounded event of which the speaker and respondent (first and second parties) are constituents. Now, to these two Bakhtin adds a third: “Each dialogue takes place as if against the background of the responsive understanding of an invisibly present third party who stands above all the participants in the dialogue (partners) (1986:126).” This third party has a special dialogic position (because, of course, there can be an unlimited number of participants in a dialogue, so this is not simply a third member). As Bakhtin (1986:126) further explains this role:
But in addition to this addressee (the second party), the author of the utterance, with a greater or lesser awareness, presupposes a higher superaddressee (third), whose absolutely just responsive understanding is presumed, either in some metaphysical distance or in distant historical time (the loophole addressee). In various ages and with various understandings of the world, this superaddressee and his ideally true responsive understanding assume various ideological expressions (God, absolute truth, the court of dispassionate human conscience, the people, the court of history, science, and so forth).
That we have here an entity on par with Perelman’s universal audience, a similar active participant, is clear. How exactly we should understand it is less clear. On the face of it, it looks like the more traditional model of the universal audience, against which Perelman is rebelling. Yet at the same time, a reliance on such a traditional model seems inconsistent with what we have understood of Bakhtin’s project. Bakhtin uses the analogues of “including the experimenter within the experimental system…or the observer in the observed world in microphysics” (1986:126), to stress that there is no outside position. Likewise, we cannot expect the superaddressee to stand outside of the utterance, unaffected by it.
Insofar as the superaddressee represents responsive understanding, and understanding cannot be from the outside, then the superaddressee is internal to the utterance. Furthermore, this superaddressee is “presupposed” by the author of the utterance, it is controlled by the author like Perelman’s arguer “creates” the hypothetical universal audience. What is less clear is whether the third party superaddressee is related to the second party respondent in as intricate a way as Perelman’s universal audience is related to the particular audience. But here again, a remark of Bakhtin’s is instructive: “The aforementioned third party is not any mystical or metaphysical being (although, given a certain understanding of the world, he can be expressed as such) – he is a constitutive aspect of the whole utterance who, under deeper analysis, can be revealed in it (126-127).” Like the first and second parties (and other features discussed earlier) the third party is a constitutive aspect of the utterance. As presupposed by the author, this party must be understood in some essential relation to the second party who is being addressed and who is, as we have seen, co-authoring the utterance itself. Still, there is more that needs to be explored here at a later date, especially as we look to transfer the discussion to the specific concerns of argumentation.
On another front, understanding the superaddressee/universal audience from within Bakhtin’s project may allow us to resolve some of the concerns about Perelman’s model. In particular, the concern that we have an extreme relativism at work here, where there will be as many universal audiences as there are arguers.
What this criticism misses that Bakhtin has made clear, is that in a very real sense the “arguer” will only exist for us in relation to an “argument” (understood now in these dialogical terms). And this argument is a unique event involving the particulars of speakers and their situation and the universal audience relevant to them. It is not a matter of each arguer deciding the universal audience in some arbitrary way, such that there are as many universal audience as there are arguers. It is a matter of the argumentative context dictating to the arguer how the universal audience can be conceived, and the respondent/particular audience playing a co-authoring role in that decision. More appropriately, then, there will be as many universal audiences as there are arguments; as many arguers as there are arguments; as many audiences, and so on. But this relativism is no relativism at all in the way that concerns the critics.

4. Conclusion
What I have attempted here is to show the ways in which Bakhtin’s ideas bear upon the concerns of argumentation in order to further the attention that Bakhtin has received in this field (Billig, 1996; Shotter, 1997). There is obviously much more to be said, and I have only made a start here. But I hope at least to have shown the viability of such a project. In one of the few specific references Bakhtin makes to argument he refers to the narrow understanding of dialogism involved (1986:121). But this is argument as conceived in the tradition, not argument as currently understood in argumentation theory which, in many of its essential elements is much closer to the kind of notion that Bakhtin could embrace. [ix]

NOTEN
i. The interest in dialogue models is not itself recent, of course– see Barth & Krabbe (1982), or the pragma-dialectical model of van Eemeren & Grootendorst (1984; 1992). But the latest innovations, in some cases developing out of what have become the received models like that of the pragma-dialecticians, mark a clear departure from the logical model of the premise/conclusion set tradition.
ii. I have in mind here Gilbert’s (1997) mutual investigation of positions and Johnson’s insistence that exchange must be present for there to be an argument.
iii. Or “super-receiver”, as Todorov (1984:110) translates it.
iv. Where an actual interlocutor is not present, “one is presupposed in the person of a normal representative, so to speak, of the social group to which the speaker belongs” (Todorov, 1984:43). I do not want to overlook the kinds of problems that can come with such a projected “objective” standard, but this is not the place to take them up.
v. This is the place where I can imagine revisiting the debate of the past decade as to whether or not argument/informal logic/critical thinking is discipline specific (here, read ‘genre specific’). I will not pursue this particular tangent; it suffices that we can recognize the utterances and contexts of ‘arguments’.
vi. A text like the Cratylus indicates what is involved here: depending on who is being addressed, we see three very different kinds of discourse. I am grateful to John Burbidge for suggesting this example.
vii. Not all commentators interpret Bakhtin this way: some stress the sense of social struggle rather than amicable disagreement. Cf. Ken Hirschkop, ‘A response to the forum on Mikhail Bakhtin’ in Morson, 1986: 73-79.
viii. ‘Person’, for Bakhtin, “is a dialogic, still-unfolding, unique event” (Holquist, 1990: 162).
ix. The presentation of this paper at the Fourth ISSA International Conference on Argumentation was made possible by a travel grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

REFERENCES
Bakhtin, M. (1986). Speech Genres & Other Later Essays. Vern W. McGee, Ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press.
Bakhtin, M. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Michael Holquist (Ed.), Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (Trans.) Austin: University of Austin Press.
Barth, E.M. & E.C.W. Krabbe, (1982). From Axiom to Dialogue. New York: De Gruyter.
Billig, M. (1996). Arguing and Thinking: A Rhetorical Approach to Social Psychology. 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Blair, J. Anthony (1998). The limits of the dialogue model of argument. Argumentation 12.
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Cohen, D.H. (1995). Argument is war…and war is hell: Philosophy, education, and metaphors for argumentation. Informal Logic 17, 177-188.
Crosswhite, J. (1989). Universality in rhetoric: Perelman’s universal audience,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 22, 157-173.
Ede, L. S. (1989). Rhetoric versus philosophy: The role of the universal audience in Chaim Perelman’s The New Rhetoric. In: R.D. Dearin (Ed.) The New Rhetoric of Chaim Perelman: Statement & Response (pp. 141-151), New York, University press of America.
Eemeren, F.H. van & R. Grootendorst (1984). Speech Acts in Argumentative Discussions. Dordrecht: Foris.
Eemeren, F.H. van & R. Grootendorst (1992). Argumentation, Communication and Fallacies. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Eemeren, Frans H. van & R. Grootendorst (1995). Perelman and the fallacies. Philosophy and Rhetoric 28, 122-133.
Foss, S. K., & C. L. Griffin (1995). Beyond persuasion: A proposal for an invitational rhetoric. Communication Monographs 62, 2-18.
Gearhart, S.M. (1979). The womanization of rhetoric. Women’s Studies International Quarterly 2, 195-201.
Gilbert, M. (1997). Coalescent Argumentation. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
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Hirschkop, K. (1986). A response to the forum on Mikhail Bakhtin. In: G.S. Morson (Ed), Bakhtin: Essays and Dialogues on His Work (pp. 73-79), Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Holquist, M. (1990). Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World . London: Routledge.
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Perelman, Ch. (1967) Justice, New York, Random House, Inc. Perelman, Ch. (1982) The Realm of Rhetoric, Trans. William Kluback, Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press.
Perelman, Ch. (1989). The new rhetoric and the rhetoricians: Remembrances and comments, In: R. D. Dearin (Ed.) The New Rhetoric of Chaim Perelman: Statement and Response (pp. 239-251), New York, University Press of America.
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Excerpt from a School Board Election Debate
We need leaders who will listen and work with parents, teachers and administrators to provide the best possible education for our kids. Our children should always be the focus of our efforts, not Board behavior. Imagine the possibilities if we could tap the vision of every concerned parent, teacher and citizen to come up with a school system that reflects the best of all tha- that all of us have to offer. Sounds better than fighting with each other doesn’t it? In elections for public office, a candidate’s record of conduct will influence how citizens vote. Whether consideration of conduct (i.e., character, personality, communicative style) is reasonable and should affect citizens’ votes, or whether it should not, is neither an easy judgment call nor one about which involved parties usually agree. As a consequence, making arguments about others’ conduct can be delicate business. The purpose of this paper is to take a close look at one community’s arguments about conduct. The site: A school board election in a medium-sized school district in the Western United States. In this election that set records for voter turn out and spending, candidates did not agree as to what were (or should be) the focal issues. Incumbents considered substantive concerns about directions for education as the main issue; the non-incumbents considered process problems – how school board members had been and should be conducting themselves in making decisions – to be the main issue. The election resulted in a decisive victory for the non-incumbents.[i] As the local newspaper proclaimed in a front page quote from one victorious challenger: “I think this election result really sends a message that rudeness is something people don’t want to see in local officials.”[ii]
After providing background on the school district, the materials, and some key events that preceded the election, I focus on the debate that occurred among the seven candidates. In particular, I show that the non-incumbents’ arguments as to why they should be elected (and the incumbents defeated) were heavily reliant on platitudes about conduct. Platitudes, I claim, are useful, perhaps even necessary conversational devices, when a candidate is criticizing a fellow candidate’s conduct. They assign responsibility without explicitly so doing, they evoke particular events for an audience yet do not explicate how a person’s handling of the event was inappropriate, and they minimize the likelihood of counter charges.

Rocky Mountain School District’s School Board
Rocky Mountain School District serves a population of a quarter of a million people. Its main city of roughly 100,000 is the home of a research university that educates a good number of the teachers and administrators that staff its schools. The district is geographically diverse, including not only the university city that is the hub, but bedroom suburbs of the city, and difficult-to-reach mountain towns. Twenty-five thousand children attend its 54 different schools. School board meetings are open to the public, occur twice a month, and are broadcast on a local public channel. Meeting involve school board members, the superintendent, the school system’s attorney and other school district officials, as well as members of the public. The Board is comprised of seven members elected for four year terms, with half of the board up for election every two years. Following each election, the Board selects its president and other officers. In the November 1997 election that is the focus of this paper four positions were at stake with seven candidates running (one district had an uncontested election). Although candidates were required to live in the district from which they ran, citizens voted in every district’s contest.

Materials and Method
The focal materials for this analysis were (1) transcription of the locally broadcast election debate (two hours), (2) transcription of two meeting segments in which the board crafted a conduct policy for itself, and (3) news articles, editorials, and campaign ads about the election that occurred in the major local newspaper. In addition to the focal materials, the analysis is informed by two years of observation, note-taking, recording of meetings, and newspaper clipping. Data include about 200 hours of videotaped meetings,[iii] extensive notes about most meetings, and an archive of articles and letters from the local newspaper. The debate and meetings were transcribed simply; attention was given to capturing exact words, word repairs, phrase restarts, vocalized particles (uhm, uh), but not to vocal intonation, pausing or turn timing. In analyzing the materials I use action-implicative discourse analysis, an ethnographicallyinformed type of talk/textual analysis that seeks to understand the problems in a communicative practice and the conversational strategies that reflect and manage the practice’s problems (see Tracy, 1995).[iv]

Key Events Preceding the 1997 Election
In 1995, Helene Stetson,[v] who two years earlier had campaigned on a back to basics and educational excellence platform, was selected as the new board president. Interpreting the results of the ‘95 election as evidence of the public’s desire for change, Stetson launched a series of high visibility changes. Included among the changes that the Stetson board instituted were :
(1) “Demotion” of the then superintendent. The superintendent’s seat at board meetings was moved off the central dais to a lower side table; several months later he resigned and was replaced by an acting superintendent who unexpectedly retired at the end of the next year.
(2) The appointment of a new superintendent and district budget director who had no experience in public schools. The superintendent had been a military officer and the budget director had worked for business;
(3) Adding a world literature course to graduation requirements despite the affected high school teachers voting 75-2 against the requirement;[vi]
(4) changing the middle school program from its recently adopted team teaching approach (which required teacher coordination time) back to an earlier junior high model;
(5) facilitating rapid expansion of alternative schools within the public school system. A recently passed state law required school districts to develop alternative schools; however, school districts were varying considerably in how quickly they were implementing the policy; and
(6) the mid-year “promotion/firing” of the principal in the district’s largest high school. This person went on to campaign against Stetson in the 1997 election. Votes at Board meetings in the 1995-97 time period frequently split into a majority and a minority with the same people in each group.

In addition to these policy and personnel changes, during this time period there had been an unsuccessful recall petition aimed at Stetson that had been signed by two of the three “minority” Board members who often voted as a bloc, a resignation mid-term of the other minority Board member who had a reputation as fair-minded and reasonable, and the appointment by the local newspaper of a 13-person “Citizens’ Task Force” to deliberate about “The Schools We Want.” The second report, issued in September 1997, 18 months after the task force had been convened and a month before the election, was critical of the school board. Communication, the task force argued, needed to be a top priority. To be a “successful and widely respected school system” attention needed to be given to “establishing significantly better communications internally and externally.”[vii] Board meetings during the Stetson presidency frequently occurred in packed rooms where attending citizen booed and applauded. As a result of the high level of expressiveness at meetings, the Board introduced the following statement as a preface to public participation:

Participation Preface
We are glad to hear from the public and look forward to receiving your comments. The Board has unanimously resolved, however, that it cannot tolerate personal attacks upon Board members, administrators, teachers or staff. We must all encourage and insist upon a more civil public discourse.[viii]
A year into the Stetson presidency, The Board had an all-day retreat with a facilitator, the purpose of which was to reflect about its own processes. Following the retreat, the Board passed a conduct policy in the hope of improving its collective behavior. In reviewing the policy to be voted on, the Board member (a majority member) who had drafted the policy said, “this is our best effort so far of what we can do and how we can get along and I think it’s a great role model for the whole community in civic discourse, civil discourse.” The conduct policy included ten commitments.

Rocky Mountain School District’s Conduct Policy
1. Be respectful of one another; address issues rather than personalities.
2. Attempt to be clear and concise in comments.
3. Admit mistakes.
4. Share information and avoid surprises.
5. Keep confidences among board members. Act ethically and responsibly. Keep confidential the discussions held in closed session.
6. Use our best efforts to bring people together rather than push them apart.
7. Recognize that consensus is a majority opinion.[ix]
8. Support presentation of both sides of issues by staff and committees.
9. When a major decision has been made, agree to a time in the future to review the decision and leave further discussion until that time.
10. Encourage communications which enhance mutual understanding and provide for mutual support; involve taxpayers, parents, teachers, and administrators in the decision-making process where appropriate.

With the exception of Principle 7, there was little disagreement. All Board members agreed on the importance of being ethical, consulting with others to make decisions, speaking respectfully, avoiding personal attack, and so on. Simply put, the Board’s conduct policy was a set of platitudes – insipid, banal remarks with which no one on this Board, or in most American communities, was likely to disagree.

In argument terms, I would define platitudes as abstract, noncontentious policy/value claims that do not engage with, or specify, particular persons, actions, and choices. One important use of platitudes is to create a sense that the group is largely in agreement. That formulating a proposal abstractly will engender more agreement than the “same” proposal at a more concrete level has long been recognized. For instance, in a widely cited study, 95% of Americans were found to agree with the statement, “I believe in free speech for all, no matter what view.” At the same time, large numbers of these ordinary citizens also agreed with statements that advocated book banning or prohibiting certain kinds of expression (McClosky, 1964). An upshot of the gap between abstract and concrete proposals is that agreement at an abstract level says little about whether agreement will be forthcoming when the topic gets specific. Applying this generalization to the Rocky Mountain Board, it seems likely that it was only because the Board avoided discussing what counted as respectful treatment of people (#1) or what involving teachers in decision-making (#10) meant, that it was able to achieve agreement about conduct. That the Board’s agreement was a veneer overlaying deep opinion differences as to what was reasonable Board behavior became visible during the election.
In the 1997 election, Stetson and two other majority Board members (one of whom was the person appointed mid-term to replace the Board member who resigned) were running for re-election. In addition, there was an uncontested seat in a district where a minority member was retiring and the new candidate had expressed the intent of carrying forward many of the minority member’s positions.
From the outset the election was seen as two slates rather than seven distinct candidates. The four challengers were running as a bloc against the three incumbents. An ad the day before the election epitomized this division. Under a large ballot box with checks next to the names of the four challengers were the names of “819 current and past teachers, staff, and administrators” of “the Rocky Mountain School District community[x] ” supporting the non-incumbents.

The Election Debate
The election debate, a two hour event sponsored by the League of Women Voters and occurring a month before the election, required the seven candidates to make brief opening and closing statements (90 seconds), and to field unrehearsed questions. Questions asked candidates to delineate the role of teachers and Board members in curriculum development, whether Board members should be on personnel search committees, their views about site-based management, class size, and the district’s diversity goal, to provide a few examples.
Candidates’ opening statements tended to include information about who a candidate was, evidence of the candidate’s commitment to public education, and an implicit proposal as to what the primary issue(s) should be for election. Consider what Board President Stetson said:
Stetson (Speaker 4)[xi]
This is a good school district. It can be a great school district. What we have to do is try to make some of the changes though in some of the basics that are delivered to our children as well as some of those that aren’t basic. We need to improve vocational education. We need to make sure our children can spell and punctuate, that they know grammar and history, that they understand math and can do simple math calculations without a calculator. We need to make sure that our children are the best prepared that they can be for the next century. This is not about teachers, this is not about parents and taxpayers. But this is about children, and I am an advocate for children. Thank You.

Stetsen’s opening statement frames key election issues to be about education policies: improving the quality of vocational education, schools giving more attention to spelling and grammar, and so on. To the degree she attends to conduct it is embedded in her final comment that the election is not about “teachers, parents and taxpayers” but about “children.” No orientation to conduct as an issue is seen in the second member of the majority bloc’s opening comment. Like Stetson, Draper frames the election as being about educational policy issues.

Draper (Speaker 6)
We have made significant gains in the following areas: raised academic standards for all students, increased time teachers spend with each student, we’ve confronted the Middle School controversy, we’ve started to reduce class size, we’ve made the budget understandable, we’ve used existing space more wisely, we’ve regained financial credibility. Personally, my goals are to improve student achievement, and also to promote accountability. I believe I am headed in the right direction, and I Ruth Draper ask to be retained on the Board.

The most direct acknowledgment that conduct was an issue was seen in the opening comment from the majority member who had crafted the Board’s conduct policy. After highlighting some of the things she had accomplished as Board treasurer, Kingston said,

Kingston (Speaker 1)
No more fads, such as Open Space classrooms, will occur which cost millions to correct. Decisions need to be made with more collaboration. Participants must work together towards common understandings. All must listen to learn and to realize that we all have pieces of the puzzle and together we can make the complete picture. I have led the Board toward working together in productive ways. Results include the Board Protocol agreement and unanimously agreed upon visions and goals.

Kingston’s statement implicates that tension and disagreement have occurred. Her formulations (“all must listen” “all have pieces of the puzzle”), though, imply that all parties (parents, teachers, administrators, Board members) have contributed to the difficulties. Strikingly different are the opening statements of the challenging candidates. Of note is that all challengers referenced Board conduct as a major concern. Each candidate offered platitudes about generally desirable conduct that, because of the larger context soon to be elaborated, became a speech action that was a strong indictment of incumbent communicative behavior. I label the rhetorical move that challengers used “platitudes plus” to highlight its dependence on the existence of a context of a particular type.

(Speaker 2)
I believe in high academic standards, inclusivity of our experts in decision making and accountability on all levels with the Board setting the standards. I believe it is the Board’s responsibility to model the behaviors we are expecting from the community. We are a community divided in this debate, and it does not have to be this way. As a Board member I will model the behaviors which I expect from the community: leadership, cooperation, listening, seeing the big picture, educational excellence and problem solving. We have to consider the messages we are giving our young people when we behave in ways that create divisions in the community. This election is not only about educational excellence, it is about leadership excellence.

(Speaker 5)
The School Board must model responsible leadership. I’ll listen to others and work cooperatively to achieve consensus on controversial issues. This November you have a choice. You can vote to change the School Board’s focus to creating opportunities for kids in the classroom or vote to keep the focus on Board behavior.

(Speaker 7)
We have a good school district, we’ve always had a good school district, and I want to bring my experiences, my common sense, my ability to make good decisions to this School Board, because I think it will help improve the Board, the Board process. In none of these three opening statement is the speaker clear how the current Board members have acted inappropriately. That the speakers regard something as problematic is cued by vague references to “creating divisions in the community,” the election being about “leadership excellence” (Speaker 2), changing the focus from “Board behavior” (Speaker 5) and “Board process” (Speaker 7). In contrast to these three candidates, Speaker 3, the ex-high school principal, was less vague in her negative assessment.

(Speaker 3)
I am running for the Board to bring balance and cooperation, a climate of civility, better communication, and a sense of service back to Board practices. Board operations should not be a battleground of win-lose. Our communities deserve better…. There is no trust between the teachers and this Board. And without trust, there is no commitment. We are not going forward, and compared to other excellent districts, they call our efforts pathetic. With a School Board that the teachers and communities can trust to work cooperatively and to listen well, one that is not pursuing personal agendas, we can build a well-understood and valid K-12 curriculum, and we can be a superbly functioning district.

Similar to the other challengers, Speaker 3 offers a set of platitudes about good Board conduct. But in referring to the lack of trust between teachers and “this Board,” characterizing the overall efforts of the district as “pathetic” and asserting that current Board members are “pursuing personal agendas” she is less vague in conveying her negative assessment. Interestingly, of all the challenging candidates, she was most often accused in editorial letters in the paper of engaging in personal attack. That Speaker 3 was characterized this way, I suggest, is because she mixed the platitudes plus strategy with language commonly regarded as hostile.
In contrast to the Board conduct policy in which platitudes were self-contained proposals used to affirm Board members’ shared values and accomplish agreement, the challengers used platitudes to mark difference and criticize opponents’ actions. In everyday interaction, a common way people complain about circumstances or another person to unsympathetic listeners is to use idiomatic phrases (Drew & Holt, 1989). Complaints against another, for instance, are summarized by saying “It was like hitting your head against a brick wall,” or “I had to talk till I was blue in the face.” The interactional usefulness of idiomatic expression, Drew and Holt suggest, is that in removing a complaint from its supporting circumstantial details, the idiomatic expression becomes difficult to challenge. A related interactional purpose is served by platitudes, although accomplished in a more inferentially complex fashion.
Platitudes about conduct are statements with which no one would disagree. No one is likely to argue against “cooperation, listening, seeing the big picture,” “a climate of civility, better communication, building trust, listening well” or “modeling responsible leadership.” These are basic, taken-for-granted values of democratic institutions. Yet when these values are invoked in the context of a debate – an argumentation context typically described as hostile advocacy (Blair, 1995, Walton, 1992) – they frequently become instruments of person-directed attack. Platitudes are especially useful in a public argument context for they promote the sense that a speaker is addressing a policy concern rather than actually criticizing (attacking?) a person. That is, platitudinous proposals about desirable conduct avoid the impression that one is hostile or engaging in an ad hominem attack on one’s opponent. If one candidate’s claim concerns the inappropriateness of the other candidate’s conduct – a situation in which the speaker has an obvious stake – then the speaker needs to display that he or she is uninterested in personal attack (Potter, 1996). Platitudes are instruments of gentle criticism.

To be rhetorically effective, however, platitudes need to be embedded in a textual and environmental context where certain kinds of occurrences are salient. A first part of the necessary context is the situation frame. The frame within which these platitudes were heard was an election debate. Frames, as several scholars have noted (Bateson, 1972, Tannen, 1993; Tracy, 1997), are kinds of social occasions that guide interpretation of talk. In a debate frame, audience members make sense of what candidates say with an assumption in place that they should hear what a candidate says as highlighting how he or she differs from the opponent. Within this frame, then, consider what meaning is likely to be inferred from Speaker 2’s platitudinous statement.

I believe it is the Board’s responsibility to model the behaviors we are expecting from the community… As a Board member I will model the behaviors which I expect from the community: leadership, cooperation, listening, seeing the big picture, educational excellence and problem solving,
Speaker 2’s statement is formulated as a broad principle: stating what she believes is desirable Board behavior and what she is committed to doing. Yet given the frame, the statement implicitly functions as a criticism of her opponents’ beliefs and actions. The statement is understood as asserting that her opponents do not favor acting in ways that model good behavior – leadership, cooperation, listening, etc. Left unspecified, however, is exactly how her opponents are not listening, not being cooperative, not modeling responsible behavior, and so on. Imagine if rather than what she said, Speaker 2 had said:
I believe Board members should not argue with each other; intellectual differences should not make people feel badly. Nor should a school board take an action that the vast majority of the teachers oppose, such as changing a course required for graduation. Furthermore, Board members should not “throw the finger” at members of the public.”
A comment that was more specific, such as exemplified above, has all kinds of logical and identity problems that the platitudinous statement does not. Although not doing what the vast majority opposes is generally reasonable, it is easy to think of instances where this should not apply. In addition, most people would not want to equate listening and cooperating with doing what another party wants, even though it is reasonable to assume some link. Similarly, to mention a specific instance of irresponsible behavior such as “throwing a finger” seems to be getting personal in just the ways public figures are expected to avoid. The usefulness of a platitude is that when events have transpired in a community and are in its public consciousness, a platitude can evoke these events without incurring the interactional costs that would accrue from being specific.
Just as in therapy psychiatrists used the conversational device of the litote to navigate between competing moral and medical frames, thereby enabling them to refer to morally problematic actions delicately (e.g., Saying to a patient, “ the report indicates you ran through the street not fully clothed” when the patient ran through the street naked) (Bergmann, 1992), so too do platitudes about conduct enable a candidate to navigate an ever present dilemma. Stated simply the dilemma is this: How does a candidate for public office legitimate that an other’s (opposing candidate) communicative conduct deserve serious attention – how a person talks to and about others is important – without problematizing that the speaker, himself or herself, adheres to the norms of fair and respectful treatment that the other is being criticized as lacking.

In an editorial, the newspaper editor summarized the community’s difficulties this way:
People in Rocky Mountain hold strong views on education, but many are tired of seeing the practical business of the public schools conducted in the spirit of a holy war. They’re tired of the “Be civil, you moron” approach to public debate in which partisans on both sides, on and off the board, call for reason in one breath and issue personal attacks in the next. They suspect that issues such as school choice, at-risk students, and fiscal management can be addressed in a spirit of compromise and reconciliation. So do we. And we’ll be looking for candidates – in both camps – who can bring that spirit to the Rocky Mountain School Board.[xii]

Conclusion
In the 1970’s Zeigler et al. (1974) described school board elections in the United States as “uncontested” and “issueless.” As this examination of Rocky Mountain’s school board shows, this description no longer applies. In the 1990’s all across the United States school boards are active sites for controversy. Whether the controversy is over the worth of vouchers, national tests, teacher training, bilingual education, or, as was the case here, how officials should conduct themselves as they work with others in their community, public arguments about education deserve a more careful look. US President James A. Garfield went so far as to argue that “Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently maintained (Tuttle, 1958: 15). It is certainly the case that meetings involving decisions about local schools (people’s own children as well as those of neighbors, family and friends) are one of the few places where large numbers of citizens participate in extended, focused, critical discussion. Local school board talk deserves serious scholarly attention.
In this paper I focused on conduct arguments in one community’s school board election debates. Of interest was the fact that conduct was not treated as an issue by both sets of candidates. The challengers, who were arguing that the incumbents were behaving inappropriately, foregrounded the issue whereas the incumbents largely ignored it. As Crosswhite (1996: 112) has noted, “there can be a conflict about what a conflict is about.” Conflicts about how to frame “the real issue” seem especially probable when one party is proposing that it is the other party’s conduct that is the issue. In the Rocky Mountain instance, the challenging candidates’ position that conduct should be the focal election issue was persuasive. This outcome, I expect, is often not the case as conduct arguments are delicate endeavors with high potential for backfiring. To sum it up, a speaker’s conversational style in making conduct arguments is inevitably treated as a lived display of the speaker’s own code of conduct. In making claims about conduct the space between issues and persons becomes microscopic. When the issue is an other’s conduct, a speaker’s own conduct becomes an issue. In arguments about conduct, platitudes are useful: They enable speakers to render evaluation, to mean considerably than they say, and do so without appearing nasty and attacking.

NOTES
i. Non-incumbents in the three contested districts carried between 57.8% and 63.6% of the vote. The Daily Camera, (November 5, 1997).
ii. The Daily Camera, (November 5, 1997).
iii. In the early stages I did audiotaping. Roughly 20% of the tapes are in audiotape form only.
iv. Action-implicative discourse analysis is a method to aid developing grounded practical theories (Craig, 1989, Craig & Tracy, 1995). In addition to identifying problems and conversational practices, it also investigates participants’ normative beliefs about the focal practice.
v. Names of the candidates and school district have been changed.
vi. The numbers “75-2” came from a public comment made to the Board by a high school Language Arts teacher (December 19, 1996). Whether there were exactly 77 language arts teachers who voted or whether the speaker is using the number “75” as an approximate round number to represent the relative degree of opposition is unclear.
vii. The Sunday Camera (September 7, 1997).
viii. Statement added to agenda in October, 1996.
ix. This statement was the main one that was discussed. Consensus decision-making is routinely distinguished from majority rule decision-making. Whether the group’s confusion about these terms was ignorance about the term’s meanings or a strategic move to define and associate majority rule decisions with the more positive and socially valued term (consensus) is not entirely clear. The 1995-97 Board was a highly educated group of people. No one had less that a college degree, two of the members had law degrees and two others had Ph.D.s. It was this item about consensus and majority rule that led one Board member in the minority faction to vote against the protocol. In voting negatively, though, she marked her agreement with the rest of the conduct statements.
x. The Daily Camera, (November 3, 1997).
xi. Speaker numbers indicate the position order in which the candidate gave opening commments.
xii. Sunday Camera, (September 7, 1997).

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Zeigler, L.H., Jennings, M. K., & Peak, G. W. (1974). Governing American Schools: Political Interaction in Local School Districts. North Scituate: Duxbury.

The main concern of this presentation is to outline those tendencies in linguistic approach to discourse analysis as they are seen from the perspective of the new ideas of open systems. First, there will be discussed some major facts that are taken into account as background for dynamic analysis of texts: the idea of the Noosphere, preference of the term paradigm applied to dynamic analysis . Then we shall deal with three main tendencies in discourse linguistics connected with open systems which are all connected with reconstruction of discourse configurations that have an integral character. Finally we shall dwell on the main similarities that of discourse paradigms.

1. Sustainable development is a term and concept that implies certain interdisciplinary global approach of vision of nature and man by both sciences and the humanities. This term is one of the most radical ones that allows Prothagor’s old formula. ‘Man is a measure of all things’ to be understood in a different way at the turn of this millenium – man, being the measure should be concerned with reasonable attitudes to natural and social spheres of his activity so that man sustains his development. Antropocentric ideas of communication turn to Noocentric founded on the basis of dialogue systems. Modern complex social and political configurations in contemporary society bring forth the problem of communication on a very specific level – dialogue is considered to be not only an interactive means of information exchange between people but as a means of interactive activity between men, nature and mind. This interaction is carried through the language. The language becomes a certain liaison between man and different forms of life thus reflecting changes in types and methods of communication.
In Russia the idea of reasonable attitudes is connected with the concept of the Nooshere (“the sphere of reason”). The term was suggested by Eduourd le Roy (1870-1954) and Pierre Teilard de Chardin (1881-1955) and taken by Vladimir I.Vernadsky (1863-1945) when he came to Paris to work in Sorbonne. According to Vernadsky the Noosphere is a new evolutionary condition of the biosphere in which there should be met certain ecological and social orders. Vernadsky wrote that from evidence of global upheavals in both the natural and social indivisibility the only imperative is uniting humanity under the auspice of science. It was science that he ascribed a special role to in the transition to the Noosphere.
He thought that science has a strongest universal binding force as being the realm where humanity has appeared to make continuous progress. This sounds very idealistic, of course, but it should be born in mind that Vernadsky was the man who launched research programs on radioactivity and radioactive elements by founding the Radium Research Institute and he was very much concerned with the utilization of atomic energy. His theory thus stands at the very intersection of the most powerful trends of the modern and postmodern world.

The concept of the Noosphere arose as a result of confluence of several creative streams. The first is the concept of the Biosphere as one which considers the view of all living matter (with the global view of material), and second is the concept of humanistic knowledge. These concepts had an integral conception of development. One cannot deny that the idea of reasonable attitude to social discourse is the core idea in the Noosphere that gave an impetus for a number of new linguistic paradigms. Analytical and pragmatic research paradigms tend to change their orientation from anthropocentric to more socio- and ecologically centric ideas.
These paradigms are based on the principles of complex dynamic and open systems of non-linear type where time and space come as one integral part. Professor Prigogine’s work has become an inspiration for new generations of analysts in pointing out that chaotic phenomennon are unpredictable by definition. This does not necessarily mean coherent ontological development but rather the temptation to match natural and artificial intelligence studies. It is not improvement of the existing analytical practices but finding new explanatory apparatus. In this case we tend to stick to the term paradigm as a more suitable one, allowing on one hand the lack of standard interpretations and using old terms on the other. This means that the sciences of chaos and complex self-organized systems that rank nowadays very high among scholars can give enough of mobility for not just setting rigid rules for analysis but for solving meaning puzzles in quite different scholarly environment.

The transition from an old paradigm to a new one is a cumulative process. Successions of paradigms are incoherent in many ways. If we take the history of science, then “Newton’s mechanics improves on Aristotel’s and that of Einstein’s improves on Newton’s as instruments for puzzle-solving”. “… but in some important respects ”Einstein’s general theory of relativity is closer to Aristotel’s then either of them is to Newton’s” (Kuhn 1970:206-207). Paradigms of sustainable development are connected with open functional systems elements of which have certain energy to destabilize the whole system. These elements may have weakly or strongly interactive character and discourse paradigms cannot but envisage them.

1. The Argumentation theory as an integrated discipline is connected with the development of philosophical and linguistic problems in respect of civilizing influence of discourse on the society. This process is defined in its turn by changing strategies and tactics of power, which has a legitimate right to manipulate human behavior. This brings forth the idea of argumentation in the evolution of the society. Here we mean not necessarily political institutions but discoursive practices at large that influence mentality. Ideological discourse includes science, literature, and mass media. Nowadays we revision the view of the ideological discourse as a closed system of logical schemes helping manipulating language users. The process of modeling communicative situations becomes an open system in many ways. It involves interpretation as a procedural work that becomes possible because of inherent potential of elements to have an ability to participate in schemes and model formation. This rather bulky statement means that in our linguistic approach to discourse we are to bear in mind complexity of system that becomes a subject of the study. Analytical paradigms are no longer reflecting the potentials language material.
Rhetorical and dialectical approaches are seen as close to each other. Both are concerned with the problems of persuasion. If we take the methodology of dialogism of the text (Bakhtin 1986) any utterance can be looked upon as an argumentative text as any utterance is not entirely an act of choice but it is an answer to another utterance that precedes it. Dialogism does not envision an absolute separation of text producing and text perception as both of them deal with the act of influencing other people. Whenever we take a text as an influential phenomenon we are turning to discourse. The sphere of rhetoric is connected with winning the favorable position in the confrontation and this seems contrary to the dialectical aim of dispute resolution. This contradiction brings dialogue system into movement. Though contradialectics is not permitted in this kind of reconstruction, this is not always the case (Eemeren, Houtlosser 1998).
Rhetorical and argumentative aspects are integrated into one another through language use. In this case if we take everyday conversations logical rationality is discussed as related to the criterion of acceptability which is related which is done through various types of relevance: propositional, illocutionary, elocutunary and perlocutionary (Rees 1996).
Besides rhetorical and dialectical aspects there appear cognitive patterns of arguments which can be defined in terms of types. They can be abstracted from any particular content showing the procedures involved. Examples of types or patterns as A.Blair called them are as following: inductive arguments from analogy, appeals to authority, generalizations of many kinds, arguments from rules and principles, arguments from implications, from sequences and precedents (Blair 1990). There is one more abstraction that is involved in this type of approach that is the relation between what is stated as a premise and what is stated as a standpoint. Thus the argumentative discourse may be analyzed as an interconnection of logical, rhetorical levels plus schematic interconnection. It is the aim of a linguist using types or schemes to find language instruments that these schemes are based (Tretyakova 1995).

2. Another type of linguistic paradigm which attracts linguists connected with sustainable development is quantum linguistics. It is developed through the showing of intertextual phenomena and various salient features of the text. The main principle is in physical theories is using relativism between laboratory experiment and mathematical or other theoretical interpretation as it was done by Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr. For a linguist it is important to deal with the idea of presentation that the founders of quantum theory had. For example, Heisenberg’s book”Physical Principles of Quantum Theory” is of a very specific character as abstract theory is done in a manner that can be understood as philosophy or poetics of time and space speculations. By this here we would like to stress special influence of scientific texts on the development of other diverse theories in far-fetched fields. From the very beginning Quantum theory was a baffle in its presentation because theoretical “elemetariness” was appealing to many people involved in social sciences and this produced a number of hoaxes as it was easily implemented into literary analysis. Here Noosperic ideas lie in the approach of implementation one scienific paradigm to another field of research. Unlike ironic “Transgressing boundaries” by Alan Sakal (1996) we would like to stress that this new approach does not necessarily mean a blind implementation of all physical and mathematical concepts into linguistic analysis but rather the possibility of diverse interpreting schemes applied to the text.
Quantum scientific apparatus introduced to poetics give linguists an opportunity to look for quantum energy sense elements. Thus it is possible to show the analogy existing between the functions of discrete quanta transmitting radial light energy and the elements of poetic texts transmitting aesthetic information This paradigm is in accordance with Florensky’s thesis of discontinuity, Bakhtin’s dialogism and Zhyrmunsky’s definition of poetics as depending on the reader’s impression. The possibilities of the approach can be demonstarted by identifying sense quants in Pushkin and Pasternak poems devoted to the figure of Russian csar Peter where Quantum analysis allows constructing impressions of Stalin epoch. Here again a linguistic paradigm helps disclosing salient features of sense formation and sense intertretation using the idea of time meaning (impression) and relevance. Unlike a post-modernistic approach to the analysis of the text when the text was not integrity but a structural model this type of textual interpretation includes mentalistic reflections such as phnuemosphere of Florensky (Arnold 1998).
Noospheric ideas are taken not mechanically but as rudiments belonging to another sphere that is Semiosphere as a sign space It has certain limitation (otgranichennost) which are defined through the number of interpretive “filters” and irregularity (neravnomernost) that is the intrusion of heterogenious texts. Open and esoteric approaches are studied in this approach. This semiosspere as a part of semiotics is a kind of linguistic programme that involves rhetoric studies and stylistics as interpretive structures  based on intertextuality. Sustainable development from a linguistic view in this approach is carried out through sign-sense- interpretation modeling. (Lotman 1992).

3. One more linguistic paradigm connected with open dynamic system is connected with the idiomaticity of human interaction. Idiom structures that linguists studied from the nominalistic point of view can be presented as elements of dynamic systems. They are developing their semantic potentials through constant use in certain linguistic environment. These idiomatic or pragma-idiomatic expressions are discourse instruments, shifters, organizing speech on one hand and they are micro systems accumulating communicative situation models. Thus they make in language a social interactive system, open and dynamic. These small elements in this case may be looked at as minidscourses that cover the domain of ritual, communication through conversational formulas, prescriptive domain through imperatives, evaluation domain through replies and comments. On one hand they belong to the semiosphere as they are signes (indexes and symbols) reflecting human behavioral habits. On the other hand they are interactional units that should meet all demands of relevance when used in communication process. For example, in the process of Argumentation such expressions are used too, e.g. anyway, even (Snoek-Henkemmans 1995). Their open system is dependent on time and space of the functioning potentials that they have. Dialectics of this kind of phrases lies in the fluctuations they have within the language – being either used as communicative expressive devices or as nominative elements. Their sustainable development depends much on time and social environment and the existing language repertoire. The language seldom invents new elements but uses the old ones in a new environment. A linguistic paradigm should take into account discoursive character of these structures.
Among semiotic systems social semiotics is of special importance for finding a special place for these structures and as semantic elements which are relevant to dialogical use that matters most for finding systemic features of these idioms. A means of understanding (interpretation) together with the mode of thinking provide a linguist with of expressive language. This type of the paradigm is based on interactively conditioned interpretive systems. Interpretation again comes as an energetic potential of an element that gives it possibility to take in the system a certain slot in a communicative frame. Frames may be defined in various ways according to social thesaurus that we have. Say, legal dialogue, feministic quarrel, political debate etc.
The process of acquiring the slot is connected with the procedures of interpretation. Procedural semantics allows defining know-how of communicative idioms showing sustainable development of this system. Thus we can proceed from the initial and conclusive meanings (S init-S fin). Procedural semantics as a method for description of dynamic system has several attractive features. For one thing, real time is included into analysis and then, literal meaning is not necessarily taken into account. This gives the opportunity to look at the language as a socially changing system. Next, recursive meaning is used as component of semantic description.
Finally, procedures allow using integral descriptions. of pragmatics and semantic elements. In conclusion it should be stressed that sustainable development in the discussed three paradigms as an approach to study open dynamic systems presupposes involvement of integral procedural semantic interpretation.

REFERENCES
Arnold, Irina V. (1998). Quantum Poetics, Vestnik Peterburgskogo Universiteta (Petersburg University Quarterly}. Series 2, Issue 2 (N2).
Eemeren, Frans, Houtlosser, Peter (1998). Rhetoric in pragmadialectics, Speech Communication and Argumentation. St. Petersburg-Amsterdam,Vol.3.
Kuhn, Thomas (1970). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press.
Lotman Yuri (1992). On the Semiosphere (O semiosfere ), Collected works, Tallinn.
Rees M.A.van (1996). Conversation, Relevance and Argumentation, Speech Communication and Argumentation. St.Petersburg-Amsterdam,Vol.2.
Snoek-Henkemmans, Francisca (1995). Special Fields and Cases, Proceedings of the 3-d ISSA Conference on argumentation. Amsterdam, June 21-24.
Sakal, Alan (1996). Transgressing Boundaries. Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, Social Text 46/47,Vol 14, Nos 1 and 2, Spring/Summer.
Tretyakova , Tatyana P.(1995). Levels of stereotype in political discussions from the perspective of Argumentation theory, Special Fields and Cases, Proceedings of the 3-d ISSA Conference on argumentation. Amsterdam, June 21-24.
Vernadsky, Vladimir (1945). Biospere and Nooshere, American Scientist 33.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REFERENCES
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Goedegebuure, J. (1991). Gewapende vrede. HP / De Tijd, 18-01-1991.
Hastings, A.C. (1962). A reformulation of the modes of reasoning in argumentation. Evanston: unpubl. diss. Kelley, D. (1988). The art of reasoning. New York / London: W.W. Norton & Company.
Kienpointner, M. (1992). Alltagslogik. Struktur und Funktion von Argumentationsmustern. Stuttgart – Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog.
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In this paper I discuss what I believe to be a serious problem in our understanding of conductive arguments. This is the problem of deep disagreement. I then consider, only to reject, the proposal that we handle deep disagreement by means of Conversational Constraint. A better title for my paper would have been “Against Conversational Constraint”.
Conductive argument is now recognised as a separate kind of argument, distinct from deductive, inductive and analogical arguments. We have a good account of the structure of conductive arguments and helpful suggestions as to how they should be evaluated. Anyone who has tried to teach the analysis and evaluation of arguments to students will admit that this is progress. We can now actually say something about a simple argument like the following: “Hume is not a sceptic, for although he argues that our basic beliefs are not rationally justified, he rails against classical sceptics, and he maintains that we are as much determined to believe as we are to think and feel.” This example of a conductive argument is due to Trudy Govier, who has done a splendid job of rescuing Carl Wellman’s “unreceived view” on conductive argument. Wellman gave his account of conductive argument in the early 1970s. (Wellman 1971). Somehow, it never caught on. In her 1985 paper “Two Unreceived Views About Reasoning And Argument” Govier introduced conductive argument to informal logicians. (Govier 1987). Subsequently she developed and refined our understanding of conductive argument well beyond Wellman’s original efforts. Obviously, Wellman and Govier – and some others – did not discover or invent a new kind of argument: conductive arguments have always been around, in the guise of “good reasons arguments” or “pros and cons arguments”, but they were just not given the attention they deserved.
What, then, is a conductive argument? My brief sketch is based on Govier’s discussion in her A Practical Study of Argument. (Govier 1996: 388-408) The salient points are:
Firstly, a conductive argument has a convergent – as opposed to a linked – support pattern. This means that each premise supports the conclusion on its own and independently of any other premises. Removal of a supporting premise, however, weakens the argument; addition of supporting premises strengthens the argument. The question may be raised why we should regard a convergent argument as a single argument rather than as two separate arguments for the same conclusion. One answer is that in fact the two premises are offered jointly. A better answer, though, is to point out that when we want to decide whether the premises indeed support the conclusion we cannot but consider them jointly. Although independent, the premises somehow add up.
Secondly, the premises of a conductive argument do not entail the conclusion. This should be apparent from my Hume example. The premises could be true and the conclusion unacceptable or false. However, the premises are relevant to the conclusion; and the premises certainly make the conclusion plausible. A good conductive argument is not – this should be stressed – a valid argument in disguise.
Thirdly, conductive arguments often include as premises not only considerations supporting the conclusion but also counterconsiderations. For instance, the Hume argument has two considerations as well as one counterconsideration. The arguer acknowledged that there is a counterconsideration that is both relevant to her conclusion and counts against it. Nevertheless, she discounted it. Counterconsiderations can be acknowledged explicitly or they can lurk implicitly. Govier rightly makes much of explicit counterconsiderations. She writes that “[I]t’s important to recognize that acknowledging counterconsiderations does not necessarily weaken your case. Often it strengthens it, because in understanding the counterconsiderations and reflecting on how well your premises support your conclusion, despite these factors, you can gain a more accurate understanding of the issue. Also, you may improve your credibility, showing your audience that you are broad-minded and flexible enough to understand some of the objections to your view, and that you have taken these into account in making up your mind and formulating your argument.” (Govier 1996: 392)
Finally, conductive arguments occur commonly in practical and interpretive contexts. When we deliberate rationally about what to do (some action, plan or policy) or about what to make of something (human behaviour or a text, say) we often use conductive arguments. In both contexts – practical and interpretive – the structure of conductive arguments nicely models the fact that several distinct considerations or pieces of evidence can have a bearing on the decision or interpretation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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