The idea of slippery slopes is a commanding and attractive metaphor. Indeed, speaking in this way has become commonplace in contemporary work in biomedical ethics.[i] It would be interesting to know whether this metaphor has a load-bearing role in philosophical analysis; whether, that is, it is anything more than une façon de parler, a figure of speech.[ii] In work underway I pursue this question in three theoretical contexts:
1. analogical arguments,
2. sorites arguments, and
3. the analysis of taboos.
Unless I am mistaken, we shall hit paydirt in the third context, and this is the context I wish to explore in this paper.

Slippery slopes in relation to taboos
In one of its meanings, a taboo is a deep cultural protection of a value, underwritten by broad and largely tacit societal consensus. In my usage here, a taboo is always an ordered pair X in which P is a principle protecting a value – usually a prohibition – and X is an exclusion, an embedded practice which excludes P itself from free enquiry, from the rough-and-tumble of dialectical probing. Sometimes the X-factor also precludes the mention in polite society of the practice prohibited by P; but its more general implication is averting discussion of P’s merits, of whether it is a justified principle and if so by virtue of what. If, for example, P is the principle that prohibits cannibalism then X is the determination not to expose P to critical reflection or scrutiny. Indeed if X is the present-day taboo against Holocaust revisionism, the X-factor operates so tenaciously as to make of the mere raising of the revisionist possibility, no matter how tentatively, an immediate self-disqualification.[iii] In the absence of the X-factor, P cannot be a taboo. In societies such as ours there is a principle which strenuously disenjoins urinating in public, but it is no taboo. Except in the most delicate of circles, there is no corresponding bar against explanation and justification, or meeting arguments which might be marshaled against the prohibition (e.g., that there is no such prohibition for males in Japan). Taboos, then, are special cases of principles or points of view attended by dialectically weak – or even non-existent – track records. Of course, there are whole classes of dialectically impotent statements, whose lack of justificatory vigour is a reflection of the fact that they are seen as not needing defence or justification. They are “self-evident”, or “common knowledge”, or some such thing. With taboos, however, dialectical impotence is less a matter of judging that a defence is not needed than that it should not even be attempted. (I return to this point.)
Many taboos were once religious proscriptions. This helps in understanding both the X-factor and the dialectical impotence that attaches to taboos even after they have lost their religious sanctions. Though shorn of this expressly religious backing, we seem to retain them out of culturally transmitted habit. When they were religious laws, they required no justification by us; indeed to raise the question of whether something commanded by God might require our justification is to risk the sin of hubris. These features are retained as the X-factor and, relatedly, a pallid dialectical track record. Other taboos such as the one against the eating of pork may be seen as risk averse generalizations from genuinely factual data, a stong induction from an occassional upset tummy.[iv] Epistemically, the generalizations are hasty; prudentially they are safe. Risk averse behaviour is tailor-made for taboos. In fact, a good deal of risk averse behaviour involves the holding of generalizations that we don’t know how to justify, or which we subconsciously see as having no inductive justification. (Of course, it doesn’t follow that risk averse behaviour is likewise without strategic justification). Thus our disinclination to raise the question of how these generalizations are justified, and the consequent lightness of the dialectical track record.

Let me here enter a caveat. I do not assume that my conception of taboo concurs fully with contemporary anthropological usage. My first interest is in structures of X sort, and is much less in the lexical niceties. Indeed, perhaps it would be prudent to stipulate my “taboo” as a technical term.[v]
Taboos come in degrees, though not exactly on a scale of one to ten. At the high end we could expect to find the cannibalism taboo; slightly lower down, perhaps, the incest taboo; and – almost another thing entirely – the prohibition, in 1948 say, of  homosexuality. These differences reflect themselves mainly in our response to violation of a P, rather than that of an X. No one in my neighbourhood is a cannibal, but I daresay that the discovery of a cannibalistic cult next door would be met with utter outrage and outright condemnation.[vi] Incest differs on two counts. Comparatively speaking, there is a lot of it around, and when it is discovered it is prosecuted, and may be the object of substantial even though less sweeping public disapproval. The prohibition against homosexuality was much sinned against even in 1948; but except for errant celebrities, a homosexual’s defections were the object of local rather than wholly general public condemnation. For all the differences, these prohibitions retained their status as taboos by virtue of the X-factor, the factor which precludes any enquiry into the permissibility of P-hood of a sort which might eventuate in downgrading the prohibited practice from its standing as a public wrong. In certain cases, therefore, taboos are a kind of social hypocrisy. They lend, in any event, hefty encouragement to discretion. It is an interesting dynamic, in which getting caught is sometimes the greater wrong than what one was caught at.
In some respects, taboos resemble conventions. Conventions I take in David Lewis’ way; they are solutions of co-ordination problems.[vii] In a classic example, the conventions on driving – on the right in countries such as Canada and on the left in countries such as Japan – are regulators of traffic’s ebb and flow. In such cases, there is no prior fact of the matter as to which side of the road is the correct side to drive on in Canada, or in Japan. The only facts of the matter are the facts which our respective conventions constitute. If taboos resemble conventions closely enough, there is reason to think that, in some cases at least, they will imbibe this feature of them. If so, the existence of the X-factor can now be seen to be a highly-motivated constituent of such taboos. Taboos carry the cachet of high moral dudgeon and of confident certainty. Under their sway, people are easily disgusted and quick to dismiss the contrary view out of hand. If a taboo is a convention or sufficiently like a convention, there is no prior fact of the matter which the taboo reports or honours. The X-factor prohibits open enquiry. It does so for a reason, as we now see. Open inquiry might well disclose that the taboo records no prior fact, hence no fact which could be seen as sustaining it. This in turn affords an explanation of the dialectical impotence of taboos; for to scrutinize a taboo is to collapse it.[viii]

Taboos sometimes have something of the character of the first principles or absolute presuppositions of normal science. They resemble Kuhnian paradigms. If a paradigm cracks, nothing less then a chunk of normal science is in the balance, and a scientific revolution may well be in store. If a taboo cracks, events of like gravamen portend – the collapse of a large chunk of case law, or of public morality, and the prospect of an axiological revolution.
Taboos are the natural enemy of other principles we hold dear. One of these is our affection for free and open inquiry. Taboos embed principles P under the protection of dialectical exclusions X. The Ps of Xs have not had occasion to win their dialectical spurs. This makes them especially vulnerable to attack when it chances that they are attached. So, taboos sometimes crack. They wear out. They lapse. When this happens, violations of the X-factor are made in ways that are tolerated or even sponsored by decision-makers and shapers of public opinion – Walter Lipmann’s “dominant élites”. Thus a practice heretofore subject to a taboo might become the subject of a Government White Paper, a series of editorials in the Times, or even the “full hour” with Larry King. When the X-factor is violated by dominant élites, there is a good chance that this alone constitutes its retirement, and we have it straightaway that the P in question has lost its status as a taboo. It is now fair game for dialectical attack which its prior status as a taboo has given it scant fire-power now to resist. This is a point worth emphasizing. So I ask the reader a blunt question, “What precisely would you say in defence of the proposition that cannibalism is an abomination?”If I might answer my own question, I haven’t a clue.

The sexual revolution
Some taboos prohibit what people in any event have little interest in or stomach for, as we have seen. Others prohibit what lots and lots of people are keen to do and would do but for the prohibition.
Let us think of the former as pro forma and the latter as substantial taboos. Let me now suggest that the collapse of a substantial taboo constitutes a slippery slope. In its use here, slippery slopes aren’t arguments, not anyhow in any sense that a logician would want for his technical appropriations. Rather they are histories of dialectic, patterns of public and private acceptance and rejection, having, to be sure, arguments as constituent elements, as well the structural features that I shall now try to describe. It will facilitate the exposition if I take as an example a slope that has been slipped down pretty nearly as far as can be, a complex social event of the last fifty years. Before turning to the example, it is useful to stress an asymmetry between what people would have thought of it in 1948 and what people think of it now, a point to which I shall also recur. Let us now re-visit or, as the case may be, imagine the year 1948. The more or less settled consensus about sexual relations was that they were forbidden except under the following conditions: Marriage, and therefore, heterosexuality, adulthood and monogamy; as well as consent, privacy, and the “penile-vaginal modality” (if the linguistic barbarism can be forgiven).
I do not say that the consensus in question had the status of a taboo in 1948. Indeed it was a convention under attack. The attack was modest. It proposed a small relaxation of the conditions cited in (1). Marriage would be displaced by engagement, or going-steady or some such thing, hence by a simulacrum of it. Yet in the space of a dozen years, only the conditions of heterosexuality, adulthood, consent and privacy would remain, and the adulthood condition was in process of re-interpretation as biological maturity.
This, of course, was the beginning of the sexual revolution. Once the only-in-marriage condition lapsed, it became increasingly difficult to retain the conditions implied by it.[ix] Even as the sexual revolution was in full flower, two taboos remained, though they endured with differential tenacity. One was the prohibition against homosexuality, the other against paedophelia. Even so, the taboo against homosexuality was fraying. How could it not have done? If the marriage-condition had lapsed, and the penile-vaginal condition[x] too, there remained little to say for the heterosexuality which those constraints imply. The heterosexuality constraint was now on its own. Indeed, the conditions that were left in force bore all the weight of our disapproval of sexual licence: adulthood, consent, and privacy, supplemented perhaps by the desiderata of tenderness and respect.
The original prohibition was against all sexual relations save in marriage. When marriage ceased being a sacrament and was well on its way to what a “pre-nup” would provide – “a mere piece of paper” as the saying has it – what was there to say for its utter dominance as a constraint? Indeed, upon reflection, what was to be said for it at all as a constraint? With the marriage-condition gone, I say again that the other specifically anti-homosexuality conditions lost their most secure mooring.
Of course, the permissibility that came to attach to heterosexual relations outside of marriage was not transmitted to homosexuality by the relation of logical consequence. When the only-in-marriage condition was in effect, it did make homosexual relations impermissible on the received, and still widely held, view of marriage. But to infer permissibility of homosexual relations from the collapse of the only-in-marriage condition would be the ancient fallacy of denying the antecedent, a logical howler and a logical embarrassment. The linkage that we are trying to describe is not a logical but rather a dialectical one. To see how this is so, let us remark that the inference we have denounced could be redeemed with a replacement premiss, however implausible on its face, to the effect that the marriage-condition is the only prohibitor of homosexual practice.

The question now is whether there is any reason to suppose that the sexual revolution were actually disposed to accept this premiss, and if so, why? Actual dialectical experience suggests that they were in a classic situation ad ignorantiam, as we ourselves are today. Short of the only-in-marriage condition, we found ourselves without convincing or plausible cases to press against homosexuality. It is a situation in which continued resistance takes on a texture of arbitrariness and prejudice. It is a situation in which our failure to find a convincing case against homosexuality eventuates in a disposition to suppose that no such case exists. It is disposition, that is to say, to favour an argument ad ignorantiam[xi]:
1. We don’t know of a convincing case against homosexuality.
2. Therefore, there is no such case.
Ad ignorantiam arguments are sometimes fallacious, needless to say. But they commit no fallacy where interpretable either as an autoepistemic argument such as
A. If there were a convincing case against homosexuality we would know what it is (by now)
B. But we don’t
A. So there isn’t or as an abductive argument such as:
A. The best explanation of our not having a convincing case against homosexuality is that there is no case
A. We haven’t, in fact, a convincing case against homosexuality
A. So it is plausible to conjuncture that no such case exists.

The autoepistemic argument is valid by modus tollens; and while the abductive argument is invalid if construed deductively, this is not the intended construal, as the tentativeness of its conclusion makes clear. In each case the main weight of the argument is borne by the first premiss. It is one thing to know whether these premisses are actually true; it is another and easier thing to suppose that in our failure to find convincing case against homosexuality, we might come to believe that they are true. The key factor in this dynamic is dialectical fatigue. With the lapse of the marriage-only condition we find that we have nothing effective to say against homosexuality. This produces dialectical fatigue which, in turn, delivers the key premiss in the autoepistemic and abductive arguments here sketched. Thus while there is no direct logical link between the rescindment of the marriage condition and the non-existence of a persuasive case against homosexuality, the dialectical fatigue which ensued upon the retirement of that condition does indeed set up some logic, and some rather powerful logic at that.
The attack on the marriage-only condition was intended to promote the modest-seeming reform we have noted. Those pressing for this reform hadn’t – for the most part anyhow – the slightest idea or intent that homosexuality would be in the ambit of its escape. They pressed their arguments innocently. They were innocent of two things, one already noted, and another which I shall mention now. The first is that when a taboo loses the protection of its X-factor, the principle it previously protected lacks the dialectical means to defend itself. The second point is that once its X-protection is lost, a newly qualified P stands little chance of reacquiring the status of a taboo, hence the protection of the X-factor. This is certainly empirically borne out by what is known of axiological collapse on the hoof, i.e., in real-life. The likely explanation is that taboos are the result of cultural evolution, and that once the taboo against unmarried sex collapsed, the culture lacked the time to re-set the taboo a notch below, so to speak.
We see in this, well enough, the elements of slippery slope. Slope is the reduction in the number, and sometimes the weight, of the original clauses of a prohibition. Slipperiness is the lack of dialectical resources to minimize the elimination of them, indeed to cut off at any point. (And here we see the general pattern of sorites arguments). If what I have been suggesting in this section has any merit, we should ready ourselves for more slippage still in the arena of sexual mores. For reasons of time, however, I shall have to defer this issue to another occasion.

NOTES
i. See, for example, Wesley J. Smith, Forced Exit: the Slippery Slope From Assisted Suicide to Legalized Murder, New York: Times Books 1997, and Peter Singer, Rethinking Life and Death: The Collapse of Our Traditional Ethics, New York: St. Martin’s Press 1994.
ii. Not to overlook Douglas Walton’s book, Slippery Slope Arguments, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1992.
iii. I thank Paul Viminitz for the example.
iv. Conversation with Kent Peacock suggested this possibility to me.
v. A suggestion put to me by Barry Allen.
vi. Against this it might be doubted that there is any taboo against cannibalism. In countries like Canada, there is no economic or sacerdotal motive for people even to consider the cannibalistic option. So they don’t; and that they don’t is reflected in the uniformity of their behaviour. If a taboo always involves a prohibition, we may wonder whether it is possible to prohibit what no one seems to have the slightest interest in doing. This suggests that Canadian avoidance of cannibalism is not the result of a taboo. On the other hand, no one in Canada wears Elizabethan garb. One could say that non-Elizabethan dress is the settled Canadian practice. There is nothing to say for there being a prohibition against Elizabethan costuming, and nothing for there being a taboo against it. Even so, the two cases harbour a significant difference. If people started dressing in this fashion, others might approve or disapprove; but there would be no prohibition. If people started setting up Hell’s Angels’ Cannibal clubs, there would , as I say, be outrage and universal condemnation. The taboo which was only counterfactually in play would now be realized. (I am indebted to Bryson Brown on this point.) In contrast with the situation in Canada, as Inga Dolinina informs me, during the siege of Leningrad in the Great Patriotic War, cannibalism was rife, and it continued after the siege was lifted, more as a matter of choice than of dire necessity, and had to be stopped by vigorous intervention of state authorities.
vii. David K. Lewis, Convention: A Philosophical Study, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1969.
viii. In a nice turn of phrase suggested by Michael Stingl in conversation.
ix. Until the pill, timely marriage was also a fail-safe strategy against bastardy, itself then the subject of a taboo. It is difficult to overestimate the influence of contraceptive technologies in the heterosexual sector of the sexual revolution. The story of this influence is well-understood and need not be developed here.
x. Itself a casuality of the displacement of the only-in-marriage condition, as it relates to procreative intent.
xi. John Locke is the originator of the name “ad ignorantiam”. In its use here it means “to ignorance”. In the concluding paragraphs of chapter 17 of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) Locke describes the argumentum ad ignorantiam as follows: “Another way that men ordinarily use to drive others and force them to submit their judgements and receive the opinion in a debate is to require the adversary to admit what they allege as a proof, or to assign a better”. Thus, if you are ignorant of such a proof, you must yield; and my argument against you is directed to that ignorance. Locke did not think that ad ignorantiam arguments were fallacious as such, but this has not stopped writers of the present day taking the opposite view. On a common contemporary conception of it, an ad ignorantiam is an argument whose elementary form is It is not known that not-P Therefore, P. Here, too, “ad ignorantiam” speaks for itself. I indicate in the body of this chapter, just below, why certain instances of this form are not fallacious.

1. Introduction
Since Brockriede (1975) and O’Keefe (1977) publicly recognized the importance of studying arguments as they are made in the context of everyday discourse (O’Keefe’s argument2), argumentation scholars have been increasingly interested in studying the phenomenon in terms of its value as a communication activity rather than a logical exercise. Rhetoricians have long been interested in the function of argumentation in persuading an audience but it has only been recently that argumentation scholars have taken up the task of examining how patterns of reason giving are created and used by those involved in everyday conversation. Scholars such as Jackson & Jacobs (1980), Trapp (1983), Walton (1992), and van Eemeren and his colleagues (e.g., van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 1992; van Eemeren, Grootendorst, Jackson, & Jacobs, 1993) have extended the study of  argumentation from the study of formal and informal logic structures to the study of the ways in which arguments function in resolving disputational communication.
One of the first and most productive lines of inquiry regarding the study of argumentation as it occurs in discourse has been the pragma-dialectical approach originating with van Eemeren & Grootendorst (1992). The pragma-dialectical (PD) perspective extends the traditional normative logical approach of evaluating arguments by creating standards for reasonableness that have a functional rather than a structural focus. An argument is evaluated in terms of its usefulness in moving a critical discussion toward a well reasoned resolution rather than concentrating exclusively on the relationship of premises to conclusions. The PD approach recognizes the importance of normative standards for judging the strength or cogency of single argumentative acts but in addition recognizes that arguments are constructed in order to achieve a communicative goal.
As evaluative criteria for the quality of arguments, the PD posits several normative guidelines for how communication in resolving or managing a dispute should proceed. While several argumentation scholars have elaborated, extended, or some way adopted portions of PD (e.g., Walton, 1992; Weger & Jacobs, 1995), there has been little direct empirical research seeking to verify that the violation of the kinds of discussion rules identified by van Eemeren & Grootendorst (1992) indeed causes problems in the management of disagreements. The purpose of this essay is to examine empirical research in interpersonal and small group argument in order to discover what harms, if any, result from the violation of rules for critical discussion. The essay will begin by examining the effects of following and violating discussions rules on the ability to resolve disputes and the quality of the decisions that result. The next section of the essay will examine the interpersonal and relational outcomes that are associated with following or violating discussion rules as articulated by van Eemeren and his associates.

In Argumentation, Communication and Fallacies, van Eemeren & Grootendorst (1992) lay the foundation for the pragmadialectical approach to argumentation study. They begin by arguing that the standard treatment of argumentation and fallacies either ignores the communicative functions in favor of examining reason/claim relationships or abandon entirely normative standards of evaluation in favor of examining whether the argument achieves the goal of gaining the acceptance of an audience. The traditional logical approach evaluates arguments based on decontextualized, abstract structural features of arguments that are applied across situations. The rhetorical perspective, on the other hand, tends to evaluates the quality of an argument in terms of its persuasiveness. PD provides an advance on these perspectives by suggesting that normative guidelines for evaluating the quality of an argument requires attention to the communicative functions served by arguing as well as the logical structure of the lines of reasoning used in the dialogue.
The functional perspective on argument is based first on the belief that argumentation is a communicative activity. And second, it is based on a functional view of communication in which messages are studied in terms of the purposes they serve and the goals they achieve. At its most fundamental level, the purpose of argumentative dialogue is the resolution and management of real or potential disputes. Therefore, it is a mistake to evaluate arguments out of the context in which they are used or in a way that looks only at the logical structure without a description of the way certain argumentative moves effect the ability to manage or resolve a dispute based on good reasons. A functional perspective requires that arguments be studied, in part, by how they contribute to the communicative goals of resolving or managing a dispute.

The PD perspective also commits itself to a dialectical framework in which arguments are assumed to be the basis of critical discussions aimed at arriving at the truth or falsity of some standpoint or set of standpoints. It is therefore, not enough to simply describe arguments and their effects. A complete picture of argument can only be arrived at by examining the quality of an argument both in terms of its usefulness in resolving or managing a dispute and in terms of its validity or cogency according to normative standards of reasonableness.
The dual requirements of usefulness and reasonableness have given rise to ten normative criteria for conducting rational critical discussions (van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 1992). These rules are organized around the functions that argumentative speech acts perform at the beginning, in the middle and at the end of a critical discussion. In the opening stage of a dispute a speaker presents a standpoint as true while their counterpart casts doubt upon it through presenting objections or counterproposals. In order for the dialogue to continue toward a resolution of the disagreement, arguers must maintain a climate of open exchange of ideas. The first rule presented in the pragma-dialectical approach is that, “parties must not prevent each other from presenting standpoints or casting doubt on standpoints” (van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 1992; p. 108). Tactics such as attacking an opponent personally violate this rule because it is an attempt to forestall discussion by disqualifying an opponent to speak on the issue, or to distract the opponent from the issue under discussion. For a critical discussion to advanced past confrontation, arguers must also be willing to defend standpoints. The second rule for critical discussions requires that interlocutors defend standpoints once entered into discussion. Violation of the either of the first two rules essential precludes rational testing of the truth of a proposition.
At the argumentation stage PD discussion rules chiefly concern the ways in which lines of reasoning are developed and how logical structures are applied to defending standpoints. Rules three and four require that protagonists and antagonists extend their reasoning in a way that is relevant to their own and their opponent’s positions regarding the standpoint under consideration. Rule five deals with the responsibility of arguers to accurately represent the expressed and unexpressed premises that each party is actually accountable for. This rule declares as unacceptable the attack on an unexpressed premise that is either not relevant to the opponent’s standpoint or that the opponent has not committed herself to defending. Rules six and seven prohibit the representation of a premise as accepted or defended as true if the starting point has not been accepted or conclusively defended. The sixth and seventh rules also prohibit the denial of a previously accepted or conclusively defended premise. The final normative guideline at the argumentation stage stipulates that reasons ought to be logically related to the standpoint(s) they are meant to defend. Standpoints that can’t, at least in principle, be shown to follow logically from the arguments offered to support them, must be withdrawn from the discussion.

The ninth rule for the rational management of critical discussions involves the closing stage. The ninth rule necessitates that standpoints that are conclusively defeated or upon which doubt has been cast must be withdrawn. The goal of offering arguments that support or cast doubt upon a standpoint is to come to some conclusion about the point at issue. Rule nine is important because it recognizes that an issue can only be resolved if discussants are willing to recognized and acknowledge that their standpoint has been shown to be untenable.
Rule ten applies at all stages of a critical discussion. Rule ten requires that arguments be made clearly and unambiguously and that an opponent’s arguments must be given a faithful and charitable interpretation. Resolving a dispute on the merits of each person or group’s case depends on both party’s cooperation. The use of ambiguous wording, syntax, or logical schemes prevents cooperative discussion because what exactly is at issue or even whether or not a dispute actually exists is open to question. Cooperative disagreement management also depends on each party’s ability and willingness to accurately interpret their opponent’s messages so that counter reasoning is directed at the actual point at issue in the dispute.
These normative assumptions about what is required to successfully negotiate a controversy have a great deal of intuitive and theoretical appeal. Recent research has provided evidence of the PD model as a tool for argument criticism (e.g., van Eemeren et al, 1993). Little, if any, direct research has been conducted that examines the outcomes of following or violating these rules, however. Fortunately, a critical examination of empirical research in group and interpersonal argument illustrates that following or violating these rules are related to the kinds of decisions that are reached regarding the point at issue as well as the perceived satisfaction with the interaction, the perceived competence of the speaker, and the perceived quality of the relationship.

2. Fallacies and Quality of Decision Making in Group Argument
Research regarding the outcomes of critical discussions have largely appeared in the small group decision making literature. In general, two qualities of decision making outcomes have been studied. One is whether or not a group is able to come to a consensus. From a PD position, coming to a consensus about a standpoint is not essential but it is preferable since the goal of a critical discussion is to resolve a dispute to the satisfaction of all parties. Research indicates that violating discussion rules prevents groups from coming to consensus.
The failure to defend a standpoint, a violation of rule two, has been found to predict whether a group comes to a consensus (Canary, Brossmann, & Seibold, 1987; Hirokawa & Pace, 1983; Pace, 1985). For example, in a study examining low and high consensus groups, Canary et. al (1987) found that low consensus groups tended to produce more unsupported assertions than the high consensus groups. Furthermore, Pace (1985) found that standpoints were developed by a variety of group participants whether or not there was overt disagreement in high consensus, but not low consensus, groups. These studies point out the importance of offering evidence for standpoints in producing mutually agreeable decisions. The use of reasoning and support for asserted standpoints facilitates the critical examination of the issue by the group and exposes flaws in the quality of decisions advocated by group members. It is easier to derive a consensus about a decision when the flawed decision alternatives are unmasked. Group members are more persuaded to come to a common assessment about a decision alternative when they have been offered reasons to do so.
Another interesting characteristic of argument in high and low consensus groups involves the willingness of group members to switch their position during a discussion. Pace (1985) found that members of high consensus groups appeared to be more likely to explore both sides of a point at issue by offering reasons that both support and cast doubt upon it. This finding offers indirect support for the importance of following discussion rules that require that  parties be willing to give up defeated standpoints and be willing to accept opposing standpoints that have been successfully defended. When arguers are willing to explore and ultimately give up their own perspective in favor of a more reasonable alternative they are also more likely to find common ground in coming to a mutually agreeable conclusion based on the merits of the case for the standpoint under discussion. On the other hand, refusing to admit that a standpoint has been defeated and failing to accept an argument that is reasonable prevents groups from agreeing about which position appears to be the most sensible.
Finally, it appears that groups that reach consensus tend to follow rules regarding the relevance of their contributions to resolving the dispute (e.g., Gouran & Geonetta, 1977; Saine & Bock, 1973). Gouran and Geonetta (1977) for example, found that non consensus groups tended to be characterized by more random contributions than consensus groups. Non consensus groups also tend to be less responsive to issues raised by group members than consensus groups (Saine & Bock, 1973). Keeping argumentative contributions relevant leads to consensus because the discussion stays on track toward resolution. As van Eemeren & Grootendorst (1987) predict, the use of irrelevant argumentation prevents productive outcomes.

Along with predicting whether a group is able to reach consensus on an issue, violating rules for critical discussion is also associated with the quality of the decision a group makes. For example, Hirokawa and Pace (1983) found that groups that make effective decisions[i] engage in more support and defense of standpoints offered by group members than groups that make less effective decisions. This study indicates that the failure to defend standpoints once they are met with scrutiny, and offering standpoints with little or no reasoning in support of them, lead to conclusions that are judged to be unwarranted. Leathers (1970; 1972) has also found that irrelevant remarks (violation of rules three and four), negative messages (violation of rule one), and highly abstract statements (violation of rule ten) are all associated with decisions deemed by independent raters to be of poor quality. Small group research also indicates that groups who leave inferences implicit (Leathers, 1970), and groups who treat unexamined or unchallenged inferences as though they were facts tend to make poor decisions. Along with Leathers (1970), Hirokawa and Pace (1983) also find that ineffective groups tend to draw inferences that are at best only weakly supported by the facts of the case and that are characterized by unsound reasoning. Furthermore, the ineffective groups tend not to explore the strength of their inferential reasoning and once the inferences are drawn, treat them as uncontested facts upon which they base their decisions. It seems clear then that failing the requirement to produce logically sound arguments (rules six, seven, and eight) in a critical discussion leads to coming to conclusions that are judged to be of lower quality.

3. Fallacies and Interpersonal Outcomes
In general, critical research involving the pragma-dialectical perspective focuses on evaluating the effects fallacies produce on the strength of the reasoning used to arrive at a conclusion or the effects fallacies have on qualities of the conversation itself. It is intuitively appealing to predict that fallacious reasoning in interpersonal disagreements will have identity management and relational impacts beyond the more instrumentally oriented outcomes that have been the focus of dialectical argumentation research. Structural properties of conversation seem to point a preference for at least the appearance of rationality in managing disagreements (Jackson & Jacobs, 1980). It seems likely that serious deviations from rational dialogue will produce less favorable evaluations of those who argue fallaciously.
However, because everyday arguers don’t generally hold each other to strict standards of traditional logic in resolving disagreements, the traditional approach to fallacious argument doesn’t provide an especially useful framework for examining fallacies in interpersonal disagreements. The PD perspective’s conceptualization of fallacies as consisting of conversational moves that derail the problem solving process maps on well to what is known about how qualities of conflictual interaction are associated with identity and relational outcomes.

To begin, research indicates that tactics designed to prevent another party from advancing a standpoint are associated with negative perceptions of the arguer and the relationship. The use of ad hominem in the form of personal criticism and defensiveness have been shown to be associated with less relationship satisfaction (e.g., Gottman, 1979; 1994) and with perceiving the partner to be a less competent communicator (Canary and Spitzberg, 1989; Canary, Brossmann, Brossmann, & Weger, 1995). Complaints that focus on personal characteristics are perceived less favorably than complaints focusing on behaviors (Alberts, 1988). Finally, personal complaints tend to be associated with creating feelings of shame and rage leading to out of control escalation in personal disagreements (Retzinger, 1991). The use of ad hominem not only is logically irrelevant to the claim being examined it also prevents critical examination of a claim by creating strong emotional reactions in listeners that make critical inquiry almost impossible.
Another way in which conversational partners attempt to discourage the examination of a standpoint is to draw attention away from the substance of a partner’s complaint by responding to it with the assertion that the act of complaining is itself so objectionable that the respondent need not be held accountable for answering the complaint. In other words, a person may discourage the examination of the standpoint by complaining about the complaint (Matoesan, 1993). Similarly, cross complaining can inhibit the examination of a standpoint by offering a competing complaint about the complainer’s own actions, attitudes, or intentions. Complaining about a complaint is a type of ad hominem attack that forestalls discussion of the original standpoint by asserting the act of issuing the complaint points to some disagreeable quality in the complainer. Cross complaining is a form of tu qou que in which the original complaint is disqualified based on some equally disagreeable and complainable, though unrelated, attribute found in the source of the complaint. Cross complaining can be treated as a fallacy of consistency or as a fallacy of obscuration in which the dispute becomes mired in the attempt to resolve two entirely unrelated standpoints simultaneously. Each party in a cross complaint situation is attempting to defend their own standpoint while attacking their opponent’s unrelated assertion. Cross complaining both prevents another from advancing a standpoint and creates an over complicated mixed dispute in which the progression toward resolution of one issue is irrelevantly linked to the resolution of an unrelated issue. Both complaints about complaints (Alberts, 1988; 1989) and cross complaining (Gottman, 1979) have been found to be judged unfavorably or associated with dissatisfaction with a romantic partner.

Along with fallacies that prevent others from advancing standpoints, it appears that the failure to defend a standpoint (rule two) and the failure to offer reasons in support of a standpoint (rules two and seven) are related to problematic interpersonal outcomes. First, a great deal of research indicates that couples who engage in demand/withdraw interaction patterns have a substantially greater chance of being dissatisfied and eventually terminating their relationship (Gottman, 1995; Heavy, Layne, & Christensen, 1993). The demand/withdraw pattern can be interpreted as a violation of the requirement that disputants defend their standpoints when asked to do so. Characteristic of the demand/withdrawal patterns is one party attempting to advance or cast doubt upon a standpoint while the opposing party stonewalls by evading the issue or simply refusing to do anything beyond reassert their original standpoint. Stonewalling and withdrawing prevent resolution of important relationship issues, issues which left unresolved create tension and dissatisfaction with the relationship and the partner.
Second, standards for the logical acceptability of an argument require that a claim be accompanied by a supporting proposition that implies the truth of the asserted claim. Arguments which fail to provide reasoning for assertions therefore violate both rule two and rule seven (which requires that arguments be logically sound). Research by Canary and his associates (e.g., Canary, Brossmann, Sillars, & LoVette, 1987; Canary, et al, 1995) indicate that conversations that are characterized by the use of unsupported assertions result in less satisfaction with the interaction, with the perception that the conversational partner is an ineffective arguer, and with perceptions of decreased satisfaction with the relationship. Canary et al (1995) conclude by suggesting that everyday arguers have minimum standards for rationality in resolving disputes. In other words, in managing ordinary disputes, conversational partners prefer reasoned discourse over simple assertion and counter assertion. Not only does the use of reasoned discourse produce better decisions it produces more favorable interpretations of the conversational partner and the relationship.

4. Implications and Conclusion
This research review points to several ways in which the fields of argumentation, interpersonal, and small group communication intersect and offer implications for each other. One important implication is the usefulness of evaluating and studying small group and interpersonal conflict in terms of dialectical fallacies. Research in small group and especially in interpersonal conflict resolution tends to focus on strategies and tactics as they relate to interpersonal dimensions of the interaction. Rarely does research on interpersonal interaction examine conflict tactics in terms of their acceptability as rational contributions to the resolution of a dispute (cf. Canary et al, 1987; Canary, Weger, & Stafford, 1991; Canary et al, 1995). Furthermore, as Gottman (1994) admits, the relationship of behaviors such as personal criticism, defensiveness, and withdrawal to relational outcomes is more descriptive than theoretical. One possible theoretical explanation for this relationship is that the use of unproductive tactics prevents disputes from being resolved in ways that are acceptable and/or workable for the parties involved. When problems go unresolved partners build resentment toward each other and feel that the costs of staying in the relationship outweigh the rewards. Resolutions to interpersonal disputes that are arrived through a process of reason giving and rational testing of ideas may not only produce logically sound conclusions but also personally satisfying ones as well.
Another implication of this research review is that argumentation scholarship would benefit by paying more attention to the relational as well as the content dimension of argumentative messages. For the most part, argument research devotes its attention to the propositional content of the messages in exclusion to any meaning the messages have for the identity of the hearer or the relationship between speaker and hearer. The dialectical approaches to argumentation theory, while better than traditional logical approaches, still tends to overlook the ways in which identity management and relationship goals have implications for the way people produce and respond to arguments. While correctly pointing out that speech acts such as expressives (i.e., messages that express a speaker’s feelings) can contribute or detract from the progress of a critical discussion, van Eemeren and Grootendorst (1993) largely ignore the relational dimensions inherent in speech acts such as assertives, directives, declaritives, and so on. For example, the fallacy of ad hominem can be accomplished through an assertive speech act by simply asserting that an opponent has poor character. An ad hominem, however, produces poor argument both because it shifts the focus of the dispute to an irrelevant issue and because personal attacks create a hostile and defensive communication climate in which an arguer’s attention to identity management and repair become more important than the original standpoint at issue. Being personally attacked also creates strong emotional reactions such as shame and rage (Retzinger, 1991) that place cognitive demands on the disputant that makes productive thinking about the situation difficult if not impossible (Zillman, 1990).
The research on small group, interpersonal, and relational argument and conflict can be taken together to suggest that normative requirements for an ideal model of critical discussion are operative in everyday instances of dispute resolution. We can see that the system developed by van Eemeren and Grootendorst (1987) for evaluating argumentation has more than intuitive appeal. Empirical research suggests that there are a number of instrumental, relational, and identity management advantages to avoiding dialectical fallacies.

NOTES
i. Effective and ineffective groups were determined by having independent judges rate the quality of each groups decision along four evaluative criteria.

REFERENCES
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Alberts, J. K. (1989). A descriptive taxonomy of couples; complaint interactions. Southern Communication Journal, 54, 125-143.
Alberts, J. K., & Driscoll, G. (1992). Containment versus escalation: The trajectory of couples’ conversational complaints.
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Canary, D. J., & Spitzberg, B. H. (1989). A model of the perceived competence of conflict tactics. Human Communication Research, 15, 630-649.
Canary, D. J., Brossmann, B. G., & Seibold, D. R. (1987, Fall). Argument structures in decision-making groups. The Southern Speech Communication Journal, 53, 18-37.
Canary, D. J., Weger, H., Jr., & Stafford, L. (1991). Couples’ argument sequences and their associations with relational characteristics. Western Journal of Speech Communication, 55, 159-179.
Canary, D.J., Brossmann, J., Brossmann, B. G., & Weger, H., Jr., (1995). Toward a theory of minimally rational argument: Analyses of episode-specific effects of argument structures. Communication Monographs, 62, 183-212.
Canary, D. J., Brossmann, B. G., Sillars, A. L., & LoVette, S. (1987). Married couples’ argument structures and sequences: A comparison of satisfied and dissatisfied dyads. In: J. W. Wenzel (Ed.) Argument and critical practices: Proceedings of the fifth SCA/AFA conference on argumentation (pp. 477-483). Annandale, VA: SCA.
Gottman, J. M. (1979). Marital Interaction: Experimental Investigations. New York: Academic Press.
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Trapp, R. (1983). Generic characteristics of argumentation in everyday discourse. In: D. Zarefsky, M. O. Sillars, and J. Rhodes (eds.) Argument in transition: Proceedings of the third summer conference on argumentation (pp. 516-530). Annandale, VA: SCA.
van Eemeren, F. H., & Grootendorst, R. (1992). Argumentation, communication, and fallacies: A pragma-dialectical perspective. London: LEA.
van Eemeren, F. H., Grootendorst, R., Jackson, S., & Jacobs, S. (1993). Reconstructing argumentative discourse. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press.
Walton, D. N. (1992). Plausible argument in everyday conversation. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Weger, H., Jr., & Jacobs, S. (1995). The burden of going forward with the argument: Argumentative relevance in
Pragma-Dialectics. In: S. Jackson (Ed.) Argumentation and values: Proceedings of the Ninth SCA/AFA conference on argumentation (525-531). Annandale, VA: Speech Communication Association.
Zillman, D. (1990). The interplay of cognition and excitation in aggravated conflict among intimates. In: D. D. Cahn (Ed.), Intimates in conflict: A communication perspective. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Can the modern science remain “neutral” with respect to ethics and values? The last decades have shown this question to become an object of intent discussions. The involvement of a man in understanding such complex objects as atomic energy, unique objects of ecology, gene engineering, microelectronics, informatics, cybernetics and computer technology which a man himself is involved into as well as wide introduction of robots and computers in manufacturing and various life spheres of a man and society make the thesis of “ethic neutrality” of modern science questionable. The natural scientific knowledge nowadays is much more closer to humanitarian sciences in terms of investigation strategy than in the previous periods of the history development. The fabric of the modern natural scientific knowledge search‘ is enriched with categories of duty, moral, good, values, etc. unusual to traditional approach.
The mechanisms transforming the ideals of the scientific knowledge argumentation enter the science more intensively in the second half of the XXth century by developing the noosphere concept and ideas of non-linear “highly unbalanced” thermodynamics, synergetics, modern cosmology and by expanding the system and cybernetic approaches, ideas of global evolutionism and the so called “antropic cosmological principle”. Some of these concepts are considered hereafter in order to highlight the modern science specific features.

The application of “man-centered” arguments and parameters is distinctly observed first of all in the noosphere concept of a well known Russian scientist Vernadsky that is based on the integrity idea of a man with the outer space as well as on the modern science integrity where the borders among its individual branches are obliterated and the specialisation takes part rather by problems than by certain sciences. Vernadsky wrote in 1926 in its work “Thoughts of the modern meaning of the history knowledge” that “the XXth century brings increasing radical changes in the understanding of a new time”, that it is a time of “an intensive reconstruction of our understanding of the World, ourselves, our environment, search for the sense of being”. These processes connected to the revolutionary changes and developments in physics, chemistry and astronomy change not only our notions of the matter, energy, space and time, but they represent also a specific turn of the scientific creative work in the other area – in the area of “place understanding of a man within the World order created on the scientific basis”. What consequences and regulation means which go beyond the scientific notions are formed within the noosphere concept and form new ideals of World understanding and search for the sense of being. Firs of all, the task to build a world by renouncing a man himself and attempting to find any world understanding independent on the man nature is above the man’s power, it is illusion. An observer himself, a subject, is obviously incorporated in the picture of the reality under study, in the Nature itself.

The noosphere is only a new qualitative state of biosphere where the man’s intellect is called to play the decisive role. By bringing the intellect, reforming activity, thought and science, a man becomes a geological factor capable to effect the planet geological processes. Since the biosphere like the planet as a whole were formed under the joint action of both the earth and the space forces, a man himself is a creation of the earth and space forces capable for taking the whole-planet decisions in their scientific, cognitive and practical activities. Following this notion, the idea of a man domination over the Nature, the consideration of the latter as a subject independent on a man is naturally replaced with harmony idea between a man and the Nature, a man and the space and with the mankind responsibility increase for the Earth’s subsequent evolution – in the favour of survival and faster formation of the noosphere within the whole planet and in every area.
Thus, the “object-based” understanding of the scientific knowledge is insufficient and even impossible from this point of view. It is “build over with” a subject-based, value-based component. The arguments theirselve used in forming the modern scientific picture become axiologically filled since a man must think and act in the planet aspect. “Pride and independent” ideal of of the scientific rationality of classical science where every object steps out as given by itself and not depending on an observer’s (cognition subject) point of view is transformed into the non-classical ideal within which a man (cognition subject) is incorporated “into” the Nature, biosphere with its value-based and world outlook concepts.

All this results into the humanisation of science and its argumentation ideals since a man himself, way of his living activity, his existence within the biosphere, influence on the latter and its preservation become the most “valid” arguments and acquire the whole-planet, space character. A man’s intellect implemented in the scientific thought is intended for the substantiation of the integrity idea of a man and the biosphere, their harmonisation and mutual independence, purposeful development of biosphere. All this must provide further development of our planet, otherwise the civilisation will disappear from its surface.
Let us notice that Vernadsky’s teaching of the noosphere is largely bound by the “Russian cosmism” heritage which is clearly and convincingly expressed the humanistic values forming the very basement of European civilisation. Many representatives of Russian thought caught the rupture between the rational “cold” seeing of the World and the existence of a man’s “Me” and his presence in this World.
The introduction of “man-centered” approaches and arguments into the modern science and culture occurs due to investigations carried out in the area of unbalanced process thermodynamics and the term of “arrow of time” was introduced into the scientific knowledge structure. H. Hacken suggested the term of “synergetics” for a new science that studies a joint action of many sub-systems with different origins. The result of such an interaction is the formation of a structure and a certain functioning.
The long dominated idea of self-organisation belonging to living systems only lost gradually its position under the pressure of the data accumulated, thus indicating the origin of the order from the chaos, the formation under certain conditions of new structures and self-organisation in non-organic systems too. At present, various scenaria of self-organisation are considered in a wide range of non-balanced physical, chemical, biological and social systems: in physics (hydrodynamics, lasers, non-linear oscillations), electrical engineering and electronics, chemistry, biology (morhpogenetics, dynamics of populations, evolution of new kinds, immune systems), general theory of computing systems, economy, ecology, sociology. The modern science shows that exposure of such regularities in different areas leads to a substantial reconstruction of our conceptions of the world, of ideals and means of the scientific knowledge substantiation and signifies the dialogue renewal of a man with the Nature and society.

The main features of self-organised systems are their non-linearity, stochastisity, irreversibility, irrecurrebility, availability of numerous sub-systems, openness. The thoroughness of these features revealed in different areas, biological and cosmic facts as well as the data on irreversible processes in the sphere of elemental particles change revolutionary our concepts of the world. Let us consider the behaviour description of such systems in terms of “unbalanced thermodynamics” and synergetics in order to clear up why in studying the complex self-organised systems it appears the need for real conceptual changes, for revision of accepted schemes of the scientific knowledge argumentation. The open character of an overwhelming majority of systems in the Universe and the presence of a large number of sub-systems within their structures lead to continuous fluctuations, i.e. occasional deviations of parameters from their average values. Sometimes individual fluctuations or their combinations may be so strong that the existing structure doesn’t withstand and decomposes. It is impossible to forecast at such turning moments (bifurcations) what direction the further development will move in, what state the system will pass into, what structure version will be “selected” by the system.
Based on the functioning analysis of self-organised systems, the modern science has made the conclusions as follows: The transfer from the past to the future (“arrow of time” manifestation) happens through the sufficient manifestation of chance and by passing from instability to stability, “order”; Determinism manifests itself in such instable systems in some cases only to counterbalance the rational model of dynamics where determinism is considered the inevitable consequence; In the situation when the former order and the structure based on it is “impaired” enough and the system is far from being balanced, even very weak fluctuations (i.e. occasional deviations or perturbations) are able to amplify the wave that can crush the previously formed structure; In accordance to functioning principles of self-organised systems, the modern man faces the need to “play through” properly possible ways of complex systems development, to analyse the reasons of their instability, to realise consequences of a man’s intervention into the development mode of many natural (ecological, for example) and social (for instance, arising on national or religious basis) processes; The analysis of arising questions and possible answers is also required in studying the unbalanced systems. What will happen if …, what price will to be paid for restoring the order from chaos, what will be the influence on the system of such a “weak” effect as …, what is the importance of what will be lost and what will appear if …, — questions of such a kind indicate the necessity to reject position of implicit “manipulation” and strict control over the study systems (both natural and social); “The freedom of choice” and chance are the inalienable concomitants of complex objects as if consolidating the structure of the latter.

The specific properties of complex statistical systems appear in it as a result of the increase of “degrees of freedom” and interaction among the system elements. Since a chance is an obvious and sufficient development factor of natural and social objects, the freedom of choice is determined by understanding the extent of its possible and occasional ways of formation rather than by realisation extent of unrealised yet reality (i.e. future). And even through the areas where all processes are traditionally considered prearranged by the initial conditions, chance and uncertainty act as necessary parameters of physical objects, their significance in social and humanitarian environment is even higher since here we deal with a man whose language “makes him capable to perceive an infinitely large number of versions of the past and the future which he may be afraid of or wait with hope”. The development of thermodynamic and synergetic approaches leads to synthesis or integration of physical, chemical, biological and social components as self-organised systems displaying their own “histories”, trends and transformation irreversibility into the interconnected and interconditioned system.

The interconditionality ideas of a man and Universe, the data synthesis of elemental particle physics, molecular biology and cosmology of a “young” Universe have led to the origin of “antropic argumentation” and “antropic arguments”. Formulated in 1973 by B. Carter, the “antropic cosmological principle” analyses realisation conditions of the Universe real history, i.e. it deals with the system origin and conditionally of the Universe regularities which determine its structure and evolution. Thus, if all the laws controlling the process of the matter self-organisation within the Universe were different we just shouldn’t appear in it. Everything happens in the World as it is due to our presence in it only. That “delicate” situation which shows that almost impossible logical possibility of Homo sapiens appearance and that the conditions of the Universe historical evolution were “assured” by the system of physical laws and by the knowledge of natural conditions to a high degree of accuracy has found its reflection in formulating two versions (weak and strong) of the antropic cosmological principle. What is its essence?
The first version asserts: our position in the Universe is undoubtedly favoured in the sense that it must be compatible with our existence as observers. The second version says: the Universe (and therefore, the fundamental constants which it depends on) must be such as to allow the existence of an observer at a certain stage of its evolution.
The modern science within the limits of “antropic cosmological principle” faces the following questions: either a “thin interlayer” of physical parameters is a “happy chance” providing the necessary conditions for the formation of highly organised structures, life and intellect? Either the “reason-based argumentation” explaining the connection between the presence of rational creatures in the Universe and the physical parameters of our World is sufficient or not? Is the Universe unique or does a number of worlds exist with different physical arrangements which define the potential “modality” of choice and ways of the Universe physical arrangement? These and other questions within the “antropic cosmological principle” break not only the usual canons of the scientific knowledge argumentation, enrich the latter with integrating variety, choice, logic of narration (history), but aim the scientists at further theoretical search.
The “antropic” arguments make their specific historical contribution into the Universe global evolution since any history matches the conditions of irreversibility, probability, possibility for new links to appear. The fundamental transformation of cosmology toward the openness, “playing through” the possibilities and choice is a common trend of the modern science manifesting itself by the deviation from the classical science ideal which didn’t have “either memory or history” and the language itself was cut off its past and thus off the possibility to invent future.

The consideration of different parameters effecting a system, refusal of strict means of the scientific knowledge substantiation and the appeal to the concept of occasional, probabilistic processes are demonstrated at the present stage in many medical sciences. The soviet clinical psychiatry crisis is largely explained, as some researchers point out, by its passion for the linear principle according to which any illness (psychical) must include the uniform reasons, manifestations, progress, outcome and anatomic changes (i.e. the same reason results into the same effect). Such a strictness in the thesis formulation (making a clinical diagnosis) has no ground as evidenced by the modern medical science since a fact must be taken into account that different individuals have their own physical and spiritual characters due to which the illness manifestation and progress will be different among them. The argumentation based on “impeccable”, “objective” and “unprejudiced” clinical method and expound without “personal interpretation” is not only logically groundless since the illness treatment is addressed not a person, as clinical psychiatry declares, but the illness, i.e. the treatment is applied to “illness but not to person”. The refusal of an inflexible and strict approach, the appeal to the theory of occasional processes will lead, as considered by some specialists, to the psychiatry renovation since the illness concept will be probabilistic and its origin will be principally unpredictable in a number of cases. The psychiatry will receive the freedom of will in its thermodynamic aspect. This will result into changes of opinion of the “norm” and illness and into the levelling of “boundaries” between the norm and illness by a wide spectrum of adaptational reactions. The opinion of “normal” will change along with the society depending on a medicine model.

The ethical and axiological arguments “penetrate” necessarily through other medical disciplines too. Such medical and biological science as tanatology that studies the reasons, manifestations and mechanisms of death advances especially sharp the problem of “ethical argumentation” in transplanting organs (how to avoid the ethical discrepancy: prior the donor’s “alive” organ can be taken the donor himself must be “dead”); in extending the life of an ill person by means of apparatus (what arguments will be ethically grounded to turn off the apparatus, i.e. “to make this ill person dead”); in deciding the problem of life maintenance of persons doomed to death due to untreatable illnesses (to what extent are ethical the medical ethic ideals when an ill man prefers “easy death”) etc.
The science enrichment with “man-centered” guides and axiological parameters, the “exacerbation” of reflection and more and more loud thesis sounding of scientist responsibility for the science results which applications may either bring the benefit to the mankind or lead to the extermination of the latter are observed already in the second half of the 40th of the current century. The real science and ethics has experienced, as M. Born wrote, the changes which make impossible to keep the old style of knowledge service in favour of this knowledge itself. We were assured that it could never bring any harm since the search for the truth is the good by itself. It was a nice sleep which we were awaken from by the World events. A. Einstein warned that there was a danger of the mankind total self-extermination that could not be disregarded. This warning sounds even more loudly on the threshold of the XXth century.
Thus, ethical and axiological arguments are used more and more widely in the modern science.

Such “from man”, “reason for man” argumentation differs sharply from the traditional scheme of the scientific knowledge substantiation in the classical science when a fact is considered true if it can be justified without referring to a man, his activity and cognition manners. The arguments used in understanding the unique evolution systems can’t be ethically indifferent and the scientific  investigation aimed at obtaining the true knowledge in any way is too narrow and dangerous in some cases. A necessity appears to engage the arguments setting the control over the scientific truth understanding itself. The value hierarchy which the scientific truth undoubtedly belongs to is or must be equally accompanied by such values as the good of a man and mankind in their unity and interaction, good and moral, prosperity and safety. The search for the scientific truth is “highlighted” by the axiological imperative: will a new knowledge increase the risk of existence and survival of a man, will it serve the mankind good and its interests.

REFERENCES
The interdisciplinary approach to argumentation theory developed by the Amsterdam’s scientific school. See for more details the following works:
Eemeren van Frans H., Grootendorst R. (1984). Speech Acts in Argumentative Discussions, Dordrecht-Holland/Cinnaminson – U.S.A, p. 18.
Eemeren van Frans H., Grootendorst R., Kruiger T. (1987). Handbook of Argumentation Theory (A Critical Survey of Classical Backgrounds and Modern Studies). Dordrecht-Holland/Providence – U.S.A., p. 7.
Eemeren F. H. van, R. Grootendorst & T. Kruiger (1984). The Study of Argumentation. New York: Irvington. Republished as Handbook of Argumentation Theory. Berlin/New York: Foris/De Gruyter. PDA 7 (1987).
Carter B. (1983). The antropic principle and its implications for biological evolution, Philos.trans. of the Roy.Soc. of London., Vol. 310, no. 1512, p. 347-363.
Prigogine I., Stengers I. (1981). La nouvelle alliance: Metamorphose de la science. P.: Gallimard. p. 305.

The value of argument in the public sphere and its relation to social change is a concept that is shared by most communication scholars: the idea that argument in some form is an intrinsic part of democracy or at least that it is a necessary concomitant to democracy. In Johnstone’s words, “[d]emocracy rests upon the use of discourse as an instrument of political change” (1974:320). Indeed, the very attempt “to marshal public opinion or public support for some policy” implies acceptance of “forms of political action that prevail in a democratic society” (Johnstone, 1974:318). Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969:55) take this position a step further: “[t]he use of argument implies . . . that value is attached to gaining the adherence of one’s interlocutor by means of reasoned persuasion.” We suggest that the Western tradition of democracy entails the notion of doing the public’s business in public. This is an important concept, one that marks a fundamental distinction among societies. While recognizing that even in the most stable democracies little of what is considered the public business actually is conducted in the open, one must nevertheless keep in mind the fact that in many authoritarian or totalitarian states there has existed no concept of the public’s business apart from the government’s affairs, so there is no thought of addressing concerns in the open.
This notion [i] that some essential portion of civic business should be played out in public is the concept that provides the philosophical ground upon which policy argument may occur: in a real sense it creates space for policy argument to exist. Argument, then, may be seen as a necessary part of the process of doing the public’s business; where the ground for that argument does not exist, it must somehow be created.[ii] But where there is no history of such a process, how does the concept develop, how does the tradition take root?

Many of the observations made in reference to Western pluralist societies assume even greater significance when applied to the role argument has played in the socio-political changes that have in  recent years transformed the former Soviet Union. In this paper we intend to explore some of the ways in which social change and argumentation interact: in particular, we will consider the way governmental information policies, accepted argumentative structures, and the whole notion of public discourse develop as society undergoes fundamental transition.
By way of background we shall review the beginnings of pluralist public policy argumentation in a specific society where none had existed previously: the Soviet Union of the pre-disintegration period. Before turning to more contemporary events, we will concentrate on two critical media incidents: the 1983 downing of the Korean airliner and the 1986 Chernobyl explosion. One must keep in mind that, all other differences notwithstanding, most political communication in the former USSR, as in the USA, was and is a mediated phenomenon that relies on mass dissemination. For that reason we will focus on the media as the purveyor of the readily available accounts of the transmission of information and opinion formation. Our methodology is historical/critical, and our corpus is drawn primarily from official print media during the period 1983 through 1991.
Of particular relevance to this discussion is the process whereby public argumentative space comes to be created. In this presentation, we explore at least one of the ways this may happen: in the movement from an authoritarian to a pluralist form of government, the space for public argument arises from the citizens’ loss of faith in the existing governmental structure.[iii] As this loss of faith intensifies, the ground for argument begins to expand and continues expanding until the process becomes self-sustaining. At this point, every incremental change in the amount of public argument intensifies the loss of faith that initiated the process, because groups and individuals begin seriously questioning the ability of their government to secure the welfare of the people. The process is recursive: opposition becomes more influential as it becomes more frequent, providing ever greater opportunities for the continued extension of argumentative ground.

Significantly, an authoritarian government’s best course is to ignore the opposition. For if government participates in the discussion it legitimates the whole notion of argument as part of the process of governing. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969) state that “[t]o agree to discussion means [a] readiness to see things from the viewpoint of the interlocutor.” Thus, merely by participating in the argument, government sanctions the concept of oppositional debate, including the risk of losing. Moreover, “the use of argumentation implies that one has renounced resorting to force alone, that value is attached to gaining the adherence of one’s interlocutor by means of reasoned persuasion.” Consequently, authoritative regimes typically do not engage in public argument; they neither justify nor provide a rationale for the actions they take. Rather, “by the use of such measures as censorship, . . . [political leaders] will try to make it difficult, if not impossible, for their opponents to achieve the conditions preliminary to any argumentation.” Obviously, denying access to the state controlled media constitutes a significant restriction of the ability to engage in argumentation.
That certainly was the traditional mode in the old Soviet Union. As an example, consider the plight of Soviet dissidents. Virtually everyone in the society knew they existed; many may have even thought they had a point. Nevertheless, they continued their protests – including underground publication, or “samizdat” – in obscurity; the only public acknowledgment emanating from the government was the occasional arrest and trial of a writer, followed by imprisonment or exile. With no access to the media – including nearly total news blackout of court proceedings – dissidents had no means at their disposal to engage the state in public debate. Thus, their efforts had little social impact within the borders of the Soviet Union.
It is our claim, however, that the Soviet government was forced into a public debate first over Chernobyl, then over the issue of nuclear power, a situation which was unique in the history of that society. Further, at the point the state felt constrained or compelled to engage in argument, the upheaval that occurred in 1991 became inevitable.[iv] Although the rapidity with which events transpired and their specific form was unpredictable, over time some sort of fundamental change had become necessary. Nor should one be misled by the rapid, almost precipitous, nature of the transformation, for no movement of this magnitude occurs without the seeds having been planted many years before.

There has been much commentary both in the media and among scholars about the Soviet Union’s economic problems and the role that those problems played in all subsequent events. In fact, Steven Cohen (1980) had predicted that if something was not done about the Soviet economy it was only a matter of time before the structure would collapse.[v] But there were other factors one must keep in mind, and economic problems should not become magnified as a causal factor in the break-up of the Soviet Union. In the international arena, the Soviet government experienced continuing problems in negotiations with the United States. Domestically, the Soviet people were grappling with the impact of the war in Afghanistan; and, in addition to other factors, they were deeply affected by the aftermath of the nuclear accident at Chernobyl.
On the other hand, it is important to keep in mind the way those factors interact with the economy. For example, the war in Afghanistan was a drain on the Soviet economy much as the war in Vietnam was on the US economy. As for Chernobyl, the economic impact of that disaster still has not been measured accurately, but surely the social and financial costs will continue to burden the people of Belarus and Ukraine through many generations to come. With all of this as prelude, one must realize that prior to 1986 there was very little social activity in the public sphere of Soviet life that scholars would recognize as argument. Within the Soviet system, the postulate that underlay all other considerations was the very notion of information itself, which was perceived as the inextricable bonding of fact to interpretation. No fact was presented on its own; rather, it was explicitly linked to some political interpretation. Traditional Soviet rhetoric stemmed from universal principles; its purpose was to move towards greater wisdom, thus contributing to the goal of perfecting the communist state. Since true knowledge of historical processes was provided by Marxist ideology, the function of the information dissemination system created by the Bolsheviks was not to search for knowledge but, instead, “to bring the fruits of Marxist analysis to the people” (Kenez, 1985:6).
It may be difficult to remember in 1998, but even at the beginning of the 1980s, Soviet theories of mass communication were still imbued with this ideological conception. The Leninist ideal for an information system was reiterated most succinctly by Evseev (1980) in a semi-official publication, “The press, television, radio or propaganda and education must assist the Soviet citizen in orienting himself in domestic life and in international events” (18).

Hence, in a way, the whole system was a propaganda network designed to interpret selected events in the world. In the wry comment of one observer, Soviet television newscasts were described not as a “mirror” but as a “magnifying glass” (Matuz, 1963; Hollander, 1972). We would maintain that, in a system like this, the news itself gains an even greater rhetorical function than it would ordinarily have, for example, in the United States [vi] and that it becomes the equivalent of public oratory in a society which has no traditional forms of oratory. Even during much of the Gorbachev era, news was not presented for its own sake, but as an interpretation and as proof that the postulates of the socialist state generally, and the current administration particularly, were correct.
Political and social crises always test the strength of such systems, and there have been a number of particularly significant events in the preceding fifteen years. What is most striking about such crises is the greater – rather than lesser – reliance on traditional communication mechanisms. In the traditional mode, crises, tragedies, disasters were typically not reported until an appropriate interpretation could be provided. Many incidents, particularly natural disasters and man-made tragedies, were never reported; on the other hand, political and social crises were given the interpretation most in tune with current policy goals of the state. Moreover, despite some fundamental changes that had occurred in Soviet media, news delivery remained a bonding of events to policy, with policy rather than events more instrumental in determining the nature, the extent, and even the timing of news coverage. The traditional response pattern exhibited by the Soviet information apparatus was so ingrained that its development can be followed quite clearly through six stages: initial silence; attacks on Western media sources; a burst of rhetorical activity setting forth the government’s position (interpretation); a public statement by the head of government; decrease in the volume of rhetorical activity; and elevation of the official interpretation into the long-term memory of the state.[vii]
In our opinion the process of change – or the beginning of the end, in terms of our analysis – really started with the 1983 Korean airliner incident. Sometimes it is difficult to remember that when this tragedy occurred fifteen ago, Russia – the USSR – was still operating under the old system. Indeed, that incident illustrates the way in which the old Soviet system operated whenever a factual event occurred—understanding that until the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident, a disaster of that type was typically not reported in the Soviet press at all. One of the unique things about the airliner incident was that ultimately it was discussed at great length.

Each of the six stages of the traditional pattern of response to crises was illustrated very dramatically in the KAL incident. First there was an initial period of silence, that is no response at all, no indication that anything had occurred, while facts were gathered and interpretations were considered. Then there was a typically reflexive response to Western news sources including the various government supported radio stations that were broadcasting into the Soviet Union telling the populace that these events had occurred; this response was critical of Western sources for raising a “ruckus” and generating anti-Soviet hysteria. The third stage would be development of the government interpretation of the event; at this point there would be a burst of rhetorical activity characterized by well-defined starting and ending points. Fourth, there would be a culmination of the interpretive process via a public statement by the head of government, after which the rhetorical activity would dramatically drop off; finally that official interpretation moved into the canon of public culture to be brought out again at appropriate times as proof that the interpretation of the new event was, and remained, correct. This last is the process of historical analogy which Hinds & Windt (1991) argue is the essential characteristic of rhetoric.
Typically, the US has engaged in very similar behavior every time an administration submitted a treaty with the Soviets for Congressional approval and opponents would bring out all the past treaties that the USSR had allegedly violated. One can conclude that the phenomenon is probably not culture-specific; nevertheless, it was very noticeable in Soviet rhetoric.
As we have indicated, the KAL incident follows the traditional pattern very clearly. In a month’s time, the incident progressed in stages from a non-event which was completely ignored (initially there was a three line statement in Pravda followed by virtually the identical statement in Izvestiya), to a deliberate provocation designed to entrap the Soviet Union into destroying the Korean intruder (Launer, 1989). The development of those arguments is clearly traceable in the Soviet press through a number of iterations (Young & Launer, 1989). Yuri Andropov’s published statement on September 28, 1983, provided the final, authoritative interpretation of that event:
The sophisticated provocation masterminded by the United States special services with the use of a South Korean plane is an example of extreme adventurism in politics. . . . The guilt of its organizers, no matter how hard they may dodge and what false versions they may put forward, has been proved (Pravda, September 28, 1983: 5).

The official Soviet government position was never completely believed by the Soviet people. Radio Liberty polls found that over 50 percent of Soviet citizens traveling in the West did not believe the government version of what happened to the Korean airliner (RFE/RL, 1983). That was a high percentage, an indicator of the beginning of erosion. From this tragedy, the Soviet information apparatus learned a bitter lesson regarding its vulnerability to Western propaganda. In this case, the government chose to target domestic propaganda at an incident that might never have been mentioned in the media at all. The incident also demonstrated that in a crisis situation, because of the need to interpret events ideologically, the Soviet propaganda mechanism was largely reactive rather than proactive (Jameson, 1986): the lag time in the response simply allowed others – specifically the West – to get their interpretation in first. And, this episode underscored the importance of public image – something Gorbachev was able to take advantage of later on.
Finally, and for this analysis, most significant, Soviet rhetoric in the aftermath of the KAL tragedy took on a justificatory tone that was an early sign of the need to engage in public argument. The debate itself must have seemed very strange to much of the Soviet public, because the state-controlled mass media were responding to allegations available only via short-wave radio.
Nearly three years later on April 26, 1986, the Chernobyl nuclear accident again challenged the constraints of the Soviet information system. Once again an event that had occurred within the borders of the Soviet Union was generating extensive coverage worldwide as a catastrophe of international proportions. Like KAL, Chernobyl presented a true crisis of information and information policy for the Soviet Union both domestically and internationally. Once again, the initial response of even the progressive Gorbachev government was to follow the traditional model. Nearly everyone undoubtedly remembers the delay before the accident was announced: the reactor blew up at 1:04 am on Saturday, April 26, 1986 (2204 GMT on April 25) but was first reported by the Swedes on Monday afternoon. Editors at the central newspapers in Moscow were initially forbidden to publish any reports, and no reporters were dispatched to the scene for several days. Local radio and television did not cover the explosion or the fire. Soviet national television did not even show a still photo of the accident site until May 1, and the first news film was presented only on May 4 (Young & Launer, 1991:105-107).
It is now apparent that the Soviet information apparatus had lost control of the situation almost from the beginning. Nevertheless, despite the fundamental changes that would ultimately be wrought in the Soviet news dissemination system, the government persevered in attempting to interpret the event to political advantage. Chernobyl was said to demonstrate the horrors of nuclear war. In this way, the accident could be linked rhetorically to the Soviet testing moratorium, each day of which was numbered in Pravda, and to Mr. Gorbachev’s proposal for the elimination of nuclear weapons by the year 2000.
The impact of Chernobyl as a rhetorical event, as an event that forced the government to justify its actions to a disbelieving public, has not been analyzed fully and certainly has been under- appreciated. The amount of material that was generated by the Soviet media with regard to this one incident is almost overwhelming. And the behaviors that were manifested by the Soviet government were unprecedented in the country’s history.
Because there was no institutionalized means for the kind of justificatory rhetoric that was necessary in the aftermath of the disaster, the government found itself engaging in a wide range of efforts to re-focus the people’s perceptions of what had happened. In dozens of published interviews ordinary citizens complained that they had not been warned of the danger. These comments reflect a startling realization among the populace that the government wasn’t interested in protecting them, but was much more interested in smoothing things over and making it appear as if nothing was wrong.
This crisis was the sort of jolt to public trust that can easily cause an erosion of faith. It occurred in a society much different from societies familiar to Western scholars. Forty five thousand people lived within three miles of the Chernobyl nuclear station, the lives of most of them inextricably bound to the plant itself. Reactor unit No. 4 exploded with a force sufficient to completely destroy the huge building that housed it. A concrete cover for the reactor vessel head, weighing about one hundred thousand pounds, was blown off to one side, landing on edge. Yet no one reacted. All the next day, despite the fact that smoke was billowing up from the disaster site, life seems to have gone on as usual, with mothers hanging out laundry and doing their shopping, with children playing outdoors, and teenagers and adults sunning themselves on apartment house rooftops in the early spring warmth (Marples, 1986: 14-15, 27). One can only speculate about the degree of trust – or fear – required for people to ignore the dramatic events occurring nearby, but it is difficult to imagine such passivity anywhere in Europe or the United States, for example. And some measure of the social compact between the people and the government of the USSR – the faith that they would be taken care of—can be measured by the utter panic that ensued once the people of Ukraine realized the magnitude of the accident. Over and over again in interviews people said “they didn’t tell us,” “they didn’t tell us we were in danger.”

Still, Chernobyl forever changed the way information is handled in the states of the former Soviet Union. The news reporting of the explosion ultimately became almost immediate. There were television cameras on the scene of the accident after the first week; there have been movies made about it; there have been documentaries; there are plays, there are poems, there are novels. And while some of that was unofficial, much of it was also official. There was a whole series of documentary films that came out after Chernobyl, at least two of which, Warning and the Chronicle of Difficult Weeks, constituted a type of ideological advertising for the government’s political message.[viii]  At the same time, the government was constrained because it didn’t really have an institutionalized way of making its arguments; the films represented an attempt to change people’s perceptions indirectly. It does not appear that they were very successful.
Chernobyl inspired debate, not just about the relationship between citizen and state with respect to the danger resulting from the accident itself. It also spawned an entire debate about the environment and the role of the individual in ecology. In many ways this was a safe debate – or so officials thought – for the government to engage in and the first step towards true public discourse. Gorbachev had opened the door with his policy of Glasnost’, announced just one year earlier; while Glasnost’ signaled a change in the relationship among the citizen, the state, and the public realm, it was never intended to address a situation such as a nuclear accident. Thus, Chernobyl and its aftermath became an argumentative wedge, a wedge that separated the state from its control over public information and knowledge.
The aftermath of Chernobyl illustrates the point that where ground for debate can be created, it will gradually expand. For, in the period following the accident, there seemed to be almost an explosion of discussion about ecological issues. To a great extent, debates over ecology served as a convenient and legitimate battleground for expressing center-periphery tensions that already existed in Soviet society but which had no discursive outlet.[ix] An example is the decision taken by the Khmelnitsky oblast soviet in the Ukraine to halt construction of the nuclear station being built there. This was an unprecedented action that was replicated across the republic: “Suddenly people demanded the right to make their own decisions on such critical questions as whether they wanted a nuclear power station in their area” (Dawson 1996: 94).

Nevertheless, through the second anniversary of the Chernobyl accident, official descriptions and interpretations of the tragedy predominated in Soviet media. Dawson (1996) notes:
[A] detailed survey of the Soviet and Ukrainian press during the 1986-87 period indicates that information on the accident was still highly restricted and published reports were often intentionally falsified to obscure the true magnitude of the disaster. While the high-circulation press permitted publication of articles dealing with the progress of the accident cleanup and investigation into its causes, no articles were published which questioned Moscow’s competence to safely operate nuclear power stations or the government’s plans to dramatically expand nuclear power facilities in Ukraine. . . . (68-69)

However, in mid-1988, expressions of public pressure in Belorussia, Russia, the Ukraine and the Caucausus Republics turned very negative, reaching the point of attributing blame to the Soviet system itself rather than to specific individuals or organizations.[x] Then, starting in mid-1989, mainstream national media began to echo the dissatisfaction that initially had been expressed only in the regional press. Coverage of Chernobyl remained a prominent feature of the Soviet media for five years. Even today, each anniversary of the event spawns features in all the mass media.
Also after the second anniversary, an intense argument was waged on the pages of the national press over scientific authority, bureaucratic privilege and official indifference to public welfare. The public, of course, believed little or none of the tranquilizing rhetoric emanating from the authorities; one of the first signs of how little effect this unprecedented barrage of information was having was the development of a government-sponsored campaign to paint growing fear of nuclear power among the population as mere “radio-phobia.” At about the same time a movement was forming among the intellectual elite in the Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus against nuclear power and the nuclear mafia that had become entrenched within the nation’s ministry structure. And, to the extent what Gorbachev called establishmentarianism was one of the crucial stumbling blocks to economic reform, the rhetorical thrust of nuclear power opponents resonated ideas that the central government wished to promote. In other words, the anti-nuclear forces successfully linked their appeals to the perestroika reforms. But the government’s national energy policy, which was based on rapid development of all forms of electrical generating capacity, including nuclear power, put the ministries in an ambivalent position vis-à-vis conservation, fuel efficiency, and pollution control – all programs advocated by the Soviet “Greens.”
One of the singular achievements of the anti-nuclear group was its ability to create symbols that appealed to a broad audience. Indeed, by attaining such success, the anti-nuclear movement succeeded in passing beyond the bounds of dissidence, emerging as the first legitimate locus of unofficial political culture. In an article entitled “Honest, They Won’t Blow Up Anymore” Oles Adamovich spoke of himself as a non-specialist (non-expert), and as such he challenged the bureaucratic insistence that the public and particularly dilettante writers had no right to question the authority of scientists, engineers, and ministry officials.[xi] These terms became code-words for a completely new phenomenon in Soviet political culture – a concerted attack on the institutions of power, on a major political and economic policy, and on the legitimacy of the system itself. Remarkably, all of these features found expression in the mainstream print media beginning in late 1988. They soon led to a fundamental reassessment of Soviet energy policy, at least with regard to questions of design adequacy, siting requirements, and enhanced operational safeguards, leading to a moratorium on new construction and the abandonment of several sites then being built. In the opinion of one prominent scholar, it would no longer be possible to propose any site for a new Soviet nuclear power plant without generating intense opposition from the local population.[xii]

Despite the anti-intellectual tenor of much movement rhetoric, in many places scientists joined the chorus of critics. One such place was Gorky [now Nizhny Novgorod], where the government was constructing a nuclear-powered heating plant. A group of scientists from the physics institute led the opposition, convincing their audience that “the absolute safety of the Gorky AST could never be achieved” (Dawson 1996:104). In July 1988, other scientific institutes joined in a publicity campaign against the heating plant that, after some resistance, ultimately received extensive local television coverage (see Dawson 1996: 104).
This 1988-89 period is particularly interesting because it demonstrates the unprecedented extent to which popular pressure from below affected public discussion of a vital issue – the future development of nuclear power production – and the extent to which the “official” establishment was incapable of maintaining rhetorical control of public perception or even of continuing to define the parameters and limits of the discussion. As a consequence, Chernobyl had a substantial effect on the social fabric of Soviet life –  even ignoring the radiological and economic consequences of the accident. Leadership of the ecological movement[xiii] broke through the rhetorical shackles of dissidence – its isolation from society’s information dissemination system – becoming the first legitimate expression of unofficial political culture opposed to policy goals established by the party and government hierarchies. In this way, the movement challenged the very legitimacy of Soviet institutions – particularly centralized planning and party control of civic society.

Writers such as Adamovich even succeeded in creating rhetorical icons around which the population at large could rally:
1. the citizenry as hostages to nuclear power;
2. the nuclear bureaucracy – ministries, design bureaus, and research institutes – as arrogant defenders of bureaucratic privilege who dismiss the opinion of the masses and ignore their welfare;
3. this same nuclear bureaucracy as the last bastion of incompetence protected by laws enforcing secrecy in the nuclear industry; and
4. anti-nuclear advocates proud of being non-specialists because that meant they were not corrupted like the bureaucrats and technical experts.

As a result, in the aftermath of Chernobyl an argumentative wedge emerged into which the Greens movement moved, developing an argument of ecology that provided the basis for a growing lack of trust in the institutions of government, which provided in turn more ground for argument to occur. And ultimately it foreshadowed the events of August 1991.

The crumbling of the Soviet empire, of course, began two years earlier, with the breaking away of Eastern Europe and the destruction of the Berlin wall. Perhaps, these events, too, are the direct descendants of changing information policy in the USSR; certainly, these incidents did little to bolster the Soviet people’s faith in the ability of their government to secure the common welfare; rather, circumstances signaled the continued erosion of the authoritarian Soviet state. But surely no one could have predicted the events of August 1991. Indeed, the coup attempt itself indicated just how far change had already penetrated the Soviet state. The attempted deposing of Gorbachev was thwarted in part because the new freedom of information enabled the domestic and foreign press to carry the story immediately, with no intervening period for interpretation and analysis. The bumbling ineptitude of the coup-plotters was no doubt to some degree the result of a lack of understanding about how to deal with the new situation. Their initial – and traditional – tale of Gorbachev’s “illness” was not only disbelieved, it was ridiculed in the world media. The world, which was suddenly on their doorstep looking in, was horrified at the turn of events. The plotters hesitated; and into the breach rushed Boris Yeltsin. The rest, as they say, is history.
Yet, one cannot imagine these events playing out in the same way even five years earlier. The rhetorical situation had changed dramatically in the Gorbachev years following Chernobyl. The press had begun using the national media to discuss issues of significance. New outlets were springing up daily, despite the chronic shortage of paper. Television was flexing its muscle; even the now defunct Vremya, once the most watched television news program in the world, took on a new look, with modern graphics and on-location reporting. Talk shows that criticized the government became popular fare. In short, there was an information revolution, not in the technological sense, but in terms of content and control. In the process, the ground for public discourse continued to expand, until it encompassed and challenged the existence of the state itself.

In the 1960’s, communication scholars in the United States talked about “body rhetoric” and activists talked about putting your self on the line in the civil rights and anti-war movements. During those same years, Soviet citizens used nonverbal communication to avoid drawing attention to themselves: visitors from the West were struck by the unwillingness to make eye contact, people looking at the ground, shrinking within themselves to avoid notice. Remembering that period, which continued until only a few short years ago, the vigorous ecological debates following Chernobyl become all the more remarkable. And the rhetorical behavior exhibited in the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg in August 1991 demonstrates the extent of change.
Debates about ecology are silent now, overshadowed by other (largely economic) concerns. Interestingly, it appears that the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the achievement of independence on the part of the Republics, dissipated the fervor of the anti-nuclear debate; now decisions about nuclear power were in their own hands and this, coupled with the economic crisis, put the issue in an entirely different perspective.
Now the debates are about the economy and the constitution and a balance of power between the president and the parliament: how much socialism, how much capitalism, what sorts of social safety nets should there be. And there are still threats of  censorship. But the discussion about policy goes on – in public media and on the street as well as in the privacy of the halls of government. It is still only the beginning of a civil society and it may yet fall apart under the weight of economic collapse. Many of the rhetorical choices sound disturbingly familiar, from reactionaries’ open yearnings for the days of communism to reformers’ inability to shake off their deterministic roots. It is still difficult to predict whether there ever will be anything truly resembling a Western-style democracy in any of the states of the former Soviet Union. But things will again never be the way they once were.

NOTES
i. The authors are grateful to Alexander I. Yuriev, St. Petersburg (Russia) State University, David Cratis Williams, University of Puerto Rico, and Bruce Gronbeck, University of Iowa for their advice and support. Scott Elliott, our research assistant, also provided invaluable help. Russian materials cited in the text were translated into English by M. K. Launer.
ii. In American society, this sometimes is manifest as an exposé or, in its milder form, an investigative article that reveals previously hidden information about governmental decisions, plans, expenditures. In totalitarian or authoritarian states, such materials usually emerge as part of a coordinated effort to implement specific governmental policies.
iii. It is important to keep in mind that governments in many of the nations deemed by Westerners to be the most pernicious nevertheless enjoy the support of an overwhelming majority of the citizenry.
iv. Even by 1990 rhetorical conditions within the country had changed to such an extent that all sessions of the new Soviet parliament were televised live throughout the nation “from gavel to gavel,” with deputies openly challenging the policies of the Gorbachev administration.
v. Prof. Alexander Yuriev, a political psychologist at St. Petersburg University, made a similar prediction at a Party Congress in 1982. Private communication, October 1996.
vi. One might argue that the current histrionic tone adopted by even the mainstream media in the U.S. has altered the traditional rhetorical function of the press.
vii. For an extended discussion, see Young and Launer, 1989.
viii. For an extended discussion, see Young and Launer, 1991.
ix. For a thorough discussion see Dawson, 1996. Dawson focuses her discussion on principles of resource mobilization and ignores the role of discourse, except in passing.
x. There is a striking resemblance here to the developmental steps of radical organizations in the US,for example, Students for a Democratic Society. A turning point in the evolution of that organization occurred in 1965, when its leadership “named” the established social mechanisms for making policy decisions and according status as the inherent cause of society’s ills. Much of that rhetoric, albeit in a milder form, was subsequently reflected in the mainstream press, and echoes of that era remain today in references to “the system.” Perhaps it should not be surprising that the Russian ecological movement would follow a similar path, for within the constraints of the Soviet system, they were clearly becoming radicalized and losing faith in the system is an essential step in that process.
xi. This argument is reminiscent of similar claims made in American rhetorical studies to the effect that on many issues technical elites have eliminated public opinion from policy formation.
xii. Academician N. N. Ponomarev-Stepnoi, Deputy Director of the Kurchatov Institute. Personal interview, June 1990.
xiii. Significantly, this leadership was drawn from both humanist intellectuals and scientists, a pattern to be seen throughout Eastern Europe in subsequent years.

REFERENCES
Cohen, S. F. (1980). The Soviet Union since Stalin. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Dawson, J. I. (1996). Eco-nationalism: Anti-nuclear Activism and National Identity in Russia, Lithuania, and Ukraine. Durham: Duke University Press.
Evseev, V. S. (1980). Partijnoe vozdejstvie pressy [The Influence of the Press in Support of the Party]. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoj literatury.
Hinds, L. B. and Windt, T. O. (1991). The Cold War as Rhetoric. The Beginnings, 1945-1950. New York: Praeger.
Hollander, G. D. (1972). Soviet Political Indoctrination. Developments in Mass Media and Propaganda Since Stalin. New York: Praeger.
Jameson L. (1986). Soviet Propaganda: On the Offensive in the 1980’s. In: Staar, R. F., Ed. (1986). Public Diplomacy. USA Versus USSR. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 18-45.
Johnstone, C. L. (1974). Thoreau and Civil Disobedience: A Rhetorical Paradox, Quarterly Journal of Speech. 60:3, 313-322.
Kenez, P. (1985). The Birth of the Propaganda State. Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917-1929. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Launer, M. K. (1989). US and Soviet Government-Sponsored Broadcasting: A Symbiotic Relationship? at The Future of International Broadcasting in the Age of Glasnost, a Freedoms Foundation at Valley Forge conference.
Marples, D. R. (1986). Chernobyl and Nuclear Power in the USSR. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Matuz, R. (1963). TV News in the Framework of Television Political Programmes. Radio and Television, 2:3-6.
Perelman, C. and Olbrechts-Tyteca, L. (1969). The New Rhetoric. A Treatise on Argumentation. Wilkinson, J. and Weaver, P., Trans. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
RFE/RL (April 1984). The Korean Airline Incident. Western Radio and Soviet Perceptions. Soviet Area Audience and Opinion Research, AR 4-84.
Siefert, M., Ed. (1991). Mass Culture and Perestroika in the Soviet Union. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Young, M. J. and Launer, M. K. (1989). Flights of Fancy, Flight of Doom. KAL 007 and Soviet-American Rhetoric. Lanham: University Press of America.
Young, M. J. and Launer, M. K. (1991). Redefining Glasnost’ in the Soviet Media: The Recontextualization of Chernobyl. Journal of Communication Spring [41:2], 102-124.

You may know – or you may not know – that the basic thesis of Ducrot’s theory of argumentation in the language-system (TAL) is that certain argumentative features are inherent to the language as a system. That means that language as a system, as an abstract, general structure (as defined by de Saussure), in itself possesses or contains some argumentative potential, some argumentative force and certain argumentative orientations, and not only language in action, its use in discourse and as a discourse. For example, there are certain language structures that (restrictively) impose certain argumentative orientation on the discourse, or in other words, language as an abstract system (at least partly) controls what discourse can say, and sets its limits. If that sounds too obvious (language controling what discourse can say), let me illustrate what I mean with a few examples. Suppose someone says to us (one of Ducrot’s favourite examples)

(1) It is 8 o’clock.

Is this an argument? Why would anybody be telling us that it is 8 o’clock? Just to let us know what time it is? Not likely, unless we wanted to know what time it was. But suppose we didn’t want to know what time it was, suppose somebody just said to us (1). Why would anybody want to do that? Obviously, because he or she, by saying (1), wanted to tell us something else. But, what possible follow-up(s), what possible conclusion(s) could such an utterance lead to? In a situation where we don’t know what the exact co(n)text is, there are many possibilities:

(1a) It is 8 o’clock Hurry up!
Take your time!
Turn on the radio!
Go brush your teeth!
………………
………………

Now, let us see what happens if we introduce two modifiers to (1), already and only respectively, as in

(1’) It is already 8 o’clock

and

(1’’) It is only 8 o’clock..

All things equal, from (1’) we can no longer conclude, “Take your time” (as we could from (1)), but only, “Hurry up”; on the other hand, from (1’’) we can no longer conclude, “Hurry up”, but only, “Take your time”. And why is that supposed to be so surprising? Because (1), (1’), and (1’’) refer to the very same (chronological) fact, namely, that it is 8 o’clock: while (1) allows a multitude of conclusions, (1’) only allows conclusions oriented in the direction of lateness, and (1’’) the conclusions oriented in the direction of earliness. How is that possible if (1), (1’) and (1’’) refer to the same chronological fact, if the basis of (1), (1’), and (1’’) is the same state of affairs? Well, this “same state of affairs” is viewed from different angles: in one case, (1’), 8 o’clock is viewed (and represented) as late, in the other, (1’’), 8 o’clock is viewed (and represented) as early.

What makes this differentiation of the same state of affairs possible is simply the introduction of two language particles, in our case, two adverbs.

Only words have the power to differentiate reality from the “facts”, only words can make the sameness different. In example (1’), already orients our conclusion toward lateness, no matter what time of day is mentioned after already; and in (1’’), only orients our conclusion toward earliness, no matter what time of day only is introducing. In other words, the argumentative orientations toward lateness and earliness respectively are inherent to – are written into – those two lexical units of the language-system.
In late 70s and early 80s, Ducrot’s argumentation theory was mainly concerned with language particles (something that some American linguists are trying to reinvent in the 90s) as mediators or vehicles of argumentative orientation. In late 80s and 90s Ducrot’s interest turned to topoi. He is using an Aristotelian term, and he thinks he is more or less faithful to his idea, though he admits he deformed it a little. The aim of this paper is to shed some light on this “deformation”.
It is today almost a commonplace (a topos of its own) that for Aristotle a topos is a place to look for arguments, a heading or department where a number of rhetorical arguments (of the same kind) can be easily found, ready for use. According to Aristotle, topoi are supposed to be of two kinds: general or common topoi, appropriate for use everywhere and anywhere, regardless of situation, and specific topoi, in their applicability limited to different sciences, fields of knowledge, expertise, opinion, situation, etc. Or, as Aristotle (1926/1991: 1.ii 22) puts it:
“By specific topics I mean the propositions peculiar to each class of things, by universal those common to all alike”.

In works on Aristotle (on his theory of rhetoric), there seems to be no unique classification of general topoi, or a consensus how such a classification should look like; what is more or less certain, and agreed upon is that topoi deal with three basic topics (sic!), common to the three kinds of rhetoric:
1. more or less (of something),
2. possible or impossible, and
3. what did happen and what did not.

And, as Aristotle says (1926/1991: 1. ii 21), “those topics will not make a man practically wise about any particular class of things, because they do not deal with any particular subject matter”.

With Romans topoi became loci, and Cicero literally defines them as places, as “the home of all proofs” (1942/1998, 2. xxxviii. 162), “pigeonholes (this “pigeonholes” are product of translators licentia poetica) in which arguments are stored” (1942/1992: ii. 5) or simply “storehouses of arguments” (1942/1992: xxxi. 109). Only with Quintilian (1921/1953: 5. x. 23 sq) do we get some “directions for use” as to how to extract arguments from those places, namely the famous net quis?, quid?, cur?, ubi?, quando?, quomodo?, quibus auxiliis?
For the Ancients, the topoi or loci were therefore places that hid ready-made arguments, but strangely enough, nobody devoted much time or space to the architecture of those places: where those arguments were hidden, how they got there, and why. Topoi were considered as a kind of heuristic devices, something a well-educated person knew how to use, while little people, obviously, didn’t have any need for.
For the New Rhetoric (Perelman 1958/1983: 113) – in this short overview, I’ll have to skip almost 2000 years of (mostly) degeneration of rhetoric – topoi aren’t places that hide arguments any more, but very general premises that help us build values and hierarchies, something Perelman was especially concerned about. But even Perelman left topoi on a somewhat descriptive level, and didn’t go into the technology of their functioning or their architectural design.
Strangely enough, the same year that Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca published their New Rhetoric, Stephen Toulmin published his Uses of Argument, probably the most detailed study of how topoi work. I say “strangely enough” because he doesn’t use the term topos or topoi, but somehow judicial term “warrant”. The reason for that seems obvious: he is trying to cover different “fields of argument”, and not all fields of argument use topoi as their argumentative principles or bases of their argumentation. According to Toulmin (1958/1995: 94-107), if we have an utterance of the form, “If D then C” – where D stands for data or facts, and C for claim or conclusion – than warrant would act as a bridge and authorise the step from D to C. But then, a warrant may have a limited applicability, so Toulmin introduces qualifiers Q, indicating the strength conferred by the warrant, and conditions of rebuttal R, indicating circumstances in which the general authority of the warrant would have to be set aside. And finally, in case the warrant is challenged in any way, we need some backing. As Toulmin (1958/1995: 105) puts it:
“… Statements of warrants […] are hypothetical, bridge-like statements, but the backing for warrants can be expressed in the form of categorical statements of fact.”

What about Ducrot, how does he define a topos? He defines it as a principle (or, as some of his followers say, “a messier”), that ensures the validity or the legitimacy of the move from utterance A(rgument) to utterance C(onclusion). Let’s take Ducrot’s another favourite example

(2) It is warm (A). Let’s go for a walk (C).

Topos is supposed to relate two properties here: a first property P (warmth), connected with the argument A, and a second property Q (pleasantness of a walk), connected with the conclusion C.

And what are the characteristics of topos, this tacit, unspoken principle, which is to be found in the background of argumentative discourse-segments? Ducrot’s claim is that it has three characteristics: first, it is general; second, it is represented as a shared belief, that is, a belief that is common to a certain group of people; and third, it is scalar. Topos, ensuring the validity of the move from A to C in (2) could therefore read

(3) T= More it is worm, more it is pleasant to go for a walk

I said “could read” because topoi are no self-subsistent, independent entities per se, like platonian ideas, but should always be reconstructed from a given argumentative string.

And how is the generality of the topos to be understood? It is to be understood that topos is a very general structure or matrix, allowing a multitude of particular conclusions, which are not obligatory or binding in a way, for example, syllogism is (which of course means that topos is not universal). A topos (i.e. summoning a topos or evoking it or using it) can allow some conclusion, but it does not necessarily bind to that conclusion or in other words: if we accept the argument, we aren’t obliged to accept the conclusion as well. For example, in response to (2), which is an invitation for a walk, we could easily say as

(2’) It is warm. But let’s go for a swim instead.
(T= More it is warm, more it is pleasant to get some refreshment in the water)

or

(2’’) It is warm. But let’s go better play cards in the shade.
(T= More it is warm, more it pleasant to be in the shade).

Which means that in both cases our addressee recognised the validity of the topos used in our conclusion, without actually agreeing with it in that particular situation. He/she found some other topos more appropriate to the situation and used it to support a different conclusion instead.

When we say that topos is general, not universal, we also admit that there might be exceptions to it, but that does not prevent the topos from being valid, which is exactly the point the famous formula attributed to Aristotle makes: “exceptions make it possible to uphold the rule in unforeseen cases”; in such cases, the notion of exception makes it possible to uphold the validity of the rule nevertheless.
How can we prove the general character of the topos? Well, once again we have to consider the refutations of an argument: very often those refutations take into account the generality of the topos. Let us suppose (once again) that it is warm, and that I am using that (once again) as an argument for suggesting a walk. You can object: “It was also warm yesterday and yet it was an unpleasant walk”. That means that you are pointing out that there are exceptions to the rule, which I have used, and in saying that, you are suggesting that perhaps I shouldn’t use that rule for that particular case. But by pointing out that there are exceptions, you recognise that the rule which I have used is a general rule, and at the same time, you are telling me that maybe – according to what you think – I wasn’t in position to use that rule in my particular situation. You do not deny its generality of the rule at all, you are simply showing me that there are exceptions to it and you are suggesting that we may be in one of those exceptional cases.
We also said the topos is represented as a shared belief, a belief that has been accepted beforehand by a community which the locutor and the allocutor (or addressee) belong to. In other words, representing topos as a shared belief means that some community (be it a nation or a small subcultural group) recognises its validity, i.e. validity and justifiability of the conclusions based on it. But, as we have already seen, that doesn’t imply that every member of the community would necessarily use the same topoi in identical situations: the use of some topos, or a conclusion allowed by this topos, can always be refuted by another (generally accepted) topos.
And finally, when we say that the topos is scalar, we are saying two things. First, properties P and Q themselves are scalar. That is to say, that they are properties, which you can have more or less of. Predicates P and Q, whom a topos connects, must therefore be considered as scales. Second, there are different degrees of intensity in the possession of characteristic P and in the possession of characteristic Q. But that does not at all mean that the arguments and the conclusions themselves are scalar. The properties used or mentioned within the topos are scalar, but not the propositions used in discourse as actual arguments or conclusions; they already represent or take as starting point a certain degree on the two scales. Let’s have a look at the following example (I’m deliberately taking all the examples from Ducrot’s last book Slovenian lectures (1996)):

(4) “It’s less than ten degrees, take a coat with you”.

There is no doubt that neither A nor C is scalar: it cannot be more or less ten degrees; it either is or it isn’t ten degrees. And you cannot more or less take a coat; you either take it or you don’t. So, the indications contained in A and in C are not scalar ones. But that does not prevent the topos, which is the warrant for that string, from being describable in scalar terms. The topos here is

(5) T= The colder it is, the warmer you must dress

and it relates one property P, which is the cold, and another property Q, which is, say, garment warmth. The indications contained in discourse segments A and C, “It’s less than ten degrees”, and, “Take a coat with you”, represent degrees within those general properties P and Q, and you will, I’m sure, agree that it can be more or less cold, and that we can wear more or less warm clothes.

There is one other idea about the scalarity of the topos that Ducrot devotes special attention to. The idea is that the relationship which a topos establishes between P and Q is itself scalar. We have already seen that P and Q are scales (it can be more or less cold, we can dress more or less warmly): a topos indicates that there is a scalar relationship between the degrees of property P and the degrees of property Q. Which means that going along the scale of property P in a certain direction also means going along the scale of property Q in a certain direction: if you move up or down one scale, you move up or down the other.

Let us go back to the example (4) for a moment. Suppose it is not less than 10 degrees, but say around 20 degrees. In such a situation one wouldn’t say, “It’s less than 10 degrees. Take a coat”, but rather, “It’s around 20 degrees. Don’t take a coat”, while the topos used would still be the same, maybe just in another form. Which brings us to a yet new idea: the distinction between topos and topical form, a distinction that is closely related to the notion of scalarity

Once more, let’s take a topos relating property P and property Q in a scalar way. We have already seen that when we move along the scale P in one direction, we also move along the scale Q in one direction: when we go up P, we go up Q. It is not difficult to notice that saying: “The more you go up P, the more you go up Q”, amounts to the same thing as saying: “The more you go down P, the more you go down Q”. If, the more you go up the warmth scale, the more you go up the pleasantness scale, it must be the case that, the more you go down the warmth scale, the more you go down the pleasantness scale. So that the same topos, which relates warmth (P) and pleasantness (Q) in a scalar way, can have two forms, which Ducrot symbolises as

(6)
+P, +Q
-P, -Q.

Those are the two topical forms, FP’ and FP’’, of the same topos T. The same relationship between warmth and pleasantness can be considered under two forms, positively in one case and negatively in the other. And there is more to that. Consider the following topical forms (where P still stands for warmth, and Q for pleasantness):

(7)
+P –Q
-P +Q

Those forms would read, “More it is warm, less it pleasant to go for a walk”, and, “Less it is warm, more it is pleasant to go for a walk”. And we have to admit that in different times, and different situations in our lives (often it is pretty difficult to say exactly when and why) we use both pairs of topical forms, (6) and (7): the former, according to which it is pleasant when it is warm, and the latter, according to which it is not pleasant when it is warm.

At first, Ducrot was using topoi only in that sense, as warrants (in Toulmin’s words) that enable/authorise the passage from the utterance-argument to the utterance-conclusion. For instance, if we take the example (4) again, topos authorising the passage from A to C would be something like (5): “The colder it is, warmer you must dress”. The problem was that topoi had to be reconstructed from the given argumentative strings, which made them look pretty arbitrary. But then Ducrot noticed that they are or that they can be much more than that, that they are in fact discourse fragments contained (written) in (at least some) words of the language-system. Let us take a look at the following four adjectives (I borrow them from Ducrot (1996) as well):

(8) courageous, timorous, prudent, rash.

You will have no problem noticing that in a way those four adjectives belong to a single category, and that they describe the same kind(s) of conduct (or, to be more exact, two related kinds of conduct), but viewed in different ways. Ducrot would say that in the language-system itself, we have two topoi, T1 and T2, for every situation (as we have already seen with warmth and pleasantness): in our present case (8), topos T1 ascribes value to the fact of confronting danger, to the fact of taking risks, and it does so by relating the notion of risk and the notion of goodness. Topos T2, on the contrary, relates the notion of risk and the notion of evil (badness). Therefore, in one case, the fact of taking risks is viewed as something good, in the other, as something evil, and at different times, depending mostly on what our discursive intentions are, we represent risk as worth taking and we have consideration for the person who takes it, and at others, on the contrary, we represent the fact of taking risks as something bad.
It is not difficult to see how those four adjectives might be classified: two of them implement topos T1, and the other two, topos T2. Which ones? Courageous implements topos T1: when one says that someone is courageous, one is attributing some positive value to him, and one is attributing some positive value to him because he dares to take risks; what we have in the adjective courageous is a positive valorisation of risk-taking. In the case of the adjective timorous, the topos used is still topos T1, the topos that values risk-taking positively, but when we say that someone is timorous, and we are attributing some negative value to him. We are attributing some negative value to him because he does not dare take a risk, which implies that risk-taking is good, at least in certain circumstances. Courageous and timorous are therefore based on the same topos T1, but courageous is used to praise those who dare take risks, and timorous is used to criticise those who do not manage to do so.
What about the two remaining adjectives: prudent and rash? They too implement the same topos, this time topos T2, a topos that depreciates risk-taking. When we say that someone is prudent, except if we do so ironically, we ascribe a certain quality to that person, and we praise him because he can keep away from risks: in that way, we consider risk-taking as bad. In the case of rash, the topos used is the same again, T2. But this time, when we describe someone as being rash, we are criticising him, we are blaming him for taking risks in an unacceptable and unjustified way. We are blaming him for not implementing topos T2, just as we are congratulating the prudent person for implementing it.
We can further distinguish courageous and timorous on the one hand, and prudent and rash on the other by making subdivisions within each of those two groups. To obtain those subgroups, we’ll have to bring in the topical forms. As far as topos T1 is concerned, we have two topical forms: FT1‘ and FT1‘’; and similarly, as far as T2 is concerned, we have FT2‘ and FT2‘’. FT1‘ will be something like, “The more one takes risks (+R), the worthier one is (+V)”, and FT1’’ will be the converse of the first topical form, that is, “The less one takes risks (-R), the less one is doing what one should (-V)”. Now that we have distinguished those two forms, we can distinguish courageous and timorous, which both refer to that topos. We will say that courageous implements the topical form FT1‘, “The more one takes risks, the worthier one is”, and timorous the topical form FT1‘’, “The less one takes risks, the less worthy one is”.
The same can be done with the two adjectives involving topos T2, which depreciate risk-taking: FT2‘ (“The greater the risk, the greater the evil”) and on the other hand, FT2‘’ (“The lesser the risk, the lesser the evil”), which are implemented by the two adjectives prudent and rash.

So, according to Ducrot, we would get the following scheme:

(9)
T1
+P, +Q (more risk, more good) courageous
-P, -Q (less risk, less good) timorous

T2
+P, +Q (more risk, more evil) rash
-P, -Q (less risk, less evil) prudent

But there is another, better, even more Aristotelian way of representing T2. Namely

(10)
T2
+P, -Q (more risk, less good) rash
-P, +Q (less risk, more good) prudent

And why is that way of representing topical forms better? Two reasons, mainly. The first one is methodological and the second one epistemological. Let me explain what I mean, using another group of four adjectives (needless to say I borrowed them from Ducrot as well): generous, avaricious, thrifty, spendthrift. According to Ducrot we would get the following scheme:

(11)
T1 (More money you give away, better it is)
+P, +Q (More money, more good) generous
-P, -Q (Less money, less good) avaricious

T2 (More money you give away, worse it is)
+P, +Q (More money, more evil) thrifty
-P, -Q (Less money, less evil) spendthrift

But reformulating T2 as

(12)
T2
+P, -Q (More money, less good) thrifty
-P, +Q (Less money, more good) spendthrift

is theoretically more appropriate because it uses the same predicates and the same description for the same variable (“good” for Q) as T1 (with which it compares); it allows us to group different topical forms not only in relation to how they describe, but what they describe. Namely (if we go back to the first four adjectives)

(13)
+P, +Q (more risk, more good) courageous
+P, -Q (more risk, less good) rash
for risk-taking, and

-P, -Q (less risk, less good) timorous
-P, +Q (less risk, more good) prudent
for risk-avoiding.

Why is that important? Because it lets us see that there are the same extra-linguistic entities that language views as complete oppositions. To the extent that it even coined different expressions for them: courageous and rash for risk-taking and timorous and prudent for risk avoiding.
Obviously, courageous, rash, timorous and prudent are complex or compound predicates (or to put it more modestly, adjectives), consisting of a description of some extra-linguistic entity (I would like to avoid saying “fact”, because I’m not really sure what a fact is) + its evaluation. We could hardly say the same, for example, for “good” or “bad”; in fact, I think they could be described as the building stones of those complex predicates, the pure evaluation.
But then, is it really the same extra-linguistic entities that the language views differently? When we say that someone is courageous, aren’t we saying that he is taking risks, and that we approve of it, while, on the other hand, we label someone as rash when we want to say that he is taking risks, and that we don’t approve of it? And, on the other hand, don’t we say that someone is prudent if we want to say that he is avoiding risks, and that we approve of it, while we label someone as timorous when we want to say that he is avoiding even reasonable and justified risks, and that we blame him for that? If so, are those extra-linguistic entities really the same? And if they are really extra-linguistic, how can we say at all they are the same?

REFERENCES
Aristotle (1926/1991). Art of Rhetoric. Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press (Loeb Classical Library).
Cicero (1942/1988). De oratore. Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press (Loeb Classical Library).
Cicero (1942/1992). De partitione oratoria. Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press (Loeb Classical Library).
Ducrot, O. (1996). Slovenian lectures/ Conférences slovènes. Ljubljana: ISH.
Perelman, Ch. & L. Olbrechts-Tyteca (1958/1983). Traité de l’argumentation – La nouvelle rhétorique. Bruxelles: Editions de l’Université de Bruxelles.
Quintilian (1921/1953). Institutio oratoria. Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press (Loeb Classical Library).
Toulmin, S.E. (1958/1995). The Uses of Argument. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

The centuries-long discussion as to what constitutes “good” argument has often found supporters and opponents on the basis of the standards selected to evaluate argument. Ancient standards of technical validity have been the subject of some twentieth-century scrutiny. No issue is more fundamental to the study of argumentation than the question of what constitutes good argument. Our legitimacy as critics, practitioners and teachers of argumentation rests upon our ability to evaluate, construct and describe good arguments. Historically, argument scholars have relied primarily upon formal standards borrowed from the field of logic to provide necessary evaluative criteria. In the latter half of this century, however, those criteria have increasingly been attacked as being inappropriate or, at least, insufficient for the study of both public and personal argumentative discourse. Stephen Toulmin has suggested we replace the mathematical model of argument with one from jurisprudence, thus focusing on the soundness of the claims we make, especially as we use argument in “garden variety discourse.”(Toulmin, 1958). Other theorists quickly followed Toulmin’s lead.

1. Recent Interpretations of Good Argument
While a few theorists (Willard, 1979) have gone so far as to reject logical standards, most others continue to recognize their usefulness as a part of broader schemas for evaluation of argument. Toulmin’s dissatisfaction with the rigidity and formalism of logic led him to propose a more open and flexible model of argument and to suggest that the evaluation of arguments involves the application of both traditional field invariant standards and previously overlooked field specific standards (Toulmin, 1958). Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca have advanced the concept of the universal audience composed of critical listeners, which presumably restrains advocates from making spurious arguments. At the same time, they suggest we consider adherence as the goal of argument, a focus on the intersection of psychological effects and logical strength (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1969). Drawing on the work of earlier scholars, McKerrow describes a good argument as one  which provides “pragmatic justification (McKerrow, 1977). This interpretation places emphasis on the “rational perusal of arguments” by an audience in a dialectic-like relationship. Farrell interprets validity in terms of “soundness” of a rhetorical argument. An argument is sound if it conforms to three conditions:
1. is addressed to an empowered and involved audience,
2. conforms to the consensual standards of the specific field, and
3. is consistent with social knowledge (Farrell, 1977).

Zarefsky defines good argument as one that is “reasonable,” and one is reasonable if “the form of inference is free of obvious defects, and the underlying assumptions of the argument are shared by the audience” (Zarefsky,1981:88).

Collectively, these authors and others suggest that good arguments are ones that have, at least, some claim to rationality and are based upon premises and standards acceptable to the specific audiences being addressed. While these conditions serve as minimal standards for good argument, they are, in our judgment, incomplete and lacking in explanatory power. What is missing from current analyses is a consideration of the role of language. Careful language usage is necessary for the construction of sound arguments, and effective language is the key to persuasive argumentation. We define a good argument as one that is linguistically sound. The term “linguistically sound” is intended to encompass three conditions. A linguistically sound argument:
1. conforms to the traditional field invariant standards of inductive and deductive argument,
2. is based upon data appropriate to the audience and field, and
3. is expressed in language that enhances the evocative and ethical force of argument.

In the sections that follow, we will demonstrate how each of these conditions is linguistically based and how a linguistic perspective helps to explain the strength of the argument.

2. Field Invariant Standards
Even a cursory examination of argument suggests a close relationship between language and argument. It is through language that we describe relationships and create meaning about the world around us. Concepts such as correlation and causation allow us to perceive relationships differently than was possible before we had appropriated these methodological terms. We may have an intuitive sense of justice and love, but our ability to differentiate them occurs through language. Thus, language is the means by which we bridge the gap between the complex and confusing world of our senses and a more ordered world of meaning.
In his thoughtful essay, “Argument as Linguistic Opportunity,” Balthrop examines argument from a linguistic perspective and establishes a strong relationship between language and discurive reasoning. Discursive reasoning itself arises in discourse and shares its characteristics: that is, it posits relations both syntactically and semantically and through the fundamental representativeness of linguistic symbols. Second, discursive reasoning is sequential – for without sequence, verbal expression cannot exist. It is from such insights that Langer observed in Philosophy in a New Key, “the laws of reasoning, our clearest formulation of exact knowledge, are sometimes known as ‘laws of discursive thought.” If the symbolic function of argument is reason-giving or presenting justification, then that function is accomplished through discursive means – for reason giving requires analysis beyond mere expression. And, in the practical world of both the naive and the more sophisticated social actor, such analysis is usually conducted linguistically (Balthrop, 1980: 190).

Thus language becomes the key to discursive reasoning, and is central to the whole activity of reason giving. Balthrop goes further to argue that linguistic forms reflect how people think – at least at the deep structure level. He continues:
The subject-predicate structure for human thought may, in fact, be universal. Langer concludes that “to all speakers of Indo-European languages the classical syllogism seems to be a logic of ‘natural inference,’ because they speak and think in subjectpredicate forms.” Izutsu goes one step further contending that “far from being a peculiarity of Western thought /predicatesubject thought/ seems to be normal and universal wherever the human mind has attained a certain level of logical thinking as far, at least, as it is carried on by means of verbal symbols” (1980:195).
An understanding of the relationship between language and argument is important because it explains why the traditional field in-variant standards of inductive and deductive argument reveal potential problems in the thinking process. Even if the traditional standards are not a perfect reflection of the ways in which experience, language, and thought are related, no one has yet provided more useful tests. Although some may argue that Toulmin’s concept of field dependent standards makes traditional invariant standards irrelevant, it is well to remember that Toulmin, himself, did not propose field variant as a substitute for field invariant standards. Moreover, research to date has tended to reveal differences among fields only in the importance assigned to particular forms and standards of argument rather than in the forms and standards themselves. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s concept of a universal audience is too abstract to be of much practical use for either the construction or criticism of arguments. And even Fisher’s concepts of narrative probability and narrative fidelity are only more generalized, and therefore, less analytical, forms of the traditional standards for evaluating arguments.
Thus, the field invariant standards of argument are an important component of a linguistically sound argument. They are grounded in our language and thought structures; they are supported by historic experience, and alternative standards seem to be insufficient. As Zarefsky concludes, reliance on these standards “in the past has led to satisfactory results far more often than not” (Zarefsky, 1980:88).

3. Data Appropriate to the Audience
The second condition for a linguistically sound argument is that the data must be appropriate to the audience and field. The audience has always been central to rhetorical theory so that Toulmin’s concept of field invariant standards of argument has been readily embraced by rhetorical scholars. Much of the literature of both classical rhetorical theory and contemporary field theory emphasizes the need for advocates to build their arguments on premises that are shared by their audiences. Bitzer’s “revisitation” of the enthymeme grounds his analysis in what the rhetor shares with his or her audience (Bitzer, 1959). So much importance is placed on shared assumptions that it sometimes appears that audiences can only be addressed on subjects they already believe in. What is often not discussed, however, is how an advocate can proceed if her basic assumptions differ from those of her audience. An examination of the role of language in argument is helpful in this regard.
Language can be used to create a greater harmony of beliefs than might otherwise exist. The ambiguous nature of values and the abstract language used to identify them make it possible to minimize differences and maximize agreement through careful conceptual choices. Kenneth Burke’s description of how dialectical terms (terms of opposition) may become transcendent (or terms of union, god terms) is a good illustration of this process (Burke, 1945). In recent years, politicians have regularly assumed that they and their audiences share a comon commitment to equal opportunity. Although most American audiences probably believe in equal opportunity at some level, such a belief does not translate into a common commitment to affirmative action; nor is a belief in affirmative action the same thing as a belief in racial and gender quotas. Thus, the ability to identify a common assumption and to link that assumption to an audience may depend in large part in the language of identification employed.
Not only are our beliefs abstract, but our belief systems encompass many different assumptions that exist in some loose hierarchy of values. This multiple, hierarchical nature of premises provides an additional opportunity for using language to establish a common ground. A linguistic bridge that embraces multiple beliefs can sometimes create a common ground out of conflicting assumptions. President Kennedy’s concept of a Peace Corps created such a linguistic bridge. The Peace Corps’ concept incorporated elements of economic assistance, service opportunities for young and elderly persons, and greater American involvement in foreign nations.
While the community service aspect of the program had relatively broad appeal, the ideas of increased foreign spending and greater U.S. involvement in the problems of third world nations were not popular with large segments of the American public. Kennedy’s labeling of the program as the Peace Corps allowed him to embrace all of these values and minimize resistance by linguistically identifying it with the higher, and more encompassing, shared value of peace. Premises are, of course, not the only form of data. When the shared assumptions of speaker and audience are insufficient and need to be built upon, evidence is required. The amount and type of evidence needed depends upon the expectations of the specific field and audience. But even within those constraints, language factors can significantly affect the impact and acceptability of that evidence.
When a range of expert testimony is available, the author’s language should be a fundamental consideration in deciding which source to rely on. The language used in the evidence should be free of offensive references. Currently, evidence which relies on “he” as a pronoun for persons in general may function to alienate certain audiences. In addition, the language should be appropriate to the level and background of the audience, and it should enhance the emotional and ethical appeal of the argument. Similarly, even statistical evidence is frequently difficult for audiences to comprehend so that special attention should be given to explaining and interpreting its meaning. For general audiences, the use of non-technical terminology is especially important. Whether data of fact or opinion, language functions centrally in both creating understanding of evidence for an audience and shaping audience attitudes toward that data.

4. Enhancing Emotional and Ethical Force
A third condition for a linguistically sound argument is that it be expressed in language that enhances the argument’s emotional and ethical force. The two preceding conditions of a good argument have generally been recognized by other authors, although they have focused less attention on the linguistic dimensions of these standards. The third condition of argument, however, has been largely overlooked as a positive element of argument. Logicians have generally viewed language as a negative factor in argument. Many of the logical fallacies, for example, are based upon language problems or upon unacceptable emotional or ethical appeals. Much of the rhetorical discussion of style has viewed it as an artistic adornment that functions to enhance effect but is largely unrelated to argument.
It is not our purpose here to disagree with specific categories of logical fallacies. We recognize that language can be misused and that the substitution of emotion or appeals to authority for reasoned argumentation is inappropriate. Nor do we wish to devalue the artistic dimensions of rhetoric. Rather it is our position that language is not only inherent to the argument process, but that an understanding of its proper role resolves the tension between the standards of logical validity and audience effectiveness.
Alan Gross and Marcelo Dascal in their essay “The Question of the Conceptual Unity of Aristotle’s Rhetoric” argue that in the Rhetoric inference (argument) is intimately related to language and style as well as to ethos and pathos. They describe Aristotle’s theory of language and style in the following terms:
Though little more than a sketch, Aristotle’s theory of style and arrangement is clearly cognitive in that it depends on the inferential abilities of particular audiences. Style is both a level at which discourse is pitched (in modern linguistics register) and a set of semantic, syntactic and prosodic variants within that register. In the former sense, a particular style is appropriate if it is proportional to situation and subject matter; in Aristotle’s words, “the lexis will be appropriate if it is … proportional /analogon/” (3.7.1). The mathematical analogy is exactly right; it emphasizes the close fit between a rhetorical situation and its verbal response (Gross and Dascal, 1998: 9).
In another passage, Gross and Dascal elaborate on Aristotle’s theory of emotion: …….. with Aristotle’s theory of emotions, a cognitive theory in which inference plays a central role ….. an audience experiences an emotional state when the necessary and sufficient conditions of that state have been met. Beliefs that speakers instill in audiences can never guarantee their anger. It certainly helps when audiences are, as Aristotle says, “irascible and easily stirred to anger” (2.2.10). Nevertheless, since the belief that one has been belittled or insulted is a necessary condition for the presence of this emotional state, speakers can stimulate anger by increasing inferential likelihood of that belief. Equally, speakers can dissipate anger by decreasing that likelihood. Inference to a articular belief or set of beliefs is a necessary condition of each emotion with which Aristotle deals – fear, shame, kindliness, pity, anger, friendship and their opposites (1998:9).

In his classic article on Aristotle’s enthymeme, James McBurney makes much the same point concerning how the forms of proof in Aristotle – ethos, pathos, and logos –relate to the dominant deductive and inductive forms of argument, the enthymeme and the example.
Rather than viewing the enthymeme and example as derivative of logos alone, he depicts both forms of argument as a product of the possible interaction of ethos, pathos, and logos. Hence the appeal to emotion, the possible instrument of style, such as the metaphor, or the character of the speaker may all interrelate in the production of an enthymeme. In this sense, the distinction between between language and argument may disappear, even in Aristotle (McBurney, 1936).
Even without an elaborate analysis of the cognitive dimensions of particular figures of speech such as those found in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, it is possible to demonstrate with references to familiar examples the evocative force that appropriate language gives to an argument. In his “House Divided” speech Lincoln used a powerful metaphor to express the fundamental claim of his speech.
“A house divided against itself cannot stand.” I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other (Peterson, 1954:491).

Lincoln’s metaphor was not a mere rhetorical flourish. It was, rather, an integral part of his proof, and functions as a good example of metaphor as enthymeme. At that point in United States history, families were literally being torn apart over the issue of slavery so that the reference to a “house divided” served both as a appropriate metaphor and as compelling evidence of the crisis facing the nation.
William Faulkner’s speech accepting the Nobel Price offers a different, perhaps even more moving example, of how language enriches and empowers argument:
I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure; that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last red and dying evening, that even then there will be one more sound: that of his puny, inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s duty is to write about these things (Faulkner, 1954: 815-16).
Faulkner’s argument is a simple one, but it is the imagery, the language of his imagination which gives the argument its ethical and emotional force.
In the terminology of the ancient Greeks, logos is not necessarily separate from ethos and pathos. Through the effective use of language these three forms of proof become united to form a linguistically sound argument.
A focus on language as the primary instrument of argument suggests that three necessary conditions exist for good argument. This paper explores the role of language in field invariant standards, how language functions in selecting and presenting data appropriate to the audience, and how language can enhance the emotional and ethical force of argument.

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