1. Introduction
Rhetorical practice has been retheorized in recent years to include not only linguistic and visual signs, but also material places and objects. Rhetorical studies of places and/or objects, such as quilts, gravestones, coffee houses, markets, parks, cityscapes, museums, and monuments, have made the claim repeatedly that objects and built environments may be just as rhetorical as words (Biesecker, 2002; Blair, 1999; Blair, 2001; Blair & Michel, 2000; Blair & Michel, 2007; Dickinson, 1997; Dickinson, Ott, & Aoki, 2005; Dickinson, Ott & Aoki, 2006; Gallagher, 1999; Gallagher, 2004; Zagacki & Gallagher, 2009). These claims have prompted Ott and Dickinson (2009), in an important recent synthesis, to take the position that “visual rhetoric in everyday life is not merely visual; it is not only an effect of the eye or a consequence of cognition” (p. 397). Simply put, visual images, and even more importantly objects and places, cannot be reduced to the ocular.

Claims about the argumentative character of place have been less plentiful, but the parallel seems to us reasonable. Indeed, we argued at the last ISSA conference that places have argumentative “potency” and, as Dickinson and Ott also suggest, that their character cannot be contained “merely,” within the visual (Blair, Balthrop, & Michel, 2007, p. 146). Still, what remains unclear is how objects or places take on argumentative force, how they accrete to themselves the capacity to argue a case to those who encounter or traverse them. We have proposed more recently that to treat “commemorative places as themselves rhetorical” is not to deny the “significance of the supplementary rhetoric that a place may give rise to, and that in turn reinterprets or reperforms the place.” We maintained, furthermore, that “juxtapositions of the material (physical place) and its circulations,” such as speech, ritual, journalistic accounts, and so forth, allow us to better understand the rhetorical dimensions of commemoration (Balthrop, Blair, & Michel, 2010, p. 172). Here we take up this suggestion more directly in analyzing the articulations of national Tombs of the Unknown Soldier (or Unknown Warrior) with public, press, and government discourses; ceremonial events; symbolic geographies; and cultural allusions and mythoi. Our reason for doing so is to show specifically how an argument is forged, in a particular historical moment, by a commemorative place in its articulations with these other cultural practices (e.g., Grossberg, 1992; Grossberg, 1997).[i] That is, while it may seem clear that places “speak,” we try to establish how they may speak argumentatively. Importantly, of course, the mediating rituals, speech, media accounts, and interpretations do not remain stable, so the argument made by a place certainly will change with its different circulations and articulations historically.

Many scholars have argued that both the political eddies and commemorative practices set off by World War I (WWI) have been deeply influential of international politics and commemorative works in later decades of the twentieth century and in our own time (e.g., Capdevila & Voldman, 2006; Laqueur, 1996).  With respect to commemoration in particular, at least three claims can be made for WWI as foundational for later practice. The first and most obvious was the nearly ubiquitous effort to remember the missing, those whose bodies were never found after the war and thus were unavailable for burial. The standard material strategy of commemorating them involved massive walls of the missing, inscribed with the names of all those who did not have graves. The British, for example, inscribed names at their massive Memorial to the Missing of the Somme, at Thiepval in France, and at the Menin Gate, in Ypres, Belgium (Stamp, 2006). Similarly, lists of American missing were inscribed on the walls of chapels in U.S. military cemeteries. In more recent years, walls of the missing have morphed into walls listing all the dead of a tragic or violent event. Although the U.S. Vietnam Veterans Memorial is usually taken to be the harbinger of contemporary memorials that name the dead, its designer, Maya Lin, has pointed to the direct influence on her work of Lutyens’ Thiepval memorial (Lin, 2000, 4:09).

Second, some nation-states following WWI chose to commemorate the dead with what they called utilitarian or “living” memorials designed to enhance life for those who remained. Sometimes they would take the form of scholarships or endowments, but usually they were useful structures, like parks, bridges, hospitals, meeting halls, or schools. The utilitarian memorial concept was highly contested in a number of Western nations in the interwar period, but it became the order of the day following the Second World War (Shanken, 2002). It remains a popular, if usually reticent, commemorative strategy.

The Tombs of the Unknown constituted the third influential innovation of the interwar period; like the other commemorative novelties of WWI, this was an international phenomenon, but one that focused in each case upon a national “hero.”[ii] The first national Tomb of the Unknown memorials appeared in France and Britain in 1920; Portugal, Italy, and the U.S. followed suit in 1921, as did Belgium in 1922.[iii] Many of the other participant nations, empires, and/or former client states of empires would create such memorials in the interwar years, including Austria, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Hungary, India, Poland, Romania, and Serbia. Australia and Canada added their offerings in 1993 and 2000 respectively, and the most recent World War I Tomb of the Unknown was unveiled in New Zealand in 2004.

There is no mystery about the conditions that gave rise to this new mode of commemoration. The mechanized killing, trench warfare, and long stalemated battles that characterized WWI resulted in massive numbers of unidentified dead – the unknowns (see, e.g., Kramer, 2007). Bodies were buried hastily in “no man’s land” between the trenches. But as battle lines shifted, individual graves, sometimes even whole temporary cemeteries, were obliterated during massive bombardments. As a result, hundreds of thousands of soldiers from WWI are listed as “missing,” with more than 700,000 from the British Empire, France, and the United States (Duffy, 2008-2009). Many of the missing do have graves, of course, some in mass burial locations, others in individual graves marked “unknown.” Laqueur (1996) puts the count of individual, unknown graves at 180,861 for the British Empire alone (p. 124).

The national Tomb of the Unknown memorials have often been remarked as new to the early twentieth century, but they have been little studied. For example, such eminent thinkers as Benedict Anderson (2006, p. 10) and Hannah Arendt (1959, p. 161) have commented on the Tombs in thoughtful ways. And there have been helpful scholarly observations about individual cases, for example, Moffett’s (2007) insightful claim that Great Britain’s Tomb of the Unknown Warrior “completes” London’s other well-known WWI monument, the Cenotaph (p. 234). Still, given the scope and significance of the international and interdisciplinary literatures on the history of commemorative practice, this research “gap” is not only surprising but quite problematic, given the echoes of interwar commemorative practices and issues up to and in our own time.

Moreover, while it certainly is the case that WWI set a tone for subsequent twentieth and twenty-first century commemoration, issues regarding the unknowns and the missing from WWI itself are far from resolved. In 2009 a British historian located a long forgotten archive at Red Cross headquarters in Geneva, with information about deaths, burials, and captures of some 20 million soldiers from WWI. According to Williams (2009), this archive contains information that may aid in identifying many of those whose graves in battlefield cemeteries have been marked “unknown” for almost a century. Likewise, in the spring of 2008, a mass grave was discovered in northern France, containing the remains of 250 British and Australian soldiers killed in the battle of Fromelles, on July 19, 1916 (Samuel, 2008). At this writing 96 of the dead have been identified by DNA and other means (Australian Fromelles 2010). The first new Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery built in almost fifty years was dedicated on July 19, 2010, in Fromelles, in a ceremony that included the final, 250th, interment, a soldier who remains unknown. These “finds” are compelling reminders that WWI continues to haunt our present moment, perhaps especially so in its prominent marking of the categories of the “missing” and the “unknown.”

Our paper begins to address the national Tomb of the Unknown memorials by piecing together two, sometimes fragmentary arguments that may help to account for the broad appeal of this practice across so many variegated national, imperial and post-imperial states in the interwar years. Both arguments arose as a result of the interaction in each case of the Tomb, its ritual of establishment, its location, as well as government, public, and press statements about it. The two arguments share a minor premise that we will establish initially. We then reconstruct the first argument, which we label provisionally a “hypothetical enthymeme of relation,” and which was addressed most directly to surviving relatives of the missing. Here, we focus most upon the cases of the U.K., France, and the U.S., for their Tombs of the Unknown were among the first (pertinently, during a time when next-of-kin were close relations) and because materials about their establishment are most easily accessible. The second argument that we name, equally provisionally, an “enthymeme of national legitimation,” was addressed to larger national and international as well as citizen groups. Here we examine a more robust set of cases, including the earliest exemplars, but also the three former dominions of the British Empire that established their tombs only in the past two decades.

2. Establishing the Enthymemes’ Minor Premise
Well publicized accounts of how a country’s Unknown was chosen from among thousands of unknowns in cemeteries on the battlefront and delivered to his final burial place in the capital city accomplished two objectives: The methods of choosing established the Unknown as truly anonymous, unidentifiable by any marker except nationality. And the rituals of the choice and transport of the body, in each case, were fitting to a head of state, rendering the body as a heroic one; this was reinforced by the prominent, national location of each of the tombs.

Selection of the Unknown was a serious issue; officials in each country wanted to ensure that the selected soldier could not be identified by any marker except nationality, and that there was insufficient information from the soldier’s remains and location to ever lead to an identification. In most cases during the interwar period, the remains of four to eight unknowns were exhumed and brought to a ceremonial location for the ritual choice. Every effort was made to ensure that the designated choice maker could not distinguish among them, even by reference to the cemeteries from which they had been exhumed. For example, the caskets were sometimes rearranged multiple times, and all markers except for identical national flags removed. Indeed, in the case of the U.S. choice, the burial records representing all four of the possible choices were destroyed, leaving no trace of the cemetery origins of the bodies (Poole, 2009, p. 150). Belgium ensured anonymity by having a blind veteran as the selector (Belgium Honors, 1922, p. 2), and some accounts hold that Britain blindfolded theirs (Lloyd, 1998, p. 66).

Whether the destination for the chosen Unknown was London, Paris, Washington, or another national capital, each traced a ceremonial path of remarkable, well publicized symbolism. The splendor and dignity of the ceremonial rites, from exhumation to burial service, were extraordinary, often compared to state funerals of presidents, prime ministers, or even royalty. These rites granted the Unknown the status of national hero. Every feature of the ritual was planned for its symbolic significance. For example, even the battlegrounds from which the candidates had been disinterred were carefully chosen, as were the locations of the selection ceremonies. The British selections had come from cemeteries in Ypres, Arras, the Somme, and the Aisne. The four U.S. choices had come from the Aisne-Marne, Meuse-Argonne, San Mihiel and Somme American cemeteries. The French Soldat Inconnu was chosen at a ceremony in the Citadelle Souterraine in Verdun, which had served as the French logistical base for the ten-month Battle of Verdun, in 1916 (Le Champ, 2008).[iv]

Speeches, bands, red poppies, military parades, flags, bugle calls, gun salutes, hymns, and large crowds accompanied each of the chosen Unknowns on their routes from the selection sites to their destinations. Even the choices of transportation were heralded. The U.S. ship that carried the American Unknown from LeHavre to Washington, D.C., was the USS Olympia, the flagship of Admiral George Dewey, a well-known hero of the Spanish-American War (Mossman & Stark, 1991, p. 9). The British chose to transport their Unknown Warrior on board the destroyer Verdun, as a tribute to the French (Lloyd, 1998, p. 68). The ship’s bell decorates one of the walls near the Unknown Warrior’s grave in Westminster Abbey. Before departures from France, French honor guards would join the home country’s honor guard to accompany the Unknowns to the debarkation port. Once on home territory, the Unknowns were honored with solemn parades that passed by or lingered at important destinations. The British Unknown Warrior’s funeral march was halted so that King George could unveil the Cenotaph, before moving on to Westminster Abbey. The French Soldat Inconnu was taken to the Panthéon in Paris enroute to his final destination at the base of the Arc de Triomphe. The American Unknown joined the ranks of former presidents, vice presidents, senators and representatives in being chosen to lie in state in the U.S. Capitol prior to being moved to Arlington. The funerals were grand affairs, presided over by kings and presidents and attended by military giants of the war, for example Marshal Ferdinand Foch and General John J. Pershing. Both British and American Unknowns were buried with soil transported from the European battlefields.

As a result of the careful selections and massive, grand ceremonies, the Tombs of the Unknown would offer a minor, demonstrative premise serving each of the two major arguments: Here is a hero of the Great War with no known identity except nationality.  Their inscriptions variously announce the premise. The casket of the British Unknown Warrior was inscribed: “A BRITISH WARRIOR WHO FELL IN THE GREAT WAR 
1914-1918 
FOR KING AND COUNTRY” (Unknown Warrior, 2009). The main inscription on the stone slab that covers the graves is more elaborate but equally relevant: “BENEATH THIS STONE RESTS THE BODY OF A BRITISH WARRIOR UNKNOWN BY NAME OR RANK, BROUGHT FROM FRANCE TO LIE AMONG THE MOST ILLUSTRIOUS OF THE LAND, AND BURIED HERE ON ARMISTICE DAY 11 NOV. 1920, IN THE PRESENCE OF HIS MAJESTY KING GEORGE V, HIS MINISTERS OF STATE, THE CHIEFS OF HIS FORCES, AND A VAST CONCOURSE OF THE NATION. THUS ARE COMMEMORATED THE MANY MULTITUDES WHO DURING THE GREAT WAR OF 1914-1918 GAVE THE MOST THAT MAN CAN GIVE, LIFE ITSELF, FOR GOD; FOR KING AND COUNTRY; FOR LOVED ONES, HOME, AND EMPIRE; FOR THE SACRED CAUSE OF JUSTICE, AND THE FREEDOM OF THE WORLD. THEY BURIED HIM AMONG THE KINGS BECAUSE HE HAD DONE GOOD TOWARD GOD AND TOWARD HIS HOUSE.”[v] Less elaborate and more secular, but a parallel, is the inscription on the French Tomb of the Unknown: “ICI REPOSE UN SOLDAT FRANÇAIS MORT POUR LA PATRIE, 1914-1918.”  The American inscription also is simply a variation on the premise’s articulation: “HERE RESTS IN HONORED GLORY AN AMERICAN SOLDIER KNOWN BUT TO GOD.” The only substantial difference from the British and French inscriptions is that these words, identical to those on all of the headstones for U.S. unknowns in WWI military cemeteries abroad, link the soldier in Arlington explicitly to all of the U.S. unknowns.

3. The Hypothetical Enthymeme of Relation
In a frequently quoted line, Gillis (1994) suggests that “all the major combatant nations eventually resorted to erecting the so-called tombs of unknown soldiers, thereby remembering everyone by remembering no one in particular” (p. 11). But this seems to miss precisely the point, given the first argument that we label the hypothetical enthymeme of relation. In it, the demonstrative minor premise is accompanied by a major premise, occasionally articulated by government officials or the press: This could be your husband, your father, your brother, your son . . . .

A poignant story about a living unknown French soldier after the war offers an instructive context for understanding the articulations that construct this major premise. Like other combatant nations, France had suffered great wartime losses: “The number of soldiers who were never to return, either dead or alive, was enormous: in November 1915, after the carnage of the first months of the war (the most casualty-heavy), they were already estimated at 300,000” (Le Naour, 2002, p. 39). The result, writes Le Naour, is that families “were . . . deprived of the certainty and closure that a body provides. After the armistice and the repatriation of prisoners, among whom these families hoped to find their missing relatives . . . the most rational resolved to accept the deaths. But the appearance of Anthelme Mangin, this unbelievable resurrection of a vanished soldier, revived hope, and it came to embody the misery of all those who refused to mourn” (2002, pp. 2-3). Mangin was one of a number of veterans returning from German prisoner of war camps in February 1918, when he was found wandering along the platform of the Lyon-Brotteaux railway station. He had no sense of who he was and no signs of identification.  He was sent to an asylum for recuperation and was given the name Anthelme Mangin by French authorities. Mangin was not the only unidentified, amnesiac veteran; Le Naour reports that ten were alive in the early months of 1919, and he notes the “alacrity with which they were reported” in the press (2002, p. 85).

The desire among the mourning to explore all possibilities to find missing relatives became starkly apparent after the publication of a small story about some of the “living unknowns” in the newspaper Le Petit Parisien. The paper received dozens of requests to publish photographs and subsequently did so. A more extensive effort was later undertaken by the Ministry of Prisons, when the photographs were published in every major national and regional newspaper. Veterans’ organizations printed posters and distributed them to city halls throughout France. According to Le Naour, “Within a few weeks, dozens of citizens had claimed to recognize . . . [Mangin] as a son, a husband, or a brother missing in action but never officially declared dead. Nearly three hundred people asked for more information, and while most of them recognized their error as soon as they saw a better photograph or met with him . . . twenty families would press their claims in court. The litigation continued . . . until the unknown man’s death [in 1942]” (Le Naour, p. 2).  Mangin, according to Le Naour, “was thus a symbol: in his anonymity and his madman’s remove from the world of the living, he was like a twin to the Unknown Soldier buried beneath the Arc de Triomphe. He stood for both the suffering of the families of the missing, who sought to identify him as their own, and for France’s difficulty in coming to terms with grief between the two world wars” (2002, pp. 2-3).

For those families and relatives who had accepted the deaths of their loved ones, however, the desire for closure and for acknowledgment of their loss led them to seek solace in the burial of the Soldat Inconnu. As Le Naour (2002) observes, the burial of the Soldat Inconnu “sought to deal with the suffering families of the missing, by giving them a body they could imagine belonged to them” (p. 72). Indeed, he quotes André Maginot’s instructions regarding the choice of the French Unknown. The chosen body, Maginot ordered, must be anonymous, so that “families who suffered the misfortune of losing one of their own in the war . . . can always imagine that their dearly beloved is the very object of this supreme tribute” (p. 73). Another general was heard to remark after the selection had been made and a mourning woman had kissed the wood coffin: “All mothers who do not know where their children lie can believe, like this one, that their own has received the highest honors” (LeNaour, 2002, pp. 73-74).

James’ (1920) report of the French ceremonies for the Soldat Inconnu suggests that the logic was shared among more than generals. He wrote: “‘Perhaps it is he.’ It was the accompaniment of that thought in the minds of thousands and thousands of fathers, mothers, wives and children that the unknown French soldier today was carried through the streets of Paris to his burial place below the Arc de Triomphe.” He continued: “Beside the writer in the crowd was an old woman, who told to her neighbor how of her . . . three sons who fell the graves of two were never known. She was one of those thousands who thought but did not utter the words, ‘Perhaps it is he,’ but she did not weep” (p. 3). Although the reporter offers no evidence for his attribution, the logic had been made clear in poetry, popular prose, and news reporting. The logic is perhaps most explicit in an inscription in the Faubourg Pavé Cemetery in Verdun: “Here rests perhaps your father, your son, your brother, your friend.” This inscription appears at the front of the burial site of those seven French unknowns who might have been but were not selected for the Tomb in Paris.

Although the French were often more explicit than others in articulating this important premise, the frequently unarticulated, hypothetical relationship seemed to be lost on no one at the time. Lloyd (1998) observes that, “When the [British] Unknown Warrior was buried . . . many of the newspapers printed stories about women who were coming to [Westminster] Abbey because they were confident that their son or husband was buried there” (p. 81).  Wilkinson (2006) mentions a witness to the burial of the Unknown Warrior, who “remembered wondering if the body could be that of his elder brother, Stanley” (p. 15). The New York Times, reporting on the burial of the U.S. Unknown, remarked on a group in attendance: “To them the services over the body of the Unknown [Soldier] had a peculiar significance, for they were the fathers, mothers, wives and sisters of the unidentified dead. Some one among them may have been the nearest kin to the boy who was this day honored by all of America” (Solemn, 1921). This kind of observation was not limited simply to the family members. Poole (2009) reports the words of Sgt. Edward F. Younger, the veteran who was honored to select the U.S. Unknown Soldier by laying roses on one of four identical caskets: “I passed the first one . . . the second . . . . Then something made me stop. And a voice seemed to say, ‘This is a pal of yours.’ I don’t know how long I stood there. But finally I put the roses on the second casket and went back into the sunlight” (p. 150).

In each case, the Unknown was hardly, contra Gillis, “no one in particular.”  His anonymity allowed the Unknown to be a very particular someone to a friend or family member, at least hypothetically. Le Naour (2002) summarizes the report of a journalist about visits of mourning relatives to the grave of the Soldat Inconnu in Paris: “A man or woman whose son did not return from the war would go to place flowers and pay homage
. . . and without knowing one another, other fathers and mothers of missing soldiers could exchange greetings and say: ‘Maybe he’s your son!’ ‘Maybe he’s yours!’” (pp. 78-79). The argument’s addressivity cannot be ignored. Its addressees are friends and family members of the WWI missing. Since this could be their loved one, it allowed them to imagine that he was their loved one. It allowed them to take solace in the presence of his grave and in the knowledge that he had been honored as a hero by his country and by other nations as well. It allowed them, in other words, to complete the argument:
Here is a hero of the Great War with no known identity except nationality.
He might be your husband, your father, your brother, your son . . . .
Therefore, take solace in the knowledge that he has a grave and has been honored
as a hero.

The argument’s conclusion, which accommodated the conversion from the hypothetical to the actual, could bring a kind of closure to families and friends of unidentified, lost soldiers. For others, the enthymeme could have resonance as an argument about the sacrifices of the mythic “national family.”[vi]

4. The Enthymeme of National Legitimation
The second argument, the enthymeme of national legitimation, worked from the same demonstrative minor premise as the first argument: Here is a hero of the Great War with no known identity except nationality. Its major premise and conclusion varied slightly, depending on the status of the country both during and after the War. Some, like the U.S. were independent republics before the war. Some were and remained empires, like the United Kingdom. France and Belgium were a bit of both. Others, which had been part of large empires, were declared at Versailles to be independent nation-states.[vii] Still others, such as Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, remained dominions of empire.  Both major premise and conclusion thus varied as follows:
Major Premise: The WWI dead sacrificed their lives to sustain [or establish] autonomous, national [or imperial] sovereignty.
Conclusion: The honor bestowed on this hero of the War legitimates the sustenance [or establishment] of this nation [or empire]. 

The major premise would have required little articulation for citizens of any of the combatant states. As exemplified by Britain’s naming of its casualties as “the Glorious Dead” or France’s articulation throughout the war of “l’Union sacrée” (a prowar coalition of church and state), most if not all the combatant nations in Europe understood the war as a “purification” and death as the sacrificial agency of purification (Kramer, 2007, p. 162). In France, as Becker (1998) argues, the names of the dead had “become a metonymy of sacrifice” for the nation (p. 123). One can hardly underestimate the image of war as a “proving ground” not only of young men but also of nations (or empires) that prevailed through much of the developed and developing world, in the latter sometimes implanted by imperial colonization (e.g., Inglis, 1999, p. 16).

Thus, while the major premise of the sacrifice for the nation (or empire) could go unarticulated because widely assumed, it certainly was never invisible or intangible, with respect to a Tomb of the Unknown. The politics of location rearticulated the premise; the choices for the tombs were sites of mythic, national status, often having to do with the birth or rebirth of the state in wartime. The Unknowns of France, the U.K., and the U.S. were entombed respectively under the Arc de Triomphe, in Paris; in Westminster Abbey, in London; and in Arlington National Cemetery, in a location from which one could clearly see a number of material symbols of the U.S. nation-state, including the U.S. Capitol and Washington Monument. In all three of these cases, there were conflicts over where the Tomb should be located. Some advocated that the U.K.’s Unknown Warrior be buried under the Cenotaph. French leftists argued for the Panthéon for the Soldat Inconnu. And some in Washington argued for the U.S. Capitol. But as exemplified by these conflicts, no one seemed to seriously entertain the idea of anything but a location of major national (or imperial) significance. The politics of mythologized location also characterized other countries’ chosen sites for their Tombs of the Unknown. Italy’s Unknown was interred at Rome’s Monument to Victor Emmanuel, II, who was credited with the unification of Italy with Rome as its capital in the nineteenth century (Chastain, 2004). Belgium’s Tomb was situated at the foot of the Colonnade of the Congress, in Brussels, built in the 1850s as a symbol of Belgian independence.

The ritualizing of the burials of each of the Unknowns, of course, magnified the significance of the message of sacrifice on behalf of the nation (or empire), partly in the pageantry of the cemeteries, but also in the fact that the Unknown of each country was honored with the highest military decorations of other nations. The American Unknown from WWI, for example, was decorated with the U.S. Congressional Medal of Honor and the Distinguished Service Cross, but also the Victoria Cross (U.K.), the French Croix de Guerre, Poland’s Virtuti Militari, and many others (Tomb, 1963; Piehler, 1995, p. 121).[viii] Many of these medals had never before been conferred upon any but the citizens of their originating nations. Such honors were bestowed on most if not all, of the other countries’ Unknowns, constituting an international recognition of sacrifice of each Unknown and pertinently thus underscoring the legitimacy of his nation (or empire). As Daniel Sherman (1999) suggests of the French Soldat Inconnu, “the unknown affirmed the continuing legitimacy of the nation-state in whose name he had died, and validated all narratives of the war that took the national polity as their basis . . .”  (p. 102).

In no cases, however, has this national legitimation been so clear as in more recent establishments of Unknown Soldier or Unknown Warrior tombs. With the Unknowns from WWI ritualized in the past twenty years, location was equally important, but the legitimation was more starkly limned by differentiation of the national states from their prior status as dominions of Great Britain. Australia was the first, in 1993, followed by Canada in 2000, both of which gave “impetus” to New Zealand join in, in 2004 (Returned, 2002-2010). Australia’s Unknown was disinterred from Adelaide Cemetery in France, and transported to Canberra to be reinterred in the Hall of Memory at the Australian War Memorial (Walsh, 2006; Australian War Memorial, 2010). In parallel fashion, the Canadian Unknown was selected from the Cabaret-Rouge Cemetery, near Vimy Ridge. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is located at the front of the Canadian National War Memorial, in Ottawa (Munroe, 2010). New Zealand’s Unknown Warrior was exhumed form the Caterpillar Valley Cemetery, at Longueval, France, and interred in the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior at the National War Memorial, in Wellington, during a ceremony surmised to be “the largest commemorative programme ever undertaken in New Zealand” (Returned, 2002-2010; Ministry).

Although the pageantry may have been equivalent, these former dominials’ stories obviously were different from those accompanying national or imperial tombs established immediately after the war. The Unknown British Warrior entombed in Westminster had been intended to represent the entire British Empire. Still, as numerous dominial monuments and cemeteries on the Western Front attest, there had been at least some discomfort with accepting the metonymic reference to the Empire, or later the Commonwealth, as completely satisfactory. There were, after all widespread mythoi that linked national identities to WWI, for example the famous observation by a survivor of Vimy Ridge, that “the troops went up the ridge as British soldiers and came down Canadian” (Bull & Panton, 2000, p. 5).

These nationalist identity myths evolved, hardened, and ultimately legitimated the former dominials’ claims to their own national tombs, as illustrated by the case of Australia. Inglis suggests that “men from the colonies had proved to be at least as valourous and proficient on [WWI] battlefields as men from the imperial heartland. Australians shared this reassuring discovery with New Zealanders and Canadians, but the squalid peculiarity of their own nation’s origin made the performance of the AIF especially precious” (p. 461). Prior to WWI, Australia was seen as nationally deficient, not only because of its early British penal colonies, but also because it had not, as Inglis points out, been able to distinguish itself in war. He quotes poet Bernard O’Dowd in 1912: “’For Great Australia is not yet . . . She is a prophesy to be fulfilled.’ Again and again the future was pressed to serve the tremulous nationalism of patriots apologetic for their country’s lack of an inspiring past” (p. 72). The burial of Australia’s Unknown “confirms,” Becker (1998) claims, that the Unknown Warrior “in Westminster Abbey had never, since 1920, represented the entire British Empire” (p. 171n.).  While that claim certainly cannot be maintained seriously, the establishment of these three new national tombs at least seemed to confirm that the Unknown Warrior no longer represented adequately the dominions of the United Kingdom. The stories of national origin, whether the Vimy Ridge or ANZAC mythologies, rendered the Tombs of the Unknown in Canberra, Ottawa, and Wellington articulate declarations of national identity, independence, and legitimacy.

5. Conclusion
There are now many more Tombs of the Unknown, some the products of the Second World War, others the result of smaller, regional confrontations. They are located in such diverse places as Iraq and Argentina, Indonesia and Syria. Some of the WWI Tombs of the Unknown have changed over time, whether simply designated by proclamation to represent the dead from all of a nation’s wars, or augmented by additional burials that represent later military conflicts. Most of them, regardless of whether there have been more recent augmentations, remain highly visible and heavily visited sites.

Certainly the arguments mustered by the Tombs of the Unknown now are different from those they enunciated in the 1920s. The closest kin of the WWI unknowns are no longer so close as those who may have been intimately affected by the hypothetical enthymeme of relation in the early years following the War. And most of the countries that dedicated Tomb of the Unknown memorials during the interwar period are hardly now in need of the same kind of national legitimation that was deemed important in the wake of WWI, which had destabilized a number of empires and states. Surely Australia, Canada, and New Zealand are limit cases with respect to the enthymeme of national legitimation. But all of the Tombs as well as other WWI commemorative forms and conflicts and issues about them continue to resonate well beyond the sites themselves and beyond the arguments they harbored at the time of their inception.

The Tombs still carry traces of their own significance into the present in harboring those who may “become known.” For example, the identification and subsequent return to his hometown of the remains of the U.S. Vietnam unknown, buried at the Tomb of the Unknowns, led to many a pronouncement that there would never be another “unknown soldier,” because of the availability of DNA testing (Blair, 2001, p. 278). The newer Tombs of the Unknown call that conclusion into question; more recent conflicts still have resulted in soldier remains in excess of those identified. Although not “soldier”-related, the conflicted and frustrating attempts to identify the remains of those killed in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 also suggest that the judgment may have been a bit premature. As reported by Reuters (Two, 2010) this past January, fifty-nine per cent of the dead from the World Trade Center have been identified, and almost 9,000 sets of remains are still being tested. Public commemoration is imbricated with all manner of historical conditions, social customs, and cultural resources, not the least of which are scientific means of making known, but also perpetually more lethal ways of making unknown.

NOTES
[i] Despite injunctions by Grossberg and others, “articulation” (or a newer, convenient equivalent, “suture”) is all too often asserted as a stand-in for relationality, rather than established by the sometimes difficult work of locating the dense, cultural relations and circulations that cultural studies calls its practitioners to engage. Although this paper is much too brief to attempt to follow and document all the trails and relationships, we have attempted to be as comprehensive as possible in mapping the most important ones that gave rise to the arguments posed by the national tombs of the unknown, especially in the early years of this commemorative practice.
[ii] The origin of this practice is occasionally, though rarely, disputed. Regardless of its origin, the practice certainly did not gain any real traction internationally until after WWI. Indeed, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker (2002) claim that it was “the Great War’s commemorative invention par excellence and a gift to posterity bestowed by war’s brutalisation” (p. 196).
[iii] Although Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker (2002) as well as Winter (1995) date Belgium’s establishment of its Tomb of the Unknown to 1921, it was in 1922. (Belgium Entombs, 1922).
[iv] The Meuse tourisme website labels Verdun the “Capitale de la Grande Guerre.”
[v] We have taken the liberty of adding punctuation to this inscription; the grammar of the inscription on the stone slab is marked by spacing rather than grammatical markings. The same is true of the inscription on the Tomb of the Soldat Inconnu in Paris.
[vi] We are grateful to our reviewers, Robert C. Rowland and Angela G. Ray, for their respective proffers of these concluding insights about the first enthymeme.
[vii] As Benedict Anderson (2006) observes, “As late as 1914, dynastic states made up the majority of the membership of the world political system” (p. 22), but “The First World War brought the age of high dynasticism to an end. By 1922, Habsburgs, Hohenzollerns, Romanovs, and Ottomans were gone . . . . From this time on, the legitimate international norm was the nation-state . . .”  (p. 113).
[viii] The exact dating of the essay about the Tomb of the Unknown from the Quartermaster Review is unclear; it is posted as 1963, but a head note to the essay says that it was published in 1958.

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1. Introduction – Logic in the Pragma-Dialectical Theory [i]
Over the past fourteen years the proponents of the Pragma-Dialectical[ii] approach to argumentation have devoted the lion’s share of their efforts to working out in detail how the rhetorical properties of arguments and argumentation can be accommodated within their pragma-dialectical framework. By now, the dialectical and rhetorical properties of arguments have been theoretically integrated to their satisfaction (see van Eemeren and Houtlosser 2009, van Eemeren 2010). Thus, of the classical triad – logic, dialectic and rhetoric – two members have been accounted for in the theory. What, one might ask, of the third member: logic?

In the early development of the Pragma-Dialectical approach, its authors saw themselves as needing to differentiate their dialectics-oriented program from the then-dominant paradigms of logic and rhetoric (see van Eemeren & Grootendorst 1984 [Speech Acts in Argumentative Discussions], hereafter SAAD, pp. 12-13, 16). Even in the latest version of the theory, the authors are critical of the Perelmanian approach, representing a certain take on rhetoric, and the Toulminian approach, representing a certain take on logic (see van Eemeren & Grootendorst 2004 [A Systematic Theory of Argumentation], hereafter STA, pp. 44-50). They have, however, come to terms with at least some features of rhetoric, namely those that clearly can and do play a role within argumentative discussions aimed at resolving a difference of opinion in a reasonable way. The time has come, I contend, for the proponents of the Pragma-Dialectical approach to undertake the effort of sorting out with similar care their conception of logic and its role in their theory.

The thesis of this paper is that the Pragma-Dialectical handling of logic does need some sorting out. I will argue, in particular, for the following propositions, which together support this thesis:
(1) The Pragma-Dialectical theory’s procedure for making unexpressed premises explicit is, due to the conception of logic employed, incompatible with the theory’s use of argumentation schemes in the analysis and evaluation of arguments.
(2) The problems with argumentation schemes aside, the explicitization procedure proposed in the Pragma-Dialectical theory is limited in scope due to the kind of logic it relies on.
(3) Some Pragma-Dialectic statements about logic are puzzling; the working conception of logic is unclear; and any case it is too narrow.
(4) The Pragma-Dialectical theory requires a clear and consistent approach to logic.

To the support for these propositions I now turn.

2. First proposition
(1) The Pragma-Dialectical theory’s procedure for making unexpressed premises explicit is, due to the conception of logic employed, incompatible with the theory’s use of argumentation schemes in the analysis and evaluation of arguments.

According to the Pragma-Dialectical theory, in order to assess the reasoning used in texts of arguments that a proponent or opponent has put to work in defending or attacking a standpoint, it is necessary (when the parties are absent) first accurately to reconstruct the arguments so the reasoning is fully explicit. The method, in the case of arguments that are not deductively valid as they stand, but are reasonably taken as meant to be deductively valid, is to add the premise(s) that would render them deductively valid (the logical level) and at the same time are maximally informative and consistent with the arguer’s expressed commitments (the dialectical level) (SAAD, pp. 141-149). (Below I will take issue with this method, but accept it for now.)
“(a) The explicitized premiss[iii] must be a statement which, if added to the speaker’s argument as a premiss, would make the argument valid (and thereby prevent a violation of the maxim of relation.)” (SAAD, p. 141)

It is clear from the discussion preceding the above passage that the authors mean by valid here, deductively valid. For they have just finished a review of alternative methods of supplying unexpressed premises, and one of the lessons they take is that rendering the argument valid by the rules of propositional logic is not sufficient – but not that it is not necessary (see SAAD, pp. 123-129). This is evidence, then, that, at least in SAAD, by ‘logic’ the authors of the Pragma-Dialectical theory mean either deductive logic in general or formal deductive logic in particular.

The theory envisages not only arguments that their proponents expect to be deductively valid but also arguments that employ argumentation schemes. In their introduction to the topic of argumentation schemes as tools for the analysis and evaluation of arguments, in a paragraph that begins emphasizing the importance of avoiding contradictions (van Eemeren & Grootendorst 1992 [Argumentation, Communication and Fallacies], hereafter ACF, p. 95), the authors of ACF make the following comment:
“[a] In order to assess the quality of the individual arguments, it must be determined whether the underlying reasoning is logically valid and starts from premises that are acceptable. [b] There is no need, however, to immediately assume that somebody who puts forward an argument is indeed involved in demonstrating how the conclusion is logically derived from the premises. [c] Still, in some way or other, the step from the arguments to the standpoint must be such that the acceptability of the premises is transferred to the conclusion” (ACF, p. 96, my numbering is added in brackets.)

Appended to sentence [c] is the following footnote:
“On this point, logic has not much to offer. In spite of important differences in the way logicians define the object, scope, and method of their work, they seem unanimous in thinking that their concern with validity is about formal rather than substantive relations between premises and conclusions, syntactico-semantic rather than pragmatic aspects, reasoning in isolation rather than in context, implications rather than inferences and – most important at this juncture – transmission of truth rather than acceptance.” (ACF, p. 96, Note 3.)

This footnote makes it abundantly clear that the authors here understand by logic formal deductive logic. It is unlikely that they had informal logic in mind. For not only do they make no reference to informal logic, but also by time ACF was being written, informal logicians had challenged every one of the assumptions attributed in this footnote to “logicians” simpliciter, and so while informal logic might well have had much to offer to account for the step from arguments (i.e., reasons or premises) to standpoints (i.e., conclusions) whereby the acceptability of the premises is transferred to the conclusions, it was not discussed. (For pertinent informal logicians, see, among others, Scriven 1976 and Fogelin 1978 both cited in SAAD’s references, and Govier 1987 cited in ACF ‘s references, but see also Johnson & Blair 1978 and Govier 1985.)

Given these passages, the authors cannot be conceiving that grounds for a justified transference of the propositional attitude of acceptance from premises to conclusion is a topic of formal logic. So, since the quoted passages occur in a section titled “Argumentation Schemes as Dialectical Tools,” one is led to conclude that they hold that it is by means of argumentation schemes whereby the acceptability of the premises is transferred to the conclusion (in non-deductive arguments).

Argumentation schemes are not in every case to be instantiated by deductively valid arguments, because in many cases the arguments that exhibit them, even when they are completely cogent, will not be deductively valid – and for good reason. It is always in principle possible in such cases for there to be new information that is consistent with the acceptability of their premises yet which is incompatible with the acceptability of their standpoint. In this sense, such argumentation schemes are deductively invalid, or perhaps better, are non-deductive.

But arguments that are instances of such non-deductive argumentation schemes can be and often are incompletely expressed, no less than are arguments that are intended to be or may be taken to be deductively valid. In order to assess such arguments found in texts where the authors are not present, the unexpressed components need to be made explicit just as do those of incomplete arguments intended to be or fairly supposed to be deductively valid. How is that to be done? If the incomplete arguments that are instances of such argumentation schemes are reconstructed by the addition of premises that render them deductively valid, the result cannot be an instance of a non-deductive argumentation scheme. So if the method for reconstructing unexpressed premises is retained without change it cannot be applied to arguments exhibiting non-deductive argumentation schemes with unexpressed premises without distorting them by altering their character.

Here one might object, following Gerritsen (2001, p. 73), that, “argument schemes are defined in pragma-dialectics as specific sorts to deductively valid arguments.” In that case, there would be no tension in the Pragma-Dialectical theory between the deductivism of formal logic and envisaging the use of argumentation schemes.  However, Gerritsen’s interpretation is surprising. Instances of the three basic argumentation schemes introduced in ACF (pp. 96-97) – symptomatic, analogical and causal argumentation – are typically defeasible. Certainly the examples the authors use to illustrate these three schemes are. “As Daniel is an American (and Americans are inclined to care a lot about money), he is sure to be concerned about the costs” (ACF, p. 97) will be a good inference unless Daniel is not a typical American in this respect, or unless Daniel is travelling on his company’s expense account, etc. “The method I propose worked last year (and this problem is similar to the one we had last year), so it will work again” (ACF, p. 97) will be a good inference unless there are new conditions surrounding the problem this year, or unless the  method worked last year only because of unusual conditions then, etc. “Because Tom has been drinking an excessive amount of whiskey (and drinking too much whiskey leads to a terrible headache), Tom must have a terrible headache” (ACF, p. 97) will be a good inference unless Tom has already taken a painkiller, or unless Tom has an unusual tolerance for excessive amounts of whiskey, etc. In none of these examples do the premises deductively imply the conclusion. Moreover, the critical questions that the authors envisage associated with each argumentation scheme (see ACF, pp. 162 ff.) anticipate that arguments exhibiting any of the schemes can in principle be defeated. So I am skeptical of Gerritsen’s interpretation.  However, if she is right and the authors of the Pragma-Dialectical theory do hold that the schemes of symptomatic argumentation, analogical argumentation and causal argumentation represent “specific sorts of deductively valid arguments,” then my claim of incompatibility between the theory’s deductivism and its appeal to schemes in the interpretation of arguments does not hold. However, in that case, the theory has to face the criticism that the argumentation schemes it relies on are on the face of it non-deductive.

3. Second proposition
(2) The problems with argumentation schemes aside, the explicitization procedure proposed in the Pragma-Dialectical theory is limited in scope due to the kind of logic it relies on.
The procedure for explicitizing unexpressed premises can be applied only to arguments that are plausibly interpreted as offered by their proponents as supposedly deductively valid. However, setting aside argumentation scheme theory, there are many kinds of arguments that are not offered by their proponents as supposedly deductively valid, but that are offered as nevertheless cogent. That is, their premises are purported to have sufficient probative force that one who accepts them is thereby justified in accepting their conclusions. Such arguments can be and often are presented with elisions, on the assumption that the interlocutor or reader can readily supply the unexpressed components; yet (to repeat) even when fully reconstructed they are not, and are not supposed to be, deductively valid. Examples include (but are not restricted to) various kinds of inductive arguments such as enumerative inductions, generalizations from samples to populations and inductive analogies; arguments to the best explanation; arguments from a priori analogy; evaluative arguments such as those applying normative criteria to cases or balance of considerations arguments. All of these kinds of arguments share the property that tokens of them can be fully explicit and cogent and yet not be deductively valid. That is because to be counted as deductively valid they would require the additional premise that the evidence given is the total evidence or that all other things are equal, when in practice that premise cannot be known to be true or cannot reasonably be committed to. As a result, to reconstruct incompletely expressed tokens of such patterns of argument so as to render them deductively valid – whatever form the selected unexpressed premise might be given – is to misrepresent the nature of the force of the grounds they supply in support of the standpoints in defence of which they are offered. To reconstruct them by adding a deductive validity-ensuring unexpressed premise to the effect that in the given case there is no further relevant evidence or that all things are equal requires attributing an unreasonable commitment to the proponent of the argument.

This conclusion will hold even if one insists, as the authors of Pragma-Dialectics do, that the missing premise supplied by the analyst should not be the “logical minimum” (namely the associated conditional of the argument consisting of the stated premises as the antecedent and the conclusion as the consequent). The authors require that the missing premise(s) be the “pragmatically optimal” proposition in the circumstances, namely, the one that renders the argument valid while also being a commitment of the speaker and the most informative of the validating premise candidates at hand in the context (see ACF, pp. 66-67). The problem is that if the argument aims at (i.e., the speaker is committed to) no more than a plausible, or a presumptive, or a probabilistic inference from premises to conclusion, then even the pragmatically optimal unexpressed premise will misrepresent the inference by turning it into a deductively valid one, one in which, given the premises, the conclusion must follow, not one in which it only plausibly, presumably or probably follows.

To be sure there are those, such as Groarke (1992, 1995, 1999, 2002), who defend the strategy of analyzing arguments with unexpressed premises as if their proponents were committed to their being deductively valid – an approach Godden has termed “reconstructive deductivism” (Godden 2005, p. 168). In a carefully-argument examination of Groarke’s reconstructive deductivism, Godden rejects that position, and I find his case against it to be thoroughly convincing. This is not the place to enter that debate except to note that if the proponents of the Pragma-Dialectical approach to reconstructing unexpressed premises are committed to reconstructive deductivism, they need to answer Godden’s case against it.

If the anti-deductivist position is correct, then the Pragma-Dialectical method for supplying unexpressed premises for incompletely expressed arguments, because it is tied to deductive validity and hence to deductive logic, perhaps even to formal deductive logic, can be used for only one of many patterns of argument (or, alternatively, presupposes only one of many types of standards of inference assessment), and some other method or methods need to be devised that work for the others. Alternatively, a different method needs to be devised that can be used generally for all patterns of incompletely expressed arguments.

Advocates of the Pragma-Dialectical theory should be sympathetic to this suggestion, for already in their original formulation of the theory they anticipated the possibility that the choice of logic would have implications for the reconstruction of unexpressed premises.[iv] In SAAD they wrote, “The choice of one logic or another may have consequences for the supplementation of incomplete arguments” (p. 128). At that point they were writing about the differences among, for example “propositional logic, predicate logic and modal logic” (ibid.) – all varieties of deductive logic. So they were thinking of “logic” as “deductive logic”: “Where the argument is one which appears intuitively to be valid but whose validity cannot be demonstrated in any of the available logics, it may indeed be exceedingly difficult to decide what sort of addition needs to be made” (ibid.). However, there seems here nothing in principle preventing them from expanding the class of  “available logics” to include also non-deductive norms of inference “validity.”

4. Third proposition
(3) Some Pragma-Dialectic statements about logic are puzzling; the working conception of logic is unclear; and any case it is too narrow.
The ideal model called a Critical Discussion (SAAD, p. 17) calls for arguers to behave as “rational discussants,” which entails engaging in argumentative discussions in accordance with a system of speech act rules that produce a regulated interchange between conflicting parties designed to lead to a resolution of their dispute in a reasonable way (see SAAD, p. 18, pp. 152-153). Among these rules is one that implies that the parties are to produce arguments that are (inter alia) valid (Rule 10, SAAD, pp. 168-169).

As we have seen, by ‘logic’ the authors of the Pragma-Dialectical theory clearly mean ‘formal deductive logic’ (see the footnote from ACF, p. 96, quoted above, or SAAD, pp. 123-129) and their unexpressed premise explicitization procedure invokes deductive validity.  In such contexts ‘valid’ would have the technical sense in which it is commonly used in formal deductive logic: not to accept the standpoint of such an argument having accepted its premises commits one to a contradiction.

When it comes to their discussion of fallacies, which is a principal component of ACF, the authors characterize fallacies as violations of the pragmatic rules that must be followed if an argumentative discussion is to resolve a difference of opinion in a reasonable way. They distinguish fallacies according to the rules that apply to each stage of such a discussion. The fallacies that occur in the argumentation stage (which is that component of the discussion where the interlocutors produce arguments and respond to one another’s arguments) are divided into two groups: the ones that typically occur when using argumentation schemes (Chapter 15), and the ones that occur when using logical argument forms (Chapter 16). We might therefore hope to gain further insight into the authors’ understanding of logic and its role in argumentation from these chapters.

Chapter 16, “Fallacies in Utilizing Logical Argument Forms,” begins with the sentences:
“For a conclusive defense of a standpoint it is necessary for all the arguments used in the discourse to be logically valid. This validity requirement relates to the form of the arguments, which should be such that if the premises are true the conclusion of the argument cannot possibly be false.” (ACF, p. 169.)

In other words, arguments must be formally deductively valid if their conclusions are to be conclusively defended. That is a reasonable position to take, given that formal deductive validity guarantees that truth (or acceptance) is transferred from premises to conclusion, and by such arguments the defense of the conclusion can be conclusive in the sense of being impossible to overturn, or reject (given that the premises are true, or accepted). By the term ‘logic’ in this context we can thus again take the authors to mean deductive logic, and in fact, more particularly, formal deductive logic (since they say, and stress, that it is the form of the arguments that guarantees their validity).

One might thus expect a contrast between Chapter 15 of AFC, which deals with fallacies of argument schemes, and Chapter 16, dealing with fallacies of logical argument forms, along the lines of a contrast between the “logic” of a conclusive defense of a conclusion and the “logic” of a non-conclusive defense of a conclusion. At first, Chapter 15 seems to suggest such a contrast. The authors write,
“In order to adequately support the standpoint, in every single argumentation [i.e., each separate argument (see ACF, p. 73)] that is put forward in defense of a standpoint the right kind of argumentation scheme must be used and this scheme must be used properly.” (ACF, p. 158.)

Since “adequate” support need not be “conclusive” support, a contrast between argument schemes, which can supply “adequate” support, and deductively valid argument forms, which are needed for “conclusive” support, might seem in the offing. However, just a paragraph later, we find the authors saying the following:
“In case there are enough mutually acceptable starting points and argumentation schemes and it is perfectly clear what they are, it is, in principle, possible to answer the question whether an argumentation constitutes a conclusive defense for a standpoint. If both the identification procedure and the testing procedure produce a positive result, the standpoint has indeed been conclusively defended. (ACF, p. 159, my emphasis)
…
“A party may not regard a standpoint as conclusively defended if the defense does not take place by means of an appropriate argumentation scheme that is correctly applied.” (Ibid., emphasis in the original.)

So satisfying the conditions of the proper use of argumentation schemes (i.e., appropriate scheme, correctly applied) is a necessary condition of “conclusive” support no less than is instantiating deductively valid argument forms. However, the force of these two uses of ‘conclusive’ is on the face of it different. For to accept the premises of a deductively valid argument but reject its conclusion is to commit oneself to a contradiction, whereas to accept the premises of an appropriate and correctly used argumentation scheme but reject its conclusion does not necessarily commit oneself to a contradiction, since one can at the same time argue that an exception occurs in the case at hand. Some explanation of the use of the same term – ‘conclusive’ – for different judgements seems called for.

Notice that some of the claims here quoted from the two chapters in ACF are incompatible. It cannot be true both that, “For a conclusive defense of a standpoint it is necessary for all the arguments used in the discourse to be logically valid.” and that, “A party may not regard a standpoint as conclusively defended if the defense does not take place by means of an appropriate argumentation scheme that is correctly applied” – unless the only kind of appropriate argumentation scheme is a one that is (deductively) logically valid, i.e., one in which the form of the argument is such that “if the premises are true the conclusion cannot possibly be false.” But the authors clearly do not mean to restrict the class of appropriate argumentation schemes to logically valid argument forms, for they discuss “argument from authority,” “argument from analogy” and “argument from consequence” (ACF, p. 160) as all potentially appropriate argumentation schemes, yet instances of none of them need be formally valid. This inconsistency is removed in STA, where these two criteria – validity and proper scheme used correctly – are clearly presented as a disjunctive set, not a conjunctive set as in SAAD and ACF.

The authors of the Pragma-Dialectical theory allow for fallacies that are mistakes of inductive inference (violations of the rules requiring that arguments have acceptable justificatory or refutatory force), such as post hoc ergo propter hoc and hasty generalization (ACF, pp. 164-165). If there are such fallacies, there must be instances of causal arguments and arguments making generalizations that are not fallacious, but cogent. But typically even the best of such arguments are open to the possibility that unexpected new evidence will undermine the inference, and thus they are not subject to deductive closure. Presumably such arguments have some sort of “logical” structure, albeit its instances will not be formally valid. Yet the authors do not discuss such a logic.

As already noted, in some places the Pragma-Dialectical account clearly means by ‘logic’ formal deductive logic, and its authors use the term ‘logically valid’ (e.g., ACF, p. 60), presumably meaning “deductively valid” or “formally deductively valid.” At the same time, the authors reject “a dogmatic commitment to deductivism” (ACF, p. 60, Note 2). Although they do not define this term, on one reasonable interpretation it is the view that only arguments with a premise-to-conclusion implication that is deductively valid are acceptable. Thus it might be reasonable to interpret the authors as open to other logical norms besides deductive validity (and a fortiori, formal deductive validity). But if so, then they cannot take logic to consist exclusively of formal deductive logic. In any event, they nowhere offer such norms or even mention their possibility.

The theory allows that argumentation schemes can constitute the warrants for the inferences from the acceptance of premises to the acceptance of standpoints. That is, they can account for the justificatory or refutatory force of a premise relative to a standpoint. On a broad conception of it, logic is, at least in part, the study of the norms that justify implication relationships – including (among others) those asserted to hold between the premises and conclusions of arguments. Accordingly, on the Pragma-Dialectical account of argument schemes, using this broad conception of logic, argumentation schemes can represent one type of logical norm. So the opportunity seems to present itself to adopt the broad conception of logic and thereby unify the theory, seeing logic as including the study of the norms of implication relationships in general. On that view, the implications asserted in some arguments satisfy the norm of deductive validity and those in others satisfying the norms of argumentation schemes. However, no such move is made.

Whether Pragma-Dialectics takes ‘logic’ to mean formal deductive logic or just deductive logic (thus allowing for material deductions), taking logic to be restricted to some form of deductive logic is too narrow. The argument for this proposition is implicit in what has already been said. It was noted above that there are many patterns of argument instances of which are taken to offer sufficient grounds for accepting their conclusions without their being deductively valid. Presumably such patterns of argument have their logics; that is, there are general norms for their adequacy. The implications alleged in the inferences they invite are subject to such norms. Presumably, also, the Pragma-Dialectical theory would want to accommodate such arguments, recognizing their justificatory or refutatory potential. It follows, then, that the Pragma-Dialectical theory needs to expand its conception of logic.

5. Fourth proposition
(4) The Pragma-Dialectical theory requires a clear and consistent approach to logic.
The Pragma-Dialectical theory defines ‘argumentation’ as:
“… a verbal, social and rational activity aimed at convincing a reasonable critic of the acceptability of a standpoint by putting forward a constellation of propositions justifying or refuting the proposition expressed in the standpoint.” (STA, p. 1.)

From the perspective of considering the role of logic in the theory, the point that argumentation is supposed to be a rational activity, aimed at convincing a reasonable critic, is key. There are two ways the theory tries to satisfy the norms of rationality and reasonableness. One is by postulating an ideal model for argumentative discussions defined by rules expressly designed to optimize the possibility of resolving disagreements by means of arguing about them in a reasonable way. The procedure is thus (supposed to be) instrumentally rational, an effective means of reaching its goal. Within this procedure the participating parties are given the freedom, and responsibility, of agreeing to the methods they will use to resolve their disagreement, with the proviso that their methods must conform to the external constraint of being rational and reasonable. Their methods are thus (supposed to be) intrinsically rational, that is, will lead to agreement based on the merits of the arguments and will convince a reasonable critic.

In deciding together how they will proceed with their argumentation, the parties must agree on the discussion rules they will be bound by. These concern the starting points and the inference norms of the argumentation. As to the starting points, they must agree on how to identify the premises they may use or be committed to. Instrumental rationality requires that they do this in a systematic way, but there is no requirement of intrinsic rationality for the propositional contents of these commitments. The authors are convinced that such a requirement presupposes “justificationism,” the (to their mind false) thesis that there can be identified basic propositions that are reasonable or rational (see their discussion of the Münchhausen trilemma, e.g., STA, p. 131). As to the inference norms, however, the parties are not at liberty to choose any they like. They must conform to the requirements of logic insofar as they must be consistent and they must agree to some set of logical norms. The only choice they get is as to which logic to use. Logic is thus an “external” constraint that imposes intrinsic rationality on their argumentation.

The authors of the Pragma-Dialectical theory do not make much of this logical requirement, however it is arguably essential in order to block one charge of vicious relativism. The criticism has been levied by some (e.g., Biro & Siegel 2006a, 2006b; Siegel & Biro 2008; Lumer, 2009) that if the parties to an argumentative discussion could adopt any inference norms they might agree to in addition to any premises they might agree to, there would be nothing to prevent their settling their disagreements in an irrational way, even if they were mutually satisfied with the outcome. Defenders of the theory have denied this criticism (see Garseen & van Laar 2010), although the critics are not convinced by their response (see Siegel & Biro 2010). Whatever the upshot of that particular controversy, were the proponents of Pragma-Dialectics to emphasize what I think is at least an implicit requirement of the theory, namely that the interlocutors of a well-regulated episode of argumentation are obliged mutually to commit to some logic, then at least one basis for an allegation of vicious relativism would be removed. The only problem then would be the lack of clarity about the nature of the logic envisaged and the role of logic in the theory.

I find it difficult to diagnose this problem in detail in any single way. The authors seem to work with a narrow sense of ‘logic,’ in terms of which it denotes just deductive logic, or even just formal deductive logic. At the same time, they (in my opinion, correctly) allow argumentation schemes a role in identifying acceptable inferences. Thus deductive logic and argumentation schemes seem to be two unrelated kinds of norms for the implications alleged to underlie the inferences invited and committed to in arguments (see Pinto 2001, pp. 36-37, for the thesis that an argument is an invitation to draw an inference).

As already hinted, one coherent way of picturing things is to think of the inference commitments of arguments as being subject to assessment according to a variety of norms. Take ‘logic’ to be the name for the general study of, among other things, the norms that govern the implication relations that may be found, in among other places, the inferences used in arguments. Thus the inferences of arguments may be assessed according to a variety of norms of logic. It is based on these norms that judgements are made about whether the acceptability of a premise may be transferred to the standpoint, whether the conclusion follows from the premises, whether one may infer (one is justified in inferring) the conclusion from the premises – the judgements can be characterized in various ways. One set of these norms consists of different theories of deductive logic. The inferences of arguments can be judged, accordingly, by whether the arguments are deductively valid according to the selected (or appropriate) deductive logic. Another set of these norms consists of the warrants embodied in (non-deductive) argumentation schemes. So understood, argumentation scheme warrants constitute another kind of logic. (How argumentation scheme warrants function in the assessment of argument inferences is a separate question.)

On this way of understanding logic in general, and deductive logic and argumentation scheme theory in particular, the question may be asked, what logical norms are appropriately applied to arguments in argumentation? The Pragma-Dialectical theory clearly envisages both deductive logic and argument scheme theory as providing legitimate norms for arguments, although it offers no rationale for that judgement. Moreover, it is silent on whether norms for inductive inferences (such as generalizations from samples to populations, or inductive analogies), or abductive inferences (the inferences of arguments to the best explanation), or conductive inferences (the inferences assimilating both positive and negative considerations)[v], or others, are also appropriate norms for the arguments of argumentation. If the Critical Discussion rules prohibit any norms not explicitly prescribed, all of these would be ruled out, and that would require a justification, given the ubiquity of these other kinds of inference. So the Pragma-Dialectical theory needs to develop an account of how deductive logic, argument scheme theory, and other kinds of logical norms, fit together (or don’t). And it would need to motivate or justify that account.

An alternative conceptualization is to understand all patterns of argument – deductive, inductive, abductive, conductive, etc. – as argumentation schemes. Thus modus ponens would be an argumentation scheme no less than generalization from sample to population, appeal to expert opinion or argument from a priori analogy. Thinking of argument schemes as warrants or inference licenses, it would then be the case that some of them authorize inferences with deductive closure while others authorize inferences to numerical probability judgements, yet others inferences to pro tanto (“all things considered”) judgements, and so on.

In addition to sorting out its theory of the normative role of argument schemes, or as part of doing so, the Pragma-Dialectical theory needs to loosen its commitment to deductive logic. Its commitment to deductive logic forces on it a method for explicitizing unexpressed premises that cannot be sustained if the theory is to tolerate, as its authors seem to want it to, arguments employing non-deductive argument schemes that may presuppose unexpressed components. What is needed is a revision of the unexpressed premise explicitization procedure that does not (entirely) rely on even reconstructive deductivism.

If these tasks are carried out, along with an account of how argument schemes function to warrant inferences, then we will have a more coherent and complete account of the nature of logic and role it plays in Pragma-Dialectics. There is work to be done before that result can be declared accomplished.

Notes
[i] My thanks, for comments on an earlier draft that have removed errors and suggested constructive changes, to Hans Hansen, Rongdong Jin, Christopher Tindale, Douglas Walton, and especially Ralph Johnson. Thanks also to two anonymous reviewers for their corrections and constructive recommendations, which have resulted in several modifications and additions to the paper originally delivered at ISSA 2010.
[ii] I capitalize the first letters of ‘Pragma-Dialectics’ and ‘Critical Discussion’ in this paper where these are terms of art, the proper names of that theory and that theoretical construct propounded by F.H. van Eemeren, R. Grootendorst and their colleagues of the Amsterdam school.
[iii] In Speech Acts in Argumentative Discussions and Argumentation, Communication and Fallacies, the spelling “premiss” is used. In A Systematic Theory of Argumentation, the spelling “premise” is used. I will spell the word “premise” except when quoting a passage from either of the first two books in which the word appears.
[iv] Thanks to one of the referees for calling this fact to my attention.
[v] I here refer to what Carl Wellman (who introduced the term ‘conductive argument’) referred to as conductive arguments of the third pattern (see Wellman 1971, 52 and 57).

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1. Concern for justice underpinning the argumentation movement
The modern argumentation movement, richly combining new rhetoric with currents of informal logic, pragma-dialectics and dialogue logic continues to be inspired by two humanist concerns – to empower human beings by liberating them from the regime of Cartesian rationalism and to promote justice. When we look back to the modern progenitors of our movement, we distinctly hear Perelman, Toulmin, and Hamblin rail against oppressive formalism and to promote the liberating dynamics of democratic deliberation. Perelman writes that “we combat uncompromising and irreducible philosophical oppositions presented by all kinds of absolutism” (Toulmin 1969, p. 510) and that “[argument] strength is appraised by application of the rule of justice: that which was capable of convincing in a specific situation will appear to be convincing in a similar or analogous situation” (Toulmin 1969, p. 464). The new rhetoric “constitutes a break with a concept of reason and reasoning due to Descartes which has set its mark on Western philosophy for the last three centuries” (Toulmin 1969, p. 1). And since no one deliberates and argues what is God-given necessary or self-evident, “all thought becomes human and fallible … knowledge thus ceases to be impersonal because every scientific thought becomes a human one, i.e., fallible, situated in and subjected to controversy” (Toulmin 1982, p. 159). Toulmin’s social history of logic locates an origin of oppressive rationality in the Peace of Westphalia that generated “a poisoned chalice: intellectual dogmatism, political chauvinism, and sectarian religion formed [a single ideological package]” (Toulmin 2001, p. 158). Toulmin also cautioned against any God’s-eye-view (Toulmin 1958, pp. 184-185). Hamblin declared that “what is, above all, necessary is to dethrone deduction from its supposed pre-eminent position as a provider of certainty” (Hamblin 1993, p. 250).

So long as it is the logic of practice that is being discussed, it is important to relate the concepts of truth, validity, and knowledge to dialectical concepts in the right way. … In the limiting case in which one person constructs an argument for his own edification … his own acceptance of premisses and inference are all that can matter to him; and to apply alethic criteria to the argument is surreptitiously to bring in the question of our own acceptance of it. When there are two or more parties to be considered, an argument may be acceptable in different degrees to different ones or groups, and a dialectical appraisal can be conducted on a different basis according to which party or group one has in mind; but again, if we try to step outside and adjudicate, we have no basis other than our own on which to do so. Truth and validity are onlookers’ concepts and presuppose a God’s eye-view of the arena. … [onlookers might intervene but] become simply another participant in an enlarged dialectical situation and that the words ‘true’ and ‘valid’ have become, for [the participant] too, empty stylistic excrescences. To another onlooker, my statement that so-and-so is true is simply a statement of what I accept. (Hamblin 1993, p. 242)

Perhaps this statement captures Hamblin’s definition of freedom, whose essence allows nothing external to mediate opinions. For, indeed, there is now neither truth nor objective ground to settle disputes, only the pragmatics of deliberation. Nevertheless, his call to dethrone deduction was simultaneously a call to cultivate a culture of justice within an arena of empowering democratic discourse.

Principal toward realizing concerns of emancipating human reason and promoting justice, many argumentation philosophers supplanted the earlier conception of good argument – a disembodied text relying on formal notions of validity and cogency – with a new conception of good argument conceived as a contextualized social activity. Crucial in this shift was reinserting pragmatic and rhetorical concerns to recognize that arguments are used by human beings with aims to persuade other human beings. As audience adherence became central, attention among argumentationists turned to acceptability of premises and inferential links. And with this shift has come a wondrous explosion of exploration and discovery into human reasoning, with the promise of continued exploration and discovery not soon to abate.

Hopes for justice continue to abound as we examine the constituents of human reasoning and promote broadening discourse as a principal means of resolving conflict. And while we remain hopeful in affirming this tack and see some remarkable successes, we are nevertheless faced with extreme regimes of injustice blighting humanity. We encounter here an astounding multiplicity of human rights violations that strike at humanity’s conscience, not the least among whom are philosophers of argument. How are argumentation philosophers to address this situation?

2. Encountering pernicious relativism and invoking a universal audience to preserve justice
However, with a rhetorical turn to audience adherence as the touchstone of a good argument, philosophers of argument soon encountered the specter of pernicious relativism. To address this problem some philosophers – notably Govier and Tindale and in a related way Johnson –
have invoked Perelman’s notion of universal audience with varying degrees of success. Taking a little license to amalgamate various threads of reasoning, we can represent the tack in the following way.

The universal audience somehow lying within a particular audience is constructed from the mind of the arguer as an imagined tool or regulative principle with heuristic ends. Somehow it is the universalization of the particular in its context. By certain universalizing techniques, emerging from standards that an audience would deem on reflection to be relevant – in the appropriate way sufficient to support the conclusion; drawn with the appropriate sensitivity; standards of relevance and rationality in the broader culture; ultimately persuasive for anyone who thinks in the normal way; in the long run, by any audience relevantly similar to the audience – the participants aim to broaden the audience as much as possible in order to transcend a milieu or a given epoch. These participants are model ‘ordinary people’, namely those in possession of high critical standards, outstanding exemplars but not gods. Premise acceptability is adjudicated by the pertinent community of ideal interlocutors and only arguments that can be universally admitted are judged reasonable. The universal is fully grounded in the practical requirements of the real just in its being the distillation of the concrete audience. Only premises are admitted that are universalizable, that is, not contradictory. (Boger 2010, CD)

We here observe a shifting, or vacillation, that characterizes discussion when a philosopher invokes the (or a) universal audience.  In principle, this shifting consists in: first, encountering the need for a universal audience to mediate difference between conflicting particular audiences; second, invoking the universal audience, and then; third, immediately recognizing this audience to be just another particular audience. Hamblin’s thinking (1993) haunts an important current within the argumentation movement.

When philosophers of argument invoke the universal audience in their attempts to preserve their humanist commitments to morality and the principles of justice in democratic society, they have inevitably fallen afoul with begging the question. We observe, for example, characteristic reference to ‘mature adult human beings at all times and places’, ‘appropriate sensitivity to context’, ‘model ordinary people’, ‘universally admissible arguments, ‘universal features of particular audiences’ to validate the universal audience. Who are these ‘mature adult human beings’ if not the rationalist ideal of pure reason? And then again, who would judge, or mediate, real disputes if not this same ideal? To invoke such an audience resurrects again – often with an appeal to the categorical imperative (with Perelman) – a formalism that has been anathema to philosophers of argument.

Our concern here asks whether these new logicians, taking joy in throwing off the shackles of an old idealist metaphysic per Hamblin, and then reveling in the newfound freedom, really reassert a form of pure subjectivity that recognizes nothing external as having authority. Hegel poignantly represented this thinking in his discussion of Kant’s moral philosophy.

This philosophy made an end of the metaphysic of the understanding as an objective dogmatism, but in fact it merely transformed it into a subjective dogmatism, i.e. into a consciousness in which these same finite determinations of the understanding persist, and the question of what is true in and for itself has been abandoned. (Hegel 1968, p. 427)

The concern we address in this discussion is philosophical. We ask whether argumentation philosophers inadvertently become apologists for privilege and inequality within a reigning status quo and in the process compromise genuine concerns for justice by becoming just as abstract as their first objects of scorn.

3. A contemporary state of affairs – the nothingness of the particular context
That becoming just as abstract seems to be the case issues from the following considerations, which outline a thread running through the argumentation movement.
(1) Recognizing that the constituent parts of the old oppressive regime included ―
A disregard for the context situatedness of an argument;
Obviating a concern for the pragmatics of argumentative discourse;
Accepting the platonistic character of propositions and dismissing that argumentation consists in human speech acts;
Affirming the objective atemporality of truth, implication, and reason;
Taking cogency to inhere in an argument and not in the minds of an audience.

(2) Argumentation philosophers, to address oppressive (abstract) rationalist formalism –
Emphasized the social and personal character of human argumentation, all of which are contextually embedded in human lived-experience;
Diminished the strict distinctions between the arguer, his/her audience, an argument, and the process of argumentation;
Broadened the nature of logic to include the multi-faceted character of human discourse;
Obviated the importance of soundness as a necessary component of a good argument, and in doing so, emphasized premise acceptability and inferential suitability; and then
Affirmed ‘truth’, ‘validity’, and cogency’ principally in the limited sense as participant-dependent and not objective properties inhering in an argument.

(3) Almost immediately philosophers of argument encountered the specter of pernicious, or nihilistic, relativism and found such a situation morally, perhaps even politically, embarrassing and reprehensible, just in the implication that audience adherence seemed to promote ‘anything goes’, and thus gave license to, for example, racists, sexists, and political demagogues and opportunists of various stripes. Obviating truth eliminated any objective ground for mediating difference and threatened commitments to effecting justice. Because of their self-conscious humanism, they sought philosophical ways to preserve their twin commitments to (1) the context relativity of argumentative situations, and (2) justice and personal empowerment.

(4) To meet the problem of pernicious relativism, one trend among argumentation philosophers has reintroduced Perelman’s universal audience, or a version of such an audience. The intention here is that such an audience would properly mediate conflicting discourses such as those that populate argumentative discussions about the universality of various articles in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

(5) However, such attempts, whether invoking a universal audience or a community of model interlocutors, collapse, just in that their own principles, which targeted the old regime, now turn on themselves. As they had asked ‘whose justice?’, ‘whose truth?’, ‘whose notion of reason?’, they were now equally faced with Hamblin’s asking ‘whose universal audience?’. Accordingly, the universal audience loses its special status to resolve conflict only to become just another particular audience; thus, its utility as a mediating instrument is subverted. Progress in this direction has had little development since Tindale (1999).

(6) Meanwhile, another trend within the argumentation movement has taken up treating the pragmatics of argumentative discourse. While not directly a response to pernicious relativism, this trend nevertheless further suspends reference to the truth or falsity of proffered claims. It dismisses these claims just in its interest to manage an argumentative situation fairly according to rules of critical discussion without recourse to the material truth of disputant claims.  This situation is characteristic of mediation.

(7) The result in both trends, albeit generally independent of one another – namely: first, that addressing pernicious relativism by invoking the universal audience; and second, that richly developing discourse pragmatics to manage argumentative situations – is much the same in respect of addressing foundational philosophical problems within philosophy of argument as its currents hold to concerns of justice.
In each case, philosophers unavoidably bracket objective social reality to render it virtually an unknowable thing-itself. The reflex of these moves is to make contexts abstract and empty by making them all equal in value. They simultaneously affirm the nothingness of both the universal audience and the many particular audiences. This makes impossible genuinely mediating opposing claims, say, for example, of those of the racist and non-racist, leaving the ‘winner’ the one who better follows the rules.
Absent truth, thus, absent material justice. Disputing parties are subject only to the pragmatics of argumentative discourse to settle a dispute fairly. Justice amounts to following the rules and dutifully accepting the outcomes.

(8) An important philosophic result of these argumentation trends is to reaffirm the abstract individual of bourgeois (aka liberal) political philosophy, itself an ideological expression of capital. Not only is the individual disputant de-contextualized within the larger context of social reality, so is the importance of his/her context itself suspended in this same respect. The isolation and nothingness of each consists precisely in their respective inaccessibility. This is a necessary consequence of dismissing truth.

(9) The philosophic corollary to this abstract individual and bracketing objective social reality is to obviate genuine concern for justice. How are claims of wrong to be redressed without reference to an underlying reality that is accessible to human reason and that can serve to mediate the truth or falsity of conflicting claims relating to concerns of justice?

(10) The final outcome is that philosophers of argument are left with relying on the good will of disputing parties and left also without a philosophical underpinning for their commitments against pernicious relativism and its rival sibling injustice.

While surely it is not an intention of philosophers of argument to undermine genuine concerns for human empowerment and justice, the developments in argumentation theory issue in reasserting a kind of oppressive formalism they sought to subvert in their initial challenges to Cartesian rationalism and its putative instrument of oppression, formal logic. Absent truth and cogency independent of participants’ assessment of suitability, we now have: (1) an empty universal audience; (2) abstract individuals and abstract contexts; and (3) sets of rules for managing disputes.

A trend within the argumentation movement, having moral and political motivations, seems to abdicate genuinely fulfilling its activist mission to engender justice. Justice will remain elusive and be subordinated to pragmatic utility, frustrated by continually encountering only the nothingness of subjective certainty.

Resurrecting external mediation – apologists for the status quo?
We now are faced with a question that arises among argumentationists about managing an argumentative situation, namely – who is the judge in such situations? Four candidates come quickly to mind. There are:
(1) Either the one or the other of two disputants engaged in an argumentative situation; or
(2) The mediator, putatively disinterested, facilitating a given dispute according to rules of critical discussion; or
(3) The universal audience, again, not a transcendent (perhaps transcendental?) entity; or
(4) The philosophers or analysts of disputation, who apparently are outside a given dispute in that they have a metasystematic orientation.

Thinking back on Hamblin’s remark, whom might we consider satisfactory among these possible judges? Relativizing cogency to what are acceptable standards for given audiences, philosophers have shifted between (1) fixing an internal, emergent standard while recognizing the need for an objective standard, and then (2) immediately recoiling from its becoming an external, imposed standard. Since the universal audience is informed only by subjective certainty – which amounts to the nothingness of pure, unmediated subjectivity and not by objective material reality – it can never achieve genuine independence and thus it can never become adequately objective in its mediations. Meaningful distinctions between is and ought, being and thinking, knowledge and belief, reality and appearance, the necessary and the contingent become conflated and empty. This amounts to resurrecting Kant’s subjective idealism to bracket as unknowable the very social ground required for a satisfactory resolution of conflicts and the promotion of justice.

The serious problem here is that this shifting results in masking the hegemony of the prevailing ruling authority in the larger social context, a context beset by profound controversies calling out for justice and an objectification of injustice. The rule of law – in the case or argumentation philosophy the rules of critical discussion – masks the reality of arbitrariness. And this arbitrariness is directed against historical necessity through the power of the jurist (or the legislator, mediator or arbiter) over social contradictions.

Accordingly, and ineluctably, there emerges a principle that appears to mediate in an objective manner according to a set of prescriptive rules of engagement, which, in the person of a judge or mediator, takes on the semblance of non-arbitrariness. However, the abstract independence of the mediator, acting with an appearance of pure duty just in officiating a set of rules, masks his particularistic and arbitrary interest. It might even be the case that this judge is himself unaware of his particularist officiating. His universality, or objectivity, is inauthentic and purely formal. Mediation turns out to be vested in an external judge and thus open to the discretion of his arbitrary will.

The significant social outcome of this vacillating is to leave vulnerable those lacking power within the larger social milieu. Their interests are likely eclipsed, that is, appropriated, by the rival power already vested in the state or in a prevailing authority, often legitimating itself through religious dogma. The appearance of objectivity and universality masks an appropriative posture, whether or not this posture is intentional. We have only to appeal to recent labor negotiations in the US to witness inequality at work, or the outcomes of mediating divorces, or addressing concerns of persons held on suspicion of terrorism but never being charged.

5. Invoking a notion of the common good – opening a way toward justice
The failure of referencing the universal audience to mediate conflict, for the philosophical reasons cited above, results in tolerating social injustices – or, expressed in another way, does not provide a firm philosophical underpinning for effecting justice. Given the reality that vast populations of the human community are marginalized, poor, disenfranchised, uneducated and non-lawyers while at the same time living within states governed by the rule of law as well as powerless and subject to the governing powers, both in respect of their laws and their priorities, what are the real chances of these peoples receiving justice when they subscribe to or acquiesce in the rules of critical discussion? And while we embrace all exercises of good will, we do not believe doing so is adequate for materially rectifying the inequalities of the modern world. We affirm that our concern fully embraces employing the rules of critical discussion; we believe that by themselves these rules will not effectively resolve problems of injustice. And were a reader curious about a political position underlying our thinking, let his curiosity be satisfied –

yes, we believe that the world’s vast social inequalities are rooted in class domination and super-exploitation and that this is an objective fact of the modern world. However, our concern in this discussion is only to highlight the philosophical inadequacy of invoking the universal audience and employing rules of critical discussion, since these tacks undermine the concern of philosophers of argument to consult an argument’s context in meaningful ways to combat injustice.

Let us put aside discussion of this universal audience to allay the specter of pernicious relativism and turn attention rather to the notion of the common good to see if there we can extract, if not a complete philosophical foundation for justice, at least a direction worth pursuing. While making reference to an objective social reality is a way to address our concern, we are leaving aside for the time being this discussion. Rather, within the framework of the increasing global concern for human rights, we suggest that an important philosophic principle necessary for addressing the fragmentation of the human community lying at the base of social injustice is to recognize the common dignity of human beings. Recognizing the dignity and worth common to human beings promotes a sense of responsibility each person has to both him/herself and others. The humanist foundations underpinning philosophy of argument have their completion in the notion of the common good. By embracing and developing this dimension of the argumentation movement’s concern for justice we shall be more successful in allaying pernicious relativism.

REFERENCES
Boger, G. (2005). Subordinating truth – is acceptability acceptable? Argumentation 19, 187-238.
Boger, G. (2006). Humanist principles underlying philosophy of argument. Informal Logic 26(2), 149-174.
Boger, G. (2007). A foundational principles underlying philosophy of argument. In Eemeren, Frans H., J. Anthony Blair, Charles A. Willard, & Bart Garseen (Eds.). Proceedings of the Sixth Conference of the International Society for the Study of Argumentation. Amsterdam: SicSat, 165-168.
Boger, G. (2009). Eclipsing justice – a foundational compromise within philosophy of argument. Proceedings of the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation. CD.
Franklin, M. (1973). The mandarinism of phenomenological philosophy of law. In Natanson, Maurice (Ed.), Phenomenology and the Social Sciences, vol. 2. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 451-570.
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Hegel, G.W.F. (1968). Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Vol. iii. New York: The Humanities Press.
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Perelman, C. (1980). Justice, Law, and Argument: Essays on Moral and Legal Reasoning. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company.
Perelman, C. (1982). The Realm of Rhetoric. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
Perelman, C., L. Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969). The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
Tindale, C. W. (1999). Acts of Arguing: A Rhetorical Model of Argument. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Toulmin, S. E. (1958). The Uses of Argument. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Toulmin, S. E. (1972). Human Understanding. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Toulmin, S. E. (2001). Return to Reason. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

1. Introduction
One influential way to think about arguments is the following: an argument consists of premises asserted in support of an asserted conclusion; the purpose of arguments is to rationally persuade their audience of the truth of their conclusions; good arguments are those that achieve their purpose. On this picture, in order for an argument to achieve rational persuasion, its premises must be rationally acceptable to the participants in the argument, and it must be rational to think that the premises support the conclusion. And, if we take the type of rationality relevant to the assessment of arguments to be epistemic rationality, then the theory of epistemic rationality becomes directly relevant to the theory of argument.

What I want to do in this paper is to try to show that epistemic rationality is not a matter of believing in such a way as to maximize the likelihood of achieving our epistemic goals. If it were, then epistemic rationality would be a species of practical rationality. But it cannot be a species of practical rationality, because it is prior to practical rationality. It follows that epistemic rationality is not a matter of achieving our epistemic goals.
In the context of the theory of argument, it is particularly important to see that epistemic rationality is not a matter of believing so as to achieve our epistemic goals: if it were, then for an agent who does not care about achieving an epistemic goal, nothing would count as epistemically rational or irrational. It would then follow that for a subject who lacked an epistemic goal, no arguments could count as good or bad. An epistemic approach would have nothing to say about arguments in such cases. I take it that that would be the wrong result, and a serious mark against the epistemic approach to argument evaluation, because the goodness or badness of arguments should not depend on whether people have an epistemic goal.

2. Epistemic rationality
The dominant way to think of epistemic rationality is in teleological terms. The standard picture is that we have an epistemic goal, and epistemically rational beliefs are those that achieve (or those that we would, on reflection, take to achieve) our epistemic goal; beliefs that fail to achieve our epistemic goal are epistemically irrational. There are various ways to specify the content of our epistemic goal; most epistemologists pick up on William James’ idea that epistemic rationality is about achieving true beliefs and avoiding errors. William Alston (1985), for example, holds that the epistemic goal is to maximize truth and minimize falsity in a good-sized body of beliefs. Other views are that our epistemic goal is to believe all of the truths that there are, and nothing else (Latus 2000), to have true beliefs and not to have any false beliefs right now (Foley 1987), to maximize truth and minimize falsity in a large body of beliefs over an extended period of time (Vahid 2003), or that we have a variety of epistemic goals, such as truth, justification, knowledge, simplicity, etc. (Kvanvig 2005).

Now, most epistemologists do not specify whether subjects must in fact have the epistemic goal, in the sense that it must be something that they want to achieve, in order for their beliefs to count as epistemically rational when they do achieve it, or as epistemically irrational when they fail to achieve it. Following Kelly (2003), we can call the position that makes epistemic rationality a matter of believing in such a way as to achieve the epistemic goal that agents have (i.e. care about achieving) the “instrumentalist conception” of epistemic rationality (ICER). Foley (1987) is the clearest exponent of a developed account of epistemic rationality who accepts ICER. Robert Nozick (1993) also appears to accept ICER. Some theorists (e.g. David 2001) explicitly want to avoid ICER, while still maintaining that epistemic justification is a matter of achieving the epistemic goal. But many theorists simply do not commit one way or the other.
The alternatives to ICER are either to hold that epistemic rationality is a matter of believing in such a way as to achieve the epistemic goal, whether want to achieve it or not (a broader sort of teleological conception of epistemic rationality), or else to hold that epistemic rationality just has nothing to do with achieving a goal. Adopting the Kantian terminology, we can call these alternatives categorical conceptions of epistemic rationality, because they hold that epistemic rationality is independent of what people desire.

I don’t think that ICER is correct. For my purpose here, it is not important which of the other two alternatives to take up, although it seems to me that the two main arguments in this paper undermine any kind of goal-directed conception of epistemic rationality. Whether they do so is not important for now, though; all that is important to see is that the epistemic rationality of our beliefs does not depend on the content of the epistemic goals that we want to achieve. If it did, then for an agent who lacks an epistemic goal, nothing would count as epistemically rational or irrational.

Now, before we move on, I should make it clear that in what follows, I have in mind a very narrow conception of practical rationality, essentially treating practical rationality and instrumental rationality as the same. Everyone at least agrees that instrumental rationality is one important type of practical rationality. Some theorists stop there (e.g. Bertrand Russell, Larry Laudan, Herbert Simon, Richard Foley), and take instrumental rationality to be all that there is to rationality. Others take practical reason to encompass also the determination of what goals we ought to adopt, what forms of practical maxims are permissible, etc. I am stipulating here that practical rationality is instrumental rationality. Nothing important hangs on that stipulation here. If practical rationality is more than instrumental rationality, then the arguments in this paper can be recast to accommodate that. I make the stipulation just in order to keep things simple.

3. Two arguments against ICER

There are two arguments that I would like to bring to bear here against ICER. If epistemic rationality is a matter of believing so as to achieve our epistemic goals, then epistemic rationality is a type of practical rationality, because achieving our goals falls under the purview of practical rationality. The first argument here is intended to show that epistemic rationality is not instrumental in nature, because epistemic goals can be achieved in epistemically irrational ways. The second argument is intended to show that practical rationality depends on epistemic rationality.

3.1. Achieving our epistemic goal in epistemically irrational ways.
The first argument against ICER to consider is the fact that we can hold epistemically irrational beliefs that nevertheless promote the achievement of our epistemic goal. Consider a typical formulation of the goal: to have a favourable truth-falsity ratio in a good-sized body of beliefs.
Given a diachronic understanding of that goal, it is easy to construct examples of epistemically irrational beliefs that serve to achieve it. Consider, for example, a student who, contrary to all the evidence provided to her by her poor academic record in high school, believes in her academic ability, which gives her the confidence required to study hard, score well on her SATs, get into a good college, and acquire all sorts of interesting true beliefs. She holds her belief in her academic ability against the available evidence, so it hardly counts as an epistemically rational belief, and yet it helps her to achieve her epistemic goal: even though it is a false belief, and she holds it against the evidence, it helps her to get into a good college and acquire all sorts of interesting true beliefs. Feldman puts the point nicely: “if believing something now would somehow lead me to believe lots of truths later, that long-term epistemic benefit is … irrelevant to [the judgment of whether p is true]” (1988, pp.249-50).

Precisely in order to avoid this sort of problem, Foley (1987) makes his formulation of the epistemic goal synchronic: the epistemic goal, for Foley, is to believe all and only truths, right now. The purpose of this restriction is to screen off epistemically irrelevant factors from our doxastic deliberations and epistemic evaluations. A subject’s belief is epistemically rational on Foley’s account iff, after sufficient reflection, the subject would take the belief to satisfy the epistemic goal. No quantitative amount of reflection can be specified for reflection to be sufficient; sufficient reflection is just reflection to the point of reflective stability, so that further reflection would not lead the subject to change his mind.

Given this way of setting up the epistemic goal and what is required to achieve it, Foley takes it that only “uncontroversial” beliefs can satisfy it. A belief is uncontroversial for a subject, roughly, when the subject has available to him an argument that, upon sufficient reflection, he would take to support the truth of the belief [i]. Now, Foley’s notion of uncontroversiality provides us with a plausible account of what it takes to be epistemically rational, I take it, which is why it is important for him to be able to show that the set of beliefs that are uncontroversial for a subject, and the set of beliefs that the subject would take on sufficient reflection to satisfy the epistemic goal, turn out to be one and the same. In order to press the objection to instrumentalism, then, what we need is a counterexample to show that these two sets of beliefs do not turn out to be the same.
So what we need is a case of a belief that satisfies the epistemic goal, but fails to be uncontroversial for a subject, or else a belief that is uncontroversial for a subject but fails to achieve the epistemic goal. Both kinds of case can be constructed, I imagine, but I’ll only give an example of the first. The point of this case is to show that even the synchronic epistemic goal can be satisfied in an epistemically irrational manner; restricting the epistemic goal this way fails to screen off epistemically irrelevant factors. (This should not be surprising, by the way; deviant ways of achieving ends are nothing new in philosophy.)

With all of that in mind, let us turn to the problem case. Suppose there is an agent, Larry, who takes himself to be infallible with respect to a domain of knowledge D, and he has taken himself to be so for some time. He has been mistaken on a few occasions, but he has successfully put those occasions from his mind. It pleases him to think that he is infallible, and he manages not to think about his few failures (like many of us, he is quite capable of ignoring evidence), so he continues to believe in his infallibility. Since the time when he formed the belief in his infallibility, Larry has produced very many beliefs within D, and he continues to hold those beliefs. Furthermore, he is aware of several scientific studies which agree that people who take themselves to be infallible with respect to domain D, for whatever reason, produce very many true beliefs about it, and very few false beliefs. The ratio of true to false beliefs, moreover, is much higher for people who believe themselves to be infallible than for those who do not. Finally, the studies also show that people who for whatever reason give up the belief in their infallibility also give up all their beliefs about D.

These studies do not, of course, figure in Larry’s reasoning when he produces beliefs about D, because he believes himself to be infallible, so he does not need the extra boost to his epistemic self-confidence. But the studies do support his belief in his infallibility, in the following way. Larry has read and been impressed by Foley’s book, and he wants to make sure that he is epistemically rational in his beliefs. He therefore proceeds to test his beliefs for how well they promote the epistemic goal of now having true beliefs and now not having false beliefs. He recognizes (because he has read the scientific studies to this effect) that because he takes himself to be infallible, he must have produced very many true beliefs and very few (if any) false ones about D. He concludes that his belief in his infallibility is an effective means to achieving the epistemic goal. He does not even bother to determine whether he has an uncontroversial argument in favour of his infallibility, because the belief just obviously promotes the epistemic goal. Even though it is in fact both false and controversial for him – since he has been mistaken on occasion, and he could make himself aware of his mistakes, if he reflected carefully – it promotes the epistemic goal so well, because it is only one false belief that allows him to hold many true beliefs. (Larry does not, of course, take his belief in his infallibility to be false, but he can see that even if it was false, it would still clearly promote the epistemic goal, so he does not go on to wonder about its uncontroversiality.)

Because Larry succeeds in achieving the epistemic goal, his belief in his infallibility counts as epistemically rational, if ICER is true. But his belief in his infallibility ought to be obviously epistemically irrational, because it is held contrary to some conclusive available evidence that is being ignored. It even fails Foley’s own test for epistemic rationality: it is not an uncontroversial belief, because upon a little serious reflection, Larry would see that he has good reason to doubt his infallibility. So, even though this formulation of the epistemic goal is designed to screen off epistemically irrelevant ways of achieving it, we have here a case of an epistemically irrational belief that nevertheless achieves it [ii]. And, although that is not a conclusive reason for rejecting ICER, it ought to undermine much of its appeal: ordinary conceptions of the epistemic goal (e.g. Alston’s) can be achieved in epistemically irrational ways, and even a formulation of the epistemic goal designed to avoid such problems (Foley’s) still runs into them. If some of our best attempts at formulating an epistemic goal fail to capture what epistemic rationality is about, then, perhaps epistemic rationality just is not about achieving an epistemic goal.

3.2. A regress argument
The second argument against ICER is adapted from Siegel (1996). Siegel argues against Ronald Giere’s and Larry Laudan’s instrumental conceptions of epistemic and scientific rationality in particular, but the argument applies to any conception on which epistemic rationality is entirely instrumental in character.
Siegel’s question is the following: given means M, evidence E, and goal G, how is it that M can be instrumentally rational as a means to achieve G? The answer is that E must make the following claim rational to believe: “M is an effective means to achieve G” (call this claim ‘C’). If E does not make C rational to believe, then M is not rational to adopt as means to achieve G [iii]. The mere fact that M will achieve one’s goals is not enough to render the adoption of M rational; it must also be rational for one to think that M will do so. The point is perfectly general: for any means M (whether it be a belief or an action) and goal G (be it a practical or an epistemic goal), it cannot be instrumentally rational to adopt M in order to achieve G unless it is epistemically rational for the agent in question to think that M will achieve G.

It is impossible, therefore, for epistemic rationality to be instrumental in character. Instrumental rationality is always about taking the means to achieve our goals, and taking the means to achieve our goals can only be rational if it is epistemically rational to think that the means will achieve our goals. Even in the case where G is an epistemic goal, and M is a belief, it will not be instrumentally rational for a subject S to adopt M unless it is epistemically rational for S to believe that M will achieve G; the mere fact that a belief is instrumentally useful for achieving the epistemic goal is not enough to make it rational to believe.
Another way to put the point is as follows. We can (and sometimes do) hold true beliefs without good reason. We have unfounded hunches, we are wishful thinkers, etc. When such beliefs are true, they serve the epistemic goal, but because we have no good reason to think that they serve the epistemic goal (we have no reason to think that they are true), they are not epistemically rational.

It does not help to object here that if claim C, the claim that M will achieve G, is itself instrumentally effective in achieving the epistemic goal, that is enough to make C epistemically rational, which in turn is enough to make M instrumentally rational. That C is instrumentally effective in achieving the epistemic goal is not enough to make C epistemically rational: what is also required is that there be good reason to think that C is instrumentally effective for achieving the epistemic goal. If there were no good reason to think that, then the case would be analogous to the case where a subject has a true belief that lacks justification. It would be just lucky that the subject’s belief C serves the epistemic goal; epistemic rationality would be absent, in that case.
And a good reason to believe C cannot be only a further instrumental reason C*, whose content is that C is instrumentally effective for achieving the epistemic goal. C*, if its own rationality is only instrumental, would depend for its rationality on the further claim C**, whose content is that C* is instrumentally effective for achieving the epistemic goal. And now we’re obviously off on an infinite regress of purportedly instrumentally rational beliefs whose rationality depends on the instrumental rationality of higher-level beliefs.
Instrumental rationality, therefore, always depends on the epistemic rationality of the claim that the means are good for achieving the goal, even in the case where the instrument is a belief and the goal is to believe truths. And the epistemic rationality of the claim that the means are good ones for achieving the goal cannot itself be merely instrumental, in the service of the epistemic goal, because that generates a vicious regress.

4. Conclusion.
It is important to see that epistemic rationality is not dependent on the content of the epistemic goals that agents want to achieve. If ICER was correct, then agents could “escape” the dictates of epistemic rationality by lacking an epistemic goal. All that we could say would be that, if an agent cares about achieving the epistemic goal, then that agent has a reason to try to achieve it. Otherwise, nothing is epistemically rational or irrational for her. But that is the wrong result: people who lack epistemic goals can still have epistemically rational or irrational beliefs. Furthermore, if epistemic rationality is the important kind of rationality when it comes to assessing an argument’s premises, and the support that its premises lend to its conclusion, then agents could escape the goodness of arguments that they do not like, and they could escape the badness of their own arguments, merely by lacking an epistemic goal. (Granted, that is easier said than done, but it is at least possible, and it seems to me that it does happen.) But, because epistemic rationality is categorical in nature, simply not caring about achieving an epistemic goal does not allow agents to escape epistemic evaluation of beliefs, or of arguments.

NOTES
[i] For Foley, it is not necessary that a subject actually have considered the argument in question in order for his beliefs to be supported by it. All that is required is that the argument be one that the subject would become aware of, just by reflecting on his reasons for the belief.
[ii] One might object: we should read Foley as holding that each belief must in and of itself satisfy the goal. That might eliminate counterexamples like mine. But that appears to be a major revision of Foley’s account, given that he doesn’t say that anywhere, and given also that the “in and of itself” restriction makes the synchronic restriction pointless. If a subject would take a belief to satisfy the diachronic epistemic goal in and of itself, then he must have an uncontroversial argument for it. So I doubt that Foley had this in mind.
[iii] I want to leave open the question regarding whether the agent must in some sense believe C, or whether it is only the case that she must have grounds that would justify C if she were to form the belief C. Siegel, at least, does not make it clear what he thinks on this point, and I do not want to try to settle the issue one way or the other.

REFERENCES
Alston, W. (1985). Concepts of epistemic justification. The Monist, 68, 57-89.
David, M. (2001). Truth as the epistemic goal. In M. Steup (Ed.) Knowledge, truth, and duty: Essays on epistemic justification, responsibility, and virtue (pp.151-169). New York: Oxford University Press.
Feldman, R. (1988). Epistemic obligations. Philosophical Perspectives, 2: Epistemology, 235-256.
Foley, R. (1987). The Theory of Epistemic Rationality. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Kelly, T. (2003). Epistemic rationality as instrumental rationality: A critique. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 66(3), 612-640.
Kvanvig, J. (2005). Truth is not the primary epistemic goal. In E. Sosa & M. Steup (Eds.) Contemporary debates in epistemology (pp.285-296). Oxford: Blackwell.
Latus, A. (2000). Our epistemic goal. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 78(1), 28-39.
Nozick, R. (1993). The Nature of Rationality. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Siegel, H. (1996). Instrumental rationality and naturalized philosophy of science. Philosophy of Science, 63, Supplement: Proceedings of the 1996 Biennial Meetings of the Philosophy of Science Association. Part I: Contributed Papers (Sep., 1996), S116-S124.
Vahid, H. (2003). Truth and the aim of justification. Teorema, 22(3), 83-91.

1. Introduction
Argumentation is a mode of discourse in which the involved interlocutors are committed to reasonableness, i.e. they accept the challenge of reciprocally founding their positions on the basis of reasons (Rigotti & Greco Morasso 2009). Even though during everyday lives of families argumentation proves to be a very relevant mode of discourse (Arcidiacono & Bova, in press; Arcidiacono et al., 2009), traditionally other contexts have obtained more attention by argumentation theorists: in particular, law (Feteris, 1999, 2005), politics (Cigada, 2008; Zarefsky, 2009), media (Burger & Guylaine, 2005; Walton, 2007), health care (Rubinelli & Schulz, 2006, Schulz & Rubinelli, 2008), and mediation (Jacobs & Aakhus, 2002; Greco Morasso, in press).

This paper focuses on the less investigated phenomenon of argumentative discussions among family members. More specifically, I address the issue of the implicitness and its functions within argumentative discussions in the family context. Drawing on the Pragma-dialectical approach to argumentation (van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 1984, 2004), the paper describes how the implicitness is a specific argumentative strategy adopted by parents during dinner conversations at home with their children.

In the first part of the paper I will present a synthetic description of the basic properties of family dinner conversations, here considered a specific communicative activity type[i]. Subsequently, the current landscape of studies on family argumentation and the pragma-dialectical model of critical discussion will be taken into account in order to provide the conceptual and methodological frame through which two case studies are examined.

2. Family dinner conversations as a communicative activity type
Dinnertime has served as a relevant communicative activity type for the study of family interactions. Its importance as a site of analysis is not surprising since dinner is one of the activities that brings family members together during the day and serves as an important occasion to constitute and maintain the family roles (Pan et al., 2000). Indeed, family dinner conversations are characterized by a large prevalence of interpersonal relationships and by a relative freedom concerning issues that can be tackled (Pontecorvo & Arcidiacono, 2007).

Several studies have contributed to the understanding of the features that constitute the dinnertime event, the functions of talk that are performed by participants, and the discursive roles that family members take up (Davidson & Snow, 1996; Pontecorvo et al., 2001; Ochs & Shohet, 2006). For instance, Blum-Kulka (1997) identified three contextual frames based on clusters of themes in family dinner conversations: An instrumental dinner-as-business frame that deals with the preparation and service of food; a family-focused news telling frame in which the family listens to the most recent news of its members; a world-focused frame of non-immediate concerns, which includes topics related to the recent and non-recent past and future, such as talk about travel arrangements and complaints about working conditions. In addition, she identified three primary functions of talk at dinnertime: Instrumental talk dealing with the business of having dinner; sociable talk consisting of talking as an end in itself; and socializing talk consisting of injunctions to behave and speak in appropriate ways. All these aspects constitute a relevant concern to focus on dinnertime conversations in order to re-discover the crucial argumentative activity that is continuously developed within this context.

In the last decade, besides a number of studies which highlight the cognitive and educational advantages of reshaping teaching and learning activities in terms of argumentative interactions (Mercer, 2000; Schwarz et al., 2008; Muller Mirza & Perret-Clermont, 2009), the relevance of the study of argumentative discussions in the family context is gradually emerging as a relevant field of research in social sciences.

The family context is showing itself to be particularly significant in the study of argumentation, as the argumentative attitude learnt in family, above all the capacity to deal with disagreement by means of reasonable verbal interactions, can be considered “the matrix of all other forms of argumentation” (Muller Mirza et. al., 2009, p. 76). Furthermore, despite the focus on narratives as the first genre to appear in communication with young children, caregiver experiences as well as observations of conversations between parents and children suggest that family conversations can be a significant context for emerging argumentative strategies (Pontecorvo & Fasulo, 1997). For example, a study done by Brumark (2008) revealed the presence of recurrent argumentative features in family conversations, as well as the association between some argumentative structures and children’s ages. Other works have shown how families of different cultures can be characterized by different argumentative styles (Arcidiacono & Bova, in press) and how specific linguistic indicators can trigger the beginning of argumentative debates in family (Arcidiacono & Bova, forthcoming). They also demonstrate the relevance of an accurate knowledge of the context in order to evaluate the argumentative dynamics of the family conversations at dinnertime (Arcidiacono et al., 2009).

For the above-mentioned reasons, family conversations are activity types in which parents and children are involved in different argumentative exchanges. By this study, I intend to focus on the implicitness and its functions within argumentative discussions in the family context, showing how it is a specific argumentative strategy adopted by parents during dinner conversations at home with their children. It is important to emphasize that argumentation constitutes an intrinsically context-dependent activity which does not exist unless it is embedded in specific domains of human social life. Argumentation cannot be reduced to a system of formal procedures as it only takes place embodied in actual communicative and non-communicative practices and spheres of interaction (van Eemeren et al., 2009; Rigotti & Rocci, 2006). Indeed, as van Eemeren & Grootendorst (2004) suggest, knowledge of the context is relevant in the reconstruction; and, more specifically, the so-called “third-order” conditions (ibid: 36-37), referring to the “‘external’ circumstances in which the argumentation takes place must be taken into account when evaluating the correspondence of argumentative reality to the model of a critical discussion. Thus, in analyzing family conversations, the knowledge of the context has to be integrated into the argumentative structure itself in order to properly understand the argumentative moves adopted by family members. Accordingly, the apparently irregular, illogical and incoherent structures emerging in these natural discourse situations (Brumark, 2006a) require a “normative” model of analysis as well as specific “empathy” towards the subject of the research, as both elements are necessary to properly analyze the argumentative moves which occur in the family context.

3. Data and method
The present study is part of a larger project[ii] devoted to the study of argumentation within the family context. The general aim of the research is to verify the impact of argumentative strategies for conflict prevention and resolution within the dynamics of family educational interactions. The data corpus includes video-recordings of thirty dinners held by five Italian families and five Swiss families. All participants are Italian-speaking.

In order to minimize the researchers’ interferences, the recordings were performed by families on their own[iii]. Researchers met the families in a preliminary phase, to inform participants about the general goals of the research, the procedures, and to get the informed consent. Further, family members were informed that we are interested in “ordinary family interactions” and they were asked to try to behave “as usual” at dinnertime. During the first visit, a researcher was in charge of placing the camera and instructing the parents on the use of the technology (such as the position and the direction of the camera, and other technical aspects). Families were asked to record their interactions when all family members were present. Each family videotaped their dinners four times, over a four-week period. The length of the recordings varies from 20 to 40 minutes. In order to allow the participants to familiarize themselves with the camera, the first recording was not used for the aims of the research. In a first phase, all dinnertime conversations were fully transcribed[iv] using the CHILDES system (MacWhinney, 1989), and revised by two researchers until a high level of consent (80%) was reached.

After this phase, the researchers jointly reviewed with family members all the transcriptions at their home. Through this procedure, it has been possible to ask family members to clarify some unclear passages (in the eyes of the researchers), i.e. allusions to events known by family members but unknown to others, low level of recordings, and unclear words and claims.

3.1 The model of Critical Discussion
In order to analyze the argumentative sequences occurring in family, we are referring to the model of Critical Discussion (hereafter CD) developed by van Eemeren and Grootendorst (1984, 2004). This model is a theoretical device developed within the pragma-dialectics to define a procedure for testing standpoints critically in the light of commitments assumed in the empirical reality of argumentative discourses. The model of CD provides a description of what argumentative discourse would be as if it were optimally and solely aimed at resolving a difference of opinion about the soundness of a standpoint[v]. It is relevant to underline that CD constitutes a theoretically based model to solve differences of opinion, which does not refer to any empirical phenomena. Indeed, as suggested by van Eemeren (2010), “in argumentative reality no tokens of a critical discussion can be found” (p. 128).

The model of CD consists of four stages that discussants should go through, albeit not necessarily explicitly, in the attempt to solve a disagreement. In the initial confrontation stage the protagonist advances his standpoint and meets with the antagonist’s doubts, sometimes implicitly assumed. Before the argumentation stage, in which arguments are put forth for supporting/destroying the standpoint, parties have to agree on some starting point. This phase (the opening stage) is essential to the development of the discussion because only if a certain common ground exists, it is possible for parties to reasonably resolve – in the concluding stage – the difference of opinions[vi].

In order to fully understand the logics of the model, it is necessary to refer to what van Eemeren and Houtlosser (2002) have developed as the notion of strategic maneuvering. It allows reconciling “a long-standing gap between the dialectical and the rhetorical approach to argumentation” (p. 27), and takes into account the arguers’ personal motivations for engaging in a critical discussion. In fact, in empirical reality discussants do not just aim to perform speech acts that will be considered reasonable by their fellow discussants (dialectical aim), but they also direct their contributions towards gaining success, that is to achieve the perlocutionary effect of acceptance (rhetorical aim).

In the present study, the model is assumed as a general framework for the analysis of argumentative strategies in family conversations. It is intended as a grid for the investigation, having both a heuristic and a critical function. In fact, the model can help in identifying argumentative moves as well as in evaluating their contribution to the resolution of the difference of opinion.

3.2 Specific criteria of analysis
According to the model of CD and in order to get an analytic overview of some aspects of discourse that are crucial for the examination and the evaluation of the argumentative sequences occurring in ordinary conversations, the following components must be elicited: The difference of opinion at issue in the confrontation stage; the premises agreed upon in the opening stage that serves as the point of departure of the discussion; the arguments and criticisms that are – explicitly or implicitly – advanced in the argumentation stage, and the outcome of the discussion that is achieved in the concluding stage. Besides, once the main difference of opinion is identified, its type can also be categorized (van Eemeren & Grotendoorst, 1992). In a single dispute, only one proposition is at issue, whereas in a multiple dispute, two or more propositions are questioned. In a nonmixed dispute only one standpoint with respect to a proposition is questioned, whereas in a mixed dispute two opposite standpoints regarding the same proposition are questioned.

4. Dinnertime conversations: A qualitative analysis
In this section I will present a qualitative analysis carried out on transcripts. In this work, I have identified the participants’ interventions within the selected sequences and I have examined the relevant (informative) passages by going back to the video data, in order to reach a high level of consent among researchers. Finally, I have built a collection of instances, similar in terms of criteria of the selection, in order to start the detailed analysis of argumentative moves during family interactions. As each family can be considered a “case study”, I am not interested here in doing comparisons among families. For this reason, and in order to make clear and easy the presentation of the excerpts, the cases below present situations considered and framed in their contexts of production, accounting for certain types of argumentative moves.

4.1 Analysis
In order to analyze the functions of implicitness within family argumentations, I am presenting two excerpts as representative case studies of argumentative sequences among parents and children, in which parents make use of sentences with a high degree of implicitness, with the goal of verifying to what extent implicitness can be considered a specific argumentative strategy adopted by parents during dinner conversations with their children in order to achieve their goal. I have applied the above-mentioned criteria of analysis in order to highlight the argumentative moves of participants during the selected dinnertime conversations.

The first example concerns a Swiss family (case 1) and the second is related to an Italian family (case 2). In the excerpts, fictitious names replace real names in order to ensure anonymity.

4.2 Case 1: “The noise of crisp bread”
Participants: MOM (mother, age: 35); DAD (father, age: 37); MAR (child 1, Marco, age: 9); FRA (child 2, Francesco, age: 6).
All family members are seated at the table waiting for dinner.
1 *FRA: mom. [=! a low tone of voice]
2 *MOM: eh.
3 *FRA: I want to talk:: [=! a low tone of voice]
→ *FRA: but it is not possible [=! a low tone of voice]
→ *FRA: because <my voice is bad> [=! a low tone of voice]
4 *MOM: absolutel not
→ MOM:  no::.
5 *FRA: please:: mom:
6 *MOM: why?
7 *FRA: [=! nods]
8 *MOM: I do not think so.
→ *MOM: it’s a beautiful voice like a man.
→ *MOM: big, beautiful::.
9 *FRA: no.
%pau: common 2.5
10 *MOM: tonight:  if we hear the sound of crisp bread ((the noise when crisp bread is being chewed)) [=! smiling]
11 *FRA: well bu [:], but not::: to this point.
%pau: common 4.0

The sequence starts with the intervention of the child (turn 1, “mom”) that selects the addressee (the mother), with a low tone of voice as sign of hesitation. After a sign of attention by the mother (turn 2, “eh”), Francesco makes explicit his request “turn 3, (“I want to talk”) and the problem that is at stake. When he explains the reason behind his opinion, the mother expresses her disagreement and tries to moderate her intervention through repetition of the genitive mark and the prolonging of the sound (turn 4, “absolutely not, no::”). At this point, the discussion is at the phase of the confrontation stage. In fact, it becomes clear that there is a child’s standpoint (my voice is bad) that meets the mother’s contradiction. In particular, in turn 5 Francesco does not provide further arguments to defend his position. In fact, for him, it is so evident that his voice is bad and he tries to convince the mother to align to this position through a recontextualization (Ochs, 1992) of the claim (“please:: mom:”). The prolonging of the sound is thus a way to recall the mother’s attention to the topic of discussion (and the different positions about the topic). In turn 6 the mother asks the child the reason behind such an idea (“why?”), expressing her need for explanation and clarification. From an argumentative point of view, the sequence turns to a very interesting point. In fact, Francesco does not provide further arguments to defend his position, but he answers with a non-verbal act which aimed at confirming his position (he nods as to say that it is self-evident). Despite the mother’s request, it is clear that the child evades the burden of proof. At this point the mother states that she completely disagrees with her child (turn 8, “I do not think so”), and by assuming the burden of proof she now accepts to be the protagonist of the discussion. Indeed, she provides arguments in order to defend her standpoint (your voice is not bad), telling her child that his voice is beautiful as that of a grown-up man.

At this point, the mother uses an ironic expression, an argument with a high degree of implicitness (turn 10, “tonight if we hear the sound of crisp bread”). Indeed, she tells the child that if that evening, strange noises were heard, such as that of crisp bread being chewed, it would be her child’s voice. It is interesting to notice that the mother uses the first person plural (“we hear the sound”) in order to signal a position that puts the child versus the other family members. The presumed alliance among family members reinforces the idea that the claim of Francesco is not supported by the other participants. The use of epistemic and affective stances (turn 8, “a beautiful voice…big, beautiful”) and the irony (turn 10) emphasize the value of the indexical properties of speech through which particular stances and acts constitute a context.

In pragma-dialectical terms, from turn 5 to turn 10, the mother and the child go through an argumentation stage. In turn 11 Francesco maintains his standpoint but he decreases its strength in a way (“well but not to this point”). Indeed, we could paraphrase Francesco’s answer as follows: Yes, I have a bad voice, but not so much! Not to that point, not as strange as the noise of crisp bread being chewed! The child’s intervention in turn 11 is an opportunity to re-open the conversation about the voice, in particular if we consider the beginning of the claim (“well”) as a proper key site (Vicher & Sankoff, 1989) to potentially continue the argumentative activity. However, the common pause of 4 seconds closes the sequence and marks the concluding stage of the interactions.

In argumentative terms, we could reconstruct the difference of opinion between the child and his mother as follows:
Issue: How is Francesco’s voice?
Protagonist: both mother and child
Antagonist: both mother and child
Type of difference of opinion: single-mixed

Mother’s Standpoint: (1.) Francesco’s voice is beautiful
Mother’s Argument: (1.1) It is big, like a grown-up man
Child’s Standpoint: (1.) My voice is bad
Child’s Argument: (1.1.) (non-verbal act: he nods as to say that it is self-evident)

4.3 Case 2: “Mom needs the lemons”
Participants: MOM (mother, age: 32); DAD (father, age: 34); GIO (child1, Giovanni, age: 10); LEO (child2, Leonardo, age: 8); VAL (child3, Valentina, age: 5).
All the family members are eating, seated at the table.
1 *LEO: Mom:: look!
→ *LEO: look what I’m doing with the lemon.
→ *LEO: I’m rubbing it out.
→ *LEO: I’m  rubbing it out!
→ *LEO: I’m rubbing out this color.
%sit: MOM takes some lemons and stoops down in front of LEO so that her face is level with his.
%sit: MOM places some lemons on the table.
2 *LEO: give them to me.
3 *MOM: eh?
4 *LEO: can I have this lemon?
5 *MOM: no:: no:: no:: no::
6 *LEO: why not?
7 *MOM: why not?: because, Leonardo, mom needs the lemons
8 *LEO: why mom?
9 *MOM: because, Leonardo, your dad wants to eat a good salad today
10 *LEO: ah:: ok mom

During dinner, there is a difference of opinion between Leonardo and his mother. Leonardo, in fact, wants to have the lemons, that are placed on the table, to play with (turn 2), but the mother says that he cannot have them (turn 5).

5 *MOM: no:: no:: no:: no::
The mother’s answer is clear and explicit: she does not want to give the lemons to her child. The discussion is at the phase of the confrontation stage. In fact, it becomes clear that there is a child’s standpoint (I want the lemons) that meets the mother’s contradiction.

At this point Leonardo (turn 6) asks his mother why he cannot have the lemons. The mother answers (turn 7) that she needs the lemons. But as we can note from the Leonardo’s answer in turn 8, this argument is not sufficient to convince him to change his opinion. In fact, he continues to ask his mother:

6 *LEO: why not?
7 *MOM: why not?: because, Leonardo, mom needs the lemons
8 *LEO: why mom?

At this point, the mother uses an expression with a high degree of implicitness:

9 *MOM: because, Leonardo, your dad wants to eat a good salad today

Indeed, she tells the child that his dad wants to eat a good salad, and that in order to prepare a good salad she needs the lemons. In pragma-dialectical terms, from turn 6 to turn 9, the mother and the child go through an argumentation stage. In turn 10 Leonardo accepts the argument put forward by the mother and, accordingly, marks the concluding stage of this interaction.

In argumentative terms, we could reconstruct the difference of opinion between the child and his mother as follows:
Issue: Can Leonardo have the lemons?
Protagonist: both mother and child
Antagonist: both mother and child
Type of difference of opinion: single-mixed
Mother’s Standpoint: (1.) You can’t have the lemons
Mother’s Argument: (1.1) mom needs the lemons
Mother’s Argument (1.2) dad  wants to eat a good salad today
Child’s Standpoint: (1.) I want the lemons

5. Discussion
In both sequences parents make use of the implicitness during conversations at home with their children in order to achieve their goal. In the first excerpt, the mother puts forward an argument with implicit meaning in order to persuade her child to retract his standpoint. In turn 10, by saying:
10   *MOM: tonight [:] if we hear the sound of “bread schioccarello” ((the noise when crisp bread being chewed)) [=! smiling] [=! ironically]
she is telling the child that if that evening all family members (‘we hear’) heard strange noises, such as that of crisp bread being chewed, it would be the child’s voice. In my opinion, the child’s answer makes it clear that he understood the implicit meaning of the mother’s argument. Indeed, Francesco maintains his standpoint, but in a certain way, he decrease its strength.
11 *FR1: well bu [:] but not:: to this point.
We can paraphrase Francesco’s answer as follow: “Yes, I have a bad voice, but not so much! Not to that point, not as strange as the noise of crisp bread being chewed!”.

According to leading scholars, commenting ironically on the attitudes or habits of children, appears to be a socializing function adopted by parents in the context of family discourse (Rundquist 1992; Brumark 2006b). In the first excerpt, commenting ironically Francesco’s standpoint by means of an argument with a high degree of implicitness, could be also interpreted as the specific form of strategic maneuvering adopted by the mother with her child in order achieve her goal. Furthermore, it is important to stress that a necessary condition for the effectiveness of this form of strategic maneuvering is that the implicit meaning is clear and shared by both arguers (i.e. Francesco understands the implicit meaning of the mother’s utterance).

In the first case, we saw how the mother can use an argument with implicit meaning in order to persuade her child to retract his standpoint. On the other hand, in the second excerpt, the mother tries to convince her child to accept her standpoint. Indeed, in turn 9 she says:
9 *MOM: because, Leonardo, your dad wants to eat a good salad today

In this case it is clear and explicit that the mother refers to father’s anger and authority, and she does so implicitly. Besides, by anticipating the possible consequences of his behavior, the mother is implicitly telling the child that the father might be displeased by the person who was the cause of him not having a good salad. Now, the mother’s behavior could be interpreted as the specific form of strategic maneuvering adopted with her child in order achieve her goal.

Furthermore, as suggested by Caffi (2007), using an argument with a high degree of implicitness can “mitigate” the direction of an order. Accordingly, the order is presented in a less direct way, we could say “more gentle”, and so the child perceives it not as an imposition. For instance, saying that the child cannot have the lemons because dad wants to eat a good salad, can appear in the child’s eyes as a desire that has to be carried out, and not an order without any justification.

6. Conclusion
In this paper I have tried to show how implicitness can be considered a specific argumentative strategy adopted by parents during dinner conversations with their children in order to achieve their goals. At this point it seems appropriate to take stock of the acquisitions of the ongoing research presented here, listing also the approximately drawn solutions that need to be specified.

Firstly, implicitness appears to be a specific argumentative strategy used by parents in family conversations with their children. Indeed, implicitness in the cases analyzed has two specific functions: In the first case, implicitness is a specific form of strategic maneuvering adopted by the mother to persuade her child to retract or reduce the strength of his standpoint. In the second case, anticipating the possible consequences of his behavior, by means of an argument with a high degree of implicitness, is another form of strategic maneuvering adopted by the mother in order to persuade her child to accept her standpoint.

Secondly, considering the two cases analyzed, we have seen that in order to be an effective argumentative strategy, implicitness has to be clear and understood by both parties. Lastly, parents seem to make use of the implicitness to put forward their arguments in a less directive form. In other words, by means of implicitness parents mitigate the direction of an order.

Considering the two cases as part of a larger research project, some questions about the argumentative moves of family members at dinnertime still remain unanswered. In particular, to provide further analyses of the collected data, we need to understand to what extent family argumentation corresponds to a reasonable resolution of the difference of opinion, to highlight the specific nature of argumentative strategies used by family members and to construct a typology of the several functions of the implicitness in the argumentative exchanges between family members, defining whether it is possible to consider young children as reasonable arguers, by taking into consideration their communicative and cognitive skills.

Appendix: Transcription conventions
. falling intonation
? rising intonation
! exclaiming intonation
, continuing intonation
: prolonging of sounds
[   simultaneous or overlapping speech
(.) pause (2/10 second or less)
(   ) non-transcribing segment of talk
((  )) segments added by the transcribers in order to clarify some elements of the discourse

NOTES
[i] The notion of activity type has been developed by Levinson (1979), in order to refer to a fuzzy category whose focal-members are goal-defined, socially constituted with constraint on participants, settings and other kinds of allowable contributions. According to van Eemeren (2010), communicative activity types are conventionalized practices whose conventionalization serves, through the implementation of certain “genres” of communicative activity, the institutional needs prevailing in a certain domain of a communicative activity. Within this framework, family dinner is a specific communicative activity type within the domain of communicative activity named interpersonal communication. In their model of communication context, Rigotti and Rocci (2006) characterize the activity type as the institutional dimension of any communicative interaction – interaction schemes – embodied within an interaction field.
[ii] I am referring to the Research Module “Argumentation as a reasonable alternative to conflict in family context” (project n. PDFMP1-123093/1) founded by Swiss National Science Foundation. It is part of the ProDoc project “Argupolis: Argumentation Practices in Context”, jointly designed and developed by scholars of the Universities of Lugano, Neuchâtel, Lausanne (Switzerland) and Amsterdam (The Netherlands).
[iii] From a deontological point of view, recordings made without the speakers’ consent are unacceptable. It is hard to assess to what extent informants are inhibited by the presence of the camera. However, I tried to use a data gathering procedure that minimizes this factor as much as possible. For a more detailed discussion, cf. Arcidiacono & Pontecorvo (2004)..
[iv] For the transcription symbols, see the Appendix.
[v] Standpoint is the analytical term used to indicate the position taken by a party in a discussion on an issue. As Rigotti and Greco Morasso (2009) put it: “a standpoint is a statement (simple or complex) for whose acceptance by the addressee the arguer intends to argue” (p. 44).
[vi] I agree with Vuchinich (1990) who points out that real-life argumentative discourse does not always lead to one “winner” and one “loser”. Indeed, frequently the parties do not automatically agree on the interpretation of outcomes. In this perspective, the normative model of critical discussion has to be systematically brought together with careful empirical description.

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As the famous discourse analyst Norman Fairclough states, “it is time social theorists and researchers delivered on their promissory notes about the importance of language and discourse in contemporary social life” (Fairclough 2003, p.204).

The aim of the paper is to analyse the use of the major stylistic devices and argumentative strategies in public discourse, in particular, to reveal the frequency of their use in the given genre of speech. The research questions are: a) whether the use of stylistic devices and argumentative strategies is determined by the subject of the speech, b) whether it is determined by gender differences, c) whether there are typical “male” and “female” devices and strategies. As the material for investigation was taken “Contemporary American Speeches” (Johannesen 2000). Following I. Galperin’s idea that “the necessary data can be obtained by means of an objective statistical count based on a large number of texts” (Galperin 1991, p.332), we have used the methods of statistical and corpus-based analyses, as well as the method of comparative analysis.

First, a general statistical and comparative analysis has been made. The total number of speeches is 53, among them 34 speeches belong to males, whereas 19 speeches to females, that is 63 percent of speeches belongs to males vs 37 percent of female speeches. According to the subject of speech, the distribution of the figures is as follows:
concerns of minorities: 9/7m, 2f [i]
military and foreign policy: 8/7m, 1 f
technology and the environment : 8/6m, 2f
economic and social issues: 7/6m, 1f
the political process: 7/4m, 3f
contemporary morals and value: 7/3m, 4f
concerns of women: 7/1m, 6f.

As can be easily seen, in the majority of cases (with the exception of the two last topics – morals and value and women’s concern) within one and the same topic male speeches prevail in number.

Below will be presented the results of the statistical and comparative analysis of the use of stylistic devices and argumentative strategies based on the whole corpus of speeches:
1. Rhetorical question: 137/88m, 49f
a) rhetorical question as interest factor: 87/64m, 23f; b) rhetorical question as reservation or challenge: 21/12m, 9f; c) rhetorical question as transition: 13/8m, 5f; d) rhetorical question as attention material: 8/4m, 4f; e) rhetorical question as a concluding device: 8/8 f, om
Example: 137/81m, 56 f

a) example as specific instance: 93/45m, 48f; b) brief example: 38/32m, 6f; c) extended example: 4/3m, 1f; d) hypothetical example: 2/1m, 1f

1. 2.  Enumeration: 136/91m, 45f
2. 3.  Quotation: 106/66m, 40f

a)     quotation as testimony: 57/39m, 18f; b) quotation as amplification: 21/15m, 6f; c) quotation as a concluding device: 20/9m, 11f; d) quotation as an introductory device: 8/3m, 5f

1. 4.  Comparison and/or contrast: 101/61m, 40f
2. 5.  Statistics: 98/72m, 26f
3. 6.  References as devices for focusing attention: 81/54m, 27f

a)     reference to self: 25/14m, 11f; b) reference to the occasion/context: 19/15m, 4f; c) reference to a historical (or past) event: 12/9m, 3f; d) reference to the audience: 11/5m, 6f; e) reference to a recent event: 8/6m, 2f; f) direct reference to the subject: 6/5m, 1f

1. 7.  Metaphor: 64/54m, 10f
2. 8. Credibility building (ethos): 62/44m, 18f

a)     demonstrating personal qualities as credibility building: 28/25m, 3f; b) showing good will as credibility building: 19/12m, 7f; c) indicating qualifications as credibility building: 12/4m, 8f; d) reducing hostility as credibility building: 3/3m, 0f

1. 9.  Parallelism: 60/43m, 17f
2. 10.  Antithesis and antithetical phrasing: 57/43m, 14f
3. 11.  Reasoning: 52/41m, 11f

a)     reasoning to consequences: 20/17m, 3f; b) causal reasoning: 13/9m, 4f; c) parallel case reasoning: 8/8m, 0f; d) reasoning from circumstance: 4/4m, 0f; e) reasoning from reciprocity: 3/1m, 2f; f) alternative reasoning: 2/2f, om; g) reasoning from class: 1/1m, 0f; h) sign reasoning: 1/1m, 0f

1. 12.  Motivational appeal: 51/40m, 11f
2. 13.  Allusion: 50/35m, 15f
3. Personal recollection or illustration: 49/22m, 27f
4. 15.  Conclusion (devices used in): 42/33m, 9f

a)     appeal: 15/10m, 5f; b) challenge: 8/8m, 0f; c) summary: 6/5m 1f; d) reference to the introduction: 6/4m, 2f; e) statement of personal intention: 4/3m, 1f; f) personal reference: 3/3m, of

1. 16.  Humour: 38/20m, 18f

a)     humour in the text: 26/13m, 13f; b) humour as a device for focusing attention: 12/7m, 5f

1. 17.  Refutation: 29/18m, 11f
2. 18.  Repetition: 29/16m, 13f
3. 19.  Definition: 27/14m, 13f
4. 20.  Analogy: 20/16m, 4f
5. 21.  Alliteration: 19/15m, 4f
6. 22.  Transition: 17/16m, 1f

a)     signal word as transition: 13/12m, 1f; b) linking phrase as transition: 4/4/m, 0f

1. 23.  Irony: 17/12m, 5f
2. 24.  Immediacy (Urgency): 12/9m, 3f
3. 25.  Personification: 11/7m, 4f
4. 26.  Climax: 10/6m, 4f
5. 27.  Apologetic strategies: 9/9m, 0f

a)     bolstering: 5/5m; b) differentiation: 2/2m; c) denial: 1/1m; d) transcendence: 1/1m

1. 28.  Illustration as a device for focusing attention: 9/2m, 7f
2. 29.  Labelling: 8/7m, 1f
3. 30.  Imagery: 7/7m, 0f
4. 31.  Parenthetical Statement: 7/5m, 2f
5. 32.  Play on Words: 7/1m, 6f
6. 33.  Simile: 5/4m, 1f
7. 34.  Refrain: 5/1m, 4f
8. 35.  Restatement: 4/3m, 1f
9. 36.  Hyperbole: 3/3m, 0f.

The total number of all the stylistic devices and argumentative strategies is 1576, among them 1059 are used by males, whereas 517 by females.

For the analysis to be more precise, in the second part of the research equal number of male and female speeches (3 for each sex) has been taken. The speeches are devoted to various topics, each of them “voiced” by one male and one female. Thus, the speeches by Mario M. Cuomo “Teaching Values in Public Schools” and by Phyllis Schlafly “The Teaching of Values in the Public Schools” are devoted to contemporary morals and values, the speeches by Ronald Reagan “Eulogics for the Challenger Astronauts” and by Virginia I. Postrel “The Environmental Movement: A Skeptical View” are devoted to technology and environment, finally, the speeches by D. Stanley Eitzen “Problem Students: The Socio-Cultural Roots” and by Christine D. Keen “Human Resource Management Issues in the ‘90s” – to economic and social issues. The statistical and comparative analyses have revealed the following:

1. 1.  Enumeration: 23/14m, 9f

2. Quotation: 17/4m, 13f
a) quotation as testimony: 12/2m, 10f; b) quotation as a concluding device: 3/1m, 2f; c) quotation as amplification: 1/1m, 0f; d) quotation as an introductory device: 1/1f, om
3. Rhetorical question: 16/8m, 8f
a)  rhetorical question as attention material: 5/4m, 1f; b) rhetorical question as interest factor: 5/3m, 2f; c) rhetorical question as transition 3/1m, 2f; d) rhetorical question as reservation or challenge: 3/3f, om
4. Example: 16/1m, 15f

a) example as specific instance: 15/1m, 14f; b) extended example: 1/1f, om
5. Reasoning: 15/10m, 5f
a)  reasoning to consequences: 8/7m, 1f; b) causal reasoning: 4/3m, 1f; c) alternative reasoning: 2/2f, om; d) reasoning from reciprocity: 1/1f, om
6. Statistics: 12/11m, 1f
7. References as devices for focusing attention: 10/6m, 4f

a)  reference to the occasion/context: 3/2m, 1f; b) direct reference to the subject: 2/2m, of; c) reference to the audience: 2/1m, 1f; d) reference to self: 2/2f, om; e) reference to a recent event: 1/1m, of

1. 8.   Comparison and/or contrast: 9/4m, 5f

9. Refutation: 7/1m, 6f

1. 10.  Credibility building (ethos): 6/5m, 1f

a)       demonstrating personal qualities as credibility building: 4/3m, 1f; b) showing good will as credibility building: 1/1m, of; c) indicating qualifications as credibility building: 1/1m, of

1. 11.    Definition: 4/1m, 3f
2. 12.   Allusion: 3/2m, 1f
3. 13.   Parallelism: 2/2m, of
4. 14.   Analogy: 2/2m, of
5. 15.  Metaphor: 2/2m, of
6. 16.   Conclusion (devices used in): 2/2m, of

challenge: 2,2m

1. 17.     Climax: 2/1m, 1f
2. 18.    Irony: 2/1m, 1f
3. 19.    Personal recollection or illustration: 2/1m, 1f
4. 20.   Summary: 2/1m, 1f

a) summary in conclusion: 1/1m, of; b) internal summary: 1/1f, om

1. 21.   Humour as a device for focusing attention: 2/2f, om
2. 22.   Imagery: 1/1m, of
3. 23.   Antithetical phrasing: 1/1m, of
4. 24.   Labelling: 1/1m, of
5. 25.   Motivational appeal: 1/1m, of
6. 26.   Personification: 1/1m of.

The total number of all the stylistic devices and rhetorical strategies under consideration is 161, among them 84 are used by males and 77 by females. Thus, as can be easily seen, also in case of equal number of male and female speeches the number of devices and strategies used by men prevails (though insignificantly). Another important conclusion is that males use comparatively larger variety of types and subtypes of stylistic devices and argumentative strategies, which is presented as follows:
males: 25 types / 35 with subtypes
females: 17 types / 28 with subtypes.

At the next stage of our investigation aiming to find out whether the frequency of the use of stylistic devices and argumentative strategies is determined by a topic of speech, taken at the same time the factor of gender differences, 3 “male” and 3 “female” speeches on one and the same topic – the political issues – were analysed. These are the following speeches: “The Watergate Affair” by Richard N. Nixon, “Inaugural Address” by John F. Kennedy, “The Rainbow Coalition” by Jesse Jackson, “The Feminization of Power” by Eleanor Smeal, “Democratic Convention Keynote Address” by Barbara Jordan and “Inaugural Address as Mayor of the District of Columbia” by Sharon Pratt Dixon. The results of the analysis are presented below:

1. 1.  Parallelism: 29/18m, 11f
2. 2.  Apologetic Strategies: 24/24m, of

a)      bolstering: 11/11m; b) transcendence: 8/8m; c) denial: 3/3m; d)      differentiation: 2/2m

1. 3.  Allusion: 23/10m, 13f
2. 4.  Antithesis and antithetical phrasing: 21/18m, 3f
3. 5.  Statistics: 18/15m, 3f
4. 6.  Enumeration: 18/8m, 10f
5. 7.  Repetition: 17/5m, 12f

8. Metaphor: 15/12m, 3f

9. Credibility building: 13/9m, 4f

a)      demonstrating personal qualities as credibility building: 10/9m, 1f; b) indicating qualifications as credibility building: 3/3f

1. 10.   Motivational appeal: 10/8m, 2f
2. 11.   Reference: 9/6m, 3f

a)       reference to the occasion/context: 4/3m, 1f; b) reference to self: 2/1m, 1f; c) reference to a historical (or past) event: 2/1m, 1f; d) reference to a recent event: 1/1m, of

1. 12.   Example: 9/4m, 5f

a) example as a specific instance: 7/3m, 4f; b) brief example: 2/1m, 1f

1. 13.   Rhetorical question: 8/4m, 4f

a)       rhetorical question as interest factor: 4/1m, 3f; b) rhetorical question as transition: 2/2m, of; c) rhetorical question as challenge: 1/1m, of; d) rhetorical question as attention material: 1/1f, om

1. 14.   Personal recollection or illustration: 6/5m, 1f
2. 15.   Comparison and/or contrast: 5/3m, 2f
3. 16.   Quotation: 5/2m, 3f

a)       quotation as amplification: 3/2m, 1f; b) quotation as an introductory device: 1/1f, om; c) quotation as a concluding device: 1/1f, om

1. 17.   Alliteration: 4/3m, 1f
2. 18.  Conclusion (devices used in): 4/2m, 2f

a)       appeal: 2/2m, of; b) reference to the introduction: 1/1f, om; c) statement of personal intention: 1/1f, om

1. 19.   Immediacy: 4/1m, 3f
2. 20.  Humour in the text: 3/2m, 1f
3. 21.  Climax: 3/1m, 2f
4. 22.  Personification: 3/1m, 2f
5. 23.  Imagery: 2/2m, of
6. 24.  Play on words: 2/1m, 1f
7. 25.  Irony: 1/1m, of
8. 26.  Labelling: 1/1m, of
9. 27.  Parenthetical statement: 1/1f, om.

The total number of all the stylistic devices and rhetorical strategies used in the analysed corpus of speeches is 258, among them 166 are used by males, whereas only 92 – by females. Besides, the types and subtypes of the devices and strategies used by men are more diverse compared with those used by women, which is represented as follows:
males: 26 types/ 35 with subtypes
females: 23 types / 31 with subtypes.

The comparative analysis of 6 speeches on different subjects, on the one hand, and of 6 speeches on political issues, on the other hand, shows that the number of strategies and devices used in the latters is significantly larger (258 vs 161), and what’s more, this conclusion refers to the usage by both females and males. In other words, political speeches are the most concentrated from the point of view of the usage of stylistic devices and argumentative strategies, which can be explained by the genre of political speeches itself characterized by utmost persuasiveness and emotional force.

The general statistical and comparative analysis aimed at revealing the frequency of strategies and devices in different types of public speeches shows that among the most frequent ones are enumeration, statistics, example, rhetorical question, quotation, comparison and/or contrast, references, credibility building, metaphor, parallelism, allusion, whereas among the least frequently used ones are hyperbole, restatement, refrain, simile, summary, illustration (as a device for focusing attention), play on words, parenthetical statement,, imagery, labelling, analogy, irony, climax, personification.

Let us give some illustrations of the most frequent devices:
Enumeration: “By pressing a key, a clerk obtains your profiles that includes voting history, address, family composition, model of car, neighborhood characteristics, ethnic group, and even indication of sexual orientation” (David F. Linowes, “The Information Age: Technology and Computers”, p. 44).

Rhetorical question: “That’s still the question today when we ask: Are women in journalism, especially now that there are more of us, some of us in positions of leadership, making a difference? Given the impact of the media in shaping our social, political, and economic life, are we seeing changes not only in numbers in the newsrooms, but in the agenda and priorities of society?” (Joan Konner, “Women in the Marketplace: Have Women in Journalism Made a Difference?”, p. 96).

Parallelism: “There is a proper season for everything. There is a time to sow and a time to reap. There is a time to complete, and a time to cooperate” (Jesse Jackson, “The Rainbow Coalition”, p. 383).

Below are examples of the least frequent devices:
Labelling: “While Reaganomics and Reaganism is talked about often, so often we miss the real meaning. Reaganism is a spirit. Reaganomics represents the real economic facts of life” (Jesse Jackson, “The Rainbow Coalition”, p. 388).

Play on Words: “You are ever aware that your right to freely practice your faith is only as secure as other people’s right to believe differently. You are eternally intolerant of intolerance” (Faye Wattleton, “Sacred Rights: Preserving Reproductive Freedom”, p. 272).

Personification: “A nation struggling for its soul against a backdrop of smiling cynical corruption and immorality in the highest offices of its government, its industry, its religious institutions” (Eleanor Smeal, “The Feminization of Power”, p. 245).

Another conclusion is that gender factor is crucial as regards the use of the devices and strategies, that is compared with women men not only use the latters more actively, they also use more diverse types and subtypes. Besides, the comparative analysis has revealed typical “male” devices (that are not used by females or that are preferred mainly by males) and, on the contrary, typical “female” devices and strategies. To “male” devices and strategies belong reasoning, statistics, devices used in conclusion, credibility building, in particular, demonstrating personal qualities, parallelism, analogy, metaphor, antithetical phrasing, imagery, labelling, motivational appeal, personification, apologetic strategies, irony, reference, alliteration, personal recollection or illustration. To “female” devices and strategies belong definition, example, humour, quotation, refutation, reference to self as a device for focusing attention, repetition, indicating qualifications as credibility building immediacy, parenthetical statement.

It is worth mentioning that the use of specific “male” devices and strategies is common, as a rule, for all types of speeches, in other words, the repertoire of “male” devices with some exceptions is the same irrespective of the subject of public discourse. Whereas typical “female” devices and strategies are “scattered” thematically: some of them are used in political speeches only, while others – in speeches devoted to other subjects.

Let us give some examples of “male” devices:
Statistics: “What you don’t read about is that $3 billion of those losses – $3 billion of the $3.8 billion – were attributed to a mere 20 institutions – less than one percent of the total number of savings and loans…. What you don’t read about is that 2,774 solvent institutions, holding 90 percent of total industry assets, reported first-quarter profits… and that the percentage of profitable institutions rose to 69 percent from 65 percent, quarter to quarter” (Theo X. Pitt, Jr., “The Truth about Savings and Loan Institutions: State and Federal Bungling”, p. 101).

Metaphor: “But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred” (Martin Luther King, Jr, “I Have a Dream”, p. 367).

Alliteration: “My constituency is the damned, disinherited, disrespected, and the despised” (Jesse Jackson, “The Rainbow Coalition”, p. 383).

Irony: “He cuts energy assistance to the poor, cuts breakfast programs from children, cuts lunch programs from children, cuts job training from children and then says, to an empty table, “let us pray”. Apparently he is not familiar with the structure of a prayer. You thank the Lord for the food that you are about to receive, not the food that just left” (Jesse Jackson, “The Rainbow Coalition”, p. 387).

Below are typical examples of “female” devices:
Repetition: “Together, we can plant strong and lasting anchors in every neighborhood in this community. Together, we can put back hope in the hearts of our children. Together, we can give the people of this great city the honest deal they deserve and expect” (Sharon Pratt Dixon, “Inaugural Address as Mayor of the District of Columbia”, p. 354).
Quotation: “When I first announced that I would run for office, I quoted Ecclesiastes, “there is a time and a season for everything and everyone” (Ibid, p. 351).
Example: “I believe the change is bubbling up from the people, especially women. For example, in California activist women are determined to change the state legislature…” (Eleanor Smeal, “The Feminization of Power”, p. 247).
Reference to self as a device for focusing attention: “But there is something different about tonight. There is something special about tonight. What is different? What is special? I, Barbara Jordan, am a keynote speaker” (Barbara Jordan, “Democratic Convention Keynote Address”, p. 370).

The research has, thus, revealed 1) that though, as I. Galperin correctly mentions: “It will be no exaggeration to say that almost all typical… stylistic devices can be found in… oratory” (Galperin 1991, p.299), the frequency of their use is very different, 2) that the concentration of devices and strategies is in direct connection with the subject: the political speeches are in this respect the most concentrated, 3) that gender factor is crucial as regards the use of devices and strategies: males not only use more diverse devices and strategies, but also use them more intensively compared with females, 4) that there are typical “male” and “female” devices and strategies.

To sum up, it will be appropriate to quote the following words by Karlyn Campbell: “Never has the need to understand the nature of persuasive discourses and to develop techniques and standards by which to analyse and evaluate them been more crucial. …In short, we shall have to become working rhetorical critics” (Campbell 1972, p.79).

NOTES
[i] M stands for male speeches, f – for female speeches.

REFERENCES
Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing Discourse. London and New York: Routlegde.
Galperin, I.R. (1991). Stylistics. Moscow: Higher School Publishing House.
Johannesen, R.L. (Editor) (2000). Contemporary American Speeches. Dubuque, Iowa: Kehdall / Hunt Publishing Company.
Campbell, K.K. (1972). Critiques of Contemporary Rhetoric: Wadsworth.