ISSA Proceedings 2010 – Controversy Over Uncertainty: Argumentation Scholarship And Public Debate About Science

• by: Leah Ceccarelli - University of Washington, Seattle

1. A rationale for studying “manufactured controversy”
The term “manufactured controversy” appears with some frequency in recent scholarship about the public rhetoric of science. But as this paper will show, it tends to be applied in isolated case studies that have not yet been connected with each other into a larger multi-case analysis. As a result, the definitional contours of the term have not been made entirely clear in the rhetoric and argumentation literature. This paper is a first step toward developing a definition of the term.

Scholars in the broader field of science studies have looked at the same phenomenon that rhetoricians have been calling manufactured controversy, but they use a different name for it, calling it the manufacture of public uncertainty about science. This paper will argue that the focus of these science studies scholars has been so effectively filtered through the terministic screen of uncertainty production that they miss some important characteristics of the phenomenon that are related to the way in which public controversy over scientific claims is constructed in the public sphere. Since one purpose of argumentation scholarship is to engage the theorization of controversy (Goodnight, 1991), argumentation scholars should be especially suited to the study of this aspect of the phenomenon.

To ground a call for scholarship on the argumentative dynamics of the “manufactured controversy”, this paper reviews some recent literature on the rhetoric of science and some recent literature from the broader field of science studies that explores cases where public uncertainty is created through the manufacture of scientific controversy in the public sphere. The goal of this paper is to set out a path for scholars of argumentation and rhetoric to make a useful contribution to the study of this phenomenon, and to briefly preview some of my own findings from a study that I have undertaken along that path, findings that I more fully develop in another longer paper (Ceccarelli, 2011). Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2010 – The Collective Making Of Temporal Aspects In Public Debates

• by: Francis Chateauraynaud - EHESS, Paris & Marianne Doury - CNRS, Paris

1. A cross-disciplinary perspective on argumentative indicators in contemporary public controversies
The starting point of this paper is the observation that arguers engaged in the defence of their standpoint in a controversy devote a significant part of their discursive activity to the representation of the debate in which they take part. Such a representation does not contribute directly to the exchange of arguments. It nevertheless provides the addressee with an interpretative frame which may be called upon in order to reach the real, deep meaning of the arguments that are being presented. To take an example, in the controversy surrounding astrology, the representation of the debate as the struggle between reason and obscurantism, or between light and darkness, is one that is favoured by the astrology detractors. As far as the astrology supporters are concerned, they portray themselves as the Galileo of modern times, as being the victims of a dominant institution – the Inquisition in Galileo’s case, the “official science” in the case of astrology supporters (Doury 1993).

When representing the controversy, the construction of a temporal frame may constitute an important strategic stake for the participants. This construction has a double nature: it is events-constrained in that it depends on the factual chronology of the debate; it is also fundamentally discursive, in that the participants make a choice among the available events which punctuate the controversy in order to select some of them which will be given a specific argumentative relevance. The combination of the order of events and the order of discourse, to borrow Foucault’s terminology, makes the temporal dimension a privileged ground for the integration of sociological and argumentative insights into the study of controversies, an integration that may contribute to the cross-fertilization of Argumentation Theory and Sciences Studies, from which both fields can benefit according to Keith and Rehg (2008).

The discursive construction of the temporality of a controversy may serve as a basis for various argumentative moves, such as arguments from the precedent, arguments from consequences, and analogy arguments. It can be realised linguistically by a number of grammatical or lexical elements. In this paper, we will adopt a lexical approach and focus on the French adverb “désormais” [from now on], in particular. We will show how “désormais” can be used to introduce a temporal breach in the chronology of a debate and how this temporal breach may be exploited in order to fulfil various argumentative purposes. We thus mean to illustrate how the linguistic investigation of discourse indicators such as “désormais” may enrich a sociological questioning within the theoretical frame of a socio-ballistics of controversies (Chateauraynaud 2009). Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2010 – Going For Broke: The Meta-Argumentation Of Desperation Strategies

• by: Daniel H. Cohen - Colby College

I have always been intrigued by Hans Reichenbach’s pragmatic justification for induction (Reichenbach 1938; Salmon 1974). It is curiously compelling even as it leaves a lingering and unsatisfying aftertaste. The source for both its attraction and it aftertaste is its almost desperate appeal at the meta-argumentation level: we do not know if anything will work to give us knowledge of patterns in nature – we cannot even assume that there are patterns in nature – but if anything will work, inductive reasoning will work!
When the conditions are right, desperation arguments can be very strong. Reichenbach’s argument meets some of those conditions, but only some of them.

1. Measures for arguments
There is something exciting about desperation strategies like the “Hail Mary” passes on the last plays of American football games, when a team down to it last play throws caution to the winds and throws the ball up for grabs with hope and a prayer that it might be caught rather than dropped or intercepted, or the decision by a hockey team, down by a goal near the end of regulation time, to pull its goalie for a sixth attacking skater. The chances for success may be small and the risks may be high, but the potential payoff is great and they seem to be perfectly reasonable strategies in the circumstances. However, the reasoning behind those strategies is worth a closer look because not all structurally identical arguments are as compelling as Reichenbach’s appeal. We need the resources to tell them apart. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2010 – Agent-Relative Fallacies

• by: John M. Collins - East Carolina University

1. Introductory
My topic is an issue in the individuation and epistemology of fallacious inferences [i].  My thesis is that there are instances of reasoning that are fallacious not in themselves, that are not intrinsically fallacious, but are fallacious only relative to particular reasoning agents. This seems like a peculiar notion. It would seem that if it was fallacious for you to reason a certain way, and I do the same thing, I would be committing a fallacy as well. Bad reasoning is bad reasoning, no matter who is doing it. But it is useful to ask: What would it take for it to be possible for there to be such a thing as an agent-relative fallacy? Here are two sets of conditions, the obtaining of either of which would be sufficient for the existence of agent-relative, or extrinsic, fallacies. Type One is that there are two agents who are intrinsically alike, molecule-for-molecule doppelgangers, one of whom is reasoning fallaciously while the other is not, due to differences in their respective environments. The other scenario, Type Two, is that there are two agents (who are not doppelgangers) who engage in intrinsically identical instances of reasoning, one of whom reasons fallaciously while the other does not, due to differences located elsewhere in their minds that affect the epistemic status of their respective inferences.  I will attempt to demonstrate that it is at least possible for agents to meet either set of conditions, and that in fact some people do meet the Type Two conditions, so agent-relative fallacies are not only possible, but actual. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2010 – Re-Presenting Argumentation In The Traditional Romanian Parliamentary Debate

• by: Mihaela Viorica Constantinescu - University of Bucharest

1. Introduction
This paper [i] is tackling two of the four meta-theoretical principles of pragma-dialectics, that is, socialization and externalization, in the context of a specific activity type – the parliamentary debate. The paper focuses on some mechanisms used in the traditional Romanian parliamentary debate for refutation (section 2). An overview of the parliamentary debate as an activity type will be given in the first section of the paper, as well as some general historical information about the XIXth century Romanian political world.

Following the pragma-dialectical model of van Eemeren & Grootendorst (2004), van Eemeren et al. (2008), socialization is achieved by identifying which members of Parliament (henceforth MPs) take on the roles of protagonist and antagonist in the context of an argumentative discourse. Throughout the interactions, MPs place themselves on different positions which they support with arguments; as far as externalization is concerned, our approach focuses on disagreement, as a discursive activity – a dispreferred marked response to an arguable act.

In the parliamentary debate, the MPs often externalise the implicit discussion; as a result, they position themselves in explicit contrast with other MPs, protagonists of a counter-standpoint, and manoeuvre strategically, in order to obtain the most favourable presentation of the disagreement (van Eemeren & Houtlosser 2002). Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2010 – Arguments About ‘Rhetoric’ In The 2008 US Presidential Election Campaign

• by: Robert T. Craig - University of Colorado at Boulder

Barack Obama’s prowess in the art of rhetoric, for which he had gained a national reputation with a stirring keynote speech to the 2004 Democratic National Convention, was much commented upon during the 2008 US presidential election campaign and became a stimulus for public debate on the necessity, value, and danger of rhetoric as a political-communicative practice. Extending work by Craig (1996, 1999, 2008; Craig & Tracy 2005) on normative concepts and arguments in ordinary metadiscourse (practically-oriented discourse about discourse), this paper presents an initial survey of arguments about rhetoric that appeared in public metadiscourse of the 2008 campaign. Issues that emerged in this debate engaged classic lines of argument between rhetorical and critical traditions of thought concerning the legitimacy of rhetoric, thus showing the continuing relevance of those traditions and their capacity to illuminate essential tensions in democratic public discourse.

1. “Rhetoric” in the 2008 campaign
US presidential election campaigns follow an extended course in which candidacies for major party nominations are usually announced more than a year in advance of the national election. Candidates campaign to raise money and compete in a long series of intra-party state contests (primary elections and caucuses) that stretch through the early months of the election year and determine the selection of delegates to national party nominating conventions held in the summer. Party candidates are formally designated at those conventions and then campaign as standard bearers of their parties until the early November presidential election. The national discourse that surrounds the campaign is punctuated by the rhythms and contingencies of this long process. Thus, the debate about “rhetoric”, both leading up to and following the 2008 election, ebbed and flowed through a series of key news events, which it will be useful to chronicle briefly as background to the following analysis. Read more