ISSA Proceedings 2006 – Arguments For Popular Audiences: Early U.S. Woman’s Rights Advocacy In The Lyceum Lectures Of Elizabeth Oakes Smith

• by: Angela G. Ray - Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, USA

At the midpoint of the nineteenth century, controversies roiled the United States. In the aftermath of the annexation of Texas, the Mexican-American War, and the California Gold Rush, Americans debated the recently named doctrine of manifest destiny. In books, journals, and public speeches, abolitionists and proslavery advocates challenged and defended the morality and legitimacy of slavery and its extension into western territories; nativist Protestants expressed fears of European immigrants, particularly Catholics from Ireland and Germany; and temperance activists continued their decades-long efforts to control or abolish intoxicating liquors. At a time of profound change in transportation and communication technologies, in patterns of migration, and in customs of work and leisure, Americans also argued about gender roles. This paper explicates one site for the production of arguments about gender, the popular public lecture, and illuminates the rhetorical challenges faced by those who rejected a necessary correlation between biological sex and individual capacity.
Although many women and men had long advocated women’s equal access to education, their right to control property, and their right to speak publicly about moral causes, it was at a public meeting in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848 that a more formal, more coherent movement on behalf of American women began. This new woman’s rights movement emerged directly from the organized efforts for the abolition of slavery, as abolitionist women had repeatedly found themselves restricted from public action owing to their sex. Adherents of the new woman’s rights movement called for women’s legal, political, religious, educational, occupational, and social equality with men.

Arguments both for and against an expansion of American women’s opportunities circulated in the media of the time – in newspapers and magazines, in conversations and sermons and legislative addresses, in poems and novels and popular lectures. Opposing arguments were powerful, often expressed by individuals with considerable cultural and economic capital. For example, in the early 1850s a prolific Methodist clergyman, Daniel Wise, published an advice manual for young women, clearly articulating a common belief in gendered realms of action. He wrote, “Everything has its appointed sphere, within which alone it can flourish. Men and women have theirs . . . . Man is fitted for the storms of public life . . . . Woman is formed for the calm of home” ([185-], pp. 91-92). Wise continued with a warning to women: “She may venture . . . to invade the sphere of man, but she will encounter storms which she is utterly unfitted to meet; happiness will forsake her breast, her own sex will despise her, men will be unable to love her, and when she dies she will fill an unhonored grave” (p. 92). Similar attitudes were heard on public lecture platforms. Richard Henry Dana Sr., a Harvard-educated poet and critic, asserted in a popular lecture in the 1840s that a “law” of sex difference grounded appropriate roles for men and women and that the acceptance of women’s public action would destroy the future of humanity, creating “a race of moral and mental hybrids” (n.d., 19). Although the educational reformer Horace Mann publicly supported increased opportunities for women’s education in the 1850s, he forecast pernicious consequences if women became involved in political strife (Ray 2006, p. 191). Such examples illustrate the argumentative obstacles faced by those who would support contrary positions: not only did the premise of natural or divinely created gender roles present a refutative challenge, forcing one either to argue against nature and God or to reinterpret natural phenomena and scriptural precedent, but a woman who chose to engage in public argument on this question also faced a profound problem of reception: her act of adopting the persona of an arguer could be seen to provide evidence for her opponents’ claims. Rhetorical scholar Karlyn Kohrs Campbell has described the woman public speaker as an oxymoron, and that figure of paradox was rarely embodied as starkly as in the mid-nineteenth century (1973, 1999).

Early U.S. woman’s rights advocates faced such challenges in a variety of ways, often offering biblical evidence to refute claims of women’s inferiority or generating political arguments based on principles of liberal democracy and especially on the nation’s founding documents. Many performed femininity in conventional ways, through dress and comportment, seeking to refute the prevailing assumption that, as activist Paulina Wright Davis described it, “all women’s rights women are horrid old frights with beards and mustaches” (1852b). Rhetorical strategies varied depending on the specific purpose, the audience, and the context, of course. Early activists attempted to create movement ideologies and rally adherents to those principles, and they addressed state legislatures to present grievances and to call for legal redress (Campbell 1989, 1:1-69, 2:33-186). Woman’s rights supporters also sought to sway public opinion, to express alternative visions of gender roles, to allay fears, and to inspire new ways of thinking and acting. In the early days of the organized movement, a few woman’s rights activists traveled throughout the country – especially the Northeast and what is now called the Midwest – addressing audiences in public halls, churches, and commercial lecturing venues like lyceums and literary societies. Only a few women became popular lecturers before the Civil War, for the strength of social pressures opposing women’s speaking in public was profound. Social norms dictated that women’s voices on public platforms could be heard reading or singing the words of men, but women speaking in instructional and argumentative modes were often deemed unnatural (Ray 2006).

It was in this milieu that Elizabeth Oakes Smith began to deliver popular lectures supporting an expansion of women’s opportunities and responsibilities.[i] Oakes Smith was unusual among woman’s rights advocates of the early 1850s, having come to public advocacy not through a formal association with the abolitionist movement but as a popular poet and novelist. A native of Maine with a Puritan and Unitarian heritage, Oakes Smith was married at age sixteen to Seba Smith, a writer and newspaper editor twice her age, and she reared four sons who lived to adulthood. Oakes Smith began publishing poetry and articles in the 1820s, but it was only after Seba Smith’s failed land speculations combined with the economic panic of 1837 that she began to publish prolifically. During the 1840s she became a well-known author, and her poem The Sinless Child of 1842 was admired by Edgar Allan Poe and likely provided the inspiration for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s character of Little Eva in her antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Oakes Smith also published novels based on Indian folklore and spiritualist belief. In 1839 she had heard the controversial Scottish heiress and freethinker Fanny Wright lecture in New York and was captivated by Wright’s platform manner, style, and radical ideas. During the 1840s Oakes Smith was increasingly drawn to public advocacy, and from November 1850 to June 1851 Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune published a series of ten articles by Oakes Smith collectively titled Woman and Her Needs, which circulated as a pamphlet in 1851 (Belasco 2001; Nickels & Scherman 1994; Scherman 1998, 2001). Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2006 – Undesirable Passions: Utopia’s Emotionless Rationality

• by: Ralph Jessop - The University of Glasgow

As these noble Houyhnhnms are endowed by nature with a general disposition to all virtues, and have no conceptions or ideas of what is evil in a rational creature; so their grand maxim is, to cultivate reason, and to be wholly governed by it. Neither is reason among them a point problematical as with us, where men can argue with plausibility on both sides of the question; but strikes you with immediate conviction; as it must needs do where it is not mingled, obscured, or discoloured by passion or interest. (Swift 1991, p. 285)

There is a large body of literature that might be called utopian ranging from Plato’s Republic to many of the more recent works of science fiction that are often more aptly described as dystopian but which inevitably critique utopianism or the attempt to construct an ideal society. Indeed, the field of literature that might be considered in relation to what I shall attempt to argue in this paper concerning utopianism’s implied notion of reason, as inferred largely from its treatment of the emotions, becomes impractically extensive when one attempts to include the countless utopianisms that haunt and inform great swathes of literature as novels, poems, and works of political philosophy variously refer to or attempt to construct utopias of varying hues. For example, to refer to just two of the main utopian texts frequently discussed by scholars of utopianism, one might examine the implicit notions of reason and how these can be better understood in relation to their respective treatments of the emotions in Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun (1623) and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1626). But other texts, some of which figure less prominently if at all in academic discourse on utopianism, might also be examined with regard to their implicit notions of reason and treatment or omission of the emotions such as Milton’s depiction of the prelapsarian Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden in Paradise Lost, Bunyan’s quest in his Pilgrim’s Progress towards freedom from the burden of sin and realization of salvation in the Celestial City, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, Voltaire’s Candide, Robert Burns’ poem ‘A Man’s a Man for a That’, John Lennon’s famous hit single ‘Imagine’, and so on. In short, perhaps unsurprisingly given the traditional connections between reason and many notions of idealism and given that all utopianisms are themselves types or sub-species of idealism, there is a superabundance of texts that are to varying degrees significantly relevant to utopianism and which might yield some interesting readings and reassessments when examined with regard to their respective notions of reason and their treatment of the emotions. However, to constrain my focus considerably: rather uncontentiously, there are three main texts that stand out as central to our comprehension of this often complex genre: Plato’s Republic, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). What I have to say in this paper relates to these texts and only indirectly to other instances of utopianism. Constraining my argument to a discussion of some rather broadly defined characteristics of utopianism, I shall not include any close reading of the primary texts in question nor shall I make any pointed reference to several of the secondary texts which have helped to inform this discussion (Kumar 1993, Molnar 1990, Starnes 1990, Slusser 1999). This paper therefore attempts to provide a merely preliminary exploration of some of the underlying assumptions concerning reason and the emotions, and the relevance of the fictive nature of utopian texts.

Evident within much of the literature on utopianism, it is justifiably a virtual commonplace to say that utopias are highly dependent upon rationality, as they construct more or less realistic fictional worlds in which conflict is minimized, social efficiency and cohesion is crafted by adherence to regulative principles, guidelines, and rules, and in which rational solutions for many if not all of life’s ills and vicissitudes collectively describe the good for humankind as something only possible by means of the overarching governance of reason. The ideally just society that is outlined by Socrates in The Republic, or the utopian society more elaborately figured by More in Utopia or brilliantly satirized by Swift in the final journey of Gulliver to Houyhnhnmland is a society governed by rationality. Indeed, in certain utopian texts, so dominant is reason or the implicit and explicit appeals to rationality, and so de-emphasised are the emotions, that there is little room for any, except the most constricted or anaesthetized, emotional life.

This rationality in the utopian text is decidedly teleological or purposive as it seems to serve a single overarching end or telos, namely, the realisation and maintenance of peace, or of a peaceful, harmonious, and even tranquil existence – More’s Utopians live wholesome lives, enjoying notably harmless, simple pleasures, comparatively unperturbed by want or strife (More, trans. 1989, pp. 50-60, pp. 74-77). This peaceful nature of the utopian society or ideally good or just society is one that is largely if not entirely devoid of conflict. Certainly, More’s Utopia seems to insist in several places on the overarching importance of internal peace or harmony and freedom from protracted internal disputes (More, trans. 1989, p. 49, p. 82, p. 104). Thus, the typical utopia is a society of internal harmony, a society almost entirely free of internal conflict. In Utopia social activities are restricted to minimize the possibility of brawling, crime, and vice (More, trans. 1989, p. 60, p. 73). Furthermore, there are plenty of severe punishments for conduct that might give rise to internal conflict – banishment, enslavement, and forced celibacy are just some of the more outstanding ones mentioned in Utopia (More, trans. 1989, pp. 80-84). However, despite More’s severe restrictions on the possibility of internal conflict, the Utopians do seem to be eminently capable of dealing successfully with external conflict as they wage war on neighbouring states (More, trans. 1989, pp. 87-95). Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2006 – A Fantasy Theme Analysis Of Prime Minister Koizumi’s “Structural Reform Without Sacred Cows”

• by: Takeshi Suzuki - Tsuda College

Introduction
In rhetorical communication, messages are “deliberately chosen to influence an audience whose members have the ability to change their beliefs or behaviors as a consequence of experiencing the message” (Rybacki & Rybacki, 1991, p. 2). In April 2001, Junichiro Koizumi, the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the Prime Minister of Japan, conjured up a vivid symbolic image of Japanese people’s interest in politics with his contested slogan, “Structural Reform without Sacred Cows.” The public’s high expectations for Koizumi’s campaign were reflected in the extraordinary high approval ratings he and his Cabinet achieved. According to a poll conducted by the Yomiuri Shimbun, his Cabinet recorded an 84.5 percent approval rating on June 30, 2001, an all-time high in Japanese politics.
This public enthusiasm was labeled as “Koizumi fever” by the mass media. David Ignatius (2001) describes: “Media reports about Koizumi have featured the gee-whiz details that journalists love – his long, wavy hair, his taste for heavy-metal music, the public craze to buy his posters, the millions of people who subscribe to his e-mail newsletter, known as “The Lion Heart” because of his leonine looks” (p. 18). Accordingly, the “Koizumi fever” functioned as a driving force for the LDP in the 2001 election of the House of Councilors. The LDP ended up with a victory, as the Asahi Shimbun (2001) reported “Koizumi tornado and the LDP’s triumph” (“Koizumi senpu” 2001, p. 1: my trans.).
Kenzo Uchida (2001) observes: “For years, LDP-centered politics have been the object of public discontent and criticism, creating a deep sense of alienation among the people” (p. 18). Then, Koizumi emerged as a reformer within the LDP. His public demands for the destruction of the usual pork barrel politics provided a blueprint for reforms that promised to end the out-of-date political structures that had been dominant in Japan as they rehabilitated political processes. Thus, the Koizumi administration was regarded as inspirational in moving “the collective will of people trying to meet manifold changes in our [Japanese] economic society to break political inertia” (Suzuki 2001, p. 16). Although his political slogan, “Structural Reform without Sacred Cows,” seemed to fulfill the public’s rhetorical need, an analysis of its symbolic function has been uncovered by the past scholars of communication.

This essay examines how Koizumi’s rhetorical constructions of a social reality unfolded during four periods of time: In the first phase, Junichiro Koizumi became the president of the LDP on April 25, 2001, by personifying himself as a “reformer.” During the second phase, Koizumi made efforts to share his rhetorical vision with the audience. In the third phase, the shared vision motivated the public to support the Koizumi-led LDP at the national election. During the final phase, or the “blank period” in August and September of 2001 disappointed the Japanese people about Koizumi’s reform. Then, the progress of Koizumi’s structural reform is stopped, at lease temporarily, in the middle of September 2001 because of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. A special Diet committee proposed a bill authorizing the Self Defense Force (SDF) to support the United States military response to international terrorism. The debate about Koizumi’s structural reform was put aside until the approval of the bill on the SDF in October 2001. Therefore, it makes sense to limit the scope of this analysis to the period from April-September of 2001.
I will analyze Koizumi’s message construction by applying Ernest G. Bormann’s Symbolic Convergence Theory (SCT) as a paradigm case of political argumentation in Japan. Bormann (1985) defines fantasy as “the creative and imaginative shared interpretation of events that fulfill a group’s psychological or rhetorical need” (p. 131). A content of the fantasy, argues Bormann (2000), consists of “characters, real or fictitous, playing out a dramatic situation in a setting removed in time and space from the here-and-now transactions of the group” (p. 248). Such a dramatized content chains out in the group of people because “a dramatic theme might relate to the repressed psychological problems of some or all of the members and thus pull them into participation” (Bormann 2000, p. 248). Conversely, speakers manipulate a content of a fantasy so that people may get involved in the fantasy. A rhetorical vision is constructed from fantasy themes or drama, which are also constructed by the speakers’ rhetorical appeals. Bormann (2000) explains that fantasy themes may draw upon a “recollection of something that happened to the group in the past or a dream of what the group might do in the future” (p. 249). A rhetorical vision contains dramas played by characters with typical plot lines. The composite dramas stimulate the people’s reminiscence of emotional chains. Consequently, the dramas catch up the audience in various forms of public communication, such as fact-to-face communication, speaker-audience transactions, as viewers and listeners to television and radio broadcasts, and in all the diverse settings for public and intimate communication in a given society (Bormann 2000, p. 250). Such a phenomenon is regarded as people’s symbolic convergence on symbolic reality.

The first phase: a construction of the rhetorical vision
In the LDP presidential election, only its politicians and 1.2 million members were eligible to vote. But Koizumi used that election campaign as an opportunity to talk to the nation by going out to the street. Koizumi’s aim was “to show the LDP that they couldn’t ignore the will of the people” (Brasor 2001, p. 21). Such a campaign strategy was effective in that the media intensively featured Koizumi’s campaign. When Koizumi beat Ryutaro Hashimoto in primaries, he commented that “I had no idea I’d do this well in so many districts. It’s like pent-up magma that’s erupted” (“Koizumi poised” 2001, p. 1). His “pent-up magma” metaphor indicated the rising public expectations. Thanks to the media coverage, his message spread out. Koizumi’s victory in the LDP presidential election symbolized a significant change of the LDP’s old political style, and, in fact, the presidential election was treated as if it were a general election by the media.
In terms of the life cycle of rhetorical vision, the initial period corresponds to the creation of a social reality. Bormann, Cragan, and Shields (2000) argue: “Speakers dramatize new formulations and others share them until group and community fantasies explain the unfolding experience in novel ways. Because they are dynamic, rhetoricians may embroider and modify the consciousness throughout the life of a rhetorical vision” (p. 261). Thus, a speaker is required to construct a new symbolic ground to catch the minds of his/her audience. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2006 – Antapologia Arguments During The Hurricane Katrina Disaster

• by: Kevin A. Stein, Suzanne Larson & Lionel A. Grady - Southern Utah University

Antapologia Arguments During the Hurricane Katrina Disaster
Katrina, a stage 4 hurricane, touched ground on August 29, 2005 just northwest of New Orleans. Twenty hours earlier New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin had called for a mandatory evacuation of the city. Nearly 92% of the city or roughly 1.2 million people heeded the warnings and left the city. However, that left over 100,000 individuals, the indigent, the poor and the sick, to ride out the storm and the massive flooding following the subsequent failure of the 17th street bridge levee. Unfortunately, the consequences of the storm and the flooding killed close to 1,500 people with an estimate cost of $200 billion in damages to the Gulf Coast.
Ellen Goodman (2005) in and editorial in the Baltimore Sun pointed out that “For days, we watch the toxic gumbo of natural and man-made disasters cooking along the Gulf Coast. ‘The city that care forgot felt forgotten. The ‘left behind’ were not characters in a faith-based thriller, but old folks, poor folks, black folks without enough money to pay for a ticket out of hell” (p. 11A.).

An 11 member select committee of Republicans concluded that “If 9/11 was a failure of imagination then Katrina was a failure of initiative. It was a failure of leadership” (Hsu, 2002, p. A5). The report further concludes that the response to Katrina, ”the blinding lack of situation awareness and disjointed decision making needlessly compounded and prolonged Katrina’s horror.” FEMA chief Brown, Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff, Governor Blanco and Mayor Nagin each were held complicit for the problem, as well as the Homeland Security Operations Center and the White House Homeland Security Council. Bush also received extensive criticism: The crisis was so rapid and extensive that citizens questioned how America could have been so unprepared. Ultimately, attackers sought to try and determine responsibility and sought an apology from Bush for the mess.
One of the primary reasons for studying apologetic discourse is that it is so pervasive in our society (Benoit, 1995a; Benoit & Dorries, 1996; Kahl, 1984; Linkugal & Razak, 1969; Short, 1987 and Ware & Linkugal, 1973). Situations calling for an image repair range from bumping into others on the street to presidents apologizing for scandalous behavior. According to Ware and Linkugal (1973) instances of apologia are “typical and recurrent enough for men to feel the need of having a name for them” (p. 273).
Ryan (1982) extended existing theories of apologia by arguing that self-defense discourse involves the speech set of both kategoria and apologia (attack and defense) and that any critical focus on the apologia requires the examination of the attack preceding it. Ryan argued that many critics, in their recognition of apologia as a distinct genre of criticism, have ignored the important genre of kategoria. The essay argued that any discourse utilized for the purpose of self-defense is naturally a response to some kind of attack. In order to better understand the nature of the defense, one has to also examine the attack. These two elements create what Ryan labeled as a “speech set.”

We argue that this speech set ignores a third component called antapologia (response to apologia). Antapologia is an important feature of the apologetic situation because the rhetor may choose to construct the initial image repair based on what he or she perceives to be the likely response by the offended person(s). What distinguishes antapologia from simply a follow-up instance of kategoria is the fact that the former is designed to be a response to the apologetic discourse and the latter is designed to be a response to the initial harmful act perpetrated by the accused. Additionally, some apologies are issued as a series of defensive statements, often adapted to be more effective than the previous statements. Just as the specific arguments outlined in the attack are likely to provoke specific strategies in the apologia, the arguments in the apologia are likely to provoke certain types of discursive responses.
For example, during the 2001 spy plane incident in China, the Chinese government as well as its people issued a series of statements condemning the U.S. act as “arrogant” and “hegemonic.” Liu Yuexin, a Chinese businessman said: “The US always advocates ‘democracy and human rights.’ However, their spy plane openly intruded into China’s territorial airspace, hit a Chinese fighter and left a Chinese pilot missing. Where are their ‘democracy and human rights’ now?” (“Chinese Condemn,” 2001). This statement reflects an instance of kategoria because it focuses the attack on the act perpetrated by the United States. When the discourse instead addresses the apologia for the act, it constitutes an instance of antapologia. For example, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue said in a statement: “The US side, disregarding the facts, continues to confuse right and wrong and even falsely accuse the Chinese side in irresponsible comments made successively by high-ranking members of the US administration in the last few days, in an attempt to shirk its responsibility” (“China Refutes,” 2001). This statement, though it does address the violation of Chinese airspace, centers on the strategies used by the U.S. to account for the incident. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2006 – Pragmatic Reflexivity In Self-defeating And Self-justifying Expressions

• by: Jeremy Morris - University of Miami

Arguments that rely on reflexive expressions, specifically self-defeating and self-justifying expressions, are far from rare in epistemology. A good example is Siegel’s objection to the epistemological relativist view that knowledge and/or truth or justification is relative to time, place, culture, or a set of non-neutral standards of evaluation. Of the objections to relativism, Siegel says:
… by far the most fundamental is the charge that relativism is self-referentially incoherent or self-refuting, in that defending the doctrine requires one to give it up… relativism precludes the possibility of determining the truth, justificatory status, or more generally the epistemic merit of contentious claims and theses-including itself… if it (relativism) is true (right or justified), the very notion of truth (or of rightness or justifiedness) is undermined, in which case relativism cannot itself be true (right or justified). (Siegel, 2004, p. 747-748)

The reflexivity in this argument lies in the charge that relativism is self-defeating; that it is inconsistent when applied to itself. In this Siegel follows the tradition reaching at least back to Theaetetus, of making that charge against various forms of relativism. Another classic reflexivity based argument is Copi’s argument for the truth of the principle of non-contradiction or (PNC): the principle that states that contradictions cannot be true. Copi’s argument is roughly that the denial of (PNC) is self-defeating. I suspect that Siegel would make the same argument on behalf of (PNC), as well as similar arguments against various forms of naturalism.
Although proponents often regard reflexivity based arguments as clearly valid instances of reductio ad absurdum, those same arguments often have been condemned as wishful thinking and nonsense. What is often missing from the primary debate in which the arguments figure is a recognition that the way a given thesis is self-defeating is not always a purely logical matter. In an effort to shed light on this contentious form of argument, I will clarify the extra-logical features of self-defeating expressions in a proposed definition of self-defeating expressions. I will then apply that definition in an evaluation of various reflexivity based arguments, including the above examples. I will also explain how self-defeating expressions relate to self-justifying expressions.

To begin, it is imperative to clarify how an expression may be self-defeating. Following Peirce’s ‘logical magnifying glass’ strategy, the signature features of self-defeating expressions may be revealed by examining extreme cases.[i] The Liar sentence is one such extreme self-defeater.

(L) This sentence is false.

Because what (L) says is that (L) itself is false, (L) can be true only by being false. The fact that (L) is true only if it is false is sufficient to qualify (L) as self-defeating.[ii] There are some who might object to the claim that the liar sentence as self-defeating. In White’s preferred sense of ‘self-defeating’, for instance, what gets expressed in a self-defeating expression must be false. According to White (L) is neither true nor false and is therefore not self-defeating. Though the claim that (L) is neither true nor false is not uncommon, it is controversial. In any case it is unnecessary to quarrel with the claim that (L) is not false since, even if (L) is not false, (L) is definitely not true. On a more liberal definition, one that does not require falsity, (L) is self-defeating because (L) can be true only by being not true. The exact nature of the non-truth of (L), may thus be left as an open question. Closely related to (L) is another extreme example, (N).

(N) This sentence is false and p.

Unlike (L), it is clearly not the case that (N) is false only if it is true. For perhaps p is false. However, (N) is true only if it is false; and that is enough to be self-defeating. A preliminary sufficient condition for being self-defeating is therefore (P1).

(P1) If ‘s’ is true, then ‘s’ is false.[iii]

That is, if (P1) is true of an expression of ‘s’, then ‘s’ is self-defeating.
Consider now, an extreme self-defeater that is importantly different from both (L) and (N).

(A) p but I do not assert that p.

Unlike (L) or (N), it is not the case that if (A) is true then (A) is false. Thus, (P1) does not capture what it is to be self-defeating at its most general because (A) does not satisfy (P1) even though (A) is self-defeating. Although the way (A) is self-defeating is not by satisfying the condition (P1), that way is not completely different from the way (L) and (N) are self-defeating. Specifically, although it is not the case that (A) is true only if (A) is false, if (A) is asserted by any speaker of English then what the speaker asserts is false, i.e., (A) can be truly asserted only if it is false. What is different is that the self-defeat arises not merely from the logical features of what is expressed but also the expressing. The act of asserting (A) prevents (A) from attaining the status of a true assertion. An assertion of (A) is reflexively inconsistent in the pragmatic sense that the assertion of (A) is inconsistent with what is asserted. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2006 – The Relevance Of Intention In Argument Evaluation

• by: Charlotte Jørgensen - University of Copenhagen

Abstract
The paper discusses intention as a rhetorical key term and argues that a consideration of rhetor’s intent should be maintained as relevant to both the production and critique of rhetorical discourse. It is argued that the fact that the critic usually has little or no access to the rhetor’s mind does not render intention an irrelevant factor. Rather than allowing methodological difficulties to constrain critical inquiry, I suggest some ways in which the critic can incorporate the rhetor’s intention in evaluating argumentation.

Over the last decades, the notion of intentionality has been challenged from various theoretical perspectives within rhetoric and argumentation. For instance, some feministic rhetoricians have rejected intention as a key term in the definition of rhetoric, claiming that the rhetor’s intent to persuade makes rhetoric an act of violence, oppression, and coercion. Likewise, but for different reasons, argumentation theorists associated with pragma-dialectic distance themselves from what they consider the critical pitfall of intention.
Although I share the common view that the definition of rhetoric cannot be reduced to matters of persuasion in a narrow sense, I nevertheless regard persuasion and persuasive discourse as pivotal to rhetoric. Furthermore, I maintain that rhetoric’s most basic contribution to society lies precisely in its insistence that the impulse to persuade others is a constructive and valuable aspect of human symbolic interaction. In the first of the following three sections, I defend this view against the attack on persuasive intent. In the second section I turn to the pragma-dialectical view of the critical relevancy of the arguers intention. This discussion leads on to the third section in which I, via a presentation of an ethical standard for rhetorical argumentation, suggest how the arguers’ intention remains central to rhetorical inquiry.

1. From her feministic point of view, Gearhart made the following allegation against mainstream rhetoric: “To change other people or other entities is not in itself a violation. It is a fact of existence that we do so. The act of violence is in the intention to change others.” (Gearhart 1979, p. 196) In their proposal for an Invitational Rhetoric, Foss and Griffin (1995) adopted this view, although not quite as rigorously as Gearhart.[i]

I strongly oppose the distinction. Surely, the intention to change others can only be an act of violence if we assume that to change others always is against their interest and that persuasion occurs in situations where the rhetor has all the power and the audience no free will to make their own decision. But does not this assumption take us back to the “hypodermic” theory of communication that we all are supposed to have left behind us long ago?
Secondly, I oppose Gearhart’s distinction because of its general implications for rhetoric and democracy. Since the intent to change the environment and the minds of others is at the root of arguing it forces us to condemn argumentation and to exclude deliberative rhetoric from the field of legitimate rhetoric.[ii] Thus, in the end, to ban the intent to persuade is, in my mind, to undermine democracy.
Thirdly, it is a simplification that the purpose of rhetoric should be to “change others”. The purpose of rhetorical communication is to effect change in public life – or defend status quo – and this involves influencing the minds of others. The intentions to do so may be good or bad, and the purpose may result in good or bad rhetoric – bad if it is oppressive.
Fourthly, making the intent to persuade per se an oppressive and immoral act leads language users and rhetorical criticism in the wrong direction. Whether rhetoric becomes an act of violence and dominance does not depend on the intention to change others. It depends primarily on the means you employ to persuade others. And instead of depriving humans of their right to seek to persuade or convince others as they think best, rhetoricians should advise debaters that it is more harmful to deny your intentions than openly admit them. For instance, politicians often do this, ostensibly wanting to inform the citizens although what they are actually doing is to persuade or convince. This arguably amounts to cheating with speech acts and is as problematic as aggressive or threatening argumentation, perhaps even worse because of its underhandedness.

2. The pragma-dialectical dismissal of intentionality is of another kind. It does not concern the morality of the arguer’s intention to persuade, but the critical relevancy of the arguer’s intention when evaluating argument. The pragma-dialecticians distance themselves from the notion of intention for methodological reasons in order to avoid psychologism (van Eemeren et al. 1996, p. 276-277, Walton 1995, p. 272).

In connection with the responsibility conditions for argumentation, van Eemeren and Grootendorst emphasize that “the responsibility conditions do not imply that the speaker need always be sincere: He may be lying and think something quite different from what he says, but even then he is committed to what he has said and, consequently, the listener can hold him to his word.” And in the footnote they specify their point as follows: “The major consequence of the responsibility condition is that the speaker, because he is answerable for what he has said, may be deemed to act as if he were sincere – whether he actually is sincere or not. For our purposes, it is what the speaker can be held accountable to that counts, not what he privately thinks.” (van Eemeren & Grootendorst 1992, p. 32)
The principle of externalization that van Eemeren and Grootendorst include in their pragma-dialectical research program has the same focus. In brief, externalization means that the critic of public argumentation must stick to what the speaker has uttered: “Whereas the motives people may have for holding a position might be different from the grounds they offer and accept in its defense, what they can be held committed to is not so much their actual position, but the position they have expressed in the discourse, whether directly or indirectly. […] The study of argumentation should not concentrate on the psychological dispositions of the people involved in an argumentation, but on their externalized – or externalizable – commitments.” (van Eemeren et al. 1996, p. 276-277)
The same principle, as formulated here, also applies to rhetorical criticism in general. If, for instance, a politician during the election campaign makes a promise to preserve the program for early retirement (or expresses himself in a manner that makes voters entitled to understand his words as a promise), and then shortly after having won the election lets his government implement a cut in the said program, his explanations are irrelevant. It is no good, as the former Danish Prime minister Poul Nyrup Rasmusssen did in 1998, to say that people had misunderstood him the first time: He never meant what he said as a promise to make no reductions at all; if people had studied this or that statement by him and other leading social democrats they should have known that he only intended to secure the system, and words to that effect. In such a case, the critic is entitled to disregard later explanations and decide whether the rhetor actually made a promise or not on the basis of what was originally said in the campaign. Read more