ISSA Proceedings 2006 – Fallacies As Violations Of Rationality Norms. An Interdisciplinary Approach

• by: Andreas Welzel - Universität Bielefeld, Germany & Christopher Tindale - University of Windsor, Canada

Introduction
Douglas Walton promoted the thesis that there is a dilemma of fallacy analysis (1995, 269-272) implying that “fallacy” oscillates helplessly between an EITHER (intentional deception) and an OR (suffering passively the occurrence of erroneous inferences). We shall argue that there is no such dilemma: The so called two horns of the dilemma are actually quite naturally connected as complementary elements, an involuntary and an voluntary element with the voluntary element presupposing the involuntary. The involuntary element captures cases where someone suffers a fallacy because of a local malfunctioning of his or her mind. The voluntary element (cor)responds to this and exploits it: Someone who knows such a pattern of malfunctioning exploits it to influence another mind in his or her favor.
And this is the point where rationality standards come in: They express norms of mental functioning that help to avoid the costs of fallacious mental processing concerning judgments, inferences, problem solving, arguments, or decision making.

Following rationality standards offers the opportunity to improve one´s own mental processing by one´s own efforts of rational self-control. And the same holds in cases where other humans try to exploit the fallacy proneness of the own mind to their advantage. Consequently, we do not restrict the analysis of fallacy to the analysis of fallacious arguments, but regard a wider realm of mental processes including problem solving, probability judgments and decision making.
And in referring to mental processes, we do not restrict ourselves to rational thinking in the narrow sense of consistency-rationality, but, instead, follow Aristotle´s tri-dimensional access to the mind comprising the dimensions of logos, pathos, and ethos. We understand mental processes as relying on three components: a logical, an emotional, and a social-interactive component, representing the interconnection of minds. In this paper we will explore four different rationality standards, each with its own norms concerning mental processes, and the corresponding norm violations, the fallacies.

1. Fallacies of bounded rationality
The focus here is on individual decision making or problem solving in a specific task environment beyond social interaction. In this section, we consider, as a prototype, a fallacy which is related to two basic patterns of demonstrative syllogisms, the modus ponens and the modus tollens:

Modus ponens
IF A THEN B
A true
______
B true

Modus tollens
IF A THEN B
B false
______
A false

Fallacy of affirming the consequent
IF A THEN B
B true
_______
A true

The fallacies of §§ 5 and 7 in Aristotle´s Rhetoric book II, ch. 24 belong to this fallacy type:
§5: Dionysius is a thief, for he is a bad man. This is fallacious because not every bad man is a thief. There are alternative possibilities and signs of being a bad man which are ignored or excluded here without further legitimacy. This illicit move makes the conclusion fallacious. §7: Someone who dresses up and roams at night is an adulterer because adulterers are of this type.

How can we remedy this fallacy beyond retreating to the principles of apodeictic reasoning? Let us first follow the path of Georg Polya, a Hungarian born Stanford mathematician, in his classic book on mathematical problem solving (Polya 1945/ 1988). He offers a formal solution concept for the fallacy by introducing the formal model of a heuristic syllogism. Heuristic syllogisms derive conclusions from signs. They are indispensable for any problem solving and discovery. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2006 – Seeing Is Believing: The Visual Diary Of Paul Wynne

• by: Catherine Ann Collins - Willamette University

This essay seeks to link visual argument, narrative characterization, and dissociational argument through a case study of a controversial but highly successful weekly San Francisco television news segment called Paul Wynne’s Journal – a diary of a local television personality who was dying of AIDS.

1. Paul Wynne’s Journal
On January 11, 1990 KGO-TV, an ABC affiliate in San Francisco aired the first of 20 segments on the Thursday evening news that chronicled Paul Wynne’s fight to live with AIDS. Wynne, a former San Francisco television personality and two-time Emmy winner, returned to the air after an absence of five years. The first segment opens with Wynne watching a tape of his earlier on-air performances. He swivels to face the audience and remarks, “I had hair, I had a tan, I had – well – half a body. And here I am today. Only today I have something I would never have dreamed about 10 years ago. I have AIDS” (Wynne, Segment 1, January 11, 1990). Physically altered, he retained his wit and charm. Approximately 4.5 million viewers in the Bay area learned about AIDS from a new perspective, that of Paul Wynne, an HIV patient living with the stigmatized disease.
He explains his purposes in creating the Journal: to dispel ignorance and a fear of AIDS, as a memorial for those who have died, to encourage those who think they might be HIV-positive to get tested and begin early treatment, to insure that the viewers will now know someone with AIDS, and finally with wicked humor he proclaims, to energize himself in the knowledge that the religious zealots will be furious with KGO-TV for letting him tell his story. The segments, placed at the end of the newscast, last from 1 to 4-and-a-half minutes with each addressing a different issue in Wynne’s journey with AIDS (hospitals, the medicine cabinet, canes, the will, telling the parents). All 20 are poignant narratives that are personal, blunt, compelling, and filled with both information and pathos.
Radical television in 1990, Paul Wynne’s Journal received a Cable Car Award, commendation from the American Medical Association’s Committee on Medical Ethics, and a Eugene Block Journalism Award among others. Available for airing throughout the country, and despite letters urging its broadcast outside of California, only one other station, KCET-TV in Los Angeles showed the segments, and they did so concurrent with the sixth International AIDS Conference that was held in San Francisco in 1990.
Wynne also circulated his message through appearances on Good Morning America, CBS This Morning, Entertainment Tonight, and a People Magazine television special. His program was reported in newspapers and magazines throughout the United States, Japan, Britain, Canada, the Netherlands and Australia. The Journal showed the media an alternative way to cover the AIDS crisis at the same time it gave the public a face for AIDS.

2. The Rhetorical Situation
In 1990, even in San Francisco, the Journal’s subject matter and style of argument was seen as groundbreaking and potentially shocking to many viewers as they saw and heard about how a patient experienced the progress of the disease. “All those involved in project were wary that viewer response might be hostile, even ugly” (Gross, 1990, p. A1). In the opening segment, Wynne admits he will probably offend some people. He tells his viewers that he is neither courageous nor political, that the decision to create the Journal, to tell his story was difficult because “there are so many people out there who don’t know me but hate me because I carry the virus” (Wynne, Segment 1, January 11, 1990).
Why the fear of a hostile audience response? Recall first, that AIDS was initially linked to male homosexuals and referred to as GRID, gay related immune deficiency. As such, AIDS was associated with behavior deemed morally unaccepted by many in the heterosexual majority. Once it became clear that heterosexuals, could contract the disease, the association between the patient and AIDS changed to include drug users who shared contaminated needles (equally viewed as morally reprehensible behavior to many in the majority), or what were cast as secondary victims, including children, who were innocent of wrongdoing but received contaminated blood. Other than stories of occasional victims, most of the public discussion of AIDS carried a denigratory association: cleaving that association proved difficult. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2006 – Dissociation: Between Rhetorical Success And Dialectical Soundness

• by: M.A. van Rees - Universiteit van Amsterdam

1. Dissociation and strategic maneuvering
As van Eemeren en Houtlosser (1997) have argued, discussants not only aim at resolving their differences of opinion in a rational fashion, but also in their own favor. To that purpose they carry out all kinds of strategic maneuvers, not the least of which is to represent the state of affairs in such a way that their own position is strengthened.
Zarefsky (1997, 2004) treats a number of techniques a speaker can use to represent matters in a particular way, or, as he calls it, to define the situation. One of the instruments that a speaker can deploy to do so, is the technique that Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca term dissociation, in which a concept that is considered by the audience as a unitary whole is split up in two new concepts that are placed on opposite positions on a value-scale of appearance versus reality. When Maria Montessori’s granddaughter defends her grandmother against the criticism that she was vain by replying that her grandmother merely had a love of beautiful clothes, but was not vain (De Volkskrant 5-1-1999), with this dissociation between the physical and the mental aspects of vanity, she paints a considerably prettier picture of Maria Montessori than her critics did.
An additional advantage of using this technique is that dissociation often is shaped as a categorical statement like “x is something completely different from y’’. In this way, a factual state of affairs is posited that it is hard to question. Former Minister of Transport Jorritsma defended her decision to once again allow a violation of the noise limits for Schiphol Airport, notwithstanding an agreement to end the past policy of tolerance, with the powerful assertion “tolerating is something completely different from anticipating on a change of law which everybody thinks should be put into effect.’ (De Volkskrant 22-01-1998). Allowing a violation of legal rules (in anticipation of a desirable change of law) here is declared with preemptory firmness to be something completely different from a policy of tolerance.
And, last but not least, a speaker can use dissociation to evade a potential accusation of inconsistency. Former Minister of Education Ritzen, for example, tried to cover up a contradiction in his position by introducing a dissociation between students taking part in the university administration (which he earlier opposed), and students participating in the university administration (which he later approved). Only in the latter case, he argued, students participating in the university administration were responsible only to the Dean and not to the student population.

Apart from these general effects, dissociation has various rhetorical effects that depend on the place in the dialectical profile in which the technique is used (van Eemeren, Houtlosser en Snoeck Henkemans 2000). For example, speakers who in the confrontation stage of a critical discussion bring forward an opposite standpoint against a standpoint brought forward earlier, can through a dissociation make a concession on an innocuous or minor interpretation of the standpoint they reject, and in that way present their own standpoint with all the more force. This is what Maria Montessori’s granddaughter does when she replies to her grandmother’s critics with her claim that her grandmother loved beautiful clothes but was not vain. By way of the dissociation, she gives the impression that her opponents are mistaken, and she lends her own standpoint the status of the better, if not the last, word.
In evaluating strategic maneuvers in the context of a critical discussion, the central question is whether these maneuvers can stand the test of reasonableness. Such an assessment can only take place in a clearly and precisely formulated normative framework. One such framework is offered by the pragma-dialectical rules for critical discussion (van Eemeren & Grootendorst 1982, 1992, 2004), against the background of which the concept of strategic maneuvering has been developed. The application of this framework enables the analyst to indicate exactly when and why a strategic maneuver by way of a dissociation transgresses the bounds of reasonableness.
In this paper, I consider various answers to the question when and why strategic maneuvering with dissociation is sound and when it transgresses the bounds of reasonableness. First, I look at how a number of scholars outside Pragma-Dialectics have approached this question, and then I look at how it is answered in Pragma-Dialectics. At the end of this paper, I reflect on the merits of these various answers.

2. Other approaches
So far, among argumentation scholars, not much attention has been paid to the question of whether and when dissociation is a sound argumentative technique. The only author who has written at some length about this topic is Schiappa (1985, 1993). Schiappa is of the opinion that dissociation is always unsound, because dissociation involves a real definition, in which one of the split-off terms is presented as the true or essential interpretation of the concept that is expressed by the original term. And real definitions are unsound, because they are essentialistic. I agree with Schiappa that dissociation always involves a definition, and also that dissociation always invokes the opposition between appearance and reality. However, I do not agree that the latter necessarily is a consequence of the definition being a real or essentialistic one.
First of all, it is quite possible that the definition that is involved in a dissociation is preferred by the speaker merely for ‘methodological’ reasons (Crawshay-Williams 1957), without the speaker having the pretense to present a real definition or a description of the essence of the definiendum. Only in a definition that the speaker expressly presents as real, such as in ‘Real peace is not the absence of conflict, but the presence of justice’ (pronounced by Harrison Ford in the role of the President of the United States in the movie Air Force One), we can be sure that we have to do with an essentialistic definition.
More important is the fact that the opposition between appearance and reality in many cases does not play a role on the level of the definition at all, but rather on the level of the subject matter that is being discussed. On the level of that subject mater, entities are assigned to the categories distinguished in the dissociation, and what is at issue is whether they really belong there or only in appearance. For example, in defending her grandmother against her critics who called her vain, the granddaughter of Maria Montessori categorizes her grandmother as someone who was not really vain, but only had a love of beautiful clothes. Although at the bottom of this categorization lies a particular definition of the term ‘vain’, limiting the meaning of the term to the mental aspects of this quality, there is no pretense that this is the one and only true definition. What is at issue is that, against the background of this definition, Montessori merely appears to be vain, but cannot be called so in reality. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2006 – Argumentation In Debate: The Parliamentary Speech In Critical Contexts

• by: Roberto Marafioti - Universidad Buenos Aires, Universidad de Lomas de Zamora

1. Introduction
The activity of Parliament is largely an argumentative activity. It involves speeches, law-making and debates. Mainly, those are argumentative debates. When I use the term Parliament I am refering primarily to the Argentine Parliament that is made up of the House of Representatives and the Senate.
Broadly speaking, the objectives that parlamentary discourse have to accomplish are similar in different parliaments in democracies all over the world: to approve, change or modernize legislation, to represent interests of different sectors, to influence public opinion and to recruit and promote political actors.
But the discourse of different national parliaments is subject to variation, at all linguistic levels, on the basis of history and context, cultural specificity and political culture. As is the case for all discourse genres, parliamentary discourse is also defined by its contexts. I agree with the point of view that holds that language, in general, and political discourse, in particular, shapes the people that use it. This is different from the common sense point of view that claims that people shape the language that they use. Namely in political discourse a representative expresses his/her opinions through the choice of vocabulary, the use of an established phrase and the set of statements from which they draw their arguments.

2. Features of Parliamentary discourse
Parliamentary discourse is primarly informative and deliberative. There are several kinds of discoursive structures that shape parliamentary discourse. Such speeches delivered in a parliamentary debate are unique. Speeches made in Parliament have to respect very specific rules. In a way they belong to the category of political discourse but in another way they have some differences that can be pointed out.
Parliamentary debates share a number of characteristics of style and interaction with other forms of discourse such as the Speaker as moderator, the turn-taking structure, a formal lexicon, elaborate syntax, and the common structures of argumentation and persuasion characteristic of debates.
What is unique in parliamentary debates, however, are obvious context categories such as the Setting (House of Parliament), the rules and types of sessions (ordinary ones, extraordinary and special), the representatives, members of the Parliament, hereafter MP’s, the objectives (different policies, etc.), and the political knowledge and ideologies of the participants. In other words, although content and even style of speech in Parliament may be shared with other types of speeches, the function of such structures must be established in relation to the specific political situation: The speeches of MPs are making legislation, representing and playing politics. In the rest of this paper I will examine such categories in more detail, and I will study a specific parliamentary debate about reproductive health care.

3. Political and Parlamentary discourses
Since political discourse has a clear identity among social discourse, it is possible to recognize variations of political discourse in television, radio, and articles written by politicians.
The labor of the Parliament is made not only in the Sessions but also in the Commitees that allow bills to pass to the House. If a bill has not been accepted or approved by the Commitee it will not be brought to the floor. The only alternative that a representative has is to ask permission from the Speaker to consider the bill, but then all representatives vote to admit or refuse it. This option has become more difficult as the House of Parliament adds seats. Leaving the lesser known and less powerful to the mercy of Commitee where they develop argumentation skills and recognition among their colleagues.
In this way the oratory that has traditionally had a main role has decreased in importance in Parliament. In national history there were and, there still are a group of members, who have the ability to make speeches, debate and argue, in a way that they can impress and shock both the real audience and the indirect audience. The representatives themselves recognize the ability that everyone has to use his/her style not only on the floor but also in the media. They know that in looking at their political future, playing to the media is a point of extreme relevance. That is why when a representative does not want to consider a colleague’s argument they use the expression “you are speaking for the tv cameras”.
This point is very well treated by Cornelia Illie (Illie, 2005, 6) who says that “a particular agonistic parliamentary procedure is for MPs to compete for the floor. In order to speak during a debate, MPs must try to ‘catch the Speaker’s eye’”[i].
Even in some cases an action can say more than an argument. For example, in 2002 during the debate about a bill that included the IMF, a representative asked for the floor, she stood up from her seat, went to the Speaker’s desk and left a United States’s flag. The media was advised in advance and the tv cameras recorded the scene. The days after, all the country’s screens displayed the representative’s success and the uncomfortable situation that the Speaker was put into. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2006 – Towards A Pragma-Dialectical Approach To Negotiation

• by: Dima Mohammed - University of Amsterdam

The aim of this paper is to explore the merits of examining negotiation with a pragma-dialectical approach. I start at the argumentative nature of the verbal interaction in negotiation, and argue that adopting a pragma-dialectical approach in analyzing and evaluating negotiation encounters, would allow for an evaluation of negotiation that emphasizes the potential for rationality without overlooking the characteristics of negotiation practice. The tension between the rational nature assumed by the promoted pragma-dialectical approach and the often non-rational aspects of negotiation practice can be mainly attributed to the gap between ideal and practice. I hope that highlighting the rational side would bring the practice closer to ideal

1. The nature of negotiation
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, to negotiate is to try to reach an agreement or compromise by discussion. People negotiate all the time: parents and children negotiate over the time to go to bed, partners negotiate terms of their relationship, workers and employers negotiate over salaries and working hours, nations negotiate border issues as well as cooperation prospects… etc. It is then not an exaggeration to say that people negotiate all the time and about everything. From the interpersonal to the international level, there is hardly a domain that does not witness negotiation. The resort to negotiation can be considered a manifestation of a peaceful, reasonable and respectful attitude towards human differences.
Among the various definitions for negotiation offered in negotiation research, I quote two that highlight essential aspects of a negotiation activity. The first definition is the one presented by Pierre Casse (Casse, 1981; Casse & Deol, 1985). Casse defines negotiation as “a process in which one individual tries to persuade another to alter ideas or behavior; a process in which at least two partners with different viewpoints try to reach an agreement on matters of mutual interest” (1981: 152). This definition of negotiation highlights the initial difference between individuals or parties, which is the origin of the need to negotiate. The role that persuasion plays in the resolution of this original difference is another aspect that is highlighted by this definition. The second definition is the one introduced by Alan Firth (1995). Firth considers negotiation to be a discourse-based and situated activity in which two parties advance reciprocal argument and counter-argument, proposal and counterproposal in an attempt to agree upon actions and outcomes mutually perceived as beneficial (1995: pp. 3-4). Firth approaches negotiation from a verbal communication perspective, adopting Sawyer & Guetzkow’s (1964) view of arguments, counter-arguments, proposals and counterproposals to constitute the central process of negotiation (Sawyer & Guetzkow 1964: 479). Such a view of negotiation endorses its argumentative nature. The argumentative nature of negotiation has also been brought to light by van Eemeren and Houtlosser (2005), who perceive negotiation as one of the various activity types of argumentative practice (van Eemeren and Houtlosser 2005: 78).

2. The advantages of analyzing and evaluating negotiation within a pragma-dialectical framework
As a type of argumentative discourse, negotiation can be analyzed and evaluated within a pragma-dialectical framework, with the help of the ideal model of a critical discussion. Pragma-dialectics, a normative theory of argumentation developed by Frans van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst (1984; 1992; 2004), introduced the tool of a “critical discussion” in order to analyze and evaluate argumentative discourse. As presented by van Eemeren et. al. (2002), a critical discussion is “an ideal of argumentative discourse aimed at resolving a difference of opinion by determining whether the standpoints at issue ought to be accepted or not” (van Eemeren, Grootendorst & Snoeck Henkemans 2002: 23). The model of a critical discussion attributes the resolution of a difference of opinion to argumentative discourse, and specifies the stages that such a resolution should go through in order to reach this aim. The ideal model does not describe the reality of argumentative discourse; it rather specifies how argumentative discourse would look like if it were solely aimed at resolving a difference of opinion, thus, providing a normative tool to reconstruct argumentative discourse, as a step prior to its evaluation.

In this paper, I argue in favor of a pragma-dialectical approach in analyzing and evaluating negotiation encounters. The promoted approach brings new insights to the study of negotiation, by providing a theoretically motivated, process focused analysis and evaluation of negotiation encounters, based on the verbal interaction in negotiation exchanges. The promoted approach overcomes three main shortcomings that can be observed in the main bulk of the available research on negotiation.

First, in most of the available research on negotiation, verbal communication has been marginalized; the language in negotiation is extremely neglected and psychological mental bases are prevailing. Conversely, a pragma-dialectical analysis will be based on the verbal interaction in the negotiation activity. In pragma-dialectics, argumentation is externalized so that arguers are held responsible only of what they have expressed; speculations about beliefs and thoughts do not play role in the pragma-dialectical analysis of argumentative discourse. Adopting a pragma-dialectical approach to negotiation would then eliminate psychological and cognitive considerations – which are not accessible states of minds – as basis for analyzing negotiation, and would instead rely on the commitments that negotiators take through their verbal interaction.
Second, while it is the case in most of the negotiation research that the outcome of negotiation is the focus of study, a pragma-dialectical approach would be process-focused. In its ideal model of a critical discussion, pragma-dialectics accentuates the purposive interactional nature of argumentation as a process of resolving disputes. Applying the model of a critical discussion to negotiation would consequently offer an evaluation that is process focused.
Third, whereas the existing models of negotiation are either purely descriptive serving no evaluative purpose, or atheoretically prescriptive stemming from personal experiences, the pragma-dialectical approach combines both descriptive and theoretically normative elements in examining negotiation, as it provides both a fairly descriptive account of negotiation encounters in the analysis as well as a theoretically motivated normative evaluation of these exchanges. The promoted approach relies on descriptive accounts of argumentative discourse to reconstruct it normatively after the ideal model of a critical discussion, which is governed by the theoretical norm of critical testing. In this way, the pragma-dialectical approach maintains a balance between the interests of normative evaluation and intentions of discourse producers, in such a way that brings about an analysis of negotiation that accounts for the intentions of the negotiators, and an evaluation that is theoretically normative. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2006 – Between Radical Democracy And Civic Virtue: Political Piety And Public Moral Argument

• by: Nathaniel I. Córdova - Willamette University

The last two decades have seen an upsurge of concern among political philosophers and other scholars regarding the character of citizens and the challenges of diversity (often referred to as multiculturalism or pluralism) to democratic life (Macedo 1990; Guttman 1994; Kahane 1996; Kymlicka and Norman 2000; Galston 2002). These scholars contend that contemporary discussions of politics, public policy, education, and morality in the public sphere should be centrally concerned with the character of citizens in liberal democratic society. The issue of character has perhaps been most assiduously discussed under the theme of civic virtue, and specifically takes stock of a decline in civic participation, the responsibilities of citizenship, rising discontent and disconnect with the life of the polis, the inability of liberal theory to motivate individuals, in short a seeming crisis for liberal democracy. While conceptions of civic virtue are decidedly not new, in fact from the ancient Greeks, through Hobbes, Kant, Rosseau, Mills, and others, it has been an essential part of political theory, its re-emergence in connection with this crisis, and the changing face of democratic life can be seen as a response by liberal democratic theory to the various challenges posed by communitarianism, and radical democratic theories among other accounts of political community.

What motivates liberal political philosophers and other scholars is the search for an answer about the crisis of liberal democracy rooted in the character of the citizen as autonomous democratic subject. This concern has been traditionally articulated as a crisis of civic virtue. Contemporary society is, it is argued, facing a crisis due to the erosion of civic virtues necessary to sustain liberal democratic life. Perhaps the best characterization of this crisis comes from William Galston, who enumerates the various problems we face by noting that we are experiencing: rising rates of crime, drug abuse, and family breakdown; of the near collapse of effective public education; of greed and shortsightedness run amok in public and private affairs; of a steady decline in political awareness and an equally steady rise in political cynicism; and of what I can only regard as the relentless tribalization and barbarization of American life (Galston 1991, p. 6).

While Galston’s formulation might legitimately be read as somewhat alarmist, especially his claim to ‘relentless tribalization and barbarization’, terms that at best require careful definition, the other points articulated are significant social concerns. In responding to such issues, political theorists of all camps, as well as liberal secularists and religious believers, look to citizen character as central node and element of public life. Other scholars have looked at the power of media, and the technocratization of the public sphere not just as narrowing and circumscribing possibilities for citizen participation, but often as corrosive to virtuous public life.
This disquiet over the character of citizens in contemporary society has been reinforced most recently by further concerns over how to strengthen the bonds of citizenship in modern democratic, pluralistic society. To be sure, much has been written about citizenship, diversity, and the demands of the ethno-cultural and religious diversity in our society (Kymlicka and Norman 2000; Gutmann 1994). To this list, the fact of religious pluralism in modern states is often added, and in particular in our post 9/11 world, the concerns over how security, ethnicity, and religion are enmeshed. To a great extent it has been only rather recently that these debates over religion, national security, and ethnicity have come to be discussed as integral to each other. The events of September 11 reawakened with much vigor a perspective that posits that the fate of modern liberal democracies is deeply connected to ethno-cultural diversity, civic virtue, religion, and national security. Read more