ISSA Proceedings 2002 – The Argumentative Dimension Of Discourse

• by: Ruth Amossy, Tel Aviv

The study of argumentation is often restricted to discourses clearly meant to persuade or, in Perelman’s terms, to gain “the adherence of minds” to a given thesis (Perelman, 1969, 14). In this view, it mainly deals with arguments’ building and refutation. According to van Eemeren and al.’s definition, “argumentation is a verbal and social activity of reason aiming at increasing (or decreasing) the acceptability of a controversial standpoint for the listener or reader, by putting forward a constellation of propositions intended to justify (or refute) the standpoint before a rational judge” (1996, 5). This delimitation of argumentation’s scope allows for a clear-cut definition distinguishing argumentation from other kinds of verbal activities. However, it also narrows its field by exclusively concentrating on discourses that have an explicit argumentative aim, thus ignoring the argumentative dimension of texts that are not immediately meant to persuade, like news reports in the media, testimonial writing, novels, etc.

I adopt the stand according to which discourses focusing on non argumentative aims – providing factual information, for example, or creating a fictional world  –belong to the realm of persuasion insofar they try to orient the audience’s ways of seeing and judging the world.  In Grize’s terms: “In the common meaning, to argue is to provide arguments, thus reasons, for or against a thesis […] But it is also possible to conceive of argumentation from a broader perspective and to understand it as a process that aims at exerting an influence on one’s opinion, attitude, even behavior. It is however important to insist on the fact that the means are discursive” (Grize, 1990, 41; my translation). In this perspective, I have slightly amended Perelman’s basic definition by adding that in argumentation, verbal means are used not only to make the addressee adhere to a thesis, but also to modify or reinforce his representations and beliefs, or simply to orient his reflexion on a given problem (Amossy, 2000, 29). Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2002 – Argumentation In Education: Issues Arising From Undergraduate Students’ Work

• by: Richard Andrews - University of York, England

1. Introduction
The field within which I’m working is argumentation in education; that is to say, it is an applied field of study in which relatively ‘pure’ studies of the discourses of argument find themselves grounded in educational contexts or purposes; and the emphasis is on argumentation as a process, rather than on argument as a phenonemon.
The particular sub-field for the present research is that of argumentation in higher education, especially within the discipline of Educational Studies itself.
In this paper, I will come to the question of argumentation in higher education through a selective literature review of approaches to argument and through a look at argument in a range of subjects in the secondary school. After discussing examples of student work in higher education, I will then reflect on further research that is needed in the field.

2. Literature review
My review of the literature from the past ten years or so is not systematic. Books and articles cover a wide and fascinating range. Those by George Myerson, like his The Argumentative Imagination (1992) – which studies dialogic and dialectical imagination in Wordsworth, Dryden, The Book of Job and The Bhagavad Gita – emphasize the literary, rhetorical dimension of argument. That position is more clearly set out in Myerson’s Rhetoric, Reason and Society (1994) with its sub-title, Rationality as Dialogue or in his book with Dick Leith, The Power of Address (1989) which positions argument (which I want to distinguish from persuasion) at the rhetorical end of a spectrum which has at its other end: logic. At the logic end of the spectrum of argument and argumentation are works like Jane Grimshaw’s Argument Structure (1990), a highly technical monograph on argument within the sentence and working within the discipline of linguistic enquiry; many of these studies see argument as sealed off from the world and operating behind the closed doors of fabricated and made-up sentences and propositions: their tools are the enthymeme, logical relations; their bête noire, the fallacy. Their weakness, from where I stand, is that their own fundamental fallacy is an attempt to make verbal language do the job of mathematical language. Their propositional formulae do not translate readily above the level of the sentence.

If those are the two ends of the spectrum, what lies in between? Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2002 – On The Use And Misuse Of Analyticity In Arguments

• by: Constantin Antonopoulos - National Technical University of Athens, Greece

1. Argument-by-Analyticity
I go to a concert and hear, among the other pieces, a particularly avant guarde piece where the notes or rather the sounds it is made up of seem to me and to all the rest of the audience to succeed one another at random. Being a bit of a conservative at the end of the concert I remark: “That thing was not music”. I intend that as a statement of  fact, even if to many it looks like a statement of value. None such can be made, unless the piece in question is first admitted to the category “music”. A progressivist friend of mine, with a tendency to radicalism, disputes my aphorism – essentially my classification – by retorting: “Why not? Music doesn’t have to be what it always has been. It can still be music, even if its component sounds come at random. Art is originality and original things cannot be copies of past ways”.

Though both my friend and I are laymen, and lack any pertinent philosophical information, we essentially stand on opposite sides of a Wittgensteinian “family resem-blance” dichotomy. To him the piece in question shares a family resemblance with music, which is thus treated as an open-ended concept, because it is possessed of sound, which standard is deemed sufficient. To me, on the contrary, it falls short of the definition of Music, in that it lacks the specific unity of sound characteristic of what we normally call music. And then music is no longer an open-ended concept, nor is any other, for that matter. The basis of my objection, though in being a layman I may lack the proper philosophical means to express it, rests upon the following, restrictive rule of identification:
[A]  Only Coherent Sound Can Be Music.
This is, paradigmatically, a rule of usage. But it is, fundamentally, an analytic rule. Being a layman I know nothing of analytic truths, synthetic ones, borderline cases between them or what have you. But this much I do know: Not anything can qualify as music. Were I a Popperian, for example, I could qualify this gut feeling of mine with an even more refined version:
[A1]  Nothing Can Be Music, Unless Dissonance Can Occur In It.

This is by strict analogy with “nothing can be science unless falsehood can occur in it” though of course, in being a layman, I know nothing of all this. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2002 – The Constitution, Critical Rhetoric, And Public Argument: The Case Of Democratic Japan

• by: Satoru Aonuma - Kanda University of International Studies

Introduction
During the “occupation” period that followed Japan’s surrender to the Allied Power in the summer of 1945, the Constitution of Japan came into effect on May 3, 1947. Some fifty years have past since then; the Japanese have developed and nurtured a political culture distinct from its prewar predecessor. In the first place, it provides “a new intellectual framework, a fresh set of ideas and values” by which they could form a new identity (Tanaka: 125-6).  In place of their earlier loyalty to the emperor and “his” Constitution, the postwar generation Japanese share a loyalty to the new Constitution not merely as a formal document, but as “a summation of preferred values and guidelines for public action” (Beer 1982: 46-7). At the same time, the new Constitution offers a ground for moral critique in postwar Japan. “Since we have not yet developed a self-oriented behavior pattern in the confusion of the postwar period, we Japanese have tried to organize a new society with the Constitution of Japan as its guiding star” (Ukai 1979: 127).

This paper seeks to offer a brief, critical reading of Japan’s postwar political culture, focusing on the Constitution of Japan as a significant instance of public argument. As an object of study and investigation, significance of a constitutional discourse to student of rhetoric and argumentation is evident. In A grammar of motives, for instance, Kenneth Burke discusses a rhetoric (and a dialectic) of a constitution as an “idealistic anecdote” (1945; also see Anderson 1995). In relation to critical cultural studies, Spivak (1990) has written on a constitutive power of a constitutional narrative that normalizes and regularizes “something called the People… as a collective subject (We)” (134). Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2002 – Cases: Their Role In Informal Logic

• by: Peter D. Asquith - Michigan State University

1. Introduction
One aspect of informal logic is the attempt to apply logic to ordinary discourse.  When attempting to do this, one needs to (a) recognize/determine that an argument is present and (b) be able to reconstruct the argument from the ordinary discourse. Doing both of these might be possible by inspection, e.g., you look and you know that there is an argument and what the argument is.  Indeed, I believe that there are some simple cases or familiar situations in which this occurs.  However, it seems equally clear that there are more complex cases in which neither the recognition nor the reconstruction can be accomplished by inspection.  A review of texts shows that rules, guidelines, lists of indicators, lists of steps to be followed, flowcharts, and examples are all frequently deployed as techniques to assist the student to achieve the objectives of identification and reconstruction.  These complex cases in which these tools are to be utilized are the interesting ones, both theoretically and pedagogically.

What are the situations encountered and how does one make the necessary determinations in these more complicated cases? What I want to do in this paper is to assess the nature of the two tasks listed above, discuss the roles of several of the tools just mentioned – rules and examples,  and look at some ways of conceptualizing what is occurring. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2002 – Constructing The (Imagined) Antagonist In Advertising Argumentation

• by: Albert Atkin & John E. Richardson - University of Sheffield

1. Introduction: the problem of the imagined antagonist
O’Keefe’s (1977) well known and well-used classification and definitions of argument1 and argument2 need little introduction: for clarity, we assume that argument1 “is something one person makes” while argument2 ‘oppositional argument’) “is something two or more persons have (or engage in)” (O’Keefe, 1977: 121). Despite this familiarity there are, nevertheless, certain contentious aspects to the division, not least on whether argument1 represents a form of pseudo-dialogue between protagonist and an imagined antagonist – O’Keefe (1977) himself pointed out that the distinction was only ever “a starting-point for analysis” out of which “[v]ery thorny issues immediately arise concerning how one is to delimit” them (p.127). Here we assume that arguments “require dissensus” (Willard, 1989: 53). Given that such differences of opinion logically entail more than one participant, in cases of argument1, pragma-dialectical theory assumes that arguments exist as dialogue. Indeed examples of rhetorical argument – or argument1 – can be shown to proceed in accordance with the four dialectic stages pragma-dialectical theory identifies (van Eemeren and Grootendorst, 1994), with speech acts operating in these various stages directed at resolving difference of opinion (van Eemeren, Grootendorst & Snoeck Henkemans, 2002; Richardson, 2001). Van Eemeren et al (1996) for example, states:
Argument does not exist in a single individual privately drawing a conclusion: It is part of a discourse procedure whereby two or more individuals who have a difference of opinion try to arrive at agreement. Argument presupposes two distinguishable participant roles, that of a ‘protagonist’ and that of a – real or imagined – ‘antagonist’. (p.277)

In order that the argument1 be as persuasive as possible, its rhetorical moves must, at all dialectical stages of the discourse, “be adapted to audience demand in such a way that they comply with the listener’s or the readership’s good sense and preferences” (van Eemeren & Houtlosser, 1999: 485). With cases of argument1 in which the antagonist is imagined it becomes necessary, indeed essential, to develop as accurate a projection of this antagonist as possible in order that the rhetorical moves employed by the protagonist be as persuasive as possible. In short, arguments should be written or spoken “in such a way that optimal comprehensibility and acceptability”, on the part of the antagonist, is ensured (van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 1994: 223). Read more