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). This approach raises several questions, especially concerning:
– The limits of argumentation: what does it actually encompass? In other words, does extending it to any kind of utterance, regardless of its declared objectives, not  deprive it of any meaning?
– The strategies of argumentation: if argumentation is not necessarily built on a series of rational arguments arranged in a more or less complex structure, can it consist of any kind of verbal means; in this case, does it still offer any discursive specificity?
– The methods of analysis: what kind of tools can be used to describe and analyze the argumentative dimension of texts pertaining to a wide variety of types and genres?

My contention is that texts can have various degrees of argumentativity, going from the overtly polemical to the apparently informative or descriptive, and that this argumentativity is closely linked to the genre of discourse in which a more or less strong attempt at persuasion occurs.

This genre-focussed approach remains faithful to the spirit of classical rhetoric with its threefold partition: the deliberative, the forensic and the epideictic. Moreover, it draws on Perelman’s insights concerning the argumentativity of the epideictic, sometimes supposed to be more literary than argumentative: “In my view, the epideictic genre is central to discourse because its role is to intensify adherence to values […] The goal is always to strengthen a consensus around certain values which one wants to see prevail and which should orient action in the future” (Perelman, 1982, 20). However, argumentation in discourse (Amossy, 2000) adopts a broader view of generic categories, defining genre (in the French discourse analysis tradition) as a socio-historical discursive model, endowed not only with rules and constraints, but also with some kind of institutional recognition. The art of persuasion displays different forms and strategies according to the framework in which it appears. It is thus important to ask not only “who speaks to whom” where and when, but also what tacit communication contract is activated, what are the rules and constraints of the chosen genre and how they accommodate argumentative moves.

Such issues are throughly examined in the field of conversational analysis – first by the Swiss linguist Jacques Moeschler (1985), then by scholars like Christian Plantin (1996, 1998) or Ghislaine Martel (1998). They show that ordinary exchanges, daily conversations have an argumentative orientation that can be revealed through linguistic and mainly pragmatics means. I would like to extend the research to a variety of discourses, written and not only oral, looking at the ways argumentation can be built into a discourse in accordance with its specific genre regulation.

In this perspective, argumentation analysis should be based on on discourse analysis (as defined in Charaudeau & Maingueneau, 2002, 41-45) as well as on rhetorical and argumentation studies. In other words, the tools provided by classical rhetoric (like figures and tropes) and by argumentation studies (like Perelman’s techniques of argumentation, Ducrot’s utterance linking,  pragma-dialectics’ reconstruction of arguments, etc.)  should be considered in the framework of the genre that imposes on the text its peculiar logic and communication norms. An analysis of the text in all its verbal and institutional dimensions is needed in order to see how it sets out to construct a point of view and share it with the audience. I will here chose examples that do not allow for any overt exploitation of rhetorical and argumentative elements in order to show that the argumentative dimension of texts can be analyzed even in discourses that by definition do not and cannot adopt any clear persuasion aim.

Let us first address historical testimony, a kind of discourse that is not supposed to develop arguments but to present facts. Testimonial narrative is by definition uttered by an individual who declares that he has actually seen what he relates, that he has been there. The told episode, certified true, is thus closely connected to the biography of a narrator who takes responsibility on what he tells, as well as on its possible social consequences (Dulong, 1998, 56). Factuality as opposed to fiction, but as tightly connected to subjectivity (the witness truly and sincerely reports what he has personally seen and felt),  is thus the main feature of testimonial discourse. Desire to prove anything but the truth of the related event cannot but look suspicious. The witness points to historical facts (in the limits of his knowledge, of course, and of the accuracy of his memory) in order to establish the truth. Any declared militant objective makes his report dubious since the witness could be accused of distorting reality to serve his own purposes.

Historical testimony expresses itself in numerous genres, such as memoirs, autobiographical narratives and confessions, published personal diaries as well as letters. The modes of testimonial discourse thus vary according to the specific rules of the generic category in which it appears: the style of historical memoirs, for example, widely differs from intimate epistolary writing. Thus the text is submitted to a double sets of constraints – the rules defining testimonial discourse, and the rules of the specific genre through which testimony is transmitted.
Here is a quotation borrowed from a war diary (“carnet de route”) written by Paul Lintier, soldier in the French artillery, during August-September 1914, later reviewed and published by him (May 1916, Plon):
L’angoisse m’étrangle. Je raisonne pourtant. Je comprends clairement que l’heure est venue de faire le sacrifice de ma vie. Nous irons, nous irons tous, mais nous ne redescendrons pas de ces côtes. Voilà! Ce bouillonnement d’animalité et de pensée, qui est ma vie, tout à l’heure va cesser. Mon corps sanglant sera étendu sur le champ. Je le vois. Sur les perspectives de l’avenir, qui toujours sont pleines de soleil, un grand rideau tombe. C’est fini! Ce n’aura pas été très long;  je n’ai que vingt et un ans” (1916 in Cru, 1993, 182).
Anguish is stifling me. Nevertheless, I’m reasoning. I clearly understand that the hour of sacrificing my life has come. We will go, we will all go, but we will never more go down these slopes. Here it is! This teeming with animality and thought, that is my life, will stop. My bleeding body will lay in the field. I see it. On the perspectives of the future, always full of sun, a big curtain is now falling down. It is over! It has not been very long; I am but twenty-one (my translation)

These notes, first taken for himself during the campaign, primarily express Lintier’s state of mind and intimate feelings before an imminent battle. They do not have any immediate argumentative aim, nor do they originally address any specific audience beyond the diarist. The text in the first person faithfully describes what the “I” thinks, feels and imagines in front of danger; it forcefully expresses the fear and regrets of a very young man about to make the sacrifice of his life. The deictics and the verb tenses stress the importance of the moment and the place in which this discourse is uttered. The alternation of the future and the present, as if the subject was contemplating his own dead body – “My bleeding body will lay on the field. I see it” –  emphasizes the anguish of the living. So do the repetitions (“we will go, we will all go”), and the exclamations (“Here we are!”, “It is over!”). The text thus conforms to the norms of the intimate diary with its expressive function: an “I” writes down his most personal feelings at the very moment of their occurrence, with the authenticity and sincerity granted by the immediacy, but also by the absolute confidentiality inherent to diary writing.

Nevertheless, the text is eventually intended for an audience, even when the diarist keeps it to himself on the battlefield. This is amply proved by his rewriting and publishing his “carnets de route” two years later at Plon (a good Parisian publishing house). As such, the faithful report constitutes not only the trace of a personal souvenir, but also the testimony of a “poilu” (an ordinary Great War French soldier) about the way he coped with the close perspective of bloodshed and death. Because he has been there, and describes only what he actually felt, his text is endowed with testimonial value. As such, it is liable to enter the public sphere and provide a valuable stand on the issue of war heroism.

In this view, Lintier’s personal evocation displays a second layer, in which argumentative tones can be detected. The expression of feelings is no more the only objective to be taken into account: far from being self-sufficient, emotion rather plays a part in the effective transmission of a specific vision of war. It increases the impact of the text on the reader by inviting him to both understand and feel the experience of the warrior in all its complexity. He can share Lintier’s inner conflict, displayed in the use of  connectives that confer upon the text its argumentative orientation.

The first connective is “pourtant”, nevertheless, that substitutes reasoning to sheer anguish: “anguish is stifling me. Nevertheless, I am reasoning”. The first move is thus to show how rational thinking can subdue anxiety, and how it allows for a clear understanding of the situation: “I clearly understand that the hour of  sacrificing my life has come”. The idea of sacrifice appears as part of the reasoning, and is followed by the conclusion “we will go”. This fragment is thus the representation of a self-deliberation using rationality to make a final decision on the necessity of fighting, whatever be the risks involved.  It is based on premises generally agreed upon during the patriotic days of the “sacred union”. The connector “mais” – but – “we will go, we will all go, but we will never more go down these slopes”, reverses the orientation of the discourse. If to go and fight is important, what follows the “but” is by definition even more important (Ducrot, 1980). The horror of the fatal issue is emphasized at the expense of the duty to be performed.

It is interesting to point out that the veiled antagonism between the official discourse the soldiers were supposed to feed on, and what they truly felt in their heart, was emphasized by later readings of the twenties and the thirties. Lintier’s text was then perceived as a strong, though indirect, denounciation of war heroism as glorified by patriotic and militarist discourses. For Norton Cru, who reproduced the quoted lines of Lintier in his famous 1929 book Witnesses (Témoins), such a testimony showed that the 1914 soldiers, far from facing death stoically and without any fear, suffered a terrible psychological misery, a genuine moral agony[i]. Indeed, the loss of life, the end of sensuality and thought that come as a result of performing one’s duty are indirectly presented by Lintier as an injustice through his emphatic sentence on the brevity of his existence: “It has not lasted very long; I am but twenty-one”.

Thus the emotional passage delivers a message insofar it depicts war less in the light of the official discourse on sacrifice and duty, than of a counter-discourse –  faithfully reporting the thoughts and feelings of those who actually experience fighting. Even if Lintier uses the “I”, his evocation of the pronoun “we” makes him part of a group. Even if he does not take the liberty to say it in so many words, since he is testifying only on what he knows from his own experience, we can imagine that he represents most of  his companions.
It is thus interesting to see how a fragment apparently intended to give an outlet to the writer’s anguish is endowed with an argumentative dimension. This argumentation can be analyzed through the connectives allowing for utterance linking, but also through the contrast between the doxa (Amossy and Sternberg 2002) mobilized by reasoning (the official discourse on war) and the experience of the soldier facing death. The transmitted vision of war opposes the dominant views the diarist himself was brought up to believe in. It is thus no wonder that it can be quoted by those who, in the early thirties, look for pacifist arguments.

The second example is taken from a novel by Marguerite Duras, The Lover, a narrative with autobiographical overtones alternatively written in the first and third person, and telling the first love affair of the very young protagonist with a rich Chinese young man. Here is a passage dealing with the “I” narrator’s mother and with her views on family pictures:
De temps en temps, ma mère décrète: demain on va chez le photographe. Elle se plaint du prix mais elle fait quand même les frais des photos de famille. Les photos, on les regarde, on ne se regarde pas, mais on regarde les photographies, chacun séparément, sans un mot de commentaire, mais on les regarde, on se voit. On voit les autres membres de la famille un par un ou rassemblés. On se revoit quand on était petit sur les anciennes photos et on se regarde sur les photos récentes. La séparation a encore grandi entre nous. Une fois regardées, les photos sont rangées avec le linge dans les armoires. Ma mère nous fait photographier pour pouvoir nous voir, voir si nous grandissons normalement. Elle nous regarde longuement comme d’autres mères, d’autres enfants. Elle compare les photos entre elles, elle parle de la croissance de chacun. Personne ne lui répond. (Duras, 1984, 115-116)
From time to time, my mother says: tomorrow we will go to the photographer. She complains about the price, but she still pays greatly for family pictures. We look at those pictures, we do not look at each other, but we look at the photographs, each of us separately, without a word of comment, but we look at them and we see ourselves. We see other members of the family one by one or gathered together. We see each other when we were little in the old pictures and we look at each other on the recent pictures. The separation between us has grown even more. Once looked at, the pictures are  put away with the linen in a closet. My mother has us photographed so that she can see us, see whether we grow up normally. She looks at us at length like other mothers do at other children. She compares the pictures, she talks about everyone’s growth . Nobody answers”. (My translation)

This text  does not have any argumentative aim: it describes an episode of the protagonist’s family life in what is supposed to be a faithful report of the past. This evocation in the first person is written in a pseudo-oral style – the syntax imitates spoken French: “the pictures, we look at them”.  It is a flat style full of odd repetitions (“we look at the pictures, we don’t look at each other, but we look at the photographs…”) and of trivialities (“One can see the other members of the family one by one or gathered together. We see ourselves when we were very little on the old pictures and we look at ourselves on the recent pictures”).  The narrator not only transgresses the rules of literary writing, she also deviates from the norms of autobiography by avoiding any personal judgment (there are no evaluative adjectives, no axiological terms) and by erasing any direct expression of feeling. The overall effect is surprising by its very simplicity. In its feigned orality, in its striking banality, it does not correspond to what the reader expects from a literary text.

The name of Marguerite Duras, however, and the prestigious publishing house “Minuit”, easily account for a deviation perceived as avant-garde transgression and, moreover, as the search of a woman artist for her own autobiographical voice.

Is there any argumentative dimension in a text that invents a new style to tell a woman’s life story, and recall childhood scenes related to family pictures? A closer look at the paragraph clearly shows that the esthetic effect of the writing builds a special vision both of family pictures and of family life. The stand of the writer is indirectly expressed through the manipulation of doxa and its transformation into paradoxa – that is, in the movement that turns upside down a banal situation and opinion. The avant-garde style that emphasizes triviality only to better twist and deconstruct it, constitutes a powerful rhetorical means: it unveils a hidden reality behind familiar scenes. Thus the repetition based on a trite assertion: they look at the pictures, they do not look at each other. The members of the family are like strangers who can see each other only through the mediation of the camera. The mother looks at the pictures of her children like other mothers do, but she actually sees them (and their growth) only in the photos. The ordinary social function of family pictures, ensuring group cohesion, is magnified to the point that they replace personal relations and contact. Photography only reveals alienation and the inability of all the family members to see each other in real life, to relate to each other.
The sentence: “The separation between us has grown even more”, referring to the children’s individual development, is deliberately ambiguous: it conveys to the reader the idea of an emotional distance keeping the children more and more apart from each other. Even the mother’s comments on the pictures cannot create any feeling of community among the sister and the brothers: “She compares the pictures between them, she talks about everyone’s growth. Nobody answers”.

It thus appears that a pecular vision of Duras’ family life is unveiled in this text through the apt manipulation of a pseudo-oral, trivial discourse. No doubt the autobiographical narrative does not claim universal value: it describes a singular, somewhat unusual childhood. One cannot help, however,  feeling that this particular scene denounces the hidden traps of family life in general. The Lover not only transgresses literary expectations, it also constitutes a demythification of doxic views. This does not mean, of course, that the text sets out to demonstrate anything. It does not intend to provide clear-cut answers about the nature of family life. It does, however, raise questions and re-orient our way of looking at the very stuff of our ordinary life. What is the function of family pictures beyond what we have been taught to think of? Is Duras’s case a monstrous exception confirming the rule, or is it a breach that opens up questions about reassuring habits, if not about the very nature of normality? In other words, the argumentative dimension of Duras’ autobiographical novel is peculiar not only because it is built through avant-garde literary means, but also because it consists of raising questions it does not set out to answer.

Although quite different, the cases of war testimony and avant-garde writing thus show that discourses that do not have any explicit argumentative aim can still have an argumentative dimension, and that this dimension is woven into the text by means that are indissociable from its generic constraints or esthetic norms. The analyzed fragments do not build or refute any rational argument, and the linking of utterances is not governed by the logic of demonstration. There is no more clear-cut thesis than explicit intention to prove anything. However, in both texts, there is an attempt at re-orienting the reader’s views. Through the expression of personal feelings and puzzlement, the diarist’s testimony  sets out to reveal the truth about the soldier’s attitude toward death, thus implicitely opposing the official discourse prevailing in 1914-1918. Through the apparently flat and neutral report of a female autobiographer, the virtues of family communion as expressed in photographs are denounced. Thus non-conformist interpretations are conveyed, that are meant to replace doxic views and destabilize common beliefs. There can be an argumentative dimension in discourses not meant to persuade, and this argumentative dimension can be built by verbal means derived from generic constraints or stylistic innovations. Discourse analysis, in its emphasis on generic frameworks and discursive strategies,  provides here an adequate approach to the study of the argumentative dimension of texts.

NOTES
[i] According to Norton Cru, Lintier’s Ma pièce, published two months before his death on the war front, clearly discredits the official patriotic discourse on the troops’ moral, on the so-called bellicous drives of the soldiers, of the latters’ indifference in front of danger and death. In the perspective of the violent debates that followed the Great war, Lintier’s testimony acquires for Cru more than an argumentative dimension: it also endows it with a polemical value. And indeed in the pacifist historian’s eyes, “no argument against war can equal in force this argument: the infernal anguish that tortures all soldiers, poor men who are again and again depicted as indifferent to the idea of risk” (Cru, 1993, 184). Lintier’s text, though, does not participate in such an overt polemic. It would be quite anachronistic to see it as part of a controversy on war and peace.

REFERENCES
Amossy, R. (2000). L’Argumentation dans le discours. Discours politique, littérature d’idées, fiction. Paris:Nathan
Amossy, R. , Sternberg, M. (2002). Doxa and Discourse: How Common Knowledge Works, Poetics Today 23:3.
Charaudeau, P., Mainguenau, D. (Eds) 2002. Dictionnaire d’analyse du discours. Paris: Le Seuil.
Cru, N. (1993; 1st ed. 1929). Témoins . Presses univeristaires de Nancy.
Dulong, R. (1998). Le témoin oculaire. Les conditions sociales de l’attestation (Paris: EHESS).
Ducrot, O. et al. (1980). Les mots du discours. Paris: Minuit.
Duras, M. (1984) L’amant. Paris: Minuit.
Eemeren, van F.H., Grootendorst, R., Snoek Hoekemans, F. (1996). Fundamentals of Argumentation Theory.  NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Grize, J.-B. (1990). Logique et langage, Paris: Ophrys.
Martel, G. (1998). Pour une rhétorique du quotidien. Québec: CIRAL.
Moeschler, J. (1985). Argumentation et Conversation. Éléments pour une analyse pragmatique du discours. Paris: Hatier/Didier.
Perelman, C. & Olbrechts Tyteca, O. (1969). The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, translated by John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press; 1st ed. in French 1958.
Perelman, C. (1982). The Realm of Rhetoric. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press; 1st ed. In French 1977.
Plantin, C. (1996). L’Argumentation. Paris: Le Seuil, “Mémo”.
Plantin, C. (1998). “L’interaction argumentative”, in Dialoganalyse VI. Proceedings of the 6th Conference, Prague 1996. Tübingen: Max Verlag, (pp. 151-159).

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?One camp might called the neo-Aristotelians; and in this camp I would see books deriving from Corbett’s 1966 Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, like Robert and Susan Cockcroft’s Persuading People: an introduction to rhetoric (1992) and Richard Fulkerson’s Teaching the Argument in Writing. Both of these, in their different ways, take Aristotle at his word when he says rhetoric or argument is the ‘art of persuasion’. They also draw on other classical rhetoricans, both pre- and post-Aristotle. The drive is toward classificatory taxonomies of argument, originally conceived for orators in the market-place and the forum but translated into progymnasmata, to use the medieval practice: exercises in writing for the college student. Pedagogically, these are primitive: the suggestion is that you learn by copying models. These exercises follow a formula: argumentation is bound by structures (anything between a two-part and a six-part structure) with a strong emphasis on proof. Consequently, arguments can be fallacious, undistributed, disjunctive and so on. They border on rhetoric manuals.

Also relevant to the present paper is the work of Deanna Kuhn, in, for example, The Skills of Argument (1991). This is a study of argument for high school and college students, and also for older participants in YMCA job re-entry schemes in New York City. It takes as its conception of argument a distinction between two main kinds: rhetorical, by which it means the restricted sense of an assertion with accompanying justification; and dialogic, which it takes to mean the juxtaposition of two opposing assertions. This appears to be a confusing distinction, because the very essence of a rhetorical view of argument and argumentation is its dialogic nature (and thus the dialogic nature of thought, if you scale up to the cognitive level). The problem might be in the pejorative use of ‘rhetorical’ argument and the somewhat sentimental use of ‘dialogic’.

It is a strategically appropriate move to place my own position at the centre of the spectrum in that it allows me to weigh up the pros and cons of the various studies and to take some kind of triangulation – in the sense of navigational positioning – in relation to studies that have already been completed. It might also be a ploy to convince you (persuade you) of my argument. We see such even-handedness deployed cynically by politicians, employers and by those in positions of power to sell a particular policy. My position, for what it’s worth, isn’t quite so – how shall I put it? – Blairite. Personally, I tend more toward the rhetorical side of the central point because I’m interested in argument in its applications in democratic processes; in contingency; rhetorical moves; its various manifestations and versions in different disciplinary settings, or different school subjects…rather than in the more formal aspects of argumentation.

There has been a great deal of work, in the last fifty years on what might be called ‘applications of Toulmin’, including by Toulmin and his associates. What inspired Toulmin was partly a dissatisfaction with the strictures of formal logic. His model moves us along the spectrum somewhat and has been developed by Douglas Walton and others in the informal logic movement. Somewhere between the informal logicians and the recent work of Mitchell and Riddle (2000), Mitchell and myself (2000) and myself and Mitchell (2001) is a vast shoal of studies on how Toulmin might be adapted for the classroom – and specifically for the writing classroom. One of the best of these is Hegelund and Kock (2000).

At the end of this brief and selective review of literature in the field in the 1990s, there are already gaps that are worth exploring in providing a background for studies of argumentation in higher education. First, there is a need for a systematic review[i]. Second, most of the studies mentioned to date operate within the Western rationalist, dualistic paradigm. That is to say, they take it is given that argument operates at both micro-, mezzo- and macro-levels in a Hegelian dialectical pattern of development: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. It would be useful to explore other paradigms in which argument had a different function within Education. Deborah Tannen’s work on conversational discourse – eg You Just Don’t Understand on differences in gender conceptions of argumentative discourse – point the way to what could be done in the educational context. Third, there is a need for studies of the choreography of argument: how do arguments start, how are they taken up, how do they develop and how do they end? Fourth, it would be interesting to apply the choreographic approach to places where argument studies have hardly reached: domestic settings, boardrooms, conferences, playgrounds etc. Fifth, there’s always a pedagogical gap between understandings of the way argument works in informal and formal settings and its actual application in classrooms, seminars and tutorials

In another paper, written recently for the journal Text, I have discussed the range of models available for understanding issues of argumentation in education. I have arrayed a number of models along a spectrum from the logical to the rhetorical. This is not the place to rehearse that argument again, but what is needed at this point are descriptions, in the best anthropological tradition, of arguments taking place in educational and ostensibly non-formal educational settings to see how much space is given to the various participants to engage in argument. We know from studies going back to Language, The Learner and the School (Barnes et al, 1969) that schools and colleges can be places where argument is stifled because of the dominance of teacher discourse; that some speech genres in education are more argument-friendly than others; that essential elements in the encouragement of argument are an acceptance of the contingency of knowledge, a receptive classroom open to different interpretations and positions, enough space for learners to hypothesize and test ideas; and so on. It is ironic that some educational institutions, by their very layout and architecture, militate against the very higher- order thinking that they are supposed to encourage. Perhaps it is too naïve to hope that the presence of Citizenship as a new subject in the curriculum will lay sufficient emphasis on the processes of citizenship: argumentation, debate, exploration and resolution of difference; rather than teach young people the structures, history and obligations of citizenship as if it were a reified substance that had to be imparted to young, supposedly disaffected minds.

3. Issues of progression in curriculum subjects
Some of the most interesting literature in the field in the last decade has been about the application of argumentation within school subjects. It is worth exploring some of this research before turning attention to argumentation in higher education.
For work on argument in English lessons, see Andrews (1995) and Andrews and Mitchell (2001).
There is also the work of Ros Driver, Jonathan Osborne and others at King’s College London on science education (eg Newton, Driver and Osborne 1999; Driver, Newton and Osborne 2000; Osborne, Erduran, Simon and Monk 2001), or Peter Lee, Rosalyn Ashby and Alaric Dickinson on progression in children’s ideas about History (Lee, Ashby & Dickinson 1996). There are observable changes in the National Curriculum for England and Wales, especially in the subject English, that suggest a much greater awareness of argumentation and its place in learning – and furthermore, at a much earlier stage in young people’s development than had previously been imagined or allowed. We can blame Piaget for the belief among curriculum designers and others that argument was simply not possible in children before the stage of formal operations; or you can subscribe to the conspiracy theory that argument was not encouraged among schoolchildren because it might give them ‘ideas’. The work of those mentioned at King’s and elsewhere is underpinned by notions of the social construction of disciplinary knowledge. Because knowledge is socially constructed or ‘negotiated’, to use Bruner’s term, discursive activity (Vygotsky) and dialogue (Bakhtin) are valued as means to that end. Rhetoric in its contemporary political sense as the ‘arts of discourse’ and its agent, argumentation, have a more active role in this world. But there is an epistemological shift going on too. Both the science educators and the history educators are interested in education about science, education about history.

One of the interesting aspects of Osborne’s work and those of his colleagues at King’s is the use of a simplified Toulmin model to describe the operation of argument in science. In the EQuASS project (Enhancing the Quality of Argument in School Science) the model is distilled to data (grounds, evidence), claims (hypotheses) and warrants. The strength of this model is that it is an eminently pedagogic frame for understanding the operation of argument in the carrying out or exploration of science. In that regard, it has strong parallels with the model developed by Mitchell and Riddle for use with undergraduate education: the ‘since-then-because’ model. Both models are dynamic in a way that the original Toulmin model isn’t. Another aspect of work here that has interested me is the classic scientific emphasis on data, evidence – and the implications for the nature of evidence. One insight afforded by this work is that a claim itself – light travels in straight lines – has been transformed, through the process of scientific testing and re-testing, into reified and reliable evidence. Perhaps Toulmin’s model is more than a model for testing the soundness of arguments; perhaps it also embodies within itself the potential for renewal via the process of claims becoming evidence and for the generation of arguments. Furthermore, the perception that thirty or more years after the study by Barnes, Britton and Rosen on the paucity of talk by young people in the curriculum we are still not very far on is probably right; and that where small group discussion does take place, it is often brief and consensual: in other words, more like discussion than argument.

An interesting case of the application of argumentation within a school subject is that described by Lee et al. (1996) in their paper ‘Progression in children’s ideas about History’. The paper traces the move toward what it calls “second-order ideas” (p50), viz children’s understandings of second-order concepts including evidence, cause, empathy, story and account – and away from first-order concepts such as ‘king’, ‘peasant’ and ‘revolution’. In other words, it’s a move toward what joins concepts together in the operation of History as a discipline and as a school subject; to what characterises History as History; to the backing and warrants of the field. Without going too far into the curriculum issues here, it becomes obvious that notions of levels and progression are closely tied into conceptions of the development of ideas about History – and, by implication, into the qualitatively different ways in which pupils and students argue about and within History as they move from primary to secondary school and beyond. Perhaps more than in any other subject – with the exception of Science – historians and students of history have paid a great deal of attention to the nature of claims and evidence, and to the relations between them.

There is also some current work on argumentation and the internet, being carried out by Lia Litosseliti at Royal Holloway College, London as part of a European network. The SCALE project (an Internet-based intelligent tool to Support Collaborative Argumentation-based Learning in secondary schools) involves partners in France, the Netherlands, Finland , Hungary and Portugal with the aim of developing an internet-based tool to facilitate the learning of argumentation in 16-19 year old students. The software “allows discussions to be represented in diagrammatic form in order to display the elements of an argumentative text. The tool… provides support for learning argumentation skills such as: how to explain relevant information; how to process information by integrating, reformulating and evaluating it; critical thinking; and adopting multiple viewpoints”. One of the many interesting aspects of this project is that it is concerned not only to help students to improve their argumentative skills (learning to argue), but also to enhance the capacity to learn (arguing to learn), no doubt using the resources of dialogue and interaction to generate positionality within a socially-conceived model of learning. Another aspect is the gauging of the difference between arguing face- to-face on the one hand, and via the internet on the other.

4. Some examples of undergraduates encountering argument as a field of study
I teach an undergraduate module called ‘Argumentation in Education’. As an optional module within a programme on Educational Studies, it is attracting an increasing number of students from the department of Educational Studies, in which I work, and from other disciplines across the University, including Psychology, Sociology, Politics, Mathematics, Archaeology and Linguistics. It is not so much the module itself that is of interest in this paper, but the students’ writing in response to it. I gave them a range of possibilities for an end-of-module 5,000 word assignment:
– one chose to undertake research into 5/6 year old children’s ability to argue by eliciting dialogues from children in a local school
– one chose to write about her son’s anger at having to do a modern foreign language at GCSE
– one wrote a critical review of the literature on argumentation at pre-school and primary school levels
– one asked the question ‘Should there be a specified role for emotion in contemporary theories of argumentation?’
– four explored the question as to whether it is possible to argue visually
– two composed an argument on a topic about which they felt strongly
– and one discussed Toulmin’s model, comparing it to others

I will focus on just two kinds of these. And then, from experience of teaching the module and responding to students’ interests, I will try to make some general points about argumentation and pedagogy. The two types of essay I want to focus on are the attempt to answer the question ‘Should there be a specified role for emotion in contemporary theories of argumentation?’ and those essays that explored the possibility of visual argumentation.

Because argument (in the academy at least), can be seen a local sea connected to larger seas and oceans in the Western hemisphere, it has come to be seen as rationalist, cool and level-headed as opposed to passionate, emotive and full of feeling. Such a dichotomy wasn’t the case for Aristotle: his Rhetoric and other works on the subject in the classical Greek and Roman periods admitted emotion as part of the repertoire of the orator. But the student who wrote about emotion in contemporary theories of argumentation is right that post-Enlightenment argument has been scientific in spirit. After a rhetorically clever opening in which she erects ad hominem arguments in order to disprove them, she goes on to trace various ways in which emotion can be incorporated into a basically Toulminian model of argument: her basic line of argument is that emotion can be incorporated as an element of rebuttal. In other words, you can strengthen an argument by recognising emotional appeals or objections to your premise or line of argument and then rebutting them (and possibly qualifying your argument in the process). But that particular function of emotion can be seem to marginalise emotion in argument. Looking at the issue from another direction, if you add emotion to an argument you can increase its persuasiveness. This seems an obvious point (and was well charted by Aristotle in Rhetoric) but few students seem able to get beyond the Aristotelian position of rhetoric as the art of persuasion: they tend to see argument as persuasion.

I hinted at this conflation earlier, and perhaps it is worth exploring the distinction further. Argumentation is a process of establishing a position and then defending or adapting it via the use of evidence, logic, negotiation, backing and so on. It’s a fundamental rhetorical operation in the business of social and political interaction. Persuasion is an aspect of presentation, and thus part of one stage of the rhetorical process. You can make an argument more persuasive with the addition of some gadgets of surface rhetoric; but to make your persuasion more effectively argumentative, you have to do a lot more than tinker with the surface.
During the essay, the student explores examples of speeches (eg the British Labour politician Neil Kinnock on the eve of the 1983 election) to push her argument further. She sees emotion as often being an unacknowledged trigger for an argument. Her conclusion, after adapting Toulmin to add emotional grounds and emotional rebuttal to the model, is:
Emotion should have a specific role within contemporary theories of argumentation. The role is not a major one – and does not necessarily have to be included for an argument to be complete. Emotional involvement acts as a motivator for our initial involvement in argument…Emotion can be used to strengthen a rational argument [or] it could serve to identify irrational opposition to an argument.
The interesting dimension of her work is that she uses a dialectical approach (argument with emotion, argument vs emotion) to suggest that a solution to the problem of the lack of emotion in models of argument is really to be found one level up, in conceptions of the relationship between rationality and feeling. Her escape route at the end of the essay, then, is via the ‘backing’ door.
Briefly, essays on the possibilities of visual argumentation tread that narrow path between argument and persuasion. One student used Trudy Govier’s work on the distinction between a question, description, explanation and argument (basically, exposition as opposed to argumentation) to examine a photo of Jean Shrimpton, images from a semi-pornographic website on anorexia, a Silk Cut advertisement and an advert from FHM magazine. What we explored in the sessions were questions of when a single image could be considered to argue a point (conclusion: when there was opposition within the image, as in the case of Jean Shrimpton at the Melbourne races), when and how two images could be said to be arguing a point (there are many examples, eg the billboard advertisements of wasted legs in an Christian Aid poster juxtaposed with those in a Pretty Polly advert) and so on to sequences of images as in photo-essays and in due course to the moving image.
Again, one can think of many advertisements that are persuasive without being at all argumentative; and many other texts that are the reverse.

Those examples are from undergraduate education. At postgraduate level, where the thesis is the genre for demonstration of capability at Masters’ or doctoral level, argument is just as important. Indeed, one of the meanings of ‘thesis’ is “a position or that which is set down or advanced for argument”, interestingly related to a down beat in a bar or metrical foot and so having a rhythmic identity as well as a discoursal one. In a recent thesis I read for the Institute of Education (Jeong 2001), the candidate, in exploring empowerment in media education, gave an account of “the most difficult discussion that [a youth project group] had throughout the entire process of production” in collaborating on the making of a trailer for a gangster film set in London:
When the discussion began, the group quickly agreed that they needed slow music with the sound of a gunshot, considering the trailer would begin with the funeral of a character… Then Kat told the group that she had found a good piece of music… In response to her suggestion, Jake suggested that they should listen to the track before they decided on it, which was reasonable. The conflict between Kat and Jake began, however, when Jake said he would like to compose the soundtrack by sampling from different music, using the facilities he could get access to in the Music department, “if Kat’s music was not good enough” (p294)

The situation created tension in the group – and not surprisingly, between Kat and Jake. The role of teachers and youth workers was to provide the grounds for negotiation to enable the participants to resolve the situation for themselves – an intervention that I’ve seen operate successfully in primary schools over the issue of bullying. The deus ex machina, in the form of the teacher/youth worker, remained ex machina are the critical points of resolution, which was based on three grounds: the theoretical (the soundtrack needed to reflect or take a tangential position in relation to the genre of the gangster film); the personal and democratic (Jake and Kat needed to be able to work out a strong compromise); and the practical (the students learned how to combine technically two different pieces of music). The researcher suggests that grounds for negotiation like these are necessary unless students are lucky enough to fall into complementary and harmonious groups in the first place – which doesn’t always happen. Argument, in this case, acted as the grit in the oyster. My main point here is to suggest that conflict resolution is an important function of argument at all stages of education – and indeed, beyond education.
On the thesis itself, as an example of argument, I’ll just comment briefly to say that it was an elegant, well-integrated piece, using case studies to illustrate and explore a research question rather than to prove or disprove a hypothesis. In that sense, it worked within a qualitative, humanistic paradigm.
Indeed, argumentation in education is always subject to argument in society. We might be able to change pedagogic practice in classrooms and seminar rooms, but the reception of argument and argumentation outside the classroom – for example when students argue for change within the institution or within the local community – is essential oxygen for the life of argument (and, by implication, rationality). In other words, you won’t get pedagogical evolution or revolution without a change in the climate beyond the classroom. It is well to remember, too, that if – like the Japanese/American liberal imperialist Fukayama – you believe that ultimately the forces of reason will survive and prevail over the current world turbulence, you must accept the paradox or irony that the defence of reason and of the chance to argue is currently being carried out by force. One of the reasons that argumentation is so compelling within education is that is has to make connections with the world outside school and outside the academy; whereas, you could argue that fiction is a safe bet for schools and universities because it posits possible worlds that can be explored and to an extent contained within framed educational spaces.

4. Discussion of undergraduate teaching in argumentation
The module, ‘Argumentation in Education’, is the first such course at The University of York and possibly in any English university. It is taught within the Department of Educational Studies, though it is available to any undergraduate student from any discipline. Because there are students from a number of disciplines, the challenge has been to design a course that is generic enough to be of interest and use to all students, but specific enough to be valuable within their own disciplines.
Such a balance is essential for courses in higher education, where disciplines and disciplinary discourses have a much greater influence of students’ thinking and study practices. In Toulminian terms, the discipline informs the conduct of argument – and even what counts as argument and evidence – from the position of the ‘backing’. During the course students from each of the disciplines interpreted the various models for themselves. Different disciplines show different degrees of awareness and application of argument, with Politics, Sociology and Philosophy being perceived as the most argumentative, and Mathematics, Biology and Economics being seen as the least argumentative.
On the other hand, the generic or core elements should not be underestimated. Currently in English higher education, there is an emphasis on core or key skills. These are skills generic to a course or to an entire degree programme: skills that the student will take with them and that will be of use in the search for employment. Such skills include research skills, communication skills, problem-solving, literacy and numeracy skills, information and communication technology (ICT) skills. It is interesting to note that, to date, argumentation has not been recognised as one of the key skills of higher education. It is a tacit skill; a skill which is embedded in each of the disciplines and which lecturers expect from their students. But it is not always clear to students what these particular skills are nor how they are supposed to incorporate them in their work.

By studying argumentation in education – from pre-school to higher education – students become aware of the sources of argument, the social contexts for it, the nature of it and of its applications. They become aware of the relationship between argumentation and cognitive development; between argumentation and problem-solving; of the functions of argument in domestic, civic and academic contexts; of constraints and possibilities within the curriculum and within educational institutions more generally; of the power relationships that are so important to the conduct and results of argument. Through such academic study, they also improve their own argumentation in debate, essays, discussion and other formats. They become skilled in translating spoken argument into written argument (so often a transition where much is lost); in using the various models to be critical about their own work; and in listening to each other’s arguments. Although it is too early to say what the long-term effects of the module are on student performance and capability, the early results are encouraging: students who took the module on argumentation in their second year had results in the first and upper second class that exceeded their previous performances and which seem to have affected their subsequent performance[ii].

Finally, students have found that each of the models that describe argument – Toulmin, Mitchell and Riddle, Kaufer and Geisler and others – have their own functions. Put simply, Mitchell and Riddle’s model is a good preparation for argument because it works at macro-, mezzo- and micro-levels in the composition of an essay. Kaufer and Geisler works during the writing of an essay because of its sensitivity to writing process and the use of sources to define one’s line of argument. Toulmin works best on completion of the first draft, when the model can be used as a critical ‘check’ on the soundness of the argument.
There is room for further teaching development and for further research in the field of argument in higher education. What follows is a pointer to other areas of argumentation that require further research in the field.

5. What research is required in argumentation in higher education?
By way of summary, let me set out some of the possibilities for further work in argument and argumentation studies in undergraduate education. We need to know more about:
– differences between subjects and disciplines in the way that argument operates; argument and epistemology
– the pedagogy of argumentation in different disciplines
– the pedagogy of argumentation via different communication channels, eg face-to-face as opposed to via the Internet
– how best to resolve conflict and controversies through argument, with the proviso that we need to provide the grounds for negotiation rather than – or as well as – the solution.
– cultural differences and similarities with regard to argument (eg is argumentation considered a reasonable way to proceed) and in the operation of argument (do you argue differently from the way I argue?)
– existing research and what it suggests; and where the gaps are; there is a need for an international systematic review.
– how the education system relates to the wider political context; if and how argument is encouraged
– specifically: how people argue domestically, and in local, regional and national/international political contexts
how argument tales place in different media, eg the visual

6. Coda
What is so attractive about argumentation is that it is so closely connected to the operation of the mind, to social interaction, to politics; and also to change and the exploration and resolution of difference or controversies – and thus to teaching, learning and education. Habermas (1984) states the case clearly. If we needed more reasons to continue to research in the field of argumentation, these surely are as good as any:
The rationality inherent in [achieving, renewing and sustaining consensus] points to the practice of argumentation as a court of appeal that makes it possible to continue communicative action…For this reason I believe that the concept of communicative action can be adequately explained only in terms of a theory of argumentation.
This rationality remains accidental if it is not coupled with the ability to learn from mistakes, from the refutation of hypotheses and from the failure of interventions.

Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Robin Millar, Jonathan Osborne and Lia Litosseliti for providing me with papers on their research; to the students who granted me permission to quote their work; to Sally Mitchell for reading an earlier draft of this paper and for the joint exploration of argument over a decade; and to Mike Riddle, Patrick Costello, and Stephen Clarke for earlier collaborations on argumentation in education.

NOTES
[i] Systematic reviews of research literature in Education are being undertaken by review groups associated with the Evidence-Informed Policy and Practice Initiative (EPPI), based at the Social Science Research Unit of the Institute of Education, University of London. See www.eppi.ioe.ac.uk
[ii] In England, degree performance is marked on a scale from 1st – the best performance – to a Pass degree. Between the two extremes are an Upper 2nd or 2.1, a 2.2 (the average performance), and a 3rd. You can equate these as Excellent, Very Good, Good, Satisfactory and Barely Satisfactory respectively.

REFERENCES
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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.
What I have done here without knowing it, is to have provided a typical sample of what may be called “Argument-by-Analyticity”. Using “only coherent sound can be music”, or its Popperian version, as a major premise, and my own conviction that “that piece contained no coherent sound” as the minor, I validly conclude that “that piece was not music”. Properly speaking, it is not even a piece. Of course, if [A] or [A1] are analytic, they are irrevisable, which is in proper harmony with my own, above noted, conservatism. Nor is there such a thing as a nonconservative type of argument, to begin with. None that we would call valid, at any rate.
In being a layman as much as I am a philosopher, or perhaps more, I have never found anything objectionable to this type of reasoning. In fact I find it perfectly natural, common to all men and impossible to do without. But philosophical sophistication, of which I sometimes think that there is just too much going around, is known to have thought otherwise. Quine, for starters, says that there are no analytic truths at all, hence, he concludes, “there is no statement immune to revision”. (Quine, 1961, p.43.) Putnam modifies this by admitting that “there are analytic truths” but such as are too trivial to make a difference (Putnam, 1975, p.36.), stressing Quine’s contribution, for “the obligation ‘not to violate the rules of language’ is a pernicious one and Quine is profoundly right in rejecting it”. (Putnam, 1975, p.38.)
Philosophers are sometimes too clever for their own good, outsmarting themselves long before they do others. Quine, for instance, claims that there is no statement immune to revision. His is, if none other is, but perhaps we can make room for one exception. Quine, again, too smartly reasons as follows:
“There are no analytic truths, hence there is no statement immune to revision.”

Which is itself but a typical sample of Argument-by-Analyticity if not indeed a straightforward analytical statement, of the very sort whose existence he has denied. Given the appropriate translation, the first statement just about means the second for, if not, then one can assert the first and still deny the second, whereupon some statements would turn up immune to revision, independently of whether or not there are analytic truths. And then it would be a bit of task, not to retrodictively identify the immune statements with the analytic ones. How that fact spoils Quine’s calculations, is plain to all, except perhaps Quine himself. It seems that Reasoning-by-Analyticity is so fundamental and ineradicable a practice, that it is extensively employed even by its worst of enemies.
This is a sound indication of its indispensability. So I suppose that digging deeper into its ramifications would not be an unworthy occupation. But I will leave that to argumentation theorists, who surely can do it better. I myself am not so much interested in the intricacies of its structure, or even the complications involved in it, which may yet lay ahead, as I am in refuting its enemies and the soundness of their epistemological claims against its more or less generic conception. So I will conclude my opening section by specifying who these enemies are, starting with my radical friend.
Not knowing how he will speak next, he makes room for noncoherent sound to be music, though were he only to still speak in the way he always has done, as I am resolved to do, he would not have allowed the problem to even arise. And then there would be no problem of how to speak in the first place. In reacting thus, my radical friend becomes a Meaning Variance theorist and, perhaps, even an incommensurabilist. I myself, on the other hand, am not all that uncertain how I will speak next. I will as I always have done. I will not call incoherent sound, or much less silence[i], music, nor will I empty frames a painting[ii]. For reasons known only to him, he bravely, though somewhat recklessly, chooses to sail the great ocean of language adrift. I choose to sail it with an anchor.

2. The Dialectics of Incommensurability
Any Meaning Variance theory, especially in its acute version of Incommensurability, must inevitably come to grips with Analyticity. For the two doctrines are nothing short of incompatible. To make matters as clear as possible, I add that Analyticity is not really a doctrine at all, though faith in it may surely be one. It is itself a concept, hence anything but a doctrine. This is being said in order that we get our priorities right.
If I hold that “matter is extended” is analytic, and you deny this, proposing that there can be matter without extension, they just don’t come any more incommensurable than that. Hence, to defy an analytic truth is to say something incommensurable about one or more of its propositional terms. Analyticity and Incommensurability are contrary postulates. This is no news to any one. What may be news is that, antinomically or, as Hegellians would say, “dialectically”, there can be no incommensurability, unless there is analyticity (of some sort) in the first place.

Indeed, what else is Incommensurability, except the denial of an existing synonymy, and the establishment of a new one in its place, where the terms hitherto considered as synonymous are now declared nonsynonymous instead? For without some form of inti-
mate connection  linguistically established  between  subject  S and  predicate P, which is
what makes “S is P” an analytic judgement, there would simply be nothing revolutionary about “S and –P”. It would be routine, not revolution. If music did not mean “coherent sound”, there’d be nothing revolutionary, hence nothing incommensurable, in calling non coherent sound music. You cannot have the one without the other. Clearly, therefore, either Meaning Variance, and especially Incommensurability, are inconsistently conceived doctrines, relying on the very thing they subsequently undermine, or else they require some form of Analyticity – though not another. As it turns out, it is precisely the latter, which is the case.

In accordance, it is a clearly warranted and, indeed, an illuminating way of describing Kuhnian Paradigms, by noting that in their frame theoretical terms authentically synonymous in a context such as Newtonian Mechanics have become nonsynonymous or even antithetic in a context such as Relativistic Mechanics, whence of course, their in-commensurability. Consider, for instance the following passage:
For  Kant, as  also for  Descartes  and Newton, objects cannot exist without space.
For Einstein, space cannot exist without objects. (Jeans, 1933, p.96-7.)

Observe the reversed synonymies: For Kant, Descartes and Newton “object” meant “that which needs space”. For Einstein “space” means “that which needs objects”. The syno-nymies can be unpacked even further. For Kant, Descartes or Newton  “to be” meant “to be somewhere”. For Einstein, “to be” no longer means “(having) to be somewhere”, at least if Jeans is to be believed, though how can something be, and still be nowhere, is a bit of a strain to fathom, as are, I imagine, all other cases of incommensurability.
What Jeans is giving us here, essentially, are antithetic semantic rules, ascribing to the terms “space”, “object” and “be” (exist) senses incommensurable with their Newtonian and/or Kantian counterparts. The classical-Newtonian semantic rule constrains us to regard the objecthood of an object as directly dependent on having first satisfied the requirements of Space, and arranges synonymies on that principle. The relativistic-nonclassical semantic rule absolves us precisely from this constraint, rearranging the principle itself and the synonymies based upon it, by simply rejecting the synonymy. But in order that a synonymy may be rejected, a synonymy there must be. In consequence, the primary, if not indeed the sole reason for the emerging incommensurability between Newtonian and Relativistic concepts stems precisely from having replaced one synonymy by another. When Jeans claims that objects are logically prior to Space, he is not perchance referring to a particular physical discovery, say the discovery of matter prior to Space, for no physical discovery of anything is possible, let alone of this one, without Space. He is pitting forth a new Grammar. A grammar incommensurable with the one presently available in the speech market, because the concepts involved are now assuming a semantic role precluded by their namesake predecessors.

On this reconstruction of the doctrine, it is by means of radically novel synonymies, i.e. novel analytic propositions, though synonymies hitherto unadopted or consciously avoided, that the novel scientific theory is rendered incommensurable to the old. This conslusion can be stated even more forcefully. Unless there are analytical propositions, there can be no incommensurability in the first place. For if there were no such things as “truths of meaning” of any kind, but only truths of brute fact, how could meanings change, if at all? The factual truth (or, rather, falsity) that “all swans are white” can implement no meaning change, when black swans are discovered, for, if this proposition were thought true by virtue of facts, it will be facts which will be false, when the proposition is refuted, and so facts which will suffer the consequences. And therefore not the meanings. Ergo, if there were only factual truths to reckon with and none other than those, there would be no meaning changes to begin with. For the refutation of a factual truth not only is a triviality in itself, and hence no prelude to incommensurability. A fortiori, is ex hypothesi incapable of bringing about a change of meanings, for its refutation is confined to considerations other than its meaning. Hence, Meaning Variance presupposes truths of meaning.
But if Meaning Variance presupposes truths of meaning and Meaning Variance, in a different connection, now comes to dispute such truths of meaning, either Meaning Variance is an inconsistent theory, or else “truths of meaning”, just, are not necessary truths. I can hardly overemphasize the extent of my own agreement with the incommensurabilists on this point, provided that it is fully understood, what it is precisely that I am agreeing with. For I do concede that “truths of meaning”, just, are not eo ipso necessary truths. But I am far from conceding the converse, namely, that necessary truths are not eo ipso truths of meaning.
For it may be true, indeed it may be inevitable, that Meaning Variance and Incommensurability are impossible without Analyticity, just as much as and just as how as Nonsense is impossible without Sense. The difference is, however, what sort of Analyticity this is. Well, in a word, it is of the expendable kind. But that is not the only kind there is. If, that is, all we are to understand under the term “analytic”  is the arbitrary, perhaps even the whimsical decision of two or more people to call a diary a “log”, because, say, the former word did not rhyme well with “dog” in the poem while the latter did, then there is really no restriction raised, no barrier erected  and no epistemological committment involved, except, perhaps, that of having to write a bigger dictionary. Apart from being a blessing to poets, such synonymy is of little significance to epistemology.

If, in other words, and (only if) “object” is a mere convention, conventionally tied to “being somewhere”, hence if (and only if) the sentence “object is something which is somewhere” is not an objective truth but only a long living verbal habit, reflecting our choice to speak in one way rather than another, then (and only then) can it be abandoned in the face of novel theoretical pressures. And so be radically (incommensurably) revised, if the need should ever arise. This is the expendable kind of Analyticity. What cannot be revised is the objectivist conception of Analyticity, which has little to do with how we may or may not decide to speak: Necessarily objects presuppose space and hence necessarily objects have to be somewhere, to be objects.
This is the nonconventional, nonrevisable, ontological and absolute conception of Analyticity, whose opposite is literally impossible. Let me explain how I conceive of it, with the example already at hand, namely, “matter is extended”. This proposition is necessary, because it turns up true, even if supposed false. Suppose the proposition is false. Then there will be matter which lacks extension. Yet, since it is only by being extended, that something can take up some space, and since it is only by taking up some space that something may be encountered in space, nonextended matter cannot be encountered and therefore cannot be located anywhere in space. To put it briefly, what lacks in extension, lacks in inspection. Nonextended matter is not the sort of thing we can ever discover. So the counter instance to “matter is extended” has not been produced and, for that matter, it is in principle impossible to produce. Hence the proposition has no conceivable counter instance to contest it. It is necessary. Then the semantic characterization, “analytic”, is not all that important and it is but  derivative on the statement’s primitive necessity.
It is this second conception of Analyticity which is incompatible with and rules out all hopes of Meaning Variance, Context-Dependence, Incommensurability, Hermeneutics  and all the rest of the contemporary mythology that goes with it, the main concern of all of which is not to serve the interests of Epistemology but only to safeguard the equal rights of different cultures, operating with different concepts, which the notion of universal necessity, and therefore universal uniformity, is presumably putting at stake, blocking he way, as it does, to the establishment of the great democracy of ignorance. This is the Analyticity on the basis of which Jeans, quite definitely, and Eistein, very probably, rather than revising the logic of certain concepts, as they think, are quite simply talking nonsense, when they seriously declare that matter can exist before Space. It is this sort of Analyticity which makes fundamental conceptual change impossible. And this Analyticity which really cuts the ice.

3. Disarming the Analytical Weapon
Here then is Putnam’s version of the story:
In  a  deeper sense  I  think  that  Quine  is right;  far more than  his critics. I  think that there  is  an analyticsynthetic distinction, but  a rather  trivial one. (…) Ignore the distinction  and you  will  not be  wrong  in connection with any philosophical
issues not having to do with. Attempt  to use it as a weapon in a philosophical discussion and you will be consistenty wrong. (Putnam, 1975, p.36.)

On the basis of this understanding of Analyticity Putnam confidently proceeds to rebut an anonymous philosopher – one he keeps anonymous in any case – who was bold enough and reckles enough to maintain that, in the words of Putnam himself:
The hypothesis that the earth came into existence five minutes ago, complete with memory  traces,  causal remains,  etc., is a  logically absurd  hypothesis. The argument was  that the whole  use of time words presupposes the existence of the past.
(Putnam, 1975, p.37.)

Having thus prepared the ground for the final blow, Putnam then proceeds to its delivery:
It is not, I think, happy to maintain that the existence of the past is analytic, if one’ s  paradigm of  Analyticity is  the “all bachelors are unmarried’ kind of statement. ‘Bachelor is synonymous with unmarried man’ though certainly analytic, still cuts no philosophical  ice, bakes no  philosophical bread  and washes no philosophical windows. (Putnam, 1975, p.37.)

Ironically, it is Putnam who commits this very error which he holds his opponent responsible for. When that unnamed philosopher rejected the hypothesis that earth came into existence five minutes ago, on the basis of how we have hitherto come to talk about the past, “past” here meaning the actual history of the world, he made a statement about the world. He did not make a statement about how we use words. He did not make a statement about the grammar of timewords and much less did he make a statement about unmarried men. That the basis of his statement was launched from considerations about how we speak about the world, and from considerations as to why we speak of it in the way we do rather than in another, can hardly be denied. But he did all that for the sole purpose of stressing the committment and even the irreversibility that goes together with having spoken about the world in the ways we have, rather than in others.

This is the specific philosophical method of deducing truths about the world by elucidating how we have come to speak about it. The idea being that, the world being such and such, we had no other option but to speak about it the way we have. Items of this method we can retrace in the entire philosophical domain covered by the free will problem. We have no material evidence that, when facing a dilemma, we are free to do otherwise, than what we will in fact do. We deduce this putative power of ours, a power to act in mutually exclusive ways within a unique set of conditions, by sheer logical analysis of the deep level structure of words such as “responsibility”, “choice”, “blame” or “guilt”, and on their encouragement alone we take a huge leap beyond the confines of language and plummet all the way into naked ontology. The line of reasoning which proceeds like “I am punished, therefore I am accountable; I am accountable, therefore I am responsible; I am responsible, therefore I’m free; I am free, therefore I could have done otherwise”, although uniquely relying on an interlinked network of logical connections between meanings, does in no way result to an assertion about meanings at all. But to an assertion about the nature of reality. A reality, where a man could have done differently in a given set of circumstances, than he did in fact do, in other words, to an assertion about a breach in the causal chain of events. Arrived at through conceptual analysis alone and based upon the sheer power of words.

When judge and jury pronounce someone guilty and demand the death penalty, (logically) deducing this man’s guilt from the postulated fact that, no matter what the circumstances, still he did not have to do the crime, but in the end much rather chose to, they are not particularly interested in the semantics of the situation, as I now am. They refer to the states themselves, of which I have given the semantic account, and which, as states, namely, as entities subsisting “out there” in objective independence of our linguistic conventions, render this man worthy of punishment. The end result of this line of reasoning, analytical reasoning, mind you, is that of a man being put to death. Is this the Analyticity which, according to Putnam, cuts no philosophical ice, bakes no philosophical bread and washes no philosophical windows? Is this the Analyticity of “bachelors are unmarried men”?
Modern philosophers are sometimes as unimaginative a lot, as modern physicists are often an unduly imaginative one. All they see in Analyticity, being too quick to sneer at those who know enough to see more, are bachelors who never took a wife and spinsters who never took a husband. Other possibilities have not crossed their minds any more than that of their house keepers. Thus in Kripke we read, once more
The common  examples of  analytic  statements nowadays  are  like “bachelors are unmarried”. At  any rate,  let’s just  make it a matter of stipulation that an analytic statement is, in  some sense,  true by virtue  of its meaning and true in all possible worlds by virtue of its meaning. Then something which is analytically true will be both necessary and a priori. That’s sort of stipulative. (Kripke, 1980, p.39.)

But why be so stingy? Let’s also make it “a matter of stipulation” that you cannot take a hundred dollars from a purse which contains only fifty. A matter of stipulation that if I’m stronger than you are (and faster than you are and smarter than you are), and we fight alone and unarmed, I will beat you in the end, no matter what. Do not worry, that you will really be beaten to the ground. “It’s all sort of stipulative”.
This then is the understanding of Analyticity which constitutes one of the major and most pervasive of fallacies of contemporary philosophy indeed, I am tempted to sup-pose, of contemporary thought. It is this understanding of it which is just the right sort of foundation generously offered to and making possible all the epistemological curiosities of this century, such as context-dependence, Kuhnian paradigms, Feyerabendian incommensurability and cultural relativism. This is the Analyticity which cuts no ice and the one chosen because it cuts no ice.
As so many other fallacies in philosophical reasoning, this fallacy too draws its roots from a fallacious reversal. The reversal being that, since all necessary truths are ex-pressed in analytic sentences, all analytic sentences should in turn express necessary truths. “That’s sort of stipulative”. Then, as the former truth was identified with the latter falsehood, philosophers, in finding no necessity of any kind in whimsical “stipulations”, cutting no philosophical ice, baking no philosophical bread or washing no philosophical windows, but merely reflecting the private determination of a particular linguistic group –  or “form of life”- to observe one optional linguistic rule rather than another, declared Analyticity nonexistent or idle. This is Analyticity of the expendable kind. And, in
getting rid of the parasite, some are quick to think they got rid of the host.

4. Necessity by Analyticity and Analyticity by Necessity
Before taking a look at how real people think, let us take a last look on how philosophers do. Roughly, this is what we are being told so far:
Analytic truths reflect only the purely semantic structure of language; they contain only dictionary information. Since the dictionary is written  independently of the encyclopaedia, sense is determined independently of  the empirical history of a term. (Ramberg, 1989, p.29[iii]

One can clearly see how Analyticity is useless as a weapon on this understanding of it. Due to the dictionary/encyclopaedia dichotomy, Analyticity is severed from the world of real events (as philosophers themselves also are) and can cut no philosophical ice of any kind. But I myself have seen it cut plenty of ice in automobile magazines, where I can read that David Coulthard finished ahead of Michael Schumacher in the formula one race held in Monte Carlo on the 15th of June 2001, all of which information fully qualifies for encycopaedia entries, because he drove faster in the last five laps. Which latter, however, is not a matter of encyclopaedia, which could have gone the other way, but a matter of necessity, which couldn’t. But then, only philosophers will conclude that encyclopaedic entries and dictionary ones are mutually exclusive. Philosophers struggle to keep the two apart, as a matter of professional duty, but actual people reason differently.
When judge and jury send a man to the death chamber, having satisfied themselves that he committed the crime in full awareness and in full possession of his sanity, they do not ground this decision of theirs on the point that we have stipulated “being punishable” to mean “being responsible” and “being responsible” to mean “being free”. This is what these expressions mean, no question about that, but that is not what we mean, when we employ them thus. What judge and jury are doing in such cases is not to fix synonymies intended for the dictionary. What they do is to trust these synonymies and feel confident to pass sentence on their basis. A sentence which will result, on the basis of strict logical, though possibly not moral, justification to the death of a man. Is all this just stipulative?

Why then are these synonymies trusted? Why do we stake our lives on them and feel confident we are doing the right thing, at least logically, even if not morally? We do because these are synonymies which are imposed on us by the world. And not “unmarried bachelor” synonymies, which we impose on the world. And which latter we can well do without, with nothing amiss. These are synonymies which we have no choice but to adopt or ignore at the price of absurdity. Kripke says that what is analytically true will be necessary  and a priori as a matter of stipulation. And Putnam, in seeing nothing really necessary or a priori in all this, not perchance because he disagrees with Kripke but, on the contrary, because he fully shares his opinion, declares Analyticity to be vacuous and redundant. He is perfectly right in doing this, as far as necessities based on synonymies go. Yet, apparently, what seems to have never occurred to any of these thinkers, is that besides necessity which is the result of prior synonymy, there is also synonymy which is the result of prior necessity. Whence, evidently, the basis of our trust.
Or that there are optional synonymies and compulsory ones. That “being punishable” is synonymous with “being responsible” and the latter synonymous with “being free” is not something of our own making. Unmarried bachelors are. The former expressions have to be synonymous, or else we will reason incoherently and still send a man to his death. One cannot be punishable, if he is not responsible, and one cannot be responsible, unless he is free to act otherwise, as a matter of oneway, strict, objective necessity.

This necessity we clearly perceive and suitably preserve by arranging our synonymies accordingly. We could not have done it differently, if we tried.
But we could have done “unmarried bachelors” differently with little effort and, come to think of it, perhaps we should have, since “bachelor” also means “bachelor of science” and thus creates unnecessary ambiguity. In merely speaking thus I have produced an objection to this synonymy. And a potential proposal to undo it. But that which is really necessary and a priori is not the sort of thing you can coherently object to or propose to undo. And, so far as I can see, it is nothing short of scandalous to treat “all unmarried men are bachelors” as something a priori true. “Unmarried bachelors” is a type of agreement, a verbal one no doubt, but an agreement none the less. And to all agreements there is a time, when still nothing was agreed upon, hence a time, when “all unmarried men are bachelors” was not even true. Let alone analytic and a priori. But to what is a priori true, there was never a time, when it was not true. This is why we call it “a priori”, to begin with.

Having begun with a fallacious reversal, we could only end up with a fallacious identity. Mistaking “all necessary truths cannot but result to truths of meaning” for “all truths of meaning cannot but result to necessary truths”, we have equated the two and then, via their equation, we came to conclude that both are equally vulnerable. Or equally impotent. This is why we have witnessed in the past decades so many philosophers unproblematically disputing whether there is such a thing as a necessary truth at all. What they meant, of course, was that the paradigm of analytic necessity, “all bachelors are un-married”, fails to qualify as a necessary truth and the rest of them are simply reducible to it. I then invite them to try and reduce to it statements such as the following:
1.  A Faster Vehicle Will Overtake A Slower One.
2.  A Larger Object Will Not Fit Into A Smaller One.

But those, they just don’t want to know about. They much prefer to take their case and try their strength with weaklings, such as unmarried bachelors or any other “dictionary entry” sufficiently whimsical and arbitrary to give them the easy victory they desire. But when it comes to statements of the types of [1] and [2] above, victory will hardly be a walk over any more. For these statements are necessary before they turn up ‘analytic’, rather than analytic before they turn up ‘necessary’. In other words, there is ‘necessity’ resulting from prior verbal agreement and there is verbal agreement resulting from prior necessity. And this is how they cut the ice and how they can be weapons in philosophical debates, when unmarried bachelors cannot.

Before proceeding, I will note a kind of difference between them, along side their similarities, intimately relating to the problem I’m tackling. [1] and [2] are both necessary, in the sense that their opposites are comparably impossible. But, curiously, we can witness the truth of [1] in ways we cannot comparably witness the truth of [2], by actually observing a faster vehicle overtaking a slower one with the testimony of our own eyes, something which the logical positivists had declared to be impossible for so-called ‘necessary truths’ in their book. [1] states a special kind of necessary truth, of which we can have the direct experience. Of [2] we can have no direct experience, for all we perceive is the impossibility, and so the absence of a fitting. And it is a bit of a strain to see the absence of anything though, to be sure, we still see what has to be seen with our mind’s eye.
Meaning Variance theorists and incommensurabilists, who regard themselves as the enemy of logical positivism, simply have no idea how much they really owe to that outdated doctrine, which, by divorcing necessity from the bond of words to the world and wedding it to the bond of words with other words, has made their own theory even barely tolerable. The mechanism of this effect I have already shown in Section 2 of my paper. For only if Analyticity is conventional, is it also expendable. Only if it is conventional, will it fail to cut the ice and be a weapon in philosophical reasonings, in ways preparing the way for impending conceptual change. It was the prejudice that all analytic truths are “reports on linguistic usage” or “reports on how we relate verbal conventions” (Ayer, 1987, p.106), which got everything started and made it all possible, earning the name of “conventionalists” to the empiricists who invented it. It was that original sin, the sin of regarding necessary truth and fact-in-the-world as mutually exclusive, which turned necessity into a concept paradigmatically and notoriously incapable of relating to fact and so one useless to Philosophy.

In the face of propositions matching the properties of [1] and, to a considerable extent those of [2] no less, that conventionalist slogan receives the discredit it deserves. [1] is a report on linguistic usage, to be sure. What is never mentioned, is why is this particular use adopted rather than the contrary and why has it prevailed. It has prevailed, for none other could have been adopted and taken its place. In other words, because it is necessary and consequently cannot be spoken of otherwise, save analytically. But whether or not it can also state a fact, just take a walk in town and see with your own eyes faster cars overtaking slower ones hundreds of times a day. Philosophers of the conventionalist persuasion do not, so one must conclude there is something wrong with their eyesight.

5.  How the Ice Is Cut
I have shown that there are necessary truths which, in addition, can also state a fact, which may have been a mystery to others but has never been one to me. Truths [1] and [2] are such truths, stating facts in ways that no unmarried bachelors ever could. So if unmarried bachelors fail to cut the ice, truths similar to [1] and [2] still could. Time, then, to show how, by cutting the hardest ice there is, i.e. the ice of contemporary science itself. My choice is the Universe Expansion Theory, also known as “the Big Bang”, an exceptionally bad scientific theory – I decline to call it  physical – which needs all the cutting it can get. Here is how it goes in a double passage, including sceptic and believer alike:
[universe expansion]  is very different from  the kind of expansion one would get if  the universe  originated  in an  explosion  into pre-existing empty space. This is because  the big  bang is an explosion of space and time, not an explosion in space
and  time.  A recent paper  by Harrison explains: “From a purist point of view one cannot help  but deplore the expression ‘big bang’, loaded with inappropriate connotations,  conjuring up  a false  picture of  a universe  expanding in space. In modern cosmology,  the universe  does not expand in space. It consists of expanding space. (van Flandern, 1994, p.27, Harrison, 1993, pp.28-31)

The combined picture of the theory drawn by these two descriptions is that the universe did not originate by an explosion in space but by one of space. In essence, therefore, it is asserted that the “Big Bang” created space. This contention is hardly different than that of Jeans’, that according to modern physics, space depends upon material objects, rather than the converse, hence that space comes second to objects in the order of things. One may at least concede, like Polonius, that there is method in the madness.
I will begin my own criticism, one systematically relying upon authentic Analyticity, by the following analytic truth first:
a. An experimental result is something (by definition) emerging at the end of the experiment.

Now this proposition has all the requisite triviality which Putnam has charged Analyticity with. And yet in spite of all this, it suffices to show that the Big Bang hypothesis is in principle a nonverifiable hypothesis for, by definition, the Big Bang can only precede all other events and follow upon none and hence must lie beyond all experimental support actual or possible, given that, by contrast, experimental results can only follow upon the performing of an experiment and never precede it. Other, related versions of this point could obviously be: [a′ ] All experiments are performed in space and [a″] All experiments are performed in time. The conclusion would still be the same. An event which creates space and time is by definition impossible to reproduce in experiments, which latter are always performed in space and time. In consequence, the putative theoretical pressures put upon us by an alleged scientific discovery, inevitably resulting to incommensurability, are no greater in this case than those formerly put upon us to call noncoherent sound music. The pressures are our own making, and otherwise purely imaginary. It is up to us to accept them and, in being imaginary[iv], I submit we should  ignore them.
If so, then the following two analytic truths become decisive:
b. An explosion, or “Bang”, is something which (necessarily) occurs at a place.
c. An explosion, or “Bang”, is something which (necessarily) occurs at a time.
Conclusion Therefore, there can be no explosion which creates space and time.

Group [a] of analytic truths, the first of which is clearly trivial in ways that the other two of its kind are not, suffice to strip bare any pretenses to authentic, scientific truth, that could be conferred upon the universe expansion theory. The theory is metaphysical to its core, no less than its biblical alternative. But there are good metaphysics and bad ones and the theory in question falls to the latter category. For on the basis of analy-tical truths [b] and [c], the theory turns up logically incoherent. No explosion can create space for it must needs occur at a place. And no explosion can create time for it must needs occur at a time. This construe, I would say, is demanded by the very essence of what it is to count as an event, not just in the vocabulary of ordinary men but, a fortiori, in the vocabulary hitherto enforced and implemented by Physics itself. An event, an event treated by Physics all the more so, is an implicitly spatiotemporal entity. Explosions are events, therefore explosions are a priori subject to spatiotemporal rules and determinat-ions. Hence the idea of an explosion creating spacetime is a sheer logical absurdity, a logical absurdity, I would add, signed and sealed by Physics.
So Analyticity has not done so badly, considering. In the case considered, in particular, it has washed the windows, several of them, and, I submit, those were windows that badly needed washing. Nor was there any other way of washing them, but by means of Analyticity, namely, by means of laying bare and elucidating the crucial meanings involved and the constraints they impose. Thanks be to Analyticity, we can at least see more clearly now, what exactly we are after, when we try and construct scientific theories such as the Big Bang.
Still, so far as I can see, the head on clash alone between the currently accepted scientific cosmology, on the one hand,  and a cluster of indispensable, that is to say, of objective analytic truths, on the other, is all that we need. Analyticity does not have to win this battle to prove itself capable of cutting the ice and washing the windows. Analyticity need only be an opponent, not a winner, to count as a weapon. In other words, make trouble. Battles are fought and won, others fought and lost. But this is not to say that battles lost were fought with no weapons, and one need only look at king Pyrrhus’s victory and count the casualties, to realize this. If that’s not cutting the ice, nothing ever is.

NOTES
[i] This is the case of John Cage’s “4 min. and 33 secs.”. (Lynton, 1980, p.331.)
[ii] This is the case of John Baldessari’s ‘painting’, containing only a written insciption on “art”. (Lynton, 1980, p.332.)
[iii] The author does not necessarily share this opinion. But it is still a description of the opinion of others.
[iv] “Scientific paradigm” theorists are the last people on this earth who can object to this claim. After all it is their very own understanding of a Paradigm, as a theoretical construct at work,  which makes us see things.

REFERENCES
Ayer, A.J. (1980). Language, truth and logic, Reading: Penguin Books Ltd.
Harrison, E. (1993). The red-shift distance and velocity distance laws. Astrophysical Journal, 403 (28-31).
Jeans, J. (1933). The new background of science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kripke, S. (1980). Naming and necessity. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Lynton, N. (1980). The story of modern art. Oxford: Phaidon Press.
Putnam, H. (1975). The analytic and the synthetic. In Putnam, H., Mind, Language and Reality (33-69). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Quine, W.O. (1961). Two dogmas of Empiricism. In Quine, W.O. From a logical point of view (20-46). New York: Harper & Row.
Ramberg B.T. (1989). Donald Davidson’s philosophy of language. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Van Flandern, Th. (1994). Did the universe have a beginning?. Meta-Research Bulletin, 3, 3 (25-35). Reprinted, (1995) Apeiron, 2, 1 (20-24).

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).

2. Becoming a sovereign nation: A logic of Japanese constitutionalism
The Constitution of Japan offers a new identity for the postwar generation Japanese.  It has helped the Japanese break with the country’s “oppressive past” and create its new future. Denouncing the prewar culture which led the country and their neighbors into catastrophic wars, the postwar generation Japanese ground their political practice in the new Constitution, looking to its text as their moral and cultural imperative. Part of the Preamble of the Constitution stipulates that “We” the Japanese desire peace for all time and are deeply conscious of the high ideals controlling human relationship, and we have determined to preserve our security and existence, trusting in the justice and faith of the peace-loving peoples of the world. We desire to occupy an honored place in an international society striving for the preservation of peace, and the banishment of tyranny and slavery, oppression and intolerance for all time from the earth. We recognize that all peoples of the world have the right to live in peace, free from fear and want. We believe that no nation is responsible to itself alone, but that laws of political morality are universal; and that obedience to such laws is incumbent upon all nations who would sustain their own sovereignty and justify their sovereign relationship with other nations.

Burke (1945) writes that, as a form of discourse, a constitution both addresses and is addressed to the “Framer’s future selves” (361). Adherence to the “universal” laws of morality stipulated in the Constitution of Japan makes us holders of the Japanese identity, a nationality in the sense of the juridical, not of the ethnic, religious, nor racial. Habermas terms such new national identity “constitutional patriotism,” a postnational, sober form of collective selfhood based upon abstract yet universalist ideas of freedom, democracy, and human rights expressed in a state’s constitution:
With [the] decoupling of shared cultural identity from the formation of society and the form of the state, a nationality that has certainly become more diffuse becomes detached from nationality in the sense of citizenship in a nation and leaves room for political identification with what the population considers worthy of preserving the postwar development of its own state at any given time. In the Federal Republic, Dolf Sternberger has observed a certain constitutional patriotism, that is, a readiness to identify with the political order and the principles of the Basic Law.
This more sober political identity has detached itself from the background of a past centered on national history. The universalist content of a form of patriotism crystallized around the democratic constitutional state is no longer pledged to continuities filled with victories; this form of patriotism is incompatible with the secondary quasi-natural character of a consciousness that has no insight into the deep ambivalance [sic] of every tradition, into the concatenation of things for which amends cannot be made, into the barbaric dark side of all cultural achievements to the present day. (1989: 256-7; also see Delbruck 1993)

Several historians of Japan have contended that “constitutionalism,” a political philosophy or “ideology” in which constitutional principles assume supreme and moral ideals, had existed prior to 1947. Akita (1967), for example, argues that the legitimacy of Japan’s first modern government established in the late nineteenth century comes from the Meiji (that is, prewar) Constitution of 1868. Beckman (1957) also traces the development of constitutionalism since 1868, indicating that, in its making, the prewar Constitution contains some populist and democratic ideals. Gluck (1992) views that the new Constitution is at least in part an extension of the Meiji Constitution, hence the postwar constitutionalism too an extension of the old one.
Yoichi Higuchi (1989; 1990; 1992), a respected constitutional scholar, however, disputes such of the historians’ understanding. He argues that the prewar Constitution is in fact an “oxymoron,” given the fact that it has nothing to do with the modern principle of “governance by law.” The prewar Constitution is not a “constitution” in a legal sense, for in it the “will of the nation” is simply absent. It is rather, argues he, an expression of the premodern idea of the Japanese nation as the single divine family in which the emperor is the supreme. Namely, constitutionalism is a manifestation of the nation’s voluntary consent toward constitutional principles, making democracy prerequisite for the existence of genuine constitutionalism.
The position advanced by Higuchi, that is, no constitutionalism is possible absent the genuinely modern democracy (and democratic constitutions), is widely supported by constitutional scholars outside Japan. Sharma (1962) discusses the development of constitutionalism in the “third” world and claims that democracy, constitutionalism, and modern states are so closely related that we cannot separately discuss one without the others; hence the concept “undemocratic” constitution is impossible. Parker (1994) also comments that a genuine constitution is basically populist: “The People Rule” should be the kernel principle of any modern constitutional state. And it is Preuss’s (1995) conclusion that constitutionalism is a “revolutionary” and “progressive” idea: it authorizes the nation’s effort toward a societal “progress.”
It is in this principle of popular sovereignty that the nation’s “new self-identity” lies. Higuchi argues that every movement that calls for “revision” of the Constitution is grounded in a belief that the sovereignty should be “returned” to the emperor. Denouncing that the new Constitution that places the “nation” as the sovereign is “unJapanese” and “culturally” and “historically incorrect,” revisionism is an attempt to restore the pre-war Constitution that stipulates the emperor as the “living deity,” the symbol as well as the sovereign of Great Imperial Japan. Sato (1990) also discusses problematic of popular sovereignty in the history of revisionism. Having backtracked several revisionist movements for the past forty years, however, he argues that revisionism is now almost dead in postwar Japan, and that the democratic ideal of popular sovereignty has already become a fact of life of the Japanese.

3. Pacifism: The ideal and the real
Auer (1990) contends that pacifism is indeed what makes the Constitution of Japan unique and distinct in the world. Maki (1990) also writes that this constitutional principle is the most peculiar, for it has nothing to do with the structure of government, the powers of its constituent elements, or the relationship between the government and the people, all of which are primary constitutional concerns. Article 9 of the Constitution of Japan reads as follows:
Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.

Indeed, the term pacifism or Heiwa shugi  has played a significant role in the formation of national policies (and psyche) for the past fifty years. Dower (1989) notes that, in postwar foreign relations, the principle of pacifism is always manifested and works as a “guideline.” Hein (1994) further argues that “peace” and “democracy,” as a set of “ideographs” (although she does not use this rhetorical term), have often “competed,” creating a dilemma in its choice over economic and foreign trade objectives.
Pacifism embedded in the postwar Constitution is not only politico-practical, however. It is also a moral imperative. Buruma (1992) argues that this article in the Constitution expresses and reminds the Japanese of “wages of guild” with which they have lived in the postwar era. “The Constitution does little more than provide a venue for people to come together and assess the political and social situation in which they must resolve conflicts. If politics is ‘the art of the possible,’ the Constitution is a venue in which we decide what ‘the possible’ is” (Anderson 1995: 266).
Moreover, pacifism that the Japanese desire is real hence “possible.” Douglas Lummis, a “western” scholar who currently teaches at a Japanese college, claims that it should become part of the “universal common sense.” Pacifism is not a fiction; it is something both real and ideal:
If Japan’s peace common sense is markedly different from the common sense of other countries, it would be a great mistake to make this distinction into some kind of fixed cultural category. It is a political and historical matter, not a cultural one. And I rather think the Japanese common sense is close to what universal common sense would be in a healthy world – that is, common sense itself. It is a slander to say that Japan’s pacifism is naive and not grounded in the realities of modern politics. It was born among a people who came face-to-face with the realities of modern politics in an encounter of devastating intensity, people standing up from the rubble of cities that had been carpet-bombed, fire-bombed, and atom bombed, and choosing a different life. They knew more about modern political reality than any bomber pilot looking down from the sky. (1993: 188)

1994 Nobel Prize in literature was given to a Japanese writer named Kenzaburo Oe. He has long been a mouthpiece for the postwar generation Japanese; in his Nobel Prize lecture, Oe speaks about the intersection between war, pacifism, history, and “ambiguous” postwar Japanese identity. Allow me to cite his words in length:
In the recent years there have been criticisms leveled against Japan suggesting that she should offer more military forces to the United Nations forces and thereby play a more active role in the keeping and restoration of peace in various parts of the world. Our heart sinks whenever we hear these criticisms. After the end of the Second World War it was a categorical imperative for us to declare that we renounced war forever in a central article of the new Constitution. The Japanese chose the principle of eternal peace as the basis of morality for our rebirth after the War.
I trust that the principle can best be understood in the West with its long tradition of tolerance for conscientious rejection of military service. In Japan itself there have all along been attempts by some to obliterate the article about renunciation of war from the Constitution and for this purpose they have taken every opportunity to make use of pressures from abroad. But to obliterate from the Constitution the principle of eternal peace will be nothing but an act of betrayal against the peoples of Asia and the victims of the Atom Bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is not difficult for me as a writer to imagine what would be the outcome of that betrayal.
The pre-war Japanese Constitution that posited an absolute power transcending the principle of democracy had sustained some support from the populace. Even though we now have the half-century-old new Constitution, there is a popular sentiment of support for the old one that lives on in reality in some quarters. If Japan were to institutionalise a principle other than the one to which we have adhered for the last fifty years, the determination we made in the post-war ruins of our collapsed effort at modernisation – that determination of ours to establish the concept of universal humanity would come to nothing. This is the spectre that rises before me, speaking as an ordinary individual. (1994)

4. Making (of) a constitutional culture (work)
Finally, it is important to note that the Constitution of Japan is not solely “Japanese” in its composition. From a “transcultural” perspective, Beer (1979; 1990), an American constitutional scholar, has found several important developments of Japan’s constitutional culture in the postwar period. The Constitution of Japan has multiplicity of voices: It represents several distinct traditions of liberalism that had been developed and nurtured by political thinkers in the east and west for the last hundred years; the most influential of all being the tradition of “American constitutionalism” that General McArthur and GHQ implanted for the first time in the soil outside the North American continent (Also see Ward 1987; Spann 1963; Inoue 1991).
Okudaira (1990) agrees with Beer and documents that there exit Japanese, American, and European traditions of liberalism traceable in the new Constitution, which, he adds, are clearly reflected in the supreme court decisions in Japan for the past forty years. Ukai (1979) further contends that American constitutional principles are well-received and have become part of the Japanese political life in the postwar era.
Takami (1987) holds that part of the reason that the Constitution of Japan has been kept “alive” in postwar Japan is due to the effort made by Kenpo mondai kenkyu kai (the Study Group of Constitutional Problems), a grass-roots organization established in 1958 by a group of liberal intellectuals. The membership included leading figures in a variety of professions: literary critic Yoshimi Takeuchi, social psychologist Sakae Agatsuma, sociologist Ikutaro Shimizu, and Nobel Prize winning physicist Hideki Yukawa. For the purpose of promoting democratic ideals embedded in the new Constitution, they held public lectures and conferences throughout the country and published books, magazine articles, and political commentaries so that their grass-roots discourses about the Constitution could reach the widest possible readership and audience.
One member of the Study Group was philosopher Osamu Kuno. A disciple of Kiyoshi Miki, a Marxist-sympathetic scholar who was tortured to death by the authorities during the Second World War, Kuno was known nation-widely as a philosopher of civil movement. And he proposed that, in order to truly embrace the postwar Constitution and its cultural imperatives, we all should participate in the discourse of the Constitution, that is, to engage in a dialectic between its text and our life experiences:
Today, let me suggest the following: Each of us should read the Constitution and understand its meaning from our own life-experiential point of view. . . . Forget about commentaries and “instructional manuals” [about the Constitution]; approach the text of the Constitution itself with our own interest or need in life and determine what the actually means, what is the most important therein, etc. (1969: 11)

Engaging in such dialectics is the only way to keep the Constitution alive. Kuno continues:
Unfortunately in Japan, we tend to think that a public document (koubun[i]) always comes from the top, that is, it is always possessed and issued by the authorities, and that we understand its meaning in a way the authorities tells us to understand. . . . It is high time that, as individual citizens, each of us should practice to understand a language of public document in our own way, reading a public document in our own terms, based on our own life experience. Otherwise, nominalization of the Constitution is unavoidable. And this nominalization not only makes the Constitution nominal; it also means that the official interpretation [of the Constitution] becomes the one and only meaning of the Constitution. (15)

“You can fulfill the responsibility as a Japanese citizen only if you carefully read the Constitution of Japan… , think and participate in discourse with your own opinion in mind” (Maegaki 2000: 2). With the currently ongoing debate over the controversial “emergency security” legislation in the national Diet (parliament) that extends Japan’s military presence in the Asia-Pacific region, the Japanese are once again getting more attentive to the Constitution of Japan as ideal and real.

5. Conclusion
It is unfortunate that students of public argument have been ignorant of the significance of constitutionalism in postwar Japan. To date, most research in Japanese rhetoric has ended up emphasizing the “unique cultural traits” that influence Japanese rhetorical practice (Ellingsworth 1969; Morrison 1972; Trommsdorf 1983; Becker 1985; Okabe 1990; Jensen 1994), ignoring, however, that there exists a tradition of transcultural discourse such as the Constitution. Despite its alleged “foreign-ness,” the postwar Constitution has become a symbol of postwar Japanese political identity.

“More than half the electorate today have graduated from primary school since the new constitution was adopted.  It is irrefutable that its concepts have become part of our Zeitgeist to such an extent that people often think in terms of this value system without being consciously aware of it” (Tanaka 1987: 126).

It is high time that scholars of Japanese rhetoric should go beyond the depressing state of “curiosity” scholarship and analyze a new “cultural ideals” embedded in postwar discourses. Such undertaking, I believe, would enable us to explore the possibility of rhetoric that addresses the universal concern.  For instance, a rhetoric of pacifism embedded in the Constitution of Japan may constitute a good example of what Thomas Goodnight (1987) calls a “generational discourse,” which “emerges to reorder much of what has gone before such as in. . . the demolishing of religious hegemony, the recognition of class, the collapse of the prospects of international order, … or even the advent of the nuclear age itself” (134-5).
People in separate cultures oftentimes are concerned about “common problems”; and so are their rhetorics.  It is simply counter-intuitive to think of their rhetoric as addressing their own local concerns only.  Our common sense tells us that there are problems that are of universal concern; and their public discourses do address these concerns.

NOTES
[i] The word koubun literally means “official” as well as “public” or “popular” document, which complicates the translation.

REFERENCES
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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.

2. Characterization of the Tasks and Processes in Informal Logic
The question of whether there is an argument (or arguments) in a passage is an existence question while the problem of what the argument is, if there is one, is an identification question.  There are important distinctions between existence and identification questions, but nonetheless these two questions have important commonalities.  In both cases the data available are going to be assessed to see if they satisfy the relevant criteria. Consequently, gaining an understanding of these tasks requires an analysis of:
a. the various sorts of criteria to be met;
b. the types of data and their characteristics; and
c. the variety of possible relationships between the evidence and  the determination of whether the criteria are met.

2.1 Criteria
The classical conception is that a criterion specifies a set of features that are singly necessary and jointly sufficient.  Although an instance must have all of the defining features, it is not precluded from having additional features. However, the defining ones are the only ones relevant to whether the criterion is met. If all of the defining features are present, classification succeeds; otherwise it fails.
There are numerous discussions in the philosophical literature about the difficulty of providing such a specification for all concepts. Alternative types of criteria which might be encountered include: sufficient conditions only; statistical rules; a list of necessary conditions which allows elimination in the absence of one them, but provides no sufficient conditions; guidelines or indicators with no specification of the circumstances under which they work although often relatively common exceptions are pointed out. Concepts for which instances may be characterized in a variety of ways and for which it is not possible to come up with a definition in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions are sometimes referred to as “polymorphic”.
The most basic concept in argument identification is that of “argument”. There appears to be no general agreement on the exact definition. But, at least among those dealing with rational argument theory, all include giving reasons in support of a claim as a necessary condition. It is at the next level – determining whether this or that should count as giving a reason where the situation becomes complex and the appropriate criteria to utilize less clear. My belief is that all theories of argumentation experience similar lack of clarity when the attempt is made to apply the theory to ordinary discourse.

2.2 The Evidence
The data itself can contribute to the complexity of the situation.  A non-exhaustive list of some obvious examples include:
a. the evidence provided by a passage may be subject to multiple interpretations;
b. the evidence provided may underdetermine an answer in the sense that more than one answer may be consistent with the provided information; and
c. there is the possibility of conflicting data.

2.3 The Relationship
In making a determination if the criteria are met one considers reasons for and against. Initial assessments of how strong the reason is will be subject to change.  For example, a “since” may initially be taken as a premise indicator. However, once the context makes clear that it is being utilized as a temporal adverb, the initial belief that the “since” indicates a reason both to suppose that there is an inference and that what follows is a candidate for being a premise or premises is rejected. Assessing whether the criteria are met is a both a process and a judgment. Consequently, the assessment can change over time. There are a variety of ways in which initially given reasons either can be eliminated, strengthened, or weakened.
Among the situations under which an assessment might change are:
a. realizing that some of the evidence has been overlooked;
b. altering the emphasis placed on a particular part of the evidence; and
c. reevaluating the relevancy of portions of the passage to determining whether the criteria are satisfied.
The reasoning to determine whether or not there is an argument is in most cases, but not all, not going to be definitive. Consequently, both the possibility of there being evidence not previously taken into account and the possibility of being wrong must be allowed for. It other words the reasoning is non-monotonic and defeasible.
Any system for dealing with argument recognition and identification is going to have to be compatible with these aspects of the situation.
Amongst the tools utilized in informal logic texts to help students achieve the goals of argument identification and reconstruction are rules and instances. I want to examine each of these in turn.

3. Rules
Many of the activities of formal logic are rule-based. Consequently, a number of texts that take informal logic to be elementary applied symbolic logic utilize rule-based procedures as the model. However, it has long since been recognized that a strictly algorithmic approach will not do.
Ordinary language is far too complex for us to be able to write a general argument-recognition program.  There is no algorithm, or set of precise instructions, by which a person or machine, presented with an arbitrary body of actual discourse, can mechanically pick out in a finite number of steps just those sequences of sentences that are associated with the appropriate claims and thus constitute arguments. (Blumberg 1976, 21).
But there are other construals of “rules” than as algorithms. However, arguments have been raised against these construals as well.  The algorithm option is considering rules as a set of universally applicable syntactic rules that, if applied, would correctly lead to both the determination that an argument is present as well as what the argument is.   A second rule-oriented approach is to have ceteris paribus rules – rules that are utilizable other matters being equal. A third rule-oriented approach is to propose guidelines, e.g., a list of indicator words which frequently, but not invariably, indicate that an inference is present. All of these variations of a rule-oriented approach face difficulties.

Govier (1990) argues that rules for the purposes we are considering could not hold with strict universality.  This eliminates the first type of rules – algorithms. On the other hand rules of thumb despite being called “rules” are, at best, indicators. They lack the systematicity to be true rules.  Rejecting them as rules does not mean they are not useful as their frequent inclusion in informal logic texts attests. The plausible candidate is a rule with a ceteris paribus clause. But then how do we deal with the application of ceteris paribus clauses? The application of such clauses appears to require either an exhaustive listing of the conditions under which the ceteris paribus clauses apply or a set of rules is available to govern their application. The exhaustive listing presupposes knowing all the situations in which the ceteris paribus clauses are applicable – something the inclusion of the clause tacitly acknowledges is not the case. Rules for applying rules raise the specter of infinite regress.
It seems to me that there are yet other possible construals of rules besides those considered by Govier above, e.g., default logic, sets of rules which form heuristics, etc. The arguments against rule-based systems considered above may be correct, but they are working with an impoverished conception of rules. Perhaps a rule-based system can be made to work. Certainly systems such as default logic provide a rule-based way to establish a non-monotonic reasoning system with defeasibility characteristics.
However, there is another alternative to explore.

4. Cases
A second type of entity that regularly occurs in informal logic texts is the individual case or instance – as exercises, examples, or illustrations. Are all individual cases the same?  What is the role for individual cases in informal logic? Do individual cases play roles other than as examples, illustrations, and exercises?

First what is the variety of ways in which we consider individual instances? Among the words used to refer to specific cases in English is the following list with definitions culled from Webster’s II New Collegiate Dictionary:
*case – <Lat. casus p. part of cadere> – to fall 1.  An instance of the existence or occurrence of something. 3. A set of circumstances: SITUATION. 4. A set of reasons, arguments, or supporting facts offered in justification of a statement action, or situation. (Plus another 7 other  possibilities.)
*exemplar – <Lat. exemplum> –  example 1.  One worthy of imitation: MODEL. 2. A typical example 3. An ideal serving as a pattern: ARCHETYPE. 4. A copy, as of a book.
*example –< Lat. exempleum. eximere – to take out> 1.  One representative of a group 2. One serving as a specific kind of pattern <a good example> 3. A case or situation serving as a precedent or model for another one that is similar. 4.a. A punishment given as a warning for others. b. The recipient of such punishment. 5. A problem or exercise that illustrates a method or principle.  – for example – Serving as an illustration, model, or instance.
*illustration – 1. An act of clarifying or explaining or the state of being clarified or explained. 2. Something used to clarify or explain. 3. Visual matter for clarifying or decorating a text. 4. Obs. Illumination.
*model – <Lat. Modulus –dim.of modus> – measure 1. A small object, usw. built to scale, that represents another, often larger object. 2. A preliminary pattern serving as a plan from which an item not yet constructed will be produced. 3. A tentative description of a theory or system that accounts for all of its known properties. 4. A design or style of an item. 5. An example to be imitated or compared <a model of politeness> 6. The subject for an artist or photographer 7. One whose job is to display clothes or other merchandise.
*pattern – 1.a. An archetype b. An ideal worthy of imitation 2. A plan, a diagram, or model to be followed in making things. 3. A representative sample: SPECIMEN  (Plus 7 more definitions)
prototype – <Gk: protos  –  first + tupos>  –  model 1. An original type, form, or instance on which later stages are based or judged <the V-1 as a prototype of modern rockets> 2. A typical early example 3. Biol. A primitive or ancestral form or species.

These words and their lexical definitions suggest a number of different functions for individual cases.  One function is simply an instantiation qua instantiation – nothing special, but the relevant criteria are satisfied. A second function is as an ideal instantiation – somehow the criteria are especially well satisfied or satisfied in an ideal way without complications. A third view has them functioning as a guide in the consideration of additional cases.
As either mere instantiations or ideal instantiations cases might play several roles. The first view is that the instantiations are merely used to illustrate the theory. A second view is that they are necessary to provide the interpretation of theoretical terms in rule based formal systems. How is the formal system to be interpreted in terms of practice?  One way is to use cases where the relevant terms apply. Providing rules for the interpretation of rules only leads to an infinite regress so the utilization of cases is essential. However, when functioning as a guide cases can not only provide cognitive content, but also play a central role in the reasoning process with respect to that subject matter.
What I want to explore is the possibility that a role of instances in informal logic might be to provide a case-based reasoning system. “Case-based reasoning is a sequence that proceeds from one (or a series of) preceding case to one similar, subsequent case, and draws a conclusion about the subsequent case, based on, similar, relevant features of the preceding cases. In arguments about precedents, the subsequent case needs to be judged in relation to some existing rule or practice, and the problem is whether it might lead to a new rule, or modification of the existing rule.”(Walton 1992, 118)
It has been suggested that some of the characteristics of a domain that indicate that a case-based approach might be suitable include:
1. records of previously solved problems exist;
2. historical cases are viewed as an asset which ought to be preserved;
3. previous cases are frequently cited;
4. specialists talk about their domain by giving examples; and
5. experience, rather in the field or working on exercises, is at least as valuable as theoretical material. (Harrison 1997). On these characteristics it would appear that informal logic might be a viable candidate.

5. Examples of Case-based Reasoning
Instances of case-based reasoning are not unknown.  In a number of areas of endeavor case-based reasoning is construed as central: scripts in various social situations; judges reasoning from prior cases and lawyers looking for precedent cases; case studies in MBA programs; casuistry in ethics; and, programs used in artificial intelligence in conjunction with categorization and pattern recognition.
Before characterizing case-based reasoning more fully in the abstract it would be useful to have an example. Any of the examples mentioned above would work, but I am going to examine the role Kuhn has proposed for exemplars in science. Given the controversy that interpreting Kuhn frequently evokes I intend to allow Kuhn to do as much of his own talking as I can by liberal use of quotations.
By exemplar Kuhn means “the concrete puzzle solutions that students encounter from the start of their scientific education, whether in laboratories, on examinations, or at the ends of chapters in scientific texts. To these shared examples should, however, be added at least some of the technical problem-solutions found in the periodical literature that scientists encounter during their post-educational research careers and that also show them by example how their job is to be done.” (Kuhn 1996, 187)
“Close historical investigation of a given specialty at a given time discloses a set of recurrent and quasi-standard illustrations of various theories in their conceptual, observational and instrumental applications.” (Kuhn 1996, 43)

What is the kind of knowledge resident in exemplars?
“When I speak of knowledge embedded in shared exemplars, I am not referring to a mode of knowing that is less systematic or less analyzable than knowledge embedded in rules, laws, or criteria of identification.  Instead I have in mind a manner of knowing which is misconstrued if reconstructed in terms of rules that are first abstracted from exemplars and thereafter function in their stead. Or, to put the point differently, when I speak of acquiring from exemplars the ability to recognize a given situation as like some and unlike others that one has seen before, I am not suggesting a process that is not potentially fully explicable in terms of neuro-cerebral mechanism. Instead I am claiming that the explication will not, by its nature, answer the question, ‘Similar with respect to what?’  That question is a request for a rule, in this case for the criteria by which particular situations are grouped into similarity sets, and I am arguing that the temptation to seek criteria (or at least a full set) should be resisted in this case.  It is not, however, system but a particular sort of system that I am opposing.” (Kuhn 1996, 192).

How is the practice of normal science carried out?
“The practice of normal science depends on the ability, acquired from exemplars, to group objects and situations into similarity sets which are primitive in the sense that the grouping is done without an answer to the question, ‘Similar with respect to what?’ One central aspect of any revolution is, then, that some of the similarity relations change. Objects that were grouped in the same set before are grouped in different ones afterward and vice-versa.” (Kuhn 1996, 200).

“Philosophers of science have not ordinarily discussed the problems encountered by a student in laboratories or in science texts, for those are thought to supply only practice in the application of what the student already knows.  He cannot, it is said, solve problems at all unless he has first learned the theory and some rules for applying it.  Scientific knowledge is embedded in theory and rules; problems are supplied to gain facility in their application. I have tried to argue, however, that this localization of the cognitive content of science is wrong.  After the student has done many problems, he may gain only added facility by solving more. But at the start and for some time after, doing problems is learning consequential things about nature. In the absence of such exemplars, the laws and theories he has previously learned would have little empirical content.” (Kuhn 1996, 187-188).
“A phenomenon familiar to both students of science and historians of science provides a clue. The former regularly report that they have read through a chapter of their text, understood it perfectly. But nonetheless had difficulty solving a number of the problems at the chapter’s end. Ordinarily, also, these difficulties dissolve in the same way. The student discovers, with or without the assistance of his instructor, a way to see his problem as like a problem he has already encountered.  Having seen the resemblance, grasped the analogy between the two or more distinct problems, he can interrelate symbols and attach them to nature in the ways that have proven effective before.” (Kuhn 1996, 189).

6. Case-based Reasoning In the Abstract
On the basis of the discussion in the artificial intelligence literature there appears to be a broad understanding of the components involved in deploying case-based reasoning.
“It is the job of the case based reasoner to have a library of cases; a method of storing new cases that allows them to be found again when needed; an indexing scheme that reflects processing that has gone on while a case was initially considered; a method of partial matching that allows new cases to be considered in terms of similar ones; and a method of adaptation that allows information garnered from one case to be applied to another.” (Riesbeck and Shank 1989, 24)

Utilizing these components case based reasoning consists of the following four steps:
1. retrieving the most similar case (or cases) comparing the case to the library of past cases;
2. reusing the retrieved case to try to solve the current problem;
3. reviewing and revising the proposed solution if necessary;
4. retaining the final solution as part of a new case.

These steps can be broken down into more specific tasks:
1. Retrieving a case starts with a problem description and terminates when a best matching case has been found. The sub-tasks involve: identifying relevant problem descriptors; searching for similar cases; returning sufficiently similar cases on the basis of a similarity threshold of some kind; and selecting the best case from the cases returned.
2. Reusing the retrieved case solution in the context of the new case consists of: identifying the differences between the retrieved and the current case; and identifying the part of a retrieved case which can be transferred to the new case unmodified or with modification can be transferred.
3. Reviewing and revising occurs after a solution has been proposed.  It focuses on: evaluating the proposed solution and, if there are faults, with the attempt to modify the proposed solution in ways that eliminate the fault.
4. Retaining the case incorporates whatever is useful from the new case into the case library. This involves deciding what to retain and in what form to retain it; how to index the case for future retrieval; and integrating the new case into the case library. (Harrison 1997).

This general characterization still leaves many specific issues to be resolved. There are numerous points at which instances of case-based reasoning can vary. There are a variety of different methods for organizing, retrieving, utilizing and indexing the knowledge retained in past cases. The two general problems are:
a. how to find matching cases and
b. how to achieve the necessary knowledge base of cases.
Sub-questions of the first include:
1. What is the search strategy to be employed?
2. How are cases indexed for efficient retrieval?
3. How is the similarity between a new problem and a retrieved case assessed? Sub-questions of the second include:
4. How are cases selected for retention?
5. How is indexing information learned?
6. How is additional domain knowledge required for the assessment of similarity acquired?
7. How does generalization occur during learning? (Bareiss 1989, 96)
There can be variations in: the type of information represented by a case –  instance, paradigm, analogy, search strategy; indexing systems; criteria for making similarity judgments; whether the similarity judgments involve global or local similarity, criteria for determining the hierarchy among matching cases; criteria to determine which cases are retained in the library; the extent to which contextual information is included with the cases; and the permissible moves to making in modifying a case or in revising a case.
Besides these theoretical differences there are also domain specific differences in how similarity judgments are made and how priorities among cases are determined, i.e., how these determinations are handled in casuistry versus the law versus science.

7. Rules versus Cases
What are the differences being claimed between a rule-based system and a case-based system? Separation is going to be imperfect – a case-based systems is going to contain some rules or guidelines while a rule-based system with generally be supplemented with cases. Nonetheless, there appear to be important differences.
On the case-based view the concept of argument is represented extensionally. The definition of the concept is implicit in its instances; no explicit definition is abstracted. Consequently, information about feature correlations, acceptable feature values, and realizable concept instances is preserved in the instances.
When using case based reasoning, the need for knowledge acquisition can be limited to establishing how to characterize cases rather than be concerned about ascertaining what rule covers all of the cases. Case based reasoning allows the case base to be developed incrementally and continuously. If one were to utilize rules instead, then cases would be discarded thereby eliminating the rule base that might later need to be revised. Decisions to generalize are always incomplete as not all possible contingencies will have been taken into account.
One might view a set of cases as a body of knowledge from which rules might be constructed, but have not yet been constructed. On this position dealing with cases is simply a postponement of induction to a rule. This postponement, however, has a number of key characteristics. “A rule induction generalization draws its generalizations from a set of… examples before the target problem is even known; that is it performs eager generalization…. This is in contrast to CBR, which delays (implicit) generalization of its cases until testing time – a strategy of lazy generalization.” (A.Golding nd). Moreover, eager generalization or rule induction emphasizes the statistical power of a number of cases rather than the unique properties of a particular case. Rule induction “derives its power from the aggregation of cases, from the attempt to represent what tends to make one case like or unlike another.  CBR derives its power from the attempt to represent what suffices to make one case like or unlike another. CBR emphases the structural aspects of theory-formation, not the statistical aspects of data.” (Loui 1997). “General principles are impoverished compared with original experiences. Generalization is never perfect and there is always the danger of losing some quite important information.”

In case-based reasoning a case from the library of cases is transformed to achieve the solution providing flexibility whereas in rule-based reasoning a rule qua rule is to be applied to the situation with no transformation.
Aha (1997, 3-4) has suggested the following benefits of lazy problem solving in the context of designing expert systems:
1. Elicitation: Lazy approaches require the availability of cases rather than difficult-to-extract rules. (This is also true for most machine learning approaches.) This can significantly refocus knowledge acquisition efforts on how to structure cases.
2. Problem Solving Bias: Because cases are in raw form, they can be used for several different problem solving purposes. In contrast, rules and other abstractions can generally be used for only the purpose that guided their compilation.
3. Incremental Learning: Lazy approaches typically have low training (i.e., data processing) costs in comparison with approaches that attempt to compile data into concise abstractions. However, the trade off often exists that lazy approaches require more work to answer information queries, although smart caching schemes can be used to decrease this workload (e.g.,Clark & Holte 1992).
4. Disjunctive Solution Spaces: Lazy approaches are often most appropriate for tasks whose solution spaces are complex, making them less appropriate for approaches that replace data with abstractions (Aha 1992).
5. Precedent Explanations: By virtue of storing rather than discarding case data, lazy approaches can generate precedent explanations (i.e., based on the retrieved cases). Characteristic (i.e., abstract) explanations, if requested, can always be derived from the stored set of cases in a demand-driven manner.
6. Sequential Problem Solving: Sequential tasks often benefit from the storage of a history in the form of the states that lead to the current state. Lazy approaches are used to store this information, which can then be used, for example, to disambiguate states (e.g., McCallum1995).

Psychologically there appears to be an advantage as well. For humans cases appear to be easier to retain than rules. It is difficult to remember an abstraction, but it is easy to remember a good coherent story.
There appear to be a number of important differences between case-based systems and rule-based systems in terms of flexibility, the type of characteristics emphasized, and the ability of non-experts to start applying knowledge to new situations.

8. Case-based Reasoning in Informal Logic[i]
An interesting characteristic of introductory courses in either formal or informal logic is their reflexive nature. While the subject matter is not reasoning itself, but rather some type of normative theory about the results of reasoning, we are nevertheless presupposing that the students do possess both the ability to reason and to evaluate their reasoning. The focus of our concern in this paper has been the meta-reasoning which goes on in informal logic. It is somewhat ironic that the meta-level logic appears to be more sophisticated than the object-level logic customarily considered.
I believe that case-based reasoning is already utilized in many informal logic texts, but not explicitly recognized. Common cases that occur are worked examples or answers to problem sets in the back of the book. It is also striking how frequently discussions with students are in terms of experienced problems and examples. However, there has been limited discussion of the assumptions and presuppositions underlying this approach when applied to informal logic as well as the criteria to use in selecting the appropriate cases.
In developing a case-based method for informal logic there is a fairly obvious set of categories of questions that would need to be addressed:
*Questions about the individual cases:
*What is to count as a case for informal logic?
*What are the features that it is important to include in a case?
*Questions about the collection of cases or library:
*How should the cases be indexed?
*Along what dimensions should similarity judgments be made?
*What would an appropriate set of cases for informal logic be?
*What would constitute a full set of cases for an individual to qualify as a skilled argument identifier and evaluator?
*What would constitute a full set for someone who is an expert in some particular field?
*What should the stages be in developing a library during the course of a semester long informal logic course? What would the contents of a library at the end of a semester long course be?
*Questions about reuse:
*What are the factors that enter into the determination of whether a solution can simply be copied?
*What are the modification and adaptation techniques that can be employed?
*Questions about review and revision:
*What are the standards for having achieved a satisfactory solution?
*What sorts of changes result in a revision of the solution?
*Questions about retention:
*What are the factors involved in determining what new information is retained?
*How is new information integrated into the already existing library of cases?

Answers to these questions are going to vary with the conception of argument employed and the standards employed to determine if an argument is “good”. Spelling out the case set and methods for even one of the conceptions of argument would be a substantial undertaking let alone undertaking the task to do a comparative review of differing conceptions.
Despite these demurrals certain sorts of situations one would want in cases for case-based reasoning in informal logic seem relatively apparent: the standard problems involved in achieving standard logical form, e.g., eliminating ambiguity, etc.; various complex argument diagramming situations; single/complex arguments contrasts; ampliative/non-ampliative argument contrasts; logically correct/logically incorrect argument contrasts; sound/unsound argument contrasts; arguments which exhibit overall argument strength versus those that do not.
A potentially interesting empirical study would be to subdivide the collection of informal logic texts into those with roughly the same conception of argument and study the set of examples and worked problems provided by the authors, analyze their contents, their sequencing, any cross-referencing that occurs, the centrality of arguments in each of the examples, etc.

While attempting to determine the overall implications of adopting a case-based method for informal logic would require having answers to the above questions, some implications seem rather immediate:
Arguments should be included in all of the cases. This suggests that issues such as ambiguity, vagueness, etc, should be looked at in the context of arguments rather than independently;
Suggests not immediately starting with complex cases from ordinary discourse, but rather developing a case set in a carefully staged way. The overall case set should illustrate commonly encountered problems including situations subject to multiple interpretations;
It may explain why lists of key words or inference indicators work to the extent that they do and are also as frustrating as they are.  Lists of key words or inference indicators can be construed as decontextualized component parts of cases.

What are the pedagogical implications of such a view for both the structure of texts and courses in informal logic? Theoretical considerations arising from the theory of argument being deployed would be one consideration in determining what is presented in the cases and how they are sequenced, but psychological factors should also be taken into account. What is the data on students being able to start out comprehending a complex environment in which they are required to do multiple tasks and retain what they are taught? What is the literature regarding learning a skill?
This paper has attempted to examine the role of cases in informal logic and argue that they have a much more central role to play than that of illustrations. Case-based reasoning plays central role in determining whether an argument exists and what that argument is. It appears productive to further explore the conception of meta-reasoning in informal logic as case-based reasoning.

NOTES
[i] There are apparently some discussions of the application of case-based reasoning to informal logic that I was not able to gain access to prior to the deadline for completing this paper  –  Wisdom (1957/1991) and Govier (1980).

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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).

Yet how (for example) in the case of a mass broadcast televisual address reaching a wide and heterogeneous audience, should the protagonist of an argument1 go about such rhetorical tailoring? In such a case, the audience will necessarily be non-present, (largely) non-interactive and would undoubtedly subscribe to “varying levels of [argumentative] competence and differing interests, beliefs and values” (Govier, 1999: 189), creating real difficulties for the protagonist. Govier argues that the problem with such an audience, from the perspective of the protagonist (though she does not use this term!) is that “one knows so little about it and cannot interact with it at the stage when one needs to do so in order to improve the quality of one’s argument” (1999: 195). Further, Govier argues that any evaluation of the acceptability (in the eyes of the audience) of an argument1 presented to a mass audience, is rendered impossible since “there is no identifiable audience point of view to apply that notion” (1999: 197). For Govier, pragma-dialectic theory is particularly ill-suited for evaluating argument presented to a mass audience because of its assumption that argument1 exists as dialogue. In short:

There is no interaction between parties […] and there is no decent basis for constructing or envisaging an interaction, because the viewpoint of the antagonist is unknown and is not even singular. The antagonist is not only absent and unable to perform any of the actions or concessions required in this model, ‘he’ is multiple and has no determinable point of view. (Govier, 1999: 197)

In this paper, we attempt to address the problems posed by the non-interactive, heterogeneous audience. Using the example of advertising – a genre of communication whose argumentation is comprehensively adjusted to appeal to an identified audience – we argue that it is more fitting to speak of ‘constructed antagonists’, who are not simply argued at (in the conventional sense of argument1) but are, in fact, demarcated via strategies of inclusion and exclusion. We introduce and discuss a proposed ‘taxonomy of inclusion’ through which advertising argumentation must orientate itself in constructing such an antagonist. Throughout, we adopt a perspective we consider to be consonant with pragma-dialectical theory: that advertising, like all argument, is constituted by an interface between structure and rhetorical content and an argumentative theory that embraces the nuances of both is essential to any account of argument. Further, we believe that our proposed taxonomy strengthens the pragma-dialectical model – particularly against the problems of the non-interactive audience – providing a possible account of how the opening stage of argument1 not only identifies the standpoint of protagonist but also constructs that of the antagonist.

2. Advertising Discourse
Myers (1994) argues that advertising is a genre of communication borne of economic surplus. The corresponding need for manufacturers – and perhaps capitalism as a whole – to both create consumers out of citizens and to nurture these consumers’ desire for branded commodities is the driving force behind advertising. Developed at the end of the nineteenth century in an attempt to bring consumption in line with over-production, “adverts construct positions for the audience”, offering “a relationship between the advertiser and the audience based on the association of meaning with commodities” (Myers, 1994: 10). Therefore, the key questions to ask when reconstructing advertising argument – and as such, the central questions upon which our paper is based – are: ‘who is communicating with who?’ And ‘how is this communication managed?’

Previous work on the discourse of advertising has illustrated how selections in form, the mode of address, transitivity, modality, style and lexis, music and a range of other semiotic systems differ according to the consumer that an advertiser is targeting (Cook, 2001; Delin, 2000; Dyer, 1982; Myers, 1994; Thornborrow, 1994; Williamson, 1978). In this paper we add argumentation to this list – indeed we suggest that the linguistic elements of the aforementioned list can, to a greater extent, be replaced by the entry of argumentation, given that a pragma-dialectical analysis of argumentation necessarily entails examination at these levels and others.

When analysing mediated argumentation we first need to bare in mind that the sender of the message is not always the same as the person who actually speaks it. In a television advert, for example, the protagonist may be an actor, though responsibility for the argument lies with an advertising agency. Goffman (1974; 1981) provides a useful approach to theorising this speaker/writer responsibility in his account of the ‘production format’ of utterances (by which he includes text and talk), developed as part of his theory of ‘footing’, the finer detail of which is surplus to the requirements of the present paper[i]. More important is the recognition that the individual(s) receiving (reading or watching) the advertisement are not always the addressee – or the person for whom it is intended. Rather, the addressees usually are “a specific target group, but the receiver is anyone who sees the ad” (Cook, 2001: 4). Such a distinction can be represented graphically, thus (Figure 1):

Figure 1 – Production format of Advertising

This is not to suggest or assume any particular resulting reaction on the part of these addressees of course. Indeed, as Cook (2001) points out, for too long analyses of adverts proceeded in accordance with the “unproven assumption that addressees only have one impoverished way of responding to discourse [and…] that people are tricked into believing that if they buy the product they will experience the attractive lifestyle of the characters” (p.203). We do not offer any such deductive leap regarding the effectiveness of advertising in this regard, specifically the difficulties in demonstrating any alteration in reader/viewer beliefs, attitudes of behaviour (Gunter, Furnham & Frost, 1994; Gunter, Tohala & Furnham, 2001). Rather, this paper focuses upon two issues: First, the potential problems in disaggregating and disambiguating the participants and non-participants in mediated argumentative discourse. Second, since adverts “draw upon and share features with many other genres, including political propaganda, conversation, song, film, [etc.]” (Cook, 2001: 12), and given the strong evidence which suggests that advertising is a parasitic discourse, drawing upon rhetorical strategies of other argumentative, political and semiotic media, this paper (and the claims we will be making) maybe of significance and of use to studies of argumentation in these areas.

2.1 Advertising as an argumentative genre
As Willard (1979) has argued, for too long the study of argument was unfortunately “coloured by the assumption that the claims and the reasons [of argumentation] must be linguistically serialised” (1979: 212). Adopting such a language-dependent position will only ever provide an inadequate account of argumentative discourse genres such as advertising. We consider advertising discourse to be per se argumentative given that advertising offers evidence – often implicit, indirect or semiotic support in addition to (largely non-requisite) premises – in defence of a contested or contestable position.

When first approaching advertising argumentation it is useful to discuss the genre in terms of three inter-related yet still theoretically distinct categories: the advert’s focus; its format and its form. Only in the third of these categories (form) do manifest argumentative features occur; the remaining two categories (focus and format) however, provide both latent argumentative features and the frame within which the manifest argumentation resides. Taking focus first: the focus of the advert relates to whether the advert is aimed at promoting a purchasable product or at promoting ideas and information. There is, of course, a strong argument to suggest that all adverts are structured upon the selling of ideas, with product adverts being designed to sell not just the named brand but also the ideology of consumption itself. The recent work of Smith (2002), for example, has shown that the products advertised in the immediate period of post-Soviet Russia were, more often than not, unavailable for purchase – it was the idea of mass, individualised consumption that these adverts were selling rather than the named and unavailable products.

Second, the format of the advert is crucial to the reception and success of its argument and the following key features (from Cook, 2001) should be accounted for in analysis:
Medium – broadcast (televisual and/or audible) – print (newspaper, magazine, billboard, etc.)
Slow drip campaign (customary or ‘everyday’ products) vs. the sudden burst (seasonal, topical or fashionable products)
Short copy vs. long copy advertising

Finally the features of an advert’s form have unequivocal and direct effect on the content of its arguments. For example:
hard sell vs. soft sell advertising
distinction: the level of directness of the sales pitch; explicit mention of desirability rather than allusion
reason vs. ‘tickle’ advertising
distinction: reason ads give motives for consumption; ‘tickle’ adverts rely on emotion, humour and mood

3. Categorising the addressee
Already from the preceding discussion we can start to see how the implicit and explicit argumentative strategies of adverts are positioned in relation to target audience (or consumer). Here we will begin to examine a proposed structure within which these strategies are placed. We will begin with a relatively formal exegesis before applying this structure to an example.

3.1 Inclusion/ Exclusion
We might think of the strategic moves of an advert in terms of manoeuvres aimed at providing an argumentative slot within which potential antagonists might/will position themselves. This is achieved, in effect, by creating, rhetorically for the most part, a template of the antagonist which the audience or consumer is asked to fill. What is more, this template, or constructed antagonist, is designed so that some particular individual within the audience can quickly identify his/her “fitness” for the template through relatively simple disjunctive devices between some identifying property and its negation. It is from this simple audience filtering that we get to the principle device in our taxonomy: inclusion and exclusion.

This binaried device is fairly straightforward and we are not using inclusion and exclusion in a highly technical way. The point is simply that, through a particular rhetorical device or devices (of the many with which we are familiar in advertising genres) an audience is presented with an argumentative slot or antagonist’s position that divides the audience in terms of A v ~A. Of the disjuncts, A is that part of the audience included by the rhetorically defined argument position, ~A is that part of the audience which is excluded by virtue of its lack of fit with the rhetorically defined argument position. Further, as suggested earlier when discussing “hard vs. soft” advertising, adverts don’t simply “say” who their product, information etc. is aimed at and they don’t “state” that certain groups or people are to be excluded by default. We therefore need to introduce a further taxonomic device that enables us to handle the interplay between who is and is not included and excluded (and also how). This motivates the move to defining inclusion and exclusion as being either implicit or explicit.

3.2 Implicit/Explicit
We can again think of an implicit/explicit dichotomy in terms of a fairly straightforward notion of disjunction. When an antagonist slot is constructed for an audience it is done largely in terms of defining one of the disjuncts A v ~A. As such the defined disjunct, being the primary position in antagonist construction, is explicit, and ~A, in being left undefined (except as an unstated non A default) is implicit.
As with the notions of inclusion and exclusion, explicit and implicit are not being used in any peculiarly technical way. We want to take them as meaning: a rhetorical outcome explicitly stated; and a rhetorical outcome implicated by, or inferred from, the explicit statement. Further, “implicit” and “explicit” are intended, within this taxonomy, to act as modifiers on the notions of inclusion and exclusion so that the taxonomy divides the construction of the antagonist slot into four possible types with regard to targeted groups (Table 1):

Table 1 – Antagonist Typology

So, whenever an addressor constructs an antagonist, he does so through the construction of an argument slot that by including and excluding (implicitly or explicitly) certain groups, or types, allows the addressee to test himself for “fit” to the slot.

3.3 The Function of the Types
As we have seen, there are four possible ways, or types, that the addressor can use to construct an antagonist slot. It may serve to say a little more about how this is supposed to work and how the groups are inter-related. We shall do this firstly by saying a little more about each taxonomic type.
Explicitly Included: When an addressor identifies or constructs the antagonist position through explicit inclusion they make explicit rhetorical moves that are aimed at appealing directly to some identified group. This is perhaps the most commonly used constructive strategy and we can identify it, for example, in the chosen time slots of broadcast advertising, or the circulation demographic of some print media adverts, whereby a particular time slot and programming type or particular newspaper, magazine etc. is seen as attached to a particular sub-set of potential audience.
Explicitly Excluded: As we have said, the most common move in constructing an antagonist is to make an explicit attempt to directly address the audience that the advertising is aimed at. However, it is possible for the addressor to do this by making an explicit characterisation of the audience he does not want to sell his product to. Although rarer it is still possible to make an explicit statement or definition of ~A in order to implicitly identify and include A. (Volkswagen and Audi have very recently employed just such a strategy: Audi identifying a particular character who would not buy their product; VW identifying those who do but are undeserving).
Implicitly Excluded: This particular taxonomic category is that part of some audience that is excluded from the antagonist position under construction but is excluded as a consequence of holding some antithetical position to the explicitly identified and targeted (for inclusion) group.
Implicitly Included: This category is that part of some audience that the addressor wants to place within the constructed antagonist position but does so as a consequence of explicitly defining an antithetical group for exclusion.

3.3.1 The Interrelation of types
It should be relatively clear from the way we have identified and defined the categorical types how we think they are related, so if we are explicit about inclusion we are implicit about exclusion and vice versa. As this suggests, there are a couple of features of the way the antagonist position can be defined (and the antithetical accompaniment that comes as corollary) that fall out of this taxonomic definition. So taking A to be the included (and ~A to be excluded):
1. Wherever an antagonist is constructed both A and ~A will form part of the construction (this is a constructive disjunction)
2. Wherever A is stated explicitly ~A is implied (or is implicit)
3. Wherever ~A is stated explicitly, A is implied (or is implicit)
4. Only one constructive disjunction is stated at each stage in the construction of the antagonist
5. The “object” identified by A or ~A cannot be stated both implicitly and explicitly within the same constructive disjunction, that is, A, the included, cannot be stated both explicitly and implicitly at the same stage of construction (similarly for ~A).
6. A disjunct within a constructive disjunction cannot be part of a constructive stage without an appropriate (from (2) (3) and (4)) accompanying disjunct (from (1))

3.4 Unacknowledged Audience
It seems as though on this picture we still need to get a better understanding of ~A. After all, it looks as though we are defining ~A as whatever A is not and there are two ways in which this could done: by thinking of domain of discourse we can think of ~A in terms of either a restricted or an unrestricted domain. Taking a quick example of what we mean by restricted and unrestricted domain we can think of A as, say a twenty-something female. ~A, depending on the domain of discourse, will be: anything that is not a twenty-something female (males, horses, running shoes and so on) if we take the domain of discourse to be unrestricted; or any female that is not a twenty-something if we take the domain of discourse to be restricted to females.
Therefore, how we define our domain of discourse (and so the scope of ~A) will have some bearing on how we think the unacknowledged audience is dealt with (that is, whether there is one, and if there is an unacknowledged or “ignored” audience, how it is isolated and treated for future fit to antagonist slot). If we take the domain of discourse to be unrestricted, for example, you are either included or you are excluded and thus there is no portion of a potential audience that is ignored – if you are excluded, this places you in a group that covers a whole range of potential sub-sets or sub-domains of the “receiver”. On the other hand if the domain is taken to be restricted then it looks as though there are three groups that arise from the inclusive/exclusive strategies; included, excluded, and “ignored” or “unacknowledged”. If we take our domain of discourse to be restricted then it looks as though we owe an explanation above and beyond that which we give for the included and excluded, i.e. an account of the ignored and its relation to the extension of the “receiver” (does it form a tripartite exhaustion of this set with the included and the excluded?) and an explanation of the relation between it and the Principal and Author (do the Principal and Author in advertising really want to ignore some portion of an audience? Is the “ignored” really ignored or are they addressed but held in mind for deferred interaction? etc.) In short, depending on whether we think of the domain of discourse as being restricted or not will determine whether our taxonomy of inclusion and exclusion exhausts the extension of the “receiver”, or whether we produce a further taxonomic group; “the ignored”.
We think that the domain of discourse is restricted in the construction of imagined antagonists and that the included and excluded does not exhaust the receiver. However, we also think that this does not mean that there is some proportion of the “receiver” that is ignored (despite my introduction of this terminology above) throughout the construction of an antagonist slot by the addressor. In explaining how the “ignored” is related to the addressed and the Principal/Author we think we can show that constructing the antagonist does not mean that any part of the receiver is truly ignored, and that ultimately it would not be in the interest of the addressor to do so. How will be made clear below.

3.5 Multi-layered Applications of the Binary
The way in which that part of the “receiver” which appears to be unacknowledged or ignored at some constructive stage can be accounted for (as the adoption of a restricted domain requires) is by noting that the construction of an antagonist slot is multi-layered. That is to say that the “receiver” will be divided at some initial level between A and ~A in very broad terms. A is then further divided by a second application of a constructive disjunction (i.e. submitted to a further constructive stage) between A and ~A.[ii] This re-application of the constructive disjunction at a further stage of construction can continue across many stages until the antagonist slot looks suitably well defined. Indeed, on the level of advertising, it is part and parcel of a successful campaign that it is able to take the constructive stages far enough to identify its target well, without over specifying the antagonist and so restricting its market. So, how does this proposed multi-staged construction of the antagonist provide an account of the “ignored”?

The answer is fairly straightforward. The excluded (or ~A) of some preliminary stage of construction, becomes “ignored” at some further stage. So if we imagine a multi-staged construction of the antagonist slot where the whole of the receiver is addressed (by either inclusion or exclusion) at the first stage, with the included of the first stage addressed further at a second stage, and the excluded of the first stage addressed no more at any stage in the rest of the construction (and so on with the included and the excluded of each constructive stage), we can see that through the accumulation of each stages excluded (except the last) we have a fair body of what looks like “the ignored” come the final constructive stage and the definitive account of A (the constructed antagonist). However, as should now be plain, the whole of the receiver is addressed at some point in the construction and so no one is ultimately ignored.
There is something interesting about this in that it captures a very basic intuition about advertising and marketing; although a targeted group of some advertising campaign might be small, the bodies behind the advertising (companies, governmental agencies etc.) are not likely to want to make any group isolated from the conventions and milieu of advertising; incomeless teenagers, for example, are tomorrow’s car driver, beer drinker etc. The advertiser is in the position of wanting to talk to everyone personally at once.
Another interesting feature of this multi-layered application is that it takes pressure off the constructive binary in its role of constructing the antagonist. Instead of one application of the constructive disjunct defining A and ~A we can take away the strain of giving tight definitions (particularly the included, A) and constructing the antagonist in one fell swoop by allowing the construction to develop more gradually over a multitude of constructive stages using more and more rhetorical devices in the process of defining the included and the excluded at each stage.

One final point here before we go on to make an application of this structure (along with the involved notions of inclusion and exclusion) is that the notion of stages might allow us to tell an interesting tale about the relations between the excluded of each constructive stage. There might be some way to describe the degree of exclusion of each stage as we find it in the final constructive stage. The thought here is that we can follow a similar strategy to that employed by Fairclough (Fairclough: 1995) in his discussion of “how events, situations, relationships, people and so forth are represented in [media] texts” (Fairclough: 1995, 103). Fairclough’s discussion focuses at some points on noting what is absent from the text and, to some extent, “a scale of presence” (Fairclough: 1995, 106). The comparison with Fairclough’s ideas for absence in media text would end here though since he thinks his scale, “running from ‘absent’ to ‘foregrounded’” (Ibid.) covers both what is present and what is absent, whereas we are here talking about the extent of exclusion. The point here is no more in depth than to suggest that the structure of our constructive stages might allow us to give a scaled account of exclusion from the antagonist slot in a way similar to that envisaged by Fairclough for presence in media texts generally. Although the need to provide an account of this scale here is secondary (and so will be passed over) it is good to note that it seems plausible, and perhaps even desirable[iii], that such an account could be given.

4. Extended Example
Let us then, make a fairly cursory application of the general structure that we have been discussing to an example. The example we are using is a one-page information advertisement from The Muslim News on 21st December 2001 (See Figure 2). There are multiple uses of the constructive disjunction through out this advertisement and we shall treat them in turn as they form part of the wider, multi-staged antagonist construction. We will look at both the ignored at each stage and the rhetorical devices that seem to be at play. We will finish with a final result which gives us the antagonist that is constructed for this advertisement through these multi-staged applications of the constructive disjunction, however, we will not provide an account of the ignored or excluded at this final stage since it is not clear how we should differentiate these at the point of final definition for A.
We should note that there is also room for some explanation of how the domain of discourse shifts from one constructive stage to the next; just as the excluded from one stage becomes the ignored of the next, the included of one stage becomes the domain of the next. We shall omit this detail here though since we have paid no formal or detailed attention to it.

Figure 2 – Copyright on Figure 2 was unclear at date of submission. Every attempt is being made, both by the authors and relevant personnel at the HMSO, to clarify copyright and grant permission for use before publication.

The construction of the antagonist here then may go something like this:
Stage One:
Domain – People
Ignored – No one
Explicitly Included – Muslims
Implicitly Excluded – Non-Muslims
Rhetorical device: The location of the advertisement in the Muslim News, a medium that has a high percentage Muslim demographic. The paper is aimed at Muslims, this is explicit in the name etc., non-Muslims then are implicitly excluded

Stage Two:
Domain – Muslims
Ignored – Non-Muslims
Explicitly Included – British Muslims
Implicitly Excluded – Non-British Muslims
Rhetorical Device: The use of English language and appeal to authority of the Muslim Council of Britain, Association of British Hujjaj.

Note:
Arguably this definition of British Muslims is apparent at the first stage since the newspaper uses the English language and has a target demographic of British Muslims. This is not a problem for our taxonomy since the advertisement is also capable of standing on its own and has been widely distributed as wall posters for doctor’s surgeries. This is why there are rhetorical devices at play in the poster itself that help to include Muslims and exclude non-Muslims (the first stage’s constructive disjunction); note the semiotic devices at play, iconic and symbolic alike, in the “Arabic” style font and crescent moon aimed explicitly at including Muslims and implicitly at excluding non-Muslims. It is unsurprising then that the inclusive strategies of the first and second stage overlap to some extent here.

Stage Three:
Domain – British Muslims
Ignored – Non-British Muslims
Explicitly Included –  “Responsible” British Muslims
Implicitly Excluded –  “Dependent” British Muslims
Rhetorical Device: The imperative “protect yourself and your family “. This command isolates those who are either responsible for themselves or for themselves and their families. It implicitly excludes those British Muslims that are dependent upon a parent or a carer since no mention of them is made.

Stage Four:
Domain –  “Responsible” British Muslims
Ignored –  “Dependent” British Muslims
Explicitly Included –  “Responsible” British Muslims with unvaccinated family members
Implicitly Excluded – “Responsible” British Muslims without unvaccinated family members
Rhetorical Device: The completion of the imperative with “from meningitis”. Obviously those British Muslims who are responsible for obtaining vaccines for themselves and their families and have already done so need to be excluded. Here they are excluded implicitly because the imperative makes direct (and so explicit) appeal to those Muslims that are responsible for themselves and families with reference to the vaccine.

Stage Five:
Domain –  “Responsible” British Muslims with unvaccinated family members
Ignored –  “Responsible” British Muslims without unvaccinated family members
Explicitly Included – “Responsible” British Muslims with unvaccinated family members going to Hajj or Umrah
Implicitly Excluded – “Responsible” British Muslims with unvaccinated family members not going to Hajj or Umrah
Rhetorical Device: The conditional “If you are going to Hajj or Umrah this year, make sure you receive the correct vaccinations from your doctor”. It is easy to use this statement to test ourselves for fit. If I am not going to Hajj or Umrah then I know that the rest of the advertisement is not relevant to me and so I am excluded. If am going to Hajj or Umrah then I know that I must continue to engage further to test for fit (or to adopt the antagonist position).

Note:
There seems to be a possibility that this stage might precede the straight forward imperative at stage four, that is, that the antagonist is better defined first by including those who are going to Hajj or Umrah and then those who are not vaccinated. This is open to debate. However, it seems more likely that these kinds of thought are because of some inclinations we have about the way we expect the strategy to work rather the way it does. It seems that in this case, the way that the poster is read and constructed, the “responsible” are isolated first and the pilgrims second. The order of the constructive stages are separate from the rhetorical effectiveness of an advertisement. We might think that the antagonist would be better defined if the stages were ordered differently, but this is separate to the way in which the antagonist is actually constructed by the addressee.

The position, or antagonist construction, that we find ourselves with in the end is the included of the final stage. In this case then, what we get is this:
Final Result:
Constructed Antagonist — Unvaccinated “responsible” British Muslims going to Hajj or Umrah
Rhetorical Device: This still may not be the final term in this example, since advertisement, having established a slot for a potential antagonist through various rhetorical stages, then goes on to provide more in depth information aimed specifically at this construction. However, the information that follows in the advert is about the specific kind of meningococcal vaccines that are required, where to get them and where to get more information should it be needed. All of this is aimed at the constructed antagonist that we arrive at the end of the various inclusive and exclusive stages.

5. Conclusion
In this paper we have attempted to address the problems which the heterogeneous, non-interactive antagonist poses to argument1. We introduced an approach to the analysis of argument1 which suggests that, in order to construct a comprehensible, acceptable and hence successful argument1, protagonists should (and, in the case of advertising, do) construct the antagonist position through a taxonomy of progressive inclusion. We have shown, through the extended application of our taxonomy, that a pragma-dialectic approach to argumentation can deal with the problems of non-interactive, heterogeneous audience Govier suggests. Our example and motivation throughout has drawn on the genre of advertising which we take, and hope to have shown, is an example of argument (argument1) but with the interesting anomaly of non-interactive and/or heterogeneous audience that Govier sees as problematic. It should also be clear that we think the ‘taxonomy of inclusion’ used in constructing an antagonist in advertising discourse is applicable to wider scenarios of non-interactive and heterogeneous audience. Consequently, we feel that we have shown a development and strengthening of the pragma-dialectical model by providing an account of antagonist construction in argument1.

NOTES
[*] Copyright on Figure 2 was unclear at date of submission. Every attempt is being made, both by the authors and relevant personnel at the HMSO, to clarify copyright and grant permission for use before publication.
[i] Goffman argues that in any communicative event, the speaker/writer role can be dissected into three “functional nodes in a communicative system” (1981: 144) – the animator, the author and the principal. Taking each of these in turn, Goffman suggests: the animator is the “body engaged in acoustic activity”, or the “individual[s] active in the role of utterance production”; the author is realised by “someone who has selected the sentiments that are being expressed and the words in which they are encoded”; whilst the ‘node’ of the principal falls to “someone whose position is established by the words that are spoken, someone whose beliefs have been told, someone who is committed to what the words say” (emphases added, Ibid.).
[ii] This is part and parcel of why we think that we should adopt restricted domain of discourse; if the domain were unrestricted, then ~A at different constructive stages of the same construction would be co-extensional, and this seems not to capture what goes on in the narrowing of an audience or targeted group; this should become clearer in the extended example given below.
[iii] Desirable to the extent that there is a basic intuition that, for example, in an advertisement aimed at black male youth, the white elderly female population seem to be more excluded than, say, white male (or perhaps even female) youth, even though all are arguably excluded.

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