ISSA Proceedings 2010 – Polemical Discourse On The Net: “Flames” In Argumentation

• by: Ruth Amossy - ADARR, Tel-Aviv University

Studies in CMC have investigated the phenomenon of “flame” and “flaming”, understood as aggressive and hostile interactions via email and online discussions. While borrowed from popular discourse, the notion has been the object of various inquiries in communication studies and social psychology, raising questions such as its exact definition, its exclusive or non-exclusive belonging to online communication, its socio-psychological sources and its functions in virtual interactions. In this paper, unlike most of the scientific literature rooted in the social sciences, I will adopt a broad argumentative approach to flaming, analyzing it as a discursive and argumentative phenomenon pertaining to polemical discourse. I will borrow my case study from a specific online genre: talkbacks and, more specifically, ordinary citizens’ debates concerning public affairs in electronic newspapers.
I will first devote a short section to the notion of flaming in the social sciences in order to see how it can be translated into the field of argumentation. I will then try to integrate it into a coherent theory of polemical discourse in general, and of online controversy in particular. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2010 – The Reasonableness Of Retracting A Standpoint In A Political Interview

• by: Corina Andone - University of Amsterdam

1. Responding to an accusation of inconsistency in a political interview
Accusing a politician of being inconsistent is common practice for interviewers in a political interview. In a political interview, interviewers are interested in gaining information from their interlocutors but, more often than not, their questions require the politician to clarify and justify his views. Questions by means of which an inconsistency is pointed out are an excellent means of urging the politician to justify his views before the listening, reading or television-watching audience, that is, in fact, the primary addressee in a political interview.[i] The audience presumably values political consistency and expects a politician who is inconsistent to account for this lack of consistency.

A charge of inconsistency may affect the politician’s image in the eyes of the public negatively. The politician, being well aware of the possible damage, more often than not tries to answer in a way that makes him no longer look inconsistent. Possible responses, among many others, are avoiding discussing the criticism of inconsistency, giving the inconsistency a positive connotation and retracting the earlier standpoint so that the politician is no longer committed to two inconsistent standpoints.

In this paper, I will concentrate on the cases in which the politician retracts a standpoint in response to an accusation of inconsistency. I will be concerned with the evaluation of such responses from a pragma-dialectical perspective.[ii] The argumentative move at hand will be seen as an instance of strategic manoeuvring reconstructed as part of the confrontation stage of a critical discussion[iii] by means of which a politician is taken to be dialectically interested in defining clearly the difference of opinion and rhetorically in doing so in his own favor. The evaluation of the politician’s move of retracting a standpoint will be carried out by applying a set of soundness conditions. These conditions will constitute the criteria for identifying the move as reasonable or unreasonable. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2010 – Should “Argument” Be Defined Without Reference To Use?

• by: Gregory Bassham - King’s College (Pennsylvania)

In his 2005 Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation keynote address, “Argument and Its Uses” (Blair 2005), J. Anthony Blair contends that arguments need not involve any attempt at persuasion, and in fact, that “argument” should be defined without reference to any particular use at all. Roughly speaking, a set of propositions counts as an argument, on his view, “just when all but one of them constitute a reason for the remaining one,” that is, support the remaining proposition to some degree.

I shall argue that Blair is correct in thinking that arguments need not be intended to persuade, but that his definition of “argument” is faulty. Contra Blair, I argue that “argument” cannot be defined independently of use – specifically, the intentional use of reasons to support a conclusion.

1. Must All Arguments Be Intended to Persuade?
It is widely agreed that arguments typically or paradigmatically are aimed at persuasion – that is, at convincing readers or listeners to accept a claim. Some theorists have gone further, claiming that all arguments, by definition or conceptual necessity, are intended to persuade. Blair believes this is a mistake and offers seven examples of what he takes to be non-persuasive argumentative discourse. These include:
1. Quasi-persuasion: offering reasons in order to strengthen or weaken adherence to a claim, or to show that a claim is possibly true, rather than to convince someone to adopt or abandon the claim.
2. Inquiry/investigation and deliberation: considering and weighing arguments, not to defend some pre-existing view, but to determine what to believe or what to do.
3. Justification: defending one’s acceptance of a particular claim, without any intention or expectation of persuading others to accept that claim.
4. Collaboration: attempting, through dialogue, to find and build on common ground, rather than to convince one discussant to accept a claim defended by another.
5. Rationale-giving: explaining the basis for a particular decision or judgment (e.g., the awarding of a prize or a legal decision), with no intent to persuade.
6. Edification/instruction: weighing arguments pro and con, either for one’s own edification or as a means of instructing others.
7. Evaluation: using arguments (as a teacher, for example) to provide practice and/or to assess performance in critical analysis. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2010 – Critical Inquiry: Considering The Context

• by: Mark Battersby - Capilano University & Sharon Bailin - Simon Fraser University

1.Introduction
The significance of considering the context surrounding an issue is underestimated and often overlooked in approaches to critical thinking theory and instruction based on informal logic. For example, fallacies of relevance such as ad hominem are seen as fallacious precisely because they appeal to the context rather than to the argument itself. In this paper we challenge this view, demonstrating how and under what circumstances considering context is relevant and even vital to critical thinking.

We begin by arguing that the downplaying of the relevance of context stems from the view of critical thinking as essentially the evaluation of individual arguments. This view, which betrays the vestiges of the deductivist heritage of informal logic, still underpins much critical thinking instruction.

We have argued, on the contrary, that critical thinking is better viewed in terms of what we refer to as critical inquiry in which argumentation is seen as a way of arriving at judgments on complex issues. This is a dialectical process involving the comparative weighing of a variety of contending positions and arguments in order to come to a reasoned judgment on the issue (Bailin & Battersby 2009; Battersby & Bailin 2010). Further, we argue that critical thinking instruction should focus on this inquiry process (Bailin & Battersby, 2010). Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2010 – Rhetorical Figures And Their Chances In Hybrid Media

• by: Hilde Van Belle - Lessius University College Antwerpen

1. Visual and verbal communication
The study of rhetoric is generally restricted to verbal communication. The art of rhetoric found its origin in the oratory, evidently so, and it is assumed that treatises on rhetoric mainly presented advice on the writing of appealing speeches that convince their audiences. However, those assumptions tend to neglect the fact that rhetoric treatises did not only handle the inventing and writing of speeches, but also the delivery. The attention for speech delivery brings into play elements of voice and body language and the audio-visual aspects of presentation. Actually, also more outspoken non-verbal elements used to be considered: the showing of a scar or a bloody weapon could be an important feature of a successful speech (Hobbs 2004, p. 58).
However, the relative neglect of the visual in the field of rhetoric does not mean that it received no scholarly attention at all. For instance: writing and speaking instruction often handled the translation of visual images into verbal text – and the other way around. There were numerous ekphrasis advices on the composition of vivid descriptions, on ‘bringing before the eyes’ (Hobbs 2004, p. 56). Quintilian e.g., saw visualisation as the most powerful means of arousing emotion, possibly the best way to convince an audience.
It is far beyond the scope of this paper to outline the history of verbal versus pictorial rhetoric or communication. Basically, I assume that, although the verbal and the visual probably do have a ‘wild zone’ to themselves, they have a lot in common. The study of rhetoric may have its roots in oral discourse, and may have focused upon verbal communication too easily, yet there are no clear reasons why it should explicitly exclude visual communication and persuasion. A clash between verbal and visual communication does not seem to be constitutive for the discipline of rhetoric (Goggin 2004). Rather, the interrelation between the two can be assumed in many ways.

In our times, different modes are merging more and more into hybrid texts. This increasing multimodality does include the reshuffling of historical and intellectual status cards. Some experts in visual communication react against the supremacy of written words in the western intellectual tradition, claiming that images do not deserve to be banned to categories of illiteracy, delusion, subjectivity, irrationality and emotion, but are at least as basic to human communication and intelligence as verbal language. How difficult it may be, it is important to work in a tradition that does not put both fields in opposition, and to find out, without denying the distinctions, how the different perspectives can enrich analysis and interpretation. I will examine how a rhetorical figure can originate in both a verbal and a visual mode, and what we can learn about the figure by looking at it from this double perspective. First, I will focus on the verbal and visual aspects in the construction of meaning and argument (§ 2). Then, I will go into research on figuration that tries to restore the link between the form and the function of style figures (§ 3). From that point, I will assess some cases of the figure antithesis within their specific context and point out the different functions of the verbal and the visual (§ 4). Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2010 – Arguments, Stories And Evidence: Critical Questions For Fact-Finding

• by: Floris Bex - University of Dundee & Bart Verheij - University of Groningen

1. Introduction 
In this paper, we look at critical questions for the process of reasoning about the facts and the evidence in criminal cases [i]. In the literature, essentially two approaches to this reasoning can be can be distinguished: the argumentative and the narrative approach. In the argumentative (or argument-based) approach, the facts should be supported by reasons based on evidence.  Key questions for argumentative approaches include which reasons can support which conclusions under which circumstances (the search for warrants and argumentation schemes, cf. Toulmin 1958, Walton et al. 2008) and how to handle conflicts of reasons and exceptions (the defeasibility of argumentation, cf. Loui 1995). The argumentative approach in legal fact-finding is based on Wigmore (1931), whose hand-drawn evidence charts predate many later developments in legal theory (Anderson et al. 2005). The approach has been explored in the field of argumentation by Walton (2002) and Bex et al. (2003), who propose and analyse numerous argumentation schemes that can be used to reason from the evidence to the facts.

The second approach to the rational establishment of the facts involves presenting these facts as narratives or stories – coherent descriptions of what might have happened – that causally explain as much of the evidence in the case as possible. In a criminal case the narrative typically includes the events of the crime (e.g. the victim being shot) information about the intentions of the criminal (e.g. vengeance) and the consequences of the crime (e.g. a dead body). Key questions in a narrative approach include how to establish the coherence and quality of stories (the search for plausibility criteria), when to believe a story (the issue of justification of the belief in a story) and how to choose between alternative stories (the issue of story comparison). The narrative approach has been studied as a model of cognitive decision-making in the psychology of law (Pennington and Hastie 1993, Wagenaar et al. 1993) and as a more analytical model for inference to the best explanation in (legal) philosophy (Josephson 2002, Thagard 2004, Pardo and Allen 2007). The narrative approach is less well represented in the literature on argumentation. In this paper we will show that a strong analogy can be drawn between reasoning patterns in argumentation, the familiar argumentation schemes (Walton et al. 2008), and patterns in the narrative approach, which we call story schemes (Bex 2009). These story schemes act as a background for particular instantiated stories in the same way as argumentation schemes act as a background for particular instantiated arguments. Furthermore, story schemes give rise to relevant critical questions in the same way as argumentation schemes. Read more