ISSA Proceedings 2010 – Institutional Constraints On The (Un)Sound Use Of The Argument From Expert Opinion In The Medical Context

• by: Sarah Bigi - Catholic University of Milan (Italy)

1. Introduction
The present paper stems from a larger research project [i] aimed at describing the most relevant features of the institutional context that constrain interactions between doctors and patients during medical consultations within the framework of the Italian National Health Care Service. The project takes into consideration the persuasive moves within the consultations in order to identify the most effective arguments and possible unsound persuasive strategies. Particular attention is placed on the institutional features of the context within which the analyzed consultations are set. This choice is justified by the crucial role that the context plays in any kind of verbal interaction; for the analysis of medical consultations this is doubly important as the institutional context they occur in is highly regulated and conventionalized, and also the roles of doctor and patient have some context- and culture-dependent features, which can have a certain import on the development of the consultation (see Bigi 2010). Building also on previous research (Bigi submitted), the present paper aims to identify the contextual features that may lead to unsound uses of the argument from expert opinion.

The paper is structured as follows: paragraph 2 presents a brief review of the relevant literature on the argument scheme from authority or from expert opinion. This will show the general agreement on the validity of this argument scheme along with its main limitations. In paragraph 3, the contextual constraints on the medical consultation are described. The Italian health care system is described from the point of view of its overall structure in order to highlight the main institutional features that can constrain the development of the consultation, the structure of which is then described. In paragraph 4, two main conditions that favor unsound uses of the argument from expert opinion are described. The final paragraph is devoted to some concluding remarks. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2010 – The Virtual World of Policy Arguments: The Case Of The Electronic Health Record

• by: Frans Birrer - Leiden University & Wouter Mensink - Leiden University

1. Introduction
Argumentation in the sphere of politics can be very complex. Several origins of this complexity can be distinguished. First, the argumentation often does not fit straightforward schemes of deduction or induction; it is conductive, that is, it is nonconclusive, with multiple premises (Govier, 1987). Second, the number of premises can be considerable (as the case in this paper will show). Third, a political argument may rest on a cluster of connected assumptions that tend to be taken as a whole, rather than be critically examined individually.

Sometimes this connectedness has to do with a particular normative framing, such as clusters in risk perception as described by cultural bias theory (Thompson et al., 1990, based on the work of Mary Douglas; for an example in the field of argumentation, see Birrer, Pranger 1994), which suggests that risks are naturally framed in the context of a political perspective on how society should deal with such risks.

Connectedness also arises when radical policy innovations or ‘transitions’ are discussed which involve multiple changes at various levels at the same time. Such radical innovations are sometimes considered the only effective way to deal with a certain policy problem, or a set of policy problems. Only the entire package of measures (and their expected effects) are supposed to establish the desired result; and not only is each individual measure assumed to be a necessary condition for the realisation of the end result, the effects of the individual changes may also interact, adding yet more complexity. It is this latter kind of connectedness problem that we will figure in this paper. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2010 – Enthymemes Of Relation And National Legitimation: Argument And Tombs Of The Unknown

• by: Carole Blair - University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, V. William Balthrop - University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill & Neil Michel - Axiom PhotoDesign, Davis, California

1. Introduction
Rhetorical practice has been retheorized in recent years to include not only linguistic and visual signs, but also material places and objects. Rhetorical studies of places and/or objects, such as quilts, gravestones, coffee houses, markets, parks, cityscapes, museums, and monuments, have made the claim repeatedly that objects and built environments may be just as rhetorical as words (Biesecker, 2002; Blair, 1999; Blair, 2001; Blair & Michel, 2000; Blair & Michel, 2007; Dickinson, 1997; Dickinson, Ott, & Aoki, 2005; Dickinson, Ott & Aoki, 2006; Gallagher, 1999; Gallagher, 2004; Zagacki & Gallagher, 2009). These claims have prompted Ott and Dickinson (2009), in an important recent synthesis, to take the position that “visual rhetoric in everyday life is not merely visual; it is not only an effect of the eye or a consequence of cognition” (p. 397). Simply put, visual images, and even more importantly objects and places, cannot be reduced to the ocular.

Claims about the argumentative character of place have been less plentiful, but the parallel seems to us reasonable. Indeed, we argued at the last ISSA conference that places have argumentative “potency” and, as Dickinson and Ott also suggest, that their character cannot be contained “merely,” within the visual (Blair, Balthrop, & Michel, 2007, p. 146). Still, what remains unclear is how objects or places take on argumentative force, how they accrete to themselves the capacity to argue a case to those who encounter or traverse them. We have proposed more recently that to treat “commemorative places as themselves rhetorical” is not to deny the “significance of the supplementary rhetoric that a place may give rise to, and that in turn reinterprets or reperforms the place.” We maintained, furthermore, that “juxtapositions of the material (physical place) and its circulations,” such as speech, ritual, journalistic accounts, and so forth, allow us to better understand the rhetorical dimensions of commemoration (Balthrop, Blair, & Michel, 2010, p. 172). Here we take up this suggestion more directly in analyzing the articulations of national Tombs of the Unknown Soldier (or Unknown Warrior) with public, press, and government discourses; ceremonial events; symbolic geographies; and cultural allusions and mythoi. Our reason for doing so is to show specifically how an argument is forged, in a particular historical moment, by a commemorative place in its articulations with these other cultural practices (e.g., Grossberg, 1992; Grossberg, 1997).[i] That is, while it may seem clear that places “speak,” we try to establish how they may speak argumentatively. Importantly, of course, the mediating rituals, speech, media accounts, and interpretations do not remain stable, so the argument made by a place certainly will change with its different circulations and articulations historically. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2010 – Logic In The Pragma-Dialectical Theory

• by: J. Anthony Blair - Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation and Rhetoric - University of Windsor

1. Introduction – Logic in the Pragma-Dialectical Theory [i]
Over the past fourteen years the proponents of the Pragma-Dialectical[ii] approach to argumentation have devoted the lion’s share of their efforts to working out in detail how the rhetorical properties of arguments and argumentation can be accommodated within their pragma-dialectical framework. By now, the dialectical and rhetorical properties of arguments have been theoretically integrated to their satisfaction (see van Eemeren and Houtlosser 2009, van Eemeren 2010). Thus, of the classical triad – logic, dialectic and rhetoric – two members have been accounted for in the theory. What, one might ask, of the third member: logic?

In the early development of the Pragma-Dialectical approach, its authors saw themselves as needing to differentiate their dialectics-oriented program from the then-dominant paradigms of logic and rhetoric (see van Eemeren & Grootendorst 1984 [Speech Acts in Argumentative Discussions], hereafter SAAD, pp. 12-13, 16). Even in the latest version of the theory, the authors are critical of the Perelmanian approach, representing a certain take on rhetoric, and the Toulminian approach, representing a certain take on logic (see van Eemeren & Grootendorst 2004 [A Systematic Theory of Argumentation], hereafter STA, pp. 44-50). They have, however, come to terms with at least some features of rhetoric, namely those that clearly can and do play a role within argumentative discussions aimed at resolving a difference of opinion in a reasonable way. The time has come, I contend, for the proponents of the Pragma-Dialectical approach to undertake the effort of sorting out with similar care their conception of logic and its role in their theory. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2010 – Argumentation And Contemporary Concerns For Justice: Shifting Focus From The Universal Audience To The Common Good

• by: George Boger - Canisius College

1. Concern for justice underpinning the argumentation movement
The modern argumentation movement, richly combining new rhetoric with currents of informal logic, pragma-dialectics and dialogue logic continues to be inspired by two humanist concerns – to empower human beings by liberating them from the regime of Cartesian rationalism and to promote justice. When we look back to the modern progenitors of our movement, we distinctly hear Perelman, Toulmin, and Hamblin rail against oppressive formalism and to promote the liberating dynamics of democratic deliberation. Perelman writes that “we combat uncompromising and irreducible philosophical oppositions presented by all kinds of absolutism” (Toulmin 1969, p. 510) and that “[argument] strength is appraised by application of the rule of justice: that which was capable of convincing in a specific situation will appear to be convincing in a similar or analogous situation” (Toulmin 1969, p. 464). The new rhetoric “constitutes a break with a concept of reason and reasoning due to Descartes which has set its mark on Western philosophy for the last three centuries” (Toulmin 1969, p. 1). And since no one deliberates and argues what is God-given necessary or self-evident, “all thought becomes human and fallible … knowledge thus ceases to be impersonal because every scientific thought becomes a human one, i.e., fallible, situated in and subjected to controversy” (Toulmin 1982, p. 159). Toulmin’s social history of logic locates an origin of oppressive rationality in the Peace of Westphalia that generated “a poisoned chalice: intellectual dogmatism, political chauvinism, and sectarian religion formed [a single ideological package]” (Toulmin 2001, p. 158). Toulmin also cautioned against any God’s-eye-view (Toulmin 1958, pp. 184-185). Hamblin declared that “what is, above all, necessary is to dethrone deduction from its supposed pre-eminent position as a provider of certainty” (Hamblin 1993, p. 250). Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2010 – On The Priority Of Epistemic Rationality

• by: Patrick Bondy - McMaster University

1. Introduction
One influential way to think about arguments is the following: an argument consists of premises asserted in support of an asserted conclusion; the purpose of arguments is to rationally persuade their audience of the truth of their conclusions; good arguments are those that achieve their purpose. On this picture, in order for an argument to achieve rational persuasion, its premises must be rationally acceptable to the participants in the argument, and it must be rational to think that the premises support the conclusion. And, if we take the type of rationality relevant to the assessment of arguments to be epistemic rationality, then the theory of epistemic rationality becomes directly relevant to the theory of argument.

What I want to do in this paper is to try to show that epistemic rationality is not a matter of believing in such a way as to maximize the likelihood of achieving our epistemic goals. If it were, then epistemic rationality would be a species of practical rationality. But it cannot be a species of practical rationality, because it is prior to practical rationality. It follows that epistemic rationality is not a matter of achieving our epistemic goals.
In the context of the theory of argument, it is particularly important to see that epistemic rationality is not a matter of believing so as to achieve our epistemic goals: if it were, then for an agent who does not care about achieving an epistemic goal, nothing would count as epistemically rational or irrational. It would then follow that for a subject who lacked an epistemic goal, no arguments could count as good or bad. An epistemic approach would have nothing to say about arguments in such cases. I take it that that would be the wrong result, and a serious mark against the epistemic approach to argument evaluation, because the goodness or badness of arguments should not depend on whether people have an epistemic goal. Read more