ISSA Proceedings 2010 – Gwen Ifill: Moderator Or Opponent In The 2008 Vice-Presidential Debate?

• by: Edward Panetta - University of Georgia

The October 2008 Vice-Presidential debate between Senator Joe Biden of Delaware and Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska drew over 70 million US viewers to their television sets. It was the second most watched political debate in the modern era of televised debates, surpassed only by the 80 million viewers for the Carter-Reagan debate in October of 1980.  The Biden-Palin debate had a higher viewership that the first McCain-Obama debate or the George HW Bush-Geraldine Ferraro debate of 1984 which had previously held the record for the most viewed Vice-Presidential debate in American political history (Bauder).

By late September 2008 there was widespread speculation in the mainstream press that Sarah Palin was not prepared to participate in a Vice-Presidential debate.  In the period leading up to the debate, she had very few unscripted public events.  And, her performance in mainstream media interviews heightened the concern that Governor Palin was not prepared for high office. Against this backdrop, an important element of the McCain campaign’s pre-debate preparation was an orchestrated effort to place the moderator, Gwen Ifill, into an adversarial role.  In making this move, Governor Palin was provided a rhetorical location from which she could successful dismiss many of the inquiries made by Ms. Ifill during the debate.

In this instance, traditional debate theory can be used to unpack the relationship between the moderator, a designated member of the press, and the political candidate.  Gwen Ifill was transformed from a debate moderator into an opponent for many who observed the debate. The McCain team nurtured the expectation that Ifill would join with Joe Biden to question Governor Palin’s fitness for office. In many respects this was the same rhetorical transformation of a journalist’s role found in the 1988 Vice-Presidential debate between Dan Quayle and Lloyd Bensen (Weiler). This instance differs from the 1988 Bensen/Quayle debate, in that the characterization of the debate as the Republican candidate versus the media and the Democratic candidate was an orchestrated element of the pre-debate preparation by the McCain campaign. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2010 – Argumentation: Problems Of Style And The Contribution Of Kenneth Burke

• by: Donn W. Parson - University of Kansas, USA

In the fourth ISSA Conference in 1998, George Ziegelmueller and Donn Parson proposed a perspective on what constituted linguistically sound arguments.  It included provisions that (1) it conforms to the traditional field invariant standards of inductive and deductive argument, (2) is based upon date appropriate to the audience and field, and (3) is expressed in language that enhances the evocative and ethical force of argument.  What was missing was the development of the third characteristic of linguistically sound arguments: the problem of language.

There has always been some division between logos and lexis.  From the time of Aristotle, whose view of argument validity is determined by the underlying notion of mathematical validity, to Stephen Toulmin, who chose to substitute the jurisprudential model for the mathematical model, logos was still the dominant approach to argument.  One of the arguments Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca make is that formal systems of logic, which are dependent on mathematical reasoning, seem unrelated to rational evidence.  They therefore propose a new look at argumentation – a new rhetoric (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, 3-9). Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2010 – Dancing, Dueling, And Argumentation: On The Normative Shape Of The Practice Of Argumentation

• by: Steven W. Patterson - Marygrove College, Detroit, MI, USA

1. Introduction [i]
Do we have an obligation to argue? If so, where does that obligation come from and how does it bind us? Is the obligation to argue a moral obligation, or a prudential one, or is it perhaps an obligation of some other sort? These questions all fall within a more general sphere of concerns that I believe would be aptly labeled the sphere of normativity in argumentation. These questions are not the whole of this sphere of concerns, but they are important members of it—perhaps even essential starting points. In this paper I will address this sphere by arguing: 1) that we do have an obligation to argue, and 2) that the obligation to argue applies to us by virtue of our standing as co-participants in a convention of argumentation. My account has its basis in social philosophy, and so is somewhat unlike other contemporary views on offer regarding the obligation to argue. It will be worthwhile to begin with a brief review of these accounts before proceeding to my own.[ii]

2. Two Views of the Obligation to Argue
Most positive treatments of the obligation to argue are individualistic in their construction.  In them the obligation to argue is treated analogously to moral obligation. This individualistic focus is understandable—it is a great aid in moving, via easy conceptual transits and analogies, between the familiar territory of philosophical ethics and the less-settled country of normative considerations about argumentation.  That said, I wish here to think about the obligation to argue from the standpoint of the social and pragmatic context. I wish to think of the obligation to argue not as it applies to individuals in particular instances of argumentation, but in terms of the practice of argumentation taken as a whole.[iii]  But is there any such thing as a practice of argumentation within which one could find an obligation to argue? At least the idea is not an entirely new one. In Manifest Rationality Ralph Johnson, for example, characterizes the practice of argumentation as
…the sociocultural activity of constructing, presenting, and criticizing and revising arguments.  This activity cannot be understood as the activity of any individual or group of individuals but rather must be understood within the network of customs, habits, and activities of the broader society that gives birth to it, which continues to maintain it and that the practice serves (Johnson 2000, pp. 154-5). Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2010 – Reasonable Non-Agreement In Critical Discussions

• by: Sune Holm Pedersen - London School of Economics and Political Science, United Kingdom

1. Introduction
In current scholarly literature both in and around the field of argumentation theory, a debate has arisen over the topic of disagreements. In particular, scholars are devoting attention to the issue of whether it is possible for two parties engaged in a fully reasonable discussion to end their discussion without reaching an agreement on the acceptability of the point at issue. In the literature, such an outcome of an argumentative discussion is typically referred to by means of expressions such as e.g. “reasonable disagreement,” (Feldman, 2006; Kelly, 2007) or “legitimate dissensus” (Kock, 2008). Opinions are divided on the issue of whether such an outcome of an argumentative discussion is possible.
In this paper, I refer to such an outcome of an argumentative discussion as “reasonable non-agreement.”[i] Whether reasonable non-agreement is possible of course crucially depends on the underlying normative question of what in fact counts as reasonable discussion behaviour. With regard to this question, theorists differ substantially in their views, and it is this disagreement that gives rise to different answers to the question of whether reasonable non-agreement is possible.

In this essay I will focus on the pragma-dialectical approach to argumentation theory and the pragma-dialectical conception of reasonableness. As opposed to other –  less mature – theories of argumentation, the pragma-dialectical theory is equipped with an explicitly developed perspective of reasonableness. In pragma-dialectics, reasonableness is fleshed out through systematically formulated standards known as “rules for a critical discussion.” From the pragma-dialectical perspective, argumentative moves are regarded as reasonable only if they do not breach any of the rules for a critical discussion. But what is the effect of these rules on the possibility of reasonable non-agreement? Or put more specifically: Do the rules for a critical discussion permit or prevent reasonable non-agreement? That is the general issue of this essay, which can be phrased somewhat more carefully in the following way:
Q: Is it possible for a protagonist and an antagonist conducting a discussion in full accordance with the pragma-dialectical rules for a critical discussion to end their discussion without reaching agreement on the acceptability of the standpoint at issue? In other words, is pragma-dialectical reasonable non-agreement possible? Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2010 – Epistemic Foundationalism and Aristotle’s Principle of the Absolute

• by: Jeanne Peijnenburg - University of Groningen

1. Turtles all the way down 
According to an ancient Hindu myth, the earth is a flat disc resting on the back of a tiger. The tiger stands on an elephant, and the elephant in turn stands on the carapace of Chukwa, a gigantic tortoise. The obvious question ‘What is Chukwa standing on?’ was already posed by John Locke in the seventeenth century and again by William James two centuries later (Locke 1959, p. 230, p. 392; James 1931). Not that Locke and James were particularly interested in an answer: it seems that they simply wanted to make fun of a cosmogony that reduced the world to an exotic version of the Grimm’s Bremen Town Musicians.

A variant of this myth is to be found in the first lines of Stephen Hawking’s bestseller A Brief History of Time:
“A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: ‘What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.’ The scientist gave a superior smile before replying: ‘What is the tortoise standing on?’ ‘You’re very clever, young man, very clever’, said the old lady. ‘But it’s turtles all the way down!’ (Hawking 1988, p. 1)

The idea of an infinite sequence of turtles supporting the earth is, if anything, even more absurd than that of one reptile doing the job. An infinite set of turtles, assuming that they could exist, would after all still need to stand on some ground. What could that ground be? Not a turtle, for every turtle has another turtle under its feet. But it can be nothing other than a turtle, after all it’s turtles all the way down. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2010 – How Authors Justify Their Participation In Literary Interviews: Analyzing The Argumentative Dimension Of The Interview Through Its Interactions

• by: Valeria Pery-Borissov & Galia Yanoshevsky - Bar-Ilan University

Disinclination to participate in interviews is common to some authors, for whom this kind of journalistic practice contradicts with the raison d’être of a writer, which is to express herself via her novels and other writings. The interview challenges this idea by shedding light on the image of the author and her personality, in a way that sometimes casts a shadow over her works. But literary interviews are telling, not only because of what they disclose on the author of the novels we love to read, but also because they may reveal other aspects, world views, attitudes towards literature, and so forth. In this particular paper, we choose to focus on ways in which reluctant authors justify their choice to be interviewed during the interview. The theoretical framework in which we discuss this is based on three elements.

One has to do with the literary interview and its significance to the study of literary criticism. As a genre which brings to the fore the personality of the writer, it has been subject to criticism and belittling (Barthes 1984; Deleuze 1977), even by the writers themselves. Hence some authors are reluctant to be interviewed, as we shall see in specific cases. Furthermore, little was thought of it as a framework where knowledge can be produced. However, in the recent decade, a few studies (Rodden 2001; Lavaud & Thérenty 2004; Yanoshevsky 2004, 2009), actually show its importance. In particular, Yanoshevsky has demonstrated through the study of the verbal interaction that takes place during the interview, how theoretical information about writing is processed and conceptualized (Yanoshevsky 2004, 2009). Read more