ISSA Proceedings 2010 – From Liberation To Liberty: Strategic Ambiguity And Politicization in Berlusconi’s 1st Liberation Day Speech: “April 25: A Honor And A Commitment”

• by: Pamela Pietrucci - University of Washington

Italy is the country I love. Here I have my roots, my hopes, my horizons. Here I have learned, from my father and from life, how to be an entrepreneur. Here I have acquired my passion for Liberty. . . . Never as in this moment does Italy . . . need people with a certain experience, with their heads on their shoulders, able to give the country a helping hand and to make the state function. . . . If the political system is to work, it is essential that there emerges a pole of Liberty in opposition to the left-wing cartel, a pole that is capable of attracting to it the best of an Italy that is honest, reasonable, modest.

Silvio Berlusconi, “Let Us Build a New Miracle”

The People of Liberty is a movement of women and men who believe in Liberty, want to maintain their Liberty, and identify themselves in the values of the Party of European People: the dignity of the person, the centrality of family, Liberty and responsibility, equality, justice, legality, solidarity. The People of Liberty was born in Liberty, from Liberty, and for Liberty so that Italy, respectful of its traditions and national unity, could increase its Liberty, justice, prosperity and become truly supportive.

Silvio Berlusconi, “People of Liberty Statute”

1. Berlusconi’s second thoughts on Liberation Day: April 25, 2009
Many journalists and politicians described April 25, 2009 as a watershed moment in the history of the Italian second Republic. Indeed Liberation Day 2009 seemed to symbolize a turning point in Italian political life: For the first time in fifteen years the controversial Italian Prime Minister and media tycoon, Silvio Berlusconi, participated in the sixty-fourth celebration of Liberation from Nazi-Fascism. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2010 – A Doctor’s Argumentation By Authority As A Strategic Manoeuvre

• by: Roosmaryn Pilgram - University of Amsterdam

1. Introduction
Argumentation can play an important role in medical consultation. Central to medical consultation is a patient’s health related problem and a doctor’s medical advice, diagnosis and/or prognosis concerning this problem. Especially when such advice, diagnosis and/or prognosis can be expected to have a big impact on the patient, a doctor might assume the patient to be hesitant to immediately accept his claim(s). The doctor could attempt to overcome such hesitance by presenting argumentation. For instance, a doctor who advises a patient to drastically change his diet might attempt to make such advice acceptable by arguing “Your cholesterol level is too high”.

The context of a medical consultation does not just enable the doctor to present argumentation; it also affects the way in which the doctor provides this argumentation. Medical consultation is a regulated institutionalised communicative practice that is conducted in a limited amount of time. The health related problem that is central to such a consultation might be of vital importance to the patient, making the discussion of this problem potentially emotion laden. Furthermore, the doctor and patient differ in the amount of knowledge and experience they possess about the patient’s health related problem. As a result of these characteristics, the argumentation by a doctor in medical consultation typically differs significantly from that in, say, informal argumentative exchanges.

Because of a medical consultation’s limited amount of time and the fact that the doctor can be considered an authority on the patient’s health related problem, a doctor might decide to present argumentation by authority in support his claim(s). After all, the patient has acknowledged the doctor’s authority on medical knowledge by requesting a medical consultation, so it could be effective for a doctor to refer to this authority in support of his medical claim(s). On the other hand, a doctor’s argumentation by authority could essentially exclude the patient from the decision making process about the patient’s health related problem. This would limit the patient’s autonomy, reflecting a paternalistic form of the doctor-patient relationship that goes against the idea that medical consultation should be based on shared decision-making by the doctor and patient (see, on paternalism, Roter & Hall 2006; and, on shared decision making, Légaré et al, 2008; Frosch & Kaplan 1999). To what extent can a doctor’s argumentation by authority then be regarded as reasonable? Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2010 – Parrying Ad-Hominem Arguments In Parliamentary Debates

• by: H. José Plug - University of Amsterdam

1. Introduction
One of the fallacies Members of Parliament may be confronted with in a parliamentary debate is the ad hominem fallacy (See Plug 2007 and 2010a). This fallacious move may, just as other fallacious moves, vary from deliberate and disruptive to quite harmless and humorous. Although the seriousness may vary, a fallacious move can be seen as detrimental to the development of the discussion on the main standpoint an MP is trying to defend. From responses to fallacies as recorded in parliamentary proceedings, it becomes clear that MPs are very much aware of the disruptive effect a fallacious move may have on the progress of a parliamentary debate.

In a debate in Dutch parliament on metropolitan problems, an MP of the Green Party, Mrs van Gent, states that the Green Party refuses the proposal to ban socially less privileged persons from problematic neighbourhoods. She argues that it is too crude a measure and that ‘we will have to invest time in these people’ rather than ‘mistrust these people or assume that these people will cause or add to problems once they move into a certain neighbourhood’. Mr Bruls, MP of the Christian Democrats, who introduced the proposal, replies by saying ‘I will leave this for what it is: the Greens are dodging like they always do when the problems of the big cities are under discussion’. From this response it becomes clear that Mr Bruls refuses to continue the discussion and does not want to discuss the argumentation that was brought forward by Mrs van Gent. By using the word ‘dodging’, he accuses Mrs van Gent and all the other members of the Green Party of avoiding responsibilities not only towards the actual problem that is under debate, but towards all problems that relate to big cities. In her reply to Mr Bruls, Mrs van Gent brings forward the following:
Mrs van Gent (the Green Party): It is alright for you to use words such as dodging and by doing so launch an aggressive attack on my person, but it will only deepen my conviction that in this debate fundamental issues are at stake. One could disagree over such matters but it is no use denouncing one another in such a debate because that will not bring us any closer to a solution to these problems.[i]
(Second Chamber, 7 September 2005, TK 103 metropolitan problems) Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2010 – Novels As Arguments

• by: Gilbert Plumer - Law School Admission Council

 I tell you he [Abraham Lincoln] got more arguments out of stories than he did out of law books, and the queer part was you couldn’t answer ‘em – they just made you see it and you couldn’t get around it. (Tarbell 1907, p. 9)

The common view (at least among nonrehetoricians) is that no novel is an argument, though it might be reconstructed as one. This is curious, for we almost always feel the need to reconstruct arguments even when they are uncontroversially given as arguments, as in a philosophical text. What are we doing then? We are making the points as explicit, orderly, and (often) brief as possible, which is what we do in reconstructing a novel’s argument. Moreover, the reverse is also true. Given a text that is uncontroversially an explicit, orderly, and brief argument, in order to enhance plausibility, our first instinct is to flesh it out with illustrations and relationships to everyday life. In other words, we expand the premises. If this process is fictive (as with “thought experiments”) and orderly, it is story-telling. So there is intuitive reason to think that a novel can be an argument, whether the argument is taken as writ large or writ small – full or condensed.

Is this intuition true? This matters because if novels can be arguments, then perhaps the fundamental value and defense of the novel is that reading novels may be critical to one’s learning how to think. If novels can be arguments, then that fact should shape literary studies, and it should shape logic or argumentation studies. Ayers draws a useful distinction between two senses that the term ‘narrative argument’ might have: (a) a story that offers an argument, or (b) a distinctive argument form or structure (2010, pp. 2, 11-12, 36-37). After drawing further preliminary distinctions in section 1 below, in section 2 we will consider whether there is a principled way of determining or extracting a novel’s argument in sense (a). The views of such authors as Nussbaum and Fisher will be evaluated. The possibility indicated by (b) will be taken up in section 3. This possibility is particularly interesting for argumentation studies insofar as it seems that the source of an argument need not imply anything about the argument’s structure. It is only rarely claimed that fictional narratives themselves, as wholes, can exhibit a distinctive argument structure (form, scheme). We will consider Hunt’s view that many fables and much fabulist literature inherently have the structure of a kind of analogical argument. I will then propose what seems to be a better account, which takes some novels to inherently exhibit the structure of a kind of transcendental argument. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2010 – Solving Potential Disputes In Health Brochures With Pragmatic Argumentation

• by: Lotte van Poppel - University of Amsterdam

1. Introduction
Governmental institutions and non-profit organizations regularly publish health brochures and leaflets in which they offer health advice. The readers are, for instance, encouraged to improve their diet or are discouraged to consume alcohol. An obvious way to promote certain behavior is to point at the positive consequences of that behavior. To discourage certain behavior one can mention the negative consequences of that behavior.
By going into the desirable or undesirable effects, brochure writers try to remove possible doubt or opposition towards the given advice, so that the reader is more likely to accept it. In other words, an attempt is made to convince the reader of the standpoint that the given advice is acceptable. Pointing at the advantages or disadvantages of a promoted or discouraged course of action can thus be interpreted as argumentation that is given in support of a standpoint. This type of argumentation is called pragmatic argumentation. In example (1) we see a manifestation of this type of argumentation in a health brochure:
(1) Place your baby on the back to sleep from the very beginning. This will reduce the risk of cot death. (‘Reduce the risk of cot death’, UK Department of Health, 2007)

In the example, pragmatic argumentation is used to justify why it is desirable to place a baby on the back to sleep: this way of putting the baby to sleep namely has the desirable effect of reducing the risk of cot death.
Besides the standard positive form of pragmatic argumentation exemplified in (1), brochure writers have three more variants of this type of argumentation at their disposal. In this paper, I will examine what dialectical and rhetorical considerations steer the choices for one or the other variant in argumentative discourse in this specific context. To explain this, I will depart from the extended pragma-dialectical theory, developed by Van Eemeren and Grootendorst (1984, 1992, 2004) and Van Eemeren and Houtlosser (2002, 2006). Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2010 – Argumentation Without Arguments

• by: Henry Prakken - Department of Information and Computing Sciences, Utrecht University & Faculty of Law, University of Groningen, The Netherlands

1 . Introduction
A well-known ambiguity in the term ‘argument’ is that of argument as an inferential structure and argument as a kind of dialogue. In the first sense, an argument is a structure with a conclusion supported by one or more grounds, which may or may not be supported by further grounds. Rules for the construction and criteria for the quality of arguments in this sense are a matter of logic. In the second sense, arguments have been studied as a form of dialogical interaction, in which human or artificial agents aim to resolve a conflict of opinion by verbal means. Rules for conducting such dialogues and criteria for their quality are part of dialogue theory.

Both logic and dialogue theory can be developed by formal as well as informal means. This paper takes the formal stance, studying the relation between formal-logical and formal-dialogical accounts of argument. While formal logic has a long tradition, the first formal dialogue systems for argumentation where proposed in the 1970s, notably by the argumentation theorists Hamblin (1970,1971), Woods & Walton (1978) and Mackenzie (1979). In the 1990s AI researchers also became interested in dialogue systems for argumentation. In AI & Law they are studied as a way to model legal procedure (e.g. Gordon, 1995; Lodder, 1999; Prakken, 2008), while in the field of multi-agent systems they have been proposed as protocols for agent interaction (e.g. Parsons et al., 2003). All this work implicitly or explicitly assumes an underlying logic. In early work in argumentation theory the logic assumed was monotonic: the dialogue participants were assumed to build a single argument (in the inferential sense) for their claims, which could only be criticised by asking for further justification of an argument’s premise or by demanding resolution of inconsistent premises. AI has added to this the possibility of attacking arguments with counterarguments; the logic assumed by AI models of argumentative dialogues is thus nonmonotonic. Nevertheless, it is still argument-based, since counterarguments conform to the same inferential structure as the arguments that they attack. Read more