ISSA Proceedings 2010 – Vagueness Of Language And Judicial Rhetoric

• by: Federico Puppo - University of Trento

1. Introduction
The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the relationships between the vagueness of language and judicial rhetoric. To this end, the discussion will be organized as follows.
1) I shall briefly analyse the vagueness of language, seeking to show its nature and characteristics. It will obviously not be possible to analyse all the various theories of vagueness. Hence the discussion will be restricted to a number of fundamental issues.
2) I shall then concentrate on legal controversy and on the logical method that regulates its conduct: that is, the rhetorical method. I shall expound the theory developed in Italy by Francesco Cavalla, according to which the rhetorical method is a rigorous logical procedure, structured in different and successive phases, and in which the rhetorician/lawyer must gradually persuade the audience to agree with his argument.
3) I shall thus analyse the various phases of the rhetorical method – which is a combination of topic, dialectic and rhetoric – to clarify how the rhetorician persuades the audience to agree with him and overcomes the objections of the adverse party. I shall pay particular attention to the relationship between rhetoric and truth.

2. The vagueness of language
The first thing that strikes one when studying vagueness is that it is not susceptible to a single definition. Various theories have sought to explain the nature of vagueness and each of them has furnished its own definition of vagueness. It is not possible here to examine these various theories (on which see Williamson 1994). However, there is a broad definition of vagueness which is presumably acceptable.

“Very roughly, vagueness is deficiency of meaning […]; there is general agreement that predicates which possess borderline cases are vague predicates” (Sorensen 1985, pp. 134-5). This can be understood very well if one considers the classic example of vagueness: that of the sorites paradox. What is it the exact number of grains of wheat necessary to form a heap? We do not know. In fact, if I pile up grains of wheat, a heap will be gradually formed. But I cannot know or say which grain of wheat is the one that changes the non-heap into a heap. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2010 – A Semantic Structure For Points Of View: About Linguistic Constraints On Argumentation

• by: Pierre-Yves Raccah - CNRS France

With almost no exception, all the approaches of argumentation acknowledge that utterances and discourses of natural languages play a role in argumentation; this role, which can be called “argumentative power”, is often considered to comprise argumentative orientation and argumentative force (see, for instance, Ducrot 1973). Pieces of evidence that the structure of natural languages constrain the possible argumentative power of utterances and discourses have been discussed since the mid ‘70s, in connection with so called ‘grammatical words’, like connectives or operators, mainly (but not only) within the framework called “Argumentation Within Language” (AWL) initiated by Oswald Ducrot (see, for instance, Anscombre and Ducrot (1976), Bruxelles et al. (1979), Ducrot (1980), Kay (1990)).

Oddly enough, according to their initiators, these discussions seemed to suggest that, because natural languages constrain argumentation, semantics should be ‘pragmaticized’. In this paper, I will show that that suggestion is a mistake, even from the point of view of AWL, and that there are strictly-semantic constraints on the argumentative power of discourses, imposed by those language units. In addition, I will give more evidence that language units constrain argumentation in a very precise way, and will show that not only ‘grammatical words’, but also all kinds of usual lexical items impose precise constraints on the argumentativity of the utterances in which they appear. To achieve this aim, I will introduce two technical concepts related to the usual blurry notions of point of view, and ideology, respectively; though the aim of the paper is not to give precise definitions of these concepts, the discussion will give elements for such definitions. In any case, the relationship between argumentation and those two concepts will be clarified, leading to a precise characterization of what semantic constraints on argumentation could look like. Several practical consequences of this approach will be discussed and, in particular, consequences on the notion of metaphor and its role in argumentative discourses. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2010 – The Paradox Of Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues

• by: Karen Rasmussen - California State University, Long Beach

In the one hundred and eleven years since the creation of the Spokane Indian Reservation in 1881, not one person, Indian or otherwise, had ever arrived there by accident.
Reservation Blues, p.3.

Sherman Alexie’s (1995) (Spokane/Coeur d ‘Alene) Reservation Blues (RB), the saga of the rise and fall of an American Indian blues  band named Coyote Springs, opens as a “black stranger” with a “guitar slung over his back” stands at a “crossroads,” waving “at every Indian that [drives] by” until Thomas Builds-the-Fire, the “misfit storyteller of the Spokane Tribe” (pp. 3, 5),[i] stops. Characters, scene, and their conversation intimate the novel’s trajectory:
“Are you lost?”
“Been lost a while, I suppose.”
“You know where you’re at?”
“At the crossroad,” the black man said (pp. 3-4).

The visitor is bluesman Robert Johnson, not dead in 1938 as advertised, but alive and seeking an “[o]ld woman [who] lives on a hill.” He needs her help because he “sold [his] soul to the Gentleman so [he] could play . . . [his] damn guitar better than anybody” (pp. 5, 8). The historical Johnson[ii]  was the paradigmatic blues artist: a “trickster, hoodoo man, . . . the devil’s son-in-law, too lazy and too proud to work for a living” (Pearson, 1984, p. 122). Johnson leaves his guitar behind because it rules “its possessor like a drug” (Pasquaretta, 2003, p. 286),  ascending the Spokane reservation’s Wellpinit Mountain to find respite with Big Mom, a pan-Indian figure who’s been around for centuries and who’s not only “a part of every tribe” (p. 199) but also “the teacher of . . . [the] great musicians who shaped the twentieth century”- Elvis, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Diana Ross, Paul McCartney (p. 201). Johnson’s guitar, which fixes itself and talks to people, continues to wreck havoc as it impacts the fate of Coyote Springs. Populated by more or less normal beings as well as supra-natural figures, RB literally is a blues-based work that embodies an argument grounded in paradox that warrants Alexie’s contention that a “shared history of pain and oppression between African-Americans and the First Nations. . . gives Natives the right to perform the blues, and the knowledge to perform it well” (Cain, 2006, p. 2). Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2010 – Making History By Analogy: Frederick Douglass Remembers William The Silent

• by: Angela G. Ray - Northwestern University

More than 150 years ago, Charles Darwin aptly noted that “analogy may be a deceitful guide” (1859/1996, p. 391). Yet comparison is so fundamental to human experience that even our immune systems operate by classifying invaders according to their similarities to or differences from previous assailants (Mitchell 2001). Cognitively, humans seem to manage the surfeit of information that we receive by making schematic and analogical linkages, creating structures of knowledge that allow us to make sense of our world (Khong 1992, p. 13). It is not surprising, then, that analogical reasoning and its subset, analogical argument, are topics of great interest to scholars from a wide array of disciplines, from argumentation theory to cognitive science, from mathematics to linguistics, from philosophy to artificial intelligence (Guarini et al. 2009; Walton et al. 2008, p. 40). Rhetorical scholars also find analogies compelling, noting their power to generate and extend thought (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca 1969, p. 385), to provide psychologically and rationally appealing evidence for claims (Campbell & Huxman 2009, pp. 90-92), or to persuade by linking the familiar with the new (Zarefsky 2006, p. 406). The basic character of an analogy – the fact that it “expresses the similarity of different things” (Burbidge 1990, p. 4) – means that it can be logically weak (see Walton et al. 2008, pp. 43-86) yet imaginatively engaging and profoundly influential.

When scholars of U.S. political and rhetorical history have examined the analogy, they have usually emphasized the ways in which historical analogies have affected elite policy-makers in moments of crisis. At such times, analogies have allowed elites to create shallow and misleading interpretations of current events, upon which they then base illogical, misguided, or pernicious decisions for action. U.S. policy-makers use analogies badly: that is the recurring conclusion of scholars, whether they are examining Woodrow Wilson’s framing of the early days of World War I as similar to the War of 1812 (May 1973, p. ix), Harry Truman’s understanding of the North Korean invasion of South Korea in 1950 in light of the events in Europe in the 1930s (Neustadt & May 1986, pp. 34-57), the U.S. State Department’s comprehension of events in Vietnam through comparison to various world crises from the 1930s through the early 1960s (Khong 1992, pp. 58-62), George H. W. Bush’s interpretations of the Gulf War of the early 1990s alongside remembrance of World War II and Vietnam (Stuckey 1992), or George W. Bush’s invocations of World War II in speaking of 11 September 2001 and its aftermath (Noon 2004). Scholars have different recommendations concerning the use of historical analogies by policy-makers (compare, e.g., Neustadt & May 1986 with Khong 1992), but there is a general consensus that the deployment of such analogies for political decision-making is fundamentally problematic, encouraging gross simplification and mistaken conclusions. David Hooglund Noon puts it succinctly: analogies in such cases, he writes, often prove powerful because they bypass “serious intellectual engagement” with complex phenomena (2004, p. 355). Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2010 – How Dialogues Create Arguments

• by: Chris Reed - University of Dundee & Katarzyna Budzynska - Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University Warsaw

 1. Introduction
The goal of this paper is to demonstrate how argumentation dialogues of various types can construct a shared map or a shared understanding of an issue under discussion. In the language of O’Keefe (1977), the goal is to show how arguments₂ create and update arguments₁.  The approach turns upon two issues. First, that the connection between locutions in a dialogue has an inferential component beyond any that may hold between the contents of those locutions; and second, that the connection between the components of an argument₁ and the components of an argument² is rich and complex – but can be explained by speech act theory. The work is part of a project which aims to build infrastructure for an online ‘Argument Web’ which will support both the analysis, manipulation, assessment and display of billions of arguments₁ and also the conduct of millions of concurrent arguments₂.

The distinction between argument₁ and argument₂ originated in an important discussion about the ambiguity of the English word, argument, between W. Brockriede (1975, 1977) and D. J. O’Keefe (1977):
On the one hand it [the word “argument”] refers to a kind of utterance or a sort of communicative act. This sense of the term I will call “argument¹”. It is the sense contained in sentences such as “he made an argument.” On the other hand, “argument” sometimes refers to a particular kind of interaction. This sense, “argument₂”, appears in sentences such as “they had an argument” (O’Keefe 1977, p. 121).

D. Hitchcock (2006) shows that this ambiguity is not present in other languages:
In classical Greek, for example, the reason-giving sense is expressed by the word logos (e.g. in Plato’s Phaedo, at 90b-91c) in one of its many senses, whereas the disputational sense is expressed by the word amphisbêtêsis or antilogia, “dispute” or “controversy”. In Latin, the reason-giving sense is expressed by the word argumentum, “proof” or “evidence”, the disputational sense by the word disputatio, “debate” or “dispute”. In French, as Plantin (2003: 174) points out in detail, the reason-giving sense is expressed by the verb argumenter (“to argue [that]”) and its cognates, the disputational sense by the verb discuter (“to discuss”, in an aggressive way). In Spanish (Claudio Duran, personal communication), the reason-giving sense is expressed by the word argument, and the disputational sense by the words discusión (discussion) or controversia (controversy) or disputa (dispute). In Russian, the reason-giving sense is expressed by the word dovod (supporting reason), the disputational sense by the word spor or ssora. In German, the reason-giving sense is expressed by the word Argument, the disputational sense by the word Disput. (Hitchcock 2006, p.102).
These two kinds of arguments have different properties, e.g.: arguments₁ can be refuted, invalid or fallacious, while arguments₂ can be pointless or unproductive (O’Keefe 1977, p. 121). Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2010 – Three Kinds Of Polemical Interaction

• by: Anna Carolina Regner - University of the Sinos Valley, Graduate Program in Philosophy, Brazil

In this paper, I will follow Marcelo Dascal’s typology for different kinds of debates. His typology covers the main features of the basic kinds of polemical interactions. Other approaches, like Eemeren’s pragma-dialectical or Pera’s rhetorical approaches make important contributions to the subject; Eemeren, to the structure of what Dascal calls “discussion”, and Pera to the use of rhetorical resources in what Dascal calls “controversy”.  However, Dascal’s approach (Dascal: 2009, 2005a, 2005b, 2006, among others) deals with “soft” rationality without reducing it to the parameters of the logic of demonstration, the issue which is at the heart of all polemics about debates. He refers to ‘hard’ rationality as a concept of rationality which has standard logic and its application as its fundamental model, according to which there must be uncompromising obedience to the principle of contradiction; precise definitions; conclusive, deductive argumentation; formalization and similar parameters. “Soft rationality” covers the vast area of the “reasonable” and is the logic of presumptions which justify without proving, of the heuristics of problem-solving and hypothesis generation, of pragmatic interpretation, of negotiation, of exercising ‘judgment’, and of countless other procedures (as Dascal says) for dealing with theoretical as well as practical situations where uncertainty and imprecision are the rule.

I intend to show how Dascal’s typology applies to the following debates: Charles Darwin versus Joseph Hooker on the migration of organic beings to explain phenomena of geographical distribution, Charles Darwin versus Alfred Wallace on the meaning of ‘natural selection’, and Charles Darwin versus George Mivart on the origin of species. Dascal’s types are ideal types which may smoothly pass from one to the other. But they are solid analytical referential. The analyses of these debates make explicit the role of some specific points, such as the role of presuppositions, or the presence or absence of audience (thus potentially putting at risk the reputation of the contenders), and even the kind of their personal relationship with each other. In order to bring these points to light, it is helpful to have in mind the more basic question which relates to the one more immediately at issue. In most cases, at this level of analysis the presuppositions involved arise naturally and reveal the contenders’ differences or convergences, which guide much of the more immediate debate. In all of the three cases to be analyzed, the bottom problem is the explanation of how species are originated in Nature. A debate between friends can make the contenders more prepared to change their minds or to find a reconcilable solution. The presence of an audience makes the contenders worry about preserving their reputation. The Darwin versus Mivart polemic took place in public, and the presuppositions and world view of each of them were irreconcilable. The debate between Darwin and Wallace was restricted to their personal correspondence. It did not detract from the acceptability of Darwin’s theory, but brought out some important issues related to the differences between their approaches, which have often been overlooked by their commentators. Darwin and Hooker’s divergences were a quasi-epistolary episode, and their most heated arguments took place in  their private correspondence. However, as Hooker had been invited to give a lecture on Darwin’s theory at the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Darwin was afraid that their divergences might have public resonance, which could have affected the acceptability of his theory. Read more