ISSA Proceedings 2010 – Assuring Cooperation: From Prisoner’s Dilemmas To Assurance Games To Mutual Cooperation

• by: Sheldon Wein - Saint Mary's University

1. Introduction
How humans should collectively provide for public (and near public) goods – such as, national defense, environmental protection, infectious disease control, and shared moral values – and common pool resources is a topic to which argumentation theorists have paid little attention. Game theorists have usually modeled the problems of providing such goods as a multi-person prisoner’s dilemma. Here I will argue that argumentation theorists need to contribute to the understanding of how to deal with both apparent prisoner’s dilemmas and with assurance games. I will use classic hypothetical accounts of Thomas Hobbes and Jean Jacques Rousseau to illustrate the problems and the areas to which argumentation theorists should contribute.

2. Prisoner’s dilemmas and assurance games
The prisoner’s dilemma derives its name from the following story. Row and Column have been accused of some crime. They have agreed with each other not to confess to the crime. But the prosecuting attorney tells Row that if she confesses to the crime and Column remains silent, Row will not be punished. If both confess, both will go to jail for a medium length of time. If both remain silent, both will go to jail for a short time. Of course, since the prosecutor is offering the same deal to Column as she is offering to Row, if Row remains silent and Column confesses, then Row will go to jail for a long time and Column will not be punished. Row must decide whether she should cooperate with Column and remain silent, or defect and confess to the prosecutor. Column also faces this choice. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2010 – Arguing Towards Truth: The Case Of The Periodic Table

• by: Mark Weinstein - Montclair State University

1. Preliminaries
For over a decade I have been presenting papers that include a theory of emerging truth that I feel is contribution towards understanding the relation of substantive arguments to their evaluation (Weinstein, 2009, 2007, 2006, 2006a, 2002, 1999). Substantive arguments address crucial issues of concern and so, invariably in the modern context, rely on the fruits of inquiry for their substance. This raises deep epistemological issues; for inquiry is ultimately evaluated on its epistemological adequacy and basic epistemological concepts are none to easy to exemplify in the musings of human beings. The traditional poles are knowledge and belief; in modern argumentation theory this is reflected in the distinction been acceptance and truth (Johnson, 2000). Crudely put, the rhetorical concern of acceptance is contrasted to the logical concern for truth with acceptability being a bridge between them in much of informal logic and argumentation theory.

It seems to me that the legacy of formal logic, embedded without much notice, in much of informal logic and argumentation theory creates a problem for an account of the logic of substantive inquiry and a muscular identification of acceptability with truth. The root problem is the model of argument as premise conclusion relations and argumentation seen as a series of such. In a recursive model, so natural in formal systems, evaluation works from the bottom up, in the standard case, by assigning truth to propositions. But ascertaining the truth of elements, except in relatively trivial circumstances, points away from the particulars and towards the context. This is particularly true of inquiry, and so is essentially true of substantive arguments that rely on the fruits of inquiry. For if we take the best of the fruits of inquiry available we find that truth of elements, although frequently a pressing local issue, is rarely the issue that ultimately drives the inquiry. Truth of elements is superseded by what one might call, network concerns. And it is upon network relations that an adequate notion of truth in inquiry can be constructed. My ultimate goal is to defend a model of emerging truth as a bridge between acceptability and truth. That is, to indicate a logical structure for acceptability that, at the limit, is as true as we can ever hope for. In this paper I want to show that the model of emerging truth captures the large structure of the inquiry that supports the acceptance of the Periodic Table, about as true a thing as we can expect. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2010 – The Emotions’ Impact On Audience Judgments And Decision-Making In Aristotle’s Rhetoric

• by: Andreas Welzel - Universität Bielefeld & Christopher W. Tindale - University of Windsor

1. Introduction: Emotions in the Rhetoric
Plato’s antagonistic model of cognition and emotion was highly influential among many of his successors, as we see in the Stoic sage and Skeptics who strove for relief from emotional states (Bett 1998), and it was adopted by the Catholic church during the Middle Ages, with adherents encouraged to subdue their emotions by means of reason and acts of the will (Lazarus 2001, p. 60). This model also formed the root of modern philosophy in Descartes’ strict separation of body and mind – what Damasio (1994, p. 249) has referred to as his most serious error. Aristotle corrects Plato’s picture, providing the first clearly cognitive account of the emotions, insofar as the speaker arouses emotions in the audience by cognitive means. There is also much more to Aristotle’s treatment that takes it beyond the attention to cognitivism. The discussion of “intentionality” below captures one such structural feature. It is the details of that account and how the emotions are thought to figure in persuasion, along with a related notion of intentionality that interest us in this paper.

After analyzing Aristotle’s theory of the emotions in a way that stresses the social nature of his account, we turn in Part 2 of the paper to show how the social emotions in the Rhetoric require a different model of intentionality from that which the tradition assumes. Social emotions are embedded in social interactions and thus such emotions require a structure of intentionality that is both other-directed and directed back on the agent (we illustrate the nature of this structure by modeling it on a game). This understanding of full intentionality presents the foundation for person worth to develop, and in Part 3 of the paper some aspects of person worth apparent in the Rhetoric are explored. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2010 – Proto-Regress Argument Schemas

• by: Jan Willem Wieland - Ghent University

1. Two cases
Consider the following two examples of a regress argument.
First example. In discussing what to do about his unreliable wife, Juvenal (1st-2nd century CE) thought hiring guardians would not be a good idea:
But who will guard the guardians? In posing the famous question, the Roman author, Juvenal, was suggesting that wives cannot be trusted, and keeping them under guard is not a solution – because the guards cannot be trusted either. (Hurwicz 2008, p. 577, cf. Juvenal, Satire 6)

Second example. Sorensen addresses the issue whether the following principle holds:
(Access) For any action x, you are obliged to do x only if you can know that you are obliged to do x.

On first sight, this is plausible. Access does not say that we actually have to know our obligations in order to have them, but it is only required that it is possible to know them. By contraposition, Access entails that if you cannot know that you are obliged to do x, then you are not obliged to do x. Yet, a consequence of this is:
(Access*) For any action x, if you eliminate your possibility to know whether you are obliged to do x, then you eliminate your (possible) obligation do x.

Here is the example. I am obliged to donate some of my inheritance to charity only if I can know that I am obliged to donate. So, if I cannot know that I am obliged to donate, I am not obliged to donate. So, if I burn the will before reading whether I am obliged to donate, then (assuming the will was my only access) I eliminate my obligation to donate. In general, the Access principle might be used to get rid of one’s obligations, namely by eliminating one’s possibility to know them (Sider 1995: 277-9). To block such options, a proponent of Access might suggest:
(Block) For any action x, you are obliged not to make it impossible to know whether you are obliged to do x. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2010 – Russian National Identity As Argument Construction An Assessment Of Political Transformations In Post-Soviet Russia

• by: David Cratis Williams - Florida Atlantic University, Marilyn J. Young - Florida State University & Michael K. Launer - Florida State University

Daniel Yergin and Thane Gustafson suggested in their 1994 report for Cambridge Energy Research Associates that this year, 2010, is a significant moment for assessing political transformations in post-Soviet Russia. They chose the year 2010 because, in their words, it “will have been exactly twenty-five years since Gorbachev came to power, starting the process that led to the new Russian revolution. By then, multiple transitions will be very far along and many of the uncertainties will be resolved. And, of critical importance, by then a wholly new, post-Communist generation will be active in Russian life” (Yergin and Gustafson 1995, p. 108). In this paper[i], we accept Yergin and Gustafson’s invitation to use 2010 as a vantage point for reflection upon the post-Soviet political transformations in Russia and the subsequent Russian search for a new political and social identity. Consistent with their approach, we take a macro-view in our assessment of both political and identity transformations, focusing not on individual texts but rather broad trends substantiated through analysis of selected discourse examples drawn from leaders, the media, and other analysts.

1. Political Transformations in Post-Soviet Russia
In 1994, Young, Launer, and Fetissenko argued that the Chernobyl nuclear accident opened argumentative space that ultimately led to the downfall of the USSR. In 1993, Williams, Young, and Elliott argued that Russia needed to develop a “culture of communication” in order to effect democratic reform. That culture of communication never developed, and lies stillborn inside the Kremlin walls. The argumentative space that appeared so promising in the early 90s has nearly closed as dissent is suppressed and media outlets are closed or taken over by government agencies. One might ask, “What happened?” Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2010 – Building A Trustful Audience In Scam Letters

• by: Galia Yanoshevsky - Bar-Ilan University

Advance fee Fraud letters or as they are also known ‘Nigerian 419 Scam letters’ are named after the section of the Nigerian penal code that addresses them. They usually involve a person pretending to have access to a vast sum of money that he or she needs help to get out of the country. In return for access to their bank accounts or other services, the addressee is promised huge cuts of the ‘proceeds’. Often, the victim is asked to fork out send hundreds of dollars up front – and then thousands – to cover the bribes, administrative costs, and other fees that are said to be required before the money can be moved out of the country. Of course the money never materializes (Brady 2003). Whereas in the past initial contacts were made via mass-mailings, hand deliveries or fax machines, today Nigerian scam letters are sent via email.

Advance fee Fraud letters are an intriguing problem to argumentation studies. Since they appeal to the reader’s empathy and infer to the character of both speaker and audience, they clearly represent a case of what Danblon dubs following Perelman “rhetorical persuasion” (Perelman 1988/1989; Danblon 2004). And because their objective is to defraud the recipient, we can say that we deal here with rhetorical manipulation. Their interest for argumentation studies stems from the fact, that despite their obvious dubiousness, they actually seem to work. Statistics are vague, but show that out of the millions of letters sent each year by email across the world, 1-2% of the receivers actually engage in “business” with the sender and send in personal details and money (Dillon 2008). Moreover, though one is tempted regard those who fall for the letters as gullible, data shows that many of the victims are nevertheless highly educated.Moreover,those who fall prey to investment or fund fraud are often established in the business world. In the study undertaken by Corpeleijn (2008), the majority of the victims (80%) worked in academia, the corporate world, government or education (Schoenmakers et al. 2009). Read more