ISSA Proceedings 2014 – Argumentation In Ronald Reagan’s Presidential Campaign Commercials

• by: Marta Rzepecka, University of Rzeszów, Rzeszów, Poland

Abstract: This article reflects on the role of argumentation in running a successful presidential campaign. It describes the notions of ‘presence’ and ‘communion’ by Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, uses them to identify and analyze arguments and argumentation strategies used in Ronald Reagan’s campaign commercials and suggests conclusions which can be drawn on the basis of the analysis.

Keywords: Political argumentation, political commercials, presidential campaigns, presidential rhetoric, Ronald Reagan

1. Political argumentation and presidential campaign rhetoric
Political argumentation is about how politicians argue their cases to either win others’ acceptance or persuade them to change their thinking, behavior or decision. It helps to specify political goals and identify the means available to achieve these goals. Seen as an essential part of political communication, argumentation creates a political reality and allows structuring, controlling, and manipulating its interpretation. It defines situations, communicates information, and evaluates events. In politics, arguments link politicians with the public. They serve to express their political positions, convey their identifications, and reveal their commitments. As elements of political discourse, arguments function as stimuli for action. Appropriate arguments result in the acceptance of proposed policies, support for specific issues, and obedience to laws while inadequate arguments bring about rejection, objection and disregard. Political argumentation most often includes persuasion – a tool used to influence others and shape their ways of thinking and behavior. Political public speaking seems to be designed to persuade more than inform or argue. It appears to be constructed to mask rather than reveal true meanings, to appeal to emotions rather than reason, to mute and eliminate potential problems rather than raise difficult questions or give rise to substantive and essential discussions. In the United States, this is especially evident when one listens to presidential campaign rhetoric. American electoral discourse demonstrates that political argumentation serves to convince more than enlighten. Based on carefully planned and presented arguments, be it those which appeal to reason or emotions, it primarily means to influence public cognitions and impressions. While it does not coerce voters to make specific choices, it does involve a deliberate attempt to influence their decisions and actions. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2014 – Conflict And Tension: The Discursive Dissonance At The UN

• by: Lineide Salvador Mosca, Departamento de Letras Clássicas e Vernáculas, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo/Brasil

Abstract: We aim at examining the governmental political marketing and its rhetorical strategies of maintenance, which also has the task of projecting an innovative image, so that the government survive and perpetuate. Among these strategies, it is included the dialogue with others governments in the international community and the engagement with common causes to the globalized world. This scenario requires an interdisciplinary field, mediated by the theories of argumentation, which constitute the core of all efforts of political nature. Speeches taken from the UN Assembly on September 23rd 2013, pronounced in a moment of great tension, not softened by diplomatic diligences, will be examined. The study of actio, the performance of political actors, is included.

Keywords: Actio, conflict, image, interdisciplinarity, negotiation, political speeches, stasis, strategies, tension, United Nation.

1. Introduction
The confrontation of speeches or stasis is frequent in contemporary political speeches, in a world that grows more complex and where it is increasingly more difficult to understand the various focuses of the questions. When one thinks of the deliberative discourse as it was conceived in the Greek-Latin world, it is possible to notice that the clash of discourses then was also heated, with the raise of discordant voices against what was being proposed. However, the transition from the Greek polis to the modern concept of State has introduced significant changes. In the latter, the political discourse is a conflictive setting in which the many manifestations are exacerbated, modulated, and softened by the norms of courtesy and diplomatic mediation necessary for modern life to work. New genres and formats arise, aiming at diverse audiences and media outlets. Although the concept of politics remains the same as in its origin – that which preserves the Common Good and what is useful and necessary to the collectivity (deliberative), what is fair (judiciary), and the cohesion of society (epideictic) – the process of institutionalization that was gradually taking place gave it new configurations. Conversely, the media, in its role as an agent that presents different angles of a story or fact, exaggerates some aspects more than one can imagine. It is up for the citizen to disentangle the questions and form an opinion about the different situations. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2014 – Should We Teach Epideictic?

• by: Benoît Sans, Langues et littératures anciennes & Groupe de recherche en Rhétorique & en Argumentation Linguistique (GRAL), Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgique

Abstract: In this paper, I consider the possibility of recreating a rhetorical teaching of epideictic inspired by the ancient practice. First, I remind of the usefulness of epideictic. Then, I try to reconstruct the technical knowledge that an ancient student acquired through epideictic training. Finally, I make some suggestions based on the ancient pedagogical material about the way we could teach epideictic to contemporary audiences.

Keywords: ancient rhetoric, blame, epideictic, praise, exercises, teaching, speech genres, technique

1. Introduction: teaching ancient rhetoric today
It is well known that since the beginning of its history, rhetoric has been taught. This teaching, as our sources still allow us to know it, seemed to closely associate theory and practice through rhetorical exercises. After the first sophists and their dissoi logoi (Danblon, 2013, pp. 127-148; Ferry, 2013; Pearce, 1994) rhetoric teaching evolved progressively and new kinds of exercises appeared. Around the beginning of the Roman Empire, there was a relatively homogeneous set of exercises called progymnasmata, which were organized in a progression from basic writing exercises to complete speeches and argumentations (Cribiore, 2001; Pernot, 2000, pp. 194-200; Webb, 2001). These exercises were supposed to prepare the students for full speeches and declamations (Patillon, 2002, p. xviii), considered as the closest to reality, and beyond them, for every circumstance or field of their future public life (local politics, advocacy, imperial service, literary contests, teaching; see Heath, 2004, pp. 276-331). In addition to the famous treatises of Aristotle, Cicero or Quintilian, we still have a lot of works whose practical dimension is more marked, like manuals of exercises and declamation collections, which inspired teachers of rhetoric for centuries. We also have some papyrological evidence, which show us the every day practice in rhetorical schools. But when rhetoric was excluded from teaching and schools’ programs, all these pedagogical tools were almost forgotten. My research team and I have recently started a research project that aims to reintroduce some rhetorical training at Brussels’ University but also in high schools, by reconnecting the ancient exercises with actual practice. In doing so, we undertake a kind of experimental archaeology. We test the ancient teaching techniques and exercises in classrooms to observe the effects they produce on contemporary audiences, to see whether they still meet the objectives they were supposed to and whether we can create other exercises that could help to stimulate and to train useful capacities and technical skills. In conducting these exercises, the usefulness and the goal of each of them became clearer: the ekphrasis consisted in making a vivid depiction of an object or a scene, the ethopoiia in imitating the ethos and the pathos of a person or character in a given context; the declamation called suasoria imitated the deliberative genre and the controversia imitated the forensic genre; both of them corresponded to actual institutions that, mutatis mutandis, we still have today. But the ancient students were also trained in a third genre, according to Aristotle’s theory: the epideictic, i.e. speeches of praise or blame (Pernot, 1993, pp. 25-42; 117-127; Pratt, 2012). In this lecture, preparing our future work with our pupils and students, I would like to propose a preliminary inquiry, through ancient pedagogical material and modern works, about what we can hope to achieve if we practice the epideictic genre and how we could do it. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2014 – Euphoria And Panic Bubbles In Presidential Debate Evaluations

• by: Flemming Schnieder Rhode, Annenberg School of Communication & Journalism, University of Southern California

 Abstract: This project examines the first presidential debate of 2012 as a disturbance of the existing “horse-race” trajectory, creating partisan bubbles of euphoria and panic through mimetic argument evaluations. Prior to the debate the expectations set by the campaigns and the media commentary about the performance and political effect became a reflexive part of the argument itself setting evaluative thresholds. This created a mimesis leading to radically different expectations and evaluative criteria for the next debates.

Keywords: bubbles, media, mimesis, politics, presidential debate

1. Introduction
Presidential debates have been a perennial object of inquiry in fields of argumentation, political communication, political science, and rhetorical criticism both to answer empirical questions of media effects and as opportunities for critique and normative considerations of public argument (e.g. Berquist & Golden, 1981; Erikson & Wleizen, 2012; Goodnight, Majdik & Kephart, 2009; Lang & Lang, 1978; Majdik, Kephart III & Goodnight, 2008).

Despite this cross-disciplinary focus on presidential debates, the literature does not reflect an unambiguous hope of its social value. Following the seminal works of Anthony Downs (1957) and Campbell, Converse, Miller & Stokes (1960) in political science much doubt arose whether political campaigns, let alone the presidential debates claimed to influence them, really mattered to voters who appeared to vote based on party identity and with no real incentive to follow debates. Contemporary researchers like Erikson & Wleizer (2012) follow this research tradition and claim that polling on candidates occasionally changes around debates, but then revert to the mean and that the candidate leading the polls before the first debate is a better predictor of who wins the election than the candidate crowned “winner” of the debates. Even amongst those who do consider presidential debates politically important, the content of the debate themselves are often dismissed as “glorified press conferences,” (Kraus, 1987, p. 215) “counterfeit debates,” (Auer, 1962) and “not debate by standards of rhetorical and argument analysis” (Meadow, 1987, p. 208). Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2014 – Argumentation As A Rational Choice

• by: Menashe Schwed, Philosophy Ashkelon Academic College, Israel

Abstract: The paper focuses on the thesis that argumentation essentially involves a choice. I wish to show how argumentation theory might reflect this essential feature. In the 2013 OSSA conference, I argued that practices of argumentation reflect choices made on moral and political grounds. My purpose in this paper is to develop this thesis, such that it deals with the problem of rationality in argumentation in a like manner.

Keywords: Argumentation, theory, choice, epistemology, philosophy, rationality, pragmatic, Wittgenstein, Grice.

1.
My main thesis is that argumentation is a practice and essentially involves a choice. The practice of argumentation is historically and culturally situated. In my paper for the last 2013 OSSA conference I focused on two propositions (Schwed, 2013): The first one is that the historical and philosophical roots of argumentation are in ethics and politics and not in any formal ideal, be it mathematical, scientific or other. Furthermore, argumentation is a human invention and practice, deeply tied up with the emergence of democracy in ancient Greece. The second proposition is that argumentation presupposes and advances Humanistic values, especially the autonomy of the individual to think, decide and choose in a free and uncoerced manner, and the choice to prefer the way of reason. I named it the humanistic stance, which provides for philosophical skepticism, whence argumentation is one choice among other ethical and political choices to resolve differences of opinions. My purpose in this paper is to further develop this thesis, such that it deals with the problem of rationality in argumentation in a like manner. The general idea is that the demand for rationality is a basic choice, derived from the moral and political ones, which are essential to it. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2014 – Argumentative Norms: How Contextualist Can They Be? A Cautionary Tale

• by: Harvey Siegel, Department of Philosophy, University of Miami, Coral Gables, USA

Abstract: Are argumentative norms contextual? Yes: argument quality sometimes depends upon criteria that are context-relative. But this contextual dimension of argumentative norms depends upon a kind of context-independence: That a given argument is strong in its context is a claim that is not itself dependent upon any particular context. Consequently, there is an in-principle limit on the degree to which argumentative norms can be rightly regarded as contextual.

Keywords: argument, argumentation, argument norms, argument purposes, contextualism, epistemological relativism

1. The case for and limits of contextualism

“Argumentation is always situated: it always occurs in context.”
(Van Eemeren and Garssen 2012b, p. xiii)

It is true, as van Eemeren and Garssen say, that argumentation always occurs in context: to engage in argumentation, an arguer must be in some context or other. But are argument norms similarly contextual? That is, are the norms governing argument quality relative to or dependent upon the context in which the argument is either asserted or evaluated? Let contextualism[i] be the view that criteria of argument quality vary by context: According to contextualists, whether an argument is good or not, and how good it is, depends upon the context in which it is either uttered or evaluated. Many authors have urged that contextualism, or something like it, is true.[ii]

There is an obvious prima facie case for contextualism which rests on the fact that the ‘good-making’ features of arguments seem to vary by context: What makes an argument good in a scientific context seems to differ in some respects from what makes an argument good in a court of law, a conversation among friends, or a marketing strategy discussion in the corporate boardroom. That is, it seems to be the case that the quality of arguments sometimes depends upon criteria that are context-relative. For example, scientific arguments at least often have to meet criteria of explanatory adequacy; legal arguments often have to meet criteria of evidence admissibility; etc. So it seems that the norms of argument quality are relative to context: an argument can be good although it doesn’t meet legal criteria of evidence admissibility if it is offered or evaluated in a scientific or corporate boardroom context; an argument can be good although it doesn’t meet criteria of explanatory adequacy if it is offered or evaluated in the context of a court of law or a conversation around the dinner table. Read more