ISSA Proceedings 2010 – Enthymemes: From Reconstruction To Understanding

• by: Fabio Paglieri - Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della Cognizione, CNR Roma & John Woods - University of British Columbia / King’s College London

1. Enthymematic resolution
Traditionally, an enthymeme is an incomplete argument, made so by the absence of one or more of its constituent statements. An enthymeme resolution strategy is a set of procedures for finding those missing elements, thus reconstructing the enthymemes and restoring its meaning. It is widely held that a condition on the adequacy of such procedures is that statements restored to an enthymeme produce an argument that is good in some given respect in relation to which the enthymeme itself is bad. In a previous paper (Paglieri, Woods in press), we emphasized the role of parsimony in enthymeme resolution strategies and concomitantly downplayed the role of “charity”. In the present paper, we take the analysis of enthymemes a step further. We will propose that if the pragmatic features that attend the phenomenon of enthymematic communication are duly heeded, the very idea of reconstructing enthymemes loses much of its rationale, and their interpretation comes to be conceived in a new light.

In an obvious extension of the well-known distinction between what an utterance means and what an utterer means in uttering it, let us acknowledge a difference between an argument as uttered and an argument as meant or, for short, an uttered argument and a meant argument. (For ease of exposition, we allow “utterance” to cover speaking and inscribing alike.) We are interested in a class of arguments in which the uttered and meant are thought to be linked in a quite particular way, to be discussed in section 2. For ease of exposition let A^u symbolize an uttered argument and A^m the argument it means. When A^u is an enthymeme with respect to A^m, we will say that A^u “craters” A^m. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2010 – Acceptance, Epistemic Concepts, And Argumentation Theory

• by: John Pajunen - University of Jyväskylä

1. Introduction
Within the field of argumentation theory, one central approach has been epistemically motivated. John Biro and Harvey Siegel, Christoph Lumer, and Alvin I. Goldman are some of the contributors to advocates of the epistemic approach. In general terms, the idea is to link argumentation theory to epistemology, that is, to the philosophical theory of knowledge. At the outset, this seems as a very good idea, especially if one defines the concepts of knowledge and argumentation using a concept of justification. The point I wish to argue is that despite the close relation of epistemic concepts and argumentation, the general theory of argumentation should be kept separate from epistemology in the sense that the general theory of argumentation as whole should not be defined in a way that restricts its application to knowledge only.

In section 2 I will describe the epistemic approach, or more accurately, some issues dealt with by Biro, Siegel and Goldman, that are relevant to my case. These include the definition of argumentation or argument, and especially within that definition the concepts of believing in truth of a claim (or truthlikeness or highly probable of a claim). Section 3 is titled ‘A general argumentation theory’, and there I will explain my view that a general argumentation theory is about the process and product of forming arguments, and that the issues within argumentation are not restricted to factual claims, but may include value claims. In section 4, I will shortly take a look at the domain of epistemology and a definition of knowledge. In section 5, I shall describe the domain of argumentation theory in terms of what kinds of points of views there are, and especially point out about value claims, that within philosophy there is an open dispute about the status of value claims, namely between cognitivists who claim that moral statements do have a truth value, and non-cognitivists who claim that moral statements do not have a truth value. The upshot of this is that if argumentation is defined using the concept of truth, then in the case moral statements do not have a truth value they would be outside the domain of argumentation theory by definition. In section 6, I will take a look at the concept of acceptance and its relation to some epistemic concepts. Relying on the distinction of semantic/pragmatic I propose that argumentation theory is defined pragmatically using the concept of acceptance, not using semantic concepts. Section 7 deals with the critique of pragma-dialectics by epistemic approach, and the idea is to view how well judging arguments with criterion of truth seeking goes, and my conclusion is that it is not promising. In section 8 I present some additional remarks and state my conclusion. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2010 – Situational Constraints On Argumentation In The Context Of Takeover Proposals.

• by: Rudi Palmieri - University of Lugano

1. Introduction
The 2010 ISSA conference has proposed for the first time a panel session devoted to financial argumentation. This is an indication that argumentation scholars are exploring an increasing variety of social domains (cf. van Eemeren 2010; Rigotti & Greco Morasso 2009b), in which people make use of arguments in order to handle with differences of opinion, interpersonal conflicts and individual and collective decision-making. The relevance of argumentation for finance is mainly due to the numerous decisions that investors and companies are concerned with. The inescapable and high uncertainty surrounding financial activities makes reasoning and argumentation fundamental and particularly complex, because the data (information) from which decisions must be inferentially drawn are often incomplete or not fully reliable (cf. Grinblatt & Titman 1998). In particular, financial argumentation is significantly conditioned by the information asymmetry and conflicts of interest that constrain the relationship between corporate managers/directors and shareholders (cf. Healy & Palepu 2001). These aspects typically characterizing financial interactions make financial communication particularly interesting for argumentation scholars. In fact, as   a result of agency conflicts, shareholders could question managers’ willingness and ability to undertake value-creating business projects, and could thus cast doubt on the actual expediency of investing in the company; due to information asymmetry, investors may lack important premises to argumentatively support their own decisions and to critically assess managers’ decisions. It is not by chance that corporate financial communication not only consists in the disclosure of relevant information that investors need in order to reason out their decisions and assess the behavior of managers/directors: companies often defend argumentatively their decisions and try to justify the investments and transactions that they propose. Read more

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