ISSA Proceedings 2002 – Designing Premises

• by: Jean Goodwin - Northwestern University

1. Introduction.
The problem of premise adequacy has vexed argumentation theorists since Hamblin opened the issue in his pioneering work on Fallacies (1986/1970). Anyone trying to evaluate an argument that has been made must apply some standard to assess the goodness of the premises. Various informal logicians have proposed one or more of the following: truth (Johnson, 2000), acceptance (or, roughly, belief; Johnson, 2000; Hamblin, in one reading), and acceptability (what is reasonable to believe, with variations; Govier, 1987; Johnson & Blair, 1994; Pinto, 1994).
Premise adequacy is not just a puzzle for evaluators after the fact, however; arguers as they practice also face the problem of securing starting points for their arguing. Each arguer presumably expects the arguments she deploys to do some work for her. To do that work, the arguments will need (among other things) to have adequate premises. Thus she too confronts the problem of figuring out what premises are up to standard, whatever that standard may be. Still, her task is somewhat different than that of the evaluator, due to the constraints of her immediate situation. The arguer is addressing her argument to others; she needs to make sure that her premises not only are adequate, but that the adequacy is conspicuous to them. And in securing such conspicuous adequacy, the arguer faces two difficulties.

First, the situations in which arguments are expected to work are characterized by open and sometimes deep disagreement. Under conditions of disagreement, it may occur that arguers will start with few shared understandings as to what premises count as adequate. And the arguers may have little motive to cooperate with each other to reach new understandings, whether by examining the truth or acceptability of proposed premises, by admitting that they are accepted, or by otherwise establishing them as adequate. They may, for example, refuse to openly express to their “dark-side commitments” (Walton & Krabbe, 1995). The arguer therefore may need to exert some (communicative) force to get her interlocutor to recognize the adequacy of her premises.
Second, the arguer often works to a tight deadline, since in practice not to complete an argument within a reasonable, often quite limited, time is effectively to not argue. Whatever work she needs to do to secure the adequacy of her premises, she needs to do quickly. She doesn’t have time for infinite regresses where her premises are secured by further arguments, whose premises in turn need to be argued; she often won’t have time even for one or two. To begin her argument, she needs to locate the unargued.
To achieve her purposes through arguing, the arguer must do something to overcome these difficulties – to invent (that is, create or discover) expeditiously the adequate premises she will need to proceed. Premise adequacy, in other words, is not just a problem in evaluation; it is a pragmatic problem as well. Or more specifically, a problem of normative pragmatics (van Eemeren, 1994; Goodwin, forthcoming b; Jacobs, 1999): for as above I will take it for granted that premises must be of a certain quality in order to do their work. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2002 – Toulmin’s Warrants

• by: David Hitchcock - McMaster University

In The Uses of Argument (1958), Stephen Toulmin proposed a new, dialectically grounded structure for the layout of arguments, replacing the old terminology of “premiss” and “conclusion” with a new set of terms: claim, data (later “grounds”), warrant, modal qualifier, rebuttal, backing. Toulmin’s scheme has been widely adopted in the discipline of speech communication, especially in the United States. In this paper I focus on one component of the scheme, the concept of a warrant. I argue that those who have adopted Toulmin’s scheme have often distorted the concept of warrant in a way which destroys what is distinctive and worthwhile about it. And I respond to criticisms of the concept by van Eemeren, Grootendorst & Kruiger (1984), Johnson (1996) and Freeman (1991). Their criticisms show the need for some revision of Toulmin’s position, but his basic concept of warrant, I shall argue, should be retained as a central concept for the evaluation of arguments.

1. Toulmin’s conception
Despite the pluralism implicit in his title, Toulmin articulated his proposal for the layout of arguments in the context of a single use of argument, that of justifying one’s assertion in response to a challenge (Toulmin, 1958, 12). The proposed layout emerges from consideration of the questions that could arise in such a challenge. Prior to the challenge, there must be an assertion, in which there is involved a claim, by which Toulmin appears to mean the proposition asserted. A challenger’s first question in response to such an assertion is something like, “What do you have to go on?”, to which the answer will be data (Toulmin, 1958, 97) or grounds (Toulmin, Rieke & Janik, 1984, 38). But a challenger who accepts as correct the information given in answer to such a question can still ask a further question: “How do you get there?”, to which the answer will be the warrant (Toulmin, 1958, 98; Toulmin, Rieke & Janik, 1984, 46). Whereas the data or grounds are the basis of the person’s claim, the warrant is the person’s justification for inferring the claim from those grounds. Justifying a step from grounds to claim, according to Toulmin, requires appeal to general considerations: “What are needed are general, hypothetical statements, which can act as bridges, and authorise the sort of step to which our argument commits us.” (Toulmin, 1958, 98; italics added) Warrants may be qualified by such modal qualifiers as “probably” or “generally” or “necessarily” or “presumably”, a fact generally reflected by qualifying the claim; if the warrant is defeasible, then conditions of exception or rebuttal may be mentioned. Finally, a challenger may ask for justification of the warrant, to which the answer will be a proposed backing for the warrant.

To repeat Toulmin’s hackneyed and familiar example, suppose someone asserts, “Harry is a British subject.” A challenger requests justification of this claim, to which the reply is, “Harry was born in Bermuda.” The challenger further asks how this ground supports the claim, to which the reply is, “A man born in Bermuda is generally a British subject.” As a defeasible warrant, this assertion has conditions of rebuttal, which could be made explicit: “unless neither of his parents is of British nationality or he has changed his nationality”. Asked to justify the warrant, the author of the claim will cite the British Nationality Acts, where these rules for determining nationality are set out. (Toulmin, 1958, 99-102) Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2002 – Metadialogues

• by: Erik C. W. Krabbe - Groningen University

1. Introduction
A metadialogue is a dialogue about a dialogue or about some dialogues. A dialogue that is not a metadialogue will be called a ground level dialogue. For instance, let the ground level dialogue be an argumentative discussion aiming at the resolution of some dispute. Then disagreement about the correctness of some move in this dialogue will constitute another dispute which the parties again may try to resolve by dialogue. This dialogue will then be a metadialogue relative to the first dialogue. It will be about this first dialogue and perhaps some related dialogues. Also, its primary purpose is to help this first dialogue achieve its end: in this sense the metadialogue will be embedded in the ground level dialogue.

Three problems arise, given this concept of metadialogue:
1. A demarcation problem. Some critical moves seem plainly to belong to the ground level. For instance, a critic’s asking for argumentative support within a context of critical discussion, though in some sense being about the preceding dialogue, would not be analysed as a move that starts a metadialogue. At least it would be very much strained to do so. Many moves on the ground level can be looked upon as asking for, or installing, conversational repairs, but are not, usually, for that reason classified at the metalevel. On the other hand a dispute about the allotment of speaking time would be so classified. Criticism of fallacies seems to lie somewhere in between. Where to draw the line?
2. A problem of infinite regress. If from any critical discussion one can move up (or down, whatever metaphor you prefer) to a metadialogue that constitutes another critical discussion, this may launch us into an infinite regress. A discussion about the rules of ground level dialogue may open up a discussion about the rules governing discussions about ground level rules, and so on. Can this regress be blocked?
3. An equity problem. Some retreats into metadialogue seem quite reasonable and bound to help the ground level dialogue proceed. In other cases one is confronted with nit-picking or completely unwarranted charges. On the one hand each party should have a right to contest the correctness of any ground level move, on the other hand its adversary should not be left without means of defense. Can we strike a balance? Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2002 – The Rhetorical Shift In Interviews: New Features In Russian Political Discourse

• by: Anna A. Maslennikova & Tatyana P. Tretyakova, St. Petersburg University

The result of modern dynamic global changes in the world has created special interest in the communicative process as a means for overcoming certain prejudices and transgressing boundaries in modern societies. This transgression is connected with the development of new paradigms in discourse analysis, which allow seeing the meaning of words, public speeches and interviews in relation to the overall global context part of which they are. This becomes especially important when the speeches political leaders make and interviews they give become part of virtual communication via the Internet. Their speedy translations into English expand the audience to global size and we believe that the functional rhetorical impact is not limited to direct actors of the interview situation.
We chose the genre of the interview as a subject of our paper because of its great potential in disclosing the interactive strategies of the participants and pragma-dialectical features of the resulting texts, the study of which, as we’ll attempt to demonstrate, can further develop the argumentation theory. Besides, this type of communication is connected with the what is known as source approach (McNair, 1995, XIII).
In the Oxford English Dictionary, the interview is defined as a “face to face meeting for the purpose of a formal conference, between a representative of the press and someone from  whom he wishes to obtain statements for publication”. The genre of the interview appeared in the US in the middle of the 19th century. Two eminent figures are credited for having invented the interview: Horace Greely, editor of The New York Tribune, and James Gordon Bennett Sr, the proprietor of The New York Herald.
The rapid development of this genre in mid-nineteenth century came as a result of many factors, the most significant of which was the new perception of public figures. According to Christopher Silvester, the editor of The Norton Book of Interviews, “The interview created for the reader an illusion of intimacy with celebrities” (Silvester, 1996, 5). He calls the interview “a broken-backed form of discourse which is necessarily partial” (op. cit., 3).

At the same time, “the interview technique grew from the familiarity of journalists and readers with verbatim court reports” (op. cit., 4). Therefore, from early on the form of interview has been earmarked by its connection to the court procedure. As will be shown below, its rhetorical structure still retains the idea of the two competing parties in a situation similar to the one in the courtroom. The difference lying in the fact that there are has two “consistent isotopies in legal discourse: its legislative level and its referential level” (Greimas, 1990, 102-106) whereas we have in the interview one referential level.
Rhetorical approach is connected with the pragma-dialectics as a theory and we follow the idea that the Aristotelian norm of successful persuasion is not necessarily in contradiction with the idea of reasonableness. Thus formal (a-rhetorical) approach is not necessarily looked upon as contradictory to anti-formal – functional, contextual one. Frans van Eemeren and Peter Houtlosser write of three levels of manoevering. “Rhetorical manoevering can consist of making a choice from the options constituting the topical potential associated with a particular discussion stage, in deciding on a certain adaptation to auditorial demand, and in taking policy  in the exploitation of presentational devices” (Eemeren, Houtlosser, 1999, 165). Topical maneuvering in confrontation stage is conducive to the most effective choice among potential issues for discussion by restricting the disagreement space. Auditorial demand is creating a “communion” and by presentational devices following Perelman and Olbrecht-Tyteca new rhetoric concept, we believe that rhetorical figures attract attention and bring the change of perspective (Op. cit. 167). This changing perspective is of special importance to present-daypublic speaking in Russia. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2002 – Legitimizing Public Discourse: Civility As Gatekeeper

• by: Raymie E. McKerrow & Jeffrey St. John, Ohio University, Athens, OH, USA

[I]f there are times when dissent is appropriate and justified, [then] public deliberation cannot proceed strictly under the banner of mutual understanding. When the public’s form is fixed by a presupposition of consensus, the creative and generative elements of opposition are squandered before they ever appear. The citizen wakes up in a public, but has nothing to say (Erik W. Doxtader).

1. Introduction
The contestation of voices in contemporary public discourse has reached an impasse of a special type. While discourses themselves continue to foment, fragment, and reconstitute at a deceptively healthy pace, the conceptual grounds upon which they do so, the discursive sites of their activity, have stagnated. In so doing, these sites have inadvertently come to undermine the political efficacy of
1. the discourses they serve; and
2. speakers’ efforts to enact those discourses in local, productive spheres of influence. Uprooted from formerly fertile, now dessicated, soil, public discourse writ large has lost much of its rhetorical purchase and an equal measure of its practical strength. With both the sites of speech and speech itself compromised in this way, what remain to us are fractious, diluted schemas of “the public sphere(s)” or “civil society,” any or all of which are poor conceptual substitutes for vigorous and inclusive public deliberation among active citizens speaking in spheres of fruitful civic association.

So goes the line of argument we seek to explore in this essay, an essay which responds to widespread reports of theoretical dead-ends reached by theorists and critics who were once hopeful of framing spheres of public discourse in ways that might encourage inclusive forms of deliberation among engaged private citizens. Though we do not presume ourselves able to gerrymander the conceptual terrain of public speech in a way that would afford ideal breathing room for all, we do think it crucial to ask why it is that the most obvious and, in recent years, most lauded corrective to disintegrative public discourse, civility, has failed to make the difference that so many parties from so many quarters have expected it to make. In the interests of rhetorical pragmatism, we question civility at the scene of the proverbial crime: at sites of its application as the argumentative crown jewel of contemporary rhetorical theorizing’s pet project, civil society.
Contending as we do that efforts to promote civility as an ameliorative agent in civil sphere deliberation have failed in some crucial respects, we offer an alternative perspective on the problem, in hopes of establishing two claims. First, we seek to show how civility is intentionally or unintentionally wielded so as to silence oppositional or counterpublical voices in public contexts, thereby removing the very possibility of real “argument” from the equation. We find that this is most often accomplished by default, as efforts to apply “civility” directly in the service of real citizens’ real speech frequently fail. Second, and relatedly, we argue that civility’s sub rosa gatekeeping of what counts or does not count as “legitimate” speech in the civil sphere is both dangerous and deeply misguided. As we hope to make evident, our second claim is the unintended outcome of the failure of the efforts described in our first claim. That is, failing to apply itself to the meat of the deliberative problem in question, “civility” instead tends broadly to bracket one set of argumentative possibilities in favor of a simple but weak reinscription of another. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2002 – Arguments Of Victims: A Case Study Of The Timothy McVeigh Trial

• by: Janice Schuetz - University of New Mexico, USA

When the sun arose over Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, occupants and nearby residents of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building experienced the horror of a bomb blast that killed 168 and injured 500 members of their community. Following a lengthy trial, the jury convicted Timothy McVeigh of the bombing. After hearing thirty-eight victims testify about the impact of the bombing on their lives and that of their loved ones, the jury sentenced McVeigh to death. The victim’s arguments, called victim impact statements (VIS), convinced jurors that McVeigh should receive the death penalty rather than life imprisonment. Federal legal authorities executed McVeigh on June 11, 2001. This essay:
1. explains the origin and history of victims’ arguments in the courts in the United States,
2. describes this type of argumentation as a distinct genre of legal discourse by using Mikhail Bakhtin’s explanations of content, stylistics, and speech plans, and
3. discusses the implications of the study for research about legal argument.

1. Origin and History of Victims’ Arguments
Victim impact statements are a unique genre of legal argumentation. The use of victims’ arguments in the McVeigh trial evolved as part of a two-decade struggle for victims’ rights in the United States (McDonald, 1976; Carrington & Nicholson, 1984; Roland, 1989). This struggle began in the late 1970s and achieved legislative success with the 1982 Victim and Witness Protection Act. Temporary setbacks in victims’ rights took place when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Booth v. Maryland (1987) and South Carolina v. Gathers (1989) that victims’ impact testimony was unduly prejudicial to jurors because it could not be refuted by the defense and because defendants generally did not know who their victims were when they committed their crimes. In 1991 the victims’ rights movement gained new momentum when both of these decisions were overturned in Payne v. Tennessee. Even more voice was given to victims in 1994 through The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act which permitted both the use of the death penalty and VIS in federal trials.U.S. v. Timothy James McVeigh (1997) was the one of first federal capital cases to be tried under this statute.
Victims (often with the assistance of attorneys) justify the death penalty for a defendant because of the suffering they have experienced as a result of a crime. Some VIS are presented to the judge in the form of written arguments; others are read to jurors by a court official. Still others are both written and presented orally to the judge and jurors. In general, victims state their names, describe economic losses or physical injuries, identify changes in their physical or psychological well being, and/or explain the general effects of an offense (Schneider, 1992). The arguments from victims provide evidence about “any harm, including financial, social, psychological and physical harm, done to or loss suffered” by a victim at the hands of the accused (Victim and Witness Protection Act, 1982, 32). Read more