ISSA Proceedings 2002 – Rejecting Incommensurability: Traditional Healing And The Biomedical Metanarrative In Africa

• by: John Rief - Regis University

 1. A Differend
The world is a place of dispute, people arguing against one another, and people sometimes remaining silent. We find little solace in these disputes, those of us who are incredulous that is. Incredulity is the new calling of the initiated (Lyotard 2002: XXIV). Beyond modernity is found the place of discomfort, incredulity and the possibility of justice. Justice is never stable nor should it be comfortable for anyone. Discomfort will lead us to justice so long as we leave behind the old justifications fed to us by the demagogues of historical inquiry. There is a place, on the edge of discourse, a place where competing phrase regimens meet, where justice can be discovered or at least attempted for those who do not yet have it. On the precipice of exchange and translation we find discourses that are not commensurable with one another. We find the impossibility of understanding, the need to appropriate if only to find comfort. There are many places where discourses work in spatio-temporal unison. They work side by side but the border is fraught with injustices that cannot always be presented because of the invocation of a particular idiom. The unpresentable must become the presentable through a destabilizing of metanarratives (Lyotard 2002: 82).  Our identity is but one of many; contingency it’s mother. When we hear the call of another phrase regimen, our rules fall off the map of the discursive game played by the Other. When discourses meet and fight for control, appropriation, and litigated meaning, death occurs. However, when discourses meet and do not seek out comfort but discomfort, do not appropriate but bear witness, when the realization that something more is needed than simple cooperation in which silences become enforced across phrase regimens, there is the place where justice can be attempted.
There is a particular clash of phrase regimens happening now in Africa. There, years of colonization have left a history of death, destruction and most of all silence. The current clash and the current point of discomfort for the West at the edge of its language game is the notion of medical knowledge. What counts as medical knowledge is at issue because a solution to the AIDS crisis in Africa has recently become a global concern. The West has a way of litigating between what is medical knowledge and what is not, a set of rules, which cannot be met by traditional methods.
The claims of non-Western medical practitioners often referred to as traditional or spiritual healers are found to be unpresentable or otherwise unprovable within Western idioms. I understand the problematical nature of a homogenizing terms like traditional healer but there are times when essentializing or homogenizing terms can help to show the vastly unpresentable nature of the claims of other discourses within the grand narratives of the West. When Western science and traditional knowledge meet within Western discursive spaces, this is the way in which the delineation has been described:
Because the senses are prone to error, Cartesian philosophy focuses on data, measurement, testing, hypothesizing, objectivity, rationality, replicability, and verifiability. In contrast, indigenous knowledge is subjective because of its basis in historical/cultural experience and uncontrolled observation (Trotti 2001: Section I.B. Indigenous Medicinal Knowledge, para.1). Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2002 – From Argument Analysis To Cultural Keywords (And Back Again)

• by: Eddo Rigotti & Andrea Rocci, Istituto Linguistico-Semiotico, University of Lugano (USI), Switzerland

1. Introduction
The present investigation aims at bridging recent research on cultural keywords (i.e. words that are particularly revealing of the values of a culture) carried out in various areas of linguistics with the logical and rhetorical analysis of arguments. It will be shown that between these two scientific endeavours there can be a fruitful two-way influence. On the one hand, considerations from argumentation theory can help significantly in the complex task of  hypothesising and testing candidates to the status of keywords in a given culture. On the other hand, our understanding of the functioning in argumentative discourse of endoxa and topoi (as culturally shared values and beliefs and culturally shared rules of inference respectively) can greatly benefit from explicit semantic analyses of cultural keywords. In the article a strategy for this interaction is outlined, motivated and briefly exemplified.

2. Keywords and cultural keywords
What is a keyword? A keyword in the sense the term acquired in the fields of Library Science and Internet search engines, is, as the key metaphor suggests, a means of access to digitally stored information. Apparently, keywords can be used so because they are in some sense representative of a whole body of knowledge to which they are associated. Likewise, the notion of cultural keywords, which introduces a further layer of metaphor, suggests the, admittedly vague, idea of words that are particularly revealing of a culture, that can give access to the inner workings of a culture as a whole, to its fundamental beliefs, values, institutions and customs. In short, of words that explain a culture.
The notion of cultural keyword is often associated to the name of Raymond Williams and to his influential pocket dictionary Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Williams 1976). His study, based for linguistic data on the Oxford English Dictionary, methodologically belongs to a broadly humanist tradition of scholarship, falling somewhere between the history of ideas and what is sometimes called the “external history of language”. In the choice of entries it largely reflects the author’s concerns for social organisation and sometimes his interest for Marxist social theorising: alienation, bourgeois, capitalism, dialectic, hegemony, revolution.
While his contribution to cultural analysis is broadly relevant for the understanding of the cultural and ideological backdrop of a number of contemporary argumentative practices, in what follows we will adopt a much narrower focus, restricting ourselves to the contribution of linguistics proper and, more specifically, to approaches that emphasise the use linguistic semantic methods and theoretical tools, in order to examine how these tools can be brought to bear on the tasks of reconstruction and evaluation of natural language arguments. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2002 – Can Testimonies Constitute Proof?

• by: Andreea Deciu Ritivoi - International Society for the Study of Argumentation, Amsterdam

In a recent book about Holocaust survivors and their role in establishing the truth about the so-called Final Solution, the author, Kelly Oliver, prefaces her argument with the following case narrative: one of the few survivors of a Nazi camp known to have been the site of a unique event – a rebellion of the inmates – included in her testimony about the camp a description of the four liquidation rooms and the four afferent chimneys. However, several archival sources about this particular camp and the activity that took place at it explicitly refer to five chimneys, instead of four. The difficulty raised by the discrepancy between the survivor’s testimony and other kinds of documents is quite serious. In fact, it constitutes a dilemma at several distinct levels: moral, philosophical, and, I will argue in this paper, rhetorical.
It has been suggested that the woman might be an impostor, precisely because her testimony is contradicted by other evidence. Obviously, such a response is predicated on the assumption that “other evidence” carry more weight that an isolated testimony. And whereas psychiatrists on the other hand have tried to explain why a survivor’s memory can present some inaccuracies while still being largely reliable, there are also historians for whom a personal narrative about the Holocaust is qualitatively preferable to other kinds of evidence – in this case, archival ones. Indeed, in an essay on the perception of history in modernity, Phillippe Ariès has argued that perhaps the most salient feature of historiography after World War II is the increasing popularity of testimonies as genre and means of argumentation. By means of proposing a definition of testimonies, Aries emphasizes their generic distinctiveness from memoirs: while the latter merely convey a private experience, the former defines experience as eminently private. In the age of modernity, with all its incomprehensible and unaccountable atrocities, says Ariès, history can begin to make sense insofar as individual human beings own up to it, by taking responsibility for it as their own (regardless where a specific event happened, in Eastern Europe or in Somalia, Israel or China).
History, on this account, moves into the realm of the private at least from an ontological and moral standpoint. For the discovery and understanding of this kind of history, testimonies play a crucial role: yet even so, their relevance is inextricably connected to their reliability: even in the aftermath of Hayden White, Louis Mink and others’ efforts to establish the thoroughly constructed nature of the past and the disciplinary proximity between historiography and literary or rhetorical discourse, claiming responsibility for the past assumes that are certain procedures which can guarantee a modicum of accuracy of the reconstruction. The recent discussion among Holocaust scholars concerning the validity of some testimonies shows the need for establishing criteria to evaluate the reliability of historical testimonies. But in more general terms, what is ultimately at stake in disagreements about the role of testimonies is their status as means of argumentation, or, to put it differently, the context in which testimonies can constitute proof. Yes, relevance should not be confused with accuracy – as some historians are quick to point out. And while Ariès argues for the moral and ethical relevance of testimonies, historians who reject them invoke the difficulty or sometimes impossibility of determining their accuracy. But what this binary leaves out, thus becoming locked into a opposition, is a third aspect connected to testimonies: their persuasiveness.

This aspect is rhetorical, and if properly explored and accounted for, it can contribute to a better understanding of the other two. This is what I set out to do in my paper: probe into the rhetorical function of testimonies in order to articulate a space of analysis for those testimonies that are particularly difficult to accept, either because of their improbable content or because their accuracy cannot be satisfactorily established. In my argument I incorporate some recent observations from the French literature on this topic, but I am also drawing extensively from historical sources, specifically the British Enlightenment and its treatment of the question of miracles. I am certainly not trying to make a case for historical or cultural continuity – that the 18th century view of testimony can or should be applied to contemporary debates in Holocaust studies. I use arguments proposed by Enlightenment philosophers as an invention tool in my own argument, as a way of getting at the problematic of testimonies. I also find the Enlightenment, particularly in Britain, a precious repository of relevant insights, in light of the fact that it had to deal a lot with improbable testimonies on very important and worth exploring topics. From this point of view at least, I see no major discontinuity between the Enlightenment and our era. In fact, there is an important similarity between miracle-reports recorded in the 18th century and Holocaust survivors’ testimonies, insofar as both pose the same rhetorical problem in terms of their plausibility, both make claims about a state-of-affairs that is, for different reasons, impossible to accept. With respect to survivors’ testimonies I am, of course, thinking of what many scholars have described as a crisis of understanding: the survivor has seen and experienced things that are so horrendous that they cannot be comprehended or communicated. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2002 – On Reasonable Question-Begging Arguments

• by: Juho Ritola - Department of Philosophy, University of Turku, Finland

1. Introduction
This paper will criticize the claim that arguments that beg the question can, in some special cases, yield reasonable belief to the conclusion, made by Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen (2001). Lippert-Rasmussen presents and examines two possible cases of arguments that appear to beg the question, but arguably give the addressee a reason to believe the conclusion. Based on these cases, Lippert-Rasmussen puts forth the following criterion:

A question-begging argument is reasonable if:
1. the addressee of the argument has reasons independent of the conclusion to accept the premises of the argument;
2. the addressee of the argument fails to conduct his reasoning on the basis of these reasons; and
3. the reasons for which the addressee rejects (or accepts) the conclusion are bad ones (Lippert-Rasmussen, 2001, 126).

What does this criterion amount to? Lippert-Rasmussen builds on the view of David Sanford (see 1972, 1981, 1988, 1989). The details of Sanford’s account need not concern us here, but two essential elements on which Sanford builds should be noted. Namely, according to Sanford, whether an argument begs the question should be decided based on the 1) the logical relations between the propositions involved and 2) the way belief in these propositions has been acquired, namely that the belief in the premise is not due to the belief in the conclusion. In essence, if one has the right reasons for holding a belief and uses these beliefs appropriately, one reaches conclusions worthy of belief. Lippert-Rasmussen argues that a comparison between the content of belief-set and arguments is what decides the value of the argument, not the manner in which the contents of belief-set are actually used: if the addressee of the argument has good reasons to accept the conclusion, the argument is reasonable, irrespective of the way these reasons affect the process of reasoning.
The intuitively good thing about Lippert-Rasmussen’s cases is that they look like a situation where a person sees the error of his or her ways and says: “Okay, I admit it now: I did actually have good reason to accept the premises (I just didn’t remember them), and the reasons why I originally rejected the conclusion were bad ones (I never should’ve trusted that fellow anyway). It was indeed a good argument.” It is this way of looking at arguments that we need to discuss. Is it tenable? Is it acceptable to evaluate arguments solely by the content of the arguer’s belief-set?
I will argue that Lippert-Rasmussen’s argument can be challenged on two main points. First challenge objects to his argument against the division between being justified in believing (situationally justified) and justifiedly believing (doxastic justification). I will argue that this division is important for the explication of fallacies. Second, and closely related, challenge is that it can be questioned whether it is these arguments that actually provide reasons for believing the conclusion. At the end of the paper, I will also briefly consider the nature of second-order conditions in argument evaluation. My conclusion is that Lippert-Rasmussen fails to show that arguments that beg the question can make the addressee’s belief in the conclusion reasonable. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2002 – Madison, Mill And The Public Sphere: A Classically Liberal Approach To Public Deliberation

• by: Robert C. Rowland - The University of Kansas

There is something decidedly odd about dominant theories concerning how the public sphere should operate. Public sphere theories focus on how societies make decisions about issues involving the public. They focus on the public in two closely related ways:  a concentration on decisions involving issues of public concern and a consideration of how the public participates in those decisions. Although the philosophical underpinnings of the two related foci of public sphere are rarely stated, it is clear that the very existence of the public sphere depends upon a society that is in some broad sense liberal. The public sphere cannot exist in a meaningful way without some sort of democratic system that protects the rights of individuals to speak their minds. The oddity in all of this is that public sphere theorists largely have ignored classical liberalism as a source for their theories of how the public sphere should operate.
Rather than draw on liberalism in order to develop theories to explain and evaluate the functioning of the public sphere, theorists have tended to be quite dismissive of traditional liberalism. For example, in Liberalism and the Problem of Knowledge, Charles Arthur Willard discusses what he calls the “crisis of liberal democracy (1996, 15) and eventually calls for “liberalism… to surrender a sweeping problematic: the problem of the public sphere” (1996, 294). In fact, Willard discusses the views of Madison, Mill, Jefferson and other classical liberals in much more detail that do most public sphere theorists, but his ultimate conclusion is to reject their views as inadequate, even antiquated.

In this essay, I argue that argumentation and communication scholars have been too quick to reject the relevance of classical liberalism for understanding the public sphere. It is certainly worth noting that at a time when many in academia dismiss liberalism as an utterly failed ideology, in the real public sphere traditional liberalism stands utterly triumphant. Traditional liberalism, a philosophy embracing representative democracy, limited government, protection of human rights, especially the right to self-expression, and a reliance on the marketplace both in the economic sphere and also the realm of public knowledge, is clearly the dominant ideology in the world today. Given this situation, it seems sensible to consider what a liberal theory of the public sphere would look like.
In order to begin to build a liberal theory of the public sphere, I will focus on the implicit theories of the public sphere found in the writings of two of the foremost liberal theorists, James Madison and John Stuart Mill. Madison, the primary author of both the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights, is the theorists upon whom “we unavoidably depend to comprehend its [the Constitution’s] intellectual foundations” (Banning, 1995, 2). Madison more than any other single individual shaped the debate that created the system of limited government and representative democracy in the United States. He was, as Matthews has argued, the “quintessential liberal” (1995, 21). If Madison is important both as a practical politician and also a democratic theorist, Mill can be seen as the supreme theorist of liberalism. Writing at the very beginning of modernity, Mill expressed the liberal vision of society more clearly than any writer before or since. It is for this reason that in a collection of Mill’s works on politics and society, Geraint L. Williams labeled him as “the philosopher of liberalism” (1976, 9) and Graeme Duncan chose to pair Mill against Marx as “the creators of the classical communist and liberal theories” (1973, 1).
In the remainder of this essay, I will develop the implicit theory of the public sphere in the political writings of Madison and Mill. In order to reveal their liberal theories about the public sphere, I will sketch the goals that they identified for public deliberation, assumptions they made about society, problems that they identified in achieving the goals, and their diagnosis of the best means of overcoming those difficulties. In the conclusion, I will draw implications for contemporary studies of the public sphere. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2002 – “I See Your Point” – On Visual Arguments

• by: Menashe Schwed - Ashkelon Regional College, Israel

1. Can a visual object be an argument?
The prevailing assumption in analyzing arguments is that the form of an argument is linguistically expressed as a set of propositions. However, Willard, for instance, has argued that argument diagrams based on Toulmin’s model, which presuppose the linguistic expression of propositions in arguments, cannot describe other forms of arguments that are conveyed by various media, as television commercials (Willard, 1976: 315). The question is not whether such criticism as Willard’s is correct. Instead, the question must be extended: What is the range of the concept of argument or what sorts of things may be considered as arguments?
The medium in which an argument is formulated does not usually get the same focus as its structure. The implicit assumption is usually that language is the medium and, thus, the possibility that visual objects can be considered as a type of argument faces the position that will disqualify them as real arguments. For instance, when Daniel O’Keefe tries to clarify the difference between an argument and argument-making, he says that a paradigm case of argument-making must not be merely linguistically explicable but indeed linguistically explicit (O’Keefe, 1982).
However, another reading of O’Keefe’s account would focus on his structural analysis of making an argument and not on the final medium in which argument-making must be described. O’Keefe argues that an argument as an entity has to be part of being engaged in an act of making an argument. Thus, identifying what is the argument and its analysis or reconstruction should be done by identifying the circumstances in which that argument was argued. The distinction between the way in which an argument is actually made or communicated, and the abstract object of “argument” is theoretically important for the possibility of a visual argument: while the visual argument is an object, its reconstruction as a linguistically explicit argument is part of analyzing the case of its making. Thus, the possibility of visual arguments is based on the distinction between its being a visual object and the ability to reformulate it as a linguistically explicit case of making an argument. In this way, the issue of the medium of the argument becomes a central part of an argumentation theory in addition to its analysis and reconstruction.

In order to make the distinction between the visual argument as an object and its final linguistic reconstruction as a case of making an argument, there is a need to reject a common assumption regarding the nature of an argument. The paradigm characterization of the concept of argument is by describing it as a type of speech act. However, such a characterization might jeopardize the possibility of visual arguments, since, strictly speaking, they are not speech acts. O’Keefe rejects this characterization and bases his claim on analyzing the concept of Argument-making (O’Keefe, 1982: 12f). According to O’Keefe, an argument is not a speech act but a notion, while “arguing” is the speech act that conveys an argument.
This distinction can be the starting point for the possibility of a visual argument, for it illuminates an important difference between two things: First, what sorts of things would be classified as arguments, which is part of the meaning and application of the concept of argument, and, second, what sorts of circumstances would entitle making an argument, which is part of argument-making. Therefore, a visual argument is an object, an instance of the notion of argument. It is neither a speech act nor an instance of the notion of argument-making. As a visual instance of the notion of an argument, both the claim and the reasons are not fully linguistically explicit. Nevertheless, they are both overtly expressed via other mediums than language. However, when a visual argument is part of a communication process of making an argument, then the need to reconstruct the visual argument in a linguistically explicit way emerges. Read more