ISSA Proceedings 2006 – Memorializing In A Time Of Terror: A Case Study Of Public Argument

• by: Barbara A. Biesecker - University of Iowa

In “Punctuations: The Time of a Thesis” Jacques Derrida offers a remembrance that goes back to 1966. After delivering a paper at a colloquium in the United States, he recalls Jean Hyppolite’s remark: “I really do not see where you are going.” Derrida replied to him, more or less, in the following way: “If I clearly saw ahead of time where I was going, I really don’t believe that I would take another step to get there.” He then offers a brief meditation on his own response: “Perhaps I then thought that knowing where one is going may no doubt help in orienting one’s thinking, but that it has never made anyone take a single step, quite the opposite in fact. What is the good of going where one knows oneself to be going and where one knows that one is destined to arrive” (Derrida 2004, p. 115)? Now I want to say something today about the relationship between knowing and doing and, even more specifically, about the relationship between reason and argument. And I want, by risking a step beyond the habits and habitus of my own thought (I have no formal training in the theory and practice of argument), to suggest, with all due respect to the experts amongst us, that we need desperately a new ethics of argument. So, knowing and doing, reason and argument, risk and ethics. But I am getting ahead of myself; this is not yet the time of my thesis. First, a retracing of my steps and a warning in advance that I will not be delivering the essay that is promised in the program. Instead, a bit of a mis-step that I hope will lead us in the direction of something completely other. The completely or radically other, whom one can never anticipate but whose arrival must nonetheless be prepared for in advance, will be yet another of my motifs.

As I said, I knew what I was doing, was quite sure of where I was going. I set out to support the claim that above all else Ground Zero has always been and would necessarily remain much less a space of memorialization – or, to use Pierre Nora’s terms, site of memory – and much more a landscape of argument (there is a critique of Nora’s thesis barely buried here, one toward which I will gesture again shortly but whose full elaboration will have to wait for another day). Indeed, nearly five years out and, still, the question of what to do with Ground Zero – the sixteen acres in Lower Manhattan on which the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center once stood – is far from settled. As one journalist writing for the New Statesman reported, “argument over what should replace the towers began before the last body part was removed from the smouldering ruins” (Wapshott 2005) and there is little sense that a consensus will emerge in the near future. To the contrary, since the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation’s jury announced its international competition’s winning design (“Reflecting Absence”) on 14 January 2004, differences of opinion have only intensified.
I meticulously tracked the controversy, step by step. Here I invoke only a sampling from that relatively protracted and deeply invaginated public debate. A near immediate reaction to “Reflecting Absence” was the formation of the Twin Towers II Memorial Foundation, a not-for-profit corporation in the State of New York whose aim is to “provide a vehicle for the American public, New Yorkers and 9-11 family members to voice their opinions by encouraging education about the current proposed site plan for the rebuilding of the World Trade Center” (Shurbet 2006). With the assistance of no less a celebrity than Donald Trump, the Twin Towers II Memorial Foundation countered the LMDC’s proposal with its own “appropriate and family-inspired above-ground memorial at the World Trade Center Site” (Shurbet 2006).
Later, the announced redesign of the Freedom Tower (a response to concerns that the structure was unnecessarily vulnerable to a truck bomb) was met by scathing critique from journalists, laypersons, and architects alike, not the least of whom was Jeff Speck, Design Director at the National Endowment for the Arts, who lambasted the revision: “We must ask ourselves what it says about our nation to produce a ‘Freedom Tower’ hiding behind twenty-stories of solid concrete. Better to build nothing than such an alienating monument to surrender” (Nason 2005, p. 24). Then summer 2005 saw the formation of “Take Back the Memorial,” a coalition of 9-11 family groups and firefighters whose most pressing mission (in addition to a massive overhaul of the memorial’s design) was to have the proposed International Freedom Center “removed” from the 16-acre site (the Drawing Center had already been effectively eliminated from what should perhaps no longer be referred to as The World Trade Center Memorial Cultural Complex). Prompted by an op-ed piece penned by Debra Burlingame (a 9/11 family member and World Trade Center Memorial Foundation board member) and published in the Wall Street Journal, the coalition adamantly insisted that an international freedom center promised to denigrate the sacred site. As Burlingame put it in terms that unmistakably invoke the partisan culture wars of the eighties and nineties that the tragedy of 9/11 was more than once claimed to have inspired the nation to transcend. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2006 – Didactics And Authority: Towards A Pragma-Didactical Approach

• by: M. Dufour - Université, Sorbonne Nouvelle

Didactical arguments are shown to be a kind of argument raising specific problems. I discuss the way they are related to dialectical arguments and to arguments from authority and suggest a new research orientation in argumentation: pragma-didactics.

1. Aristotle on didactical arguments
At the beginning of the On Sophistical Refutations (II, 165 a-b), Aristotle gives a four types classification of arguments that can be involved in a discussion:
Of arguments used in discussion there are four kinds, Didactic, Dialectical, Examination-arguments and Contentious arguments. Didactic arguments are those which reason from the principles appropriate to each branch of learning and not from the opinions of the answerer (for he who is learning must take things on trust). Dialectical arguments are those which starting from generally accepted opinions, reason to establish a contradiction.

First, two remarks. Although dialectical arguments are discussed at length in On Sophistical Refutations and the Topica, Aristotle says hardly anything more about didactical arguments. Thus, scientific arguments are not listed here although they are discussed in some later books, especially the Analytics. This last point can be explained by the fact that scientific arguments are not debatable because of the specific nature of their premises. In Posterior Analytics (I, 2, 71, b, 20), Aristotle writes that scientific premises must be “true, primary, immediate, better known than, prior to, and causative of the conclusion”. Accordingly, neither the premises nor the full scientific argument are open to discussion: this could explain why scientific arguments are missing in On Sophistical Refutations list.
So, when asking whether an argument can be both scientific and didactical, the answer would be “no!” since didactical arguments are debatable when scientific arguments are not. This seems confirmed in Topica (I, 1, 100, a 30) when Aristotle claims that “Things are true and primary which command belief through themselves and not through anything else; for regarding the first principles of science it is unnecessary to ask any further questions as to ask “why”, but each principle should of itself command belief”.
This conclusion about compatibility between didactical and scientic arguments leads to the surprising conclusion that science cannot be a branch of learning.

To avoid this difficulty, a solution is to make a distinction between didactical practice and science acquisition. Note that such a distinction is quite common, at least in folk psychology, when a distinction is made between explanation – an action made by the teacher – and understanding – an action made by the student.
However, as suggested by the previous quotation from the Topica, Aristotle seems to admit that a discussion may begin in a scientific context: suffice the student asks “why?” about a principle. But this should not happen since it would be a sign that the student does not understand the principle as a principle. In any case, following Aristotle, since the scientific knowledge of principles must be immediate it cannot rely on trust paid to a master. Moreover, according to Posterior Analytics where Aristotle sets out his empirical and inductivist epistemology, the principles of knowledge are said neither demonstrable (otherwise they would not be principles) nor undemonstrable. They are acquired by another way: “there is a definite first principle of knowledge by which we recognize ultimate truths” (I, 3, 72, b, 20). Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2006 – Rationality, Reasonableness, And Critical Rationalism: Problems With The Pragma-Dialectical View

• by: Harvey Siegel - University of Miami & John Biro - University of Florida

A major virtue of the Pragma-Dialectical theory of argumentation[i] is its commitment to reasonableness and rationality as central criteria of argumentative quality. However, the account of these key notions offered by the originators of this theory, Frans van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst, seems to us problematic in several respects. In what follows we criticize that account and offer an alternative that seems to us to be both independently preferable and more in keeping with the epistemic approach to arguments and argumentation we favor.[ii]

1. The Reasonable Rabbi
In their most recent systematic discussion of these matters (2004), van Eemeren and Grootendorst define argumentation as “a verbal, social, and rational activity aimed at convincing a reasonable critic of the acceptability of a standpoint by putting forward a constellation of propositions justifying or refuting the proposition expressed in the standpoint.” (2004, p. 1) On this view, rationality is an essential aspect of argumentation, and by saying that argumentation is “a rational activity,” van Eemeren and Grootendorst mean that it is “a complex speech act aimed at convincing a reasonable critic,” one that is “generally based on intellectual considerations” (2004, p. 2, emphases in original):
When someone advances argumentation, that person makes an implicit appeal to reasonableness: He or she tacitly assumes that the listener or reader will act as a reasonable critic when evaluating the argumentation. Otherwise, there would be no point in advancing argumentation. (ibid.)

As van Eemeren and Grootendorst make clear, the pragma-dialectical view attempts to combine descriptive and normative approaches to the study of argumentation under the heading of ‘normative pragmatics.’ (2004, pp. 9-11) The normative dimension is captured by their accounts of acceptability, which concerns the appropriateness or acceptability (or otherwise) of argumentative moves or claims, and of reasonableness, which concerns the discussion rules in accordance with which judgments of acceptability are ideally made. They invoke the image or model of “an extremely wise man – say, a rabbi,” whose position is “that of a rational critic who judges reasonably.” (2004, p. 12) The rabbi asks himself: “When should I, as a rational critic who judges reasonably, regard an argumentation as acceptable?” (2004, p. 13) And if he adopts “the critical-rationalistic view of reasonableness” (2004, p. 17, emphasis in original) that van Eemeren and Grootendorst favor, he answers that “an argumentation may be regarded as acceptable” just in so far as it “is an effective means of resolving a difference of opinion in accordance with discussion rules acceptable to the parties involved.” (2004, p. 16) So, argumentations (argumentative moves, i.e., particular speech acts) are evaluated in terms of acceptability, which is itself a matter of instrumental efficacy: an argumentation is acceptable if it is “an effective means of resolving a difference of opinion in accordance with discussion rules” and conforms to procedures that the parties accept.[iii] Such rules are in turn deemed reasonable to the extent that they are adequate for resolving the relevant difference of opinion. Thus it is argumentations that are or are not acceptable, and discussion rules (and/or the procedure in which they play a role) that are or are not reasonable:
The extent to which a particular rule is considered reasonable depends on the adequacy of that rule, as part of a procedure for conducting a critical discussion, for solving the problem at hand. (2004, p. 16)

So, “[o]ur rabbi…asks himself which theoretical instruments are, or can be made, available to him to systematically arrive at a solution of his problem regarding the acceptability of argumentation.” (2004, p. 19) To pass judgments about the acceptability of argumentations, the rabbi, if he embraces the pragma-dialectical approach, uses “an ideal model of a critical discussion and a procedure for how speech acts should be presented in order to be constructive moves in such a discussion.” (2004, p. 20) Accordingly, the rabbi’s judgments concerning the acceptability of argumentations will be based on the reasonableness of the discussion rules that license the argumentations in question. The rules are deemed reasonable just in so far as they conduce to the resolution of the relevant difference of opinion. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2006 – Mill On Argumentation

• by: Hans Vilhelm Hansen - University of Windsor

Half the wrong conclusions at which mankind arrive are reached by abuse of metaphors. (Lord Palmerston)[ii]

In this essay [i] I want to make an approach to understanding Mill’s view of argumentation, especially as his attitude toward this activity can be extracted from his essay, On Liberty.[iii] I will do this in a round-about way by considering three figures of speech, one of them associated with argumentation in general and the other two specifically attributed to Mill’s thought. These figures of speech have the character of metaphors or perhaps what Stephen Barker has called revelatory definitions. His example is, “architecture is frozen music.” As a definition this statement does not say how ‘architecture’ is used in English, nor does it introduce a new meaning for that term; it rather proposes a new way of looking at architecture. “We must reflect,” writes Barker, “about the extent and validity of this comparison between music and buildings; the [revelatory] definition is a good one if the comparison is illuminating.” (Barker 1965, p. 204) So, in this essay I will consider how apt and illuminating are the metaphors, “argumentation is war”, “the marketplace of ideas” and “society is a debating club”, with regard to Mill’s views on argumentation. Respectively these figures suggest that argumentation is war-like, debate-like, and free trade-like. Having done that I will try to identify what it is that is unique and peculiar about Mill’s view.

1. War
Perhaps the most common metaphor associated with argumentation is that “argument is war.” It may well have its roots in ancient Greek dialectic. One interpretation of Aristotle is that he taught “dialectic as a form of self-defence, organizing techniques and strategies … into the structured discipline of a philosophical martial art” (Hill & Kagan 1995, p. 34). A long time later, in the 1830s, Richard Whately used a military metaphor to explain why it is an advantage to have the presumption on your side when engaging in argumentation: an army defending a fort may well be able to turn back any assault, but should the army go “into the open field to encounter the enemy,” – that is, should the army go on the offensive – rather than wait for the enemy to attack, it might be defeated (Whately 1846, p. 113). Recently Ralph Johnson and Anthony Blair have given their informal logic textbook the title, Logical Self-Defense, intimating that some kind of combat-like attitudes and skills are needed as a safeguard against the “species of illogic” (Johnson and Blair 1983, p. xiv). Most recently the metaphor, “argument is war,” has been the point of departure for Deborah Tannen’s book, The Argument Culture. She speaks of a pervasive tendency – she calls it “agonism” – in our society to engage in argumentative behaviour. “In the argument culture,” she writes, “criticism, attack, or opposition are the predominant if not the only way of responding to people and ideas” (Tannen 2003, p. 7). Daniel Cohen, who worries about the metaphor’s implications for education, has written that,
Despite any ambiguities and subtle nuances of the word “argument,” this metaphor manages to dominate our discourse about arguments and our argumentation practice. We routinely speak, for example, of strong, or even killer, arguments and powerful counterattacks, of defensible positions and winning strategies, and of weak arguments that are easily shot down while strong ones carry a lot of firepower and are right on target (Cohen 2004, p. 36).

Tannen (2003, p. 14) points out that ‘war’ is, however, a key term in many other metaphors as well, such as the war on terror, the war on crime, the war on cancer, the war on poverty; to which I may add my own favourite – the battle of the bulge. Whenever we are involved in a struggle or competition, and the stakes are high, we seem to be ready for a metaphorical war. Cohen’s concern for how easily the language of military conflict can be adapted to that of intellectual engagement is shared by many.

Consider what we might be expected to glean from the argument-is-war metaphor.
1. There are opposing sides in the argumentation.
2. The purpose of engaging in defensive argumentation is to resist the imposition of another’s view.
3. The purpose of engaging in offensive argumentation is to impose your view on another.
4. There are few, if any, rules or standards of argumentation to be followed (trickery may be employed; there is no requirement to respect opponents).
5. Winning is more important than getting at the truth.

These may not be the only insights that purveyors of the metaphor wish to impress upon us. I have ordered the insights 1 to 5 in what seems to me to be an ascending scale of war-like behaviour: if only 1 – 3 are satisfied then there is only slight support for the metaphor but should either of 4 or 5 be satisfied as well, then it may be said that argument is war is a telling metaphor. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2006 – A Pragma-Dialectical Response To Feminist Concerns

• by: Linda Carozza - York University, Toronto Ontario

1. Introduction
The ideas that motivate this work come from an article written in Informal Logic, Deborah Orr’s “Just the facts ma’am: informal logic, gender and pedagogy” (1989). In this article Orr states that she followed the Informal Logic movement throughout the 1980s, and at first she excitedly implemented the tools of Informal Logic in her classroom teaching. However, Orr comes to find that “the toolbox is less than fully equipped” and so she makes “some suggestions as to where informal logic might look to enlarge its stock of implements” (p. 1). While Orr’s main focus comes from a pedagogical and not a field concern per se, Orr’s contribution to Informal Logic, that its toolbox is in need of feminist tools, is nonetheless an important consideration for the field. In this paper I maintain that her suggestion, that Informal Logicians begin to incorporate feminist concerns within their theories and models of argumentation, is still largely unexplored. I begin by summarizing Orr’s contribution to Informal Logic. I articulate her criticism of Informal Logic further with feminist epistemology and discuss to what extent Informal Logic considers such concerns. Then I turn to Pragma-Dialectics for a better response to addressing such feminist epistemological concerns in argumentation. My investigation shows that the Pragma-Dialectical model provides an adequate foundation for addressing feminist concerns, but it does not provide a very feminist-friendly model of argumentation as it stands.

2. Deborah Orr’s “Just the facts ma’am: informal logic, gender and pedagogy”
Orr does not hold any one system of reasoning, be it Formal Logic, Informal Logic, Pragma-Dialectics, etc., to be faulty or negligent. Rather, it is just a single area of reasoning equipped with a series of the same tool type. Orr thus likens the field of Informal Logic to a toolbox. That is, a good toolbox is equipped with sets of screwdrivers, nails, wrenches, and so on, and each of these series of tools is a part of a single tool type. Having a toolbox with a dozen different screwdrivers does not give a workperson a wide range of tools to access when building her project, since she has only a series of that one tool. A good toolbox has a variety of tools that can be accessed. Thus, if a workperson is building a bookshelf, and she needs to nail the shelf onto the frame, it does not matter how many types of screwdrivers are available. A hammer is needed to complete the project. Orr’s point is that the particular criteria Informal Logic relies on in its approach to argumentation is much like the situation of a toolbox with only a set of screwdrivers. Informal Logic provides a single tool type with a possibility of different rules to work with, just as the workperson has different types of screwdrivers to access. Orr, however, argues that a possibility of multiple tools of reasoning should exist for Informal Logic, so that the Informal Logician has a fuller toolbox (p. 1).
To concretize this point, consider the two argumentative contexts and rationales that follow. First, imagine you are vying for a particular position in a job interview, what you likely need to do is develop reasoning tactics that strongly support you getting the position. It does not matter how many Formal Logic formulas you have at your disposal (modus ponens, modus tollens, etc.), since even if you plug in the appropriate criteria, using them will probably not help you get the position. One of several different strategies might be to develop descriptive analogies between a previous job and the current position being interviewed instead. This could help develop a strong argument in your favour within the interview. This example, it seems to me, is not a contentious example. In fact, Informal Logic recognizes and is a response to the limited nature of Formal Logic (see Johnson & Blair, 2006, p. xiii; Groarke & Tindale, 2004, p. xv; Govier, 2001, p. ix). But, just as Formal Logic is not really helpful in the context of argumentation in job interviews, Informal Logic has its limitations as well. Consider another example: you are in the midst of a custody battle with your former partner. Both of you need to provide solid arguments for sole custody rights. Important to the field of Informal Logic is reasoning devoid of fallacies. And, let’s say you make solid arguments that are not fallacious, ones that meet the requirements for sufficiency. This might not amount to much in your means to resolving, or winning, the custody battle. An alternative helpful strategy could be to focus on finding common ground with the other party instead (see Gilbert, 1997, pp. 111-112), whether or not fallacies are committed. Read more

ISSA Proceeding 2006 – Hidden Obstructions In Discussions Involving Conductive Argumentation. Core And Surface In The U.S. Debate On The Use Of Data Mining Techniques In The Fight Against Terrorism

• by: Frans A.J. Birrer - LIACS (Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science), Leiden University

Abstract
This article examines some obstructions to adequate discussion that reside not so much at the level of dialectic procedure, but rather at the level of content and motivation. Such obstructions may arise particularly easy when a discussion involves conductive argumentation, and both discussants have reasons for partially or totally suppressing the discussion of certain aspects, in spite of their relevance to the issue at stake. Such jointly agreed suppression does not formally violate the pragma-dialectical rules, since these rules focus on fairness. As an illustration, an analysis is presented of a US debate on the use of data mining against terrorism. Here two potential obstacles of the nature described above can be observed:
(i) There is an ambiguity in the way the issue of privacy tends to be conceptualised.
(ii) Even though the trustworthiness of government agencies is at the core of the issue, there is sometimes a certain reluctance to explicitly address this aspect.

1. Discussion failures and obstructions
Discussions are not always as good or as productive as they could be. The reasons for this can reside at various levels:
(i) Certain reasonable principles or standards for discussions are violated by the discussants (failure of procedure).
(ii) Certain arguments that are highly relevant to the issue under discussion are marginalised in the actual debate, or even totally ignored or suppressed (failure of content).
(iii) The discussants are driven by motivations that make them less than willing to address certain ‘faults’ in the discussion (failure of attitude).

An analysis restricted to level (i) addresses no more than what is put forward by the discussants themselves – augmented perhaps with some obvious and uncontroversial background assumptions not explicitly stated. The only ‘faults’ identified then will be violations of formal or logical rules concerning the line of reasoning or concerning the procedure of the discussion. It sometimes happens, however, that certain relevant arguments or issues remain unduly marginal in the discussion, are insufficiently addressed or, worse, not stated in any recognizable form at all. This can be due to negligence. It may also be the case that all participants in the discussion have motives that make them forsake these particular aspects. As an example of the latter, take environmental issues. As soon as concrete measures for improving the environment are to be discussed, most actors have a strong incentive to duck the issue: consumers are reluctant to give up their pleasures, industry fears costly changes that could mean a set-back in the international competition, politicians refrain from advocating unpopular measures, and so on (Birrer, 2004; 2001b).
When the discussants themselves fail to sufficiently discuss (or even fail to discuss at all) certain arguments or issues that are highly relevant to the subject of discussion, such failure will be hard to address when the analysis is restricted to level (i), since such an analysis is forced to remain relatively blind to issues of content – and even more so, of course, when that content is entirely missing in the actual discussion. If it is possible at all to address such a failure at level (i), this is likely to require a long chain of interrogating questions of clarification addressed by the analyst to the discussants, since the analyst can only point to the violation of rules rather than directly enter into the content matter itself. When the discussants are consciously or unconsciously motivated to avoid the issue, the situation is still worse, since the indirectness of the analyst’s approach makes it easy to evade by the discussants.
It looks like in such cases attempts to improve the discussion should put the discussion in a broader perspective, including levels (ii) and (iii). Even if one’s single aim would be to understand what happens in the discussion, it could still be held that such an understanding is incomplete if it does not include an understanding of why the discussion proceeds in the way it does rather than in another, and that therefore it cannot ignore the aspects under (ii) and (iii).

In the next sections, I will illustrate obstructions at level (ii) and (iii) in more detail for a recent discussion in the US on the use of certain computer techniques in the fight against terrorism. More in particular, I will analyse the arguments that can be found in one specific report on this subject. The issues and arguments that I want to address are all in the report, including what I will identify as the “core issue”, so in this case I need not bring in any new arguments or issues that are not already mentioned by the discussants themselves. The potential obstacles to productive debate, however, can be clearly recognised in the arguments in the report – as well as elsewhere in the debate on this issue. The case can thus serve as an illustration of the importance of the broader perspective for understanding the discussion process and for a realistic view on the opportunities for improvement. In the final section, I will return to a few more general questions regarding analysis at level (ii) and (iii). Read more