ISSA Proceedings 2006 – Ad Hominem Argument In The Bush/Kerry Presidential Debates

• by: Michael Leff - University of Memphis

“Do you believe that you could do a better job than President Bush in preventing another 9/11 attack on the United States?”[i] This question, directed toward Senator Kerry by moderator Jim Lehrer, opens the 2004 Presidential Debates in the United States. The issue Lehrer raises seems appropriate and unremarkable, since in the aftermath of 9/11, security had become a dominant concern in American political discourse. The phrasing of the question, however, offers a less obtrusive but perhaps more important measure of the political atmosphere. Lehrer does not focus upon policy or party or ideology but instead asks for a direct comparison between the Senator and his opponent and thus gives priority to the persons who are competing in the debate. Moreover this strong emphasis on the two individuals accurately reflects the tenor of the whole campaign and anticipates the later course of all three debates. These debates center on persons, and in this direct and literal sense, their arguments rest upon ad hominem considerations.
This arrangement of priorities reverses the normal expectations in argumentation studies, where the propositions advocated by the arguer represent the focal concern for evaluation, and the persona of the arguer is, at best, a secondary consideration. To consider the debates from an argumentative perspective, therefore, requires an alteration in perspective and a revision or expansion of existing conceptions of the role of character in argument. And so I need to begin by reviewing some of these conceptions in an effort to open space for my purpose, which is to present a realistic analysis of the debates that maintains contact with traditional interests in argumentation scholarship.

1. Ad hominem, Ethos, and Ethotic Argument
One traditional conception of argumentation (associated with what is called the “standard treatment”) hardens the distinction between arguer and argument to the point that ad hominem appeals are treated categorically as fallacies. From this perspective, rational inquiry requires strict attention to the quality of the argument qua argument, and any reference to the person making the argument constitutes an irrelevant distraction. This position, of course, virtually exiles campaign debates from the domain of rational argument and leads us to view them as exercises in “mere rhetoric,” designed to manipulate opinion with little regard for the substance of the issues and without any relation to normative principles of reasoning. And in fact, the debates are routinely treated in this way by much of the public, by the press, and even by scholars who study them. It is not an accident that the large and diverse scholarly literature on U.S. presidential debates contains very few entries devoted to argumentation.

A more recent approach to ad hominem argument, developed by Douglas Walton (1998, 2000, 2001), Alan Brinton (1985, 1986, 1995), Trudy Govier (1999) and others, offers a more fluid conception of the relationship between arguer and argument than the standard treatment allows. On this view, the character, commitments, and actions of an arguer often are relevant to the assessment of an argument, and hence ad hominem considerations, while they may sometimes be irrelevant, often are legitimate and appropriate resources for rational argumentation. But, while these revisionist positions allow space for assessing the role of persons in arguments, they still maintain a focus on the proposition or stand-point of the advocate rather than on the advocate per se. Brinton, for example, explains that ad hominem argument deals with an arguer, a proposition endorsed by the arguer, and the proposition itself, and a “logically healthy” ad hominem draws a conclusion only about the second element in this sequence. That is, the reasoning proceeds from characteristics of the arguer to a judgment about the propriety or legitimacy of that arguer’s advocacy of the proposition (Brinton 1995, p. 214).
David Zarefsky (2003) productively complicates this view of the relationship between person and argument by demonstrating the potential interaction between two species of ad hominem that normally receive separate treatment. Contemporary theorists divide ad hominem arguments into a number of types, the two most prominent of which are the direct or (the misleadingly named) abusive ad hominem and the circumstantial ad hominem. Direct ad hominem raises doubt about an arguer’s position because of some character flaw (e.g. Jones is a pathological liar, and therefore his testimony is unreliable). Circumstantial ad hominem calls attention to an inconsistency between the arguer’s position and the arguer’s actions (e.g. Mayor Jones has given himself a raise, and therefore he ought not to claim that the budget crisis justifies salary cuts for all city workers), or an inconsistency between the arguer’s position and other commitments that the arguer has made (e.g. Congressman Jones has repeatedly supported the principle of equal rights for all citizens, and so he ought to not support a ban on gay marriage). For the most part, informal logicians have classified arguments as belonging to one or the other of these types and treated them in isolation. Zarefsky, however, uses the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore (the case that decided the outcome of the 2000 presidential election) to indicate how the two may be linked together.
Zarefsky argues that the majority opinion in Bush v. Gore inconsistently departs from the justices’ prior commitments in four respects, and thus it stands open to circumstantial ad hominem critique. He then adds that the circumstantial inconsistency warrants a direct ad hominem judgment, since a decision so much “at odds with … prior commitments” raises a legitimate question about the basis for the decision and supports the conclusion that it is based on political preferences rather than legal principle (2003, p. 307). In this case, then, Zaraefsky holds that circumstantial considerations provide logical grounds for a charge of direct or abusive ad hominem.
This effort to connect a typology of arguments with the character of arguers nudges the study of ad hominem into territory more familiar to rhetoricians than to informal logicians. The tendency is hardly surprising given Zarefsky’s disciplinary affiliation (note the ad hominem here) and his conviction that “personal character is intrinsic to argument” (2003, p. 307). This view, of course, follows from a long-standing rhetorical interest in ethos (character) as a mode of proof, and Zarefsky’s essay implicitly supports Alan Brinton’s cogent but neglected appeal for argumentation scholars to explore the relationship between the study of ad hominem argument and rhetorical ethos (Brinton, 1985, 1986). Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2006 – Past-Oriented And Future-Oriented Emotions In Argumentation For Europe During The Fifties

• by: Sara Cigada - Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore

1. Introduction
Studying some texts by the so-called “Fathers of Europe” in the French-speaking area (Robert Schuman, Jean Monnet, Paul-Henri Spaak and Denis de Rougemont) and comparing them among each other and with their “inter-discourse” (cf. Amossy 2000, pp. 97-99), it is possible to perceive some nuances of their argumentation and in particular to detect some specific emotive strategies (cf. Plantin 1999, pp. 209-216 and Caffi 2001, pp. 69 ff.). In fact, discourses for Europe in the Fifties reveal a relevant presence of emotive communication.
In this paper, we focussed in particular on the evocation of emotions in their orientation towards the future or the past. In fact on the one hand authors often refer to the disphoric couple grieve and fear and on the other hand they point to pride and hope. Observing the temporal characterisation of these emotions, it can be said that grieve refers to the recent past of Europe and fear to its future, in that immediate decisions about the management of the political international situation will determine peace or another war like the two World Wars just finished at the moment of the discussion. On the other hand, when authors argument for pride and hope, they refer pride to the ancient past of European countries, made of great honour and cultural traditions. Pride turns out to be an argument in favour of hope about the political international situation (cf. Schuman 1963, passim).
It should be noticed that the analysis of the historical context allows us to state the “contextual reasonableness” of emotional involvement (i.e. spontaneous expression of emotions) and the relevance of emotive discourse (i.e. strategically provoking emotions in the audience)[i].

The traditional distinction we just mentioned between emotional and emotive communication was firstly proposed by Anton Marty in 1908 and it is still considered valid even if it goes on posing a number of problems. Let us see some of the most important ones.
Emotional communication of ten provokes emotions in the addressee (it causes a natural phenomenon of «emotional synchronization» as Martina Drescher calls it, cf. Drescher 2003): a first important question is to what extent it is correct to call this communication emotive, as addressee’s involvement is not sought after purposely by the speaker. Many effects of emotional synchronization do not depend on strategic communication, as they are a natural effect of the addressee’s emotive capacity (Caffi – Janney 1994, p. 327) when reacting sympathetically with the speaker. The pathological lack of this capacity as a consequence of neurological diseases or chirurgical interventions has been studied e.g. by Damasio (cf. Damasio 2001) while a specific psychological trouble, alexithymy, has been used by Christian Plantin as a metaphor to stigmatize the modern refusal of emotion as intrinsically fallacious in argumentation theory and in some currents of Western culture (Plantin 1998).
Another problem concerns the recognition of an emotion as authentic: it is obviously difficult to determine by a verbal distinctive feature whether an emotion is genuine or simulated; moreover it is sometimes uncertain whether the distinction makes any sense at all. In therapeutic contexts, for instance, the therapist displays towards the patient a “bigger” quantity of involvement than expected in a “normal” context, in order to oblige him to synchronize and guide him back to a “normal” involvement (cf. Caffi 2001).

Finally, emotive communication may be used purposely in order to manipulate the addressee (in the sense explained by Quintilian, when he says that anyone is able to create arguments if he has proofs at his disposal, but what the orator must be able to do is to make the judges see reality in a different way, provoking emotions with his discourse, and thus changing the judge’s view, cf. Quintilian VI, 2, 5-6). This notion of emotive communication could be easily linked to the censure of emotions as sources of fallacies. But emotive communication can be “used” in a reasonable (cf. Rigotti – Rocci – Greco 2006, pp. 268-272) way also in argumentative contexts, not for manipulation purposes. In this case, emotive communication aims at provoking the due involvement in the addressee, i.e. at making him feel the relevance of the decision or choice he is facing. Emotive appeal focuses on the interest of the addressee, in the sense that the author suggests him that it would make no sense to decide without considering some particular implications of his decision. These implications could not be perceived if they were not described in detail and thus imagined and evaluated. The author’s intention, anyway, is not to twist (cf. Rigotti 2005) the addressee’s view. On the contrary: emotive communication is used in a strategic way in order to make the interlocutor consider in a more serious way some relevant aspects of the situation. Here emotion plays its most natural role: it works as a magnifying glass, producing in the addressee a magnified image of a relevant detail. Relevance is addressee oriented (it is not a particular interest of the speaker to make him see that detail, in order to bias his judgment; on the contrary, he realizes that the addressee could miss a relevant point and “forces” him to consider it). Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2006 – Arguments In Child Language

• by: Lilit Brutian - Yerevan State University

1. Introduction
The paper aims at the analysis of children’s arguments. Paraphrasing the words by Piaget “There is no better introduction to child logic than the study of spontaneous questions” (Piaget 1971, 162), it could be stated: “There is no better introduction to child logic than the study of their argumentation”.

Many scholars have investigated children’s argumentation (see, for example, the works of J. Piaget 1967, R. Maier 1991, M. Miller 1987, C. McCall 1991). A very impressive list of literature on children’s argumentation can be found, in particular, in rather an interesting article by D. Brownlee and I. Fielding 1991. Yet, I claim that children’s arguments until recently have been examined insufficiently. In the paper I will make an attempt to analyse them from different perspectives and as thoroughly as possible.
As D. Brownlee and I. Fielding correctly mention, “Determining the extent to which children’s argument has been studied depends upon how one defines “argument”” (D. Brownlee and I. Fielding 1991, 1198). In other words, it is important to clarify first whether children use “arguments” in the sense which is understood by scholars and whether children use arguments in general. With regard to the latter C. McCall writes: “… can young children reason? One might reverse the question and ask why should young children be excluded from the category of reasoners? There is no doubt that many theorists do so exclude them”. (C. McCall 1991, 1192). I can’t but agree with the author who states that “it is a large step from saying that … children do not perform correctly to saying that children are uncapable of reasoning.” (C.McCall 1991, 1192).
As an argument in favour of this thesis C. McCall correctly claims that “evidence that children do not do X, does not imply that they cannot do X… young children who are not exposed to situations which require reasoning will not do well on tests for reasoning skills, but this does not mean that they do not have the capacity to reason” (C. McCall 1991, 1193). Little children not only can reason and use arguments – they do reason and use arguments, though in a very specific way. In other words, children’s argumentation can be viewed as a very specific phenomenon typical of children only and denoting their own, a very special way of giving reasons and persuading. As it is correctly mentioned by K. Chukovsky, a famous Russian investigator of children’s discourse, adults often use such expressions as “childish logic”, “to reason like a little child”, “to be as silly as a child” when speaking about a person who talks nonsense. But if we try to penetrate into child logic and reasoning, we can see the desire of a child to comprehend the surrounding world and to establish causal relationship between life phenomena (K. Chukovsky 1990, 154). That is why the notion of “children’s argumentation” should be distinguished from that of “childish argumentation”, the latter characterizing some adults.

The data for the research were extracted from several sources: a) recorded spontaneous discourse of my two children during the age period from 2,5 to 11, b) several diaries of Armenian parents, c) K. Chukovsky’s (1990) book “From two to five”, which contains speech corpora of little children of different nationalities, collected for several decades. Thus, the factors of different cultural and social backgrounds, as well as the diachronic aspect were taken into account.
First, the whole corpus under investigation was classified thematically, according to the particular topic of argumentative discourse: discourse concerning birth, death, philosophical problems, time and age, sex differentiation, animated and inanimate objects, family ties. Then the arguments have been examined from the point of view of their form of manifestation, structure and character. Finally, a comparative analysis has been made. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2006 – Argumentation And Counter-Argumentation Using A Diaphonic Appropiation In A Parlamentary

• by: Roberto Marafioti, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Universidad de Lomas de Zamora, Argentina - Zelma Dumm, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Universidad de La Matanza, Argentina & María Elena Bitonte, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina

1. Introduction
The purpose of this article* is to show how with diaphonic appropiation (Roulet, 1985, quoted by Perrin, 1995) argumentations and refutations, topical negotiations and political rival´s disqualifications take part, turning the debate into a “language game”, particularity when roles that are ideologically tied to institutional restrictions where the interactions take place.
In the study of reported speech two uses can be distinguished: polyphony and diaphony. In the first of them, the another´s words are raised as a reference object, but he or she does not become an interlocutor, so there is not a true interaction in the argumentative sense. In polyphony, the reference has only narrative aims. On the other hand, in a diaphonic structure the enunciator appropiates and gives a new interpretation to the addressee´s words in his or her own speech (L. Perrin, 1995). As a consequence of this, every  diaphonic appropiation has a argumentative value. In Roulet´s words, “diaphonic appropiation’s structure is also one of the privileged characteristics of points of view negotiations present in every interaction” (Roulet et al., 1985, p. 71). Our corpus belongs to a debate held on September 22nd, 2004, in the National House of Representatives, where the subject treated was the retroactive sanction of a bill submitted by the National Executive Power to allow the access to the country to foreign troops and the exit of national troops.

According to Miche (1996), parlamentary debate develops a triangular interaction between three actors: the speaker or direct enunciator, the receiver or interlocutor (indirect) and the blank actor, or assembly. Nevertheless, the kind of interaction in a parlamentary debate is a complex one, for different reasons. The first being that representatives are generally speaking in the name of broader collective enunciators, as political blocs are. Second, media often have cameras and other transmission devices, ready to receive and spread representatives´ speeches to new audiences. Leaving to be defined who the real audience is, the people present or the television viewers. In conclusion, to reduce the actual communicative relationship in Congress to a triangular interaction is a matter of opinion. Using this, we will show, in this analysis, how this acting scheme becomes more complex when considering that participant’s places in the debate are, in one way, previously determined, but in another they are roles developing during the speech and the communicative situation.
Although representative’s statements are verbally addressed to a primary audience (in this case, the Speaker), turning the assembly into an indirect or secondary addressee, from the speech´s point of view it can be noted that the hierarchy is the opposite. When a statement is addressed to both at the same time, they are both direct audiences. So, if we look at the parlamentary debate as an example, the roles are filled by representatives, the Speaker and the audience, as complex enunciating devices. Each of the representatives exposes his point of view (in fact, it is a collective one, because it represents his or her whole block, party and constituent’s desires). The public can be seen as a listener, a primary or secondary audience, and their identity depends on the discoursive construction and the situation (media, general public, people present). The Speaker, in addition to his role as addressee, has the task to give the order of speakers, to take control of the time used by each, and mainly to bring order to the discussion, avoiding deviations.

2. Analysis of a discoursive identity construction
Our corpus belongs to a debate held on September 22nd, 2004, in the National Congress House of Representatives, where the subject treated was the retroactive sanction of a bill submitted by the National Executive Power to allow the access to the country to foreign troops and the exit of national troops.
Its discussion and approval by a majority first occured in the Foreign Relationships and Worship Commission and then in the Parlamentary Labour Commission. The latter is where agreement is reached on the matters which will be considered in each session, the order, and the results of the treatment of each subject, previously known. Each bloc´s president is allowed to take part in these meetings. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2006 – Perelman’s Vision: Argumentation Schemes As Examples Of Generic Conceptualization In Everyday Reasoning Practices

• by: László I. Komlósi - University of Pécs

“My client in this law suit would be the first to outrage if the allegations brought up against him concerning child molestation turned out to be true.” (defence attorney)

1. Background considerations
In The New Rhetoric (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 1969), argumentation schemes are observed as effective techniques of persuasion by seeking and establishing agreement among interlocutors regarding the acceptability of the argumentative process. Such agreement-seeking is in accord with the speaker’s orientation at prospective perlocutionary effects to be achieved in the hearer. This very orientation lies in the heart of the psychological faculty of mental-state-attribution too, whose manifestation is the intentional nature of mental events and the intentional relations constituting human communication (cf. Dennett 1987, Komlósi 1996). Argument schemes are considered to be complex mental entities whose validity domains are enlarged by a set of potential adjoining propositions often inducing implicational consequences for sound reasoning. The paper attempts to show that the interplay of these observed faculties inherently contributes to the achievement of agreement among the audience in matters of soundness and acceptability of arguments. It is claimed in my approach to everyday reasoning practices that the intentional orientation inherent in the argumentative schemes ought to be treated as a meta-discursive parameter.
The paper provides fundamental support from contemporary studies of the types of mental operations in dynamic meaning construction in ordinary language use and sets out to apply those mechanisms to argumentation and reasoning practices (see earlier research in Komlósi 2002, 2003, 2006b, Komlósi & Knipf 2005). A central claim of the paper concerns the occurrence of these dynamic mental processes at very different levels and varying complexity of meaning construction: at the levels of lexical construction, conceptual construction, conversation and argument construction alike. The argumentation techniques in the New Rhetoric rest on two principles: association and dissociation. Association consists in unifying elements into a single whole by bringing together elements which previously were regarded as separate. Dissociation consists in letting existing wholes disintegrate by separating elements previously regarded as units.
After an initial analysis of the nature of premises (both explicit and intended ones), the paper distinguishes presumptions (that show audience agreement) and assumptions (that show lack of audience agreement and are in need of further negotiation and confirmation) in order to provide for a case study of presumptive arguments. The main objective of the analysis, however, is to render underlying mental operations widely studied in cognitive disciplines (such as categorization, mapping, selective projection, detachment, association, compression, substitution, counterfactual reasoning, conceptual blending and conceptual integration) to reasoning practices and propose appropriate applications of these mental operations to the study of argumentation, especially argumentation schemes. Observing and acknowledging the mechanisms of integrating various mental spaces (or alternatively conceptual domains) in our everyday mental activities, the paper provides further confirmative evidence for Perelman’s original classification of argumentation schemes (one type producing argumentation based on the structure of reality, another type producing argumentation establishing the structure of reality) with the help of the conceptual apparatus of fit between mental models and reality. Association and dissociation constituting argumentation schemes are regarded as complementary mechanisms (with integrative – disintegrative – reintegrative moves) allowing for flexible and dynamic argument evaluation.

2. Argumentation schemes in reasoning
My interest in studying argumentation schemes increased beyond expectation when I started to realize what a potential the concept of argument scheme revealing the internal relationships within an argument may have for everyday reasoning practices and rational argumentative discourse. It was held for at least a quarter of a century that what The New Rhetoric by Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1958, 1969) proposed was that argumentation schemes should be observed as effective techniques of persuasion by seeking and establishing agreement among interlocutors regarding the acceptability of the argumentative process. It also offered the taxonomy of argumentation schemes by introducing a level of abstraction to provide for a guideline in understanding the logical ways responsible for the internal combinatorial arrangements of premises inside a single argument, as opposed to argumentation structure that describes the external organization of the various arguments, i.e. the composition of the argument as a whole. However, it is important to see that the situation is more delicate and the phenomenon of argumentation schemes is much more complex: argumentation schemes ought to be conceived of as having a much more challenging nature and a much more complex function than just the taxonomic one (cf. Komlósi 2006a). The revised view on the status of argument schemes appeared in the formulation of (van Eemeren, Grootendorst, Snoeck Henkemans et alii, 1996, p. 19.) as follows:
“Argumentation schemes relate to the kind of relation established in a single argument between its premises and the standpoint the argument aims to justify or refute. Just as logical argument forms, argumentation schemes are abstract frameworks which can have an infinite number of substitution instances. All substitution instances can, of course, be logically analyzed as involving an argument form of the modus ponens-type, but this argument form does not reveal the distinctive features of the various argumentation schemes. (…) An analysis of the argumentation schemes used in a discourse should produce information as to the principles, standards, criteria, or assumptions involved in a particular attempt at justification or refutation.” Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2006 – Fallacies As Violations Of Rationality Norms. An Interdisciplinary Approach

• by: Andreas Welzel - Universität Bielefeld, Germany & Christopher Tindale - University of Windsor, Canada

Introduction
Douglas Walton promoted the thesis that there is a dilemma of fallacy analysis (1995, 269-272) implying that “fallacy” oscillates helplessly between an EITHER (intentional deception) and an OR (suffering passively the occurrence of erroneous inferences). We shall argue that there is no such dilemma: The so called two horns of the dilemma are actually quite naturally connected as complementary elements, an involuntary and an voluntary element with the voluntary element presupposing the involuntary. The involuntary element captures cases where someone suffers a fallacy because of a local malfunctioning of his or her mind. The voluntary element (cor)responds to this and exploits it: Someone who knows such a pattern of malfunctioning exploits it to influence another mind in his or her favor.
And this is the point where rationality standards come in: They express norms of mental functioning that help to avoid the costs of fallacious mental processing concerning judgments, inferences, problem solving, arguments, or decision making.

Following rationality standards offers the opportunity to improve one´s own mental processing by one´s own efforts of rational self-control. And the same holds in cases where other humans try to exploit the fallacy proneness of the own mind to their advantage. Consequently, we do not restrict the analysis of fallacy to the analysis of fallacious arguments, but regard a wider realm of mental processes including problem solving, probability judgments and decision making.
And in referring to mental processes, we do not restrict ourselves to rational thinking in the narrow sense of consistency-rationality, but, instead, follow Aristotle´s tri-dimensional access to the mind comprising the dimensions of logos, pathos, and ethos. We understand mental processes as relying on three components: a logical, an emotional, and a social-interactive component, representing the interconnection of minds. In this paper we will explore four different rationality standards, each with its own norms concerning mental processes, and the corresponding norm violations, the fallacies.

1. Fallacies of bounded rationality
The focus here is on individual decision making or problem solving in a specific task environment beyond social interaction. In this section, we consider, as a prototype, a fallacy which is related to two basic patterns of demonstrative syllogisms, the modus ponens and the modus tollens:

Modus ponens
IF A THEN B
A true
______
B true

Modus tollens
IF A THEN B
B false
______
A false

Fallacy of affirming the consequent
IF A THEN B
B true
_______
A true

The fallacies of §§ 5 and 7 in Aristotle´s Rhetoric book II, ch. 24 belong to this fallacy type:
§5: Dionysius is a thief, for he is a bad man. This is fallacious because not every bad man is a thief. There are alternative possibilities and signs of being a bad man which are ignored or excluded here without further legitimacy. This illicit move makes the conclusion fallacious. §7: Someone who dresses up and roams at night is an adulterer because adulterers are of this type.

How can we remedy this fallacy beyond retreating to the principles of apodeictic reasoning? Let us first follow the path of Georg Polya, a Hungarian born Stanford mathematician, in his classic book on mathematical problem solving (Polya 1945/ 1988). He offers a formal solution concept for the fallacy by introducing the formal model of a heuristic syllogism. Heuristic syllogisms derive conclusions from signs. They are indispensable for any problem solving and discovery. Read more