ISSA Proceedings 2006 – The Quality Of Argumentation In Masters Theses

• by: Marita Seppänen - University of Helsinki

1. Introduction
Thesis writing is an inherent and important part of university studies that guarantees academic qualifications and the quality of scientific knowledge building. Thesis writing gives students an experience of doing real scientific research. It also has an impact on university teaching and learning methods.
The purpose of the study was to survey the quality of theses. The quality was assessed with respect to the scalability of grades and the structure and standard of the argumentation of the theses. The role of argumentation and argumentation skills are important in thesis writing, both for building scientific knowledge and presenting relevant conclusions. Behind the study lies the fact that the Faculty of Behavioural Sciences introduced a new thesis assessment form in the autumn of 2004.
This is why this project surveys masters theses assessed using this new form. The project is also related to the Bologna Declaration which forms the basis for assessing the standard of university education and theses. The Faculty of Behavioural Sciences of University of Helsinki wanted to evaluate students masters theses and research the scalability of good and excellent grades. The purpose of the project was to evaluate the credibility of the grading system. Teachers and professors wanted to know whether the theses were evaluated according to the same criteria in five chosen departments or whether there were there differences between criteria. Finnish universities have joined in the European Bologna Process (the Bologna Declaration 2003) in August 2005. The Bologna Process requires that the quality of university education and degrees must be assessed and developed both nationally and internationally. Finnish university studies consist of a two-tier structure. All students first take a bachelors degree but they all have the right to continue their studies to a master´s degree.

The declaration is considered to be a call to assess also the quality of theses. Finnish university pedagogy focuses on counseling and education students so that they become fully qualified experts and researchers in their own disciplinary. This same kind of counseling and education must be present in all the different teaching and learning methods (e.g. lectures, seminars, group works). Teaching methods have to be consistent and in line with learning evaluation methods. Teachers can not teach issues and evaluate students learning differently (Ramsden 2003). For example, students’ personal epistemological development and students’ skills in justifying their points of view and using argumentation for knowledge building have to be visible in the teaching and learning methods. The principle of university teaching should be a student-focused approach because the quality of students’ learning and learning results are used as the criteria for the evaluation of successful teaching. A student-focused approach also sees students as different learners and as individual people each with their own learning skills, values, beliefs and experiences (Trigwell & Prosesser 2004).
Besides the Bologna-process the Faculty of Behavioural Sciences of the University of Helsinki wanted to evaluate students’ masters theses and research the scalability of good and excellent grades. The purpose of the project was to evaluate the credibility of the grading system. Teachers and professors wanted to know whether the theses were evaluated by the same criteria in five selected departments or whether there were differences between criteria and whether teachers evaluated good and excellent theses somehow vaguely in any way and by unfair means. In this research, the writing and evaluation of master theses are explored within the context of Finnish higher education. The case study consists of the theses from the Faculty of Behavioural Sciences of the University of Helsinki. In Finland, a thesis is required of all university students completing their master degrees. The nature of the thesis varies across study fields to some extent, but there is a general norm that students have to show a good command of the research phenomenon, mastery of research methods and the capability to produce academic writing.
Students participating in a one-year seminar in which they make research plans and get their own work started. The teaching and practice of argumentation are not compulsory studies in the seminar and the teaching of argumentative writing is very unusual. These issues also have an impact to data analysis. Finally, in the end of this paper I will point to suggestions for development for teaching argumentation and university pedagogy which are based on the results of the study. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2006 – Controversy Participation As A Function Of Direct Reported Speech In News

• by: Peter A. Cramer - Simon Fraser University

1. Introduction
As an object of study, controversy presents a problem for argumentation researchers because on the one hand, it suggests something familiar – a discursive conflict in the manner of a dialectical exchange – yet on the other hand, it suggests something afield – an ill-defined discursive conflict embedded in a variegated institutional, historical, social, and textual environment. Dascal has emphasized the second sense of controversy, its qualities that lie outside of the norms of dialectical exchange, thematizing ‘accidental and “vicious” aspects’, ‘endless “procedural” debates about framing’, and ‘passionate rhetoric’ (Dascal, 1990). Where argumentation research has addressed controversy, it has tended to analyze it through argument reconstructions and/or to evaluate it is as a failed or a juvenile dialectical exchange. Viewing controversy this way, as a deviation from the norms of argument and dialectic, encourages a number of presumptions about it as an object of study. One of those presumptions is that, like dialectic, controversies are dyadic exchanges, and, by extension, identifying the participants in a controversy is either not a problem, or not an interesting problem. This paper investigates participation as a problem by asking who counts as a controversy participant.

As part of a constitutive approach to controversy, this paper examines a corpus of newspaper texts that report on the Brooklyn Museum controversy of 1999. A survey by the First Amendment Center narrates the event this way: ‘Controversy about the show, titled “Sensation”, centered on a painting of the Virgin Mary by British artist Chris Ofili that incorporated elephant dung and cut outs of pornographic images into its design‘ (McGill, 1999).

In this paper, I want to discover who counts as a participant in the eyes of journalists who covered the Brooklyn Museum controversy. By asking the question about participation in this way, I can deliver an answer that does not rely on analyst presumptions about the number, kind, or prominence of participants. Instead, it examines the attribution and content of direct quotations in the controversy coverage as a measure of participant prominence and, by extension, the impact of participant prominence on reader representations of the controversy. The paper reports the results of this investigation, revealing that while hundreds of individual participants are quoted directly in the coverage of the Brooklyn Museum controversy, New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani is by far the most quoted, and that certain strings of his direct reported speech are routinely repeated across the months and years of coverage, making him a particularly prominent participant. Given that for most readers the coverage is their only experience with the Brooklyn Museum controversy, the journalists representation of this event as one dominated by Mayor Giuliani carries considerable power in inscribing the terms of the controversy for New Yorkers. Beyond the general priority on controversy as an object of study that is wed to its variegated institutional, historical, social, and textual environment, this analysis of the Brooklyn Museum case leads to some conclusions about controversy participation in general: Controversies are not necessarily dialectical encounters. Though many more than two speakers may participate in controversies, as few as one speaker can dominate them. Along with its discoveries about the Brooklyn Museum case, this paper provides an empirical approach to analyzing participation in a controversy, an approach that describes controversy as a kind of event that is named, narrated, and defined for a publicaudience by media coverage. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2006 – Argumentation At The Swedish Family Dinner Table

• by: Åsa Brumark, Södertörn University College, Sweden

1. Introduction
Argumentative competence is a basic communicative skill generally supposed to be acquired through formal training in school. Accordingly, most studies of argumentation among children have been based on discourse samples elicited in semi-formal or experimental pedagogic or clinical settings (see Pontecorvo & Fasolo 1997).
However, in a paper on argumentative discourse in informal discussions between peers in a school situation, Maynard claims that children between five and seven years of age use argumentative techniques in an already quite sophisticated way. Furthermore, language acquisition research gives evidence for considerable argumentative knowledge even before school (Pontecorvo & Fasolo 1997; Viksten Folkeryd 1998). Despite the focus on narratives as the first genre to appear in communication with small children (Snow 1978; Snow & Goldfield 1983; c. f. Pontecorvo & Fasolo 1997) caregiver experience as well as observations of conversations between parents and children suggest that family discourse may be an important context for emerging argumentative strategies (Pontecorvo & Fasolo 1997; Wiksten Folkeryd 1998, Wallgren Hemlin 2001). Focusing on family disputes, Wiksten Folkeryd shows for example rudimentary skills in children from one year and six months, in expressing both points of view and opinions. However, except for those mentioned above (i. e. Pontecorvo & Fasolo 1997; Viksten Folkeryd 1998), there still seems to be surprisingly few studies of family discourse as a context for argumentative development. The fact is that studying argumentation in family discourse may be of interest not only for revealing the ontogenesis of argumentation but also for theoretical considerations: the irregular, illogical and often incoherent structures emerging in these natural discourse situations indeed put a challenge to current argumentative theories and models of analysis.
The study to be presented here is focused on argumentative exchanges during dinner conversations in twenty families with school children in the age range 6-17 years. By using a model of analysis adapted to argumentation occurring in informal conversation, I wanted to 1) describe certain recurrent argumentative features in the context of family discourse and 2) find out whether and how argumentative structures differ with the ages of the participating children. The study thus takes a developmental, non-evaluative (c. f. Vuchinich 1990) perspective and is primarily descriptive (c. f. Felton & Kuhn 2001), though governed by a model, basing model construction and analyses on a corpus of video recordings (c. f. Viksten Folkeryd 1998).

Methods
1. Data generation
Twenty Swedish families with one to four children of school age (7 – 17 years) were divided into two groups, depending on the children’s age spans. In both groups, at least one child was aged 10-12 years (mean age 10;8 and 10;9 respectively), referred to as the target child, but the families of group A included siblings who were younger (6-9, mean age 7;3) than the target child, while the families of group B included siblings who were older (13-17, mean age 13;9).
In each family, one dinner table conversation was entirely recorded (average duration: seventeen minutes; see further Brumark 2003). Verbal utterances and non-verbal expressions of all participants, having a clear communicative function relevant to the conversation as judged by two researchers, were identified and transcribed. Selected parts of the transcriptions were checked against the video recording by two researchers familiar with the actual transcription methods. The reliability of this check amounted to 85% of the compared transcripts.
For the segmentation of the recorded conversations, the basic unit of turn was preferred to that of move (c.f. Maynard 1985) or speech act (Grice 1975), the former allowing for a thorough analysis of the interactive as well as the argumentative structure without regarding it as a logically constructed game.
Exchange refers to two or three part discourse, comprising at least two turns but generally three or four (i. e. two adjacent pairs of four turns) held together and delimited by a main topic (macro-theme) or referential focus and a main function or communicative aim (c. f. game in Linell & Gustavsson 1987, Linell 1998). An argumentative exchange according to the model presented in section 2.2 should entail a disagreement between at least two parties and a follow-up consequence of this disagreement consisting of at least one turn.
Sequence refers to two or more exchanges, held together and delimited by a main topic (macro-theme) or referential focus, a main function or aim (c. f. local sequence in Linell 1998). An argumentative sequence contains at least one argumentative exchange but may comprise an indefinite number of exchanges, of which not more than one has to be argumentative. In table 2, an overall picture shows the extent to which argumentations appeared in the two family groups. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2006 – Arguments About “Dialogue” In Practice And Theory

• by: Robert T. Craig - University of Colorado at Boulder

This paper examines arguments appealing to a normative concept of “dialogue” in discourse samples drawn from newspapers, websites and other sources. The analysis identifies normative assumptions that are involved when “dialogue” is used as grounds for assessing, advocating, or opposing some action, or when arguing that dialogue in a relevant sense has certain requirements or that it is a good, necessary, impossible, or bad way to communicate with some particular others or in some type of situation. Having provided an exploratory description of assumptions about “dialogue” in ordinary metadiscourse (practical discourse about discourse), the paper concludes by reflecting briefly on these practical arguments about dialogue from the standpoint of dialogue theory.

1. Dialogue as a Practical and Theoretical Concept
The English word “dialogue” has several distinct senses. This paper is concerned with dialogue understood as a normative way for people to communicate with others who are different, a sense in which we can speak of dialogue as occurring, or failing to occur, between nations, ethnic or religious groups, or individuals. This sense of dialogue “represents a common contemporary European concept” that emerged only in the mid-twentieth century (post-World War II) and is perhaps “particularly salient in English, not only in the political and religious contexts but also in many other domains – social, cultural, scientific, etc.” (Wierzbicka 2005, pp.7-8). This specific concept of dialogue has no equivalent in many other world languages but has been spreading globally with the use of English as a lingua franca.
According to Wierzbicka’s corpus-based semantic analysis, this sense of dialogue refers to a process of reciprocal communication that occurs in a series of episodes over an extended period of time. Participants in dialogue are aware of their differences and are motivated to seek mutual understanding and common ground but not necessarily full agreement or rapprochement. Their attitudes are characterized by mutual respect, good will, and openness to change. Dialogue “usually involves groups of people (or people representing such groups) rather than private individuals,” and the term inherently implies a positive evaluation, the “assumption that interaction of this kind can be valuable (constructive, productive, etc.), that is, that it can lead to something good” (Wierzbicka 2005, p. 6). But, Wierzbicka notes,
“It is not, however, uniformly valued; there are also those who fear that “dialogue” may take the place of genuine discussion and healthy argument, that it may be used to promote relativism and to discourage a search for truth or that it may pursue a perceived need for harmony that is in reality false and phoney rather than based on truth.” (p. 20)

Wierzbicka contrasts this ordinary concept with currently prominent theoretical concepts of dialogue such as those attributed to Martin Buber and (mistakenly, she claims) to Mikhail Bakhtin:
“Given the great expectations linked with the word dialogue in many philosophical and psychological writings on human relations and the human condition, it is important to recognize that dialogue in the sense explicated here is a relatively modest ideal, which does not imply anything like Bakhtin’s “interpersonal communion” or Buber’s “I – thou” relationship. It does not imply closeness, intimacy, “heart-to-heart” communication, or even complete frankness and openness. It implies that each party makes a step in he direction of the other, not that they reach a shared position or even mutual warm feelings. It does not imply full mutual understanding or a closeness which no longer requires words.” (p. 21)

Wierzbicka appears to assume that these theoretical concepts of dialogue have little or no practical importance, an assumption I do not share. Pointing out that “the meanings of words are social facts which cannot be changed at will by individuals, no matter how prominent,” she goes on to argue, “Philosophers can of course use words in idiosyncratic and metaphorical ways (and they often do), but such use has usually little if any impact on the meanings which are shared by whole speech communities” (p. 22). While this is undoubtedly true as a generalization about the resistance of natural languages to intentional change, it does not warrant the assumption that theoretical debates about dialogue have no potential to influence linguistic-communicative practices in society.
True, individual theorists are seldom able to influence society “at will.” In a broader view, however, ideas that become prominent in academic and intellectual discourse do sometimes circulate through society and influence everyday concepts and practices. Theoretical concepts that are relevant to practical concerns can be used in practical metadiscourse. For example, some educated ordinary speakers are able to criticize fallacies in others’ arguments, using the technical language of argumentation theory for practical purposes. The potential for this kind of transference from theoretical to practical metadiscourse seems especially strong in the case of a communication-related concept like dialogue, because communication is a topic about which there is considerable public interest and a growing demand for “expert” knowledge (Cameron 2000). Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2006 – Agonistics Among The Wooden, Democratic And Monarchic Discourses In Contemporary Bulgaria

• by: Donka Alexandrova - Sofia University

The political communication in post Communist Bulgaria reflects trends which are common for all other countries in transition to democracy, like Russia, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and others, namely:
1. Democracy is understood as a full consensus in public life rather than as an interplay and competition among various groups, expressing different viewpoints and ideas;
2. Society is still expecting primitive egalitarism as a consequence to the ideological matrix inherited from socialism;
3. Demand-led satisfaction in terms of expectations that the state should meet all the needs of its citizens;
4. The prominent role of the workplace in association with the home, not the local community, as the crucial organizing centre of everyday life;
5. The prevalence of apathy and passivity facing the future;
6. Generalized mistrust of authorizes, elites and media. (1)

The demolition of the communist state machine and the one-party rule in all post communist countries brought about a new type of political discourse, defined by Jacques Derrida as “monstrous”. The monster according to the French philosopher is a “figure” composed of heterogeneous organisms, planted one on top of another. At the same time “monstrous is what is happening for the first time and therefore is not yet recognized”. It is “something” which still has no name, which however does not mean that the kind or combination, i.e. the hybrid of already familiar kinds is abnormal”. (2)
The “monstrous” discourse is connected with the future, i.e. with the unknown, the unexpected, which causes fear with its uncertainty. The power of the monstrous effect corresponds to the strength and contrasts the collision between the desire for change and the fear of the unknown. The reality of transition in which the very foundations of a society are destroyed, i.e. the status quo is done away with, in order to build a new civil society without knowing either its framework, or the methods and the means of achieving it, can be described as monstrous. It is here that the nostalgia and the disappointment of a large section of the population stems from. Experienced in all former communist states, the diversity of idialects became paradoxical and exotic during the last several years in Bulgaria.(3)

In 2001 Bulgaria shocked the world with three unique events in its political communication. Firstly, the last Bulgarian tsar – Simeon II Saxe Coburg-Gotha returned home after 50 years of exile, organized a political movement named after him in less than two months and won the General Elections gaining absolute majority, thus becoming the first and only King-Prime Minister of a Republic in the world. Soon after the “royal victory” in the autumn of 2001 the Bulgarian public witnessed the success of the Bulgarian Socialist Party (the reformed successor of the Bulgarian Communist Party). Its leader, Georgi Parvanov, was elected President of the Republic in the end of the same year. The third paradox of 2001 was the failure of the United Democratic Forces. Its leader, Ivan Kostov, who at that time was the Prime Minister of the only cabinet that completed its full term in office since 1989 badly lost the Parliamentary Elections. These, at first glance, paradoxical events evolved and showed their essence during the next several years when the real reasons for the change of position became evident. The paradox can be observed not only in the carriers (communicators) but in the political discourse itself (wooden, monarchic and democratic). In any case it cannot be regarded as a tag once and forever pasted on the concrete representatives.
Speaking about political language we, naturally, have to analyze such elements as key words, slogan, clips, billboards, manifestos, programs, inaugural speeches, press releases, interviews, also numbers insinuations and the black PR. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2006 – Contradiction In Madhyamaka Buddhist Argumentation

• by: M. Siderits - Illinois State University

What happens when one utters a contradiction, something of the form ‘p and not p’? To do so is to challenge one’s audience to work out the Gricean conversational implicature (Grice 1975). One of Grice’s rules governing conversation is that one utter only statements that one takes to be true. And by the laws of classical logic, any statement of the form ‘p and not p’ must be false. If the utterance is clearly of that form, it will be evident to the audience that this is evident to the speaker. And so there is open flouting of a rule governing conversation. Such flouting is the mechanism whereby Gricean conversational implicatures are generated. The question in the case of a contradiction is, which implicature? What might the speaker intend to communicate through uttering something that is transparently false?
So-called paradoxes are a staple of religious discourse. This is especially evident in expressions of religious mysticism, such as the writings of Eckhart, Śankara and the masters of Sufiism and Zen. But one also finds this element in what are taken to be expressions of quite sane religious doctrine, such as the Christian teaching of the trinity. The sort of statement I have in mind here is not strictly speaking paradoxical in the logical sense: a statement that if true is false and if false is true.[i] It is rather a statement that is evidently false; it is called a paradox simply because its assertion seems to defy the rules of communication. We can see why use of such a trope might be common in the religious context. Through it the speaker can convey the sense that something quite esoteric is being communicated, thereby contributing to the perceived value of the religion’s teachings by suggesting that they may hold the answer to some of life’s persisting problems. People expect religious teachings to have an element of the mysterious about them: if ‘the answer’ were perfectly straightforward, wouldn’t everyone have worked it out already?
Such language can also serve to mark a separation of the sacred from the profane. The Christian doctrine of the trinity works this way. We know that one person cannot be three persons (particularly when at least one of them is necessarily omniscient). So when God is said to be three persons, this will suggest that things work quite differently where the divine is concerned. We see an extreme form of this in certain explicitly contradictory teachings of the Upanishads and Advaita Vedānta concerning Brahman, where the language seems intended to be taken as apophatic. Thus when Śankara says it can be neither affirmed nor denied that Brahman is cause of the world, the intended implicature is that we understand Brahman to be beyond the representational capacities of rational discourse.
There is a class of Mahāyāna Buddhist texts containing what appear to be similar claims. In the Prajñāpāramitā literature one often encounters statements such as, ‘All feeling is devoid of the nature of feeling’, and ‘Space is neither existent nor non-existent’. That these statements are meant to function as part of a soteriological discourse is clear both from context and from the fact that they make clear reference to some of the Buddha’s most basic teachings. It is thus tempting to suppose that the intention here is likewise to convey that the object of Buddhist wisdom is something inexpressible, perhaps something that can only be apprehended through a kind of non-rational intuition.

But this temptation should be resisted. For the use of apparent contradiction has a long history in Buddhist literature, beginning with some key discourses of the Buddha himself. When the Buddha was asked whether the enlightened person or arhat is reborn after death, the Buddha replied that this could not be said (Horner 1957, pp.162-7). But when it was then asked whether the arhat was not reborn after death, the Buddha replied that this too could not be said. When asked how it could be that someone is neither reborn nor not reborn after death, the Buddha replied with the analogy of the fire that has gone out: if it were asked where this no longer visible fire had gone, it could not be answered that it had gone to the north, to the south, to the east or to the west. For the question ‘Where has the fire gone?’ has a false presupposition, namely that the fire continues to exist. Likewise the question whether the arhat is or is not reborn after death has a false presupposition, namely that there is such a thing as a person. For according to the Buddha’s teaching of non-self, while there is a causal series of psychophysical elements, the person as owner of these elements is a mere conceptual fiction, something we take to be real only because we take too literally what is just a useful way of talking.
In this case the contradictory statement ‘The arhat is neither reborn nor not reborn’ generates the following conversational implicature: the question concerning the post-mortem status of the arhat contains a false presupposition, that persons are ultimately real. And Buddhists claim that our ignorance about the falsity of this presupposition is an important source of the suffering we seek to mitigate. Thus statements with the form of a contradiction may function quite differently in the Buddhist context. They need not generate the implicature that the subject matter of the statement is ineffable and accessible only through some special non-discursive faculty. They may instead generate the implicature that strictly speaking the statement lacks a subject matter. The seeming failure of the law of bivalence – that every well-formed statement is either true or false – may be due to simple failure of reference. And given the soteriological context, this may be important to our well-being. Read more