ISSA Proceedings 2006 – “Yucca Mountain Will Become Unhappy And Angry” : Culture, Metaphor, and Argument

• by: Danielle Endres - University of Utah

“Yucca Mountain Will Become Unhappy And Angry” – Southern Paiute Edward Smith [i]
Argumentation is a cultural phenomenon. It is a way of thinking and speaking that can vary slightly or vastly between different national, ethnic, regional, gendered, or racial cultures. George Kennedy’s (1998) examination of the rhetorical traditions of a variety of cultures provides support for the argument that the Western Greco-Roman tradition of argumentation that serves as the foundation for most American and European theories of argumentation is not a culturally-universal tradition (see also, Combs, 2004a). An increasing corpus of literature supports this thesis by showing both the similarities and differences in argumentation across cultures, most often defining culture as national culture[ii] (Combs, 2004a; Combs, 2004b; Becker, 1986; Dolina & Cecchetto, 1998; Ellis & Maoz, 2002; Endres, 2002; Garrett, 1993; Garrett, 1997; Lee & Campbell, 1994; Liu, 1999; McLaurin, 1995; Walker, 1987; Warnick & Manusov, 2000). Indeed, the diversity in argumentation across cultures can be categorized into variations of the form (preferred reasoning forms), function (goals of engaging in argumentation), and evaluation of argument (how ought we to judge a “good” argument) (Endres, 2002). However, the field of argumentation still focuses mostly on the Western Greco-Roman argumentation tradition. When non-western cultures are considered, they are often evaluated based in according to the Western tradition of argument and are sometimes considered to be cultures without an argument tradition. Littlefield and Ball (2004) concur stating, “There is a certain presumption in our acceptance of Greco-Roman forms of argumentation as proper, intellectual, even historical. But every society must have accepted forms of argumentation if its members are to solve conflict” (p. 99). The key is recognition that the Western tradition is not the only way of arguing and understanding the world. One goal of scholarship that explores the connection between culture and argument is to better understand the forms, functions, and evaluations of argument as understood and used by members of particular cultures.

Just as important as a focus on argumentation theory and practice in particular cultures is the study of cross-cultural argumentation in particular issues of controversy. In other words, what happens in the interaction of two or more argumentative traditions? In addition to showing how the forms, functions, and evaluations of argument differ across cultures, we must also turn our attention to how the differences and similarities in argumentation traditions play out in public debate and controversy (see Dolina & Cecchetto, 1998; Ellis and Maoz, 2002; Liu, 1999; Walker, 1987). This essay closely examines the arguments in a scientific and environmental controversy over the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site, the future site of the first permanent nuclear waste repository in the United States. Though there are multiple participants in the controversy, this essay focuses on the arguments of American Indians from the Western Shoshone, Southern Paiute, and Owens Valley Paiute and Shoshone in a situation that demands intercultural communication with non-Indian audiences[iii]. By examining the arguments of these American Indian tribal members in a public hearing session about the Yucca Mountain site, I reveal the forms of argument used by tribal members in this controversy, show how the European-American Western tradition of argumentation interprets these arguments, and examine how these arguments circulate in the Yucca Mountain controversy.
Interestingly, though some American Indian forms of argument can be classified and discussed under the rubric of Western argumentation theory, such characterizations do not tell the entire story of argumentation in American Indian cultures. Attending to role of history, values, worldview, and ritual in American Indian cultures provides a rich understanding of American Indian arguments in an intercultural controversy. For example, American Indian arguers often referred to Yucca Mountain as having living, human characteristics, which can be considered a form of prosopopoeia or of metaphor. Further investigation of the values, spirituality, and worldview of the tribes, however, discloses that what a Western argumentation theorist might classify as prosopopoeia is likely not seen by American Indian arguers as such, but is reflective of a worldview that assumes that mountains speak and feel. This difference in understanding has significant implications for the force of American Indian arguments and the outcome of the controversy.

Because this essay looks at a case of intercultural controversy as opposed to a case of argumentation within a particular culture, this finding has significant implications for the intersection of values, culture, and argumentation in controversy. Moreover, this essay contributes to the scholarly conversation with an improved understanding of American Indian forms, functions, and evaluations of argument, and the importance of considering the intersection of differing cultured ways of arguing in public argumentation over issues of controversy.
This essay begins with an examination of American Indian forms, functions, and evaluations of argumentation in general. This examination includes scholarship focused on individual American Indian nations and on American Indians as a whole. In this section, I identify some of the problems with current understandings of American Indian argument. Next, I investigate the particular case of American Indian arguments in the Yucca Mountain controversy as a way to show specific ways of arguing by the Western Shoshone, Southern Paiute, and Owens Valley Paiute and Shoshone, the difficulty of characterizing these arguments with Western theory, and the implications of this on the controversy. The paper concludes with implications and a call for further research. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2006 – Obscuring The Facts: The Bush Administration And The Politicization Of Science In The Greenhouse Debate

• by: Edward Panetta - University of Georgia

In an essay published in the journal Science, Naomi Oreskes reviewed 928 refereed essays published in scientific journals between 1993 and 2003 and found that none of the studies disagreed with the consensus position that anthropogenic climate change is occurring (Oreskes). Despite widespread agreement in the scientific community, the Bush administration asserts that climate science remains uncertain. The thesis of this essay is that the Bush administration is committed to rekindling the debate over the uncertainty of climate research in the face of the scientific consensus on the subject. The Executive branch of government has embraced a distinctly minority viewpoint in an effort to portray the debate over the nature of climate change as a case in controversy. This rhetorical strategy is an effort to keep the focus on the status of “good science” and allows the administration to advance its policy of voluntary efforts to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
To understand the administration’s public argument strategy, there is a need to understand the ways that climate arguments take place in two locations. Initially, one must have a sense of the appeals used in scientific fields by scholars who hold a distinctly minority point of view on the greenhouse question. These arguments serve as the cornerstone of the administration’s call for additional support for research. The circulation of these appeals is due in part to the way the media in America reports on climate change. The longstanding commitment to the journalistic principle of balancing the reporting on controversial subjects provides the critics of global warming theory with extensive coverage in print.

1. The “Controversy over Consensus” in Climate Research
While media outlets in the United States continue to report that there is disagreement in the scientific community over the unprecedented rate of global warming, one finds very little proof of a genuine debate in peer reviewed scholarly research. For example, in a report released shortly after the 2004 election cycle in the United States, the Natural Resources Defense Council indicated that a team of 300 climate researchers concluded that half of the Arctic may melt before the end of the Century This melting will be accompanied by a loss of most of the Greenland Ice Sheet and a warming in the region of 7-13 degrees F (St. Clair). This report affirmed the conclusion of the noted Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its Third Assessment Report: “There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities. And in the light of new evidence and taking into account the remaining uncertainties, most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations” (Connolley). Perhaps the most convincing evidence comes from the National Science Academies of the G-8 nations, Brazil, China and India in 2005. The group concluded that the scientific understanding on climate now justifies nation states taking policy action to curtail the emission of fossil fuels.

The alleged controversy surrounding publication of Oreskes’ 2004 survey on climate research highlights the strategy of obfuscation employed by climate skeptics. They are compelled to contest the scientific consensus to avoid the debate that would ensue over policy actions that might be implemented to stall the warming effect. Instead of a robust debate interrogating the economic, legal and moral implications of public policies, the skeptics continue to push the claim of uncertainty and call for the public to keep an open mind (which is translated by some into a rationale for voluntary emissions reduction strategies) on the subject of global warming.
Naomi Oreskes, a Historian at the University of California at San Diego, began her scholarly project as an effort to see if there is a disagreement between the public statements of opinion leaders in a scientific field and their research community. To test this position, she settled on looking at climate research to interrogate the nature of scientific consensus (Whipple). The review of the consensus proclamations of groups, like the IPCC, and the survey of refereed papers in the field of climate science found that the opinion leader’s assertions simply affirmed the work of researchers. In fact, she did not find a single article in the selected group of 928 that stood in opposition to the consensus claim. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2006 – A Defeasible Pragma-Dialectical Model Of Argumentation

• by: Minghui Xiong - Institute of Logic, Cognition, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China & Yi Zhao - Politics & Administration School, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, China

1. Introduction
What’s an argument? According to Daniel J. O’Keefe (1977), there are two types of argument. Argument1 is an argument characterized as “a kind of utterance or a kind of communicative act”. It can be thought of as a claim and its reason. Argument2 is described as “a particular kind of interaction” and denotes the process of arguing, or the act of making arguments for a certain claim. In other words, argument1 means argument-as-product while argument2 denotes argument-as-process (Reed & Walton, 2003). Habermas (1984) called the former “argument” and the latter “argumentation”. However, in the first half of 20th century, the structure (or form) of arguments had mainly been idealized, i.e., mathematical proofs had been taken as paradigm of successful argument. An argument was entirely abstracted away from the daily context. Most people focused on argument1 (argument-as-product) while neglected argument2 (argument-as-process). In the framework of argumentation evaluation based on classical or traditional logic, therefore, an argument is treated as static, context-insensitive, no goal-oriented, and zero-agent (van Benthem, 2003). Whereas, generally speaking, the basic characters of argument in everyday life is dynamic, context-sensitive, goal-oriented, and multi-agent.

Beginning in 1940s, as a matter of fact, many philosophers such as Strawson, Austin, Searle et al. focused on the pragmatic elements in assessing arguments. Toulmin (1958) presents a dialectical model, which is called Toulmin Model, differing from the CM in trying to describe the structure of argument as process. Toulmin has pointed out that formal logic lacks adaptability to different fields, but arguments can only be understood in a context. However, it is a pity that their works had little bearing on the formal semantic developed by Richard Montague and his followers. It was not until the rise of Informal Logic (in North America), Pragma-Dialectics (in Holland), and Radical Argumentativism (in France), that argumentation theorists or (informal) logicians paid attention to the importance of pragmatic elements such as context again. It is apparent that we cannot deal with the above character of argumentation with the classical model of argument evaluation. Therefore, another logical model is needed to evaluate a real argument.

2. Classical Model and Its Limitations
The model of argument evaluation based on classical logic is called the Classical Model (CM). This model, which is based on deductive validity, usually consists of at least two calculus systems: the one for propositional one and the other for predicate one, where the essential rule is,

R1 [Modus Ponens (MP)]
p→q, p├q

It means that if p then q, p, therefore, q. MP consists of three statements. The first statement is the “if-then” or conditional statement, namely that p implies q. The second statement is that p, the antecedent of the conditional statement is true. Following those two statements, it can be logically concluded that q, the consequent of the conditional sentence, must be true as well.
In order to grasp the CM, let us start with analyzing a classical example presented by Wilson (cf., Walton, 1989, p.2). Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2006 – Scientific Demarcation And Metascience: The National Academy Of Sciences On The Greenhouse Effect And Neo-Darwinism

• by: Thomas M. Lessl - University of Georgia

Scholars who have followed up on Thomas Gieryn’s work (1983) on scientific boundary – work have often seen rhetorical behavior of this kind as an informal alternative to the kind of demarcation undertaken by philosophers of science. The functionality of informal demarcation was fleshed out in Charles Alan Taylor’s (1996) application of this model to various controversies in American science. Like Gieryn, Taylor regards boundary – work as a positive alternative to formal philosophizing on the nature of science. I do agree that the articulation of such dividing lines as arise from institutional challenges to science may achieve practical resolutions to problems that philosophers of science have never been able to resolve, but this exclusive focus overlooks some of the complexities arising from demarcation of this kind.
Certainly it is as important for scientists as it is for philosophers to develop what I will here call “metascience,” answers to the question: what is science? And so the informal argumentative work that achieves this may be as vital as Gieryn and Taylor suggest – especially if it succeeds where more academic exercises of scientific demarcation do not. But in this essay I will consider the complicating fact that the motives that inspire boundary-work are not strictly regulated by intellectual concerns. Because of this informal demarcation could easily misfire, causing scientists to define their own intellectual labors in ways that could weaken or perhaps even undermine public deliberations that bear upon scientific questions.

This problem is suggested by Gieryn’s own analysis of the three ideological pressures that inspire boundary-work (pp. 785-791):
(1) outside encroachments upon science such as might come from religious interests,
(2) challenges to the ethicality of science, and
(3) the need to protect scientific patronage by excluding pseudo-science.

Of course these efforts may have something to do with science as practice, but more often they have to do with the secondary concerns of science as an institutional body. This is shown in one of the cases that interested Gieryn, the informal demarcation undertaken in the energetic public campaign for science that was advanced in Victorian England by such figures as Thomas Huxley, Herbert Spencer, and John Tyndall. Focusing specifically on Tyndall, Gieryn (pp. 785-786) observed that the Irish physicist constructed these boundaries differently when he was working two different fronts of this campaign. The emerging scientific professions at this time felt threatened by the deeply entrenched power of the Anglican Church, which continued even in the face of science’s rising fortunes to wield considerable influence over faculty positions and curricular decision-making in English universities. But on another front (pp. 786-787) scientists like Tyndall were also wary of the growing power of the technical professions, since these competed with science for patronage and for a hold on the public imagination.

Gieryn observes that Tyndall demarcated science differently on each of these fronts. To show science’s epistemic superiority over technology, the physicist highlighted its purely theoretical powers, but to show its superiority to theology he was disposed to play up its concrete character and applicability. Science was superior to theology because it solved real problems, but it was superior to engineering precisely because it did not. While the pragmatic reasons why this influential scientist would have taken these contradictory stances are evident, Gieryn does not consider the rhetorical costs that demarcation of this kind might have accrued. In fact he does not regard this inconsistency as a problem at all. Tyndall, Gieryn tells us, was not “disingenuous” when he described science differently in various contexts. “It would be reductionistic, “he insists, “to explain these inconsistent parts of a professional ideology merely as fictions conjured up to serve scientists’ interests” (p. 787). This was a “genuine ambivalence” reflecting “an unyielding tension between basic and applied research, and between the empirical and theoretical aspects of inquiry” (p. 787). Of course Gieryn is right about this, but this explanation overlooks the obvious fact that Tyndall communicated these half truths with the intention of deceiving his listeners by masking this very ambivalence. Had the physicist explained this as forthrightly as Gieryn does, he would not have been able to achieve these boundary-work effects, for to acknowledge that science is both theoretical and applied, would be to admit that it cannot be utterly demarcated either from theology or engineering. In wanting to forgive Tyndall’s equivocation, in other words, Gieryn seems to suggest that it is okay to mislead the public, provided that one remains true to science. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2006 – How Newspaper Coverage Transforms Policy Issues Into Character Matters: Debate About A School District’s Test Scores

• by: Karen Tracy - University of Colorado

1. Introduction
Eliasoph (1998, p. 210) argued that ”Reading the local newspapers . . . did not help citizens make connections between politics and everyday life, did not help them learn about the art of political debate, and inadvertently discouraged them from speaking out in a public-spirited way.” The dominant practice for reporting local events, she opines, tends to drain the political out of whatever is going on. Unlike national and international news, balance is rarely needed for local issues; local activities are presented as factual events rather than as issues that warrant debate and reason-giving. Such a state of affairs, quite often, is NOT the case in local U.S. communities when the issue concerns a school district’s educational policy. In Boulder Valley School District (BVSD), this paper’s focal case, the community’s main newspaper was not fostering apathy. Not only did its news and editorial pages regularly present a variety of debates related to BVSD activities, but on certain occasions the paper became an initiator of a controversy. Such was the case in May of 1997 in the heated discussion about the district’s 4th grade reading test scores that occurred in the newspaper and board meetings.
School board meetings are a particularly American institution, finding their roots in the early 20th century progressive movement that treated education as a community “good,” democratic but not very political, in the same category as, for instance, road repair. A typical board meeting brings together elected officials, citizens, and school staff in a district to make decisions. Meetings also serve as screening sites, using citizen commentary, permitted at certain meeting moments, to identify issues that should become a focus of later board deliberation (Craig & Tracy, 2005).
This study is part of a larger project examining dilemmas and discursive strategies of “ordinary democracy” in local governance groups (Tracy, forthcoming; 1999; Tracy & Ashcraft, Tracy & Muller, 2001).This paper focuses on the controversy about BVSD’s reading test scores. Following a brief overview of the controversy, I describe the arguments forwarded by various BVSD players, organizing them into two lessons that the participants’ discourse teaches about publicly-made education arguments. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the advantages and troubles that the Camera, the community’s local newspaper, encountered in its civic journalism motivated efforts to foster community engagement.

2. The Controversy and Its Discursive Unfolding
The controversy began with a lead editorial in the Sunday newspaper that proclaimed “reading scores are shocking” that went on to inform readers that “Twenty-eight percent of our fourth graders are reading below grade level. More than one out of four. Alarming? You bet. What is going on?” (Camera, 1997, May 18, p. 2E) In the editorial, the 12 schools with the largest percentage of “below grade level” children were identified, along with the exact percent of each school’s students that were below the 50th percentile on the reading section of the California Achievement Test (CAT). Offset in large print in the middle of the editorial was the following assertion: “The problem is fairly obvious: Our schools are doing a lousy job teaching the most important learning and survival skill of all-reading.”
Earlier in the week, board member Riddle had met with the Camera editor Hartman to express her concern about how the district was teaching reading. During the meeting Riddle had shared information about the district’s 1996 reading test scores. The next Sunday an editorial appeared criticizing the district’s teaching of reading. In an interview with Hartman I asked him what role he saw the Camera taking in developing opinions about issues important to the community.

(1) We really feel that we should be totally objective on news pages, but not on the editorial pages. I thin- we’re (KT: okay) we’re we- we’re being paid to try to understand what’s going on and try to offer some guidance and leadership. And that’s what we do on the editorial pages. But we also provide the whole open forum for the public to respond. For the school board to respond and for uh people writing letters to respond.

In addition to the “lousy job” assertion noted above, five additional claims were contested by one or another party in letters, opinion pieces, and in the subsequent May meeting:
(1) “Riddle may be on to something” for favoring a “nuts-and-bolts” philosophy” and worrying that the “new educational theories may be doing more harm than good.”
(2) 28% of the district’s kids are reading below grade level.
(3) High Peaks Elementary, a core knowledge program that had zero percent of students reading below age level, has teachers that “are doing something unique” that “is worth modeling in more schools.”
(4) Those who might say scores are not alarming, since they are better than most districts in Colorado, are wrong.
(5) District shouldn’t let a “hundred more students slip though the cracks”. . . ”the mandate is to do something, and to do it now.”

Two days later, and the day before a regularly scheduled board meeting, a news article appeared reporting the reading scores with a table listing the percentage of students below the 50th and 34th percentiles at each of the district’s 30 elementary schools (Taylor, 1997). In addition, the article had a picture of board president Hult followed by a quote saying “If I were an elementary school parent, I would not be comfortable having my child go to a school where somewhere between 30 and 55 percent of kids are not reading at grade level.” At the school board meeting the next night, “reading program and achievement” was an agenda item up for discussion toward the end of the meeting. This meeting brought 37 citizens out to speak and lasted 7 hours. In the weeks following this meeting, the editorial pages of the Camera were full of letters to the editor and opinion pieces, as well as a second editorial by the Camera. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2006 – A Bottom-Up Approach To Argument Schemes: The Case Of Comparative Argument

• by: Marianne Doury - CNRS

The question of the internal structure of argumentation and the identification of the various argument schemes constitutes a central stake for argumentation studies. Analyzing argumentation requires that the analyst adopts a somewhat acrobatic but necessary median position in order to place himself at an intermediate level, between the “letter” of the argumentation (its very content, which is proper to a specific (text/discourse) and its “logical” structure (its possible translation into a general logical scheme, which misses most of the substance of the argumentation).
Distributing the various arguments we may be confronted to into general schemes, according to the nature of the relation which links the argument to the conclusion allows to distance oneself from the literal and specific content of an argumentative discourse in order to gain in abstraction. It then becomes possible to compare various argumentative speeches, dealing with various subject matters, but susceptible to mobilize argumentative strategies resorting to similar configurations of argument schemes.
Nevertheless, at the moment, researchers in the field of argumentation studies, and maybe in particular in the French-speaking sphere, have no systematic, coherent typology of argument schemes at their disposal.
The reference typologies are mostly directly inspired by that proposed by C. Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca. Their classification may be of great help because of the variety of the argument schemes it comprises (and because of the associated definitions), but it is weakened by a lack of coherence in the proposed classification criteria and therefore, by the heterogeneousness of the categories considered as argument schemes. Beyond these theoretical difficulties, the application of the model – trying to identify argument schemes used by arguers in everyday discussions – is far from being simple.

This paper will focus on a broad group of arguments defined by the fact that they are based on a comparison process. More precisely, on the basis of a similarity between two cases, such arguments focus on a characteristic of the case which constitutes the analogue, or the source, or phoros of the comparison, and extend it to the second case, which constitutes the primary subject, or thema, or target, of the argumentation.
In order to avoid the trap mentioned by Christian Plantin, who claims that “any proposition of synthesis of existing typologies finally results in an additional typology” (2005, p. 50), this paper will be limited to a non-exhaustive inventory of several parameters identified in various academic works, parameters which permit a sub-categorization of arguments based on a comparison.
Considering that an argument scheme is associated with a set of specific critical questions, we will test the relevance of such a sub-classification of comparative arguments for ordinary arguers. We will then investigate whether speakers, when engaged in an argumentative discussion, use “wide-spectrum” refutation strategies in order to counter an opponent’s comparison, or whether they use specific refutation strategies according to the sub-type they are confronted with.

1. Sub-classifications within comparative arguments.
1.1.A first distinctive feature which introduces a sub-classification in the group of arguments based on a comparison opposes:
– comparisons which parallel situations or cases issued from two heterogeneous domains of knowledge (see, for instance, a beautiful example from C.S. Lewis, quoted by Govier (2001, p.350-351):
“You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act – that is, to watch a girl undress on stage. Now suppose you came to a country where you could fill a theatre simply by bringing a covered plate onto the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let everyone see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food?)”:
– to comparisons which parallel situations from the same domain of knowledge (most of the comparisons of the a pari type seem to belong this category ; see the example quoted by Garssen (1994, p.106):
“You should give Miriam an expensive birthday present, because on Alice’s birthday you also gave her an expensive present”. Read more