ISSA Proceedings 2006 – The Invocation Of Time Within Argumentative Discourse In An Asynchronous Internet Environment

• by: Miriam Greenfeld - Rutgers University

Interactive online environments often contain arguments. Research has been conducted on flaming behavior (Lee, 2005), but other linguistic elements of online conflict do not receive much attention. One such element is the invocation of time. While such a move makes use of a solitary concept, this strategy is one that has yet to be examined. It is useful to understand what takes place when people invoke time in order to have a better understanding of online argumentative discourse in general.
Several different areas of theoretical research provide ways of understanding possible ways to examine how people introduce and use time within online argumentative discourse. These include linguistics (Clark, 1992; Lakoff, 1987), chronemics (Bruneau, 1977, 1979; Laguerre, 2004), pragma-dialectics (van Eemeren, Grootendorst, Jacobs, & Jackson, 1993), and strategic maneuvering. The discursive inclusion of time may in fact prove to be fallacious, which requires a further theoretical understanding of fallacy theory.
To examine the invocation of time requires acknowledging that time can be considered a distinct linguistic category. Cognitive linguistics provides a way to examine categorization. Lakoff (1987) broke from previous theories regarding language and categorization by using examples to demonstrate that language categories are linked to human cognition. These examples led to a final dismissal of elements of classical categorization in exchange for a theory of categorization based on internal cognitive models. While Lakoff’s work has limited applicability to argumentation theory as a whole, it does shed light on how certain words or phrases may connect logically to one another to create an overall argument. This cognitive linkage suggests that more difficult to follow metaphors and language use can also be examined based on the way that concepts are categorized in order to understand the rationale behind the argument.

Chronemics was initially conceived as a way to examine time as a variable influencing human communication (Bruneau, 1977, 1979). He defined chronemics as “the study of human temporality as it relates to human communication” (Bruneau, 1977, p. 3), later expanding the definition to include the influence and interdependence between temporality and communication. In his examination of chronemics, he defined eight interdependent levels of time-experiencing. Despite these levels, Bruneau (1977) opened chronemics as an area for further research without creating any definitive way to categorize time.
Later Bruneau (1979) studied chronemics relative to organizational communication, further developing the understanding of time to include the relations between personal, group, and organizational time. Ballard and Seibold (2004) also worked in organizational communication, demonstrating that variation in three communication structures associated with organizations influenced the way people perceived time on numerous dimensions. The way work members perceived time was created through interaction and their intersubjective experience.
While this research focused on organizational communication, it is important to note that there may be competing ideas about time. The multiple dimensions of time lead to different reasons for people to invoke time. Other research has also demonstrated the possibility for competing conceptions of time to create conflict (Jaffe, 1975). This conflict demonstrates the cultural construction of time, which may influence how time is invoked and understood within argumentative discourse. Therefore, time contains several complexities that may influence its invocation.

The advent of the Internet also influenced the category of time. Laguerre (2004) examined the notion of the cyberweek and how it compared to our previous understanding of the civil week. The cyberweek is further broken down into the concepts of ‘cybertiming’ and ‘flexitiming’, which blur the boundaries between work and leisure time, the workweek and the weekend, and public and domestic spheres online. Using the idea of an interactional model, with the cyberweek being both part of the civil week and apart, a cyberweek is defined as “a set of times electronically produced through the intervention of a human agency – measured with no reference to the rotation of the moon or sun – all of which are equivalent and contained in linear or non-linear sequences, or in both, in a flexible, cyclical temporal domain” (Laguerre, 2004, pp. 226-227). While it does not take temporal aspects like time zones into account, virtual time is still rooted in civil time. For example, responses across time zones may take a while because the receiver is sleeping while the sender works.
While Laguerre’s (2004) focus on the cyberweek is more concerned with its connection to organizational matters, other researchers examined virtual time in a more general manner. Lee (2005) demonstrated that asynchronous written communication on the Internet might also affect the expression of hostility. McMillan and Hwang (2002) pointed out the importance of the time something takes to load on interactivity, an aspect that does not factor as much into other discussions on time. While the authors studied interactivity related to advertising, this could have an impact on how people invoke time in argumentative discourse in other places.
The realm of invocation occurs within an overarching interaction. Clark’s (1992) arenas of language use provide a way to examine how this discursive move affects the interaction between the participants. In this pragmatic approach to the collaborative nature of language use, arenas of language use are considered structural arenas of actions. There are three properties of arenas of language use: participants, social processes, and collaborative actions. These properties demonstrate that there are multiple people directly involved to accomplish some social process working independently and together, which create the setting for language use. Therefore participants are responsible for managing both the content of the conversation as well as the process. There cannot be argumentation between arenas as there are in fields of argumentation (van Eemeren et al., 1993) because arenas include all of the participants within the discourse. However, from Clark’s standpoint argumentation may be a possible arena. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2006 – Managing Disagreement In Multiparty Deliberation

• by: Mark Aakhus & Alena Vasilyeva - Rutgers University

1. This paper examines a case of deliberation that took place during a meeting among community leaders and representatives for a land-housing development firm. The meeting involves a speech, made by one of the developer’s representatives, and the subsequent discussion of what is put forward among the community leaders and representatives of the development firm. The participants’ discussion moves following the speech provide an opportunity to reflect on a practical problem faced by parties to a deliberation: how to enable the expression of sufficient disagreement among participants while preventing the unlimited expansion of disagreement. Observations of the meeting based on a transcript made from an audio-recording will first be described followed by a discussion of the implications of these observations for further understanding how disagreement is managed in multiparty deliberation.

2. The meeting where the deliberation takes place involved eight members of the community’s government (the mayor, four council members, planning board chair, and borough attorney) and five representatives of the development firm (main speaker, his assistant, firm’s attorney, the president of the corporation’s regional division, and the vice-president of land development for the region). The meeting was held as a broader controversy related to the development discussed in this meeting emerges in the community about appropriate land-use and development. The official status of the meeting is not clear since no record of the meeting was available until it was discovered during the pre-trial phase of a lawsuit related to the development discussed during this meeting. The speech lasts nearly 18 minutes and the ensuing discussion lasts 1 hour and 30 minutes.

The speech begins with preliminaries that update those present about matters that the developer has been “studying.” The speaker defines the land under contract (161 acres) and describes the availability of the adjacent pieces of property. He points out their goal to build 350 units, which is the maximum allowed by the Borough’s ordinance, as a senior lifestyle community with recreational amenities. He also points out that there are several “outside forces in flux” including the determination of the protected wetland boundaries on the property and the borough’s ordinances. He then previews the main points of the presentation as real estate taxes, infrastructure costs, and ordinances. He defines these as “three kinds of global issues” on which the developer “needs some feedback.” The speaker then makes a prediction that the borough residents will realize a “25-42 percent” real estate tax decrease depending on how many units can be developed and how the project is put together. The speaker puts forward a theory of how to make the project successful and thus attain that tax benefit for the whole community. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2006 – Modern Rhetoric And The End Of Argument

• by: Don Paul Abbott - University of California, Davis

1. Introduction
A remarkable number of critics and historians have asserted—sometimes with dismay, sometimes with delight—the death of rhetoric. The exact time of this termination and the precise cause of the capitulation are matters of considerable conjecture. Yet there is perhaps a consensus that after a long and celebrated life rhetoric died sometime between the end of the eighteenth and middle of the nineteenth centuries. Thus for Tzvetan Todorov the history of rhetoric is one of “splendor and misery” and for Roland Barthes the same history is “triumphant and moribund.” In his Figures of Literary Discourse Gérard Genette offers what he calls a “cavalier account” of these developments which ends with the “great shipwreck of rhetoric” (p.114).
For Genette, rhetoric’s career has been a “historical course of a discipline that has witnessed, over the centuries, the gradual contraction of its field of competence…from Corax to our own day, the history of rhetoric has been that of a generalized restriction (pp. 103-104).”  For Genette, this “generalized restriction” is a movement from rhetoric, classically conceived, to a theory of figures, to a theory of tropes, to a final “valorization” of metaphor as the surviving heir of the rhetorical tradition.

Like Genette and others Paul Ricoeur also sees rhetoric as having followed a course of gradual decline from its classical origins to its present moribund state. In The Rule of Metaphor, Ricoeur offers an account of rhetoric’s career that concludes with its “dying days” (p. 28). One cause of rhetoric’s death was its reduction to “parts,” that is, the figures. Ricoeur decries the taxonomic tendency of rhetoric, as exemplified by the lists of figures, largely because these taxonomies are, in his view, “static.” The more crucial problem is that the taxonomies contributed to rhetoric “severing” itself from argument. Ricoeur recognizes that Greek rhetoric was “broader, more dramatic, than a theory of figures” (p.12). After all, says Ricoeur, before taxonomy there was Aristotle’s Rhetoric (RM, p.12). And, moreover, says Ricoeur, “before rhetoric was futile, it was dangerous” (p.11).
Ricoeur agrees with Genette’s thesis that “the progressive reduction of the domain of rhetoric” was its undoing (p.44). Ricoeur agrees with Genette that “since the Greeks, rhetoric diminished bit by bit to a theory of style by cutting itself off from the two parts that generated it, the theories of argumentation and of composition. Then, in turn, the theory of style shrank to a classification of figures of speech, and this to a theory of tropes (p. 45).”
This interpretation of rhetoric’s history as a “progressive reduction” in its scope away from invention and argument in favor of a limited view of tropes has gained considerable currency. It is probably appealing to scholars of argument to believe that abandoning invention and argument led directly to the demise of rhetoric. And while the “progressive reduction” position is plausible, it may not be historically accurate. For if Genette and Ricoeur are correct rhetoric, or at least rhetoric with a significant inventional component, should no longer be evident by the second half of the nineteenth century. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2006 – Argumentation, Keywords And Worldviews

• by: Alessandro Grilli - Università di Pisa

The aim of this paper is to show how the semantics of natural languages implies some consequences which are basic to the very definition of argumentation and to the analysis of the structure of arguments. I am particularly interested in emphasizing how the persuasiveness of any discourse, observed in its concrete effectiveness, relies for the most part on the semantic flexibility of keywords, that is, of those concepts which articulate the main structural components of the argumentation: the analytical question and the thesis (Dell’Aversano & Grilli 2005, pp. 555-564; 169-211). My work has developed as an effort to pin down some implications of the theory of argumentation set out by Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca in their Traité de l’argumentation. Theirs is an avowedly asystematic model: in delineating dichotomy between argumentation and demostration they are well aware of the complex interplay of linguistic and pragmatic factors which contribute to the functioning of an effective argumentation. Demonstration is not open to dispute, while an argumentation cannot achieve its persuasive aim without the voluntary engagement of its audience. This is because, from the semantic viewpoint, a demonstration links concepts whose definition is completely explicit, unambiguous and context-independent, while argumentation not only allows for the semantic variability of its keywords but is actually, as I will show, dependent on it for its efficacy. Not surprisingly, the Traité keeps itself clear of any perscriptive ambitions: its authors do not look for rules but are interested in explaining the way individual argumentations work with reference to the objects of prior agreement which their audiences share with their authors. Their method is based not on a general reflection on abstract models but on hundreds of enlightening and painstaking analyses of real argumentative texts which are examined against the background of their cultural contexts. Following their example, my own reflections will not take the shape of a systematic classification, but will simply put forward a description of some peculiarities of the structure of argumentative texts starting from some concrete examples.
The most important theoretical element which I derive from the Traité de l’argumentation is the notion of prior agreement. As the Traité repeatedly emphasizes (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca 1958, pp. 65-66), no argumentation is possible unless the speaker be able to rely on some shared foundation on which he can build his relationship with the audience. More specifically, this notion can be used to define an effective argumentation as a discourse which modifies the boundaries of the prior agreement by extending them: the result of an effective argumentation is that an element which was external to those boundaries (the thesis which the speaker upholds) will eventually be included within them, as a part of the notions speaker and audience share.

As a first step towards a better definition of the role of keywords in argumentative dynamics it will be useful to introduce a distinction according to where keywords are situated in relation to the boundaries of the prior agreement connecting the speaker to the argumentative community before which he is arguing. Keywords may accordingly be divided into conventional and original concepts: the first category will include all concepts which, because they belong to the vocabulary the speaker shares with his audience, can be used to refer in a recognizable way to any element included within the boundaries of the prior agreement. The category of original concepts includes concepts which are absent from that shared vocabulary, and which are therefore not included among the objects of prior agreement, and cannot be assimilated to them. This distinction can be made clearer by quoting an example from a historical monograph by Philippe Ariès:

In medieval society the feel for childhood did not exist; which does not mean that children were neglected, abandoned or despised. The feel for childhood is not identical with the affection for childhood: it entails the awareness of the peculiarities of childhood, peculiarities which essentially distinguish children from adults, however young. This awareness did not exist. Accordingly, as soon as children were able to survive without the constant care of their mothers or nannies, they belonged to adult society and were no longer distinct from it. This adult society often appears childish to us: this is no doubt a consequence of its mental age, but also of its biological age, because it was in part composed of children and youngsters. The language did not give the word “child” the specific sense I now attribute to it: “child” was the equivalent of our “boy”. This indeterminacy with respect to age extended to the whole of social activity: games, trades, weapons. There is no collective representation where children, younger or older, do not have their place, huddled, sometimes, two at a time, in the trousse which hangs from the women’s neck, or portrayed while they urinate in a corner, or while they play their part in a traditional pageant; as apprentices in shops, as pages waiting on knights and so on.(Ariès 1962, p. 145) Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2006 – Virtue Argumentation

• by: Andrew Aberdein - Florida Institute of Technology

1. Virtue in ethics
After centuries of obscurity, the study of the virtues is now one of the most prominent methodologies in ethics. Proponents of this so-called ‘aretaic turn’ differ substantially in the details of their respective proposals, but they tend to see a renewed focus on ethical virtues as a fresh source of insight into problems which have deadlocked more familiar approaches, such as Kantianism or utilitarianism. Moreover, virtue ethics has an immediacy to everyday human interests which its competitors have often been criticized as lacking. Yet, despite its fashionability, the roots of virtue ethics go back much further than those of its modern rivals.
An emphasis on virtue, or aretê, was characteristic of Ancient Greek thought from the time of Homer, if not earlier. Both Socrates and Plato could be said to have virtue theories, and the latter is responsible for the so-called Cardinal Virtues, of courage, temperance, wisdom (or prudence), and justice (Protagoras 330b). This list was subsequently incorporated into the Christian tradition by the successive authority of Saints Ambrose, Augustine of Hippo, and Thomas Aquinas. However the principal theorist of virtue in (Western) philosophy is Aristotle. Both of his major ethical works defend an account of the good life as an activity in accordance with our highest virtues. He catalogues many different ethical virtues. His earlier Eudemian Ethics (1220b-1221a) lists gentleness; courage; modesty; temperance; righteous indignation; the just; liberality; sincerity; friendliness; dignity; hardiness; greatness of spirit; magnificence; and wisdom. A similar list may be found in the later Nicomachean Ethics (1107a).
A distinctive feature of Aristotle’s approach is his ‘doctrine of the mean’: the thesis that each virtue represents the right degree of some property, of which either an excess or deficit would constitute vice. Hence every virtue is situated between a pair of opposite vices. For example, gentleness is the mean of irascibility and spiritlessness, and courage that of rashness and cowardice. This doctrine provides a plausible analysis of at least some familiar virtues, but few if any modern virtue theorists endorse it wholeheartedly. Nevertheless, the doctrine of the mean has a substantial intellectual legacy. In particular, since the good agent must be able to know what the mean is in any specific case, the doctrine obliged Aristotle to develop his ethics in an epistemological direction with the introduction of intellectual virtues. These include knowledge, art, prudence, intuition, wisdom, resourcefulness, and understanding (Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI). Chief amongst them is prudence, the traditional translation of phronesis, which might better be rendered as practical wisdom, or common sense. For Aristotle this is a disposition to deliberate well, that is, so as to arrive at a course of action which brings about the good. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2006 – An Analysis Of Argument In George Washington’s Newburgh Address: “Address To The Officers Of The Army,” March 15, 1783

• by: Mary L. Kahl - State University of New York

George Washington’s “Newburgh Address” ranks among the most consequential speeches given during the Revolutionary War and it is certainly one of the most famous addresses delivered by America’s first president. The speech often receives passing mention in rhetorical histories of the early nation, but scant attention has been paid to it by scholars of communication. My interest in the address is based both on its rhetorical-historical import and on the location in which it was given. Newburgh, New York is the city in which I live, so I hope to explicate the argumentative dimensions of this famous speech that was conceived and delivered in my own back yard.

Newburgh is the location of Washington’s Winter Headquarters, of the Last Encampment of the Continental Army, and of the New Windsor Cantonment. It is located on the Hudson River, about 15 miles north of West Point and 55 miles north of New York City. Because of its unique geographic properties, it was a heavily fortified area during the Revolutionary War. Washington spent the last years of the war in Newburgh, composed this address at his headquarters there, and delivered it just a few miles down the road at the Army cantonment.
The address effectively forestalled a mutiny that might have ended all hope for American independence just as the peace treaty with Great Britain was being negotiated and signed.
Examination of the conspiracy and Washington’s address allows for a better understanding of just how fragile the notion of effective American self-governance really was and how tenuous were principles of nationalism that we take almost for granted today.

1. Background to the Speech
In the fall of 1782, peace talks were underway in Paris and, with the Revolutionary war nearly ended, there was a fair amount of apprehension that Congress would disband the Continental Army without adequately compensating either officers or common soldiers. (Some had not been paid for years.) The soldiers had been disaffected for some time, and, by the time the Army cantoned near Newburgh for the winter, there were widespread desertions, hangings in effigy, and other symptoms of discontent. Regular soldiers had heretofore been the trouble- makers, but now Army officers, upon whom Washington counted to keep order among the troops, had also become restive. On at least seven occasions the Commander in Chief warned civilian authorities that his officers were disgruntled, writing that the patience of these men was “soured by penury and… the ingratitude of the Public” (in Ferling, p. 309). Just after Christmas, the officers acted. They sent a memorial to Congress, written by General John Knox, which detailed their grievances over pay and suggested that they wished to renegotiate the terms of their future compensation. “We have borne all that men can bear – our property is expended – our private resources are at an end, and our friends are wearied out and disgusted with our incessant applications,” they pleaded (in Worthington, pp. 291-293). The officers had in 1780 been promised pensions – half-pay for life – but now, realizing that they stood little chance of ever collecting, they pressed Congress for a commutation that would afford them an equivalent lump-sum payment at the conclusion of the war (Kohn, 1970, p. 189).

The nationalists in Congress-led chiefly by Alexander Hamilton and the Morrises – Robert and Gouverneur – realized that they might use the threat of unrest within the Army to augment the powers of the national government. Congress debated and rejected payment plans for the Army in the first two months of 1783 and, by late February, the nationalists had devised a plan to further pressure the government. The Newburgh conspiracy was hatched. They would encourage, if not incite, further discontent and even disorder among Army officers, use evidence of that unrest to manipulate Congress, and forewarn Washington of at least a part of their scheme, counting on his ability to control his men.

Hamilton wrote to Washington in late February, telling him that the country would be bankrupt by June. There would be no more money to fight the British or to pay officers’ pensions, if peace had been achieved by then. Hamilton decried the lack of “wisdom and decision” in Congress and suggested that if the Army again petitioned about payment, such an action might sway “those weak minds which are influenced by their apprehensions more than their judgments.” Hamilton cautioned Washington that the danger in such a maneuver was “to keep a complaining and suffering army within the bounds of moderation.” Washington should see that “prudent persons” handled the petitioning and could, if things turned ugly, “bring order perhaps even good, out of confusion” (in Syrett, 3: pp. 253-255). Washington did not rise to the bait, but only affirmed the right of his officers to just compensation and continued to pressure Congress himself on their behalf. He warned those meeting in Philadelphia that he would remain in Newburgh and “Try like a careful physician to prevent if possible the disorders getting to an incurable height” (in Fitzpatrick, 25: p. 270).
The conspirators contacted several high-ranking officers who were headquartered in Newburgh with Washington, among them General Knox (to whom they anticipated that the Commander would turn for counsel), and General Gates, second in command after Washington and one of his few antagonists. Gates was highly popular with young, middle-grade officers and it was within the ranks of these men that the conspiracy gained a life of its own. Major John Armstrong, a former aide to Gates, wrote the words that nearly caused the officers to mutiny (Wright, p. 178). Read more