ISSA Proceedings 2002 – Spectacle And Trauma: An Analysis Of The Media Coverage Of The Oklahoma City Bombing

• by: Kevin Cummings - Regis University

The headlines in the days and weeks following the Oklahoma City Bombing tell a tragic story of lost lives and harrowing escapes. Storytellers who told of the devastation painted a grim picture of the horror that occurred in the Alfred P. Murrah Building on April 19, 1995. The media translated the spectacle of trauma, individuals suffering from injury, and the loss of family and friends into best selling stories. The Oklahoma City Bombing coverage included dozens of narratives of the private pain and suffering that individuals experienced. Trauma was positioned at the center of the political experience of domestic terrorism. It is my belief that the media commodified the disaster as an event for public consumption and positioned the audience as a spectator or watcher. If my contention is correct then it poses a serious problem for the body politic because a spectator that merely watches is disengaged from active participation and does not have the same critical capacities as an involved citizen. In this essay I will advance the thesis that the use of trauma narratives and the spectacle of bodies in pain calls into being an audience that voyeuristically watches a disaster without becoming critically engaged.

It is too easy and perhaps arrogant to cry foul against the media for perverting and commodifying people’s suffering for profit. After all, they are providing coverage that public wants to watch, wants to listen to, and wants to read. In addition, there are plenty of alternative media sources for those who wish to critically engage the issues. I do not wish to focus my attention in this essay simply on criticizing the media. Instead I believe it is more fruitful to examine the arguments that become embedded in trauma narratives. Argumentation theorists such as Goodnight (1982, 215) and Zarefsky (1992, 411) have both brought into question the state of public deliberation. Their work has done much to highlight the problems that plague the public sphere. Trauma narratives run the risk of furthering damaging the spaces available for critical interrogation of public issues. However, there are plenty of examples of the productive use of spectacle and of trauma narratives that have been used to mobilize an engaged and critical citizenry. Some of the best examples come from the Civil Rights Movement. Images of the Freedom Riders, Dr. Martin Luther King, and Rosa Parks did not stifle public action but instead acted as public arguments for justice. The sharing of their trauma mobilized a nation to act. While the problems of racism persist in the United States, few would suggest that the work of these individuals was in vain. So that begs the question of how to determine whether or not a trauma narrative will aid or harm the public sphere. I believe the litmus test for answering this question hinges on the whether the trauma narrative calls into being a critical citizen or a spectator that is disengaged and watches the spectacle for entertainment. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2002 – Perelman’s Universal Audience: Between Norms And Facts

• by: Emmanuelle Danblon - Université Libre de Bruxelles

I will open this lecture by pointing out that, quite paradoxically, Perelman’s notion of Universal Audience seems to oscillate between two incompatible interpretations. We have, on the one hand, a factual universality, which is linguistically impossible to reach, and on the other hand, a universality of right, which concerns some happy few only among a well-read community.
Indeed, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca first claim that the agreement of a Universal Audience is a matter of right (1988 : 41); but they acknowledge, afterwards, that this notion looks like an illegitimate generalization of a particular intuition. In sum, the Universal Audience seems to lie somewhere between norms and facts.
In a second time, I will try to show that this hesitation could be the very sign of an underlying cognitive continuity. Relying on a genealogical perspective which aims at understanding the origin of audience as an argumentative notion, I will define our contemporary notion of a Universal Audience as a hybrid concept that covers two components: first, a regulatory principle which is concerned with norms; second, a factual notion that refers to the conscience of every man. The intimate link between both sub-notions paves the way to critical discussion. Indeed, when a norm turn out to conflict with facts, we endeavour to unearth its spirit through the feeling of a human conscience. Such a genealogical perspective helps us to understand the working of this argumentative process, without which every norm, sooner or later, is threatened with arbitrariness.
Finally, I will illustrate my claim by analyzing a debate that concerns Human Rights. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2002 – Retransmittability And Empirical Propositions

• by: Antoni Diller - University of Birmingham

1. Introduction
The standard dictionary definition of a formally valid argument in classical, bivalent, deductive logic proceeds as follows: An argument is valid if it is impossible for all its premises to be true and its conclusion to be false. A valid argument, unlike a sound one, can have false premises or it can have a mixture of true and false premises, but if all of its premises are true, then its conclusion must be true as well. This can also be expressed by saying that truth is transmitted from all of the premises of a valid argument to its conclusion and that falsity is retransmitted from the conclusion of a valid argument to at least one of its premises. The terminology of transmittability and retransmittability has its origins in the work of Popper and Lakatos. That truth is transmitted and that falsity is retransmitted are both mentioned in (Popper, 1974, 64), though Popper sees these as being properties of valid rules of inference rather than of arguments. Lakatos, in the course of developing his mathematical methodology of proofs and refutations, formulates a principle of the retransmission of falsity which states ‘that global counterexamples be also local: falsehood should be retransmitted from the naive conjecture to the lemmas, from the consequent of the theorem to its antecedent’ (Lakatos, 1976, 47).

Two interesting questions to ask of valid arguments are whether anything other than truth is transmittable and whether anything other than falsity is retransmittable. Concerning transmittability, some unusual contenders have been proposed. For example, in (Gjertsen, 1989, 127) it is suggested that if the premises of a valid argument are ambiguous, obscure, uncertain or bland, then so must be its conclusion! In this paper I am interested in the questions whether the property of being an empirical proposition is transmittable and, especially, whether this property is retransmittable. I show that a valid deductive argument with consistent premises, all of which are empirical, can have a non-empirical conclusion which is not logically true. I also show that it is possible for a valid deductive argument with consistent premises to have an empirical conclusion and yet to have no empirical premises. (Note that in this paper I do not, as some philosophers do, distinguish between propositions and statements. These terms are used interchangeably.) Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2002 – Communicative Components Of Imperatives As Speech Acts

• by: Inga B. Dolinina - McMaster University

1. Introduction
Speech act theory brought in a diversity of communicative components associated with the Imperative (viewed as an actualization of a Directive) and initiated debates about the importance of these components for defining Imperative meaning (see the review of these debates in Hamblin, 1987).
I propose a systematization of the communicative (speech-act related) components associated with Imperative meaning. My approach to this systematization is based on separating the (variable) “pragmatic” components which reflect the meaning of an imperative utterance in context from the (invariant) “basic” components which constitute the meaning of an imperative construction independent of context and should be regarded as the grammatical meaning of the Imperative. Furthermore, I propose to interpret the basic imperative meaning by treating the Imperative as a speech-act category rather than a verbal Mood.
I claim a) that the basic imperative meaning is a speaker-oriented entity and not just a relation between the Sb and Pr of a content proposition, and b) that this meaning is not a semantic primitive, but a highly complex entity. I argue that it includes three situations (appellative, causation/volition, and content/proposition), where each situation in turn contains a specific predicate with its sets of arguments, and also a ‘framing-framed’ relation reflecting that the content proposition is not an actual one.
Finally I claim that my approach allows us to present the meaning of an imperative utterance not as a chaos of communicative components, but as an organized system. This system gives ground for defining the “logical form” of any imperative utterance. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2002 – Topos In Rhetorical Argumentation: From Enthymeme To Figure

• by: E. F. Dyck - Independent Scholar, Grande Cache, Alberta, Canada

James J. Murphy some ten years ago raised the question, “[W]hat is the relation between Topos and . . . Figura?” (Murphy, 1990, 240), a question he understood as one of an historical development yet but dimly known, and whose answer would require long and difficult scholarship. No doubt he was right, but one might equally well ask a related, equally important, and perhaps more manageable question: “What are the intrinsic (structural) relations between topos and figura?”, relations which are presupposed by the historical developments which Murphy rightly insisted need to be investigated.

It is the latter question that this paper proposes to engage – I say engage, not answer, because a full answer relies also on historical developments, though not as profoundly as the answer to Murphy’s question above. This paper investigates in a preliminary way the historic relations between topos and figure, and, using recent developments in the theory of topos, argues that the figures are enthymemes constructed from particular topoi. The paper proceeds in three steps:
1. What are the (historically constituted) intrinsic relations between topos and figure?
2. What does recent scholarship say about the relation between topos and enthymeme?
3. To what extent does the notion of the figure as an enthymeme constructed from a topos explicate the extrinsic relationship between topos and figure? Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2002 – A Normative And Empirical Approach To Petty And Cacioppo’s ‘Strong’ And ‘Weak’ Arguments

• by: Renske van Dijk, Lettica Hustinx & Hans Hoeken(i) - University of Nijmegen

What makes a persuasive message persuasive? According to the Elaboration Likelihood Model (Petty & Cacioppo 1986), argument quality plays an important role in the answer to this question. The present study takes a close look at this factor. First, background information will be given about the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM). Subsequently, the role of argument quality in the ELM will be discussed.  After that, the results will be presented of a normative and empirical study of Petty and Cacioppo’s research material containing strong and weak arguments. These results will provide insight into the role of argument quality in the persuasion process [i].

1. Petty & Cacioppo’s Elaboration Likelihood Model
According to the Elaboration Likelihood Model, people can be persuaded into adopting a claim by walking two different routes. The first route is called the central route. At this route, people systematically examine the quality of the given arguments. If they agree with these arguments, they adopt the claim. If they disagree with the arguments, they reject the claim. The second route is called the peripheral route. At this route, people are persuaded by peripheral cues. Peripheral cues are all non-argumentative features of a message that are capable of influencing the formation or change of the receiver’s attitude. Commonly used peripheral cues are rules of thumb, such as ‘If this authority says so, it must be true’ or ‘If hundreds of people used this product before me, it must be a good product.’
Which route is being taken is determined by two factors: motivation and ability. Motivation is about wanting to process the persuasive message. If people want to be very sure of the correctness of their attitude, they will be very motivated to examine the given arguments carefully. So, for example, motivation is higher when a house is to be bought than a detergent. The second factor is about being able to process the message. The easier it is for people to examine the given arguments, the quicker they will perform this task. Motivation as well as ability is required in order to follow the central route. If these conditions are not met, the peripheral route will be taken. Read more