ISSA Proceedings 2002 – Reasonableness Before Rationality: The Case Of Unreasonable Searches And Seizures

• by: Darrin Hicks - Department of Human Communication Studies, University of Denver

I find Perelman’s (1979) claim that the rational and the reasonable are distinct, freestanding ideals – that they are not interchangeable terms, but in fact, in certain cases, the rational and the reasonable are in precise opposition –  to be his most important political insight. For instance, Perelman argues as applied to the law the “rational corresponds to adherence to an immutable divine standard or to the spirit of the system, to logic and coherence, to conformity with precedents, and to purposefulness; whereas the reasonable, on the other hand, characterizes the decision itself, the fact that it is acceptable or not by public opinion, that its consequences are socially useful or harmful, that it is felt to be equitable or biased (p.121).” The rational corresponds to mathematical reason; the reasonable corresponds to common sense. The rational purports to transcend all particular situations and apply equally to all persons regardless of circumstance; the reasonable is defined in relation to and bound by time, place and situation. However, both the rational and the reasonable strive for universality: the rational through an approximation of divine reason or immutable principle, the reasonable through the construction of a working consensus achieved through open and searching dialogue over the dictates of common sense and the standards of fair cooperation. It is because both the rational and the reasonable strive for universality and more precisely because each standard routinely fails to achieve universality due to the structural indeterminacies of communication as well as the contingencies that mark social life that they stand in a productive dialectical tension. Neither the rational nor the reasonable are sufficient by themselves to ensure either a true or just social order. The rational if left unchecked by the dictates of common sense and fairness would devolve into an inhuman instrumentality. The reasonable if unchecked by the systematicity of the rational would devolve into ethnocentrism. Hence, for Perelman, it is “the dialectic of the rational and reasonable, the confrontation of logical coherence with the unreasonable character of conclusions, which is the basis for the progress of thought (p. 120).”

Much of the reception of Perelman’s work, it seems, abandons this dialectical stance – where each of these distinct standards would be entertained simultaneously, not to reject one in favor of the other, but, to have them constantly modify each other – in favor of the claim that practical reason is exemplary for theoretical reason.  Perelman, and even more so his most articulate defenders such as Crosswhite (1996), Maneli (1994) and McKerrow (1982), hold that logical criteria, epistemic principles, and methods of inquiry are the result of a socialized, embodied, practical constellation of reasoning practices and norms of justification. These criteria, principles, and methods (which combine to form a community’s understanding of rationality) do not exist as antecedent conditions for discovery and justification, but have emerged over time as the consequences of dominant processes of inquiry. Hence, the criteria of theoretical reason do not govern practical reason: practical rationality is the grounds for and therefore determines, the cogency of technical rationality and sets the limits for it.  The relationship between the rational and the reasonable set out in the classic epistemic account is thereby inverted: the reasonable, understood as common sense, is the condition of possibility for the rational. It is this reversal – of the classical ideal of phronesis over the modern norm of instrumental rationality – that allows public judgment to serve as a normative standard for critiquing scientific knowledge that is the hallmark of contemporary rhetorical theory. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2002 – Fundamentalism Versus Cosmopolitanism: Argument, Cultural Identity, And Political Violence In The Global Age

• by: Thomas A. Hollihan, Patricia Riley -Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California & James F. Klumpp - Department of Communication, University of Maryland

In the series of essays to which we add the current paper (Hollihan, Riley, & Klumpp, 1993; Klumpp. Riley, & Hollihan, 1995; Riley, Hollihan, & Klumpp, 1998; Hollihan, Klumpp, & Riley, 1999; Klumpp, Hollihan, & Riley, 2001), we have considered a number of threats to democratic community at the turn of the 21st century, including the erosion of state power, the demise of the mass media, and development of extremist groups who grow from the openness of a democracy. None of these, however, represent a threat quite like the attacks of September 11, 2001. Most obviously the 9-11 attacks involved the use of violence against the United States and the death of three thousand citizens of the world, predominantly Americans. In addition, the 9-11 attacks presented an external threat; our work has highlighted internal problems that threaten democratic communication.

But, in addition to their violent destructiveness, the 9-11 attacks certainly had profound implications on democratic communication. Some of the effects have come in reaction to the threat to life and property. The reaction of the democracies has been at least partially to limit democratic rights such as free speech and the press. All democratic nations are tempted to forfeit democratic rights in the face of threats to security. The United States has been no exception. The White House quickly moved to silence news coverage of the videotape produced by Osama bin Laden’s organization soon after it was released, with a rather transparent warning of some hidden coded message. The flames of patriotism stoked by President Bush’s polemic declaration of an evil enemy quickly closed debate over the motivations for the intensity of Islamic radicalism. Susan Sontag’s rather mild curiosity about the roots of support for the radicals was met, not with disagreement, but with a barrage of ad hominem accusation including a questioning of her patriotism[i].

The attacks on democratic discussion are all the stronger because when President Bush declared this an act of “war,” it became the first war of the information age. The attacks were clandestine, a failure of our intelligence gathering, exploitive of information in the public domain. These story lines turned democratic freedom-to-know into the enemy of our security. With no sense of irony, the amount of information available to our citizens was systematically diminished, governmental information withheld from depository libraries, campaigns of disinformation promoted in the military, and a drumbeat of unsubstantiated, frightening threats substituted for a texture of inquiry and proof.

All of these diminutions of our freedom, cultural and statutory, were the reactions of a society under attack. Although they are real threats to democratic communication, they should not blind us to the threats to democratic community by those who perpetrated the attacks of 9-11. The movement supporting the attacks represents a new reality in the 21st century world and, we believe, a real threat to democratic values. In this essay, we propose to examine the challenges of the movement supporting the 9-11 attacks to democratic communication. We will begin by arguing that the movement is a fundamentalist identity movement. Then we will locate the specific challenge to democratic values represented by this new breed of opponent. And finally, we will identify the alternative to our military initiative: an initiative to foster the cosmopolitan values of a viable democratic politics. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2002 – Arguing For A Cause: President Bush And The Comic Frame

• by: Stephanie L. Hood - California State University, Los Angeles

1. Introduction
On the morning of September 11, 2002, a drama unfolded. It began in the air and ended in flames. Over the course of the day, planes would crash into buildings, individuals would be emotionally and physically injured, thousands would die, and a national symbol would collapse. This ensuing drama would become the single worst case of terrorism to occur on American soil and one of the worst cases of violence in history.
On September 20, 2001, President George W. Bush responded to the terrorist attacks that transpired on September 11. In a speech delivered to a joint session of Congress, Bush argued a position and spelled out a plan that would begin a new social movement that not only involved the United States, but also an international assembly.

The following analysis will first explore the rhetorical situation through the lens of Burke in an attempt to discover why and how this text was dramatized. Additionally, Bush’s motivational apparatus will be analyzed through a Dramatistic perspective by utilizing the constructs of the comic frame and examining the associational/ dissociational clusters used by Bush. Exploration of this text through the lens of the comic frame reveals that Bush reaffirmed the social hierarchy and ultimately gained support for a “War on Terror” through civil disobedience and public liability. Recognition of the associational/ dissociational clusters explores how Bush used symbols to create identification among a national and international audience. Furthermore, they illustrate how Bush named a vague enemy and christened this enemy a clown in order to maintain, rather than eliminate, this enemy’s role in society.

2. A President Challenged
In the days between the attacks and Bush’s address to Congress, millions watched and listened as Bush’s rhetorical techniques began to alter and change. Previously shying from venues that called for an impromptu response, Bush not only began offering personal opinions, but also seemed comfortable in doing so. His rhetoric shifted from guarded to colorful and full of Wild West colloquialisms as he pronounced that he wanted Osama bin Laden “dead or alive” and that he would “smoke them out” (Bumiller & Bruni, 2001).
Rather than curb Bush’s word choice, speech writers and White House Officials decided to utilize this “down home” image to reconstruct the fractured American mythos of invincibility. It is this same rhetorical structure that was applied to the discourse presented to the world on September 20. In addition to being conscious of word choice, Bush was also mindful of his choice of venue (Max, 2001). Choosing to speak in front of a joint session of Congress would provide an air of authority and stability. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2002 – Assessing The Problem Validity Of Argumentation Templates: Statistical Rules Of Thumb

• by: Sally Jackson - University of Arizona & Dale Brashers - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Burden of proof, a central concept in argumentation theory, situates the requirements for good argument within bodies of substantive knowledge and practical action (Gaskins, 1982). To respond to the burden of proof associated with any claim means providing grounds for acceptance that are adapted to a constellation of related beliefs and prior experience. Burden of proof should not be assumed to be a set of logical requirements, but instead should be understood as an outline of what is known so far that might constitute grounds for challenging claims of some particular sort within some particular substantive domain. The burden of proof that structures scientific argument in any field should be expected to change over time, as disagreement over particular claims reveals general grounds for disagreement with whole classes of claims. For this reason, scientific arguments contain myriad allusions to argumentative failures of the past, answering objections no one may actually have, simply because someone could have that objection or has had that objection to some other claim in the past.
Within expert fields of all kinds, and especially scientific fields, the burden of proof to be discharged may evolve over time as new issues emerge from research and theorizing. Among the discoveries of scientific fields are discoveries of things that can go wrong in drawing conclusions about the subject matter. Such discoveries are likely to stimulate the invention of new methods for guarding against the things that can go wrong, including routinized safeguards applied in research procedures (like “double-blind” administration of experiments or use of drug placebos). These routinized safeguards and boilerplate arguments associated with them often come to be understood by scientists themselves as their methods (McCloskey, 1985).
Disciplinary research practices may be seen as a kind of technology of reasoning and argumentation, embodied in new devices (such as statistics) that have been designed to serve an argumentative purpose and that may become interactionally stabilized in scientific discourse. As distinct from natural, commonsense reasoning, disciplined argumentation has a “designed” quality that comes from the tuning of argumentation to the requirements of the subject matter. As pointed out by Walton (1997), the more specialized these become, the more impenetrable they become for anyone other than a specialist. In this paper we illustrate how relatively impenetrable expert practices such as statistical testing can be opened to theoretical analysis, blending concepts and methods from pragma-dialectics with systematic computer simulation of certain designs for arguing. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2002 – Two Conceptions Of Openness In Argumentation Theory

• by: Scott Jacobs - University of Arizona

One of the central values in dialectical models of argumentation is that of openness. Sometimes this value is embodied in the form of specific rules – such as those in the pragma-dialectical code of conduct (van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 1992) which specify such things as rights to challenge, burden of proof, and so forth. But usually openness has a more informal quality to it. In any case, the concept lacks the precision one finds with, say, the concept of inferential validity in logical models of argumentation where we find not only well-defined exemplars of deductively valid forms of inference, but also a relatively clear definition of validity in general. It is perhaps because of this informal quality that argumentation scholars have not fully appreciated how the value of openness is used in two distinct ways when evaluating the quality of argumentative conduct. In one way, the concept of openness reflects an epistemic orientation. In the other way, the concept of openness takes on a more socio-political orientation. This paper spells out these two different senses of openness, articulates their rationales, and then explores some of the implications of this distinction for understanding the nature of reasonable argumentative conduct.

1. Two Functions of Argumentation.
In large part, these two conceptions of openness in argumentation theory are responsive to two different functions of argumentation: a cognitive function and a social function. So, to get a better lock on the two sense of openness, we begin by considering these two different functions. There has always been a tension in argumentation theory between a cognitive understanding of argument and a social understanding of argument. Logical approaches most clearly exhibit a preference for emphasizing the cognitive function: that of belief management. Logical approaches have a tendency to reduce the argumentative function to processes of individual reasoning – so much so that not only are notions of interaction and audience easily erased from the picture, but discourse itself is largely stripped away until only something call ‘propositions’ remain. But whether or not such a reduction seems prudent, it does isolate this cognitive function of argumentation. Argumentation does clearly have a truth-testing function. It is this epistemological aspect that dominates the study of argument in philosophical traditions. And this concern is quite proper. This concern derives from the very structure of accountability and reason-giving that forms an integral basis for ordinary language uses of argument. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2002 – The Effects Of Different Socio-Economic Factors, Language Environments And Attitudes Of First Year Natural Resources Students On Their Performance In A Critical Thinking Appraisal

• by: Marietjie de Klerk - Polytechnic of Namibia, Windhoek, Namibia

1. Introduction
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), after consulting a wide variety of sources including results of many national and regional conferences and many experts in different fields of study, published a document titled: Educating for a Sustainable Future: A Transdisciplinary Vision for Concerted Action in 1997. In this document under curriculum reform, the following recommendation was made: ‘Students need to learn how to reflect critically on their place in the world and to consider what sustainability means to them and their communities. They need to practise envisioning alternative ways of development and living, evaluating alternative visions, learning how to negotiate and justify choices between visions, and making plans for achieving desired ones, and participating in community life to bring such visions into effect. These are the skills and abilities which underlie good citizenship, and make education for sustainability part of a process of building an informed, concerned and active populace. In this way, education for sustainability contributes to education for democracy and peace.’
It was clear from this document that critical thinking or, how to reflect critically should, in the future become an integral part of education and training in all fields of study. Against this background the aim was to establish if the first year students in the discipline of Natural Resources did have the skills, knowledge and attitudes for critical thinking, and if not, a possible explanation for the situation.

The initial intention of the investigation was to research the issue of critical thinking ability within the Namibian context. The latter may differ from other countries, as seen against previous research done on this issue. Namibia is regarded as a developing country, while most of the research has been done in developed countries. Political ideologies and policies which have an influence on all aspects of the life of the citizens of a country are not the same for all countries but in some cases differ radically from each other.
In certain rural areas in Namibia, communities still actively practise their traditions and cultures as they have done for the last centuries. In most communal areas socio-economic conditions are characterized by subsistence livelihood and a high rate of unemployment. As a result many adults moved to urban areas to seek employment and in many cases women became the main source of income for a household. Children in these cases are usually taken care of by other family members, namely the extended family.
This research can best be described as illuminative, to provide data that may shed light on or go some way towards explaining a situation, and retrospective, in that it is concerned with events which have already occurred (Parnell 1993).
In this paper the investigation regarding the socio-economic factors will be discussed in detail while investigation regarding language environments and attitudes will be briefly reviewed. Read more