ISSA Proceedings 2002 – Linked And Independent Premises: A New Analysis

• by: Gregory Bassham - King's College Pensylvania

Most introductory logic and critical thinking textbooks include a discussion of linked and independent premises. The core intuition underlying this distinction is clear. In some arguments, the premises work together as a logical unit in such a way that the amount of support offered by one or more of the premises is dependent on the other(s). Example:
Case 1
1. All members of the Oakwood Society are over 50 years old.
2. Bert is a member of the Oakwood Society.
3. Therefore, Bert is over 50 years old.

Here, neither of the premises provides any support for the conclusion without the other. Taken together, however, the premises validly imply the conclusion. Thus, the premises interact to produce a degree of support that is not simply the sum of the supports of the individual premises. Premises of this sort are said to be linked[i].

In other arguments, the premises work completely separately and independently of one another, in such a way that the degree of support they provide for the conclusion remains the same even if some or all of the other premises are omitted or assumed to be false. Example:
Case 2
1. Harry’s car has a flat tire.
2. Harry’s right leg is in a cast.
3. Harry’s driver’s license was recently suspended.
4. Therefore, Harry won’t drive his car to the game. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2002 – The National Education Reform Debate And The Rhetoric Of The Contrarians

• by: Shawn Batt - Department of Communication, University of the Pacific

Abstract
In the years between 1991 and the present, Gerald Bracey and other so-called “contrarians” have called into question the dominant view of schooling in the United States. According to the contrarians, many widely held myths about public education are false, including the view that schooling and the economy are closely related and the notion that the schools are failing. The contrarians provide an exemplary case of public moral argument, one that draws attention to many salient issues in argument criticism: the role of experts in public discourse, the status of facts in public debates, the relative values of consensus and dissensus, and shifting communication practices within the public sphere.

The National Education Reform Debate and the Rhetoric of the Contrarians
So many people have said so often that the schools are bad that it is no longer a debatable proposition subject to empirical proof. It has become an assumption. But it is an assumption that turns out to be false. The evidence overwhelmingly shows that American schools have never achieved more than they currently achieve. And some indicators show them performing better than ever. (Bracey, 1991, p. 106)
That most people would read these last two sentences with intense skepticism grants Gerald Bracey’s rhetoric a degree of critical interest. While substantial extant does suggest that Bracey may be right (Sandia National Laboratories, 1993), the claim that American schools are doing just fine merits attention because it contravenes what everyone believes to be certainly true. Since 1991, Bracey has made some version of the schools-are-doing-fine argument repeatedly, both in his annual Phi Delta Kappan reports, and in his other articles and books. Along with the other so-called “contrarians,” Bracey has attempted a remarkable rhetorical feat by calling into question the dominant view of schooling in the United States.

Bracey and the contrarians provide an exemplary case of public moral argument, one that draws attention to many salient issues in argument criticism: the role of experts in public discourse, the status of facts in public policy, and shifting communication practices within the public sphere. Drawing upon the “spheres of argument” literature as well as Boothian ethical criticism, this paper explores these themes and develops the premise that meaningful expert contributions to public moral argument can be hindered by an inappropriate confounding of expert and human moral virtue. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2002 – Linguistic Criteria For Demarcation And Hierarchical Organization Of Episodes In A Problem Solving Task

• by: Sandra Bégoin-Augereau & Josiane Caron-Pargue - UMR CNRS 6096 "Langage et Cognition" (LaCo) Université de Poitiers - Maison des Sciences de l'Homme et de la Société (MSHS)

Introduction
Argumentation implies reasoning, and an important aspect of this process involves processes of reorganization of the adressee’s representation. The same processes of reorganization happen in the course of problem solving, a traditional topic of research in cognitive psychology. Traditionally, in the study of problem solving processes, with or without interaction between partners, the reorganization of the subject’s representation was drawn from impasses, viz from the situation where the AI system simulating the problem failed. The system was considered to set the right representation when the resolution was optimal, and to shift into the wrong representation when the strategy moved aside from the optimal one. More recent researches in this area try to focus on the study of the reorganisation of the representation and to elaborate criteria for a more refined approach of its definition, in terms of pauses, backtracks, illegal moves, constraints (Richard, 1982, 1993), or in terms of adjustments to the external world through preliminary simulations of the planning, for example SOAR (Rosenbloom & al., 1991), case based planning (Hammond, 1989). Let us notice some more deepened studies focus on particular steps of the strategy (Allport, 1989; Welsh, 1991; Begoin-Augereau, 2002).

Some other studies focused on the analysis of concurrent verbal reports following Newell & Simon (1972) and Ericsson and Simon’s model (Ericsson & Simon, 1979, 1984), which had the peculiarity to link the linguistic form to the content of the memory of attentional processes (Short Term Memory). In spite of Nisbett & Wilson’s criticisms (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977) and without falling into the trap of introspection, they demonstrated that thinking aloud verbalizations during a problem solving task have to be considered as a coding of the information available in short term memory. In this line Vanlehn (1991) showed that the reorganization of the representation is not linked only to impasses, and that several linguistic marks, notably interjections, point to reorganizations of the subject’s representation, according to the insights of the Gestalt approach (Ohlsson, 1984a, 1984b ; Simon, 1987). Read more

ISSA Proceediings 2002 – Two Ways Of Analysing A ‘Light Mix’ Newspaper Article

• by: Hilde van Belle - Lessiushogeschool Antwerp

In most communication situations, the pragma – dialectic rules are violated in a more or less flagrant way. Most of the time, people do not talk or argue as reasonably and rationally as they want to or believe they do. This is a problem, not for most communication situations, but for the above mentioned rules. In a ‘normative’ approach, the most common ways of talking and communicating are treated as deviations. As analysis contains more than determining the correctness of an argument, this polarization – along with the dialectical system of protagonist versus antagonist – might leave us helpless in the grey zone where arguments are more or less right or wrong.
Perelman & Olbrechts Tyteca show that the assumption of logical arguments is questionable. They distinguish so called quasilogical arguments: arguments that are based upon the status of logic. Many others have tried to describe the complex and often ambiguous ways of argumentation and persuasion, and to take into account the variety of situations in which they occur. They have developed ways of reasonable thinking adapted to different fields. Others propose to broaden the general scope and for instance to make room for ‘emotional’ arguments in argumentation theories, next to the ‘rational’ arguments of allegedly ‘calm and cool’ speakers (Gilbert: 1995). Roman Jakobson pointed out the six different functions in language, which are always at work at the same time in the same utterance. As a consequence, when an argument is analysed as if it were limited to the rational aspect of the message, we have to consider the fact that this kind of analysis takes place on a more or less abstract level. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2002 – Cut-Ups, Slams And Jabs: Verbal Aggressiveness Or Politeness?

• by: Keith Berry - Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, USA

There is no such thing as human nature independent of culture.
(Geertz, 1973, p. 49)

What does it mean to be a “polite,” “supportive,” “non-aggressive” interpersonal communicator? What is the significance behind communicators who engage in ways of speaking that explicitly contradict traditional ways of interpersonal “competence” and, yet, construct and maintain group solidarity? The intersection of these questions is where I locate the Upward Bound case.
In this essay, I explore the ways of speaking of the Upward Bound speech community. Upward Bound is a government-assisted program that gives high school students from poor socioeconomic statuses the opportunity to earn early college credit for free. A goal of this program is to allow for the student to make a smooth transition into college once they graduate from high school, and then to boost their level of preparation and thus success once in the college setting. In order to qualify for the program, students must come from low-income households, and households in which the parent/s do not hold a college degree. Group members were familiar with one another, as they had spent the last three years in the program together.
Through my fieldwork, I realize that these students use talk in culturally distinctive ways. Their communication styles illustrate a norm of “politeness” that is strikingly antithetical to the germinal “politeness” universal proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987) and valorized widely by scholars who study interpersonal communication. As a result of this discovery, I begin to problematize the notion of “Politeness Theory” and normative theories pertaining to “defensiveness” and “verbal aggressiveness” and communication scholars reliance on linguistic universals in general.
The following study is an attempt to “reverse” my scholarly ways. Following Pike’s (1954) lead, I use an emic (rather than etic) approach to focus more on the reports of the participants and to let conclusions emerge from the data. In line with Philipsen’s (1977) discussion on “linearity” in research protocol, I begin this analysis with some theory in mind (e.g., “Politeness Theory”). In this sense, I am curious about how this speech community enacts “politeness,” “defensiveness,” and “verbal aggression.” However, I make a deliberate move to first discover this group’s (potentially distinctive) methods of communicating prior to employing (i.e., embracing and/or challenging) traditional theory. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2002 – Legal Argumentation Theory And The Concept Of Law

• by: Stefano Bertea - University of Edinburgh , Faculty of Law

1. Premise
There has been wide recognition over the last three decades that argumentation plays a pivotal role in shaping the law, since practically any stage of what is ordinarily considered the legal domain involves recourse to reasoning[i]. Legal scientists put forward interpretive statements: they propose what they see as reasonable interpretations of laws and defend these interpretations with arguments. Both of these tasks requires reasoning. Lawyers, when they bring cases to court, must do more or less the same (even if the aims here are more specific and concrete): they interpret general norms and precedents, qualify concrete cases and offer reasons in support of their conclusions. Judges decide cases, an activity which makes it necessary to find and sometimes reconstruct the rule of law, interpret rules and apply them to concrete circumstances, weigh principles, settle conflicts between norms encased in the same legal order, follow precedents, ascertain and qualify facts, determine the most reasonable solution to the case at hand, and put forward justifications for their decisions. All such operations are argumentative. And lastly, in a constitutional democratic state the legislators, too, will tend to offer reasons backing their deliberations, so to make these last more easily acceptable to the people they govern. In doing so even the legislators accept to take part in the game of argumentation.

Clearly, these types of reasoning differ markedly from one another: some are aimed at finding solutions; others are intended to enable making a choice among competing interpretations of norms, qualifications of facts, or decisions of cases; and others still are designed to uphold a point of view and show it to be reasonable. But they have a general feature in common in that they are all deliberative procedures and so not entirely rule-bound. In other words, reasoning and argumentation in law differ from a mere subsumption of concrete facts under general rules. It is precisely because legal argumentation is not entirely deductive that it warrants careful investigation and has attracted the attention of several researchers in different fields of study. Legal scholars, philosophers and argumentation theorists have shown in recent years a growing interest in legal reasoning[ii]. They have been concerned with legal reasoning at different levels of abstraction: philosophical, theoretical, methodological, empirical and practical[iii]. We owe it to their effort if legal argumentation is “no longer considered as merely a part of a broader field of research, but as an object of study it its own right” (Feteris, 1999, 13). In this essay, argumentation in law is approached from a particular perspective, that of jurisprudence. More specifically, the aim here is to make explicit the implications which the recent development of studies in legal reasoning carries for the concept of law. Read more