ISSA Proceedings 2006 – Hurricane Katrina: An Argumentative Analysis Of Race And Gender Issues In The Media Coverage Of A Natural And National Disaster
On August 29, 2005 Hurricane Katrina, one of the strongest hurricanes to make U.S. landfall in the last hundred years, struck the central Gulf of Mexico U.S. coast. With gusts of up to 125 miles per hour, the storm wrought havoc and devastation on the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama (National Climatic Data Center December 29, 2005). The city of New Orleans suffered the worst effects of the storm. The combination of a rainfall at the rate of an inch per hour, powerful sea swells and breeched levees resulted in the flooding of 80% of the city. Thousands of residents who had not or could not heed the order to evacuate were trapped and survived in squalor without adequate food, water, shelter or sanitation as they awaited rescue. Over 1,500 people died in the three states struck by the hurricane. The national and international media were there broadcasting the tragedy to audiences across the world. Everywhere people could see the world’s sole superpower dealing ineptly with the crisis.
There are many issues concerning this tragedy worthy of investigation: the failure to assure the integrity of the levee system, the inadequacy of evacuations, the delayed and incompetent rescues. This paper examines the argumentative frames presented through the media coverage of the hurricane and its after effects. We utilize a narrative approach and seek to illuminate issues of race and gender raised by this coverage. We argue that the media’s coverage can be profitably considered in phases, each employing its own narrative focus and argumentative lens. These phases are admittedly overlapping and imprecise; nevertheless the phases share certain characteristics that we believe are of significance to scholars of argument. Through an explication and analysis of each phase of the media’s coverage of Hurricane Katrina we argue that the media distorted the narrative and distracted its audience from the lessons that should have been learned. Read more
ISSA Proceedings 2006 – A Perfect Circle: Visual Argument Field And The Definition Of The Middle Class
One of the great mysteries of argumentation theory is the construct of field. While multiple attempts have been made to understand, categorize and essentialize the nature of field, it remains an elusive concept; one that appears central but has yet to be fully actualized. Despite early theorizing from some of the most important theorists in argumentation, little attention has been paid to field in the last 20 years.
Contemporary theorizing about visual argument is reminiscent of the treatment argument field received during the 1980s. Theorists know it is important; but they have had difficulty pinning down precisely the operations that visuals play in argument. Thankfully, theorists seem to have moved beyond the fundamental debate over whether visuals could perform any argumentative function. However, contemporary work in visual argument seems rooted in examining specific visuals in order to understand how they communicate. Additionally, theorizing on the physiological reactions of audiences to visual stimuli has been a central focus. While we find all this research useful to building a foundation for the study of visual argument, we are interested in understanding the larger role that visuals play in discourse.
In recent years, visual rhetorical theory and criticism has generated a vibrant and compelling body of literature. Taylor’s (2003) essay finds “expanding engagement by communication critics with particular visual genres” (p. 3). No archetype theory or method for the analysis of visual argument has yet emerged from these writings, but it is clear that the visual turn in rhetoric has emerged as one of the dominant themes of contemporary theorizing.
Visual argument analysis has two dominant foci: one interested with the substance of the argument, the other with the interaction that the audience has with a visual argument. Shelly (1996) and Blair (1996) are both concerned with understanding the substance of visual argument. Blair and Goarke (1996) and Finnegan (2001) investigate the intersection of the visual form with audience assent. Blair and Goarke argue that in order to understand how a visual argument works on an audience, a critic must examine three types of context, “immediate visual context, immediate verbal context, and visual culture” (1996, 6). The first two contexts are read in relation to the visual; the third requires a critic to understand how the public reads the visual in relation to its interaction with other visuals. Blair and Goarke (1996) claim “The meaning of a visual claim or argument obviously depends on a complex set of relationships between a particular image/text and a given set of interpreters” (5). Mitchell (1994) and Finnegan (2002) both make very similar arguments; visuals cannot be separated from the surrounding symbol systems. Read more
ISSA Proceedings 2006 – When You Don’t Have Anything To Prove: Strategic Manoeuvring And Rhetorical Argumentation
‘Because deciding to smoke or not to smoke is something you should do when you don’t have anything to prove. Think it over.’ To smoke or not to smoke, that’s the question. Even the most notorious doubter in history is called upon in this smoky tragedy of legal limits versus free choice. The quoted Reynolds tobacco company advertorial is one of the examples Frans Van Eemeren and Peter Houtlosser bring in to present the integrated pragma-dialectical model. In Rhetorical Argumentation. Principles of Theory and Practice, Christopher Tindale (2004) puts forward a model of argument that is characterised as rhetorical. In the introduction to this project, Tindale mentions this ‘rhetorical turn’ of the pragma-dialectic school. Van Eemeren and Houtlosser (2000) consider rhetoric part of dialectic, as dialectic deals with abstract and general questions, whereas rhetoric deals with specific cases and with context, elements that are to be embedded in the general.
First I will present the pragma-dialectic method and Tindale’s project, then I will deal with Tindale’s comments on the integrated pragma-dialectic model. Finally I will put forward the Reynolds case for my own discussion on the position of rhetoric and reasonableness in the integrated pragma-dialectic model, and the relation between dialectical and rhetorical norms. I will show how the advertorial can function as a prototype for the very notion of the complex shifting of norms in argumentation. Read more
ISSA Proceedings 2006 – The Justification Of The Normative Nature Of Argumentation Theory
In this paper[i], I would like to propose an account of the normative nature of Argumentation Theory which aims to solve the problem of a dichotomy between descriptivism and prescriptivism as attempts at justifying the suitability of our normative models for the appraisal of real argumentation. This account presupposes a conception of argumentative value which is non-reducibly normative. Therefore, my second task will be to argue for it, something to be done by comparing this conception of argumentative value with an instrumentalist one. In order to give a measure of the standard of normativity that this conception of argumentative value involves, I argue that there is a sense of Biro & Siegel’s epistemological approach to argumentation which is also instrumentalist, and therefore, unacceptable.
1. Descriptive vs. normative? Whether we aim to develop descriptive or normative models for argumentation, a preliminary task is to shape a conception of argumentation able to steer our work. The reason is that, as a matter of fact, within the field of Argumentation Studies there is a lack of agreement on which are the identity conditions for argumentation. And the truth is that argumentation theorists cannot appeal to an ordinary univocal practice of naming ‘argumentation’ certain type of communication, certain forms of discourses, the structure of some linguistic activities, a particular kind of semantic reconstructions, or whichever other possible reference of the term.
By accomplishing the task of providing a set of identity conditions for argumentation, argumentation theorists define the object of their models. The representativeness of this object respecting the sort of phenomena they aim to deal with happens to be a main criterion in order to decide on the practical and theoretical value of these models. Read more
ISSA Proceedings 2006 – Rules Of Refutation And Strategies Of Dissuasion In Debate
I would briefly consider and pose to your refutational criticism three questions: why to refute, how to refute, when to refute. These questions concern the place of confirmation/refutation between logic and rhetoric and involve the pair apology vs. criticism.
I’ll begin with an apodictical starting, only in order to establish a subjective certainty among many uncertainties.
The logical process of refutation is naturally associated with the act of dissuasion. How can we dissuade? Which are the tools of dissuasion? The typical human weapon of dissuasion should be a discouraging argument, an argument against, a proof of falsehood. Indeed it is unquestionable that ‘the use of reasoning is more characteristic of man than the use of physical strength’, using the words of Aristotle (Rhetorica 1355 b 1). Dissuasion, or changing the belief or the behaviour of an audience, is the perlocutionary effect of refutation, whose illocutionary effect may by confusing, confounding, shedding doubt.
But refuting is not a performative act. And dissuasion is not the simple opposite of persuasion. I would like to consider the origin, the nature and the implications of this difference, a difference that concerns perhaps some other general and problematic couples such as validation/invalidation, affirming/denying, approving/disapproving, constructive analysis/destructive analysis.
The terminology of refutation /dissuasion
There are some curious and interesting linguistic facts. The common language, said John Austin, is not the last, but indeed the first word. The speech acts theory may be yet useful in many ways. For example, in refuting one demonstrates the falsehood, by refuting one dissuades. We can dissuade from believing and from saying, or from doing and making something. Furthermore dissuasion may have a side-effect, a ‘perlocutionary sequel’ (Austin 19752, p. 118), such as to cast doubt, confuse, block, paralyse.
What means ‘to refute’? the three names of refusal
If I deny, object, challenge, I deny, object, challenge just because I say what I say: the speaker names something and, as he names it, it appears. On the contrary if I say ‘I refute’ I’m simply announcing my intention to do that. Saying that I’m confuting is not to confute, while saying that I’m denying (objecting, challenging), is to deny (object, challenge). In the frame of the speech acts theory, the first act is like to utter a descriptive ‘I eat’, the second is like to utter an operational ‘I promise’.
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To refuse, to object and to refute are three different ways of dissenting.
Who is refusing expresses his disagreement without necessarily offering any reason. He rejects but he does not explain why a thesis or a thing should not be accepted. Read more
ISSA Proceedings 2006 – Understanding, Arguments, And Explanations: Cognitive Transformations And The Limits Of Argumentation
1. Introduction: epistemic and cognitive transformations
Arguments serve many functions. Some of their functions are ethical, social, personal and political. A lawyer arguing on behalf of her client, two conflicting parties agreeing to mediation, people who feel they have been wronged seeking acknowledgement, or someone simply venting a bit of frustration are all using argumentation for some of these purposes.
The most philosophically salient of argumentation’s functions, however, are, broadly speaking, epistemological. Arguments persuade or convince an audience; they justify actions and decisions; they demonstrate truths, expose and refute errors, and test hypotheses; they critically explore; and they help us deliberate. The common element in all these cases is that successful argumentation brings about some sort of transformation in how and what we think. These transformations are all epistemic or doxastic (Pinto 2003, pp. 6f.). At the individual level, arguments may try to raise doubts, justify belief, or even yield knowledge. Arguments can convert nagging suspicions into confident belief as easily as they can transform smug belief into chronic doubt. It can crystallize indecisiveness into a decision, and, in the paradigm case, create knowledge from ignorance. Similar transformations occur at the interpersonal level: argumentation settles disputes, re-opens questions, determines the collective will, and, in the paradigm case for dialectics, forges consensus out of dissensus.
Explanations like arguments, also have many functions. And like arguments, their most philosophically important role is in bringing about cognitive transformations in a rational way. Paradigmatically, the perlocutionary act that explanations hope to perform is replacing incomprehension or puzzlement with understanding, rather than replacing ignorance or unreflective beliefs with justified beliefs and knowledge (Achinstein 1983, p. 16).
Not all cognitive transformations are epistemic. Seeing the duck-rabbit now as a duck, now as a rabbit, for example, does not seem to involve epistemé. Nor does coming to regard someone as a friend rather than a rival, or the aesthetic judgment involved in taking an object as an object of art, or learning how to tell a work by Beethoven from one by Mozart. Coming to understand something falls into this category.
Understanding is a cognitive achievement of the first rank, often exceeding knowledge. Understanding generally includes some knowledge: we are said to understand an event, for example, when we know that it occurred and we also know the reasons for or causes of its occurrence. This is the kind of understanding that is on display when we know how to answer the question why the event in question occurred, not just whether it occurred. But knowledge by itself is not always sufficient to produce understanding. There are senses of understanding that involve more: the change from incomprehension to understanding something may entail changes in attitudes, perspectives, associations, and abilities that are not represent-able in purely propositional terms (cf. Wittgenstein 1953, §152-4; Hacker1986, p. 248). And since understanding often goes beyond knowledge, it probably ought to have a higher profile in our epistemic projects and in the discourse of epistemology. However, since the epistemological tradition in large part arose as a response to the problem of skepticism, and has been periodically revitalized over the centuries in response to new skeptical challenges, it might be better to describe the transformations that explanations bring about as cognitive in a very broad sense than narrowly epistemic. But this just helps locate explanations in conceptual space vis à vis arguments rather than clearly defines or distinguishes them.
There are many important and promising areas of research for argumentation theorists arising from the juxtaposition of argumentation and explanation. Moving from arguments to explanations, we can begin by noting that explanations may be logically and syntactically indistinguishable from arguments, in order to ask whether the fallacies that occur in argumentation also infect explanations? Is there a distinctive class of explanatory fallacies to identify and worry about? Second, why is the dominant metaphor for arguments – argument is war – so inapplicable to explanations? That is, how can explanations share so much with arguments, but lack the central – some say defining – adversarial component? When it comes to explanations, the entire ‘dialectical tier’ of questions, objections, disagreements, and challenges are all possible. Even so, disagreement – the initial and, some say, fundamental dialectical factor – does not have to be present to initiate explanation.
Third, how does that dialectical difference manifest itself in the subsequent stages of reasoning in explanations? Since alternative explanations need not be competing explanations, how does the closure reached in successful explanation relate to the resolution reached in successful critical discussion? Read more