ISSA Proceedings 1998 – Two kinds Of Argument In Editorials Of Women’s Magazines

• by: Viviane M. Heberle - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina

1. Introduction
Women’s magazines, understood as a popular feminine genre (Marshment 1993) and a form of self-help (Cameron 1995), aim at instructing and entertaining women (Ballaster et al 1991; McCracken 1993). Women’s world as portrayed in these publications is related to feminine social values, norms, problems, doubts and expectations within a personal, private sphere. These publications became a ‘feminised space’, with contradictions, asymmetry of gender differences and issues of sexuality constantly being re-worked (Beetham 1996).
Among the different genres and types of discourse found in women’s magazines are the editorials, also known as editors’ letters, comments or columns. These texts constitute a significant instance of advertising of the magazines, an example of ‘hybrid information-and-publicity (or ‘selling and telling’) discourse’ (Fairclough 1992:115). They are an amalgam of advertising and editorial material (McCracken 1993), since they provide information about sections of the issue but they do so stressing the wonderfully useful (from a Cosmopolitan editorial) features in the issue.
My investigation is based on principles of critical discourse analysis (CDA) which allow for the study of the bidirectional link between language use and context. Critical discourse analysis as a multidisciplinary field focuses on the complex relations between macro and micro linguistic features and different social issues, especially those concerned with ethnic, socio-economic, political or cultural inequalities. I specifically draw on Fairclough’s (1989; 1992; 1995) social theory of discourse with its three interdependent levels of analysis: text (lexicogrammatical features), discourse practice (analysis of the processes of text production and interpretation); and social practice (institutional, societal issues; power and ideology). Halliday’s (1978; 1985; 1994) systemic-functional grammar is considered an insightful linguistic tool for CDA studies, to analyze textual and contextual features.
An important aspect of discursive practices in contemporary society concerns the conversational, promotional (Wernick 1991) and confessional nature of discourse. Giddens’ (1984) concept of modernity is also useful to perceive globalized discursive practices in contemporary society, with local and global habits and customs, individual and collective aims put together.
As a researcher of a text aimed at women, I also found it necessary to investigate studies on language and gender which have proved insightful for the link between the contextual features and the text analysis. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 1998 – Visualizing Recognition

• by: Tom Heeney - College of Charleston

1. Introduction
My point of departure will be several related articles and a review published recently in the journal Argumentation and Advocacy that focus renewed attention on the question of whether visual images can be understood as arguments. And if so, then how? Should logic, rhetoric, or aesthetics be taken as the foundation upon which images can be understood as depicting an argument? Indeed, is a conceptual approach alone sufficient, or satisfactory?
These recent position papers review many a traditional answer; the conflict between image and concept is as old as the rivalry between rhetoric and philosophy. Some of these articles advocate taking one side of this relentless antagonism against the other. For example, J. Anthony Blair (1996) and David Fleming (1996) doubt that images can be understood as arguments unless and until their (manifest and latent) content is reconstructed into propositional terms, thus repeating the familiar subordination of aesthetics, literature, and rhetoric to the perspective of logic as the proper and sole critical method in the field of argument studies.
Gretchen Barbatsis (1996) takes the opposite approach and imports critical methods from literature, aesthetics, and media criticism to show precisely how much the reduction of an image to a proposition is a misreading that fails to understand the potential for manipulation in modern mediated forms of communication. And a recent collection of articles reviewed by Lenore Langsdorf advocates ‘visual literacy’ and a “recognition that a visual argument is, despite appearances of spontaneity, in fact being made by an unacknowledged argument partner, for less than evident purposes, and culminating in other than obvious conclusions” (1996: 50).
In many ways, the dispute over critical methods in the analysis of images raises two additional theoretical issues. The first is whether a descriptive or a normative model is the most appropriate for understanding the image as communicative form. The second is whether ‘argumentation studies’ as a discursive field should welcome or resist this importation of analytical models and critical methods from disciplines other than logic. Fleming resists just these centrifugal tendencies and wonders, rhetorically, if we now are to recognize pictures as arguments, “do we risk losing something important in our conventional understanding of argument?” (1996: 11). But whose ‘conventional understanding’ is at stake?: his restrictive sense of ‘argument fields’ limits debate by accepting only those definitions of argumentation already advanced by recognized authors in the same scholarly journals that promote a limited (and primarily deductive) definition of argument. This is a legitimate, but ultimately sterile move, although in extreme cases it raises the specter of a possible incommensurability of assumptions when these move across divergent disciplines. Yet since most argument scholars accept the norm that narrowing differences of opinion should count as the operative definition of the purpose of argumentation, this should not pose a real danger (except in cases of unsuccessful argument). Finally, as David Birdsell and Leo Groarke remind us: “Most scholars who study argumentation theory are… preoccupied with methods of analyzing arguments which emphasize verbal elements and show little or no recognition of other possibilities, or even the relationship between words and other symbolic forms” (1996: 1). Read more

ISSA Proceedings 1998 – ‘Three Strikes’ And ‘Hail Mary’ Passes: Sports Metaphors In Public Argument

• by: Dale A. Herbeck - Boston College

The language of sports permeates public argument in the United States. In his study of the role played by sport and game in American culture, Oriard (1991: ix) suggests that sports metaphors are significant as they contain “American ideas not just about sport and play themselves, but about all the things for which sport and play have become emblems – heroism, success, gender, race, class, the law, religion, salvation; the relations of Humankind, God, and Nature.”
References to sport, either general or specific, are more than linguistic decoration. Invoking a sports metaphor can have profound implications on the discussion of competing policy alternatives. Since it would be impossible to do justice to all sports metaphors in a single work, this essay focuses on a series of sports used in two notable public arguments in America during the early 1990s. By analogizing criminals to baseball players, proponents of “three strikes” legislation have effectively masked underlying social and economic inequities that plague our society. Likewise, by analogizing American military intervention against Iraq to a football game, proponents of intervention in the Persian Gulf justified the use of force and legitimated our grand military strategy and battlefield tactics. While some claim that sports are ideology-free, repeated references to sports metaphors function to reinforce a dominant political ideology and authorize political action. This conclusion is not meant to damn sports, but rather to suggest that seemingly innocuous sports metaphors can, in fact, constitute a subtle, yet powerful form of argument.
This thesis is developed in more detail in the pages that follow. The first two sections of the essay document the use of the “three strikes” metaphor in public argument over criminal justice and a series of football metaphors in the public argument over American intervention in Iraq. Having documented the widespread usage of these metaphors, the next two sections consider how these metaphors functioned as analogic arguments for a particular set of policy options.

1. “Three Strikes and You’re Out”
Americans have grown increasingly concerned about crime over the past decade. According to Wilson (1994: 26), crime “was not a major issue in the 1984 presidential election and had only begun to be one in the 1988 contest; by 1992, it was challenging the economy as a popular concern and today it dominates all other matters. ” In a 1994 survey, Americans listed “crime and violence as the number-one problem facing the nation, far surpassing worries over the economy or health care” (Pettinico 1994: 29). To a large extent, this concern reflected the belief that crime was growing worse. Reports in the popular press, for example, routinely reported on innocent citizens who had fallen prey to career criminals. These horrific narratives take on new meaning when accompanied by statistics showing crime growing ever more violent.
Given the public clamor, it is not surprising that politicians from “both parties, from cities and suburbs, and from all regions of the nation are scrambling to establish a tough position regarding crime” (Pettinico 1994: 32). While some have advocated social programs stressing prevention or rehabilitation, retribution has come to dominate the political debate. National leaders have argued, with considerable eloquence and vigor, that swift and certain punishment is more effective than social programs purporting to target the causes of crime. If a crime is punished by probation, advocates have argued for incarceration; if the sentence for a crime is ten years, advocates have proposed that it be doubled; if the sentence is life, advocates have suggested the death penalty. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 1998 – Interactional Resources Of Argumentation

• by: Thomas Spranz-Fogasy - Institut für deutsche Sprache

In the following paper I focus on some rhetorical practices that are used by interactants in arguments with others. I identify argument criteria interactants refer to and describe how they use them as interactional resources for their argumentation. My considerations are part of a broader study of conversational rhetoric in problem oriented and conflict interaction, conducted at the Institute for German Language in Mannheim, Germany (see Kallmeyer 1996). The main goal of this project is the analysis and description of interactive practices under a functional rhetorical perspective which is derived from an ethnomethodological approach to the study of conversation. Ethnomethodologists have so far mainly looked at the organizational order of interaction (see Garfinkel & Sacks 1970), we also investigate on forms of interactive influence and interactive effects of the participants’ interactive work.

In order to describe a wide range of rhetorical practices we take into account various dimensions of interaction that have been explicated by Kallmeyer and Schütze in a theory of the construction of interaction (Kallmeyer & Schütze 1976). According to this theory interactants have to carry out their conversation by simultaneously dealing with different dimensions of interactional organization (listed in Figure 1):

Organizational structure of talk
Thematical organization
Activity organization
Identity and relationship construction
Modality construction
Reciprocity organization

Figure 1 Dimensions of interaction construction

Concerning rhetorical practices, there are for example different practices of cooperation and constraint that are required due to the organizational structures of talk, or practices of social positioning of the participants due to identity and relationship construction, or practices of setting and blocking perspectives due to reciprocity demands. The context of my argumentation analysis is the dimension of thematical organization in problem and conflict interaction. Argumentation as a whole is seen then as one rhetorical practice for thematical clarification amongst other patterns such as for example story telling, reports, or portraying (see Kallmeyer & Schütze 1978). Thus, first I had to analyze argumentation as a whole and to work out the conditions under which argumentation is established and carried out in interaction.
Briefly put, interactants begin an argumentation when their thematical exchange runs into a deficit. Then they have to explain and give reasons. Typical deficits include dissent or uncertainty. Argumentation, then, is an interactive pattern for explaining a position and for locally clarifying the deficit and for then integrating the solution of the deficit into the „normal“ course of the current interaction. Formally characterized, argumentation has a three part structure consisting of initiating, carrying out and reintegration. I do not want to specify the difficulties of the empirical analysis of the argumentation pattern but to focus on argumentative relevances that interactants deal with during their argumentation. In the course of that I will point out resources of argumentation which are made relevant from the participants themselves in rhetorical argument practices. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 1998 – Dividing By Zero – And Other Mathematical Fallacies

• by: Lawrence H. Powers - Wayne State University

In this paper I shall discuss a fallacy involving dividing by zero.  And then I shall more briefly discuss fallacies involving misdrawn diagrams and a fallacy involving mathematical induction, I discuss these particular fallacies because each of them seems at first – and seemed to me myself at one time – to be a counterexample to a theory of mine. The One Fallacy Theory says that every real fallacy is a fallacy of equivocation, of playing on some sort of ambiguity. But these particular fallacies do not seem to involve ambiguity, and yet they do seem to be real fallacies.[i] Let me begin with the dividing-by-zero fallacy.

It goes as follows:
1. Let a = b
2. So a2 = ab (multiply each side by a)
3. So a2 – b2 = ab – b2 (subtract b2 from each side)
4. So (a + b)(a – b) = b(a – b) (factoring)
5. So a + b = b (cancelling (a – b) on each side)
6. So 2b = b (since a = b)
7. So 2 = 1 (cancelling b on each side).

Now this argument appears to be a counterexample to my theory. Each step is stated in unambiguous algebraic terminology. The invalid move takes us from an unambiguously true equation 4 to an unambiguously false equation 5 by a move of cancelling a -b which is unambiguously though not obviously a division by zero. There seems to be no ambiguity.

My theory then seems to imply that there is no real fallacy; we do not have an invalid step which appears, by virtue of a covering ambiguity, to be valid, but rather a naked mistake with no appearance of goodness. A naked mistake is not a true fallacy.
But surely, the argument is a real fallacy. For it passes the phenomenological test. The first time I myself saw this argument in a book, I went through it carefully looking for the wrong step. And I could not find it, at least not just by going through the argument step by step. It looked like a proof to me, and at a time when I knew there had to be something wrong and was, in an intellectually serious way, looking for the mistake!
So clearly the argument is a real fallacy. It therefore seems a counterexample to my theory.
Now in trying to defend my theory, I think as follows. If a serious person is taken in by an invalid argument A/ .. B and ‘A’ and ‘B’ are not ambiguous, perhaps there is some other reasoning in the person’s mind. Perhaps he thinks that A implies C and C implies B, and it is the interpolated term C which is ambiguous. Another person who accepts A/ .. B may accept it for a different reason, using a different confusion, say A/ .. D/ .. B.

I therefore ask: Why did I myself think the argument dividing by zero was valid step by step? Read more

ISSA Proceedings 1998 – Public Reason And The Political Character Of Reasonableness

• by: Darrin Hicks - University of Denver, Colorado USA

A theory of argumentation is underwritten by a philosophical conception of reasonableness. This standard of reasonableness takes into account the normative character of argumentation. That is, participants engaged in argumentative discussions (of all sorts) assert and defend normative judgments not only about the content of the reasons put forth, but also issue normative evaluations of the character of their own and their interlocutors’ reasons. A philosophical conception of reasonablness explicates the sources, conditions, and consequences of the explicit as well as tacit criteria participants (including argumentation theorists) use to render normative judgments about the form and content of reasoning practices.
Given the fact of reasonable pluralism, democratic legitimacy must be constructed from the process of public justification in the face of social controversy rather than found in the contents of a universal reason, the procedures of rational choice, the conditions set out in natural law cosmologies, or the laws set out in a deep-structure social theory (Unger, 1987). That is, an account of democratic legitimacy is underwritten by a theory of argumentation and a philosophical conception of reasonableness; hence, the importance of accounts of public justification in contemporary liberal-democratic theory. One of the most pressing task for liberal democratic theory is the construction of a conception of reasonableness that could guide persons in their projects of constructing ways to live together in the face of pluralism in a just manner. It is at this point that a theory of argument and a theory of deliberative democracy need to converge.
While the field has geometric, anthropological, epistemic, and critical-rationalist accounts of reasonableness it has yet to formulate a public/political conception of reasonableness. Such an account would focus on the critical functions invocations of reasonableness plays in actual instances of public justification. I contend that the ideal of public reason as set out by Kant and Rawls, if amended to account for the critical use of the concept in actual argumentation, provides a good starting place for formulating a public-political standard of reasonableness. I begin by examining some of the ways in which reasonableness is conceptualized in argumentation theory and advocate a conception attuned to the ways reasonableness is used as a critical standard by participants to regulate argumentative discussions. I then sketch how the ideal of public reason can be amended to serve as a public/political conception of reasonableness that underwrites a deliberative account of democracy. Read more