ISSA Proceedings 2002 – Coductive And Abductive Foundations For Sentimental Arguments In Politics

• by: Bruce E. Gronbeck - The University of Iowa

In 1936 A. J. Ayer wielded the ax that chopped away sentimentality and other emotions, ethics, and aesthetics from their roots in rational argument theory. He divided the world into the arenas of sense and non-sense. The verifiability principle was used for the sorting process: that which was verifiable, accessible to the senses, was adjudged sensible and hence capable of supporting truth-claims and reasoning about them, while everything else was relegated to the world of non-sense. (And, of course, it was easy to remove that hyphen.) Mathematics, ethics, self-expressive statements, and aesthetic judgments were dispossessed and dispatched to non-sense. In Ayer’s (1936/1952: 108) words, sentimental arguments are “used to express feelings about certain objects, not to make any assertion about them.” Thus, they could be considered “normative,” yet “unanalysable… pseudo-concepts” (107).

And so, to Ayer and much of the western world of ethics and aesthetics since then, value and aesthetic theories – other than those grounded on utilitarian or admittedly subjectivist speculation – have faced the so-called “problem of truth.” Ethical and aesthetic statements or reports of feelingfulness have been confronted with serious problems in reasoning because of modernist assumptions that premises in arguments should be propositions capable of being assessed as true or false (1936/1952: ch. V, passim). If feelings, moral pronouncements, and aesthetic judgments can be expressed but not asserted, then there is no place for evidence in support of such propositions that, when taken together, would be recognized as an argument.

A year ago at the biennial Alta conference (Gronbeck, 2002), I started an inquiry into these problems particularly as they operate in a portion, at least, of the American political arena. I examined some of the events of the 2000 Republican and Democratic national political conventions. Each party hosted a four-day convention filled with broadcast videos, parades of citizens and politicians who synecdochally re-presented or epitomized the policies advocated in their platforms and by their leaders, and both of the presidential candidates – Governor George W. Bush and Vice President Al Gore – permitted viewers to see personalized, romanticized depictions of their lives. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2002 – Tu Quoque? Fallacy And Vindication In Appeal To Other People’s “Wrongs”

• by: Hendrik Kaptein - University of Amsterdam Faculty of Law

1. “Practice what you preach or you’re wrong”: wrong?
Tu quoque is the type of argument trying to rebut standpoints by referring to speakers’ conduct inconsistent with their standpoints. For example: A tells B to be less lazy in physical exercise. B answers A that he must be telling nonsense, because he is not performing any physical exercise himself. Tu quoque may also denote arguments referring to (direct) contradiction in speakers’ standpoints, like: “You can’t be right, because yesteryear you vigorously defended a completely contrary standpoint.” This second (and probably less interesting) variety of tu quoque will not be discussed here.
Such arguments seem obviously fallacious, if only because of their complete lack of reference to any relevant subject matter. Whether physical exercise is a good or bad thing to do (at least in the sense of: being good or bad for health) is to be determined by medical evidence, not at all by any speakers’ conduct in physically exercising themselves or not (see § 2 for further reasons against tu quoque reasoning).
Though simply fallacious at first sight, the well-nigh omnipresence of tu quoque in daily and even in professional and scholarly life may not just be a consequence of listeners’ lack of intellect and dexterity in discussion. Actually, tu quoque appears to be something like an “umbrella” concept, covering a wide variety of types of reasoning, ranging from obvious fallacies to sound and important argument.

First, tu quoque fallacies may serve important argumentative and communicative purposes apart from rebuttal of speakers’ standpoints, for example in showing up speakers’ lack of integrity (see §§ 3 and 4). Second, not all argument presenting itself as tu quoque really is tu quoque in any fallacious sense. Legal and moral argument may look like tu quoque, but may in effect come down to sound argument from contract, precedent and “tit for tat” rules (see § 5). Also, varieties of tu quoque are implied in and related to many more forms of interesting argument, for example in attempts to justify rules of conduct by reference to third parties’ behaviour (see § 6).
Thus tu quoque appears to be not so much a simple fallacy as well as a highly useful complex of heterogeneous appeals to some or other kind of commitment, mutual or otherwise. Not so much avoidance of tu quoque may be the thing to do as well as to avoidance of conduct leaving room for tu quoque reactions. The essence of (avoidance of) tu quoque is positive commitment in the first place (§ 7).

2. Fallacious varieties, for fundamental reasons
Tu quoque arguments purport to lead to normative and/or evaluative conclusions, with few exceptions. It could not be otherwise, as tu quoque refers to inconsistency of utterance and conduct: “You tell me to do x, you yourself are doing non-x, so you’re wrong”. A descriptive tu quoque may not be a fallacy at all, as it may run along the following lines: “You’re stating to me that human beings are x, you are non-x, so you must be wrong”. Anyway, discussion will here be focused on evaluative and/or normative tu quoque arguments. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2002 – Aesthetic Arguments And Civil Society

• by: Gerard A. Hauser - University of Colorado at Boulder

The Public and its Problems, John Dewey (1927/1954) wrestles with the difficulty of a public forming an adequate opinion about its members’ shared interests. American journalist Walter Lippmann (1922/1949) had argued that the complexity of the modern age, coupled with the average citizens’ disinterest in reading and learning the results of accurate investigation, condemned them to a vulnerable state of disarray. Dewey allows that Lippmann’s point is well taken, save its oversight of the potency of art. “Presentation is fundamentally important,” he writes, “and presentation is a question of art… Artists have always been the real purveyors of news, for it is not the outward happening in itself which is new, but the kindling by it of emotion, perception and appreciation” (p. 183).

Dewey recognized art’s relationship to the publicity principle, which lies at the heart of informed citizen participation in the political process of the modern state. The conditions of modernity – the invention of mass and instant means of communication, the rise of mass transportation and increased mobility, universal dependence on mass manufacturing, and concentration of population in urban centers – led to the eclipse of the public, he argued (pp. 110-42). The era of politics conducted under the Aristotelian assumption of prerequisite leisure had passed. Democracy’s new realities were connected to the conditions of civil society: the network of associations existing outside the state and regulative of it through the force of publicly formed and communicated opinion on duly elected and appointed representatives. The need to participate in civil society, along with the conditions that fragment and isolate citizens, led Dewey to raise a different point than the connection of art to life. His regarded artists as the purveyors of news because art maximizes the publicity principle. It brings issues to those whose interests are at stake, raises their awareness, and shapes their political thoughts. His point is not about culture but about communication and specifically deliberation that lies at the center of civil society’s political function.
At the conclusion of his analysis of why “the public” is in eclipse, as he considers the consequences of rapidly changing conditions of economy, work, travel, and information transfer on human association, he notes that desires and purposes created by the machine age are disconnected from the ideals of tradition. He concludes, “Our Babel is not one of tongues but of the signs and symbols without which shared experience is impossible” (p. 142). More important than the information content of a literary work is the artist’s power to bond strangers in shared experience through portraits constructed with signs and symbols that evoke deeper reflection.
The freeing of the artist in literary presentation, in other words, is as much a precondition of the desirable creation of adequate opinion on public matters as is the freeing of social inquiry. Men’s conscious life of opinion and judgment often proceeds on a superficial and trivial plane. But their lives reach a deeper level. The function of art has always been to break through the crust of conventionalized and routine consciousness. Common things, a flower, a gleam of moonlight, the song of a bird, not things rare and remote, are means with which the deeper levels of life are touched so that they spring up as desire and thought (pp. 183-84). Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2002 – Consensus And Power. The Facts Of Democracy

• by: Tim Heysse - K.U. Brussel / Vlaams Parlement

In a democracy, Hannah Arendt writes, “the people are supposed to rule those who govern them” (Arendt, 1986, 62). The meaning of this phrase may not be entirely clear at once, as happens often with such platitudes. Nevertheless, it is instructive for three reasons.
Firstly, by explicitly talking about “ruling” and “governing”, Arendt leaves no room for doubt concerning the fact that, in the words of John Rawls, even in democratic societies, “the fundamental relation of citizenship includes among other things the relation between free and equal citizens who exercise ultimate political power as a collective body” (Rawls, 1996, xlv).
Secondly, by distinguishing between “the people who rule” and “those who govern”, Arendt suggests that the citizens in a democracy cannot or ought not to take power in their own hands directly. In order to understand what it means to be a citizen in a contemporary democratic society – one way of formulating the aim of this paper – we must therefore study not only the mutual relations between the citizens, but also the relationship between the citizens and those who exercise power.
Thirdly, since in a democracy the people are supposed to rule, political power in a democracy is supposed to be “ultimately the power of the public, that is the power of free and equal citizens as a collective body” (Rawls, 1996, 136, 38), as Rawls puts it (quite rightly replacing the chimerical notion of ‘the people’ with the legal notion of ‘the citizens’).

In this paper I will investigate whether these three features of a democracy may be the starting point for an interpretation of public reason in democratic societies that does not reduce, cynically, all (democratic) politics to the conquest and the exercise of power, but that doesn’t start directly from moral principles either. We may see this intermediate way, if we pay close attention to the role of public argumentation and discussion in a democracy. For, if power is supposed to be ultimately power of the citizens considered as free and equal, the stable exercise of power in a democracy presupposes that the general structure of political authority and (at least a great number of) the actual political decisions and actions “are justified by reasons which are acceptable to many citizens” (Rawls, 1996, 136, 38). And precisely in and through public argumentation and discussion that such reasons may be discovered. The suggestion is that the term ‘democracy’ refers to specific conditions or rules for the conquest and the exercise of power and that these conditions or rules create a particular balance of power that confers a form of reasonableness to the exercise of power.
The purpose of this essay is therefore to explain how political power in a democracy can acquire a form of reasonableness, what sense of ‘reasonableness’ is meant here and what the role of public argumentation and discussion is in creating such a ‘public reason’. I will focus on the interpretations of public reason that have been presented by John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas[i]. Rawls and Habermas are not only the most influential political philosophers of the moment[ii], but their interpretations may also be considered as the extremes of a spectrum in which the different interpretations of public reason can be arranged that are currently being proposed under the general label of ‘deliberative democracy’[iii]. 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