ISSA Proceedings 1998 – A Critique Of The Dialectical Approach: Part II

• by: Maurice A. Finocchiaro - University of Nevada

1. Introduction
This paper is part of a project designed to explore the nature of the dialectical approach in argumentation theory, its relationship to other approaches, and its methodological fruitfulness. The main motivation underlying this project stems from the fact that the dialectical approach has become the dominant one in argumentation theory; now, whenever a given approach in any field becomes dominant, there is always the danger that it will lead to the neglect or loss of insights which are easily discernible from other orientations; this in turn may even prevent the dominant approach from being developed to its fullest as a result of the competition with other approaches.
In a previous paper (Finocchiaro 1995), I undertook a critical examination of two leading examples of the dialectical approach. I argued that Barth and Krabbe’s (1982) demonstration of the equivalence of the methods of axiomatics, natural deduction, and formal semantics to formal dialectics works both ways, so that the former acquire the merits of the latter, and the latter the limitations of the former. I also argued that Freeman’s (1991) demonstration that the structure of arguments as products derives from the process of argumentation is insufficiently dialectical insofar as it involves a conception of dialectics in which dialogue is easily dispensable, and insofar as it suggests that argument structure is rooted more in an evaluative process than in a process of dialogue between distinct interlocutors.

In this paper I plan to examine the ideas of other authors who have written on or have used the dialectical approach. I shall use as a guide the following three working hypotheses suggested by the just stated conclusions reached in my previous paper. The first is the claim that if one takes the point of view of formal dialectics, the formal dialogical approach is not essentially different from the monological approach, but rather the two approaches are primarily different ways of talking about the same thing. The other two working hypotheses involve informal rather than formal dialectics. The second working hypothesis is that perhaps there are two versions of the informal dialectical approach, depending on whether one emphasizes the resolution of disagreements or their clarification. The third working hypothesis is that the dialectical approach is fundamentally a way of emphasizing evaluation, a way of elaborating the evaluative aspects of argumentation.[i] These are working hypotheses in the sense that I shall be concerned with testing their correctness, namely with determining whether they are confirmed or disconfirmed by other actual instances of the dialectical approach. Since I shall be examining only examples of the informal dialectical approach, I will be dealing primarily with the second and third working hypotheses. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 1998 – Critical Thinking: Assessment, Flow Charts And Computers

• by: C. Lynne Fulmer - Southwest Texas State University

This paper will look at some new directions in the teaching of critical thinking. This project originally began as an assessment project to discover how well our students were mastering the critical thinking unit in our introductory philosophy course. By using computers to test the pre and post course skills of students, and by running some statistical analyses of what students were and were not learning, I became aware that students had little difficulty memorizing logical concepts – they could define arguments, they understood the difference between premises and conclusions, etc.What they were not able to do successfully, or as successfully as I would like, is apply these concepts to new material. They had difficulty distinguishing arguments from other forms of discourse, evaluating new arguments for strength and validity and recognizing examples of pseudoreasoning. What they most needed help in was learning the skills one uses to come to the decision that a passage does or does not contain an argument, or that a particular form of fallacious reasoning is being used.
My initial computer exercises focused on reinforcing the nature of the concepts – what an argument is, what a slippery slope involves, distinguishing between valid and invalid arguments, etc. These exercises improved student outcomes, but not as significantly as I had hoped. My next step was to develop flow charts to help students picture graphically the relevant reasoning processes. I have used three such charts, designed to help students recognize arguments, recognize valid arguments, and recognize several informal fallacies. The students could then use these flow charts to develop their own methods to accomplish these tasks.
By focusing on the processes used to make logical decisions, I hope to show that students can master logical concepts more easily. Most logic texts are problem based; yet little is offered on processes to solve the problems. For example, most texts include problems on identifying arguments, but do not show the steps necessary to distinguish arguments from other types of discourse. Notable exceptions to this are units on more complicated logical procedures such as diagraming arguments, using Venn Diagrams and logical proofs. Logic Texts address part of this problem when they teach students how to recognize premises and conclusions. The expectation seems to be that if students can understand the concept of an argument, they can therefore identify arguments in practice. But I do not find this to be the case. This is not enough to give students the ability to distinguish arguments from other types of discourse. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 1998 – Root Metaphors And Critical Inquiry Into Social Controversies: Redeeming Stephen Pepper In And For The Study Of Argument

• by: G. Thomas Goodnight - Northwestern University & David B. Hingstman - University of Iowa

Human communication is an unfinished social and cultural project undertaken anew by each generation. Yet the constellation of controversy on both large and small scales may be discovered when competing understandings of communication come at odds within and across fora. Whatever the particular or local stakes of a controversy, the understandings which ground arguments advancing a particular cause or point of view put at risk by opening up to interest and inspection the modes of communication and styles of thinking which are imbricated in the discussion. This essay examines four root metaphors which ground versions of communication in certain values: mechanism, formism, contextualism, and organicism.
Critical inquiry into controversy takes upon itself the responsibility of engagement, that is of reading what the debate has to say about reason and communication as social practices. Reading a controversy requires a descriptive phase where the world is explicated in its coherence and incoherence, agreements and disagreements, shared assumptions and contested differences by advocates. The reading is an examination of how disagreement and communication rendered possible by the discourses.
One approach taken in recent studies of argument has been to develop the notion of “argument communities, “with overlapping, multiple contextualization of communication conventions, genres and rules. This notion appears to offer a situated view of argument practices compatible with the controversial. But however helpful such work can be in disclosing diversity and combating hidden analytical prejudices, it does not go far enough to assess what is at stake in the communicative engagement. What does the text put at risk?
Critical intervention into controversies is necessary because categories among reason and communication are themselves put at risk through practice. Root metaphors can open the arc of controversy by offering grounds for the critique of practice inconsistent with the metaphor. Controversies exhibit opposition as a kind of drawing from or occupation of root metaphors. Indeed, the purification of root metaphors, or reduction of argument to a single ground, can itself become an object of controversy. Root metaphors as places for a dynamic of controversy account for institutional arguments insofar as a root metaphor offers a line of argument that can integrate the practices of an institution while leaving open ever greater spaces for opposition. The drawing from alternative groundings gives to controversy its unstable alliances of motives and its combination of “fruitful ambiguity” where people support the same thing but for different reasons. Finally, communication itself is grounded in world hypotheses that employ root metaphors as ways of making acts of discourse for self and others.
The emphasis in this essay upon the relationship between root metaphors and communicative practice differentiates our approach sharply from previous appropriations of Pepper’s categories within schemes of interpretation that make the metaphors incommensurable, and thus incapable of intellectual intercourse. White, in particular reduces Pepper’s root metaphors from cultural resources to particular forms or notions of historical consciousness that are assumed by, and characterize, the philosophical thinking of particular historians (13). They become tools to classify historiographic specimens
according to their qualities as cognitively responsible discourses. What is at stake for the study of argument practices in the dispute between Pepper’s and White’s appropriations of root metaphors is the very flexibility of those practices as conceived by the positioning of the metaphors within their theories. White’s reduction of the metaphors to mere perspectives of individual historians assumed without further argument makes the metaphors incommensurable in practice. It assumes that the root metaphor explanations in historical narratives can be communicated with no risks of failure. The contextualizing discussions in Pepper’s book about the root metaphors opens space for an alternative interpretation of them as sites of production whose ability to shape practice are always in jeopardy because of the interplay of dependence and autonomy in particular institutional disputes. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 1998 – A General Theory Of Public Argumentation: Death And Rebirth?

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

For some time, coteries of philosophers, rhetoricians, social theorists, and various other students of public reasoning have thought and written about the possibility of resurrecting the presumably dead practice of rational public argumentation. They have sought, in the words of James Crosswhite (1996: 70), “not to expose [public arguments] for the wretched things they are, but to reveal the intrinsic hopes carried by the practice of argument.” They have pursued optimistic answers to questions that Michel Foucault (1993:18-19, qted. in Crosswaite 1996:13) asserts have been central to philosophy and critical thought since the eighteenth century: “What is this Reason that we use? What are its historical effects?
What are its limits, and what are its dangers? How can we exist as rational beings, fortunately committed to practicing a rationality that is unfortunately crisscrossed by intrinsic dangers?” More specifically, I have argued (1998) that most western general theories of argumentation have been grounded in understandings of specific relationships between knowers and the known:
* ideas as the contents of minds
* evidence as external to minds
* inference as grounded in both mental and linguistic operations, that is, as reflective of mental activity yet materialized in particular kinds of language use.
Those three epistemological assumptions were the foundations of the philosophy of science and then public argument theory that grew up in the nineteenth century (see Fuller 1993: esp. ch. 1), making argumentative discourse – a kind of logical talk – the link between the knower and the known, and hence the mechanism for reasoned decision making as it ought to occur in the worlds of all knowers from all eras of human existence.
Such assumptions have been under attack at least since Kant sought to collapse the Cartesian dichtomy between knowing and being and since Nietzsche declared the end of philosophy. Following World War I, there were concerted drives to save public, rational argumentation by eliminating fallacious reasoning (Lasswell 1928), by neutralizing and concretizing interpersonal talk[i], and by making the verifiability principle a weapon for distinguishing between sense and non-sense in all arenas of human affairs (e.g., Ayer 1936/1962). Read more

ISSA Proceedings 1998 – The Institutionalisation Of Argumentation Within Organisational Settings

• by: John A.A.Sillince - University of London

1. Introduction
Very little research has been undertaken which considers the organisational setting of argumentation. The research which does exist tends to emphasise agency at the expense of structure – it either takes the perspective of individual political power and influence (e.g. Jablin et al., 1987; Krackhardt, 1990; McPhee & Tompkins, 1985) or explores the language of micro-contexts using discourse analysis (e.g. Watson, 1995; Barley & Tolbert, 1997; Cooper et al., 1996), or provides a methodology for relating argumentation in organisational interaction to the measurement and representation of managerial cognition (Sillince, 1995). This paper aims at laying the foundation of an organisational theory of argumentation which provides more theoretical links than exist at present to organisational structure and its constraints on individual members’ actions.

2. The setting
The setting comprises prototypical collectivities of individual attributes (goal, role, action and artifact), situational atmosphere (friendliness, relaxedness, time for reflection) and organisational attributes (function, form and stage of change). These define where in the organisation the setting is located and determine whether or not any warrant is appropriate. The setting affects warrant appropriateness in several ways – for example, an organisation’s function affects warrant appropriateness (e.g. trade unions use the fairness warrant), and also an individual’s goal affects warrant appropriateness (e.g. a powerless listener will be more likely to be persuaded by the fairness warrant than a powerful one). The concept of setting is implicit in the question: “what types of arguments occur in what types of organizational social systems, and why this is so” (Willihnganz: 1994: 920). Setting provides one boundary condition constraining the explanatory power of any theory.
Rather similar to setting is the concept of argument field. Argumentation often occurs between individuals who share important interpretations and who occupy social, cultural or organisation spaces called “argument fields” (Willard, 1982; 1983; 1988) or “argument communities” (McKerrow, 1980). Such fields are social or organisational contexts in which particular discourse norms (Grice, 1975), common grounds, and shared values are taken for granted and in which specific premises, warrants, and claims are appropriate. Argument fields constrain behaviour, because people “surrender a measure of their freedom to the entailments of the field’s concepts and traditions” (Willard, 1983: 149). Argument fields within organisations enable specialists to reap the rewards of their expertise, so long as that expertise is organisationally relevant – part of the expert’s argument from authority derives from her role – “… factual claims imply institutionalized credibility: they cannot be made unless the speaker is seen as in some sense speaking for an expert domain” (Willard, 1989a: 73).
Cultural differences in argumentation behaviour have been observed – for example, American negotiators have been found to rely more on argument by induction (e.g. “X and Y occurred in a number of cases and X is true so Y is true”), Soviet negotiators more on argument by deduction (e.g. “X occurred, and X implies Y, so Y is true”), and French and Latin American negotiators rely more on argument by analogy (Glenn et al., 1970), whereas Middle Eastern cultures value the use of hyperbole, dramatic non-verbal cues, and elaborate emotional expressions during argumentation (Gudykunst & Ting-Toomey, 1988). Chinese negotiators tend to ask many more questions and to interrupt one another more frequently than American negotiators (Adler et al., 1992). However, cultural similarities have also been discovered – for example, both Japanese and North Americans prefer positive compliance-gaining strategies, such as using promises over negative ones, such as using threats (Neuliep & Hazelton, 1985). It is in an attempt to transcend such potential sources of conflict that the idea has been introduced of the ‘ideal audience’ which rises above factional interests (Perelman, 1986: 8). Read more

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