Keynotes

Keynotes addresses

Michael Gilbert
Department of Philosophy
York University

Consensus and Unified Argumentation Theory

There is very little consensus in Argumentation Theory, including just when it was born. The one belief that seems to permeate all theories is that argument is vitally important as an alternative to violence. Building on this, I want to suggest that we need to forge a unification of Argumentation Theory that goes beyond a perspectival approach, and that an integration of the several perspectives is now called for. Recent work by a number of scholars demonstrates that drawing from a variety of disciplines opens the possibility of creating an Argumentation Theory as a true, and semi-independent, discipline. This can only happen if work done by rhetorically minded scholars is included in our general approaches to Informal Logic, and if rhetoricians in turn incorporate work being done in the social sciences. These alliances or mergers have the potential to open new avenues of investigation that can offer solutions to contentious issues. We might, for example be able to identify something we could call “natural normativity,” that occurs when ordinary arguers are in conflict. Natural normativity would not be just which arguments we identify as good which bad, but why they are accepted or rejected by disputants. Such advances could only be made by a unified Argumentation Theory.

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Dale Hample
Department of Communication
University of Western Illinois

The Arguers

Argumentation studies is dominated by four main academic orientations: rhetoric, pragma-dialectics, the communication specialization called argumentation, and informal logic. All four take an essentially textual view of arguments. Some scholars from these fields are insistent on seeing arguments as propositions, some consider them to be speech acts, and some treat them as literary compositions. Nearly everyone implicitly treats them as static texts.

I wish to argue in favor of a different orientation, one that takes to heart Brockriede's remark that "arguments are not in statements but in people." While much has been gained from textual analyses, even more will accrue by additional attention to the arguers. When we encounter a structurally or morally awful argument, besides detailing its textual horror, we should also be asking "who would say that?" and "who would be convinced by it?" When we find a vein of excellent arguments, we should wonder what kind of person is capable of such fine arguing, and whether it will resonate with its audience. The pedagogical implications of this view are obvious, but the additional descriptive information about arguing will also deepen our community's grasp of its own topic.

My thesis follows from the perspective that textual materials are really only the artifacts of arguments. The actual arguing is done exclusively by people, either the argument producers or receivers, and never by words on a page. In fact, most of our textual interpretations are quietly founded on the assumption that the artifact is fully informative about what people meant or understood.

I will offer a general description of the sorts of things we already know about arguers, and show that this sort of information is needed or unobtrusively assumed in many textual analyses from all four orientations. I will also acknowledge the objection that this makes argumentation a species of psychology, and then set it aside on the grounds that we need to follow our topic wherever it leads us.

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Christian Kock
Department of Rhetoric
University of Copenhagen

Norms of legitimate dissensus

Argumentation theory needs to develop a tightly reasoned normative code of reasonableness in argumentation so that reasonableness is severed from the goal of reaching “consensus,” as in Habermas and others, or of “resolving the difference of opinion,” as in Pragma-dialectics. On one hand, given degenerative trends in present-day public debate, there is a need for argumentation scholars to enter the public sphere and try to lay down such a code as a common ground of controversy; on the other hand, argumentation theory should recognize that in important respects public controversies cannot be modeled as collaborative enterprises, because dissensus between groups or individuals is legitimately and ineradicably inherent in political and other practical issues in the public sphere. Perhaps the way to develop such a code is not top-down from abstract principles assumed to be axiomatic, but bottom-up from scrutiny of significant authentic examples of public argument. Examples will be drawn from the long-standing controversy over immigration policies, etc., in a European country. Sidelights will be thrown on such theoretical issues as argument evaluation, the “relativism” charge against theories holding that argument strength may be audience-dependent, the characteristic nature of pro and con arguments in practical reasoning, and resources available for legitimate political controversy.

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