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Keynotes
addresses
Ruth Amossy
Robert Pinto
David Zarefsky
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Agreeing on the “Reasonable”: A
Discursive and Cultural Approach to Arguments
RUTH AMOSSY
ADARR (Analyse du Discours, Argumentation,
Rhétorique)
Tel-Aviv University
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Rather than the art of putting
forward logically valid arguments leading to Truth, argumentation is here
viewed as the use of verbal means ensuring an agreement on what can be
considered reasonable by a given group, on a more or less controversial
matter (Perelman 1958). What is acceptable and plausible is always
co-constructed by subjects engaging in verbal interaction. It is the
dynamism of this exchange, realized not only in natural language, but also
in a specific cultural framework, that has to be accounted for. From this
perspective, it is not enough to reconstruct patterns of reasoning. As
logos is by definition both Reason and Language, abstract schemata
have to be examined in their verbal realization in a given situation of
discourse. Such an approach to arguments allows for a “thick” description
taking into account their discursive and communicational aspects, as well
as argumentation’s constitutive dialogism and its inscription in a set of
common representations, opinions and beliefs (a doxa). These
principles will be exemplified by a short analysis of political discourses
borrowed from different national cultures.
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Argumentation
and the force of reasons
ROBERT PINTO
Department of Philosophy
University of Windsor
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Beginning with a very brief survey of argument cultures
in the sense of the various cultures of theorizing about arguments and
argumentation, this presentation will attempt answer the question “What
must argument or argumentation be if it can be approached and illuminated
in the variety of different ways that have appeared in the argumentation
literature?”
The presentation will guided by
two orienting ideas. First, that argumentation consists in offering and/or
exchanging reasons – either reasons for adopting one or another
point of view towards a propositional content or else reasons for acting
in one or another way. Second, that the force of reasons is through and
through a normative force – both because (i) reasons are always and
essentially either good reasons or bad reasons and because (ii) having a
good reason for X "justifies" X or makes it right.
The presentation will attempt to outline the core of an account of reasons
by offering a coherent set of answers to the following questions: (a) What
is it for a person to have a reason? (b) What is it that persons
have reasons for? (c) How do the sorts of norms to which
reasons must answer differ from other sorts of norms? And finally (d) How
does the sort of "justification" or “rightness” bestowed by
reasons differ from other sorts of justification or rightness?
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What Does
an Argument Culture Look Like?
DAVID ZAREFSKY
School of Communication
Northwestern University
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The very term “argument culture” has been used in the
title of a popular book to disparage what the author believes is an
epidemic of bickering and quarrelsomeness in contemporary society. On
this view, an argument culture is detrimental to cooperation that improves
the quality of life. Our use of the term, I hope, is more positive and
productive. “Culture” focuses our attention less on disembodied sets of
propositions than on argument as process, method, and human activity. A
culture designates a body of norms and practices, and the people who
engage in them, that are sustained across time. The norms may be implicit
and even unacknowledged, yet they undergird the practices.
A strong argument culture is characterized by at
least five productive tensions: between commitment and contingency,
between partisanship and restraint, between personal conviction and
sensitivity to the audience, between reasonableness and subjectivity, and
between decision and nonclosure. Differences in how communities manage
these tensions explain why there are multiple argument cultures and,
hence, why we need to understand arguing both within and among different
cultures. The keynote presentation will elaborate these five productive
tensions, offer some examples of argument cultures that negotiate them in
various ways, and consider what it means to argue across cultures in a
world that is both increasingly diverse and increasingly atomized.
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