Director of Legal Studies and
Professor of American Studies
Brandeis University
Our
varied communities of discourse face a rhetorical future shaped by juridical
styles reminiscent of the "adversary culture" postulated by post-war
American critic Lionel Trilling. Itself
the subject of litigious debate, the adversarial spirit today shows few signs
of weakening, but its influence can be better understood and guided along
certain tracks.
To
influence this adversarial style in coming decades, we need to explore the
difference between evidence-based reasoning, which draws on the sensationalist
logic of induction, and reflexive reasoning, which draws on the second-order
logic of presumption. This reflexive
style expands in an "information age" saturated with symbolic
expression and engaged in the process of "sending powerful messages"
through speech and action. It shifts
public debate to more radical postures, comparatively unconstrained by the
settling factors of empirical data and factual authority. Its excesses are much condemned, even as we
value its powerful sweep on behalf of our own preferred presumptions.
Understanding
the structures and dynamics of this reflexive style forces us to address our
responsibilities as speakers, as we seek to shape our rhetorical future. Close examination of adversarial conflict
may lead us toward useful consensus on how the new game should be played.
Dean, School of Speech
Northwestern
University
New
information and communication technologies are transforming both the ways in
which public discourse is conducted and the tools available for study and
analysis of argument. These developments simultaneously present argumentation
studies with a challenge (adapting existing frameworks to illuminate new
phenomena) and an opportunity (developing new methods and analytic frameworks).
This presentation will focus on the concept of argument fields and consider the
ways it can be reworked to reflect the more fluid boundaries of contemporary
communication genres; indeed, something like the concept of argument field will
be required to understand the social life of arguments in an age of convergent
media. The talk will also consider how new information technologies can be
applied to better represent the structure and evolution of argument fields, and
argue that new tools for statistical analysis of large bodies of discourse
provide an interesting new view of the structure and development of arguments.
DOES INTRACTABLE SOCIAL DISAGREEMENT STOP ARGUMENT IN ITS TRACKS?
and
The 2001 Vonhoff Professor, University of Groningen
It has been widely recognized
since ancient times that a standard way to resolve disagreement is for one
party to extract concessions from the other which he or she (the other) is less
prepared to give up than his original thesis. Central to this methodology (and
what gives logic an intrinsic place in argumentation theory) is specifying the
various forms of consequence which bear on matters already
conceded. Not all disagreements are
responsive to this methodology. I shall
speak of a class of disagreements as intractable when parties are
unwilling to “split the difference” or to “agree to disagree” and yet are
unable to agree on procedures to resolve their original disagreement.. When intractable disagreements turn on
values that are widely held and widely judged to be of the first importance,
intractable disagreements constitute an apparent impediment to social policy
formation. An urgent question is this:
“Is coherent and supportable public policy possible concerning matters subject
to intractable disagreement?”
(Consider, for example, abortion and euthanasia. And pedophilia.)