ABSTRACTS: L to Z

JAN ALBERT VAN LAAR (Philosophy, Groningen University) ”Equivocation in dialectical perspective”

In this paper I will approach equivocation from a dialectical perspective. An instance of the fallacy of equivocation will be analysed as an argument by which the proponent of a thesis maneuvers the opponent into an interpretation dilemma. In order to handle equivocation adequately discussants should be equipped with devices to actively criticize such arguments. I will examine the following question: what rules should govern persuasion dialogues in which equivocation can be actively criticized?

MICHAEL LEFF (Speech Communication , Northwestern University) “Rhetorical figures of thought and dialectical schemes of argument”

Among contemporary argumentation scholars, “argumentation scheme” has become an important term of art. These schemes have an affinity to the “schemes” or “figures” of classical rhetoric, especially with the so-called “figures of thought.” Following Jeanne Fahnestock, I argue that figures of thought are best conceived as figures of address that model relationships between the speaker and other actual or imagined participants in the rhetorical context. Schemes do not simply reflect but also sometimes help to construct argumentative contexts.

JOSEPH LITTLE (Education, University of California, Santa Barbara) “Culturally inherited cognitive activity implications for rhetoric of science”

Rhetorical studies of analogy project the latent assumption that sound analogical reasoning is a universal property of human consciousness rather than a culturally inherited cognitive activity that varies over time and place. After briefly discussing notable cases of cultural variation in analogical reasoning, I present Lev Vygotsky's concept of internalization and Dedre Gentner's structure mapping theory of analogy as promising theoretical and methodological means through which to detect socio-cultural variation in analogical reasoning in science.

PAUL LOS (Philosophy, University of Toronto) “Attention to kinds of statement in argument analysis”

It is standard procedure in the evaluation of arguments to assess the truth-value or acceptability of the premises and the strength of connection between the premises and conclusion. However, it is my contention that an initial step ought to be that of determining what kind of statement the conclusion is, since arguments for descriptive conclusions ('It is the case that p') and arguments for prescriptive or normative conclusions ('It ought to be the case that p') require different evaluative treatment.

CRISTA MCINNIS (Département d'Études Anciennes at l'Université de Montréal) “Ebrius: The rhetorical topos of drunkenness in Cicero’s speeches”

Argumentation, and in particular rhetorical polemic, was of considerable importance to the orations delivered in the political sphere of Republican Rome. The censure of public figures was employed by skilled political tacticians in an attempt to influence the outcome of this turbulent period. This paper will examine the significance of the theme of drunkenness in the political speeches of Cicero, and identify its rhetorical nature.

VANCE MENDENHALL (Philosophy, University of Ottawa) “When it's not just rhetoric”

The point of this paper is to show how Paul Ricoeur in ‘Le paradigme de la traduction’ uses various rhetorical devices not just to embellish his argument, but to construct it and make it hang together. This paper will also show that it's hard to note this use of rhetoric without running into bigger questions having to do with standard argument practice (is Ricoeur really arguing?) and limits (a way of arguing limited to, say politics, law, morality, philosophy?).

MARI LEE MIFSUD (Speech Communication, University of Richmond) “The rhetorical bridge and reflexive rhetoric: considering Henry Johnstone and Homer's Odyssey”

This essay is an extension of Henry W. Johnstone Jr.'s work on the rhetorical wedge. I explore the performance of the rhetorical bridge as an extension of the wedge in reflexive rhetoric, or the rhetoric of personal decision-making. I use portrayals of personal decision-making in Homer's Odyssey for this exploration because of the controversy over reflexivity in the Homeric world and also to extend Johnstone's work on argumentation to another area of his philosophical interests, the Homeric world.

JOE NOVAK (Philosophy, University of Waterloo) “Peirce and the abduction of the Aristotelian Library” This paper explores Peirce's use of abduction to support reports about the loss and recovery of the Aristotelian writings prior to their current format. The paper is divided into three sections: the first summarizes and evaluates the historical reports; the second reviews Peirce's theory of abduction in light of Aristotle's remarks on apagoge (abduction); the third presents Peirce's own analysis in an abductive format, thereby giving a practical application and evaluative illustration of his method on an historical claim.

KENDALL R. PHILLIPS (Speech Communication, Syracuse University) “Divided by enlightenment: Habermas, Foucault and the place of rhetoric”

The present paper explores the distinctions between Habermas and Foucault and suggests these distinctions can be grounded in the way each identifies the focus of their critique. For Habermas, critique reestablishes the ground for communication through validity questions and the initial, threshold question is whether the statement is comprehensible. Comprehensibility, for Foucault, is not the threshold of critique but its goal. Thus, where Habermas seeks to reconstruct the grounds of communication, Foucault seeks to disrupt and problematize them.

ROBERT C. PINTO (Philosophy, University of Windsor) “Truth and premiss adequacy”

This paper deals with the issue of whether premises, to be adequate, must be true as well as rationally acceptable. It examines the most salient arguments on this issue in the recent literature. It then attempts to remake the case against truth as an additional criterion of premises adequacy, taking into account the recent developments in the literature that it has reviewed.

CHRISTIAN PLANTIN (CNRS-Université Lyon 2, Philosophy) “Spoken data and theories of argumentation”

Different theories imply consideration of different data (examples). The analysis of argumentation in (conversational or institutional) interactions must take into account a basic requisite of interaction studies, that is, the collection of long spoken (audio- or video-taped) corpora. This involves a set of basic problems : transcription (and translation), authorship and technical and legal problems linked with the communication of the primary data. A (hopefully realistic) theoretical and analytical framework will be suggested, supported by examples (originally in French).

JOSÉ PLUG, (Faculty of Law, Erasmus University, Rotterdam) “The strength of arguments in legal argumentation”

In legal argumentation it is important to be able to ascertain the strength of arguments that are presented by the legal parties or by the judge. The argumentative force of each single argument in multiple argumentation is stronger than in coordinative compound argumentation. Within coordinative compound argumentation, however, the arguments need not be of the same importance. I will discuss suggestions as to how the argumentative force of arguments may differ and how these differences could be identified.

GILBERT PLUMER and KENNETH OLSON (Test Development, Law School Admission Council) “What constitutes a formal analogy?”

There is ample justification for having analogical material in standardized tests for graduate school admission, perhaps especially for law school. We think that formal-analogy questions should compare different scenarios whose structure is the same in terms of the number of objects and the formal properties of their relations. The paper will deal with this narrower question of how legitimately to have formal analogy test items, and the broader question of what constitutes a formal analogy in general.

LAWRENCE H. POWERS (Philosophy, Wayne State University) “On statistical syllogisms, Part I”

Borrowing an idea from Sellars, the argument '90% of professors like Bach; Joan is a professor; therefore Joan likes Bach' is 90% valid in the sense that if the first premise is true then in 90% of cases where a second premise 'X is a professor' is true, the conclusion 'X likes Bach' is also true. I generalize this idea to assess the validities of more complex forms of arguments such as chain arguments and convergent arguments.

CHRIS REED (Applied Computing, University of Dundee) “Applications of argumentation schemes”

Argumentation schemes capture common, stereotypical patterns of reasoning which are nondeductive and nonmonotonic. As interest in understanding these schemes from a theoretical point of view grows, so too does an awareness within computational work that these schemes might yield powerful techniques in a range of domains. This paper aims to consider the various roles argumentation schemes might play in Artificial Intelligence, with reference to problems in natural language generation, knowledge representation and multi agent communication.

M. AGNES VAN REES (Speech Communication, Argumentation Theory and Rhetoric, University of Amsterdam) “Argumentative functions of dissociation in every-day discussions”

Dissociation is one of the two main types of argument scheme distinguished by Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca. I explore the ways in which dissociation is used dialogically as a means of bringing about the resolution of the conflict of opinion around which a discussion revolves. I will analyze a number of examples from actual every-day discussions, investigating in what sequential contexts dissociation is used, what form it takes, and what dialectical and rhetorical functions it fulfills in these different contexts.

WILLIAM REHG (Philosophy, St. Louis University) PETER MCBURNEY and SIMON PARSONS (Department of Computer Science, Liverpool University) “Computer decision-support systems: philosophical issues in deployment and evaluation”

Computers have been used to support human decision-making for several decades, and increasingly, formal argumentation models are being used in their design. However, their use raises a number of conceptual and social-ethical questions that have yet to be fully addressed. We explore some questions raised by two current proposals for computer-mediated argumentation and decision-making, in particular, assessment of inherent quality and of successful performance-in-use.

PEDRO REYGADAS (National School of Anthropology and History, Mexico) “The argumentative move – from denying violence to erasing the subject”

The world field of argumentation theory is dominated by dialectical approaches. Most of these theories are normative and work with ideal types and schemes of argumentation. The logical heritage drives these models to construct subjects of only one dimension. Once they privilege the dialectical mode, reduce the argumentation to what must-be and subjects to one dimension, these theories think about the possibility and even the need of pacific rational consensus. In our paper we try to challenge these models.

MENASHE SCHWED (Philosophy, Ashkelon Regional College, Israel) “Naturalized argumentation and philosophical skepticism”

This talk provides a new examination of the prevailing descriptive and empirical argumentation theories from a broad perspective of philosophical skepticism. To this end, a generic concept of rationality is proposed as being fundamental to any descriptive theory. The main claim is that the descriptive approach is inevitably normative in its essence and therefore collapses into the long-established normative approach. The discussion draws on Quine’s naturalistic epistemology and on Barry Stroud’s version of philosophical skepticism.

JOHN A. A. SILLINCE (Management School, Royal Holloway, University of London) “The coherence of argumentation within organisations.”

One of the most studied forms of discourse is conversation. However, conversation is characterised by short turns with the intention of encouraging partners' participation. Argumentation does not fit into this important meta-level characterisation, because the bundling of supporting sub-arguments and their presentation in the form of persuasive chains of reasoning require a selfish monologue style of talking. It therefore raises the question of what creates coherence between contributions by different speakers (turns) within argumentation.

CHRISTINA SLADE (Communication, University of Canberra) “Seeing reasons: visual argumentation in advertisements”

It is a commonplace of discussion about the impact of visual media, whether they be visual images in print, televisual images or the images of the internet, to claim that they function irrationally. This paper argues against that claim. First, the assumptions about the connection between rationality and linear, written, unemotional prose are unjustified. Secondly, using analytic techniques analogous to those used in identifying argumentation in verbal text, is possible to discern arguments in visual text, in particular in image based advertisements.

ELZA C. TINER (Humanities and Social Sciences, Lynchburg College) “Teaching freshmen to reason – and live – through modes of persuasion”

This presentation demonstrates an application of the three Aristotelian modes of persuasion, pathos, ethos, and logos, in a first-year, two-semester composition course. Students learn argumentation with the modes of persuasion in texts representing two themes of the Lynchburg College Symposium Readings Program 1) war and peace, and 2) tyranny and freedom, as applied to the self, family, friends, and national and international communities. Results include a video/CD showing fallacies of reasoning in Hitler's speeches during the Holocaust and web-site portfolios prepared by the students.

DALE TURNER (Philosophy, California State Polytechnic University at Ponoma) “You should have arguments for your views?”

One of the primary goals of the Informal Logic movement is to provide students with some guidance concerning the adjudication of contemporary controversial social issues. The guidance often comes in the form of a rallying cry: "You should have arguments for your views." In this paper I question the viability of the rallying cry. Controversy arises when understandings are far apart. But without effortless competence and generally shared relevant understanding, giving an argument loses much of its dialogical promise.

LEV G. VASSILIEV (Linguistics, Kaluga State Pedagogical University, Russia) “How charitable is enthymeme restoration?”

Communication is partially implicit, and we apply different kinds of understanding to different parts of a message. Partially implicit communication becomes enthymematic in argumentative contexts. With seemingly self‑evident premises recipients do not always restore enthymemes to comprehend an argument correctly. But the self‑evidence has to be conventional; if it is not, recipients try to find the way out using certain principles like Charity. Two problems of the Principle of Charity are considered: its cultural specificity and syntactic ambiguity of conventions.

BART VERHEIJ (Metajuridica Universiteit Maastricht) “Evaluating arguments based on Toulmin's scheme”

Toulmin's argument scheme (1958) represents an influential approach to argumentation. The scheme enriches the traditional premises-conclusion model of arguments by distinguishing additional elements, like warrant and rebuttal. The present paper elaborates on the formal evaluation of Toulmin-style arguments. It builds on research on defeasible arguments, as performed in artificial intelligence (cf. e.g. the work of Pollock, Loui, Vreeswijk and Dung). More specifically, the author's work on the dialectical logic, DefLog, and the argumentation tool, ArguMed, serve as starting points.

SHELDON WEIN (Philosophy, Saint Mary's University) “Decision theory as a primary part of Critical Thinking”

This paper argues that the basic elements of rational decision theory ought to be included in all introductory critical thinking or basic logic courses. It is held that more time should be devoted to rational decision theory than to such traditional areas as argument evaluation or fallacy avoidance because knowing decision theory is most likely to further the typical student's interests.

ROBERT J. YANAL (Philosophy, Wayne State University) “Incorrect judicial decisions”

Judicial decisions are sometimes criticized as wrong, that is, as having decided law incorrectly. Yet can we speak truly when we say that a judicial decision is incorrect? The surprising answer is No.. The argument is briefly this. Someone claims (A) Bowers v. Hardwick (1986) was an incorrect judgment regarding U.S. law. (A) implies (B) Bowers is not U.S. law. However (B) is false. Since the inference from (A) to (B) is deductively valid, (A) cannot be true.

IGOR Z. ZAGAR (Educational Research Institute of Slovenia & University of Ljubljana, Slovenia ) “Argument and conclusion as semantic block”

Argumentation is supposed to be cognitive and discursive, but once we open our mouth things change radically. Not only do we ‘inject’ concepts into things, our arguments can only be understood as from conclusions (and the same goes for conclusions in their relation to arguments). Argument and conclusion therefore form a semantic block, and are not independent from one another. The paper will try to analyze the concept of semantic block, and explain its relevance for argumentation theory.