Ethotic arguments, such as arguments from expert opinion and ad hominem arguments, play an important role in communication practice. In this paper, we argue that there is another type of reasoning from ethos, in which people argue about actions in the world. These subspecies of ethotic arguments are very common in public debates: societies are involved in heated disputes about what should be done with monuments of historical figures such as Stalin or Colston: Should we demolish the building they funded? (...) Should we revere their statues? Should the street named after them be renamed?; and the general public vividly argue about what should be done with the legacy of producers, directors and actors in debates of the #MeToo movement: Should their new movies be distributed? Should their scenes be deleted from motion pictures? Should their stars from the Hollywood Walk of Fame be removed? Many arguments in these debates boil down to the character of the public figures: He was a slave trader!—But he is a part of our history; He harassed a young girl!—But he is an important actor. The reasoning step here is legitimised by the association between a person and an extra-linguistic object: the association between a historical figure and their statue or between an actor and their movie. The nature of this association is explained in the paper using Peirce’s theory of signs. We propose to extend an existing approach to patterns of reasoning from ethos that will help us to shed new light on ethotic argumentation and open an avenue for a systematic account of these unexplored argument forms. (shrink)

How do Dutch people let each other know that they disagree? What do they say when they want to resolve their difference of opinion by way of an argumentative discussion? In what way do they convey that they are convinced by each other’s argumentation? How do they criticize each other’s argumentative moves? Which words and expressions do they use in these endeavors? By answering these questions this short essay provides a brief inventory of the language of argumentation in Dutch.

This paper presents a dialogue system called Lorenzen–Hamblin Natural Dialogue (LHND), in which participants can commit formal fallacies and have a method of both identifying and withdrawing formal fallacies. It therefore provides a tool for the dialectical evaluation of force of argument when players advance reasons which are deductively incorrect. The system is inspired by Hamblin’s formal dialectic and Lorenzen’s dialogical logic. It offers uniform protocols for Hamblin’s and Lorenzen’s dialogues and adds a protocol for embedding them. This unification required (...) a reformulation of the original description of Lorenzen’s system to distinguish “between different stances that a person might take in the discussion”, as suggested by Hodges. The LHND system is compared to Walton and Krabbe’s Complex Persuasion Dialogue using an example of a dialogue. (shrink)

In the academic community, predatory publishers are exploiting academic integrity and the open access publishing model. Academicians receive numerous spam e-mail messages inviting article submissions each day which deceive authors by promising fast review and publication. The content of these emails present arguments in a way to appear as legitimate and valid to grab the attention of authors. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to advance insights into the arguments deployed by fake journals in their attempt to convey specific (...) indexicalities of identity and truthfulness. As a result of thematic analysis of 50 email messages from such journals, this research drew on two main themes-explicit and implicit arguments and their most frequent subcategories which were formal lexicon/grammar and fast peer- reviewed process. These arguments were, further, mapped on to Toulmin’s Model of Argumentation to find out more about the strength of the information used to support their claim. Utilizing Toulmin’s model, the findings highlighted the fact that there were instances of discursive deviations or “hidden rebuttals” that revealed the predatory journals’ ingenuity. (shrink)

The author holds that the old theory according to which philosophy is the matrix of argumentation studies must be entirely reviewed currently. He argues that argumentation theory, as an interdisciplinary domain, may start playing, in new terms, the role which ― in the Cartesian tree ― was that of philosophy as the trunk of the different branches of human knowledge, as long as a set of requirements, which he lists, were met.

In the framework of the extended pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation, Corporate Social Responsibility reporting is approached in this study as a particular communicative activity type, which can be reconstructed as part of a critical discussion. CSR reports excerpts are viewed in the analysis as parts of a virtual critical discussion in which a company acts as a protagonist maneuvering strategically to defend the standpoint according to which the business is operated ethically, and to convince the audience about what is mentioned (...) in the standpoint. The reconstructed standpoint of a CSR report, We are doing business responsibly, may be regarded as stereotypical, since it corresponds to the institutional point of this regulated type of communicative activity. In the first part of the study, a brief overview is given of the CSR reporting activity, then the concept of strategic maneuvering is presented, under its three aspects, as well as the notion of communicative activity type, with a highlight on the role of the context and of institutional preconditions in analytical studies on argumentation. The analysis in the latter part of the study concerns presentational techniques used by the protagonist in the confrontation and in the argumentation stages in CSR reporting, in order to reconcile rhetorical and dialectical aims by maneuvering strategically. The coordinatively and the subordinatively compound structure of argumentation, the symptomatic argument scheme, as well as reformulations of the standpoint, use of emotionally endowed words, concentration of the arguments in the form of nominal sentences acting as headings are among the most important presentational devices constitutive of argumentative moves aimed at convincing the audience that the company acts ethically, but also at promoting a positive image of its business responsibility, which appears to be the ground for winning the discussion. (shrink)