The New Rhetoric identifies the self-deliberator as one of three main types of audience. But such a turn toward the self is at odds with studies of contemporary argumentation, particularly social argumentation. Argumentation takes place “out there”, modifying the environments in which audiences operate. Equally interesting is the use of self-deliberation as a rhetorical strategy. Arguing with oneself, especially when that self is distanced in some way from the individual involved, employs self-deliberation beyond the ends that Perelman assigned to it. (...) In this paper, my goal is to explore the nature of the self-deliberator as an audience and self-deliberation as a rhetorical strategy employed in argumentation. (shrink)

Minimal adversariality consists in the opposition of contradictory conclusions in argumentation, and its usual metaphorical expression as a game between combating arguers has seen it be criticized from a number of perspectives: the language used, whether cooperation best attains the argumentative telos of epistemic betterment, and the ideal nature of the metaphor itself. This paper explores primarily the idealization of deductive argumentation, which is problematic due to its attenuated applicability to a dialectic involving premises and justificatory biases that are left (...) hidden and unelucidated. To clarify the issue and offer up a solution, we consider minimal adversariality as an involuntary state of affairs before relating this interpretation to a link between rational persuasion and the attainment of epistemic betterment. Through this we see how the idealizing tendencies of minimal adversariality can be reduced even in argumentation involving premises whose justifications for any arguer are inaccessible to any other arguer. (shrink)

Both questions as abstract objects and the speech acts, here called requests, by which we ask them play an enormous role in all argumentative practices. Nonetheless, there is hardly a proper systematic treatment of questions and requests in current argumentation theories. This paper is a first attempt at providing such a systematic treatment. This is achieved by following the ideal model of a critical discussion as elaborated over the years by the Amsterdam school of pragma-dialectics. After introducing the distinction between (...) questions and requests, the paper sets forth and illustrates the norms of questioning which implicitly underlie the four stages of a critical discussion in the standard order: confrontation, opening, argumentation, and conclusion. Among other things, it is shown that crucial insights of pragma-dialectics are illuminated by the questioning perspective, in particular the distinction between single and multiple differences of opinion, the duties of the antagonist and protagonist roles, the precise character of the argumentation stage, and the different ways in which a disagreement can be resolved. (shrink)

Is a virtue approach in argumentation possible without committing the ad hominem fallacy? My answer is affirmative, provided that the object study of our theory is well delimited. My proposal is that a theory of argumentative virtue should not focus on argument appraisal, as has been assumed, but on those traits that make an individual achieve excellence in argumentative practices. An agent-based approach in argumentation should be developed, not in order to find better grounds for argument appraisal, but to gain (...) insight into argumentative habits and excellence. This way we can benefit from what a virtue argumentation theory really has to offer. (shrink)

Sanford Goldberg’s account of epistemic coverage constitutes a special case of Douglas Walton’s view that epistemic closure arises from dialectical argument. Walton’s pragmatic version of epistemic closure depends on dialectical norms for closing an argument, and epistemic coverage operates at the limits of argument closure because it minimizes dialectical exchange. Such closure works together with a shared hypothetical consideration to justify dismissal of surprising claims.

This is a descriptive study (_N_ = 243) of how Polish undergraduates and graduates perceive face to face arguing. We had some reasons to suppose that they would not be especially aggressive. The Polish culture has a number of proverbs warning against combative arguing, with “agreement builds and disagreement destroys” being illustrative. In addition, up until 1989 public dissent and open disagreements were suppressed by the government, and older generations often found it prudent to avoid arguing. We compared Polish results (...) with previously reported data from the U.S. and Ukraine. We did, in fact, find that Polish orientations were less aggressive and more other-oriented than the two comparison nations. We also discovered Poland was more wary of engaging in interpersonal conflicts. Distinct sex differences appeared when we compared Polish men and women, with men being more forceful. Correlational patterns, especially concerning argumentativeness and verbal aggressiveness, were largely consistent with those originally found in the U.S. Power distance continues to have important connections with the standard argument orientation measures, but its patterns of correlation are not entirely consistent across the relatively small number of nations where the variable has been studied. (shrink)

Informal logic is an attempt to develop a logic that can assess and analyze the arguments that occur in natural language discourse. Discussions in the field may address instances of scientific, legal, and other technical forms of reasoning, but the overriding aim has been a comprehensive account of argument that can explain and evaluate the arguments found in discussion, debate and disagreement as they manifest themselves in daily life — in social and political commentary; in news reports and editorials in (...) the mass media ; in advertising and corporate and governmental communications; and in personal exchange. (shrink)

The concept of deep disagreement was introduced by Richard Fogelin in a 1985 paper published in Critical Thinking. Since then, about 12 papers have been published in journals or presented in conferences on argumentation theory. All these papers relate back to the initial Fogelin paper. Andrew Lugg’s 1986 critical response to Fogelin introduces significant questions concerning his views. Peter Davson-Galle in 1992, takes a more positive approach to them. The more extensive publication on deep disagreement can be found in a (...) 2005 issue of Critical Thinking dedicated entirely to this topic. Most of the 5 papers found here take a positive approach and introduce a challenging set of issues. Two papers presented later on, one in the 2007 OSSA Conference by Vesel Memedi, and the other one by David Zarefsky in the 2010 ISSA Conference, discuss the question of resolving deep disagreement. This proposed paper intends to draw specifically from the last two papers mentioned above, especially the one by Zarefsky, in order to introduce the notion of “levels of depth” in deep disagreement. Since Fogelin’s 1985 paper, deep disagreement seems to have been understood in rather absolute terms not allowing for differences in “depth” in cases of deep disagreement. (shrink)

This essay addresses the collapse/incoherence problem for normative frameworks that contain both fundamental values and rules for promoting those values. The problem is that in some cases, we would bring about more of the fundamental value by violating the framework’s rules than by following them. In such cases, if the framework requires us to follow the rules anyway, then it appears to be incoherent; but if it allows us to make exceptions to the rules, then the framework “collapses” into one (...) that doesn’t make use of rules in the first place. The chapter begins with an examination of happiness and truth as fundamental values in Mill’s work, which lead into parallel versions of the collapse/incoherence problem in ethics and epistemology. It then sets out the collapse problem for rule-consequentialist approaches in ethics, truth-directed accounts of justification in epistemology, and epistemological approaches to argument cogency. The chapter closes with discussion of two potential solutions to the problem. (shrink)

The article develops and justifies, on the basis of the epistemological argumentation theory, two central pieces of the theory of evaluative argumentation interpretation: 1. criteria for recognizing argument types and 2. rules for adding reasons to create ideal arguments. Ad 1: The criteria for identifying argument types are a selection of essential elements from the definitions of the respective argument types. Ad 2: After presenting the general principles for adding reasons (benevolence, authenticity, immanence, optimization), heuristics are proposed for finding missing (...) reasons, for deductive arguments, e.g., semantic tableaux are suggested. (shrink)

While, in common usage, objectivity is usually regarded as a virtue, and failures to be objective as vices, this concept tends to be absent in argumentation theory. This paper will explore the possibility of taking objectivity as an argumentative virtue. Several problems immediately arise: could objectivity be understood in positive terms— not only as mere absence of bias? Is it an attainable ideal? Or perhaps objectivity could be explained as a combination of other virtues?

“Objective” is a term that has a long and sometimes tumultuous history and a wide range of meanings. The sense in which I am interested here is the one that refers to ways of thinking, and especially the explicit criticism of an argument or judgment as not being “objective,” as exemplified in the following. You’re not being objective. You have to look at it objectively. Objectively, the best choice is… Being objective, I’d have to say… Implicit in these statements is (...) an ideology that denigrates emotion and other communicative aspects in favour of an idealized sense of fact, data and truth. The underlying idea holds there is a way of thinking, deciding, arguing that is at best impervious and at least resistant to personal beliefs, attitudes and perspectives. However, there have been suggestions that such a view of the world is not tenable. Different perspectives including feminist, rhetorical, and pragma-dialectical, question the popular ideology and suggest that the kind of objectivity does not really exist. I will rely on Bem, Lakoff, Gilbert among others. I will conclude that the examples are not without meaning and the term can, when properly understood, be useful. An example using an editorial from the Toronto Globe & Mail regarding baseball will illustrate the point of the essay. (shrink)