(1984). A CALENDAR FOR THE MESSIANIC AGE A CONCEPT OF HENDRIK NICLAES, FOUNDER OF THE HOUSE OF LOVE / A Calendar for the Messianic Age, a concept of Hendrik Niclaes, Founder of The House of Love. Bijdragen: Vol. 45, No. 3, pp. 276-294.

As one of the world's most eminent living philosophers, John Perry has covered a remarkable breadth of subjects in his published work, including semantics, indexicality, self-knowledge, personal identity, and consciousness. Looking particularly at the way in which he deals with issues of self, communication, and reality, this volume is organized in seven chapters that highlight a different aspect of Perry's work on the intersection of these subjects. A fundamental work for students and scholars, Identity, Language, and Mind explores questions that (...) are not only essential in understanding Perry's writings, but also contemporary philosophy as a whole. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The word, aggression, refers in general usage to unjustified attack, and any serious writer who uses it extensively in some figurative or newly‐coined technical sense should leave his meaning in no doubt. Unfortunately some ethological writers fail to do this and deceive themselves into the bargain. They somewhat naively claim to find aggression built into the fundamental nature of animals, a kind of instinct which cannot be resisted, indeed which must figure in their social cohesion. If the word really (...) retains the moral connotation which I have indicated, then much animal biology is vitiated. Not only are animals misjudged, but, since conclusions are then applied to our human selves, we too are misjudged and recommended to adopt false moral principles. It is possible that ensuing armchair pseudo‐cures may be responsible for a real increase in human violence. (shrink)

Opposed to Norman's proposal, processing of affordance is likely to occur not solely in the dorsal stream but also in the ventral stream. Moreover, the dorsal stream might do more than just serve an important role in motor actions. It supports egocentric location coding as well. As such, it would possess a form of representational memory, contrary to Norman's proposal.

A fundamental part of the process of referring to an entity is to categorise it (for instance, as the woman). Where multiple categorisations exist, this implicitly involves the adoption of a conceptual perspective. A challenge for the automatic Generation of Referring Expressions is to identify a set of referents coherently, adopting the same conceptual perspective. We describe and evaluate an algorithm to achieve this. The design of the algorithm is motivated by the results of psycholinguistic experiments.

BackgroundFor many decades, the debate on children’s competence to give informed consent in medical settings concentrated on ethical and legal aspects, with little empirical underpinnings. Recently, data from empirical research became available to advance the discussion. It was shown that children’s competence to consent to clinical research could be accurately assessed by the modified MacArthur Competence Assessment Tool for Clinical Research. Age limits for children to be deemed competent to decide on research participation have been studied: generally children of 11.2 (...) years and above were decision-making competent, while children of 9.6 years and younger were not. Age was pointed out to be the key determining factor in children’s competence. In this article we reflect on policy implications of these findings, considering legal, ethical, developmental and clinical perspectives.DiscussionAlthough assessment of children’s competence has a normative character, ethics, law and clinical practice can benefit from research data. The findings may help to do justice to the capacities children possess and challenges they may face when deciding about treatment and research options. We discuss advantages and drawbacks of standardized competence assessment in children on a case-by-case basis compared to application of a fixed age limit, and conclude that a selective implementation of case-by-case competence assessment in specific populations is preferable. We recommend the implementation of age limits based on empirical evidence. Furthermore, we elaborate on a suitable model for informed consent involving children and parents that would do justice to developmental aspects of children and the specific characteristics of the parent-child dyad.SummaryPrevious research outcomes showed that children’s medical decision-making capacities could be operationalized into a standardized assessment instrument. Recommendations for policies include a dual consent procedure, including both child as well as parents, for children from the age of 12 until they reach majority. For children between 10 and 12 years of age, and in case of children older than 12 years in special research populations of mentally compromised patients, we suggest a case-by-case assessment of children’s competence to consent. Since such a dual consent procedure is fundamentally different from a procedure of parental permission and child assent, and would imply a considerable shift regarding some current legislations, practical implications are elaborated. (shrink)

Although law is established on a strong presumption that persons younger than a certain age are not competent to consent, statutory age limits for asking children’s consent to clinical research differ widely internationally. From a clinical perspective, competence is assumed to involve many factors including the developmental stage, the influence of parents and peers, and life experience. We examined potential determining factors for children’s competence to consent to clinical research and to what extent they explain the variation in competence judgments.

The three research questions of this study have been: what exactly is active ambiguity?; how should we assess active ambiguities in an argumentative discussion?; what does an adequate dialectical account of active ambiguity look like? These three questions have been answered by giving a definition of active ambiguity, and by elaborating on the properties of active ambiguity. Based on the survey of possible consequences of active ambiguities, and based on the basic division of labour in a persuasion dialogue, we arrived (...) at a set of requirements that a normative, procedural account of active ambiguity should satisfy. The model for ambiguity dialectic both provides a detailed account of evaluating active ambiguities, as well as a dialectical account of dealing with alleged active ambiguity. The distinction between constitutive and regulative rules for discussion has made it possible to provide a discussion model in which discussants can raise the issue of active ambiguity, and in which they can argue about the correctness of such points of order. This immanent dialectical approach has lead to a fourfold classification of fallacies: by using an actively ambiguous expression a party either violates a regulative, or a constitutive rule for persuasion dialogue, and if this party violates a rule, he or she either commits a fallacy of ambiguity, and possibly also the more complex fallacy of equivocation. This model for ambiguity dialectic has been shown to be useful for the analysis and evaluation of complex debates and discussions. The present study can be extended in various ways:  A model for critical discussion can be enriched so that it accommodates other regulative rules, such as the rule that requires arguments to be valid. By doing so, other points of order and other fallacy criticisms can be studied from the perspective of a critical metadiscussion.  The results concerning active ambiguity can be applied to other modes of reasoning, such as visual argumentation.  The results can be applied to ambiguity at the level of larger stretches of argumentative discourse. That could lead to a fruitful contribution to the theory of argument structures.  There still is a need for dialectical models that concern the use of usage declaratives different from providing a disambiguation, such as the use of definitions, clarifications of unfamiliar expressions, amplifications, etc., and the question would have to be answered how the rules with respect to active ambiguity would relate to those models.  The model can be enriched by inserting a specific ‘linguistic utterance meaning testing machine’. That would be a major step towards implementing the model in a computer program.  The use of descriptive profiles of dialogue could be improved further. In order to analyse the way parties respond to dialectically complex contributions, we are in need of a dialectical theory that provides the parties with specific rights and obligations for putting forward complex contributions and for responding to complex contributions. (shrink)

This essay concerns the authors’ translation of the debate between the Jesuit astronomer Christoph Scheiner and Galileo Galilei in 1611–1612, published as On Sunspots by the University of Chicago Press in 2010. In offering an account of their experience as translators, and of the intellectual aims and unforeseen complications of this project, they have focused on two particular issues. The first is that of the asymmetrical linguistic environment of this epistolary exchange: Galileo’s Tuscan was accessible and congenial to his patron (...) and primary audience but not to his German rival, who was forced to rely on translations and to respond in the more cumbersome idiom of scholarly Latin. The second concern lay with the often problematic translation of the solar images themselves, central to this debate, from various media to print. Here they encountered both the subterfuges of the protagonists and the fiscal concerns, understandable and ultimately manageable, of their own publisher. (shrink)

In his theory of criticism, D. N. Walton presupposes that an opponent either critically questions an argument, without supplementing this questioning with any reasoning of her own, or that she puts forward a critical question and supplements it with a counterargument, that is, with reasoning in defense of an opposite position of her own. In this paper, I show that there is a kind of in-between critical option for the opponent that needs to be taken into account in any classification (...) of types of criticism, and that should not be overlooked in a system of dialogue norms, nor in a procedure for developing a strategically expedient critique. In this third option, an opponent questions and overtly doubts a statement of the proponent and supplements her doubts with a counterconsideration that explains and motivates her position of critical doubt, yet without supporting any opposite thesis, thereby assisting, as it were, the proponent in his attempt to develop a responsive argumentation, tailor-made to convince this particular opponent. First, I elaborate on the notion of an explanatory counterconsideration. Second, I discuss Walton’s distinction between premises that can be challenged by mere questioning and premises that must be challenged by incurring the obligation to offer counter-argumentation. I contend that the latter type of premises, that I would label “normality premises,” can be attacked without incurring a genuine burden of proof. Instead, it can be attacked by means of incurring a burden of criticism that amounts to the obligation to offer an explanatory counterconsideration, rather than a convincing ex concessis argument. Of course, providing the opponent with the right to discharge her burden of criticism with explanatory counterconsiderations brings a clear strategic ad- vantage to her. It is much less demanding to motivate one’s doubts regarding proposition P, than to convince the proponent of not-P. If we want to encourage opponents to act critically, and proponents to develop responsive arguments, the importance of the notions of an explanatory counterconsideration and of a motivated doubt should be emphasized in the theory of criticism. (shrink)

This article introduces the topic ‘‘Production of Referring Expressions: Bridging the Gap between Computational and Empirical Approaches to Reference’’ of the journal Topics in Cognitive Science. We argue that computational and psycholinguistic approaches to reference production can benefit from closer interaction, and that this is likely to result in the construction of algorithms that differ markedly from the ones currently known in the computational literature. We focus particularly on determinism, the feature of existing algorithms that is perhaps most clearly at (...) odds with psycholinguistic results, discussing how future algorithms might include non-determinism, and how new psycholinguistic experiments could inform the development of such algorithms. (shrink)

A substantial amount of recent work in natural language generation has focused on the generation of ‘‘one-shot’’ referring expressions whose only aim is to identify a target referent. Dale and Reiter's Incremental Algorithm (IA) is often thought to be the best algorithm for maximizing the similarity to referring expressions produced by people. We test this hypothesis by eliciting referring expressions from human subjects and computing the similarity between the expressions elicited and the ones generated by algorithms. It turns out that (...) the success of the IA depends substantially on the ‘‘preference order’’ (PO) employed by the IA, particularly in complex domains. While some POs cause the IA to produce referring expressions that are very similar to expressions produced by human subjects, others cause the IA to perform worse than its main competitors; moreover, it turns out to be difficult to predict the success of a PO on the basis of existing psycholinguistic findings or frequencies in corpora. We also examine the computational complexity of the algorithms in question and argue that there are no compelling reasons for preferring the IA over some of its main competitors on these grounds. We conclude that future research on the generation of referring expressions should explore alternatives to the IA, focusing on algorithms, inspired by the Greedy Algorithm, which do not work with a fixed PO. (shrink)

Bundel filosofische voordrachten over de object-kenmerken van voorwerpen van esthetisch welgevallen.

When producing a description of a target referent in a visual context, speakers need to choose a set of properties that distinguish it from its distractors. Computational models of language production/generation usually model this as a search process and predict that the time taken will increase both with the number of distractors in a scene and with the number of properties required to distinguish the target. These predictions are reminiscent of classic findings in visual search; however, unlike models of reference (...) production, visual search models also predict that search can become very efficient under certain conditions, something that reference production models do not consider. This paper investigates the predictions of these models empirically. In two experiments, we show that the time taken to plan a referring expression—as reflected by speech onset latencies—is influenced by distractor set size and by the number of properties required, but this crucially depends on the discriminability of the properties under consideration. We discuss the implications for current models of reference production and recent work on the role of salience in visual search. (shrink)

Though we humans are immensely more gifted than other animals, yet we are not the outcome of an inevitable selection of the ‘fittest’. Nor on the other hand is our importance diminished by our evolutionary inheritance. Besides, we are already here! Faith in inevitable progress is a ‘scientific’, not a Christian, delusion. We realise that the universe has its own rules and complications which intrude on our lives and often thwart our choices. It is therefore legitimate to talk of chance, (...) but we often fail to appreciate the real significance of this word. Chance is not a cause; in essence it refers to our own consciousness that we are immersed in circumstance, and it has no reality without our own purposiveness. Thus chance is not some blind and indifferent or even hostile cosmic mystery; it is the occasion of our own responses, and it even offers the opportunity of human growth. Just as we accept the laws (and dangers) of physics (e.g. gravitation), as the framework of our ordered existence, so also we may accept the surprises of chance without any despairing conclusion either from our latest researches in astronomy or from a fatal accident in the street. (shrink)

Argumentation as the public exchange of reasons is widely thought to enhance deliberative interactions that generate and justify reasonable public policies. Adopting an argumentation-theoretic perspective, we survey the norms that should govern public argumentation and address some of the complexities that scholarly treatments have identified. Our focus is on norms associated with the ideals of correctness and participation as sources of a politically legitimate deliberative outcome. In principle, both ideals are mutually coherent. If the information needed for a correct deliberative (...) outcome is distributed among agents, then maximising participation increases information diversity. But both ideals can also be in tension. If participants lack competence or are prone to biases, a correct deliberative outcome requires limiting participation. The central question for public argumentation, therefore, is how to strike a balance between both ideals. Rather than advocating a preferred normative framework, our main purpose is to illustrate the complexity of this theme. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to show the pervasive, though often implicit, role of arguments in negotiation dialogue. This holds even for negotiations that start from a difference of interest such as mere bargaining through offers and counteroffers. But it certainly holds for negotiations that try to settle a difference of opinion on policy issues. It will be demonstrated how a series of offers and counteroffers in a negotiation dialogue contains a reconstructible series of implicit persuasion dialogues. The paper (...) is a sequel to van Laar and Krabbe, in which we showed that for some differences of opinion it may be reasonable to shift from persuasion dialogue, aimed at a resolution of the difference on the merits, to negotiation dialogue, aimed at compromise, whereas in the present paper we show that such a shift need not amount to the abandonment of argumentation. Our main aim in this paper as well as in the previous one is to contribute to the theory of argumentation within the context of negotiation and compromise formation. (shrink)

A substantial amount of recent work in natural language generation has focused on the generation of ‘‘one‐shot’’ referring expressions whose only aim is to identify a target referent. Dale and Reiter's Incremental Algorithm (IA) is often thought to be the best algorithm for maximizing the similarity to referring expressions produced by people. We test this hypothesis by eliciting referring expressions from human subjects and computing the similarity between the expressions elicited and the ones generated by algorithms. It turns out that (...) the success of the IA depends substantially on the ‘‘preference order’’ (PO) employed by the IA, particularly in complex domains. While some POs cause the IA to produce referring expressions that are very similar to expressions produced by human subjects, others cause the IA to perform worse than its main competitors; moreover, it turns out to be difficult to predict the success of a PO on the basis of existing psycholinguistic findings or frequencies in corpora. We also examine the computational complexity of the algorithms in question and argue that there are no compelling reasons for preferring the IA over some of its main competitors on these grounds. We conclude that future research on the generation of referring expressions should explore alternatives to the IA, focusing on algorithms, inspired by the Greedy Algorithm, which do not work with a fixed PO. (shrink)

This paper attempts to systematically characterize critical reactions in argumentative discourse, such as objections, critical questions, rebuttals, refutations, counterarguments, and fallacy charges, in order to contribute to the dialogical approach to argumentation. We shall make use of four parameters to characterize distinct types of critical reaction. First, a critical reaction has a focus, for example on the standpoint, or on another part of an argument. Second, critical reactions appeal to some kind of norm, argumentative or other. Third, they each have (...) a particular illocutionary force, which may include that of giving strategic advice to the other. Fourth, a critical reaction occurs at a particular level of dialogue (the ground level or some meta-level). The concepts here developed shall be applied to discussions of critical reactions by Aristotle and by some contemporary authors. (shrink)

The dialectical approach to teaching critical thinking is centred on a comparative evaluation of contending arguments, so that generally the strength of an argument for a position can only be assessed in the context of this dialectic. The identification of fallacies, though important, plays only a preliminary role in the evaluation to individual arguments. Our approach to fallacy identification and analysis sees fallacies as argument patterns whose persuasive power is disproportionate to their probative value.

In this paper we study the termination behavior of Russell’s description elimination rewrite system. We discuss certain claims made by Kripke (2005) in his paper concerning the possible nontermination of elimination of descriptions.

Negotiation is not only used to settle differences of interest but also to settle differences of opinion. Discussants who are unable to resolve their difference about the objective worth of a policy or action proposal may be willing to abandon their attempts to convince the other and search instead for a compromise that would, for each of them, though only a second choice yet be preferable to a lasting conflict. Our questions are: First, when is it sensible to enter into (...) negotiations and when would this be unwarranted or even fallacious? Second, what is the nature of a compromise? What does it mean to settle instead of resolve a difference of opinion, and what might be the dialectical consequences of mistaking a compromise for a substantial resolution? Our main aim is to contribute to the theory of argumentation within the context of negotiation and compromise formation and to show how arguing disputants can shift to negotiation in a dialectically virtuous way. (shrink)

The epistemologists Biro and Siegel have raised two objections against the pragma-dialectical approach to argumentation. According to the first objection the pragma-dialectical theory is not genuinely normative. According to the second objection the rejection of justificationism by pragma-dialecticians is unwarranted: they reject justificationism prematurely and they are not consistent in accepting some arguments (‘justifications’) as sound. The first objection is based on what we regard as the misconception that the goal of resolving differences of opinion cannot provide a normative approach. (...) In response to the second objection we argue that in pragma-dialectics, the notion of argument, and related notions, are defined in a non-justificatory manner. (shrink)

We shall investigate the similarities and dissimilarities between old and new dialectic. For the ‘old dialectic’, we base our survey mainly on Aristotle’s Topics and Sophistical Refutations, whereas for the ‘new dialectic’, we turn to contemporary views on dialogical interaction, such as can, for the greater part, be found in Walton’s The New Dialectic. Three issues are taken up: types of dialogue, fallacies, and strategies. Though one should not belittle the differences in scope and outlook that obtain between the old (...) and the new dialectic, the paper will show that in many respects the old dialectic foreshadows the new dialectic. (shrink)

Some critical reactions hardly give clues to the arguer as to how to respond to them convincingly. Other critical reactions convey some or even all of the considerations that make the critic critical of the arguer’s position and direct the arguer to defuse or to at least contend with them. First, an explication of the notion of a critical reaction will be provided, zooming in on the degree of “directiveness” that a critical reaction displays. Second, it will be examined whether (...) there are normative requirements that enhance the directiveness of criticism. Does the opponent have in circumstances a dialectical obligation to provide clarifications, explanations, or even arguments? In this paper, it is hypothesized that the competitiveness inherent in critical discussion must be mitigated by making the opponent responsible for providing her counterconsiderations, if available, thus assisting the proponent in developing an argumentative strategy that defuses them. (shrink)

A letter to The Times of London, May 9, 1992 protesting the Cambridge University proposal to award an honorary degree to M. Jacques Derrida.

Criticism may degenerate into quibbling or nitpicking. How can discussants keep quibblers under control? In the paper we investigate cases in which a battle about words replaces a discussion of the matters that are actually at issue as well as cases in which a battle about minor objections replaces a discussion of the major issues. We survey some lines of discussion dealing with these situations in profiles of dialogue.

Although the main responsibility for informed consent of medical procedures rests with doctors, nurses’ roles are also important, especially as patient advocates. Nurses’ preparation for this role in settings with a hierarchical and communal culture has received little attention. We explored the views of hospital managers and nurses regarding the roles of nurses in informed consent and factors influencing these roles. We conducted a qualitative study in a private, multispecialty hospital in Indonesia. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with seven managers. Two (...) rounds of focus group discussions with nurses (n = 27) were conducted. Constant comparative approach was used in the analysis. Nurses can act as manager, witness, information giver, and advocate in the informed consent process. These roles are influenced by nurses’ preparedness, hospital culture and policy, patients’ understanding, family involvement, and cost-related issues. In preparation for these tasks, nurses should acquire communication skills, clinical knowledge, and legal and ethical knowledge. (shrink)

in 1612, lodovico cigoli completed a fresco in the pauline chapel of the basilica of santa maria maggiore in rome depicting apocalypse 12: “a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet.” he showed the crescent moon with spots, as his friend galileo had observed with the newly invented telescope. considerations of the orthodox view of the perfect moon as held by philosophers have led historians to ask why this clearly imperfect moon in a religious painting raised (...) no eyebrows. we argue that when considered in the context of biblical interpretation and the rhetoric of the counter-reformation, the imperfect moon under the woman's feet was entirely consistent with traditional interpretations of apocalypse 12. (shrink)

In the introduction to hisAllgemeine Psychopathologie, published in 1913, Karl Jaspers stated that psychology has little value for the psychopathologist because it focuses on all kinds of interesting matters, but not on normal psychic life. In this article we argue that today, in the year 2013, little has changed in this respect. During the past century, normal psychic life has rarely been a topic of research. Clinical psychology has focused primarily on studying three other topics: the mind-body problem, the methodological (...) debate and the psychotherapy debate. Due to this focus, our knowledge in the above-mentioned areas has increased significantly, but the issue raised by Karl Jaspers about normal psychic life has still not been addressed. In this article, we propose that normal psychic life should indeed become the new focus of clinical psychology. We illustrate the importance of this new focus with three examples from clinical psychology: the Global Assessment of Functioning scale, empathy and the emergence of positive psychology during the past decade. We then explore the efficacy of phenomenology for studying this normal psychic life, thereby discovering a useful epistemological basis in Husserl’s systematic phenomenology. Various phenomenological research methods are evaluated in the light of this systematic phenomenology. (shrink)

This response discusses the experiment reported in Krahmer et al.’s Letter to the Editor of Cognitive Science. We observe that their results do not tell us whether the Incremental Algorithm is better or worse than its competitors, and we speculate about implications for reference in complex domains, and for learning from ‘‘normal” (i.e., non-semantically-balanced) corpora.

Contemporary theory of argumentation offers many insights about the ways in which, in the context of a public controversy, arguers should ideally present their arguments and criticize those of their opponents. We also know that in practice not all works out according to the ideal patterns: numerous kinds of derailments are an object of study for argumentation theorists. But how about the use of unfairstrategiesvis-à-vis one’s opponents? What if it is not a matter of occasional derailments but of one party’s (...) systematic refusal to take other parties seriously? What if one party continually forgoes any form of critical testing and instead resorts to threats or blackmail? Can this be countered by the tools of reason? Or should one pay one’s opponent back in the same coin? To gain some grasp of these issues, we describe a number of strategies used in the public controversy about induced earthquakes in Groningen. We check whether these strategies arefair,i.e.balanced, transparent,andtolerant.We also investigate the effects of the choice for a particular kind of strategy. It appears that, in circumstances, choosing a fair strategy may be detrimental for resolving the controversy and choosing an unfair one beneficial. Following up ideas from social psychology and political science, we formulate some guidelines for the choice of strategies. At the end, we stress the importance — especially for those whose opinions carry little weight — of having a society in which the knowledge and skills needed for assessing the fairness of strategies are widespread. (shrink)

What if in discussion the critic refuses to recognize an emotionally expressed argument of her interlocutor as an argument, accusing him of having presented no argument at all. In this paper, we shall deal with this reproach, which taken literally amounts to a charge of having committed a fallacy of non-argumentation. As such it is a very strong, if not the ultimate, criticism, which even carries the risk of abandonment of the discussion and can, therefore, not be made without burdening (...) oneself with correspondingly strong obligations. We want to specify the fallacies of non-argumentation and their dialectic, i.e., the proper way to criticize them, the appropriate ways for the arguer to react to such criticism, and the appropriate ways for the critic to follow up on these reactions. Among the types of fallacy of non-argumentation, the emphasis will be on the appeal to popular sentiments. Our aim is to reach, for cases of non-argumentation, a survey of dialectical possibilities. By making the disputants themselves responsible for the place of emotion in their dialogues, we hope to contribute to a further development of the theory of dialectical obligations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Room for Maneuver When Raising Critical DoubtJan Albert Van Laar1When interlocutors start talking at cross-purposes it becomes less likely that they will be able to resolve their initial difference of opinion (Van Eemeren and Grootendorst 1992, 125). How much room should we give a party for rephrasing or revising her adversary’s standpoint in a manner that suits her individual purposes in the dialogue? Certainly, as textbooks in argumentation (...) and critical thinking make clear, we should steer clear of erecting and attacking straw men (Ennis 1996, 172; Govier 1985, 109–12; Groarke, Tindale, and Fisher 1997, 123). Still, a critic in a discussion or debate should be given some room to maneuver in order to rephrase the arguer’s position in her own words or to get at the underlying position of the arguer. In this article, I will be dealing with this issue from the pragma-dialectical perspective of strategic maneuvering between the shared dialectical objective of resolving a difference of opinion and the individual rhetorical objective of persuading the other side. According to existing accounts of the straw man fallacy (Talisse and Aikin 2006; Van Eemeren and Grootendorst 1992; Walton 1996), the criterion for fallaciousness resides in whether or not the critic misrepresents or distorts the arguer’s actual position. In this article I intend to provide more detailed guidelines for critics: a critic distorts or [End Page 195] misrepresents a position when she changes the formulation or nature of the arguer’s standpoint, even though this contribution by her cannot be reconstructed as containing a proposal for a change that might be acceptable to the arguer.In section 2 I will elaborate on the notion of confrontational maneuvering, that is, of strategic maneuvering between the dialectical and rhetorical goals that arise from the confrontation stage of a critical discussion. In section 3 I will characterize the form of maneuvering where an antagonist reformulates or modifies the protagonist’s standpoint in an opportune way. In section 4 I will examine the conditions under which applications of maneuvering of this kind can be sound and legitimate from a dialectical perspective and relate these conditions to the straw man fallacy. In section 5 the results of the preceding sections will be applied to a case.2. Confrontational ManeuveringIn argumentative discourse, participants typically try to achieve two kinds of objectives. First, they try to be dialectically reasonable, and second, they are out for some kind of personal triumph. The act, by the critic, of reformulating or revising the arguer’s standpoint will be dealt with from this dual perspective of strategic maneuvering (Van Eemeren and Houtlosser 2000, 2003). In order to analyze and evaluate the maneuver under discussion, I will elaborate in this section, first, on the notion of critical discussion in order to clarify the meaning of dialectical reasonableness and fallaciousness; second, on the importance of reconstruction for understanding argumentative discourse; third, on the notion of a confrontation stage; and fourth, on the distinction between direct and indirect maneuvering. These notions will be applied as follows: critics have some room for maneuvering when raising critical doubt, even when they change the arguer’s position or formulation, because there are contexts of utterance within confrontations where such a contribution does allow for a reconstruction in such a way that the result is not a direct and fallacious confrontational maneuver but, rather, an indirect and dialectically reasonable one.According to the pragma-dialectical methodology developed by Van Eemeren and Grootendorst (1984, 1992, 2004), an argumentative discourse must be reconstructed and evaluated from the perspective of a critical discussion. A critical discussion is a normative procedure that starts from a difference of opinion and that is solely aimed at resolving this dispute on the merits of the case (as perceived by the participants). When following [End Page 196] this procedure, discussants start by putting their difference of opinion into words in the confrontation stage; they proceed by deciding on the procedural and material starting points in the opening stage and by exchanging arguments and criticisms in the argumentation stage; and then they bring their discussion to a close by deciding in the concluding stage on whether the initial... (shrink)