Quintilian and the Pedagogy of Argument

Originating in the Sophistic pedagogy of Protagoras and reflecting the sceptical practice of the New Academy, Quintilian's rhetorical pedagogy places a special emphasis on the juxtaposition of multiple, competing claims. This inherently dialogical approach to argumentation is referred to here as controversia and is on full display in Quintilian's own argumentative practice. More important to this paper, however, is the role of controversia as an organizing principle for Quintilian's rhetorical curriculum. In particular, Quintilian introduces the protocols of controversia through a series of progressively more complex exercises in imitation, role-playing, and declamation (now referred to as situational games). All of these exercises are open for adaptation by contemporary teachers who would promote a dialogical approach to argument, i.e. argument with its methods of inquiry, invention, and judgment based on direct interaction with opposing parties.     

Aristotle and the tradition of rhetorical argumentation

The first part of this paper contends that argumentation is central and essential to Aristotle's Rhetoric, and recounts a number of arguments in support of that view, particularly the recognition that deliberative rhetoric or the rhetoric of counsel is the primary concern of Aristotle's work. The second part of the paper reviews the work that follows in this present volume to show that the other writers' views fit in perfectly with this thesis.     

创造发明中顿悟的原型启发脑机制

科学界关于“原型启发”催化创造发明中顿悟发生的事例十分普遍, 从中国的“鲁班从带齿边的茅草中得到启发而发明锯子”的传说, 到“瓦特从沸腾的开水壶上受到启发而发明蒸汽机”的经典故事, 都说明“原型启发”是创造发明的一种重要思维方式。然而, 由于创造发明思维过程的复杂性, 国内外关于创造性思维脑机制的研究还停留在非科学问题解决的研究上。依据科学家运用原型启发而成功发明创造的最新实例, 项目组编制了《创造发明实验问题材料库》, 并计划以功能性磁共振成像(fMRI)和事件相关电位(ERP)作为技术手段系统探讨原型启发催化创造发明中顿悟发生的脑机制, 例如, 原型激活和启发信息利用的脑机制、问题意识下灵感捕捉的脑机制以及原型知识表征、动机与情绪状态、大脑工作状态等因素对原型启发影响的脑机制。该研究的开展, 对理解人类的创造性本质具有重要的理论意义, 对培养和激发人的创造力具有一定的实践价值。     

CICERO, AMBROSE, AND AQUINAS "ON DUTIES"OR THE LIMITS OF GENRE IN MORALS

To compose a Christian book on exemplary Christian living, Ambrose appropriates and criticizes Cicero's book on “duties,”De officiis. In many passages within the moral part of his Summa of Theology, Thomas Aquinas incorporates quotations from both Cicero and Ambrose. Comparison of the three texts raises issues about the relation of genres to terms, arguments, rules, and ideals in religious teaching. Genre becomes a useful category for analyzing religious rhetoric only when it is conceived as a set of persuasive or pedagogical relations below a text's surface disposition.     

Forms of Authority and the Real Ad Verecundiam

This paper provides a typology of appeals to authority, identifying three distinct types: that which is based on a command; that which is based on expertise; and that which is based on dignity. Each type is distinguished with respect to the reaction that a failure to follow it ordinarily evokes. The rhetorical roots of Locke's ad verecundiam are traced to the rhetorical practices of ancient Rome.     

Manipulations in argumentation

In public and political practice, argumentation involves verbal manipulations, which have not been sufficiently studied in modern argumentation theory. This paper proposes to analyse such manipulations as speech acts, by means of the pragmadialectical theory of argumentation.     

Certainty,reasonableness and argumentation in law

This paper defends a position that parts ways with the positivist view of legal certainty and reasonableness. I start out with a reconstruction of this view and move on to argue that an adequate analysis of certainty and reasonableness calls for an alternative approach, one based on the acknowledgement that argumentation is key to determining the contents, structure, and boundaries of a legal system. Here I claim that by endorsing a dialectical notion of rationality this alternative account espouses an ambitious approach to reasoning in law and conceives of the theory of legal argumentation as the vantage point from which to analyze legal systems and tackle the main problems connected with their existence. Next, I look at what this alternative approach does for the way we should go about treating certainty and reasonableness, considered singularly as well as in their reciprocal relationship. I conclude on this basis that when argumentation receives its due emphasis in law we have to redefine certainty and reasonableness and recast their connection as non-conflictive.     

Rules for argumentation in dialogues

In this article it is pointed out what kind of rules for communication and argumentation are required in order to make it possible to resolve disputes in an orderly way. In section 2, Gricean maxims and Searlean speech act conditions are integrated in such a way that five general rules for communication can be formulated. In section 3, starting from Lewis's definition of convention, it is argued that the interactional effect of accepting is conventionally linked with the complex communicative act complex of argumentation. In section 4, the rules for argumentation are placed in a dialogical perspective.     

Conversation,relevance, and argumentation

This paper deals with the explanation the maxim of relevance provides for the way utterances in argumentative discourse follow each other in an orderly and coherent fashion. Several senses are distinguished in which utterances can be considered relevant. It is argued that an utterance can be considered relevant as an interactional act, as an illocutionary act, as a propositional act, and as an elocutionary act. These four kinds of relevance manifest the rational organization of discourse, which is aimed at bringing about mutual alignment between the participants, enabling them jointly to work out certain interactional outcomes that are acceptable to both of them.     

Cultural attitudes: in contexts of argumentation and explanation

Traditionally, attitudes are supposed to predict behavior. However, due to their poor performance, we are sometimes advised to abandon the notion. The present study attempts to preserve the concept but takes attitudes to be evaluative goals accomplished through interactional, especially argumentative and explanatory activities. The paper uses reasoned-discourse analysis and demonstrates the attainment of positive attitudes towards the Dutch by expatriate Chinese intellectuals in the Netherlands by attending to a variety of argumentative and explanatory strategies in their interview talk. Results suggest that there is good empirical reason to believe that attitudes are accomplishments of communicating actors' rhetorical contextualizations.     

Towards an account of argumentation in science

In this article it is argued that a complex model that includes Toulmin's functional account of argument, the pragma-dialectical stage analysis of argumentation offered by the Amsterdam School, and criteria developed in critical thinking theory, can be used to account for the normativity and field-dependence of argumentation in science. A pragma-dialectical interpretation of the four main elements of Toulmin's model, and a revised account of the double role of warrants, illuminates the domain specificity of scientific argumentation and the restrictions to which the confrontation and opening stages of scientific critical discussions are subjected. In regard to the argumentation stage, examples are given to show that a general account of argumentation, as advocated by informal logicians, is not applicable to arguments in science. Furthermore, although patterns of inference differ in various scientific practices, deductive validity is argued to be a crucial notion in the assessment of scientific arguments. Finally, some remarks are made concerning the burden of proof and the concluding stage of scientific argumentation.     

论墨子功利思想主导下的修辞观

作为墨家学派的代表人物,墨子非常崇尚实用和功利,并以此作为衡量一切事物、一切行为的标准。墨子这种功利思想,对其语言观、修辞观也产生了极大的影响。墨子认为,言谈辩说具有强大的社会功用,人们要重视辩说、谨慎言语;要以有利于国家、百姓为准则,注意言说的时机、场合、对象,在“言之有物”的基础上酌情修饰,“先质后文”。     

The formalising tendency in philosophy and experimental psychology

This paper is an exercise in the phenomenology of science. It examines the tendency to prefer formal accounts in a familiar body of experimental psychology. It will argue that, because of this tendency, psychologists of this school neglect those forms of human cognition typical of the humanities disciplines. This is not a criticism of psychology, however. Such neglect is compatible with scientific rigour, provided it does not go unnoticed. Indeed, reflection on the case in hand allows us to refine the characterisation of the formalising tendency.     

Rhetoric and Dialectic in the Twenty-First Century

The paper presents a historical overview of some characteristic differences between rhetoric and dialectic in the pre-modern tradition. In the light of this historical analysis, some current approaches to dialectic are characterized, with special attention to Ralph Johnson's concept of dialectical tier.     

On the Art of Finding Arguments: What Ancient and Modern Masters of Invention Have to Tell Us About the "Ars Inveniendi"

This paper deals with what has been called "ars inveniendi" (art of finding) in antiquity, medieval and early modern times. A survey of different techniques of finding tenable and relevant arguments is presented (among them, the Topical tradition, Status theory, Debate theory, Encyclopedic systems, Creativity techniques). Their advantages and disadvantages are critically compared. It is suggested that a mixture of strategies of finding arguments should be used. Finally, a few remarks showing the relationship beween the strategies of finding arguments and creativity in general are given.     

Partisan Bias and Information Discounting in Economic Judgments

Research shows that partisanship biases people's views about the economy. Yet, there is little understanding of the factors, if any, that might mitigate the influence of partisanship on these judgments or the effect of partisanship on metacognitive judgments. This study uses an experimental design to show that partisanship continues to bias economic judgments even when subjects receive direct and neutral information about specific aspects of the economy. Moreover, it extends our understanding of partisan bias by showing it has a direct effect on people's metacognitive assessments of their own attitudes—particularly the degree of uncertainty people have in their own economic judgments. However, it appears that people are aware of the conflict between their partisan‐based judgment and economic information since we observe increases in economic uncertainty when information is counter to a subject's partisan predisposition. The results provide new insight into the extent of partisan bias and the difficulty of countering partisan‐based judgments.     

Training fast and frugal heuristics in military decision making

Fast and frugal heuristics have been used to model decision making in applied domains very effectively, suggesting that they could be used to improve applied decision making. We developed a fast and frugal heuristic for infantry decisions using experts from the British Army. This was able to predict around 80% of their decisions using three cues. Next, we examined the benefits of learning to use the fast and frugal heuristic by training junior officers in the British Army to apply the heuristic and assessing their accuracy and mental workload when making decisions. Their performance was compared to a control condition of junior officers who applied standard military decision methods. Participants using the fast and frugal heuristic made decisions as accurately as participants in the control condition, but with reduced mental demand. This demonstrates that fast and frugal heuristics can be learnt and are as effective as analytic decision methods.     

Expertise effects in the Moses illusion: detecting contradictions with stored knowledge

People frequently miss contradictions with stored knowledge; for example, readers often fail to notice any problem with a reference to the Atlantic as the largest ocean. Critically, such effects occur even though participants later demonstrate knowing the Pacific is the largest ocean (the Moses Illusion) [Erickson, T. D., &; Mattson, M. E. (1981). From words to meaning: A semantic illusion. Journal of Verbal Learning &; Verbal Behavior, 20, 540–551]. We investigated whether such oversights disappear when erroneous references contradict information in one's expert domain, material which likely has been encountered many times and is particularly well-known. Biology and history graduate students monitored for errors while answering biology and history questions containing erroneous presuppositions (“In what US state were the forty-niners searching for oil?”). Expertise helped: participants were less susceptible to the illusion and less likely to later reproduce errors in their expert domain. However, expertise did not eliminate the illusion, even when errors were bolded and underlined, meaning that it was unlikely that people simply skipped over errors. The results support claims that people often use heuristics to judge truth, as opposed to directly retrieving information from memory, likely because such heuristics are adaptive and often lead to the correct answer. Even experts sometimes use such shortcuts, suggesting that overlearned and accessible knowledge does not guarantee retrieval of that information.     

Stimulus format and working memory in fast and frugal strategy selection

The necessity of retrieving complex attribute information from long‐term memory has been shown to elevate processing costs and boost the use of simple decision heuristics. This effect was confined to verbal as opposed to pictorial attribute information. In a large‐scale experiment (N = 151), either verbal or pictorial information for inferences had to be retrieved from long‐term memory. Concurrent secondary tasks either interfered with the Central Executive, the Phonological Loop, or the Visuo‐Spatial Sketchpad. These are hypothetical components of working memory responsible for processing different information formats. Whereas the information format massively affected strategy selection, there was an additive rather than interactive effect of secondary task, suggesting enhanced retrieval costs irrespective of the information format. An additional analysis in terms of a similarity match as proposed by exemplar‐based models did not enhance the explanation of the data. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.