Public Debate – An Act of Hostility?

This paper focuses on eristic in political debate of the forensic, or confrontational, type. First, some findings on the enactment and persuasiveness of hostility in a series of Danish TV-debates 1975–85 are presented, including a list of the clearly hostile debater's characteristics and a subdivision of conspiracy arguments. This presentation serves to illustrate that hostility is less persuasive than argumentation practitioners and theorists tend to assume. Next, the widespread notion of debate as a genre half-way between the quarrel and the critical discussion is challenged in a discussion of Douglas N. Walton's distinction between types of dialogue. It is maintained that the normative model of confrontational debate excludes the quarrel and that debate should not be perceived as second-rate critical discussion.     

Presumptions and the Distribution of Argumentative Burdens in Acts of Proposing and Accusing

This paper joins the voices warning against hasty transference of legal concepts of presumption to other kinds of argumentation, especially to deliberation about future acts and policies. Comparison of the pragmatics which respectively constitute the illocutionary acts of accusing and proposing reveals important differences in the ways presumptions prompt accusers and proposers to undertake probative responsibilities and, also, points to corresponding differences in their probative duties. This comparison has theoretically important implication regarding the norms governing persuasive argumentation. The paper is based on a broadly Gricean account of speech acts.     

Argument as Inquiry in a Postmodern Context

Argumentation is a form of communication, rather than an application of(formal) logic, and is used in communicative activity as a means forinquiry, although it is more typically thought of as bringing inquiry toclosure. Thus interpretation is an intrinsic and crucial aspect ofconversational (interactive) argumentation. In order to further thisunderstanding of argumentative activity, I propose a procedure forinterpretation that draws upon hermeneutic phenomenology. In response tocriticisms by argumentation theorists (and others) who understand thistradition as oriented to psychological, perceptual, or textual objects, Iargue that hermeneutic phenomenology supports methods for analysis ofpublic communicative activity. The resulting conception of thick argumentation responds to contemporary (postmodern) claims that argumentation valorizes univocity, stasis, and certainty at the expense ofthe pluralism, fluctuation, and range of epistemic results thatcharacterize discourse in the public sphere.     

On the origin of normative argumentation theory: The paradoxical case of the Rhetoric to Alexander

The Rhetoric to Alexander (second half of the fourth century B.C.) is among the oldest contributions to the study of argumentation. From antiquity on, this treatise, which abounds in opportunistic advice, has come under heavy criticism on normative grounds. And yet, as I shall maintain here, it clearly takes into account the requirements of rational argumentation which are still in use today. Moreover, it contains the seeds of a whole series of doctrines found in modern normative argumentation theory. There are reasonable grounds for maintaining that some of these modern doctrines stem indirectly from the tradition to which the Rhetoric to Alexander belongs.     

Reasoning Dialogues

When people argue with others in conversation, they make a variety of conversational moves: They make claims, ask for justification of others' claims, attack claims, and attack claims' justifications. The arrangement of these moves gives argumentation its characteristic shape. This article illustrates a proposed format for conversations of this type, and it reviews some findings about the way people understand and evaluate these conversations. The findings suggest that judgments of the arguers' burden depend not only on the content of their claims, but also on the conversation's structure. In addition, judgments of the strength of a justification—an arguer's evidence or explanation—are a function of the argument's setting.     

Justifying My Position in Your Terms: Cross-cultural Argumentation in a Globalized World

A community of minds has long been presumed to be a condition of possibility for genuine argumentative interactions. In part because of this disciplinary presupposition, argumentation scholars tend to exclude from their scope of inquiry conflict resolution among culturally heterogeneous and ideologically incompatible formations. Such a stance needs to be reexamined in view of recent developments in the on-going process of globalization. The unprecedented worldwide economic and financial integration has created for the first time a generalized interest across national and continental boundaries. The need to countercheck global market forces has given rise to calls for a global legal/ethical system or even a transnational public sphere. Non-Western interlocutors in general are willing to debate cross-cultural issues in Western terms. Increasingly, Western interlocutors are also seeking to justify Western positions in non-Western terms. This emerging situation renders it both necessary and possible to argue across the boundaries of communities that do not share the same cultural or rhetorical tradition. It also poses a host of theoretical and practical issues whose exploration and analysis should become a new focus of argumentation studies.     

Argument from Consequences and the Urge to Polarize

Polarization is a generalized feature of intellectual life. Few authors however have studied polarities as they actually occur in every day life and discourse. This paper proposes two hypotheses to account for the pervasiveness of polarities. The first relates to uncertainty. Almost everything that touches our lives is filled with irreducible uncertainty. As a rhetoric, polarization uses arguments from (future) consequences in order to manage the future. The second hypothesis relates to phenomenology: body and behavior incorporate tensions or dualistic properties which are easily reproduced in language and thinking. Polarized thinking helps people to imagine extremes so that they may better anticipate the spectrum of possibilities available for action. The article concludes with remarks on the dangers of (over)generalizing and universalizing particulars (or extremes) in polarity based argumentation.     

Rethinking the Fallacy of Hasty Generalization

This paper makes a case for a refined look at the so- called fallacy of hasty generalization by arguing that this expression is an umbrella term for two fallacies already distinguished by Aristotle. One is the fallacy of generalizing in an inappropriate way from a particular instance to a universal generalization containing a for all x quantification. The other is the secundum quid (in a certain respect) fallacy of moving to a conclusion that is supposed to be a universal generalization containing a for all x quantification while overlooking qualifications that have to be added to the more limited kind of generalization expressed in the premise. It is shown that these two fallacies relate to two different kinds of generalization.The classification of fallacious generalizations is based on a new theory of generalization that distinguishes three kinds of generalizations – the universal generalization of the for all x type, used in classical deductive logic, the inductive generalization, based on probability, and the presumptive generalization, which is defeasible, and allows for exceptions to a general rule. The resulting classification goes beyond a logic-oriented analysis by taking into account how a respondent may oppose a potentially fallacious generalizing move by falsifying it. Using a dialectical interpretation of premise-conclusion complexes, the paper outline a richer concept of generalizing argument moves embedded in a communicational reconstruction of the strategic uses of such moves in which two parties take part in an orderly dialectical exchange of viewpoints.     

Social epistemology as a rhetoric of inquiry

Fuller's program of social epistemology engages a rhetoric of inquiry that can be usefully compared and contrasted with other discursive theories of knowledge, such as that of Richard Rorty. Resisting the model of conversation, Fuller strikes an activist posture and lays the groundwork for normative knowledge policy, in which persuasion and credibility play key roles. The image of investigation is one that overtly rejects the storehouse conception of knowledge and invokes the metaphors of distributive economics. Productive questions arise as to how notions of creation and distribution might guide this rhetoric.