Rhetoricians on Argumentation 3031188012, 9783031188015

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Christian Kock   Editor

Rhetoricians on Argumentation

Rhetoricians on Argumentation

Christian Kock Editor

Rhetoricians on Argumentation

Previously published in Argumentation “Special Issue: Rhetoricians on Argumentation” Volume 34, Issue 3, 2020

Editor Christian Kock University of Copenhagen Copenhagen, Denmark

Spinoff from journal: “Argumentation” Volume 34, issue 3, September 2020 ISBN 978-3-031-18801-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

Introduction: Rhetoricians on Argumentation ................................................ C. Kock: Argumentation 2019, 2020: 34: 287-295 (20, September 2019) DOI: 10.1007/s10503-019-09503-0

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Underlying Assumptions of Examining Argumentation Rhetorically ........... 11 D. Zarefsky: Argumentation 2019, 2020: 34: 297-309 (11, October 2019) DOI: 10.1007/s10503-019-09501-2 Argument from Similitude in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Deliberative Dissent from War................................................................................................ 25 R. L. Ivie: Argumentation 2019, 2020: 34: 311-323 (17, September 2019) DOI: 10.1007/s10503-019-09502-1 Progress, but Slow Going: Public Argument in the Forging of Collective Norms ............................................................................................ 39 L. S. Villadsen: Argumentation 2019, 2020: 34: 325-337 (18, September 2019) DOI: 10.1007/s10503-019-09500-3 Rhetorical Structures, Deliberative Ecologies, and the Conditions for Democratic Argumentation ......................................................................... 53 R. Danisch: Argumentation 2019, 2020: 34: 339-353 (11, September 2019) DOI: 10.1007/s10503-019-09496-w Teaching Argument Through Relationships .................................................... 69 W. Keith, R. Mountford, and T. Steffensmeier: Argumentation 2019, 2020: 34: 355-369 (3, October 2019) DOI: 10.1007/s10503-019-09506-x Rhetorical Citizenship and the Science of Science Communication .............. 85 J. Fahnestock: Argumentation 2019, 2020: 34: 371-387 (18, September 2019) DOI: 10.1007/s10503-019-09499-7 Frans H. van Eemeren and Bart Garssen (Eds.): From Argument Schemes to Argumentative Relations in the Wild: A Variety of Contributions to Argumentation Theory ..................................................... 103 F. Leal: Argumentation 2020, 2020: 34: 389-397 (10, March 2020) DOI: 10.1007/s10503-020-09514-2

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Eddo Rigotti and Sara Greco: Inference in Argumentation. A Topics‑Based Approach to Argument Schemes ........................................... 113 C. Geudens: Argumentation 2020, 2020: 34: 399-402 (13, March 2020) DOI: 10.1007/s10503-020-09518-y Correction to: Eddo Rigotti and Sara Greco: Inference in Argumentation. A Topics-Based Approach to Argument Schemes ........... 117 C. Geudens: Argumentation 2020, 2020: 34: 403 (28, April 2020) DOI: 10.1007/s10503-020-09520-4

Argumentation (2020) 34:287–295 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-019-09503-0

Introduction: Rhetoricians on Argumentation Christian Kock1 Published online: 20 September 2019 © Springer Nature B.V. 2019

Abstract This introduction presents the set of six articles, written by rhetorical scholars, which constitute the bulk of the present special issue of Argumentation. In the introduction, the issue editor seeks to identify defining features of a rhetorical approach to argumentation. Taking this approach means dealing with argumentation in the “realm of rhetoric” (a term from C. Perelman), which comprises argumentation where deductive “demonstration” is not available. This has several corollaries, including the condition of uncertainty and the necessity of securing adherence from an audience. The articles in the issue explore these and other characteristics of argumentation in the realm of rhetoric. Keywords Rhetorical argumentation · The realm of rhetoric · Perelman · Certainty · Audience · Demonstration The present special issue was put together and edited by a rhetorician, at the invitation of the editors of Argumentation. It aims to give an impression of how a representative group of notable rhetoricians believe their field may contribute to argumentation studies. Not only rhetoricians believe that rhetoric and argumentation studies are neighboring academic fields that may supplement and learn from each other. The two academic environments that have been the prime movers in contemporary argumentation studies—the Amsterdam school of pragma-dialectics and the group of North American scholars who use the label “informal logic”—have both done much to understand and integrate rhetorical thinking; the present special issue of Argumentation may be seen as just one example of that. A comparable initiative was the special issue of the journal Philosophy and Rhetoric, vol. 46, no. 4 (2013), guest edited by Chapter 1 was originally published as Kock, C. Argumentation (2020) 34: 287–295. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s10503-019-09503-0.

This is the introduction to the special issue “Rhetoricians on Argumentation” edited by Christian Kock at the invitation of Argumentation’s editor Frans van Eemeren. * Christian Kock [email protected] 1

Professor Emeritus of Rhetoric, Department of Communication, University of Copenhagen, Karen Blixens Plads 4, 2300 Copenhagen, Denmark

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informal logicians Ralph Johnson and Christopher Tindale, addressing “the intersection of rhetoric and argumentation.” However, in a sense the present special issue represents something that is still unusual: it does not present ways in which argumentation scholars with roots in other traditions see rhetoric, but instead devotes all its space to showing how rhetoricians see argumentation. Throughout this issue, rhetorical scholars offer their own respective takes on what rhetoric is and on how rhetoric and argumentation studies may both benefit from an even closer dialogue. With six contributors plus one editor involved in this effort, the reader might well ask whether these scholars actually have anything substantial in common that may unite them within the growing and diverse community of argumentation scholars; in other words, do they represent something that might be called a distinctively rhetorical approach to argumentation? As editor, I answer this query clearly in the affirmative. Below, I shall try to show how the six contributions represent certain shared, distinctive positions that mark them as the work of rhetoricians. Moreover, I suggest that the six papers in many respects constitute a coherent, orderly sequence where insight presented in one prepares the ground for the next. A reference to two pathbreaking works, both published in 1958, may help flesh out what these shared assumptions are. One is La nouvelle rhétorique by the philosopher Chaïm Perelman and the sociologist Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca; the two Belgian scholars explicitly equated “argumentation” and “rhetoric,” as they defined these terms, with each other. The other key reference is Stephen Toulmin’s The Uses of Argument—a work by an independently thinking philosopher who, although he knew nothing at the time of rhetoric as an academic field, later realized that the approach he represented had much in common with rhetorical thinking. One fundamental insight that unites these seminal works is that in most real-life argumentation, the standard by which argumentative merit should be measured is not, and cannot be, logical inference in the traditional understanding of it as deductive validity. There are large realms of argument (or, as Toulmin would say, “fields”) in which good argumentation is achieved and assessed in other ways.

1 Rhetorical Argumentation: The Realm of the Uncertain One important service that rhetoricians can render to argumentation studies is precisely to emphasize the existence of different realms or domains of argumentation. Perelman ond Olbechts-Tyteca based their work about “the new rhetoric” on an insistence on the difference between the “realm” of rhetoric (the term used in the translation of Perelman’s L’empire rhétorique) and that of logical proof (i.e., deductive inference, “demonstration”). As noted, they see the “realm” of argumentation as synonymous with the realm of rhetoric, which again is defined as the realm of matters where demonstration cannot be achieved. As for Toulmin’s theory and model of argument, its main insight is arguably that the warrants which validate or support arguments in different fields may be of several diverse kinds and have different degrees of strength, dependent on the field or realm. Thus, a warranted argument is not the same thing as one that achieves deductive demonstration. Nor will adding deduction’s traditional sidekick, induction, give us a complete list of the ways in

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which arguments may be warranted. The realms where the old “-duction” twins cannot account for how argument functions are elucidated in all the essays that follow.

2 Hallmarks of Rhetorical Argumentation The distinctive properties of argumentation in the realm of rhetoric are clearly laid out in David Zarefsky’s essay in this issue “Underlying Assumptions of Examining Argumentation Rhetorically.” Those properties can all be shown to follow from the nature of the realm of non-demonstrative reasoning. First among them, Zarefsky names the concern with audience and the condition of uncertainty. That rhetorical argumentation is always uncertain is a way of restating its defining property according to the “New Rhetoric”: that it is not demonstration. Zarefsky pointedly notes that demonstrative (i.e., deductive) proofs are really just “thinly veiled tautologies” (p. XX)—a fact already underscored by early Wittgenstein but not always appreciated by logicians. The realm of uncertainty or non-demonstration has different tracts; as Zarefsky points out: “Uncertainty results not only from the incompleteness of knowledge on which the arguers rely, but also from differences in the hierarchy and intensity of their preferences and values.” He presents a telling case in point, representative of the realm where the issue of an argument is what action to take. We may imagine a couple arguing about whether to spend part of their savings on a family vacation or on an addition to the house. Not only do both alternative projects involve many factors on which the arguers’ knowledge can only be incomplete and uncertain; just as importantly, value notions and their resultant preferences regarding actions inevitably and legitimately differ across individuals. Absent certain, audience-independent proof, arguers in the realm of rhetoric must instead seek to achieve the adherence of individuals in the audience(s) they address. Adherence comes in all kinds and degrees: Full agreement will rarely result, and likewise Zarefsky notes that “we cannot say that consensus of the arguers is the only measure of a successful resolution of a disagreement on the merits”—even between two cooperating dialogue partners. Hence there are no “final victories,” and reasonable arguers must “restrain their partisanship,” duly acknowledging the conditions of the realm: they just might be wrong, or they might change their minds, and continuing disagreement might in any case well be the result of differences among the arguers regarding the values they hold and how they interpret them. We might add that a theory of rhetorical argumentation along these lines will, despite many commonalities, part from the main inspiration of early believers in deliberative democracy, e.g. the early Habermas, who held that sincere “communicative action” will tendentially result in consensus owing to “the unforced force of the better argument.” In this respect, a better inspiration for rhetorical argumentation theory would be John Rawls for his belief in “reasonable disagreement.” Because arguers in the realm of rhetoric must seek adherence in the absence of proof, they draw instead on a storehouse of other resources.

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3 The Resources of Rhetorical Argumentation Pragma-dialectical theorists, after they began systematically to integrate rhetorical insights, have rightly named three rhetorical resources as basic in “strategic maneuvering” (their term for the rhetorical aspect of argumentation): topical invention, considerations of audience, and “presentational devices.” These are indeed fundamental in the realm of rhetorical argumentation (although others might perhaps be named with equal right). Robert Ivie’s essay in this issue “Argument from Similitude in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Deliberative Dissent from War” demonstrates what a presentational device, such as metaphor, can do. The wide range of similarity-based imagery in Martin Luther King’s 1967 anti-war speech, “Beyond Vietnam,” opened space, according to Ivie, for deliberation “by articulating, through figuration, a moral argument from similitude.” Employing metaphors of dark/light, sickness/health, death/life, madness/sanity, enemy/brother, and sin/atonement, he brought about a perception of the war in Vietnam as symptomatic of a malady of the American soul and of the Vietnamese people as brothers. Ivie’s analysis of how King “worked rhetorically toward making the war debatable” also illustrates how rhetorical argumentation, in its attempt to win and widen adherence, works gradually and incrementally, not by proof. The analysis moreover shows how, in King’s rhetorical argument, his metaphors were not presentational devices only, but also embodiments of topical thinking and audience considerations, woven inextricably together. In achieving this, Ivie’s essay instantiates one of the particular strengths found in the best work of rhetorical scholars: observant close reading of significant texts, where both context and effect are carefully considered, and from which insights of more general relevance are drawn.

4 The Laborious Job of Rhetorical Argumentation The slow, gradual and incremental nature of the work of rhetorical argumentation is highlighted in Lisa Villadsen’s paper in this issue, “Progress, but Slow Going: Public Argument in the Forging of Collective Norms,” in which she explores how rhetoric is and always has been central to the evolving formation of public morality. Rhetoric in society is a broad category embracing many types of symbolic manifestations, and rhetorical argumentation in the sense of explicit reason-giving is just one of them. Villadsen chooses the broad view, looking at all the “multiple, various, protracted—and often controversial—discursive efforts it usually takes to effect change in people’s views.” This is particularly so in the domain of values—the one which fostered Perelman’s and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s driving concern: understanding how values can be argued about. Rhetoric, to quote Ivie, “confronts us with choices involving values,” and that is one reason why a

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“watertight argument-to-end-a-discussion,” as Villadsen says, is not available in this realm. Instead, rhetors across all sectors of a society must rely on an insight from Ovid, used as the article’s epigraph: “The water drop hollows a stone not by force but by falling often.” In modern times, the same thought is memorably expressed in Bertolt Brecht’s famous “Song of the Moldau”: “The big will not stay big, the little won’t stay little.” Changes take time. And repetition. Multiform, continuous argumentative efforts by multiple actors over lengths of time go into the work of “framing viewpoints in collective terms, making them matter to others and giving them civic resonance”; not only great oratory by public figures like King, but also countless drops of quotidian, vernacular discourse are needed to hollow the stone and ensure that what was little becomes big. In this way, “societal norms are continuously and rhetorically constituted,” and thus, “our individual participation as rhetorical citizens who speak or observe, form or critique, perpetuate or challenge public discourse has civic and ethical significance.” Accordingly, students of rhetorical argumentation need to observe public argument in a wide variety of forms and contexts. Drawing on rhetorician Celeste Condit’s notion of “crafting virtue,” Villadsen visits topics were these slow processes have been in evidence, or are so at the present moment, such as the abolition of slavery, public apologies and the #MeToo movement. The philosopher Hans Blumenberg lends support to her claim that “rhetoric is crucial to the establishment of a motivational ground for action.” This, we might say, expresses one of the constitutive conditions of the realm of rhetoric, but at the same time it also implies that public moral argument is always ongoing and provisional.

5 Venues of Rhetorical Argumentation Just as rhetorical argumentation generally works on a different time-scale than logical inference, so it also requires certain spatial and institutional conditions to thrive. Robert Danisch, in his essay in this issue, “Rhetorical Structures, Deliberative Ecologies, and the Conditions for Democratic Argumentation,” draws primarily on the thinking of John Dewey to emphasize that not only does democracy depend on certain practices of deliberation and argumentation, it also requires certain structures for citizens to inhabit as communicative agents. These need to be “structures that promote collaborative communication practices and rhetorics of cooperation.” The term “structures” may here refer not just to physical facilities but also to the conditions and “ecologies” of argumentation. Structures that foreground conflict, like the American legal system, need to be replaced with structures promoting collaborative inquiry. The settlement Hull House in Chicago, founded by the social reformer Jane Addams, and also the buildings constructed to house the American “Forum Movement,” as explored by William Keith, are examples of such structures. Another was the ekklesia of ancient Athens, a rhetorical space that exerted control over the conditions for argumentation, persuasion, and deliberation, and where medium-level social units, called “tribes,” created links between stable local ties and a desired national identity.

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Today, we need spaces where strangers can freely interact in face-to-face dialogue, rather than places like shopping malls, where people are more likely to interact with products. Research on small group deliberation, similar to that favored by Dewey, Addams, and ancient democratic theorists, has opened promising perspectives. So do certain discussion websites that valorize listening with respect rather than trying to defeat or smear the other side. There is a need for such structures to build relational ties, weak but significant, between strangers. The pragmatist sociologist Robert Park is another inspiration with his emphasis on a rhetorical human “ecology” favoring deliberative cooperation. Danisch concludes with a set of questions to assess the current situation and the rhetorical structures that characterize it. Do we have spaces for open, and evidence-based deliberations? Are they tolerant of ambiguity? Do they enable strangers to interact face-to-face? Do they foreground question-based processes and background assertion-making and self-interest? In tying the value and uses of rhetoric closely to context, Danisch also gives substance to the view of rhetoric as not just verbal technique but as a cement that holds the edifice of society together.

6 Rhetorical Argumentation Pedagogy as Civic Education As Danisch’s tribute to Athenian democracy exemplifies, the role ascribed to rhetoric by rhetoricians who draw their inspiration from Dewey recalls the emphasis in ancient Greece and Rome on rhetoric as a formative force in society and education. The paper in this issue on “Teaching Argument Through Relationships” by Keith, Mountford and Steffensmeier subscribes to that heritage: “The civic traditions of rhetoric that grow roughly out of the legacy of Isocrates, Cicero and Quintilian have always focused, among other things, on the role of reason in public life,” they say; and this involves “the robust exchange of arguments for deliberative purposes.” Rhetoric was always a pedagogical tradition—the original civics course, we might say. In accord with the basic insight that deliberative arguments can never prove or demonstrate, but must secure adherence from those whom it addresses, the three rhetoricians choose as their focus, not the teaching of argumentative discourse itself, but the relationships that exist and evolve between arguing interlocutors. Again, the inevitable involvement of values in deliberative discourse is key to this choice. In public deliberation, they declare, we as citizens, with the goal of informing personal and institutional decision-making, collectively work through “what we value and what we should do” (emphases in the original). Keith emphasizes the need for students to deeply understand the audience’s underlying interests and outlook. Key to these approaches is making time for the “relational” work of argumentation. Teaching argument is not the same as teaching argumentation, which is “the creation and maintenance of relationships within which reason and evidence make a difference.” Consonant with the requirements named by Danisch to structures that may favor deliberative cooperation, Keith discusses relational dispositions such as respect, empathetic listening, humility, and the ability to manage multiple interpretations as paramount teaching goals.

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Mountford, drawing on “The Mt. Oread Manifesto” by Keith, herself and a group of other rhetoricians (XX), details the University of Oklahoma’s First-Year Composition Program—a series of activities aiming to teach students the difficult attitudinal shifts that may capacitate them as citizens who deliberate productively on issues. Krista Ratcliffe’s work on “rhetorical listening” (XX) is one weighty inspiration here, helping to build relationships in which students fully comprehend the values and cultural logics underpinning their views of audiences and stakeholders and are able to accept “delayed argument.” Steffensmeier, in turn, addresses the genre of public deliberative meetings. Most such meetings remain largely unproductive. For example, an observation that connects with Danisch’s emphasis on how physical setup may impact on public deliberation is that mostly citizens “each get a few minutes to voice their critiques to the authorities in charge, seated in the front of the room. This meeting design produces mostly a series of monologues.” Little is won when the default mode is “to critique the other’s position and assign blame”; relationality between participants is what remains absent. For argumentation pedagogy, public meetings may be a window on what creates a deliberative standstill. Steffensmeier draws on neighboring disciplines for remedies, including case-in-point pedagogy, the developmental psychology of Robert Kegan and scholarship on leadership development. The key notion is the “holding environment”—a kind of environment where citizens may engage productively in exchanges on decisions of shared concern because multiple interpretation, competing reasons, quiet reflection and curiosity are invited.

7 Scientists as Rhetorical Citizens The realm of rhetoric, seen as centered around civic deliberation, increasingly involves communication between citizens and persons of expertise and authority. Public deliberative meetings are one kind of venue for such encounters; another is the meeting between scientists and citizens—often referred to as science communication. This is a domain where the essential uncertainty and provisionality of scientific knowledge are crucially involved, but just as much is the legitimate variety of the values and preferences underpinning collective decisions. Hence, key rhetorical notions like trustworthiness and speaker–hearer relations are accordingly central. Yet, as Jeanne Fahnestock notes in her paper “Rhetorical Citizenship and the Science of Science Communication,” rhetorical insight has not (yet?) been allowed to play its proper role in this domain. Instead, the discipline of “science communication,” based on social science ideals, holds sway. It has risen in response to an accelerating crisis in public trust in science, a crisis driven in part by growing numbers of retractions, fraud, oversold claims, and other ills in the sciences themselves. Fahnestock takes a rather dim view of the science of science communication. Among the failings she lists are: its tendency to see audiences as social segments with fixed identities; its belief that the product of science is “information” which only needs to be packaged; the assumption that credibility is a preexistent function of a communicator’s identity, rather than a product of the discourse itself; an Reprinted from the journal

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overeager reliance on clever “framing” and narrative as all-purpose tools; and a lack of language awareness. In all these respects, the rhetorical tradition from Aristotle onwards has superior, time-tested insights to offer, yet the “science of science communication” community is unlikely to take them in, partly because of the ancient (Platonic) fear of “the R word.” The inability of science communication to deal with the crisis of trust in science, Fahnestock contends, ultimately stems from the fact that the science communication literature does not promote addressing audiences as “citizens capable of rational argumentation.” Thus, “argumentation,” she suggests, is perhaps, rather than “rhetoric,” the most plausible key term for a better response to the credibility crisis—however, argumentation taken in the sense of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca: the use of the entire range of rhetorical resources not just to “inform” audiences, but to present arguments to citizens in situations of uncertainty, and, if relevant, to argue with them “as respected partners in rhetorical deliberation.”

8 Rhetorical Argumentation: For a Coherent View This special issue of Argumentation is a collective effort in which a set of rhetoricians explore aspects of what they themselves understand by “rhetorical argumentation.” Ideally, readers of Argumentation will find a picture in the following pages whose parts exhibit a fair degree of cohesion. Moreover, as argued in this introduction, it may also be said to have cohesion as a central theme. Zarefsky’s paper lays down the distinctive features of the realm of rhetorical argumentation: it encompasses issues where uncertainty is a condition—so that deductive inference (“demonstration”) is not available. From this several corollaries flow. In Ivie’s paper one of these is carefully investigated: a great rhetor’s use of verbal imagery in argumentation is shown as capable of accelerating a historical shift in a country’s actions and self-understanding. Villadsen’s paper expands on the theme of how rhetorical argumentation, as well as rhetoric’s other resources, may work incrementally over long years, helping help along seismic reappraisals of a variety of fundamental moral issues—efforts never complete and never universally accepted but always ongoing, precisely because there is no final “proof.” Danisch’s paper highlights how structural and physical conditions may help or hinder the work of rhetorical deliberation and, as a result of that work, help or hinder social cohesion. Rhetorical argumentation as the central component of civic education is the theme of the collaborative paper of Keith, Mountford and Steffensmeier. To teach rhetorical argumentation, they hold, it is necessary to focus on the relationality between citizens because they argue out of differing but deeply held values and outlooks.

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Finally, Fahnestock’s paper essentially tells scientists who wish to communicate on their discipline with credibility in the eyes of citizens that they too must become rhetorical citizens—and try to win the adherence of other citizens by means of argumentation. This special issue, in which a handful of rhetoricians have sketched their respective contributions to the understanding of argumentation, has been put together to give an impression of how rhetoricians themselves tend to see their discipline as concerned with, and defined by, a certain realm of communication: the realm where citizens argue about their shared concerns. The positive potential and proper function of rhetorical argumentation is to be a social cement—it may help build and sustain a society, just as well as it may help tear it apart. Publisher’s Note  Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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Argumentation (2020) 34:297–309 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-019-09501-2

Underlying Assumptions of Examining Argumentation Rhetorically David Zarefsky1 Published online: 11 October 2019 © Springer Nature B.V. 2019

Abstract Argumentation is the offspring of logic, dialectic, and rhetoric. Differences among them are matters more of degree than of kind, but each reflects basic underlying assumptions. This essay explicates five key assumptions of rhetorical approaches to argumentation: (1) audience assent is the ultimate measure of an argument’s success or failure; (2) argumentation takes place within a context of uncertainty, both about the subject of the dispute and about the process for conducting the dispute; (3) arguers function as restrained partisans and accept risks that follow from such a status; (4) despite its seemingly adversarial nature, argumentation is fundamentally cooperative, pursuing the shared goal of making the best decision; and (5) argumentation is grounded in the situational context of particular cases. Keywords  Rhetorical argumentation · Audience · Persuasion · Uncertainty · Fallibility · Restrained partisanship · Cooperative argumentation · Personal risk · Situatedness · Context

1 Introduction Argumentation is the offspring of three disciplinary parents: logic, dialectic, and rhetoric. From logic it derives its concern for the relationships among statements, a matter of form. Deductive logic is concerned with formal validity in its traditional sense; non-deductive logic understands validity as a satisfactory response to critical questions. From dialectic, argumentation derives its concern for interaction between participants seeking to resolve disagreement. Dialectical argumentation is about a rule-based procedure for managing disagreements with the goal of a mutually satisfactory settlement. And from rhetoric, argumentation derives its concern with an audience. Rhetorical argumentation is about how inferences are justified for Chapter 2 was originally published as Zarefsky, D. Argumentation (2020) 34: 297–309. https://doi.org/ 10.1007/s10503-019-09501-2.

* David Zarefsky d‑[email protected] 1



Emeritus Professor, Communication Studies, School of Communication, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, USA

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audiences in specific situations, following Aristotle’s definition that rhetoric is the faculty of discovering the available means of persuasion in a given case. In practice, the three roots of argumentation studies are not so distinct as the above paragraph suggests. Most argumentation scholars embrace aspects of all three perspectives in their scholarship, with their differences being matters of emphasis and degree, not kind. Moreover, each of these perspectives can be imagined to embrace the others, almost in imperialistic fashion. For example, a dialogue can be imagined as a transcript of a set of statements whose relationships reveal formal characteristics. An audience, even if large or heterogeneous, can be imagined as a series of simultaneous dialogue partners with whom the speaker is engaged. And the proponent and respondent in a dialogue can be construed as each other’s audiences in a rhetorical exchange. Logic, dialectic, and rhetoric can each be imagined as the dominant overarching perspective on argumentation, but that is not the most natural or efficient way to approach our common subject. It seems needlessly awkward and cumbersome, for example, to imagine a mass audience as if it were hundreds of simultaneous dialogue partners, or to disregard the content of the statements in an argumentative exchange, or to emphasize formal validity to the neglect of considerations of actual influence. It makes more sense not to press these disciplinary distinctions too hard, but instead to notice how theorists reflecting each of these different traditions gesture toward the others, acknowledging that the richest account of argumentation will result from drawing on what usefully can be drawn from all approaches. For example, the most robust dialectical approach to argumentation is pragmadialectics, pioneered by Frans van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst.1 But for the last 20 years, its most significant thrust is the incorporation of what they call “strategic maneuvering,” including attention to topical choice, audience demand, and presentational devices—typically rhetorical considerations—into the framework of analysis. Since their primary commitment is to dialectic, they stipulate that an arguer adds these rhetorical considerations while still fulfilling his or her dialectical responsibilities. Conversely, critics putting forth a normative theory of rhetoric will invoke standards similar to some of the pragma-dialectical rules for a critical discussion, while holding that these standards are achieved while arguers uphold the primacy of their rhetorical goal of influencing an audience. When one gets past the competing claims for disciplinary primacy, the analysis of an argumentative exchange by these two groups of scholars will not be much different. Why, then, does it matter whether one studies argumentation from the perspective of logic, or dialectic, or rhetoric? The answer is that each of these approaches involves certain assumptions or commitments, usually tacit unless they are challenged, that may not be shared or may not be important from the vantage of other theoretical approaches. In what follows, I will consider five underlying assumptions or commitments that are made by arguers when they act as rhetors or by critics and theorists when they examine argumentation as fundamentally a rhetorical exchange.

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  For a concise summary of pragma-dialectics, see Frans H. van Eemeren, Argumentation Theory: A Pragma-Dialectical Perspective (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2018).

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This is not a comparative analysis of all three perspectives, but an explanation of what is implicit in the rhetorical perspective.

2 The Underlying Assumptions 2.1 The Audience The first key assumption made by rhetorical perspectives on argumentation is the primacy of the audience, whose assent is the ultimate measure of the argument’s success or failure. Arguments are constructed with the views of the audience in mind. The fundamental unit of analysis is what Aristotle labeled the enthymeme, sometimes called a “rhetorical syllogism.” One or more of the argument’s premises is drawn from the beliefs and values of the audience and usually is left unsaid because it can be assumed. The arguer then makes inferences from those beliefs and values to a claim that presumably would be accepted by that audience. An example I often use to illustrate this point is the drafting of The Federalist in 1788. Often mistakenly seen as a masterful exposition of political philosophy, in fact it was written to sway the votes of New York delegates so that they would ratify the U.S. Constitution. There was considerable skepticism among New Yorkers about the Constitution. Some feared the federal government would show favoritism to the neighboring small states of Connecticut and New Jersey. Others thought the new government would undermine civil liberties or that it would have too much power. To allay these concerns, the authors addressed their arguments to them specifically. As Jeffrey Tulis and Nicole Mellow have pointed out (2018, esp. Ch. 2), supporters of the Constitution took popular anti-ratification arguments and turned the tables so that they became reasons to support the Constitution. To do this, they began by defensively arguing that limitations on the power of the new government minimized the difference between the Constitution and the prior Articles of Confederation, and then celebrated these limitations as positive virtues of the Constitution. Now, the authors of The Federalist could have selected other arguments instead—such as warning New York that it had too much power and needed the kind of oversight the Constitution envisioned. Such an argument would have backfired because it did not speak to the concerns on the minds of the audience. A more contemporary example of arguing with the audience in mind involves the judicial conferences at which U.S. Supreme Court Justices declare how they plan to vote. Knowing that a particular justice is likely to be the deciding vote in a closely argued case, attorneys from both sides are likely to tailor their arguments to that justice—quoting his or her decisions from other cases, identifying as critical arguments those with which the justice is thought to sympathize, drawing analogies to the circumstances of other known cases, and so on. This position is sometimes misunderstood. It is denigrated as pandering to an audience, as if the only tests of an argument’s soundness were that some fanatic could find some gullible person somewhere who would accept it. That sort of appeal by the cynic to the gullible takes us into the realm of “alternative facts,” but it is not what is recommended here. This is because the notion of “the audience” has a Reprinted from the journal

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dual character. It is not only the actually present audience witnessing the encounter; it also is a hypothetical audience, imagined by the speaker, composed of critical thinkers who will scrutinize the claims that an advocate puts forth. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca famously refer to this second notion of audience as the “universal audience,” implying that it is composed of all reasonable people (1969, esp. pp. 31–35). No such audience actually exists, of course, but it is imagined by the speaker or writer. Pandering to such an audience would not be effective, because not all its members will hold the particular beliefs, bias, or prejudices that could be pandered to. The arguer who would succeed with such an audience must rise above appealing to prejudice or bias. He or she will tailor the argument to the views that the actual audience would have held if it had been exercising its critical judgment and viewed itself as a manifestation of the universal audience. Like the critical discussion in pragma-dialectics, the universal audience is not an empirical reality but an aspirational norm. Purely descriptive studies might be limited to the beliefs in fact maintained by the actual audience in the given simulation. But argumentation has long been recognized as having both descriptive and normative dimensions. A purely descriptive account of argumentation will not establish or validate standards to which we should aspire. The beliefs and values of the audience furnish the outer limits of what will be regarded, as a practical matter, as acceptable positions for arguers to maintain. When we say that a certain argument offends “common sense,” we are saying that it falls outside these boundaries. Tenuous causal claims (“Revenue sharing between the federal and state governments will lead to nuclear war”) are an example of a kind of argument that audiences will not entertain, no matter what purported evidence could be adduced for it. Another example is an inversion of widely accepted value judgments that is so extreme as to alienate almost any audience (“Racism is a good thing,” for example). In short, a rhetorical perspective on argumentation begins with the assumption that the argument takes place for the benefit of the audience, that the arguers do their work with the audience in mind, and that the assent of the audience when it is thinking critically is the test of an argument’s success. Logical and dialectical perspectives may share this assumption in part or at certain times, but will not give it the same degree of prominence. 2.2 Uncertainty A second underlying assumption of rhetorical approaches to argument involves uncertainty, both as the subject of the dispute and with regard to the process of reasoning. About matters that are certain, Aristotle wrote, no one deliberates. The reason is obvious. Argumentation is a cumbersome and inefficient way to work through a disagreement. If a matter is certain, there are much easier ways to settle it—and this was true even before the days of Wikipedia and Google. One can look it up in an authoritative source, consult a recognized expert, or perform an empirical test, for example.

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But large domains of discourse involve matters that cannot be known with certainty. Perhaps the most obvious example is a choice about which of two (or more) competing actions to take. The need for choice arises even in the personal realm. “Should we take a family vacation this year, or build an addition to the house?” is such a choice when the family budget is not large enough to permit both. Which choice will produce the greater benefit of pleasure over cost cannot be known for sure. So we weigh and balance the competing claims, including the possibility that different family members will weight them differently, and make what seems to be the best judgment under the circumstances. But since we cannot be certain, it is always possible that we will end up regretting the choice. Uncertainty results not only from the incompleteness of knowledge on which the arguers rely, but also from differences in the hierarchy and intensity of their preferences and values. The person who prefers personal space over memorable experiences likely will choose to expand the house. But the person who prefers memorable experiences may hold that preference more intensely and hence be harder to dissuade. In that case, the first person might be more likely to yield his or her preference, without changing it. Furthermore, simply articulating each arguer’s preference is not likely to settle the dispute, since it is hardly the case that all people have pre-existing preferences, precisely measured, on all subjects. Sometimes hierarchies of preference will be modified during the course of the argument; sometimes they will be discovered or revealed only during the course of the argument. All these factors compound the uncertainty inherent in a rhetorical view of argument. Consequently, we cannot say that consensus of the arguers is the only measure of a successful resolution of a disagreement on the merits. Sometimes it is, but other outcomes, such as capitulation without modifying beliefs, accepting the judgment of a third-party arbiter, submission to majority vote, non-reasoned methods such as a coin toss, or even “agreeing to disagree,” can be signs of a successful argument, from the perspective of rhetoric. The need for decisions in the face of uncertainty is even greater in the realm of public policy, when choices will affect a much wider audience, and may involve a larger number of people in the argument. “Should the government cut taxes or increase its spending on social welfare programs?” poses such a choice when it would be impractical or irresponsible to do both, as does a question such as “Should we try to influence the behavior of other nations or should we mind our own business?” The topics involved are inherently uncertain, as is the fact that we are talking about what should happen in the future. The first question involves choices about the relative merits of individualism and communitarianism as well as about how much confidence to give to economic forecasting and how much weight to give to the multiplier effect. The second question depends on competing theories of activism and passivity in foreign affairs, assessments of the merit and strength of diplomatic maneuvers, and judgments about military preparedness and possibly about military goals. None of these are matters that can be known for certainty. Nor will the prior hierarchies of preference held by the arguers be identical.

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So frequent is the tendency to argue about action-focused choices that it is tempting to regard that condition as the defining feature of rhetorical argument.2 But to say that is to confuse frequency of appearance with defining characteristic. There are many other topics about which we cannot know for sure and hence make decisions amid uncertainty. These include moral and aesthetic principles, predictions about the future, choices between competing theories seeking to explain past events, and even certain questions of fact when there is no authoritative record or source. These all fall within the ambit of rhetorical argumentation. Recognizing the uncertainty of the topics we argue about should call forth a degree of humility. In a given controversy we may have a strongly held viewpoint, feel confident that we are right, and see it as our task to change the views of others, but we cannot know for sure. In acknowledging the uncertainty of our subject matter, we implicitly agree that not only do there exist viewpoints in opposition to ours, but also that they might be right. In addition to the subjects we argue about, a rhetorical approach to argumentation also recognizes uncertainty in the process of reasoning from grounds to claim. We do not reason with the certainty of formal deductive logic. In fact, although we sometimes speak of deductive syllogisms as “arguments,” it would be more accurate to regard them as thinly veiled tautologies. They tell us nothing that we do not already know from the statement of the grounds alone. If all argumentation scholars are brilliant and Juliet is an argumentation scholar, then we already know that Juliet is brilliant—we just have not yet made it explicit. There is no inference here, no movement from the known to the unknown. The syllogism is more like a rearrangement of known facts than like an argument. In contrast, rhetorical reasoning begins with a premise accepted by the audience and proceeds from there to a claim that the speaker wants the audience also to accept. This movement involves an inference, a mental judgment that one statement seems to “follow from” another. It does not follow in a formal, logical sense, but in the sense that accepting one statement increases the likelihood of one’s willingness to commit to the other. When a person exercising critical judgment makes such an inference from grounds to claim, we say that the claim has been justified for that person. Again, justification is not proof, although it sometimes is referred to as “rhetorical proof” to suggest its analogous function. It is a matter of evolving enough confidence in the claim that audience members are prepared to commit themselves to it and, if appropriate, to act upon it. Their willingness to do so will be enhanced if the inferences match one or more of the patterns known as argument schemes and satisfy the critical tests associated with the particular argument schemes. Even if all the arguers are trying their best to exercise their critical judgment, however, they could be mistaken. They might conclude that all of the statements in the argument are true and that the inference is warranted, and yet turn out to be wrong. This is precisely because the inferences in rhetorical argumentation are uncertain. They hold generally, and yet there are exceptions. There really are such

2

  In fact, Christian Kock maintains that arguing about choices is, indeed, the defining feature of rhetorical approaches to argumentation. See, for example, Kock (2009).

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things as hasty generalization, the fallacy of composition, the post hoc fallacy, and the abusive ad hominem. Furthermore, unlike the simple cases usually presented in textbooks on reasoning, we sometimes do not recognize them when we encounter them in actual argumentation, especially if the subject is one about which we feel strongly. Moreover, inferences in rhetorical argumentation are based on probabilities and preference hierarchies, and one cannot be sure that these are on his or her side in any given case. (Those who confidently predicted the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election from the probabilities of each candidate’s success received a vivid demonstration of this problem.) Therefore, to engage in rhetorical argumentation is to acknowledge uncertainty in the reasoning process as well. Precisely because of uncertainty, a rhetorical approach to argumentation engages controversies that seem never to get resolved. To be sure, practicality requires that decisions get made about whether to take the vacation or to build the addition to the house, and about what public policies to adopt. But the underlying issues may arise again and again, sometimes in different forms and in the course of different controversies. Whether individual freedom is more important than loyalty to the state, or vice versa has been argued for centuries, as have questions like the relative weight of liberalism and communitarianism or the relative merits of reward and punishment as incentives to behavior. In the United States, the controversy over slavery was, thankfully, settled by the Civil War. Yet the underlying issue of federalism versus states’ rights—the relative sovereignty of the central and local governments—recurs even today on such diverse topics as abortion rights and the expansion of Medicaid. A consequence of the role of uncertainty in argumentation is the recognition that there are no final victories. Indeed, a rhetorically grounded culture of argument is threatened with disruption just when advocates forget that tension between competing values and hierarchies is the normal condition and seek not just to defeat but to vanquish their opponents, winning a victory for all time. 2.3 Role of the Arguers A third underlying assumption of rhetorical approaches to argumentation has to do with the role of the arguers. They are restrained partisans. This term, introduced 50 years ago in a seminal essay by Ehninger (1970), captures the somewhat counterintuitive nature of the arguers’ task. It is easy to see how they are partisans. They believe that the claim they are advancing is right; that, after all, is what prompts them to advance it. And whether out of concern for their audience, the desire for victory, or both, they want to influence their audience to come to the same conclusion. Whatever the disagreement that has produced the argument, they want for it to be resolved in their favor. But they also recognize that they might be wrong. They surely do not want to be responsible for inducing the audience to accept a position that turns out to be erroneous, possibly even dangerous or harmful. So they voluntarily restrain their partisanship. They want their audience to concur with them only if assent is freely given. They want audience members to think about the argument and reach the conclusion themselves that the arguer’s claim warrants their assent. To obtain this result, the Reprinted from the journal

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proponent of the argument refrains from behavior that might short-circuit or pressure the audience’s judgment. So, for example, they will not withhold reluctant evidence or represent nuanced claims as more unequivocal than they actually are. They will legitimately invoke emotional considerations but they will not make inappropriate appeals to emotion that bypass the reasoning process. They will avoid needlessly loaded language and will not take advantage of ambiguity. These are examples of the self-restraint arguers will practice in the hope that they will influence their audience by the force of their arguments and not by extraneous considerations. These practices are normative, of course. While they are aspirational, it would be foolish to think that every case of actual argumentation satisfies them. In this respect, they are analogous to the pragma-dialectician’s emphasis on observing the rules of critical discussion, or to the informal logician Ralph Johnson’s emphasis on meeting one’s dialectical obligations.3 There is an additional respect in which arguers restrain their partisanship. Knowing that they are fallible and could be wrong, they want their claims to be carefully scrutinized. This too may seem counterintuitive; in the moment of argument, very few find it comfortable to have their claims and reasons critically examined, subjected to possibly withering critique. But a larger purpose is served by the arguer’s inviting this scrutiny. Just as claims to which one’s adversary freely assents are more likely to be reliable and valid than are those to which assent is coerced or manipulated, so claims that withstand careful scrutiny are more likely to be well-founded than are those that do not invite such scrutiny. I will be far more confident in my belief if I know you have come to the same conclusion after examining it carefully and being unable to undermine it. By adopting a posture of restrained partisanship, an arguer willingly assumes two basic risks. First is the risk of being shown to be wrong and hence both losing the argument and losing face. Suppose, for example, we believe that the president is needlessly endangering national security by antagonizing other nations. We enter into an argument to defend that claim and, we hope, to enlist the support of others. But in the course of the argument we become convinced that the president’s judgments are sound because they best protect the national interest in situations when it is really important to do so. Our earlier belief has been shown to be wrong. But not only that, our credibility to make other judgments about the president, or about other political figures, may be called into question as well, perhaps because our underlying hierarchy of preference has been undermined. If we are wrong about this assessment of the president, why should we be trusted when we make judgments about Senators or Supreme Court Justices? A successful challenge to our beliefs might lower our standing or reputation in the eyes of people we care about. (This would also be true, of course, if the terms of the example were reversed—if we began by supporting the president and were convinced by the argument that his or her judgment was misguided.)

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  See, for example, van Eemeren, Argumentation Theory, 33–50; Ralph H. Johnson, Manifest Rationality: A Pragmatic Theory of Argument (Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum 2000).

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Beyond that, there is a second risk. We will need to modify our larger system of beliefs or values to take into account the change we have just been convinced to make, a change that might well introduce a discordant element into a previously harmonious system.4 To continue with the hypothetical example about the president, suppose we believe that “conservatives make bad presidents.” So long as we believed that the current president, a conservative, was making bad judgments in foreign affairs, the specific case would be perfectly consistent with our general belief. But if we engaged in an argument that convinced us that the judgments to which we objected were really in the national interest, we would need to rethink our larger position that conservatives make bad presidents. We might need to confine that belief to matters of domestic policy, or we might conclude that this president is “the exception that proves the rule,” or we might decide that standards for success have changed, or that we overstated how poor the conservative presidents have been as a whole. (Again, the hypothetical example will work equally well if the ideological positions were reversed.) Having to modify one’s system of beliefs can be a major challenge to one’s identity and sense of self. It is hardly a trivial matter. Why, then, would anyone choose to argue, running these risks that argumentation entails? Somewhat paradoxically, we do so because it is the best way to compensate for the fact that we are dealing in the realm of the uncertain. Arguers do not know for sure that they are in the right to start with; they know that the claims they advance are fallible. They want to reduce the chance that they will be wrong or that they will lead their audience into error. So they seek the audience’s assent only on the condition that it is freely given and that it is the result of careful scrutiny of their own claims and reasons. In accepting these risks, arguers yield an important byproduct. They bestow personhood on their audiences and interlocutors. Arguers recognize others not just as objects to be persuaded but as human beings whose capacity for thought and independent judgment is valued. A person who values others’ capacity for thought and judgment will value it in himself or herself and will expect that others will treat him or her accordingly.5 2.4 Cooperativeness The fourth underlying assumption follows directly from the third: Despite its seemingly adversarial nature, argumentation is fundamentally cooperative. This will sound strange, especially to speakers of English, because the connotations of “argumentation” involve controversy and conflict. The assumption of partisanship, even restrained partisanship, suggests that arguers will question, challenge, and oppose one another’s arguments—and they do. But these adversarial elements are only means toward the goal of careful scrutiny and testing of claims. And that goal, presumably, is shared by all the arguers.

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  These two dimensions of risk are discussed in Johnstone (1965, pp. 1–9).  The relationship between argumentation and personhood is examined in Johnstone (1970) and in Ehninger (1970), pp. 109–110. 5

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We might imagine argumentation as if the ultimate decision-maker or judge, in order to achieve rigorous testing to help reach a decision, had assigned competing advocates the task of finding and organizing the strongest mix of reasons for their own position and doubts about the opposing position, to facilitate a careful and informed judgment. Of course, this is exactly how we might imagine formal debates. But all argumentation shares the goal of reaching a decision in which participants have the highest degree of confidence. Disputing with one another is the means for testing arguments, and the desire to prevail supplies the competitive motivation stimulating arguers to develop the strongest position they can. Those who decry what they see as excessive competitiveness of rhetorical argumentation should remember that it is this very competitiveness that motivates everyone to produce strong claims and arguments, a goal that is shared cooperatively. Arguers cooperate in other ways as well. They share a common language and set of meanings, which assure that they all talk about the same thing. They also share underlying procedural assumptions and norms. For example, while they disagree about what their evidence says, they will agree about what counts as evidence and about the weight that should be given to evidence. Similarly, arguers will need to hold norms such as politeness, turn-taking, civility, and respect for the other in the same light. If one regards these as modes of intelligent discourse, while another regards them as masks enabling those with power and privilege to dominate those without, then the resulting discussion will not get very far. Finally, arguers share values such as modesty, respect for the audience, the importance of fairly given assent, and willingness to listen seriously and possibly to be convinced. The competitive and adversarial elements of argumentation are undergirded by these common values. 2.5 Particularity The final assumption underlying rhetorical approaches to argumentation is the particularity of argumentation practice. It was Aristotle who emphasized the importance of finding the available means of persuasion in the given case.6 This recognizes that each instance of argumentation is embedded in a particular constellation of contexts encompassing such factors as the background and previous experience of the arguers, the origin and history of the controversy, the stakes in the dispute, the dominance and power relationships among the arguers, and so on. This emphasis on the boundedness of cases has obvious implications for attempts to formalize argumentation studies. In general, the social sciences aim to develop formalized theoretical models which can be applied to explain and to predict particular instances of behavior. Prediction is often the ultimate goal because it permits control of cases. Rhetoric resists the drive for formalization and remains grounded in the study of particulars. It produces what often are rich analyses of cases with limited potential generalizability. It recognizes that the quest for formalization results in inattention to the particulars that distinguish one

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 Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1355b (emphasis added).

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case from another. Its method is more like that of the ethnographer in search of thick description than like that of the experimentalist concerned with generalizability and replication. This does not mean that the rhetorical scholar is uninterested in theory, but it is theory of a different kind—what lawyers would call a “theory of the case.” The goal is to abstract from the particulars of a given case in order to be able to explain what is happening in that case, moving beyond mere reporting to explanation. What is lost by the inability to offer higher-level generalizations is offset by the gain in understanding that permits deep appreciation for the particular case. It is the responsibility of the rhetorical scholar, then, to argue for the significance of the cases that one chooses to examine. Sometimes the case will be almost selfevidently significant by virtue of its antecedents or consequences. In other cases, the significance might be that it is an example of a kind of argumentative behavior not previously examined, or that it is a sign of a particular kind of movement in theory or practice, or that it deviates from expectations, or that it complicates conventional wisdom. There is no end to the kinds of claims one could make for the significance of the case under investigation, but the claim needs to be advanced, lest the critical “So what?” question go unanswered. Nor does the grounding of rhetorical studies in particular cases negate interest in broader patterns, but the patterns develop inductively as the result of examining cases that turn out to be similar in certain respects. From observed similarities one can formulate generalizations that apply to multiple cases, but they are far more like inductive generalizations than like covering laws. At best, they have high explanatory power but low predictive power. For example, in my own work I have found numerous instances of a technique for breaking links between concepts that Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca label dissociation (1969, pp. 411–459). I’ve seen it used as a technique for redefining controversial terms, for reframing issues, for changing the valence of terms from positive to negative and vice versa. My observation of these patterns has sensitized me to the importance of this phenomenon and has led me to draw upon it in order better to understand and appreciate the situations in which it occurs. But it does not equip me to predict circumstances in which it will be used in the future or to specify the conditions under which it will succeed or fail. Fortunately, since argumentation studies is an interdisciplinary field, it is not necessary to choose between the objectives of formalization into generalizable principles and appreciation of the particular case. One’s research question, after all, should determine one’s approach. But there is value in recognizing where rhetorical approaches to argumentation are placed along that continuum, just as there is for other approaches. Finally, it is important to recognize that what has been described here as a binary is actually far more nuanced. Rhetorical studies can approach formalization through comparative studies of particular cases through a common framework, just as a more formal approach such as pragma-dialectics veers toward consideration of particulars when it introduces the study of strategic maneuvering in an attempt to account for rhetorical considerations.

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3 Conclusion Each of the major theoretical orientations—logic, dialectic, and rhetoric—finds that argumentation has both a descriptive and a normative dimension. The former allows scholars to characterize actual practice in order to explain what is happening in this unique kind of human interaction and to make sense of the products that result from it. In contrast, the latter provides models for improving the practice of argumentation by bringing it closer into line with a counterfactual but aspirational ideal. For at least some varieties of informal logic, the normative ideal is an arguer who displays “manifest rationality” by producing discourse structures with both an “illative core” and a “dialectical tier” (see Johnson 2000), acknowledging possible objections while satisfactorily answering critical questions that are appropriate to the argument scheme, analogously to the validity questions of formal logic. For pragma-dialecticians, the ideal is a protagonist and antagonist engaged in dialogue that observes the rules of a “critical discussion.” And for rhetoricians, the ideal is a speaker addressing an audience imagined to include all reasonable people, welcoming critical scrutiny and enacting a stance of restrained partisanship so that the encounter serves a cooperative purpose even if the overt motives of the arguers are adversarial. In all cases, of course, actual practice is sometimes far indeed from the normative ideal. In the case of rhetoric, arguers sometimes try to conceal their claims from critical scrutiny, to appeal to audiences on grounds extraneous to the reasonableness of the claims, and to make pragmatic effectiveness their only consideration. Sometimes consensus is not the objective, and rhetoric sometimes serves to create or to magnify disagreements rather than to resolve them. Sometimes it even serves to incite violence rather than to offer an alternative to it. Rhetoric that does these things is still a fit subject for study by analysts and critics who seek to understand what is happening and why it matters. But to the degree that rhetoric is guided by and strives for the aspirational ideal, it provides a way to answer the question, “What’s reasonable?” that is grounded in the practice of effective communication. This essay has been an attempt to explicate the tacit assumptions that are implicit in attempts to practice or study argumentation rhetorically. In some respects, they are unique to this disciplinary perspective. Yet a subsidiary theme of the essay is that in some respects, the normative ideals of logic, dialectic, and rhetoric are quite similar. For instance, if the rhetorician’s universal audience really existed, it would observe the dialectician’s rules of a critical discussion. The aspirational goals, though drawn from different starting points, expressed in different vocabularies, and employing different degrees of systematicity and formalization, nevertheless share the therapeutic objectives of giving meaningful voice to all arguers, enriching democratic practice, and improving the human condition.

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References Ehninger, Douglas. 1970. Argument as method: Its nature, its limitations and its uses. Communication Monographs 37: 101–110. Johnson, Ralph H. 2000. Manifest rationality: A pragmatic theory of argument. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Johnstone, Henry W. 1965. Some reflections on argumentation. In Philosophy, rhetoric, and argumentation, ed. M. Natanson and H.W. Johnstone, 1–9. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Johnstone Jr., Henry W. 1970. The problem of the self. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Kock, Christian. 2009. Choice is not true or false: The domain of rhetorical argumentation. Argumentation 23: 61–80. Perelman, Chaïm, and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca. 1969. The new rhetoric: A treatise on argumentation (trans: John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver). Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Tulis, J.K., and N. Mellow. 2018. Legacies of losing in American politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. van Eemeren, Frans H. 2018. Argumentation theory: A pragma-dialectical perspective. Cham: Springer.

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Argumentation (2020) 34:311–323 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-019-09502-1

Argument from Similitude in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Deliberative Dissent from War Robert L. Ivie1 Published online: 17 September 2019 © Springer Nature B.V. 2019

Abstract Martin Luther King, Jr.’s anti-war speech, “Beyond Vietnam,” is a noteworthy example of deliberation by dissent from the margins. Attention is given to the formation of his moral argument from similitude, its foundation in metaphor and archetypal imagery, and how it shifted perspective to enable the introduction of alternative lines of argument. King’s argumentation, as it worked rhetorically toward making the war debatable, exhibited key features of deliberative dissent, including catachresis, contingency, perspective, and incommensurability. Keywords  Metaphor · Archetype · Analogy · Argument from similitude · Dissent · Deliberation · Martin Luther King, Jr. · Vietnam War Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one’s own bosom and in the surrounding world. Martin Luther King, Jr. “Beyond Vietnam,” April 4, 1967

In the context of political culture, argumentation assumes a distinctly rhetorical character, which becomes evident when an argument contravenes conventional wisdom. Truisms—political culture’s prevailing beliefs and sentiments—narrow the margins of plausibility and tolerance for dissenting opinions. Making a case for nonconformist views elicits rhetorical twists and turns—in a word, tropes—to shift perspective and prompt alternative lines of argument. Tropes operate on the principle of catachresis, rhetoric’s trademark, according to Laclau (2014, pp. 64, 68, 123). With a twist of language, one can say more than otherwise can be said and can render sedimented articulations contingent. In this way, Chapter 3 was originally published as Ivie, R. L. Argumentation (2020) 34: 311–323. https://doi.org/ 10.1007/s10503-019-09502-1.

* Robert L. Ivie [email protected] 1



Professor Emeritus, English (Rhetoric) and American Studies, Department of English, Indiana University, Lindley Hall 215 / 150 S. Woodlawn Avenue, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA

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argumentation that is overly constrained by political dictums and cultural platitudes might be reactivated while speaking, in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s (1967) words, “with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision” and thus without recourse to absolutist discourse.1 King’s rhetorical encounter with conformist thought confronted the problem of how to give dissent sufficient argumentative purchase to warrant deliberation. He spoke in a context of ruptured politics. By the spring of 1967, protest was a gathering storm in the nation’s streets. The antiwar movement gained national prominence after the US bombing of North Vietnam began in March of 1965. The base of the protest widened from that point forward. A hundred thousand demonstrators massed at the Lincoln Memorial on October 21, 1967, 30,000 of whom marched on the Pentagon, leading to a brutal confrontation with soldiers and US marshals. The national protest was further intensified by the Tet Offensive in January 2018, which put the lie to any claim the war was winding down to a victorious end. By then, about half the public disapproved of the war. After winning the presidency in 1968, however, Richard Nixon declared that a vocal minority of protesters should not be allowed to drown out what he termed the silent majority. Protest was raw and division ran deep before and after King’s dissent from the war, but his intervention was not without probative value and deliberative import. King had previously expressed disapproval of the war in Vietnam, but his extended critique of the war at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967 left no doubt about where he stood and why. The speech progressed thematically from addressing the necessity of protesting the war and speaking on behalf of those most affected by it to developing a history of the conflict from the standpoint of the Vietnamese, ultimately calling for a revolution of values to overturn American militarism (Dionisopoulos et  al. 1992, 99–102). Insisting there was a convergence of interests between the civil rights and peace movements, King accused the US government of being a purveyor of colonial violence. The war was a vehicle of economic exploitation and oppression. It profited the rich while robbing national resources for addressing issues of social injustice, especially the needs of poor blacks deprived of their civil rights at home and sent off in disproportionate numbers to fight an unwinnable war against another oppressed people. Accordingly, he called for an end to the bombing in North and South Vietnam, a unilateral cease fire, and a negotiated conclusion to the war followed by reparations made by the US for the damage done to the Vietnamese people. In opposing the Vietnam War, King confronted the political orthodoxy of Cold War anticommunism and a “lingering legacy” of McCarthyism that “conflated dissent with treason” (Lucks 2015, 399). Operating within a noxious culture of conformity, he reworked pieties of American political thought tropically to advance a principled argument. He opened space for deliberation by articulating, through figuration, a moral argument from similitude. The culturally apt metaphors from which his argument developed effected a shift of perspective from which to debate the war’s legitimacy. 1

  All excerpts from King’s speech, “Beyond Vietnam,” are drawn from King (1967).

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1 From Metaphor to Analogy and Similitude Metaphor is the trope Burke (1969, pp. 503–517) associates with perspective. Drawing upon language from Richards (1936), we might say one term (a vehicle) frames another (the tenor). Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969, pp. 398–400) refer to the fusion of phoros and theme. Burke (1969, pp. 503–504, emphasis in the original), writes that “metaphor is the device for seeing something in terms of something else”. It tells us about one thing from the point of view of another. In King’s dissent, the tenor of war and its potential transformation were conveyed through a number of metaphorical vehicles, including soul, night/darkness, madness, poison, malady, death, autopsy, path, light, health/life, maturity, atonement, and brotherhood. Together, they framed the problem of war as a malady of the nation’s soul: “If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam”. King aimed to recover “the life and health of America”. Within this enabling framework, he crafted a multifaceted argument from similitude operating on the principle of an underlying analogy: The war was to the nation’s soul as poison to the body; it was destroying America’s spirit or true self. “Those who argue from similitude,” Weaver (1953, pp. 56–57) observes, “invoke essential (although not exhaustive) correspondences” to “establish a probability” about the unity or “oneness of the world”. This argument is used chiefly by “thinkers of the analogical sort”. All analogy, Weaver (1957, p. 129) states, “depends on a theory that if two things resemble in a certain number of respects, it is probable they resemble in still further respects”. Framed as an enthymeme, the major premise of an argument from similitude asserts the principle of similarity or comparability; the minor premise asserts the fact of similarity; the conclusion asserts the probability of additional similarity. Weaver (1957, pp. 130–131) illustrates the argument from similitude with a selection from a speech by William Jennings Bryan opposing a policy of national armament. The essence of Bryan’s argument against military preparedness was that if two neighbors increase the likelihood of getting into a shootout by arming against each other, two nations increase the likelihood of war by arming themselves against one another (Weaver 1957, p. 131). In Bryan’s (1916, p. 259) concluding words: “as the pistol-toting man is a menace to the peace of the community, so the pistol-toting nation is a menace to the peace of the world”. Human nature is much the same in both circumstances, including the conceit of arming oneself to keep the peace. The movement from metaphor to analogy and similitude forms a proposition. As Weaver (1953, p. 211) explains, a “term is a name capable of entering into a proposition,” which is to say, “a single term is an incipient proposition, awaiting only the necessary coupling with another term”. This coupling might be expressed as a fusion of phoros and theme, or a framing of tenor by vehicle. Naming is critical to forming an argument. The argument from similitude is an inference that terms alike in some ways are alike in other ways. When “impressed with the similarity drawn between two things,” Weaver (1970, p. 210) notes, we are “more likely to accept a policy which involves treating something in the same way in which its analogue is treated”.

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This double movement of fusion and inference is evident in King’s speech. The vehicle of poison linked the war to spiritual death, which set in motion an argument to save the nation’s soul by ending the war. King mentioned poison four times: “America’s soul” risked being “totally poisoned” by the Vietnam War. In Vietnam, the US “fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long”. The Vietnamese people “watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops”. This business… of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane” was a route to “spiritual death. The metaphor fused tenor and vehicle—two richly symbolic terms animating one another to prompt the premise that America’s soul was being poisoned by the war in Vietnam. Continuing a war that poisoned the water of life and injected a humane people with the poison of hate would result in spiritual death. Thus, King concluded, “In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war”. Or, consonant with Weaver’s point that a policy is more likely to be accepted if it means treating one thing consistent with the treatment of its analogue, King’s basic argument can be rendered in the following way: Just as one would save the body by withdrawing the poison, the US should save its soul by withdrawing from war in Vietnam. The double movement of fusion and inference drew upon a cluster of related metaphors extending from the nation’s poisoned soul to an image of atonement. Vehicles of malady, madness, darkness, curse, hell, and autopsy came into play to underscore an ominous sense of illness, blindness, and death; images of paths to suggest a choice of direction; images of light and maturity to signify insight, growth, and movement toward health and life; an image of brotherhood to transcend nationalism and point to the end of war. Such imagery propelled a set of inferences about what was wrong with the war and how to make it right: Somehow this madness must cease. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight. … We are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us. The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam. As Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969, pp. 399–403) explain, such metaphors are condensed analogies, which makes them important to argumentation. They consecrate the relationship between phoros and theme to present the analogy as a datum, not merely a suggestion. The phoros of the analogy functions as a starting point from which to draw conclusions about the theme. It advances a

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viewpoint and corresponding attitude that transcends traditional classifications. War in Vietnam, as poison to the soul, was a choice of death over life, darkness over light, madness over sanity, arrogance over maturity, which—from King’s alternative perspective—rendered the war irrational. Initiating the end of armed hostilities made moral sense. King’s moral argument was consistent with his personal identity and ethos. The Reverend professed to operate “on the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience” to bring Vietnam into the field of his “moral vision”. Weaver (1953, 57) observes that thinkers of the metaphorical-analogical sort, who use the argument from similitude chiefly to express “belief in a oneness of the world,” are often “poets and religionists”. King—identifying himself as “a preacher by calling”—personified the nation’s wounded moral conscience, a conscience he articulated metaphorically as a condensed analogy in which poisoning the soul (phoros) was fused with fighting the war in Vietnam (theme).

2 Archetypal Imagery Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969, pp. 372–374, 378, 381, 385–386, 392) theorize that arguments from analogy work to establish the structure of reality, at least a probability thereof. The relationship between the terms in the analogy’s phoros frame the way the relationship between the terms in the analogy’s theme are understood. The association of phoros and theme across spheres of meaning impacts the value or significance attributed to the theme while providing the theme with a plausible structure and conceptual setting as a starting point for a line of argumentation, assuming of course that the analogy’s probative value is not overreached. In this regard, “multiple analogies can support each other” to articulate a plausible structure of reality. Indeed, the moral argument from similitude, advanced by our analogical thinker, drew on a cluster of metaphors to establish a presumption of reality. His argument’s standing, as a framework for disputing the war in Vietnam, drew upon the mythos of its metaphors. Mythos, understood as a symbolically rendered pattern of beliefs, attitudes, and ideals embedded in a culture’s worldview, is the source of a people’s ethos. It is their poetic logic (Mali 2003, pp. 1–3). Its narrative and imagery constitute the rationale of the civil world (Mali 1992, pp. 3–4), forming a sensus communis that provides meaningful order where otherwise incoherence would prevail (Daniel 1990, pp. 4–7, 10; Schaffer 1990, pp. 1–4). Its operative principle is metaphor, which is myth in miniature or, in Vico’s terms, abbreviated myth, which shapes thought and reason by “highlight[ing] the similarity of things rather than their differences” (Daniel 1990, pp. 10, 22, 129, 134). The moral force and unity King sought in argument from similitude emerged mythically from a cluster of metaphors carrying archetypal import and authority. Archetypal metaphors, as Michael Osborn (1967, pp. 116–117, 119–120) underscores, operate rhetorically to advance value judgments by drawing on dark/light, disease/remedy, death/life, and other paradigmatic imagery, establishing mood and perspective by linking experience to basic motivations. Speakers draw on archetypal Reprinted from the journal

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metaphors when they wish “to effect crucial changes in societal attitudes”. Advancing an ethical premise with a qualitative argument by analogy, Osborn observes, corresponds to argument by archetype, which can prove probative in periods of political crisis. The archetypal metaphors from which such arguments emerge carry a motivational charge that tends to persist over time; they can “interact and reinforce each other” to convey “narrative impulses toward certain actions” that are hard to deny or repudiate (Osborn 2018, pp. 77–81). King’s archetypal imagery featured dark/light, sickness/health, death/life, madness/sanity, enemy/brother, and sin/atonement metaphors to convey the moral mythos of his argument from similitude. The general movement of this archetypal cluster was along a path from the darkness of disease, madness, death, enemies, and sin to the light of health, sanity, life, brotherhood, and redemption. “We are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness,” he insisted, a way for “radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam” to bring “a society gone mad on war” into a field of “moral vision,” working for “the brotherhood of man” in order to recover “the life and health of America” and “to save the soul of America”. Allegiance to the “vocation of sonship and brotherhood” runs “broader and deeper than nationalism”. It requires Americans to choose “twixt that darkness and that light” (in the words of James Russell Lowell), to “admit that we have been wrong” in Vietnam, King observed, and “to turn sharply from our present ways” in order “to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam”. King’s extended argument from similitude—its metaphors operating as condensed analogy and abbreviated myth—was synthetic, not linear. It articulated a claim of moral unity, the oneness of humankind, linking Americans to Vietnamese in symbolic kinship, a spiritual bond of brotherhood transcending the divisions of nationalism. Humanizing the enemy under the sign of kinship—a direct challenge to, and departure from, the demonizing theme of war rhetoric—constituted an alternative framework of argumentation. Expressed in premises, the thrust of King’s argument (conveying the moral oneness of humanity by means of archetypal metaphors) went something like the following: To save our soul, we must stop the killings in Vietnam (claim/conclusion), because the Vietnamese are our brothers (data/ minor premise), and killing a brother is sinful (warrant/major premise). As Dionisopoulos et al. (1992, 101) observe, “King’s account of the war” depicted the US as “morally culpable,” which required “an act of expiation”.

3 Perspective‑Taking Arguments The framing argument from similitude authorized subsequent arguments from perspective. Viewing the Vietnamese people from the standpoint of fellow human beings (rather than an evil enemy) lent a degree of plausibility to arguments proffered by King in their name. Humanizing the enemy under the sign of kinship gave salience to claims, warrants, and data that otherwise fell outside the scope of deliberation (Toulmin 1958). The “true meaning and value of compassion,” King insisted, is that it “helps us to see the enemy’s point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves,” to “see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and

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if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition”. Thus, King tried “to give voice to the voiceless in Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called ‘enemy.’” Arguments King articulated from the standpoint of “the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now” included the observation that “they must see Americans as strange liberators” who supported France’s “effort to recolonize Vietnam,” paying up to 80% of French war costs, and “rejected a revolutionary government [of Vietnamese] seeking self-determination” in favor of a dictator in South Vietnam who “ruthlessly rooted out all opposition” and “refused even to discuss reunification with the North”. While promising peace, democracy, and land reform, the US sent its troops in massive numbers to support a series of governments in South Vietnam that “were singularly corrupt, inept, and without popular support”. American military forces destroyed Vietnamese families, villages, land, and crops, corrupted Vietnamese women and children, and killed their men. “We must speak for them,” King concluded, “and raise the questions they cannot raise. They, too, are our brothers”. Claim: the US supports tyranny and war over democracy and peace. Data: the US funded France’s effort to recolonize Vietnam, supported South Vietnamese dictators, and sent its own army to kill Vietnamese and destroy their way of life. Warrant: actions are more telling than promises.2 King also articulated arguments from the standpoint of the National Liberation Front (called Viet Cong and communists, even though communists made up less than 25% of the NLF membership, King insisted). He spoke for those who, he said, were designated as America’s enemies but had been “pressed” to a level of violence that was “dwarfed” by the violence of Americans and the South Vietnamese dictators they supported. The NLF was the only political entity in touch with the Vietnamese people; it controlled large sections of South Vietnam; the South Vietnamese press was censored and controlled by a military junta; yet the US spoke of holding free national elections excluding NLF participation. Again, King pointed out the inconsistency between what the US professed and what it did, data and warrant supporting a claim that the US preferred coercion over democracy. Arguing from the standpoint of North Vietnam, King claimed it was hesitant to negotiate with a US it could not trust. North Vietnam had watched the US breech the Geneva Agreement of 1954 by sending troops to South Vietnam and by conspiring with South Vietnam dictator Diem to prevent an election that would have brought the North’s Ho Chi Minh “to power over a united Vietnam”. North Vietnam listened to the US speak of aggression from the North as “the most powerful nation of the world” dropped “thousands of bombs on a poor, weak nation… more than 8000 miles away from its shores”. American “cynicism” was such, King concluded, that “none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved”. The US sent its troops to fight for “the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor”.

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 Recounting his decision to speak out, King (1998, pp. 334–335) wrote that he hesitated at first because President Johnson declared his willingness “to negotiate, to talk peace, and thus end the death and destruction”. Eventually, after measuring “promising words of peace against the baneful, escalating deeds of war,” King discerned that his country “was only talking peace but was bent on military victory”. Reprinted from the journal

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Speaking as “a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam,” King insisted “the great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours”. Arguing from the standpoint of the larger world, the world beyond Vietnam, the developing world where “men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression,” King observed that the US war in Vietnam was a “symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit,” a malady that required a “profound change in American life and policy,” a “true revolution of values”. America was “on the wrong side of a world revolution”. It was “making peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments”. Capitalists were taking profits out of Asia, Africa, and South America with “no concern for the social betterment” of the poor people in those lands. The US must “recapture the spirit of revolution,” declare “eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism,” “develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole,” and “make democracy real”. Americans “must not engage in a negative anticommunism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism” is to undertake positive actions to remove “conditions of poverty, insecurity, and injustice”. Data: the US is acting the part of an arch antirevolutionary, violently exploiting people throughout the developing world. Warrant: exploitation and oppression are incompatible with American values. Claim: America must renew its commitment to democratic values.

4 Deliberation by Dissent King’s dissent from war was deliberative in the sense that its moral argument, grounded in archetypal metaphors, engaged American values, humanized the enemy Other, and set in motion a set of perspective-taking arguments to lend credibility, salience, and focus to the otherwise marginalized issue of US aggression. As one of the first “to venture so far out on this limb,” he formulated a case against the war in “culture-specific” language (Antczak 1993, p. 129). His argument was overtly catachrestic, drawing on metaphor to initiate a shift of perspective. As an exercise in what Burke (1984, 69) called “perspective by incongruity,” it merged “categories once felt to be mutually exclusive”. It recognized its own limited vision even as it worked to complicate the narrow, totalizing orientation within which the case for war operated. Drawing on analogy to reason in a single step from something known to something unknown is to allow implicitly that “the available knowledge of the subject permits only probable proof”. Weaver (1970, pp. 213–214) sees “in this source of argument a kind of decent reticence, a recognition of the unknown along with the known”. As Laclau (2014, pp. 202–203, emphasis in the original) explains, to advance a truth without attempting to make it absolute means it will be confronted with “other opinions, views ideas, and so on—and if the truth is permanently non-total it will have to incorporate into its form this element of confrontation, which involves collective deliberation,” deliberation, that is, “conceived in a wide sense (involving partial conversions, dialogues, negotiations, struggles, and so on)”.

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King’s argumentation worked rhetorically toward making the war debatable. It prompted controversy and “occasioned extensive debate in Congress and in the public press,” raising “an insistent cry, once heard only at extreme radical fringes of the political culture” (Dionisopoulos et al. 1992, pp. 93, 102). “The moral clarity and courage of King’s speech marked his finest hour,” Lucks (2015, p. 415) concludes; it helped to “turn the tide of black opinion against the Vietnam War”. As a moralist and pragmatist, King had the capacity, in Halberstam’s (1983, p. 311) terms, to bring a disorder to the surface and make it visible. While the initial reaction to King’s dissent was largely negative, Dionisopoulos et al. (1992, pp. 93, 105), writing 25 years after the speech, could state that the morality of King’s stance and his right to speak out were by then broadly accepted. King was a rhetorical forerunner, contributing to an eventual shift in public opinion (Darby and Rowley 1986, p. 50). While King’s opposition to the Vietnam War “undoubtedly strengthened the peace campaign” (Fairclough 1984, p. 34), the arguments he deployed to generate debate were necessarily rhetorical and thus subject to resistance and criticism. As Fairclough (1984, p. 38) observes, his critics called attention to “oversimplifications and hyperboles” as evidence that he lacked expertise in foreign affairs. Maybe South Vietnam’s Diem was not one of the most vicious dictators of our times; maybe the National Liberation Front was not essentially non-communist, fully independent of the North, or supported by the “vast majority” of Vietnamese; and why no mention of the violence and oppression perpetrated by the North Vietnamese? “Nevertheless,” Fairclough (1984, p. 38) continues, “King’s understanding of the nature of the war was far clearer than that of the Johnson Administration, which consistently interpreted the conflict in terms of ‘militant, aggressive Asian communism’… thus ignoring the all-important nationalist and anti-colonialist dimensions” of the war. Moreover, “subsequent revelations” (about Agent Orange, My Lai, and the like) demonstrated that King’s critique of US war practices “was, if anything, understated”. As Harding (2008, p. 68) notes, the same Washington Post that immediately criticized King’s speech for drawing inferences without sufficient documentation later reported on its front pages, as did other leading newspapers, all the documentation, “direct from government files,” needed to bolster the factual foundation of his critique of America’s role in the war. The data King introduced by looking through a Vietnamese lens served as the ground on which he based his controversial claims. In Toulmin’s (1958, pp. 97–98) terms, they were an early answer to the question, “What have we got to go on”. Additional information coming from other sources subsequently bolstered that foundation. The movement between data and claim is not necessarily unidirectional in a synthesizing argument. In short, King’s dissent carried deliberative import, both as a contribution and a prompt to debate.

5 Deliberation in a Moral Context Most importantly, King placed the debate within a new moral context. Antczak (1993, pp. 137–138, 140–142, 145) develops this point by focusing on the speech’s call for a revolution of values which entailed a reshaping of “the language of Reprinted from the journal

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political discourse” in order “to change how Americans deliberate” the war, “the very way they recognize benefits and costs”. King’s appropriation of central themes of the American dream “created new possibilities for talk and action”. He edged Americans toward acknowledging the dark side of American involvement in Vietnam, “to see and describe things differently, to abandon the conventional terms and objects of calculation,” and to consider “what it might tell us about ourselves”. Seeing the poor and exploited as spiritual kin, as neighbors and brothers, enabled them to peek beyond the delimiting Cold War framework that promoted materialism, militarism, and racism under the guise of anticommunism and at the expense of “American values of revolution, freedom, and democracy”. Antczak’s point resonates with Cornel West’s (1999, pp. 426, 432–434) assessment of the prophetic voice of American civil religion reverberating in King’s discourse, which fused “secular and sacred history” and combined “Christian themes of deliverance and salvation with political ideals of democracy, freedom, and equality” to challenge imperialism and racism. Rather than the bland American dream of material enrichment, King sought a moral renewal by calling the nation back to its founding vision and ideals. The “genius” of King’s address, Jasinski and Murphy (2009, pp. 108, 117–119) conclude, was the interanimation of civic republicanism with a radicalized version of the genre of the jeremiad, thus capitalizing on two traditions of American dissent to “craft an effective ethical response to the powerful imperatives of presidential war rhetoric,” a war rhetoric that renders the enemy in the demonizing image of savagery. King recovered “corrupted or deformed national values” and reconstituted the Puritan tradition of an errand into the wilderness to allow for transformative possibilities within the political culture. His dissent was radical in its extension of national values beyond their parochial horizon to encompass a worldwide fellowship rather than a narrow American exceptionalism. Locating deliberation in the space of war dissent brings into focus the challenge of arguing against conformist thought. To speak against the established view of reality, the orientation in which the nation-state is deeply invested, is an act of impiety. Piety is Burke’s (1984, pp. 3, 69, 76, 169) term for the deep motivational sense of “what [properly] goes with what”—the “yearning to conform with the ‘sources of one’s being’”. Violating that “largely self-perpetuating” sensibility can be profoundly disorienting. Thus, the perceived impropriety of challenging the legitimacy of a war system to which the country has committed itself materially and symbolically is met with a powerful reluctance even to acknowledge, let alone debate, claims made against the war in Vietnam. Dissenters, if they hope to get a hearing, must draw on the symbols common to the political culture, especially metaphors that can serve by analogical extension and the logic of similitude as a cue for organizing data into generalizations (Burke 1984, pp. 95–100, 245). To argue for an alternative perspective in the spirit of analogy is to advance a claim on the basis of a similarity rather than an identity, which is to confront conformity without substituting one absolute for another. Closure of this kind is incomplete rather than totalizing, conclusions are provisional rather than irrevocable, and contingency is reactivated as the ground of argumentation (Laclau 2014, pp. 63–64). It requires powerful symbols—in King’s case archetypal metaphors—to

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achieve this result reasonably enough to render a prevailing piety debatable and to challenge it with an alternative vision of oneness partly realized. Weaver (1970, pp. 224–225) insists that language, including rhetorical argumentation, is sermonic and that, as language users, we are all preachers because we “have no sooner uttered words than we have given impulse to other people to look at the world, or some small part of it, in our way”. Rhetoric “confronts us with choices involving values,” leaving to the principled preacher-rhetorician the challenge of directing us toward “noble ends”. Reverend King’s argument from similitude portended a shift of perspective and reevaluation of the war in Vietnam by the public at large. Whether eventually it will help to prompt a revolution of values remains an open question. War culture persists into the present day seemingly unabated. Yet, the words King uttered at Riverside Church more than 50 years ago remain embedded in the national conscience and imaginary. Exactly 1  year after his speech at Riverside Church, King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. While resistance to the war grew on the home front, the war did not end for Americans until the beginning of 1973 and for the Vietnamese until April 30, 1975, 7 years after King was killed. The man was silenced by an assassin’s bullet, but the lesson he taught in deliberative dissent was not so easily erased. He planted a seed of doubt in the war culture by helping the country turn a corner of awareness and gaze upon its compromised soul.

6 Conclusion King’s example of deliberative dissent resonates with Christian Kock’s (2017, pp. 1–2, 5–6, 8, 10–11) conception of practical reasoning in deliberative rhetoric, which involves arguing foremost about choice (what to do, what action to take, what policy to support). There are always arguments for and against a proposed course of action, which requires a relative weighing or balancing of arguments on the issue at hand without necessarily coming to a consensus. The multiple “conflicting value dimensions” of practical reasoning allow for a “reasonable dissensus,” that is, an “enduring disagreement even between reasonable people arguing reasonably”. Argument from similitude is a case in point. It is one of the main types of argument Weaver (1970, p. 211) specifies for rhetoric understood as “an art of emphasis embodying an order of desire”. Rhetorical reasoning by similitude “exhibits an attitude” that “implies an act” (Weaver 1970, p. 221). It can lend weight to a case by virtue of moral emphasis. King’s tropes, especially his metaphors, articulated a profound shift of perspective, a moral reframing and weighting. His argument for ending the war to save America’s democratic soul was incommensurable with the Johnson administration’s case for a military campaign against communism in Asia. His deliberative dissent deviated from Cold War orthodoxy by turning to a moral argument for undertaking “a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to… seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity, and injustice, which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops”. Reprinted from the journal

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This was Cornel West’s (2015, pp. x–xv) “radical King,” whom the government considered “the most dangerous man in America”. This radical King saw that his dream of a freer and more democratic America had become a nightmare of racism, poverty, materialism, and militarism that sickened the nation’s soul and warped its priorities. This radical King was a “warrior for peace” loyal to the country he critiqued from the vantage point of a wider angle, “a spiritual giant who tried to shatter the callousness and indifference of his fellow citizens,” a man who called for a revolution of priorities in the nation’s “way of thinking and living,” a prophetic figure of “kinetic orality, passionate physicality, and combative spirituality that wedded mind to movement, soul to sustenance, and body to empowerment”. King’s dissent was deliberative in Elizabeth Markovits’s (2008, pp. 3–4, 9–11, 23, 26–28) sense of deliberation as “the process of weighing various sides of an issue,” which involves reason and feeling, is inescapably rhetorical, and occurs in a “decentered arena”. Its goal, she explains, is not necessarily consensus or even “reaching the same conclusion about what action to take,” because that works to discourage dissent and thus to deprive the debate of differing perspectives, including an understanding of how far apart those perspectives may be. It also leaves bargaining and negotiation outside the scope of deliberation, obscures the complexity of the democratic process, and ignores the fact that agreement, when it occurs, can be reached on the basis of different, even incommensurable reasons. Privileging consensus too readily depoliticizes dissent and thereby silences marginalized voices and thus the ability to “contest hegemonic political discourses”. Dissent, as a rhetorical contribution to democratic deliberation, is argumentation that begins on the margins. Its immediate impact is more likely to excite controversy than to effect a change of policy. It is vulnerable to suppression. Its potential is to introduce an alternative perspective and to prompt debate. It may gain weight over time, but any such gain is situational and episodic. Hegemonic forces, including war culture, work to recapture dissenting arguments (Certeau 1997, p. 24), which requires tactical maneuvering to avoid being subsumed and neutralized. Deliberative dissent is a fugitive practice (Wolin 2010, pp. 277–278) crucial to democratic politics but subject to depoliticization. The moral argument from similitude that emerged from King’s archetypal imagery is noteworthy for its potential to resist erasure and foster debate, not only in the relatively early phase of protesting America’s war in Vietnam but decades later. King warned that the war was “a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit,” with implications “beyond Vietnam”. A failure to heal the nation’s sickened soul—“to turn sharply from our present ways” in “this nightmarish conflict”—would perpetuate the war system and sustain a counterproductive pattern of violently suppressing recurring revolutions against “old systems of exploitation and oppression”. The continuing relevance of King’s argumentation should be apparent to those who wish to deliberate US militarism.

References Antczak, F.J. 1993. When “silence is betrayal”: An ethical criticism of the revolution of values in the speech at Riverside church. In Martin Luther King, Jr., and the sermonic power of public discourse, ed. C. Calloway-Thomas and J.L. Lucaites, 127–146. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press.

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Argument from Similitude in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s… Bryan, W.J. 1916. The proposal for a league to enforce peace—negative, 245–259. Documents of the American Association for International Conciliation. New York: American Association for International Conciliation. Burke, K. 1969. A grammar of motives. Berkeley: University of California Press. Burke, K. 1984. Permanence and change: An anatomy of purpose, 3rd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press. de Certeau, M. 1997. The capture of speech and other political writings, eds. L. Giard, Trans. T. Conley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Daniel, S.H. 1990. Myth and modern philosophy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Darby, H.E., and M.N. Rowley. 1986. King on Vietnam and beyond. Phylon 47 (1): 43–50. Dionisopoulos, G.N., V.J. Gallagher, S.R. Goldzwig, and D. Zarefsky. 1992. Martin Luther King, the American dream and Vietnam: A collision of rhetorical trajectories. Western Journal of Communication 56 (2): 91–107. Fairclough, A. 1984. Martin Luther King Jr. and the war in Vietnam. Phylon 45 (1): 19–39. Halberstam, D. 1983. Martin Luther King, American preacher. Esquire 100 (6): 306–312. Harding, V. 2008. Martin Luther King: The inconvenient hero, rev ed. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Jasinski, J., and J.M. Murphy. 2009. Time, space, and generic reconstitution: Martin Luther King’s “A time to break silence” as radical jeremiad. In Public address and moral judgment: Critical studies in ethical tensions, ed. S. Parry-Giles and T. Parry-Giles, 97–126. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. King, M.L., Jr. 1967. Beyond Vietnam. American Rhetoric: Online Speech Bank. Retrieved January 21, 2019 from https​://www.ameri​canrh​etori​c.com/speec​hes/mlkat​imeto​break​silen​ce.htm. King, M.L., Jr., 1998. The autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. C. Carson. New York: Warner Books. Kock, C. 2017. Deliberative rhetoric: Arguing about doing, ed. H.V. Hansen. Windsor, Canada: University of Windsor. Laclau, E. 2014. The rhetorical foundations of society. London: Verso. Lucks, D.S. 2015. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Riverside speech and Cold War civil rights. Peace & Change 40 (3): 395–422. Mali, J. 1992. The rehabilitation of myth: Vico’s New Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mali, J. 2003. Mythistory: The making of a modern historiography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Markovits, E. 2008. The politics of sincerity: Plato, frank speech, and democratic judgment. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Osborn, M. 1967. Archetypal metaphor in rhetoric: The light-dark family. Quarterly Journal of Speech 53 (2): 115–126. Osborn, M. 2018. Michael Osborn on metaphor and style. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Perelman, C., and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca. 1969. The new rhetoric: A treatise on argumentation, eds. Trans. J. Wilkinson and P. Weaver. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Richards, I.A. 1936. The philosophy of rhetoric. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schaffer, J.D. 1990. Sensus communis: Vico, rhetorc, and the limits of relativism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Toulmin, S. 1958. The uses of argument. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weaver, R. 1953. The ethics of rhetoric. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company. Weaver, R. 1957. Composition: A course in writing and rhetoric. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Weaver, R. 1970. Language is sermonic: Richard M. Weaver on the nature of rhetoric, eds. R. Johannesen, R. Strickland, and R. Eubanks. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. West, C. 1999. Prophetic Christian as organic intellectual: Martin Luther King, Jr. In The cornel west reader, ed. C. West, 425–434. New York: Basic Civitas Books. West, C. (ed.). 2015. The radical King: Martin Luther King, Jr. Boston: Beacon Press. Wolin, S. 2010. Democracy incorporated: Managed democracy and the specter of inverted totalitarianism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Argumentation (2020) 34:325–337 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-019-09500-3

Progress, but Slow Going: Public Argument in the Forging of Collective Norms Lisa S. Villadsen1 Published online: 18 September 2019 © Springer Nature B.V. 2019

Abstract Rhetorical argumentation is a craft: collective, processual, and circulating, and it partakes in the indeterminate evolution of public norms. Official apologies can illustrate how rhetorical modalities over time can reflect change in civic sensibilities and effect collective moral reflection and evolution. Rhetorical citizenship, understood as encompassing both critical production and reception of publicly circulating arguments, is a way of conceptualizing the interaction between the individual and the collective in the ongoing discursive formation of the community and the norms that inform it. Keywords Rhetorical citizenship · Public norms · Craft · Rhetorical argumentation · Celeste Michelle Condit · Chaïm Perelman · Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca · Public morality · Official apologies · Justin Trudeau · Hans Blumenberg Gutta cavat lapidem non vi, sed saepe cadendo.

1 Rhetorical Argumentation and Public Values This article is about argumentation in a broad sense.1 It concerns the use of appeals and reasons to influence other people’s thinking and action, but not particular argument schemes or specific argumentative moves. Instead of being concerned with the unique, game-changing, clever, or watertight argument-to-end-a-discussion, the topic here, rather, is the nature of the multiple, various, protracted—and often Chapter 4 was originally published as Villadsen, L. S. Argumentation (2020) 34: 325–337. https://doi.org/ 10.1007/s10503-019-09500-3. 1

 Ovid, Epistulae ex Ponto IV, 10, 5. “The water drop hollows a stone not by force but by falling often”.

The article is based on a keynote lecture entitled “Rhetorical citizenship and public moral argument: A quaint idea for turbulent times?” given at the 2nd International Rhetoric Workshop held in Ghent, Belgium, 2018. * Lisa S. Villadsen [email protected] 1

Department of Communication, University of Copenhagen, Karen Blixens Plads 8, 2300 Copenhagen S, Denmark

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controversial—discursive efforts it usually takes to effect change in people’s views. The article revisits the question of the relation between rhetoric and public morality, understood as norms and values held by (a majority of) a community, asking what brings about shifts in public2 assessment of moral questions. The claim is that rather than argumentation in a narrow sense as “demonstration”, “inference” or “resolution of a dispute”, rhetorical discourse, or argumentation in a broad sense, drives the formation and development of collective public norms. Given the age-old charge against rhetoric that it aims at persuasion at any cost and in so doing bypasses rational contemplation by addressing the emotions (thus rendering it a tool of distortion and manipulation), the association of rhetoric and ethics has traditionally been considered tenuous. This raises the question: What is, or can be, the role of rhetorical practices in the shaping of public norms? This article suggests that rhetoric is central to the formation of public morality and that rhetorical argumentation broadly construed is involved in the process. Its purpose is to make a case for the recognition of public discourse as a key factor of value evolution at a collective level. A key source of inspiration for this view is the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg’s discussion of rhetoric seen in an anthropological light (Blumenberg 1987). Taking his starting point in the question of whether mankind can be viewed as either a rich or a poor creature and likening that to the question of rhetoric’s status (is it “rich” with inventive adaptability or “poor” from lack of purchase on the truth?), Blumenberg writes: “Action compensates for the ‘indeterminateness’ of the creature man, and rhetoric is the effort to produce accords that have to take the place of the ‘substantial’ base of regulatory processes in order to make action possible”. Without rhetoric there would be no sense of relevance and no way to weigh competing positions against each other; rhetoric is crucial to the establishment of a motivational ground for action. He continues: “From this point of view, language is a set of instruments not for communicating information or truths, but rather, primarily, for the production of mutual understanding, agreement, or toleration, on which the actor depends” (p. 433). Describing the function of rhetoric as “a system not only of soliciting mandates for action but also of putting into effect and defending […] a selfconception that is in the process of formation” (p. 442), Blumenberg’s suggestion to understand rhetoric as “a rational way of coming to terms with the provisionality of reason” (p. 452) captures a key characteristic of rhetorical argumentation, namely its acceptance of contingency and its commitment to establishing relevance and social meaningfulness. The understanding of argumentation I mobilize here is equally inspired by Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, whose driving concern was how we reason about values. In their seminal treatise on argumentation, The New Rhetoric (1969 [1958]), they took appeals to values (and in this connection the epideictic genre in general) to be legitimate and thus deserving of serious inquiry, and they proposed a thoroughly rhetorical approach to reasoning by making a clear distinction between “argumentation” and “demonstration” (13), (the former being concerned 2

  By”public” I refer to the common opinion or, in classical terminology, doxa.

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with discursive techniques meant to induce or increase adherence to theses presented for assent; the latter being about applying rules of formal logic regarding validity). Demonstration proves, argumentation persuades. Importantly, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca did not pose persuasion as a binary phenomenon recognizing only two options: either one is persuaded or not. More helpfully, they proposed the term “adherence” for the many different degrees of awareness, interest, acceptance, conviction, etc. that an audience may take in relation to a thesis (p. 4). Like Aristotle, who defined rhetoric as the “faculty of discovering in any particular case all of the available means of persuasion” (Aristotle, 1354b), Perelman and OlbrechtsTyteca’s conception of rhetoric pivoted on argumentative approaches to inducing or increasing adherence (rather than studying actual effectiveness), and as Aristotle had described with his notion of “dialectical reasoning”, they recognized the interconnection between reason and emotion and values (p. 3). In a recent article on the relation between argumentation and memes Canadian philosopher Christopher Tindale similarly underscores the importance of keeping argumentation closely tied to human meaning making more broadly construed: What we are, as audiences and arguers, as persons, is a product of our social interaction, linguistic and experiential. The task is not to acquire the self-evident but to communicate argumentatively—to understand, influence, and even persuade. And to develop dispositions in others and ourselves that promote beliefs and actions that can be judged as reasonable (p. 574).

2 The Nametag A place to start is with an anecdote about an experience I had at an academic conference held in the US. Like at any other conference, participants wore nametags displaying their first name and their institutional affiliation. I ran into a friend who, in longhand, had added something below the printed name. It said: “He, him, his”. I was aware that some of my American colleagues include such pronoun information on their university web site and that they begin a new semester asking students about their preferred pronouns. I had also, from afar, noticed the 2016 American controversy over the North Carolina bathroom bill and the struggle over inclusive or exclusive signage, a debate which dramatized a clash between a traditional understanding of sex as a binary phenomenon (male or female) and a growing public awareness that gender is not a dichotomous phenomenon and that the way we label public toilets is one way to ignore or acknowledge this. In my own teaching I had even drawn on the controversy and the example of bathroom door icons to illustrate the notion of interpellation. Still, the handwritten pronouns took me by surprise. With my cursory understanding of the background and of the theoretical and ethical considerations at play, I wondered why my friend found it relevant to let other people know that he identifies as cis-gender. My first thought was that I couldn’t imagine that anyone really would be in doubt about how to refer to him. What I took to be the informational value of these additions to his nametag seemed unnecessary. In response Reprinted from the journal

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to my question about it my friend replied that he thought everyone should mark their nametag in a similar way. Having given this some thought, I came to interpret his announcement of his preferred pronouns not as a piece of information but as a gesture of solidarity towards others for whom the pronoun issue is not as ‘straightforward’ as it might be for him. By indicating his preferred pronouns he was doing his part in normalizing the act of paying attention to this, and he was enacting one way to make social interaction more hospitable and inclusive. He was at once participating in an ongoing argumentative effort about inclusivity and employing a symbolic modus to be the kind of rhetorical citizen he believes to be ethical. Or that is what I made of it.

3 Rhetoric and Public Morality The nametag anecdote illustrates not only that social norms are subject to deliberate change, but also that such change relies on multiple forms of public engagement, ranging from visual icons to legal argumentation. The experience highlights how everyday symbolic practices are opportunities to promote one’s value commitments, and it illustrates, in the words of Robert Asen, the capacity of rhetorical engagement “to refashion social norms and beliefs and to recast nonpolitical activities as political” (2004, p. 207). To ground my case for the appreciation of public discourse as a key factor in the shaping of collective values, I revisit Celeste Michelle Condit’s 1987 article “Crafting Virtue: The Rhetorical Construction of Public Morality” to ask if the rhetorical craft she described then has any purchase in our age of social estrangement and political polarization. I place her theory about how an active public morality springs from collective argumentative discourse in conversation with Robert Asen and Daniel Brouwer’s notion of modalities of public engagement (2001) and Christopher Tindale’s ideas about the circulation of memes/arguments in cognitive environments (2017), and I invoke Christian Kock’s and my own concept of rhetorical citizenship (2008, 2014) to make the case that at this moment—when despair and “tuning out” can be tempting reactions to a hyper-polarized political climate and to alarming developments in areas such as international relations, social inequality, minority protection, etc.—rhetorical practice remains a hope for collective ethical improvement and civic commitment. While it is not difficult to point to issues still far from a consensual understanding (e.g. abortion), or where political action actually lags behind basic agreement of the facts and their severity (e.g. climate change), and even instances of backlash of basic humanistic principles (treatment of refugees), there are occasional instances of arguable progress, or, in Condit’s own words, hope for “the possibility of slow, painful, moral resolutions in the public realm” (p. 81).

4 The Function of Public Debate While public debate often is aimed at reaching some level of common understanding of an issue and perhaps a compromise course of action to deal with it, it is important to remember that this pragmatic purpose is not the same as agreeing on a ‘correct’ answer

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or reaching consensus. To the extent that public debate is concerned with resolving issues, one might say that the “resolution” refers more to the participants’ resolve to settle on a course of action than reflects an ambition to resolve, as in settle, an issue once and for all. Seen this way, public debate serves the purpose of rehearsing, extending and testing viewpoints and arguments that will resonate with a wider public and possibly also make them see the matter with more perspective, thereby preparing the ground for collective assessment—and eventually action. In public debate, competing rhetors are not necessarily there to persuade each other, but to provide arguments for third parties, audiences, and thereby to create a “public consensus” that does not require the approval of every individual on every point, but can work with a general level of common acceptance. Rhetorical argumentation is characterized by framing viewpoints in collective terms, making them matter to others and giving them civic resonance. Condit underscores that “it is precisely the practice of public rhetoric that converts individual desires into something more—something carrying moral import, which can anchor the will of the community”, and that “[t]his transformation of desires is possible because public rhetoric requires that an individual speak a public language that includes linguistic commitments shared by all who are constituents of a community” (p. 82, emphasis in the original). Condit’s work here resonates with Perelman and Olbrecths-Tyteca’s in that she focuses on the long term “massaging” of the premises underlying public argumentation—what Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca call starting points; linking the facts, truths and presumptions and the values, hierarchies and loci that rhetors build their arguments on to the public and giving them reasons why to ascribe greater weight or relevance to one over the other. To illustrate her point about how collective discourse serves as the source of an active public morality, Condit takes the example of the American civil rights controversy, specifically Anglo-American and Afro-American relations, as it unfolded over many decades. Taking a panoramic view of public discourse from 1840 to 1960, she suggests that a rhetorical strategy of developing a sense of similarity between whites and blacks was central to the gradual improvement of race relations in the States because it enabled greater degrees of identification: The more Whites grew to see and know Blacks as human beings with the same needs and abilities as themselves, the arguments about how they were different in kind and quality that had previously seemed reasonable, gradually lost their force and appeal, and an emerging recognition of their equal rights came to be more generally accepted as a moral principle. This was a rhetorical effort that extended over a long time, with arguments gaining traction incrementally, and attitudes gradually shifting in the direction of greater inclusiveness. The point here is not to discuss this particular analysis but instead to consider Condit’s more general point that time and active, multiple and diverse rhetorical effort to develop new arguments are key in bringing about change in a country’s moral code (p. 90, emphasis added).

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5 Public Argument as a Rhetorical “Craft” Contrary to more traditional conceptions of rhetorical art as located with a unique and visionary individual rhetor, Condit suggests the metaphor of “craft” to describe how rhetoric shapes public values. The metaphor highlights the processual and collective nature of public rhetorical argumentation and rethinking of societal norms. Condit likens this civic reflection to what goes on in a workshop (p. 94). This is a metaphor that locates the process in a much more vernacular and accessible setting than is typically associated with the emergence of moral insight. The workshop metaphor suggests that a large part of the collective crafting of morality is mostly anonymous; it is something that is part of quotidian circulation of a community’s doxai and in this sense it is anonymous, common, and shared. It is the circulation over time of ideas, arguments and appeals that eventually sediment into a collective change of opinion because the relevance or weight once attributed to a view has shifted as the result of argumentative appeals. Asen and Brouwer later linked Condit’s craft metaphor to the classical Greek term techne to signify a process of productive knowledge in a domain of intervention and invention. This, they remind us, underscores “techne’s processual constitution and its connection to ameliorative social action”. It recognizes the role of individuals and groups in crafting their lives, even as people act amid constraints. Further, they say, “a techne is learned and practiced among others, which reminds us that engagement has an epistemic value: we may learn when we engage others publicly, even in cases of conflict and disagreement. As a productive art, techne transforms the material it uses” (pp. 19–20). Condit does not negate the significance of the individual rhetor; clearly an individual member of the community occasionally formulates ideas that radically challenge common practice or social norms, and as the rest of the community gradually integrate these arguments in their views there can be a shift in the valuation of the norm. Many social movements have had such highly visible leaders, but Condit’s point is that their real impact is tied to the penetration of their ideas into public opinion. In this way, Condit writes, “the collective and the individual interact to produce morality. The ‘duality of communication’ dictates that it is through the arguments of individuals about enactment of particular moral rulings that the collective moral code is built” (p. 94). Condit’s point that public moral convictions are rhetorically constructed over time offers a framework for paying attention to both ‘great’ and more ‘quotidian’ rhetoric across a multitude of modes and genres, and in this way not only invites us to ask whose voices are heard and whose not, but also consider the uptake, in other words, the various forms of collective participation in public debate—what Asen and Brouwer talk about in terms of modalities, and what Christian Kock and I talk about in terms of rhetorical citizenship (2012, 2017). I will take up these ideas in turn as I now turn to an example of how the craft of rhetorical argument can be argued to unfold in a contemporary controversy with moral implications.

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6 Official Apologies: Explicitly Crafting Public Morality A case in point is the genre of official apologies and the potential for crafting public morality residing in this genre. Official apologies are statements offered by heads of state, governments or legislatures for wrongdoings perpetrated in the name of the country. My discussion here is very closely cropped to serve as an illustration that they constitute a contribution to the public values record.3 Speaking in epideictic terms, official apologies contain elements of praise and blame: blame in the sense that they identify past policies and actions (and the values that informed them) as morally wrong, and praise in the sense that they formulate better and more ethical alternative or reinterpreted values and policies to guide future action. In this sense, an official apology is a window on contemporary civic values and the ongoing shaping of these values. As such official apologies are one format for rhetorical citizenship: intertwined with the primary and extremely important function of seeking reconciliation with wronged groups, an official apology is also a means by which the civic norms informing the community as such are communicated, explained and motivated to its citizens. The merits of or problems with official apologies are often discussed within a very narrow time frame, treating them as speech acts that can or cannot do a particular thing. But official apologies are often the result of a long process, and attention to their different stages of evolution—first faltering attempts to raise an issue, then public discussions and protests for and against an apology, and sometimes eventually the apology itself and the public reactions to it—casts into relief that they are better studied as processes than products, and that their meaning to the community changes as public debate unfolds over time. Elsewhere I have argued that official apologies are not just potentially meaningful to the wronged group. The debate that typically accompanies official apologies also carries importance for the surrounding society in that it confronts issues of social injustice on a collective level by discussing formerly politically sanctioned discrimination or maltreatment of minorities as public issues (Villadsen 2014). Official apologies in this way represent a society’s often painful coming to terms with its former and present values in ways that are unusually explicit and typically the result of prolonged public debate of various kinds. A recent example of an official apology is Justin Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada’s November 2017 speech in the House of Commons (Trudeau). In this speech he apologized for the Canadian federal government’s past treatment of members of the LGBTQ2 community: Based on the assumption that non-heterosexuals would be at an increased risk of blackmail by the country’s adversaries, the government for decades instigated programs to identify and monitor public servants suspected of non-normative sexual behavior, and a range of repercussions were used to deter them from continuing working for the state. Trudeau described these practices as a “purge” that constituted a “tragic act of discrimination”. He blamed the 3

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Canadian government through 40 years for exercising “its authority in a cruel and unjust manner” and for “undertaking a campaign of oppression against members, and suspected members, of the LGBTQ2 communities”. He then went on to express “shame” and “sorrow” on behalf of the Canadian government for the things it did and to apologize to the wronged LGBTQ2 people and their families for this “statesponsored, systemic oppression and rejection” and for the abuse of power its past policies represented. This speech of apology speaks to a change in public moral views across time. From his contemporary standpoint Trudeau called the thinking that originally motivated the campaign “prejudiced and flawed”. In this, Trudeau marks that a development has taken place from previous times to the present in public understanding of sexuality and its relevance to an individual’s role in society. The speech also clearly intends to further this change in the direction of greater inclusivity and more justice for all. Trudeau’s claims did not come out of the blue. To a large degree, they represent views that have emerged over decades as a result of the arguments and other rhetorical modes by activists, lawmakers and countless ordinary people who came out of the closet and supported others in doing the same. Rather than present the current view on the matter as a given or a strike of sudden ethical insight, Trudeau celebrates these activists and protesters, and all the victims who over the decades in various ways have brought attention to the injustices visited on LGBTQ2 people and fought in words and protest action, thereby contributing to a gradual and incremental change in mainstream public understandings of non-normative sexuality and its place in society. My key point here is that, together with the prior grassroots rhetoric, a public statement like this by a prime minister, in a nation’s legislative assembly, and with both the primary apology recipients and a national audience as witnesses, can be understood as not just a matter between the wronged groups and the perpetrator of the injustice. It is that, and that is very important, but it is also a matter for the civic community in the sense that it is a format for rehearsing and reinterpreting the arguments informing the collective’s norms. In this case, the Canadian constitutional principles of non-discrimination and of equality for all citizens were found to have been ignored due to prejudice and leading to systematic abuse of power against innocent citizens. By apologizing and naming the constitutional principles that had been trampled and explaining how this was at odds with the country’s values, and how a new approach is needed, the speech partakes in the country’s process of collective reflection and normative re-orientation. Where prejudice and discrimination against this population group was formerly hardly noticed, the prime minister emphatically condemns it, thereby explicitly launching a revised moral language for assessing such views and practices argued to be better aligned with the national values as they are generally celebrated. One speech does not do away with prejudice and discrimination. But the Prime Minister’s discourse of denouncing the policies of the past as morally corrupt provides a language for others to take up in discussing similar issues, and as such the speech is poised to mark a change in future public debate about the role of LGBTQ2 people in public service. This is all the more a reason to recall Condit’s call to pay attention to the circulation or uptake of the individual’s contribution

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by the collective, that is, to study how both “great” and more “ordinary” rhetoric across genres partake in the gradual adjustment and development of public moral norms. Robert Asen and Daniel Brouwer’s work on modality (2010) as a metaphor for public rhetoric complements Condit’s ideas about the circulation of normative argumentation, and the authors in fact cite inspiration from Condit’s craft metaphor and her attention to process. “Modality”, they suggest, “foregrounds the productive arts of crafting publicity, a rendering that we route through the rhetorical tradition of techne” (p. 3, emphasis in the original). And they continue: “Modality references ways of being and studying public. In our rendering, modality entails a focus on multiplicity, movement and activity, and the mutual implication of theory and practice” (p. 3). The “modality” metaphor encompasses other forms of communication than we would normally associate with “argumentation” as reason-giving discourse. While the two authors are in fact more focused on symbolic and non-verbal manifestations, my point here is to suggest that argumentation is an integral part of this very diverse pool of rhetorical communication practices and partakes in the cognitive environment on par with other modes. In the words of Christopher Tindale, this is a reminder that “[t]he habitual ways we use culturally shared expressions has long been part of rhetoric’s understanding of informal patterns of expression that carry rhetorical—and—argumentative force” (p. 576). With their reorientation to other forms than traditional public address and other established rhetorical genres, Asen and Brouwer point to a wider range of rhetorical forms that collectively shape public culture as they contribute to the circulation of alternative views and justifications for putting more weight on particular values such as equality for all. When it comes to sex and gender equality, it is not difficult to think of a host of rhetorical modalities and spaces in which this idea is discussed, expressed, highlighted, celebrated, and of course, also debunked. It is not all about public oratory. From formerly seeing LGBTQ persons as sinful and outside the realm of social solidarity, many citizens’ views on minority sexualities are changing. Between the argumentation of individuals such as Harvey Milk, the advocacy and activism by ACT UP, literary and other artistic productions, and innumerable everyday encounters with queer people, growing sections of the public have gradually begun to see these groups as human beings with feelings and needs so similar to straight people that the arguments for treating them as other have become difficult to justify. The “Pride Parade” is an obvious example of rhetorical signification characterized by movement and activity, and the bathroom signs and pronoun announcements mentioned above are others. The much-publicized social mediadriven #metoo movement is another recent and significant example that collective moral reorientation does in fact occur as a result of diverse and multiple sustained rhetorical contributions across genres and media. In many countries this movement has been instrumental in changing patterns of quiet acceptance of sexual misconduct, and victims of sexual harassment have gained a voice. Each in its way, these examples contribute to spreading an idea, giving it conceptual weight and visibility, and integrating it in everyday practices. Cumulatively, such rhetorical efforts affect the basic terms for discussing the issue in more inclusive terms suitable for moving Canada and other societies in a direction of greater social Reprinted from the journal

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justice. With Condit we can see these as examples of contributions to a controversial, and slow, gradual evolution of the moral question of sexual equality.

7 The Provisionality of Public Moral Argument At a time when many people, rightly, are concerned with the norm-defying discourse practices characterizing public debates in many countries today, the choice of an official apology as an example suggests that we can still find examples of public discourse that address matters of public morality, place them historically, and explicitly appeal to civic doxai. Official apologies are a form of public discourse where we see the result of longitudinal argumentative efforts in the making of public norms and introducing ways to make civic practices and policies better live up to them. Further, the phenomenon of official apologies illustrates Blumenberg’s and Condit’s point about the provisionality of collective morality: It is always a product of its time and its concerns and conditions. Condit makes a particular point about the incompleteness of the moral record. Her central point that we should not flatter ourselves with having reached a moral highpoint is as relevant now as 30  years ago. It encourages us to remain alert to the fact that also our understanding of morality is contingent. Over the past few decades, official apologies have dealt with past injustices linked to racially and ethnically oriented injustices. Trudeau’s speech can be seen as an example of a current reorientation to a different arena of societally sanctioned injustice, namely to sexual minorities. In the same category we might place apologies regarding treatment of the mentally and physically disabled. In the future we are going to see apologies for yet different kinds of wrongdoing as public awareness of “new” moral subjects emerges. Different times will put different weight on different normative principles and therefore find different things to regret. In that sense too, rhetoric, in seeing moral argumentation as an incremental process of strengthening individuals’ adherence, rather than demonstrating the truth or securing consensus, is a gradual, unstoppable and collective affair, like evolution: it is impossible to be certain where it will move next. As Condit makes clear: “The current code may be used, as such codes historically have been used, to prevent the development of a better code”; the current code is never final (p. 93).

8 The Matter of Time The Ovidian phrase serving as epigraph here points to the role of time rather than that of force in the changing of the world. The perspective of time is useful in appreciating the centrality of process in a rhetorical conception of how argumentation works in society. In the essay mentioned earlier, Hans Blumenberg points to the dimension of time as a way to conceptualize the difference between science (or for our purposes: formal logic) and rhetoric: the former “can wait”, i.e. the correct answer is out there, we just need to figure out the right way to find it, whereas rhetoric “presupposes, as a constitutive element of its situation, that the ‘creature of deficiency’ is compelled to act”. Because rhetoric is linked to the vita activa it cannot

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afford the (in principle) endless time horizon of philosophy or science, but must reach decisions on what to do, thus accepting provisionality as an inescapable condition. In Blumenberg’s words: “To see oneself in the perspective of rhetoric means to be conscious both of being compelled to act and of the lack of norms in a finite situation. Everything that is not force here goes over to the side of rhetoric” (p. 437). Describing how rhetoric is involved in the fitting together of actions in time, Blumenberg contrasts the “acceleration” or concentration of “rationality” in our culture (as found in scientific and logical reasoning where demonstration in Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s sense can suddenly bring about a result) with rhetoric which he calls “a consummate embodiment of retardation” when it comes to the temporal texture of actions (p. 445). Blumenberg’s concern is with describing the human relation to reality, and with rhetoric he finds a way to describe the “indirect, circumstantial, delayed, selective and above all ‘metaphorical’ (p. 439) approach that characterizes the processes by which people form the basis for collective action. “Modern rhetoric”, he claims, “seeks to promote the delaying of action, or at least the understanding of such delay” (p. 447). While less celebratory of the retarding function of rhetoric as such than Blumenberg, Condit’s craft metaphor for the rhetorical processing of public norms is useful for appreciating the significance of the indeterminate change of collective ethical norms. Condit believes in the eventual, albeit slow and at times even reversed, improvement of public morality and she explains how the craft metaphor “speaks to the human urge for goodness, creativity, and perfection” (p. 94) while anchoring it in the world of possibilities, not a transcendent, perfect world. This should highlight for us, she says, that morality is about “perfecting”, in other words: a continual striving. Importantly, hers is not a triumphalist declaration of the innate ethical superiority of rhetorical deliberation. It is, rather, a modest statement regarding the potential of rhetorical argumentation—over time and by virtue of situationally adapted diverse symbolic appeals and challenges—to make a dent in common conceptions and gradually reshape them. According to Condit, understanding the craft of morality-building as including all forms of rhetoric—conversation, debate, discussion, etc.—allows us to “recognize morality as a collective craft”. This view not only leaves the agency with humans, but also reminds us that it is a process, one that calls us “to account for our participation in the ebb and flow of human morality” as she says (p. 94). There are two important implications here, namely that societal norms are continuously and rhetorically constituted and that as such, our individual participation as rhetorical citizens who speak or observe, form or critique, perpetuate or challenge public discourse has civic and ethical significance. We make the categories. This awareness of the good and ill uses of rhetoric, Condit ends by saying, is a “contingency that makes our individual participation in the collective so crucial, infusing each of our moves with broad meaning” (p. 95). As rhetorical citizens everyone has a role to play, whether as a forger of arguments or slogans, as an activist or participant in the public debate, or as someone who reads or hears or sees such rhetorical manifestations and has to decide what to make of them. With a political debate culture as harsh and mutually alienating as the contemporary one where public agents increasingly speak only to their own and try less and less to reach across Reprinted from the journal

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political, religious and other dividing lines and to engage competing views, this is a particularly important point. In writing about rhetoric as a praxis Thomas Farrell, too, underscored the importance of understanding the reciprocal nature of rhetorical action suggesting that,” a broadened vision of rhetorical practice will make little difference if we fail to extend our horizon of appreciation for the rhetorical practitioner as well. In particular, this enhanced understanding needs to include the condition of being a rhetorical audience. This is a condition in which we are called to exert our own critical capacities to a maximum extent” (p. 208). Understanding rhetoric as a crafting of public values prompts us to “decide—quite literally—what sort of public persons we wish to be” (p. 208).

9 Crafting Argumentation and Rhetorical Citizenship The increasingly polarized political and cultural climate in many countries makes it all the more important to consider Condit’s point that it is neither reasonable nor sufficient to explain away one’s opponents’ views with their simply being immoral, deluded, or self-serving. Scholars of rhetoric and public argumentation have a special vantage point for studying and critiquing ways in which moral crafting takes place. Few other disciplines study such issues with the same attention to details of argumentation, topoi, etc., and in connection with contemporary theoretical frameworks, “traditional” rhetorical and argumentation analysis has the potential to contribute substantively and constructively to the public debate climate. In this article I have heeded Tindale’s call to “think seriously about the environments we share that are not physical but that involve ideas and values, because it is in these environments that we will encounter arguments” (p. 580). Tindale refers to these as “cognitive environments” and while his discussion focuses on the circulation of memes as available arguments, this article has focused on the movement from a collectively built cognitive environment where arguments have emerged and been honed, and the passed into the minds of individuals (e.g., in remarkably pointed rhetorical utterances), and then recirculated back to the broader cognitive environment. Tindale describes the career of an argument in biological terms, explaining that e.g. the success of the meme ‘a woman is a person’ reveals its “survival fitness” (p. 582). To him, the meme itself is unaltered and is “what is replicated and becomes part of the means of persuasion that brings about change in people’s thinking and action” (p. 582). Condit and Tindale are both concerned with describing public argumentation as part of an extended tradition and a broader cognitive environment. While Tindale poses the effective rhetor as someone who knows “which memes have been replicated well in cognitive environments” and is able to “use various devices to make them present, enlisting them in their argumentation” (582), Condit’s concern is more on the creative development of public moral argument and on the ethical responsibility of the rhetorical community. Her craft metaphor is helpful in turning our attention to a society’s normative foundation as the result of a slow process that rarely is smooth but takes place in bursts and spouts and relies on multiple voices, arguments, and various other rhetorical modes and manifestations. She reminds us

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that although social change takes time and is constrained by material conditions, it occurs. It happens in part as a result of rhetorical agents, prominent as well as ordinary people, who undeterred by resistance, humiliation, punishment, or ridicule challenge the ruling doxai and lead the way in changing the social imaginary. It calls on us to be the kind of rhetorical citizens we believe to be ethical.

References Aristotle. 1991. On rhetoric. A theory of civic discourse (trans: Kennedy, George A.). New York: Oxford University Press. Asen, Robert. 2004. A discourse theory of citizenship. Quarterly Journal of Speech 90: 189–211. Asen, Robert, and Daniel C. Brouwer. 2010. Introduction: Public modalities, or the metaphors we theorize by. In Public modalities. rhetoric, culture, media, and the shape of public life, 1–32. Tuscaloosa: University of Alambama Press. Blumenberg, Hans. 1987. An anthropological approach to the contemporary significance of rhetoric. In After Philosophy: End or Transformation (trans: Wallace, Robert M.), eds. Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman, and Thomas McCarthy. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 429-457. Condit, Celeste Michelle. 1987. Crafting virtue: The rhetorical construction of public morality. Quarterly Journal of Speech 73: 79–97. Farrell, Thomas B. 1991. Practicing the arts of rhetoric: Tradition and invention. Philosophy & Rhetoric 24: 183–210. Kock, Christian, and Lisa Villadsen (eds.). 2012. Rhetorical citizenship and public deliberation. University Park: Penn State University Press. Kock, Christian, and Lisa Villadsen. 2014. Rhetorical citizenship as a conceptual frame. What we talk about when we talk about Rhetorical Citizenship. In Contemporary rhetorical citizenship, ed. Christian Kock and Lisa Villadsen, 9–26. Leiden: Leiden University Press. Kock, Christian, and Lisa Villadsen. 2017. Rhetorical citizenship: Studying the discursive crafting and enactment of citizenship. Citizenship Studies 21: 570–586. Perelman, Chaïm, and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca. 1969. The new rhetoric. A treatise on argumentation. Trans. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Tindale, Christopher W. 2017. Replicating reasons: Arguments, memes, and the cognitive environment. Philosophy & Rhetoric 50: 566–588. Trudeau, Justin. 2017. Apology in the House of Commons for the federal government’s past treatment of members of the LGBTQ2 community. https​://pm.gc.ca/eng/news/speec​hes. Accessed 10 July 2018. Villadsen, Lisa S. 2008. Speaking on behalf of others: Rhetorical agency and epideictic functions in official apologies. Rhetoric Society Quarterly 38: 25–45. Villadsen, Lisa S. 2012. Beyond the spectacle of apologia: Reading official apologies as proto-deliberative rhetoric and instantiations of rhetorical citizenship. Review essay. Quarterly Journal of Speech 98: 230–247. Villadsen, Lisa S. 2013. The regretful acknowledgement: A ’dignified end to a disgraceful story?’ In Apology between ritural and regret: Symbolic excuses on false pretenses or true reconciliation out of sincere regret? ed. Daniël Cuypers, Daniel Jansen, Jacques Haers, and Barbara Segaert, 209–228. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Villadsen, Lisa S. 2014. More than a nice ritual: Official apologies as a rhetorical act in need of theoretical re-conceptualization. In Let’s talk politics. New essays on deliberative rhetoric, ed. Hilde Van Belle, Kris Rutten, Paul Gillaerts, Dorien Van De Mieroop, and Baldwin Van Gorp, 27–43. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Villadsen, Lisa S. 2018. Keep calm, carry on, and above all: Don’t apologize! Changing rhetoric in the service of stalling political change. In Rhetorics change/rhetoric’s change, ed. Jenny Rice, Chelsea Graham, and Eric Detweiler. Parlor Press and Intermezzo. 978-1-60235-502-6 (ePub).

Publisher’s Note  Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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Argumentation (2020) 34:339–353 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-019-09496-w

Rhetorical Structures, Deliberative Ecologies, and the Conditions for Democratic Argumentation Robert Danisch1 Published online: 11 September 2019 © Springer Nature B.V. 2019

Abstract John Dewey’s belief in democratic deliberation rested on a “faith in the capacity of human beings for intelligent judgment and action if proper conditions are fur‑ nished” (Later Works 227). The stipulation of “proper conditions” is an essential feature, then, of participatory democracy, and Dewey spent considerable time con‑ cerned with these conditions, especially in The Public and Its Problems. This essay argues that the structures and ecologies within which we live make certain kinds of argumentation possible or likely, and that when we alter those structures we alter the possibilities for argumentation. Democratic forms of argumentation are made pos‑ sible by structures that promote collaborative communication practices. This means that practical, public argument is not just a matter of making valid claims, but also a matter of effective contexts that can improve the quality of argumentation. Keywords  Democratic deliberation · Rhetorical structures · Agency · Ecology · Public argument Democracy, as a way of life and not just a system of government, is sustained, revi‑ talized, improved, and sometimes even rescued by effective deliberation and argu‑ mentation.1 Such a premise may lead us to presume that the practices of deliberation and argumentation we use are essential for the processes of sustaining, revitalizing, improving, and rescuing. This is undoubtedly true, and the ability to reason well with others (as a practice of communicative action) ought to be a central consideration for 1

  In this essay, I define the word "democracy" (from a Deweyan perspective) as both a method of con‑ ducting government and making laws by means of popular suffrage and elected officials and the broad participation of all people in egalitarian relationships and communication that help in the formation of the values we use to regulate our lives together. Democracy as a way of life indicates the importance of quality relationships between strangers. Chapter 5 was originally published as Danisch, R. Argumentation (2020) 34: 339–353. https://doi.org/ 10.1007/s10503-019-09496-w.

* Robert Danisch [email protected] http://www.rdanisch.com 1



Department of Communication Arts (ML‑236B), University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada

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those interested in promoting democracy as a way of life (as well as those interested in the effective functioning of democratic systems of government). But the structures that we inhabit as communicative agents play a vital role in conditioning, or making possible, certain forms of agency or argumentation practice while marginal‑ izing and devaluing other communication practices. John Dewey, as a champion of participatory, deliberative democracy and a student of human ecology and systems theory, was acutely aware of this: “Democracy is a way of personal life controlled not merely by faith in human nature in general but by faith in the capacity of human beings for intelligent judgment and action if proper conditions are furnished” (1988, p. 227). In other words, we’d be naïve to believe that humans will just stumble upon, and then start using, effective practices of deliberation and argumentation, which are essential for good judgment. Instead we need to think through what kinds of struc‑ tures or conditions will make it more likely (or less likely) that the inhabitants of a democratic culture will reason well and communicate effectively. How can we cre‑ ate the conditions whereby we can realize the best modes of deliberation and argu‑ mentation and thus make intelligent judgments? Dewey uses the verb “control” in the preceding quotation, indicating the degree to which he thought conditions could determine practices. The stipulation of “proper conditions” is an essential feature, then, of partici‑ patory democracy, and Dewey spent considerable time concerned with these con‑ ditions, especially in  The Public and Its Problems. This essay will argue that the structures and ecologies within which we live make certain kinds of argumentation possible or likely, and that when we alter those structures we alter the possibilities for argumentation. Deweyan or deliberative democratic forms of argumentation are made possible by structures that promote collaborative communication practices and rhetorics of cooperation, and not divisive, irrational, and antagonistic practices or rhetorics.  Our moment seems especially prone to bad judgments, to un-intelligent or poorly reasoned public discourse, and to violent, divisive conflict between oppos‑ ing rhetorical forces. This may be a result of the ways in which our structures pro‑ mote divisive, irrational, and antagonistic practices of argumentation (think about examples like pundits on CNN and Fox News or comments on Facebook posts and Twitter feeds). One remedy might be to instruct all of those involved in our dem‑ ocratic cultures in the best rhetorical practices for improving argumentation and deliberation, but another remedy might be to alter the very conditions that prevail in our moment and that promote the forms of interaction that characterize our cir‑ cumstances. Improving our rhetorical structures just might improve our modes of argumentation and deliberation and the likelihood that intelligent judgments will be made. This, at least, was Dewey’s belief, and it remained a central consideration for American pragmatism throughout the twentieth century. Rhetoricians often focus, justifiably, on the practices of argumentation that we use to influence democratic decision-making, but my aim here is to analyze the ways in which the environment we inhabit makes certain forms of rhetorical practice more or less likely. Before proceeding to elucidate that claim, I want to note the distinctively rhetori‑ cal (and non-philosophical) approach to argumentation that I’m using. Philosophi‑ cal approaches to argumentation rely too much on concerns about the validity of an argument and thus whether or not we know an argument is true or false. Informal

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logic, for example, analyzes the construction of arguments in everyday life with the aim of identifying and assessing whether the forms we use produce valid state‑ ments about the world. This obsession with validity can overshadow or ignore the importance of context and effectivity in evaluating arguments. Rhetoric is a stra‑ tegic art of persuasion, and rational arguments can certainly be persuasive, but so can irrational arguments. The current Twitter feed of the President of the United States is an example of just how effective irrational and baseless arguments can be. In other words, an argument’s validity has little correlation with its effectivity or its ability to persuade an audience, coordinate action, and drive democratic decisionmaking. The aim of philosophical approaches to argumentation is often to explain, formally or informally, why some set of claims can be true regardless of context, occasion, circumstance, or any other conditional factors, while the aim of rhetori‑ cal approaches to argumentation is to explain why and how some arguments work to persuade particular audiences. In a rhetorical approach to argumentation, context always matters in assessing effectivity. Part of that context includes the kinds of structures or environment that we inhabit when we make arguments. Our agency as rhetors (or arguers) is always, already implicated within structures that make some claims more or less likely to work. The concept of “rhetorical structures” is meant to foreground or highlight the extent to which context and environment influence processes of argumentation, while putting the more philosophical commitment to validity in the background. Teaching people to make arguments with greater degrees of validity might not necessarily change what works within a given democratic cul‑ ture. But changing the structures of that democratic culture might encourage citizens to reason with greater care (for both facts and one another) or in different ways. One can imagine an antagonistic democratic culture that made decisions and judgments within structures that foregrounded conflict. The American legal system looks like such a structure, and some companies (like the hedge fund run by Ray Dalio also set up structures like this). Dewey’s concern at the beginning of the twentieth century was that American democratic structures did not do enough to promote collabora‑ tive inquiry, which he saw as preferable to antagonistic debate. Dewey championed this form of inquiry because he saw it as the best means of both solving problems and forming relationships between strangers. Antagonistic structures make it harder to form relationships between strangers. I’ll be advocating for the kinds of structures that promote collaborative inquiry over those that promote antagonistic debate (even though either might be considered “democratic”) because the former foreground the importance of relationality to democratic life. This essay begins with a description of “rhetorical structures” and an argument that certain kinds of “rhetorical structures” have always been central considera‑ tions in the formation and practice of democracy. Strategic attention to the ways in which our structures influence possibilities for rhetorical practice between strangers is always, already a central question for any democracy. I then describe the critical features of an effective deliberative ecology by analyzing what kinds of practices are promoted by specific structural features of the environment that we inhabit. In the same way that our environments promote the survival and flourishing of some specific physical features in animals, so too does our environment promote the sur‑ vival and flourishing of specific features of argumentation practice or rhetorical Reprinted from the journal

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practice. Finally, I describe some ways in which our current predicament might be improved by altering the structures of our own democratic culture. This entails thinking through the way large-scale systems of communication, laws, architecture, and political processes all make some kinds of rhetoric more likely than other kinds and how we might best change the odds in favor of a brighter, more collaborative and peaceful democratic future. I’m self-consciously disinterested in argumenta‑ tion as a practice of reasoning engaged in by a democratic citizen (although I still see this as an essential area of consideration) or an antagonistic process of conflict and disagreement (although I also see this as a viable mode of democratic living) because I think even the very best practices of argumentation fail when the circum‑ stances and environment conspire against the effectivity of those practices (even if those practices produce valid or true claims) for both making decisions and fostering relationships. As American pragmatism teaches us: we ought to concern ourselves with what works, but what works is determined by circumstance and occasion. By advocating for changes to our structures, we may alter what kinds of practices of argumentation work. Rhetoricians, keenly aware of how context shapes communica‑ tive interactions, can help diagnose the ills in our current structures and prescribe some new conditions for the improvement of effective deliberation.

1 What Are Rhetorical Structures? Jane Addams was an American progressive social reformer, political activist, and sociologist. In 1889 she founded a settlement house with Helen Gates Starr called Hull House near the west side of Chicago, Illinois. Addams did this with the aim of creating positive social change in Chicago and with a direct awareness of, and attention to, the importance of the structures that governed life in American dem‑ ocratic society. Hull House, as both a building and an idealistic realization of a specific political theory, embodied Addams’s commitment to the importance of the physical structures in which we live. The material characteristics of Hull House and its place within the geography of the city of Chicago helped make possible the kinds of practices and forms of political engagement advocated by Addams. Hull House, from my perspective, stands as a clear example of the rela‑ tionship between structure and agency and how that relationship might influence how we understand democracy as a way of life.2 All structures are rhetorical to the extent that they make possible specific forms of rhetorical practice or commu‑ nicative agency; Addams was thinking intentionally and strategically about this feature of our physical environment. By thinking about Hull House as a useful physical structure for the promotion of democratic values, Addams set Ameri‑ can pragmatism on a course that sought structures that could promote the values of inquiry, deliberation, equality, and identification and that sought coordination,

2

  Much has already been written about the relationship between structure and agency, especially from the perspective of sociology. For an initial foray into the broader issues of structure/agency see: Hays (1994).

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collaboration, and cooperation between and among strangers. Not all structures do that kind of work (as I mentioned earlier, Addams could have invented an antagonistic structure that combatively engaged injustice in Chicago), but prag‑ matism was, from it’s very inception in American intellectual history, preoccu‑ pied with finding, inventing, or extending structures that could foster collabora‑ tion and cooperation. In Democracy as Discussion, William Keith (2007) recounts the history of the American Forum movement alongside a history of pedagogical commitments to argument and discussion. This is a fascinating case in the constitution of a specific rhetorical structure designed to promote rhetorical practice and engage diverse citi‑ zens in the life of democracy. Interestingly, Keith also cites Dewey’s influence on “discussion pedagogy” and the belief that citizenship required an ability to talk with others about pressing public issues. Discussion was not possible, however, with‑ out the buildings that sprang up throughout the United States that could house the forum movement. Space and structure were required to make possible specific kinds of practices of argumentation and deliberation. Unfortunately, the forum move‑ ment faded from the American political scene. The buildings, in many cases, were eventually organized for different uses. But Keith’s book poses a direct question about whether or not we have any such structures now or any pedagogy capable of supporting the kind of commitment to democracy as a way of life. Even if we don’t have structures that promote a form of argument as discussion, we have other structures that promote other modes of citizen-interaction. We ought to attend care‑ fully to those structures to detect how they influence our reasoning practices. James Fishkin’s recent attempts at “deliberative polling” are a more contemporary example of promoting these kinds of structures and an attempt to update the Forum move‑ ment in important ways. The argument that physical structures (and other structural institutions) condi‑ tion forms of agency, generally, and communicative agency, narrowly, is not radi‑ cally new. Foucault (1977, 1978) spent much of his brilliant career demonstrating the ways in which we are all the subjects of systems of power that function in and through the structures that quietly order our lives. I find Foucault’s perspective deeply depressing because it becomes hard to see how any form of agency is pos‑ sible if we are all subjects of either a literal or a symbolic panoptic prison. We can‑ not argue our way out of the panopticon, no matter how rational or valid our claims might be. Compare Foucault’s perspective, however, to Ancient Greek intellectuals and early champions of rhetoric, who also recognized the capacity for structures and institutions to condition opportunities to speak. Athenians thought intentionally and strategically about how to organize their city-state, both in terms of architecture and institutional rules for living, so as to promote a specific form of democratic life (Hansen 1999). The ekklesia, as a key space within which democratic decisions were made, was a rhetorical structure that privileged specific forms of rhetorical practice based on its design. The Athenian example of the ekklesia is the opposite of the Fou‑ cauldian panopticon when we view them both as rhetorical structures. One struc‑ ture makes specific forms of rhetorical practice possible, while the other seeks total control over communicative agency. In Athens, democracy developed and thrived for a brief period of time in part because of the structures, including and extending Reprinted from the journal

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beyond the ekklesia, that allowed citizens the space and opportunity to participate and practice rhetoric. I’m using the example of ancient Athens here because of the ways in which the kinds of practices made possible by rhetorical structures like the ekklesia align with pragmatism’s commitment to a form of deliberative democracy advocated by Jane Addams and John Dewey at turn of the twentieth century. I confess that the ver‑ sion of Athenian democracy I’m describing is idealistic and perhaps unsuitable for our moment. But the regulative ideals built into these structures do provide us with some important insights into how democracy as a way of life my best be realized. Both the Athenians and the pragmatists sought modes of face-to-face deliberation as essential for effective democratic decision-making (as did the founders of the Amer‑ ican forum movement), and then built spaces within which these kinds of interaction could happen. This was democracy by small group communication, reliant on spe‑ cific forms of argumentation as collaborative inquiry or problem-solving. Scholar‑ ship in Communication Studies, Psychology and Sociology in the last 50 years has shown how and why teams are able to make effective decisions through practices of small group deliberation similar to those entailed and prescribed by Dewey, Addams, and ancient democratic theorists.3 This scholarship includes both the challenges small groups face and the advantages when small groups are organized well. For example, Granovetter (1973) has shown that small-scale teams or networks based on strong ties among individuals promote intensive interaction but do not allow for “bridging” from one network to another. In a canonical work, Michels (1966) argued that participatory democracy could not work because large-scale forms of social organization inevitably devolved into rule by a managerial elite, thus extinguishing their ability to engage in collaborative inquiry. Ancient Athens combated both of these problems with institutional structures and an organizational design that was demonstrably effective. That design was based on integrating long-standing, familiar natural units or social teams (the existing villages and neighborhoods of Athens) into new, unfamiliar and highly artificial units called tribes. The tribes became the bridging link between stable, strong, local ties and a desired national identity, as well as the structural feature for the promotion of collaborative inquiry. The Council of 500 further organized those new tribes into a social structure charged with the key task of deciding what matters would be discussed in the full Athenian Assembly. The Council met regularly in a purposefully built architectural complex. The Athe‑ nian Council developed the character of a learning organization through the devel‑ opment of a formal, archival system and the codification of specific work routines.4 These practices guided the participation of all Athenian citizens. In addition, the regular turnover of membership and the diversity of experience insured that innova‑ tive solutions were never repressed in favor of routines. The Council was made up of amateurs (in that their experience as Councilors was limited), but they were able to manifest the characteristics of experts with lots of experience to call upon because of the ways in which this particular group was nested within other kinds of teams, 3

  For a general contemporary account of how groups function, see: Gastil (2007).   For a more detailed description of “learning organizations,” see Argyris and Schön (1992).

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and the practices of aggregating and dispersing knowledge within the structures that emerged from these prescribed forms of organization. This model would be unlikely to help us in our moment (and it does not address critical issues of power that lurked in the background of social life in Athens), but it does offer insight into what matters most in an effective deliberative democracy. Katzenbach and Smith (1993) have argued for the advantages of small groups of workers with complementary skills, a common purpose, a common set of perfor‑ mance goals, a commonly agreed-upon approach to their work, who hold each other mutually accountable for their collective performance. The result of participating in a group like this enhanced overall organizational performance and enhanced individ‑ ual satisfaction, as well as improved decision-making. The institutional structure of Athens clearly made for the creation of these kinds of teams. The fifty-person tribal teams on the Council, as well as the members of ten-person magisterial boards, each had to figure out how to work together to achieve an outcome that resulted in coop‑ erative joint action. Furthermore, research on teams (Janis 1982; Sunstein 2011) has shown that in order to perform well teams need to avoid specific small group com‑ munication problems: group think and information cascades, strategic individual behavior based on the desire for long-term individual gain, or polarization and the tendency for individuals in groups to develop extreme positions that can warp judg‑ ment are three such problems. Athenian team members seem to consistently avoid these problems because of institutional structures. Service on teams in Athens was intense but normally limited to 1 year. These intense interactions allowed individ‑ uals to learn a lot about others but limited the tendency to seek individual longterm gains. Shared tribal identities created the grounds for cultural similarity, but the selection processes insured that different personal perspectives would be repre‑ sented on each team. Perhaps most importantly, teams emphasized formal equality in respect to public speech and legitimized vocal dissent. These structural features of teams promoted conditions that maximized the chance for valuable, unique informa‑ tion to be presented, heard and incorporated into group decisions (essential features of face-to-face argumentation in a fully-functioning democracy). The citizen Assembly, or ekklesia, is generally regarded as the signature institu‑ tion of Athenian democracy. A mass audience (6000–8000 citizens) was responsible for making vitally important decisions under severe time constraints on the basis of listening to public speeches on different sides of an issue (Sinclair 1991). Assembly‑ men ordinarily had to make a number of decisions by the end of the day (and often in a half day). Highly skilled speakers advocated different, mutually incompatible courses of action and addressed the mass audience on complex and important mat‑ ters. In each case, the audience expressed its decision by a simple majority vote. Some historians have argued that the decision-making context of the ekklesia man‑ dated an increasingly powerful role for expert public speakers and that these speak‑ ers dominated governmental processes because of their mastery of rhetoric (Ober 2009). But such an argument does not account for the ways in which teams and other social structures prefigured participation at the ekklesia. Because of widespread par‑ ticipation in many other forms of Athenian governance, assemblymen knew that the matters to be discussed had been worked through in advance and that a deliberative, participatory body had set the agenda. The members of the Assembly had already Reprinted from the journal

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ascertained the value of social knowledge and were well informed on a variety of substantive matters. Every Assembly included a high percentage of people who had been members of some other organizational structure. The combination of the teams and the structure of the Assembly undeniably aided the development of rhetorical theory and rhetorical education. In other words, the assembly was a rhetorical struc‑ ture in that it exerted control over the conditions for argumentation, persuasion, and deliberation. I’m dwelling on ancient Athens here because we can use this example to draw a distinction between authoritarian rhetorical structures and democratic rhetorical structures. As I’m using the term, any structure (physical, material, legal, social, institutional) can be rhetorical to the extent that it makes certain forms of commu‑ nication and argumentation possible and other forms impossible. Free speech laws, for example, are often central rhetorical structures in a democracy because of the ways in which they allow for a broad variety of forms of public discourse, while authoritarians tend to strictly curtail forms of speech through legal limitations on public communication, journalism, and other forms of expression. Public buildings that create spaces whereby strangers can freely interact in face-to-face dialogue are also rhetorical structures in that their material organization facilitates certain kinds of communication. Capitalist systems may replace those kinds of public spaces with shopping malls and storefronts whereby people are more likely to interact with products than strangers. What the Athenian example makes clear is that democratic rhetorical structures make cooperation and collaboration between strangers possible and thus entail forms of group inquiry. The same can be said for pragmatism and spaces like Hull House. In these cases, group inquiry is a kind of argumentation whereby validity is less important than the process of leveraging all of the knowl‑ edge of a diverse group into any decision-making procedure. Authoritarian rhetori‑ cal structures try, instead, to prevent kinds of argumentation as joint inquiry. If a cul‑ ture lacks the buildings, laws, institutions, or rules for bringing diverse citizens into the process of inquiry then it is difficult to see how that culture could be democratic. But such a culture would also preclude certain forms of argumentation, and it is in precluding those forms of argumentation that decision-making suffers. American Pragmatism, like the founders of democracy in ancient Athens, sought the structures that would promote the kinds of deliberative argumentation, and social practices necessary for the development of what John Dewey called “the great community”. Here we could begin classifying different kinds of democracy by the forms or structures they promote for public communication. Dewey’s com‑ mitment to inquiry need not be the only form of democratic life, but it is one form that has the advantage of trying to foster positive weak ties between strangers for improved decision-making. Perhaps antagonistic structures would be better able to address problems of power in ways that deliberative structures can’t. But we ought to consider just what the benefits of deliberative structures might be. The famous proclamations from The Public and Its Problems highlight the importance of rhetor‑ ical structures: “The essential need… is the improvement of the methods and condi‑ tions of debate, discussion, and persuasion. That is the problem of the public. We have asserted that this improvement depends essentially on freeing and perfecting the process of inquiry” (208). The Public and Its Problems is an attempt to outline

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the practical and intellectual conditions for community-based inquiry as a method of channeling communicative practices for the benefit of democratic society. The rhetorical structures that might make this possible did not entail a commitment to the centrality of argument as public address, nor would they promote an antago‑ nistic model of rhetoric as debate. Instead, Dewey claims that we need structures that seek the cooperation necessary for community-based inquiry. These structures also do not entail a mediated rhetoric of symbols, icons, or images—they seek the face-to-face in an effort to leverage the knowledge of each participant in a delib‑ eration. The Public and Its Problems centers on a vision of a “great community,” a community whose success would rely on the “perfecting of the means and ways of communication of meanings so that genuinely shared interest in the consequences of interdependent activities may inform desire and effort and thereby direct action” (155). Accordingly, Deweyan pragmatism seeks methods of communication that would allow individuals in a democracy to participate in decision-making and real‑ ize the interconnectedness of the community to which they belong. This is what the activists involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement sought to build (more than they sought a set of policy outcomes), and this is also what I would call a delibera‑ tive ecology. In our own moment, we could ask important questions about the virtual spaces we’ve built for public communication. Do those spaces promote antagonistic rheto‑ rics or cooperative rhetorics? Do they meet the needs of our democratic culture? On Reddit, an Internet discussion website, a forum called “Change My View” gives us a glimpse of what a deliberative structure might look like. Founded in 2013 by Kal Turnball, a Scottish teenager, “Change My View” promotes and requires respect‑ ful conversation. Strict rules essentially prohibit the use of profanity and ad homi‑ nem attacks, but more importantly the site demonstrates how public communica‑ tion is more a matter of meeting people where they are instead of where we might want them to be. It also moves away from forms of antagonistic reasoning whereby one side in a debate tries to defeat the other side. Deliberation is a matter of listen‑ ing with respect and for the purposes of understanding (something Dewey would have likely endorsed). This is perhaps where the greatest promise of deliberative rhetorical structures lies: In the ability to teach us all how we might more produc‑ tively approach the project of cooperation in ways that will create stronger forms of relationality between strangers and better decisions capable of generating change. “Change My View” might give us a small window into how we could create coop‑ erative rhetorical structures, or the fact that it remains a subreddit tucked away in a distant corner of the Internet might be a sign that it’s too late. The rest of the virtual structures we inhabit tend to promote forms of antagonism when they are unencum‑ bered by the rules set out in “Change My View”. If we consider Donald Trump’s Twitter feed, or any one of a number of Facebook group chats, we can see how the very structure of social media works against the kind of collaborative spirit of “Change My View.” Perhaps an even better exam‑ ples is the extremist videos posted to Youtube. We can use conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s remarks about former Director of the F.B.I. Robert Mueller as an example of antagonistic rhetorical practice. In July 2018, Jones claimed, during a posted You‑ Tube video, that Robert Mueller was a “demon” and a “monster,” and he followed Reprinted from the journal

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those claims up by suggesting he would shoot Mueller in a cowboy style showdown. Then Jones claimed that Mueller was also a “pedophile” that has helped cover-up a child sex ring operation in Washington D.C. “Demon,” “monster,” and “pedophile” are not the communicative means of fostering deliberative cooperation. At work in Jones’s rant is the rhetorical task of dissociating Mueller from other presumably more faithful and committed Republicans, as well as the general category of rational civic actors or citizens. The critical effect of what Kenneth Burke would call an act of dissociation is to construct an enemy that might strengthen the bonds between those that oppose what the enemy stands for. In other words, a rhetoric of division and identification (in the Burkean sense) underpins Jones’s comments. The structure of social media seems to lend itself to rhetorical practices of hyperbole and reifica‑ tion, both forms of communication that make deliberative cooperation less likely. Our moment seems replete with examples of hyperbole especially because hyper‑ bole (On Twitter, Youtube or elsewhere) is the surest means of generating attention and viewership when we are all inundated with an overwhelming number of claims on our attention.

2 What Are the Features of a Deliberative Ecology? Given the argument that structures influence the possibilities of communicative agency and processes of argumentation, how can democratic societies build deliber‑ ative ecologies with rhetorical structures that will promote collaboration and coop‑ eration? We might also ask how they might build rhetorical structures that make useful forms of antagonistic debate capable of driving decision-making? I take the former question to be central to American pragmatism and more worth pursuing because of the ways in which the answers might allow us to build stronger relational connections between strangers (necessary for the kind of social democracy Dewey championed). But I concede others may prefer a system of antagonism. If we stick to the former question and not the latter, we can answer by first tracing the connection between concerns with “human ecology” and American pragmatism’s argument that democracy is a way of life. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Robert Park was a key founder of what would eventually become known as the “Chicago School of Sociology” (Mathews 1977). In numerous research projects that focused on the city of Chicago, he (and others) developed a theory of human ecology that under‑ stood cities as kinds of natural environments. For Park the city was a laboratory for studying social interaction (Park and Burgess 1984). He argued that biological metaphors and ecological models were appropriate framing devices for understand‑ ing social interactions. As part of a human ecology, Chicago school sociologists also focused on groups (like occupational teams and extended families). Park (1936) and other members of the Chicago School began to try to map the ways in which cooperation and competition governed social interactions and what they eventually called “communities of practice” in order to understand how and why these groups functioned as they did. In 1936, almost 10 years after The Public and Its Problems, Park published an essay in The American Journal of Sociology called “Human Ecol‑ ogy.” That essay provides a fascinating perspective on what I’m calling rhetorical

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structures. “Human Ecology” is Park’s attempt to apply theoretical insights into the interrelations of plants and animals to human associations, and one of his key insights was that competition, which is prevalent in biological ecologies, is limited by custom and consensus produced in and through institutional structures. Human society, as distinguished from plant and animal society, “is organized on two levels, the biotic and the cultural. There is a symbiotic society based on competition and a cultural society based on communication and consensus” (14). To put the insight another way: the economic, political, and moral orders that arise on a cultural level incorporate individuals through practices of communication into a “control organi‑ zation”. The function of society is “to restrict competition and by so doing bring about a more effective co-operation of the organic units of which society is com‑ posed” (14). In other words, Park’s argument (and some might reasonably disagree) was that animal ecology is based on competition but human ecology is based on a social order made possible by cooperation. Just as John Dewey had, Robert Park lectured at Hull House and participated in some of the other educational activities there. Park, along with other Chicago School sociologists, worked with the residents of Hull House to help map and trans‑ form the social order of Chicago. Their project was largely descriptive and sought to give an account of the forms of human association that organized life in the city. Dewey was most certainly aware of, and influenced by, the research agenda of Chi‑ cago sociology. The Public and Its Problems operates as a kind of philosophical analysis of the fine-grained sociological descriptions of community life that Park and others authored. My purpose in reading Addams, Dewey, and Park alongside one another here is to show that pragmatism was deeply invested in describing, ana‑ lyzing, and promoting community life and forms of social interaction. Communica‑ tion, rhetoric, and argumentation were omnipresent but under-theorized and rela‑ tively ambiguous concepts within Park’s sociology, Addams’s work, and Dewey’s philosophy. The conclusion that I think we ought to draw from Addams, Dewey, and Park is that democratic societies need specific kinds of social structures able to foster cooperation among diverse populations. I have chosen to call these social structures “rhetorical structures” because I want to highlight the importance of those structures in promoting forms of communicative agency and democratic argumen‑ tation. But Park, Addams, and Dewey rarely get into details about the practices of argumentation and communication that we ought to use, and instead they leave us only with a commitment to a deliberative ecology. Ecology is an apt metaphor to use within the context of questions about democ‑ racy as a way of life and argumentation as a central practice for democratic life for two reasons. First, the biological concept of ecology was developed in Chicago dur‑ ing Dewey’s time there and was linked to human societies through pragmatist soci‑ ology. Second, the concept of ecology highlights interactions between organisms and their environment, as well as the diversity and open-endedness that character‑ ize such interactions. The dynamically interacting parts of an ecology include both forms of human association and the institutions and structures in which those forms of human association are practiced. In other words, we interact with other agents as well as with the institutions and structures that make up our ecology. Pragmatism is a philosophy of interaction through and through, by which I mean it is concerned Reprinted from the journal

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with interactions between agents and between agents and their environments, which is why it offers us a set of commitments to democracy as a way of life. This is what Park’s concept of human ecology teaches us. What this ought to tell us about the practice of communication and argumentation is that it is not just a matter of one person articulating a valid, formal argument. Any two participants in a communica‑ tive act (or interaction) are embedded within a larger social structure that condi‑ tions the ways in which that interaction can and does take place. Too often rhetorical theory focuses on the individual rhetor as a language-using subject. Athenian rhe‑ torical theorists were certainly guilty of taking on such a perspective. The sophists often taught their students individual argumentation practices that could aid their own advancement within the political structures of Ancient Athens. But the sophists could teach such practices because the social structures and institutions of Athens were so firmly in place and worked so effectively to generate democratic decisions and forms of cooperation and coordination (within very narrow range of people con‑ sidered “citizens” in Athens). The forms of collaboration and cooperation that are characteristic of commu‑ nity life in general were, for first generation pragmatism, essential for understand‑ ing democracy as a way of life. Therefore, pragmatism sought to build deliberative ecologies, and pragmatists like Addams and Dewey were committed to finding and building rhetorical structures that could promote the development of deliberative ecologies. I use the word deliberative to refer to the process of long and careful consideration and discussion of public issues (Gastil 2008). Deliberation is a faceto-face, uncertain, open-ended process that requires broad participation. It employs reason, dialogue and care, all with the end of consensus or comprise in mind.5 But individual agents within a democracy cannot practice deliberation without specific structures within which face-to-face, open-ended conversations can take place. Those structures would support communication practices oriented toward collabora‑ tion and cooperation. A deliberative ecology holds the potential to bring Dewey’s “Great Community” into being and requires physical structures like Addams’s Hull House that can answer the challenges posed by living in a far more complex society than any Athenian democrat could have ever imagined. Pragmatism suggests that we can test and evaluate our own democratic society by assessing the human ecol‑ ogy within which we interact with other citizens. If that ecology promotes forms of deliberation and is supported by rhetorical structures that make possible a kind of argumentation that privileges coordination, collaboration, and cooperation, then we might be part of a “deliberative ecology”. Such an ecology would be essential for building a social democracy and realizing the individual and collective benefits of political democracy. If, however, our ecology does not promote deliberation and does not possess the kinds of structures that make collaboration and cooperation

5

  Consensus is likely a rare occurrence in democratic life. Compromise is probably more likely given that two parties may agree temporarily on an imperfect solution. From the view of both rhetoric and pragmatism, democratic life involves different parties with legitimately different claims, and reconciling that difference is never a permanent of perfect process.

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possible, then one of our intellectual burdens is to figure out how to build structures comparable to Hull House that might do that kind of work.

3 How Do We Create the Conditions for Democratic Argumentation? If we assume that building a deliberative ecology is essential for democratic life, then how might we create the conditions for the kind of argumentation that would exist within a deliberative ecology? I take this to be one of the central, and most pressing, questions that we must answer now that we face rising tides of authori‑ tarianism around the world. Our current conditions seem unable to resist authoritar‑ ian rhetoric or forms of argument. While demagogues like Donald Trump routinely spread false, misleading, and irrational arguments throughout our human ecology, the capacity for thoughtful, group inquiry instead of partisanship seems more rare. I think we can instead ask a series of important questions in order to make evalua‑ tions and judgments about the prospect of creating conditions for democratic forms of argument. These questions use core insights from what we know an effective, fully-functioning deliberative ecology would look like in order to test the conditions within which we find ourselves. In other words, these questions might reveal why our moment seems resistant to effective democratic argumentation and receptive to authoritarian forms of argumentation (and why those authoritarian and baseless arguments seem so effective and persuasive). First, do we have the spaces and systems for conducting regular, open, and evi‑ dence-based deliberations? Such spaces and systems would benefit synergistically from the knowledge and motivation of diverse citizens. Lone decision-makers seem undemocratic from a Deweyan perspective, whereas the participation of a variety of citizens linked to a diversity of constituencies contributes feedback that enables the ability to solve novel problems. Or do we have irregular, closed systems that ignore evidence and rely on participation from very few people? Second, do we have spaces and systems that preserve and promote a high tolerance for ambiguity? We know that processes of deliberation and argumentation that are open to deviant or contrary perspectives enhance learning, innovation, and the performance of all sorts of cogni‑ tive tasks. But because minorities tend to conform with majorities, and people with less authority tend to defer to those with more, a human ecology, over time, can lose its diversity. We need organizational structures that preserve diverse perspec‑ tives within processes of argumentation. One of the best ways to preserve diversity is to tolerate ambiguity and uncertainty and to resist the urge to make final, declara‑ tive, absolute statements. Third, do we have spaces and systems whereby strangers interact in face-to-face settings to work on joint projects or find common ground? Face-to-face forms of argumentation as inquiry open up possibilities for creating both weak and strong ties, or the kinds of social relationships necessary for good decision-making. Where, when, and under what circumstances do we meet stran‑ gers? Do those circumstances facilitate or prohibit deliberative encounters? Fourth, do we have spaces and systems the foreground question-based processes and back‑ ground assertion-making based on self-interest? Such systems wouldn’t rule out self-interest but would background it (or at the least make self-interest only one of Reprinted from the journal

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several important considerations). We know that self-interest can often compromise effective deliberation, and examples like the Athenian system of networks can miti‑ gate the influence of self-interest through processes of coordination. How might we create similar systems and spaces in our moment? If we take a moment to answer these questions, then we might see an imagined possible deliberative ecology. In such an imagined ecology we may need systems of mass communication like social media but those systems would need regulations or rules that might mitigate the spread of divisive rhetorical practice (like hyperbole, reification, and ad hominem attacks) and promote instead the building of weak ties. This might even include regulating the algorithms used by social media companies to deliver news and advertisements to users such that our existing biases and beliefs are not catered to so easily. We also may need public spaces with the capacity for physically positioning strangers in places where they can see and hear one another. The public infrastructure of local libraries remains one of the few remaining spaces in the U.S. where community-based inquiry might happen. How do we imagine and build new spaces around the values of interaudibility and intervisibility? Perhaps institutionalizing deliberative polling practices, like those advocated by Fishkin, would create another key rhetorical structure. Additionally, using sociological tech‑ niques of mapping, we could create a living system to identify when and where indi‑ vidual citizen inhabit deliberative or antagonistic rhetorical structures in order to compile data and visual evidence to help us see how likely we are to be positioned in the ways that Dewey had hoped. It is perhaps beyond the scope of this essay to flesh out all of the possibilities for rhetorical structures capable of promoting democracy as a way of life. But at the very least we ought to acknowledge the extent to which we lack such structures now and how that lack might harm the ability of argumenta‑ tion or communication to drive social and political change. We simply cannot rea‑ son our way out of the Presidency of Donald Trump because our context conspires against us through the felt absence of rhetorical structures that would create the con‑ ditions whereby we might engage in effective, careful deliberation and make some new friends while doing so. How often do we inhabit a space or a system whereby we are more inclined to ask questions than to advance our already existing beliefs in aggressive fashion? That, in my view, is the essential question we must ask of any rhetorical structure. The extent to which we can create structures that open up the possibility that citizens will ask questions and have a revisable sense of what might be possible instead of being asked to advocate for their pre-existing preferences will determine whether we are more or less likely to build a democratic culture. Democratic argumentation requires rhetorical structures that would build a delib‑ erative ecology in which collaboration, coordination, and cooperation were made manifest. This is less a matter of knowing how to make a valid argument, and more a matter of knowing how to relate to strangers under conditions of uncertainty, ambi‑ guity, and transparency about strategies, tactics, goals, values, beliefs, and facts. One of the principle lessons of rhetorical approaches to argumentation or communication is that audience matters, and if we are to be persuasive we must think first about the others whom we wish to persuade. This means that the process of argumenta‑ tion does not just require making formally sound assertions that can be shown to be true through some form of proof. That kind of argumentation is not necessary for

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democratic life, and unrelated to the process of building a deliberative ecology to sustain democracy. Instead, argumentation is a process of learning to live well with others that are different from us while still making good decisions.

References Argyris, Chris, and Donald A. Schön. 1992. On organizational learning. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Dewey, John. 1988. The later work of John Dewey, vol. 14. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. New York, NY: Vintage Books. Foucault, Michel. 1978. The history of sexuality, vol. 1: An introduction. New York, NY: Vintage Books. Gastil, John. 2007. The group in society. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Gastil, John. 2008. Political communication and deliberation. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Granovetter, Mark. 1973. The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology 78: 1360–1380. Hansen, Mogens Herman. 1999. Democracy in the age of Demosthenes: Structure, principles, and ideology. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Hays, Sharon. 1994. Structure and agency and the sticky problem of culture. Sociological Theory 12: 57. Janis, Irving. 1982. Groupthink: Psychological studies of policy decisions and fiascoes. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Katzenbach, John R., and Douglas K. Smith. 1993. The wisdom of teams: Creating the high-performance organization. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Press. Keith, William M. 2007. Democracy as discussion: Civic education and the American forum movement. Lanham: Lexington Books. Mathews, Fred. 1977. Quest for an American sociology: Robert E. Park and the Chicago school. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Michels, Robert. 1966. Political parties: A sociological study of the oligarchical tendencies of modern democracy. New York, NY: The Free Press. Ober, Josiah. 2009. Mass and elite in democratic Athens: Rhetoric, ideology, and the power of the people. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Park, Robert. 1936. Human ecology. American Journal of Sociology 42: 1–15. Park, Robert, and Earnest Burgess. 1984. The city: Suggestions for investigation of human behavior in the urban environment. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Sinclair, Ronert. 1991. Democracy and participation in Athens. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Sunstein, Cass. 2011. Going to extremes: How like minds unite and divide. New York, NY: Oxford Uni‑ versity Press.

Publisher’s Note  Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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Argumentation (2020) 34:355–369 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-019-09506-x

Teaching Argument Through Relationships William Keith1   · Roxanne Mountford2 · Timothy Steffensmeier3 Published online: 3 October 2019 © Springer Nature B.V. 2019

Abstract One way of understanding how to intervene in dysfunctional public discourse is to attend to the ways that we teach argument. This article contends that argument pedagogy would benefit from consideration of the process of argumentation, in which participants are prepared to enter into deliberation by attending to relationality. To ground their discussion, the authors present rhetorical praxis taught in two university sites and one public site. Keywords  Argumentation · Relationality · Rhetorical listening · Civic empathy

1 Introduction What is going on in the public sphere these days? The acrimony around the Brexit vote and the election of President Trump seem to signal a kind of failure of public argument. The penetration of conspiracy thinking (aided or not by Russian trolls, Jamison 2018) seems like a serious threat to the possibility of a healthy public discourse, and hence to most notions of liberal democracy. Given these conditions, attention naturally turns to what the study and teaching of rhetoric can offer. The civic traditions of rhetoric that grow roughly out of the legacy of Isocrates, Quintilian and Cicero have always focused, among other things, on the role of reason in public life. While rhetoric has multiple dimensions, some tending toward manipulation and emotion cleaved from rationality, the robust exchange of arguments for deliberative purposes has never been far from the foreground. What form does the public use of reason take? Generally, it is in the ability to argue—that is, to muster arguments and evidence for a position, bill or a policy. Chapter 6 was originally published as Keith, W., Mountford, R. & Steffensmeier, T. Argumentation (2020) 34: 355–369. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-019-09506-x.

* William Keith [email protected] 1

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, USA

2

University of Oklahoma, Norman, USA

3

Kansas State University, Manhattan, USA



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As Bruce Kimball argues in Orators and Philosophers (1986), a civic and rhetorical version of argument predominated until the first part of the nineteenth century, when at least in America a sea change occurred, when the “folk hero” of the educated class went from Cicero to Socrates, with a corresponding change in the kind of argument valorized, from broad public argument about the particulars of the moment, to bounded philosophical argument about universal themes and claims. In the process, the place of argument in liberal education shifted to a focus on logical arguments, to the syllogism, and later, to formal reasoning and fallacies; the rhetorical character of argument, in college instruction, was therefore attenuated. Discontent with the pedagogies of civic argument arose early in the twentieth century (Keith 2007) as people wondered if the dominant pedagogy of debate represented the best version of democratic politics. The evolution of discussion pedagogy was an attempt to find a different mode of argument, focused on discussion rather than debate. We see ourselves as continuing that project, for as it turned out, it was easier to specify what one liked about discussion than to design teaching methods that would produce those outcomes. This paper will explore how we can understand argumentation in our current moment through the lens of pedagogy; we will be trying to weave together argumentation with the revival and reformation of rhetorical pedagogy called for in “The Mt. Oread Manifesto on Rhetorical Education” (Keith and Mountford,  2014). In order to extend the civic tradition, we will explore an account of argument more congenial to the public context. We will take as our basic question, “What does it mean to teach argumentation as opposed to argument?” The difference between these approaches parallels the distinction between process and product; this point was first made by O’Keefe (1977) in argumentation theory, but of course it has been highly influential in composition pedagogy. An argument emerges as an outcome of reasoning, which may be solitary and take any number of forms; the argument, however, exists independently of the process that brought it into being, and can be assessed as valid, sound, fallacious, etc., without reference to its production. Argumentation is an activity between people that involves (among other things) making claims, giving reasons, responding to objections and counterevidence, and so on. The purpose of argumentation is not necessarily to produce an argument, but rather to change the minds of participants, including everything from believing new things, disbelieving previous assumptions, entertaining new ideas and so on. Argumentation is thus closer to classical practices of dialectic, yet is different in that it is not so focused on logical moves. Argument itself has been well theorized through formal and informal logic, which seek to capture the structure of arguments, primarily in order to evaluate their logical or epistemic worth. In other words, argument pedagogy tends to position the student as consumer or evaluator. While sometimes we assume that this activity creates a potential transfer of skills for the creation of argument, this claim is neither well evidenced or particularly persuasive, since other domains (appreciating music or literature) illustrate that the ability to evaluate doesn’t imply the ability to create. With respect to argumentation (as opposed to argument), the situation is rather different. Since argumentation is a process, participation in it has generally been understood as a practice, and a pedagogy of argumentation would involve teaching people the practice of argumentation. Several theories have contributed to this

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perspective. The Amsterdam school of argument has adapted (through a complex path, by way of Habermas and the Erlangen school) an approach that is highly normative, with norms being embedded in rules for turns or “moves” in an argumentative encounter; this group shows that many features of formal and informal logic (implication rules, fallacies) can be reconstructed as uses and violations of the rules. Stephen Toulmin’s famous model (Toulmin, 1958), despite its frequent reduction to a product theory for pedagogic purposes (Brockreide and Ehninger, 1960, Keith and Beard 2008), is a process account. Starting from a broadly Wittgensteinian perspective in The Uses of Argument, Toulmin begins with the question of how to make sense of the move from probabilistic reasoning to probabilistic argumentation. He concludes that adding “probably” to a claim means different things in different contexts (which he calls fields), so there is no single practice of argument; betting on sports games and calculating the odds of climate change both involve probabilistic reasoning, but they use evidence and inference in quite different ways. Debate, as theorized as the practice of intercollegiate debate, is a highly structured activity that is both a competitive sport and can serve as a “laboratory” for the exploration of policy ideas and arguments (Keith 2010). We take Toulmin’s account to be essentially correct, in that there probably is no general theory of argumentation, but many different ones, according to context. Lacking such agreement, how can we outline an argumentation pedagogy? We will grasp the stick at the other end, beginning with contexts of argumentation, and work back to argumentation from there. We will focus on the case of public argumentation. By public argumentation we mean the arguments that circulate through multiple public spheres and are distinguished by their attempts to use evidence and reasoning to respond to claims and issues that are already in a public sphere. Public argumentation occurs mainly among strangers, though surely we can import it into contexts of friends and acquaintances. Our basic case is that argumentation, unlike argument, is relational, which is to say that it is a property of specific patterns of human interaction. Our rough definition of argumentation is “the creation and maintenance of relationships within which reason and evidence make a difference.” These relationships are similar but not the same as ethos  in Aristotle’s rhetoric; Aristotle thinks you should cultivate ethos as a kind of trust, so that people will be open to hearing your arguments (“You can believe me because…”). We are trying to identify something much richer, which is a commitment to a kind of complex interactional pattern, one in which argumentation and reason-giving that prove, refute, and explore ideas and suggestions for action and problem solving, are simultaneously sensitive to value commitments and alert to how values may not be shared or prioritized in the same way. Nothing requires that every relationship be of this kind, and the difficulty of maintaining them speaks to their special status. Why is such a relationship important? A fundamental element of the communication that constitutes argumentation is a notion of “in good faith.” If you think the other person is lying, equivocating intentionally, playing games, trying to do stealth persuasion, then you may not want to engage their reasoning—or engage them at all. Thus, our task here is to outline how such relationships are created and maintained, and how we could teach students to do so. We will take a specific notion Reprinted from the journal

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of civility as the ground of civic/public communication. We are not talking about a weak notion of civility that quashes dissent or argument based on drawing-room norms of politeness in which we avoid challenging people. We want to endorse a strong notion of civility that allows arguers to communicatively construct a relationship that will foster and support vigorous argumentation, argumentation that engages deep and meaningful disagreements for the purposes of advancing the public good. In the context of public argumentation, civility is a thick version of relationality, a description of the relationship that does/should promote the deliberative goals of conversation, writ large. We view public deliberative discourse as a kind of ecosystem, including face-to-face and mediated, synchronous and asynchronous communication, supported by institutions, corporations and organizations. We assume that—for all its fits and starts, side-trips, and hiccups—public deliberation is oriented toward a kind of collective process of working through the arguments about what we value and what we should do with the goal of informing personal and institutional decision-making. What defeats or disables this kind of distributed deliberation? Critics often point to bad arguments and argumentation, but of course, overall, the system should correct for this, in the give and take of the process, spotting fallacies, strengthening evidence and so on. We can participate in argumentation knowing that we don’t have the final answer, yet hoping to get a better one by watching weaker arguments fail (Doris Kerns Goodwin describes a similar model in Team of Rivals). The larger problem, as we see it, is disengagement. Either people decide not to engage each other (refusing a relationship) or they build a relationship on dysfunctional engagement, relying on motivated arguments (reasoning driven by emotional need), sarcasm, escalating rounds of insults, stereotyping and the like. So civil discourse (discourse bound by norms of civility) doesn’t entail a relationship in which everything is harmonious and comfortable; it defines a relationship that is capable of sustaining argumentation—disagreements, based on reasoning, that have no necessary terminus. With respect to teaching, what are the learning outcomes/skills associated with this relationship? We name five: • Respectful engagement Respectful engagement is the ability to validate a person

while simultaneously disagreeing with or criticizing their positions, claims or evidence. While the argument/argumentation literature is replete with metaphors of war and attack (Ong 1981), it must at bottom be a cooperative or collaborative enterprise, which requires that the relationship be maintained. If in “attacking” arguments you so insult the other person that they walk away, you are left with arguments but no argumentation. Of course, not all arguers or their arguments are worthy of respect (and therefore should be denounced rather than engaged within the process we are describing here), but that still leaves many, many topics of policy, ethics, aesthetics and much else that are suitable for argument. • Deep (empathetic) listening Deep listening requires going beyond paying attention to what has been said and instead attempting to sympathetically enter into a belief system and even a form of life that may be foreign or obnoxious to you. This enables engagement in which each party goes beyond responding to the surface form of claims and reasons and gives the most generous possible reading of each other’s positions. Krista Ratcliffe calls this process “rhetorical listen-

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ing.”  (Ratcliffe, 2005).  It is the ability to fully understand the cultural logics beneath a position or claim—not simply to be able to replicate (repeat back) a position. It is the opposite of the “straw dog” fallacy, which involves attacking a position that someone doesn’t hold. Deep listening is also the means to seeing places of convergence, of shared beliefs and values. But to see those places of convergence, one must have the ability to offer insightful readings of one’s own beliefs and practices as works-in-progress. When working with students, deep listening requires exploring the ways in which values motivate action and beliefs, and represent particular cultural logics; this allows students to become more aware of the ways in which their own commitments are contingent. For example, becoming aware of the fact that one can share a core value with someone from across the ideological spectrum can be illuminating. • Humility Humility is a contingent commitment to the rightness or universal

character of one’s own beliefs and practices. Similar to what Henry Johnstone called “self-risk,” humility requires the willingness to be open to change when the arguments justify it. Taking a stance that you will offer arguments in an argumentative relationship but will never be influenced by them is toxic, since it undermines the point of the relationship. The goal of argumentation is to jointly see if we can, through exchange, arrive at “better” positions than we now take. Balancing one’s commitments with openness to counter-arguments is the hallmark of the best argumentation. • Managing multiple interpretations Most complex arguments involve multiple accounts, or theories, of the “same” set of facts or events. The ability to juggle these simultaneously, while testing them against your previous commitments, is necessary to prevent either treating others reductively or engaging only in refutation. As Fitzgerald puts it, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function”.

2 Pedagogy 1: First Year Composition (Mountford) A common focus for first-year composition curricula is the teaching of formal argument. But, as we have argued, teaching formal argument can too easily elide the difficult attitudinal shifts that must attend argumentation as process. The University of Oklahoma’s First-Year Composition Program was inspired by “The Mt. Oread Manifesto,” which calls for communication and composition scholars to build courses that capacitate citizens to deliberate productively on issues of local and national importance. The Program’s core learning outcome is the development of civic empathy among its students, so that regardless of their initial/ongoing political affiliations, they gain abilities to engage in public debates in such a way that they will not contribute to our broken national discourse. Some features of this curriculum include:

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• Focus on values that motivate meaningful action • Study of the ways in which groups and stakeholders are motivated by values and

beliefs

• Practice in rhetorical listening (taught as an element of deliberation) • Engagement with public issues that have a local face • Study of rhetorical concepts such as stasis theory that help illuminate controver-

sies

• Study of and practice with arguing to specific stakeholders • Encouraging meaningful personal connections with research and writing • Engaging in formal and informal public speaking

The program-wide curriculum intervenes in students’ understanding of the relationship between their beliefs and values and their stance on public issues. Across a two-semester course arc, students engage in study of the ways that values motivate their own and others’ actions. Drawing on I. A. Richard’s definition of rhetoric as “the study of misunderstanding and its remedies,” students then enter a public controversy they care about, using stasis theory and stakeholder analysis to deeply understand the views of others on their issue before crafting an argument to a specific stakeholder or stakeholder group they have learned to know. In addition to the “Manifesto,” the program draws on Ratcliffe’s work on rhetorical listening. In working to respond to the assignments, students are prompted to study the values and cultural logics behind others’ positions, including positions they may not initially agree with. When they begin to take part in public arguments in the second semester, they do so with the knowledge that they are engaged with others whose views may grow out of the same set of values (for example, environmentalists identify “life” as a core value, just as anti-abortion proponents do). Students may emerge as liberal or conservative as they entered the classroom, but the curriculum’s slowing down of the argumentative process and focus on listening to others actively thwarts them (at least in class) from dismissing the thoughtful views of others with whom they seek to deliberate. In concert with the authors of the Manifesto, the program believes students should “feel motivated and competent enough in their communication skills to advance an idea in the public sphere and engage in meaningful deliberation about ideas” (3). The first course in the curriculum makes students’ and their subjects’ cultural logics a topic of study so they may begin to analyze the values that are present in and motivate all communication. The course begins by asking students to look inward before moving them into the public realm. Students are challenged to find the core value that motivates them and the definition of that value that is unique to their experiences. Students tend to see their lives as private—as disconnected from public life. Step one in capacitating them as citizens is to intentionally disrupt this public/ private binary, helping them see that their values are shared with others and those values motivate action in the world. Using values as the lens rather than beliefs also provides them with a way to link with others who may differ from themselves, as when a progressive environmentalist and evangelical conservative both identify “life” as a core value that motivates them to action. In the second assignment, students are asked to perform deep listening by dropping into the world of a text that espouses a view they disagree with. We ask them

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not to choose a text that is hateful in any way (in general, hate speech and demagoguery are out of bounds, since the argumentative relation we are striving for is obstructed). Students are asked to study the worldview of the text—the full rhetorical context, the affiliations and past speech-acts of the author(s), the nested values represented in the text, the cultural logics (Ratcliffe) motivating the text. Students are not asked to find common ground, nor are they required to take on the voice of the opposition to better understand a seemingly contradictory position. The assignment invites students to be curious about different viewpoints and to allow the texts to put pressure on their own perspectives. This assignment demonstrates to students that, while they may disagree with a point of view, they may also find places in which their values intersect with another perspective. In the next assignment, students move from the personal to the immediate public (and the social), investigating the way a group puts a shared value into action in a social space. We ask students to identify a local group they might like to join and to study that group through primary and secondary research. Their analysis then identifies stated and implied values in the group’s publications and activities. As we state at the outset of this article, a key problem for public life is disengagement; this assignment is designed to move students from individuals with values that motivate them to members of publics like the one they study. It also begins to help students connect values to concrete social and political issues in the public sphere. Many students join the group they study, moving them into public or quasi-public life. The final assignment of the first course is a formal public speech in which students present something meaningful they have learned from the course to their classmates. This open-ended assignment is extremely popular with students and instructors, giving students practice in speaking to classmates while engaging them in reflection about their work—and their classmates’ work—all semester. The program embraces instruction in formal public speaking as critical to connecting students with publics (in this case, the proto-public of the classroom, Eberly 1999). Throughout the first semester’s assignment sequence, students engage in rhetorical activities in new ways, as the assignments they complete necessitate an awareness and articulation of the sociohistorical context not only of argumentation, but also of public life generally. The sequence asks students to engage in deep listening—of their own values and motivations, of a possible opponent’s worldview, and of a group’s efforts to bring into public life a set of values they hold. In a sense, the curriculum encourages understanding and empathy as a condition of argumentation, the task of the entire second semester. In the second course of the sequence, students enter rhetorical situations in more direct ways, but as they do, the curriculum continues to require them to linger inside their research so that their work grows not out of opinion but rather out of developing relationships with others’ arguments and perspectives. The program calls this process “delayed argumentation.” First, students choose a single topic that will be the subject of all four major assignments throughout the semester. Often in first-year composition courses, when students move through various forms of written argument, they also shift topics, changing their focus from one project to the next. Principles of Composition II is intended to keep students focused on a single issue and dig deeply into it. Students have sixteen weeks rather than three to five to research in Reprinted from the journal

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a way that leads not only to a nuanced understanding of their topic, but also an ethical and well-reasoned stance that considers the complexities of the rhetorical situation itself and the effects any action will have on various stakeholders. Students do not simply conduct research for three weeks and move to make a persuasive claim. They must first consider all the possibilities of the claim they will eventually make. The course begins by asking students to write an essay that identifies the history and background of a public controversy they want to write and speak about all semester and to explain both why the controversy exists and their connection to it. The first assignment requires students to explore this issue within a specific sociohistoric context, inviting them once again to explore nuance and avoid oversimplification. By conducting in-depth research on an issue for which they will eventually create a persuasive argument, students must look past the binaries framed in news reports and appreciate the complexity of public issues. The second assignment in the sequence turns students’ attention from the context of the issue they have chosen to the stakeholders the issue affects. This project requires students to conduct stakeholder analysis so they recognize that every public argument acts on and is acted upon by a number of individuals and groups with material, philosophical, and/or personal stakes in the issue and varied ability to influence the issue. Students listen carefully for perspectives that may be muted and learn to hold up multiple truths simultaneously, looking for what Ratcliffe refers to as “exiled excesses,” or details that are cast aside for the sake of finding common ground or supporting a thesis. Students have the opportunity to pause and hear the voices silenced when opinion comes before investigation. Using stasis theory to understand the nature of the arguments that stakeholders are making (or should be making), they are then invited to explain why the public controversy remains unresolved. At this point, students have suspended their own judgment on the issue they have chosen to study for 8 weeks. In the third project, they are finally invited to make an argument to a stakeholder they have studied—someone who is affected somehow by the outcome of the issue. They write directly to this stakeholder individual or group, making specific rhetorical decisions based on the beliefs and values of that audience. To be successful, students must appeal to the stakeholder directly, respectfully meeting the stasis of the audience. In this way, students learn that while they are ready to offer a solution to climate change (stasis of policy), for example, their stakeholder depends on a job with the oil industry and is committed to denying the science (stasis of conjecture). Therefore, students must address the science as well as the economic challenges and opportunities posed by climate change (stasis of conjecture). The fourth project is a formal public speech addressing the beliefs and values of students’ classmates. Students must continue doing research on their topic and must learn enough about their classmates to address them as an authentic audience, addressing the stasis that best accords with their classmates’ positions on the issue. So, to use the same climate change example, students might find that their classmates are ready to address climate change (stasis of policy), so their speech might outline possible approaches and to persuade their classmates to advocate for one approach. To encourage deliberation, each speech is followed by a question and answer session.

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What makes this pedagogy diverge from traditional approaches to argument is that students are encouraged to sustain curiosity about other positions and rather than using their research to outwit or pander to their opponents. By asking them to withhold their judgment in order to consider the needs of other stakeholders and listen to the claims they are making, the sequence of assignments is structured to delay argumentation. In the end, students do craft effective, persuasive arguments, but only after they have learned to deeply listen, to themselves and others, a skill that, according to Ratcliffe, has been neglected in rhetorical praxis. Through this process, OU’s curriculum works to create ethical and thoughtful users of language who are self-reflective and capable of practicing civic empathy as they enter into deliberation with others.

3 Pedagogy 2: Public Speaking (Keith) The public speaking course common at US universities is an unusual type of course internationally. It grew out of a tradition of performance courses (including theatre, oral performance of literature, declamation and debate), and has had several generic versions. The course as taught today may or may not have an exclusive focus on argument; it’s common to have three major speech assignments based on the three goals or functions (officia) of rhetoric as described by Cicero (to teach, to move and to please), resulting in an informative speech, a persuasive speech and an entertaining speech. While there is an enormous amount of variability, most courses do cover the basics of argument, evidence and research, and these are part of the required course outcomes (Keith and Lundberg, 2018). To get a sense of what it means to teach argument in a public speaking course, let’s contrast it with a course in logic or informal logic. Both of those courses also treat the structure and evaluation of arguments; they are analytic (of formal and informal modes of reasoning), and they take some notion of validity or truth-preservation between premises and conclusion as the normative principle in evaluating arguments. They don’t, in general, deal with argumentation and students are generally not creating arguments but evaluating ones they find in their textbook on in the public sphere; the course positions them as consumers. A public speaking course gives students some notion of audience, and asks them to create arguments for their audience, with purposes such as persuading and convincing. So the public speaking student needs to understand the structure and quality of arguments relative to an audience and a context. But what audience and what context? Again, different genres of the course exist, but let’s focus on one that takes the public, civic context as primary. What does it mean to create context and audience for argumentation in this course? A primary obstacle is the format of the public speaking situation: One person is talking, others are listening. Structurally this one-to-many situation is all too similar to marketing and advertising, with the idea of designing “messages” aimed at “audiences.” Such a stance works against the relational values of arguments, and worse, confuses students to no end. Consider an ordinary conversation. In the back and forth of talk, you “adapt” to your audience by mutually constructing and revising Reprinted from the journal

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topic, relevance, reasoning, evidence and so on. Then we ask a presenter to get up and “adapt,” except that there is no interaction, and they are trying to adapt to many people simultaneously. No wonder they are nervous—it seems impossible. So many textbooks and pedagogies revert to an advertising model: Look at the demographics of your audience and use stereotyping to figure out how to adapt to them. This approach not only invites a reductionistic view of the complexity of people in demographic categories, but results in speeches that are a jumble of different arguments, proofs and styles that attempt to cover every group present in the audience. An alternative is to extend the idea of “conversation” to the public sphere, which allows reconceptualizing the (physical) encounter in the classroom (this resonates with Kenneth Burke’s “parlor”—or, as students call it at the University of Oklahoma, Burke’s “bar”). Assume there are any number of public conversations going on, right now, on innumerable subjects, across all the media (oral, written digital) that make up the complex ecosystem of the public sphere. Given that, what the speaker is doing is not like an advertisement or marketing plug, but like taking a turn in the conversation, albeit a slightly long one. The conversation pre-existed particular speakers, and will continue after them, and rather than trying to unilaterally affect the audience, the speaker is essentially inviting them into the conversation. This understanding of the speaking moment draws back from the performative dimension (the embodied person speaking in that moment, with a voice, an appearance, mannerisms, and so on), in order to focus on the interactive dimension. While arguments can be, importantly, embodied in the person of the arguer on some occasions, argumentation in the public sphere is embodied in so many different kinds of media that its interactive character is highlighted. In this way public speaking as argument is an exercise of the discursive imagination, invoking the existing conversation through summary and citation of sources, and inviting the audience into the conversation by framing the arguments to demonstrate their relevance to them. Having discarded an advertising model, how does a speaker assess relevance for a specific audience? The basic technique is to cut across the many differences and specificities of individuals in the audience by addressing the audience in a particular role, hailing a facet of their common identify to which the arguments are relevant. For example, as Perelman and Olbrects-Tyteca have pointed out, in general everyone shares a common set of values: fairness, equity, compassion, honesty, self-respect, success and so on. (Perelman points out that disagreements arise both in application of these values and in how to prioritize them when they conflict.) Thus one combination of frame and audience could be: “As students, you value education, and therefore should resist the defunding of universities for these reasons.” A slightly different frame can arrive at the same goal: “As citizens, you value education, and therefore should resist the defunding of universities for these reasons.” In each case the speaker can articulate the reasons why student or citizens should care about education. Just as in an ordinary conversation our relationship/role frames the content (“Are you speaking to me as a friend or coworker?”), so public speakers can conjure up the audience to which they will argue, creating (in the best cases) a reciprocal coherence between the conversation, relationship and arguments. How, then, can speakers work to create and maintain this relationship? Here’s where civility provides a guide. Obviously, in both public and interpersonal settings,

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respectful engagement and deep listening are key. Public speakers enact these by their treatment of the ongoing conversation they are stepping into—doing their homework, knowing what has been already argued, understanding the commitments of those who advocate various positions—as well as the treatment of the audience. If speakers are going to call on the audience as “citizens,” they will have to grapple with the complexity and history of that category, as well as its exclusions and silences.

4 Pedagogy 3: Public Meetings (Steffensmeier) Democratic processes in the United States routinely include public meetings for citizens to interact with elected officials and decision makers to discuss policy matters. From an analysis of citizen talk at legislative meetings, Tracy concludes that “public hearings are a good way to connect citizens to elected officials and allow them to express their views on contentious issues” (2014, p. 321). In school board meetings, Tracy finds that citizens engage in reasonable hostility—a responsive communicative practice that aims for respectful talk, but is an emotionally laden critique of another’s position (2011). These studies of people engaging in ordinary democracy illustrates the deliberative capacity of citizens (Tracy 2010, Tracy and Hughes, 2014). It also emphasizes the delimited role of citizen talk in most public meetings. Community members each get a few minutes to voice their critiques to the authorities in charge, seated in the front of the room. This meeting design produces mostly a series of monologues. While public meetings can be helpful ways for citizens to set the agenda and hold officials accountable (Adams 2004), this kind of talk can truncate the diagnosis of the problem, and it leads to solutions that require nothing different from the person arguing that others are at fault. Most importantly, speaker-at-a-microphone meetings miss an opportunity for people to learn about how they are interacting together. For instance, when people are asked to provide input on crime rates in a local neighborhood, the default mode of talk is to critique the other’s position and assign blame. For those being blamed by the increase in crime rates, the meeting is not experienced as reasonable talk; rather, it sounds like personal attacks, scapegoating, and straw dog arguments. Many public meetings achieve their purpose of surfacing additional points of view, but they fall short of argumentation as relationality because the discussions seldom implicate the participants themselves, leading to a shallow diagnosis of the problem and a limited understanding about one another. Public meetings designed for people to help make progress on civic problems are always opportunities to foster learning about argumentation. One pedagogy, called case-in-point, puts a spotlight on human interaction to illustrate its relationship to argument and problem solving. This experiential learning approach uses a live case in the room and holds it up to be examined (Parks 2005). The assumption of case-in-point pedagogy is that the human dynamics and issues that make addressing problems difficult out in the world are also represented in the meeting room; our arguing “in here” is homologous to the arguing “out there,” both in terms of obstacles and advantages. This approach is particularly valuable when groups are dealing Reprinted from the journal

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with deeply contested and threatening issues, and when emotions run hot. Case-in point proceeds from “the premise that learners bring with them to the classroom all the promises and persistent problems faced by the company or community they represent” (Green and McBride, p. 39). The pedagogy is one way to help people learn about how the process of reason giving is occurring. In a public meeting, for instance, the facilitator using this approach would be shining a light on how the participants are impacting the group’s evidence, reasoning, and decision-making. Using the participants’ interaction as the case deepens the diagnosis of the problem. This diagnostic work increases the options available to make progress. For the argumentation teacher, the public meeting is an opportunity for people to explore their part of the mess—to see their assumptions and arguments under a harsh light, which is an uncomfortable proposition for most participants. By focusing on the problems in the room, a level of disequilibrium is likely to be experienced by the group; when they do not feel safe or feel disrespected, people get angry and defensive, sometimes withdrawing and sometimes lashing out. To productively engage people in a meeting with a fair amount of heat requires a different container for learning, which we’ll call a holding environment. The facilitator tries to shape a holding environment, one with “ways of being present that foster the building of collective strength” (Parks p. 100). Paying attention to the holding environment is first order work for argumentation as relationality. A holding environment is a temporarily constructed relationship that creates places for difficult work to occur (Kegan 1982). In our case, the difficult work is teaching argumentation that runs counter to the traditional practice of consuming arguments. An analogous application of holding environments has emerged in the field of leadership development. Ron Heifetz, psychiatrist and leadership educator at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, notes that a holding environment “consists of any relationship in which one party has the power to hold the attention of another party and facilitate adaptive work” (Heifetz p.105). In the context of leading change, the latter phrase, facilitate adaptive work, refers to a learning process where people are held in a state of disequilibrium to discover what they need to keep and give up in order to make progress on a tough issue (Heifetz et al. p. 303). Holding environments are integral to addressing problems because they keep people in diagnosis long enough to consider multiple interpretations. Evidence of the usefulness of this approach abounds in Kansas, where thousands of adults who are working on challenges in various sectors (business, non-profit, government, faith, and education) have learned these ideas at civic leadership trainings conducted by the Kansas Leadership Center (KLC). The approach is reshaping how people diagnose issues and take action on collective problems (for examples of these ideas in action see: https​:// klcjo​urnal​.com/). As argumentation teachers, we can play a role in enhancing the diagnostic capacity for citizens to make more progress on addressing systemic problems. Fostering argumentation as relationality is one way to enhance the process of public problem solving. This involves the difficult work of developing the competency to be in relation with one another to have difficult arguments. In this way, the holding environment is a structural dimension for argumentation to be an exercise in developmental learning. Directing attention and resources to holding environments is a way to

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facilitate the learning about relational dynamics of arguing. In other words, building a trustworthy holding environment increases the likelihood that argumentation, as outlined in this essay, emerges. Here are a few practical strategies to developing a holding environment in public meetings: • Make multiple interpretations When diagnosing problems, start by asking par-

ticipants to make multiple and tough interpretations about the problems.

• Hold competing reasons Helping people consider (or hold) multiple and conflict-

ing reasons supported by various lines of evidence is another diagnostic skill.

• Take a pause At any point in the meeting, particularly after a hot moment, hit the

pause button and ask the group to reflect on what is happening in the room. This helps people make sense of their interactions in a way that builds trust. • Stay curious In many ways, you are inviting people at the public meeting to hold the possibility that a person with opposing views is as morally serious as they are in their reason giving.

5 Conclusion The three settings for argument pedagogy we outline above begin to offer some direction for those who are interested in fostering robust and ethical contemporary public discourse. Several threads connect these pedagogical approaches. First, all three approaches seek to develop space for others within a discourse. Coursework in writing and public speaking is performance-based, so the challenge is to create assignments that open the deliberative potential of language. The first-year composition program that Mountford describes includes some relatively traditional assignments, but the twist is that the program engages students in a process whereby their attention is diverted from surface opinion to what lies beneath public controversies. Keith describes public speaking courses in which students bring the deliberation into their own speeches. Steffensmeier describes a facilitative process in which a community group is literally held in place so that they might more deeply consider their own and others’ positions. Another thread concerns process. What deliberation needs most is time so that participants can consider multiple interpretations of a public issue. Steffensmeier’s solution is the “holding environment”; Mountford’s is “delayed argumentation.” Keith emphasizes the need for students to deeply understand the audience’s interests. Key to these approaches is making time for the relational work of argumentation. Because time is considered a consumable element of life, yet another important thread is choice. Community members choose to involve themselves in the facilitated group discussions Steffensmeier describes. Students in Mountford’s and Keith’s curricula are able to choose issues that they find meaningful and that will engage them. As Eodice et al. (2016) argue, choice is an important component to writing assignments that stay with a student beyond the class—or even beyond the degree—in which the assignment occurs. If we’re going to encourage the hard work of public engagement, we must do so through the open door of choice. In the Reprinted from the journal

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University of Oklahoma’s curriculum, that extends to saying yes to any controversy that is truly debatable, knowing that the inquiry will drag even the most recalcitrant student to engage ideologies and values that will challenge their views, since the stakeholders are real, complex human beings like themselves. The work we are striving for involves a kind of learning that can best happen through the crucible of interaction that is sustained by deep listening and is tolerant of the discomforts of difference. We recognize that our neoliberal communities (proto-public classrooms and actual publics) are mostly bowling alone, which makes these interventions both necessary and existentially daunting. Nevertheless, this is what it means, in our view, to teach argumentation as opposed to argument. These three settings for argument pedagogy, two in the school context and one in the public, offer a window on what teaching argumentation might do for contemporary public discourse. They also offer guidance for designing courses that place the fostering of relationships at the center of any curriculum that emphasizes argumentation.

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Teaching Argument Through Relationships Tracy, Karen. 2010. Challenges of ordinary democracy: A case study in deliberation and dissent. University Park: Penn State University Press. Tracy, Karen. 2011. Reasonable hostility: Its usefulness and limitation as a norm for public hearings. Informal Logic 31: 171–190. Tracy, Karen, and Jessica Hughes. 2014. Democracy-appealing partisanship: A situated ideal of citizenship. Journal of Applied Communication Research 43: 307–324. Toulmin, Stephen. 1958. The uses of argument. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Walter, Ong. 1981. Fighting for life: Contest, sexuality, and consciousness. New York: Cornell University Press.

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Argumentation (2020) 34:371–387 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-019-09499-7

Rhetorical Citizenship and the Science of Science Communication Jeanne Fahnestock1  Published online: 18 September 2019 © Springer Nature B.V. 2019

Abstract Public policy decisions often require rhetorically-engaged citizens to have some understanding of the science and technology involved. On many current issues (GMO crops, vaccinations, climate change) sectors of the public hold views differing from those of most scientists, and they often do not support proposals based on the scientists’ views. The overall cultural authority of science has also been challenged in the last decade by several negative trends in the sciences themselves, including widely-reported cases of fraud and failures in replication. With the support of professional science organizations, science communication specialists have stepped in aggressively to address science’s communication problems scientifically. This paper will examine the assumptions behind their advice on scientific information, their recommended strategies of framing, narration, and projecting trustworthiness, and their characterizations of audiences and the nature of science itself. From the perspective of rhetorical argumentation, the science communication literature does not promote addressing audiences as citizens capable of rational argumentation. But the science of science communication is likely to remain the dominant approach to public science with the professional science community. Keywords  Scientific information · Rhetoric · Framing · Narrative · Scientific argumentation

1 Introduction In 2007 representatives of Shell Petroleum presented the town council of Barendrecht in the Netherlands with a proposal, already approved by the national government, to pump waste ­CO2 from a refinery into depleted natural gas reservoirs under their town. Despite “public information meetings,” local citizens grew increasingly Chapter 7 was originally published as Fahnestock, J. Argumentation (2020) 34: 371–387. https://doi.org/ 10.1007/s10503-019-09499-7.

* Jeanne Fahnestock [email protected] 1



Department of English, University of Maryland, 2119 Tawes Hall, College Park, MD 20742, USA

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suspicious about a project with safety issues that apparently profited Shell and the government while it decreased their own property values. Resistance grew with demonstrations and petitions from organized groups like “No to C ­ O2,” all covered in the media. Despite ministerial approval of the project in 2009 and a new law that gave the national government the right, formerly in the hands of municipalities, to issue permits for projects considered of national importance, the Barendrecht carbon storage initiative was dropped in November 2010 (Feenstra et al. 2010; Lockwood 2017, p. 75; Kuijper 2011, p. 6232), Though proponents of this project considered the resistance “irrational” (Feenstra et al. 27), the residents of Barendrecht were exercising their rights of “rhetorical citizenship” and participating in the deliberative processes of their local government. Shell’s Barendrecht proposal, like so many in a heavily industrialized and networked world, included a significant scientific and technical component concerning geological formations, the diffusion of gases under pressure in porous rock, possible contaminants, effects on groundwater, and more. When such highly technical proposals involve controversial points, the public often hears conflicting expert testimony, as happened in the Barendrecht case (Feenstra et al. pp. 12, 19). As a result, support for any particular project, for the funding of further research, and even for the authority of science itself can weaken. Clearly what the public hears, reads, and sees on science and technology, usually from a wide variety of sources, forms their views. In the US, assessments of public views on a variety of scientific and technical issues can be found in the biennial reports of the National Science Board of the National Science Foundation [NSF]. The Board pays special attention to issues where some sector of public opinion seems to run counter to prevailing views among scientists (e.g., on creationism, genetic engineering, and the safety of nuclear power). In the 2018 report, for example, surveys indicate an increase in those questioning the safety of GMO-sourced food and the morality of using human embryonic stem cells. Public attitudes on anthropogenic climate change are another continuing concern, and in 2018 those believing that “global warming is likely caused by humans” stands at 6 out of 10. But overall confidence in the scientific community remains tepid, and confidence in the medical community has declined to its lowest reported level at 36% (National Science Board 2018, 7/4).1 Scientific professionals see poor communication as a major source of these disjuncts between the views of scientists and various publics. Alan Leshner, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science [AAAS] from 2002 to 2015, has repeatedly pointed to such problems (2006, 2013), and the pages of Science and Nature, the premier English- language journals for cross-disciplinary communication among scientists, have featured complaints about the state of the publicscience interface (see e.g. Rowland 1993; Salomon 2001; Schenkel 2010, Leshner

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 Any overall decline in the prestige of science, at least in the US, has been rebutted by the Pew Research Council, another source of survey-derived assessments, which claims that public perceptions of sciencehave not declined since the 1970s. They report that in 2018 44% of U.S. adults surveyed expressed a “great deal of confidence” in scientists, though percentages varied in relation to specific issues (Funk and Kennedy 2019).

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2012). Among the sources of the problem, journalists who act as intermediaries and report on “both sides” of scientific or technical issues are often blamed for perpetuating controversies where scientist-advocates believe disagreement is not warranted (Lewis 2014; Sheldon 2018). Because of a resulting distrust of science reporting, scientific associations have encouraged scientists to accept, in the words of a National Science Foundation campaign, “Becoming the Messenger” themselves.2 The idea behind this emphasis is that scientists will inevitably be better at explaining their work to the public than any intermediary could be. There is another dimension to the problematized public perception of science. Not only have scientists been concerned with public views on specific scientific and technical issues, like those involved in the Barendrecht controversy, but they have also worried over a decline in the cultural authority of science overall. This anxiety stems from several negative trends building in the sciences themselves over the last ten years that have also received wide media attention. Indeed in AAAS CEO Alan Leshner’s words, “An array of issues within science are not going so well …and negatively affect the societal climate for science (2013; ellipses Leshner’s).3 These trends and their media coverage are worth reviewing to establish the problems that the professional science community and scholars specializing in “science communication” have responded to. Their response, and the assumptions it builds on, are also outlined below, followed by an assessment of those assumptions from a rhetorical perspective on argumentation.

2 Problem Trends in the Sciences First among the negative trends undermining the authority of science is the increase in the number of retractions of scientific papers in the last twenty years, a trend made famous by the blog “Retraction Watch” created by two science journalists in 2010. Retraction is a formal speech act of renouncing and withdrawing published work, and among its felicity conditions is the requirement for an appropriate agent, usually the author but sometimes an editor, to use the performative verb retract, often with the speech act indicator hereby. A published paper is retracted if it cannot be simply corrected in a way that does not compromise its claims. A 2011 assessment in the journal Nature reported a tenfold increase in retractions between 2001 and 2009 in the PubMed and Web of Science databases (Van Noorden 2011, p. 27), and a survey of retractions in journals indexed in BioMedCentral found a sixfold increase between 2014 and 2015, due largely to the discovery of faulty reviewing procedures (Moylan and Kowalczuk 2016, p. 3).4 Compared to the volume of research articles 2

  https​://www.nsf.gov/event​s/event​_summ.jsp?cntn_id=11784​5.   Leshner’s list is longer and somewhat different from that offered in this chapter. He names on a PowerPoint slide, “Incidents of scientific misconduct, human subjects concerns, animal welfare issues, conflict of interest problems, publishing by press release, hyperbolic and exaggerated claims, appearing to suppress dissenting views, mistakes in scientific papers, failures to replicate.”. 4   Van Noorden lists falsification, self-plagiarism, plagiarism, honest error and irreproducible results as the reasons for retraction. Moylan and Kowalczuk include among reasons compromised peer review, data falsification, image duplication, plagiarism, and a co-author unaware of a publication. 3

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published, the number of those retracted is miniscule. But retraction is a draconian measure, and the rise itself is taken as a sign of a much larger number of flawed papers. Indeed a nutrition research group complained in Nature that they identified 37 fatally flawed papers in their weekly literature review sessions. They pursued corrections on 25 of these but gave up because they were stonewalled by authors and editors and the process was too time-consuming and costly (Allison et al. 2016). The overall increase in retractions and those involving key papers has been widely covered in The New York Times and other prominent media (e.g., Tuller 2012; Pollack 2014; Benedict 2015; Roston 2015; Kolata 2018). Among routine retractions are an extensive number due to fraud (Fang et  al. 2012). Many of these are implicated in serious health risks like the claim linking MMR vaccination with autism published in The Lancet in 1998 (Harris 2010; see also Black and Rappuoli 2010, on loss of public confidence in vaccines). Other spectacular cases include the Hwang human cloning scandal (Check and Cyranoski 2005), the “scientific misconduct” conviction of Marc Hauser, Chomsky’s collaborator (Carpenter 2012), and perhaps most disturbing, the discovery that social psychologist Diederek Stapel never performed the widely- cited “priming” studies he was famous for in his 55 retracted papers (Enserink 2012). Again, both individual cases and the overall increase have received wide media coverage (Editorial 2012; Zimmer 2012; Fountain 2014), and such coverage, especially in high-end media outlets, is taken as a sign of public awareness. Just as research can be fabricated so can entire journals. The parasitic industry of “fake” or “predatory” scientific journals thrives in the open access publishing market where authors pay for online publication and peer review is largely non-existent (Burdick 2017). In 2013 Science reported on a “sting operation” that circulated a fabricated paper with high-school-level errors to 304 open access journals and received acceptances from 157 (Bohannon 2013, p. 64). These fake journals, now numbering in the thousands, as well as fake conferences, constitute a “parallel world of pseudo-academia” (Kolata 2013, 2019), and add detritus to the millions of scientific studies published per year (e.g., 2.3 million in 2013; NSF 2017). How many of the studies in that massive load would survive replication? In 2005 an epidemiologist, Dr. John Ioannides, published a study in JAMA sampling clinically significant research reports that were later scaled back or contradicted (2005a). He then published what became the most downloaded article in open access publishing, “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False” (2005b). Bringing Ioannides’ hyperbolic charges to life, in 2011 the drug company Bayer announced its failure to replicate two-thirds of the published results on 67 potential drug discovery targets (Prinz et  al. 2011), and the following year scientists with the genetic engineering firm Amgen divulged that they could replicate only 6 of 53 cancer biology studies (Begley and Ellis 2012). These widely-cited revelations increased an already building “Reproducibility Crisis,” an awareness that much research, especially in biomedicine, cannot be reproduced (Baker and Penny 2016). Among sciences, perhaps the hardest hit with replication problems are psychology and especially social psychology, the fraudulent Stapel’s field (Światkowski and Dompnier 2017). In response to a catastrophic loss of confidence in the field, several prominent psychologists announced in 2011 that they would redo 100 studies published in three major

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psychology journals in the year 2008. Four years later they published their controversial findings: only 36% of the studies could be replicated (Open Science Collaborative 2015) leading to a front-page headline in the New York Times, “Psychology’s Fears Confirmed: Rechecked Studies Don’t Hold Up” (28 August 2015, p. A1). Less widely reported but far more important has been a backing away from widely-used statistical methods, especially from significance testing with p-values. The suspicion of widespread misuse of statistics was accelerated by the fraud and replication problems, but it was lurking for a long time. In 2011 a trio of statisticians showed that what has come to be called “p- hacking” could produce support for almost any claim (Simmons et al. 2011); that, coincidentally, was the same year that a psychologist at Cornell published a research report in a respected journal supporting the existence of ESP (Bem 2011). Among responses to the loss of confidence in p-values, the editors of Basic and Applied Social Psychology announced in 2015 that papers using standard null hypothesis significance testing would no longer be accepted (Trafimow and Marks 2015). Other journals have not outlawed this routine procedure, but they have changed their reporting requirements, and in March 2016 the American Statistical Society issued warnings and guidelines on the use of confidence testing (Wasserstein and Lazar 2016).

3 Responses to Improve Science Communication with the Public In response to these trends, a “science is broken” theme emerged in media coverage, as in a series of blogs by David Engber (2017) in Slate,5 and in a widely-reviewed book by NPR [National Public Radio] science reporter Richard Harris (Rigor Mortis 2017) that indicts lapses, wasted funds, and a “broken culture” among researchers in biomedicine. The resulting negative public perception of science overall, as well as the “the wide opinion gap” on specific issues (Leshner 2015, p. 459), prompted professional science societies in the US to launch several very visible initiatives to study and repair the communication between the scientific community and the public. The US National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, for example, organized several Sackler Colloquia on Science Communication, 2012, 2013, 2017 and 2019, bringing together scientists, administrators, and academic social scientists to exchange views on problems and best practices. Presentations from the first three Sackler conferences were later published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The National Academies also convened a “Committee on the Science of Science Communication” to review the research on science communication and determine what still needs to be learned. The result was a (2017) report on Communicating Science Effectively: A Research Agenda, discussed below. That same year saw the publication of The Oxford Handbook of the Science of Science Communication, also containing papers from those involved in the Sackler Colloquia.

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  5 May 2017, 17 May 2017, 21 August 2017. See also The Week, 18 April 2016; Aeon, November 7, 2017. For summaries of the “science is broken” theme see Hilgard and Jamieson (2017), and National Science Foundation (2018), “Threats to Science’s Reputation,” 46. Reprinted from the journal

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Focusing on the life sciences, the National Research Council (NRC) also created a forum in 2013 on challenges to communicating advances to the public, and it published a summary of the discussion, largely on direct scientist to public communication. Meanwhile the AAAS launched its own initiative in the form of a Center for Public Engagement with Science and Technology that sponsors seminars and onsite workshops, and in 2015 it created the Alan I. Leshner Leadership Institute offering fellowships to scientists promoting public outreach (Hoy 2018). In all the National Academies, National Research Council, and AAAS initiatives and their publications, the social science discipline of “science communication” dominates as the source of expert analysis and advice. Turning to social science allows the claim that science will be used to solve the problems of science communication, and indeed this overall approach has been called “the science of science communication.” The editors of the Oxford Handbook of the Science of Science Communication, for example, strongly assert their scientific credentials, claiming that their analysis is “transparent and replicable, theory driven, and generalizable” and their “evidence is derived by the scientific method” (2017, p. 1). The actual advice on how to communicate with the public is usually presented to scientists in short training sessions lasting from half a day to a few days. In the US, the National Science Foundation sponsors workshops across the country on “Becoming the Messenger.” These have been delivered by a private consulting firm featuring a team of media specialists.6 Trainers from AAAS’s Center for Public Engagement with Science and Technology have offered over 200 “Communicating Science Workshops” that focus on using social media and interacting with journalists and policy makers,7 and they have sponsored a “Communicating Science Seminar” at the yearly AAAS meetings since 2013, providing “a forum for scientists, science communication and public engagement professionals, and social scientists whose research can inform best practices to share their expertise and learn from one another.”8 Finally COMPASS, a consortium of professional science communication specialists, runs day-long seminars on effective science communication, “grounded in the latest research on science communication.”9 The advice given in these workshops can be sampled from the available online materials and from interviews with trainers and scientist-participants (Besley et al. 2015, 2016). How will better prepared scientists actually address the public? The notion of a “deficit model” of audiences needing instruction was replaced several years ago by an “engagement model” in which dialogue and listening are promoted over one-way communication (Leshner 2006). Scientists have been advised to seek out interactive forums and use social media, and such venues do seem to encourage two-way communication fostering rhetorical citizenship. However, confidence in the engagement model has recently shown cracks. Ten years after recommending engagement

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  https​://www.nsf.gov/event​s/event​_summ.jsp?cntn_id=12405​6&org=OISE&previ​ew=false​.   https​://www.aaas.org/progr​ams/commu​nicat​ing-scien​ce. 8   https​://www.aaas.org/page/cente​r-publi​c-engag​ement​-scien​ce-and-techn​ology​/2019-annua​l-meeti​ngcommu​nicat​ing-scien​ce-semin​ar. 9   https​://www.compa​sssci​comm.org/compa​ss-scico​mm-dc. 7

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Leshner wrote, “Forget the staged ‘town hall’ meetings—studies show that they are not very effective” (2015). Scientists are instead encouraged to give talks at science cafés, community clubs, science museums, science fairs and other small-scale events. These occasions may allow an informal question period, but they are basically one-way communication venues once again. There is also a strain of advice from communication specialists recommending that scientists bypass the public and go for “opinion leaders” and “policy makers” instead as the empowered audiences actually worth addressing (CSE, pp. 39–43).

4 Grounding Assumptions of the Science of Science Communication While it is not inevitable that rhetorical and social scientific approaches to science communication are incompatible, there are significant differences that will strike a rhetorician who encounters the research and recommendations from communication specialists. What follows is an examination of the science of science communication establishment from a rhetorical perspective, with a look at some of the assumptions undergirding its analyses and advice. The 2017 report on Communicating Science Effectively and the PNAS papers derived from the Sackler Colloquia constitute the primary material sampled for its assumptions about the content communicated, the approaches, the audience, and the nature of science itself. 4.1 Information The dominant term for the content communicated in the science communication literature is scientific information, a term that appears 114 times in Communicating Science Effectively [CSE] while information appears over 400 times. Early in the report a footnote defines ‘scientific information’ as “knowledge from science and how it is produced” (CSE, p. 3), suggesting a settled body of factual knowledge. The 2017 report amply acknowledges that there is “uncertainty associated with scientific information” (CSE, p. 27), but it also notes that “clear information about uncertainty” can be helpful and that audiences vary “in their desire for and responses to information about uncertainty” (p. 28) These are curious locutions. It seems that scientific communication with the public consists only of information—whether it is information about content or information about uncertainty, that is, certain statements about uncertainty. This information sits alongside other views and is somehow used in decision making (deliberative arguments) as evidenced from these opening lines of the report: “[P]eople face an increasing need to integrate information from science with their personal values and other considerations as they make important life decisions” (CSE, p. 1). Science communication specialists had once assumed that information would lead the public to agree with scientists’ policy goals, but they are now sure that there is no “simple, traceable relationship between the provision of information and a specific decision” (p. 39). The clear, factual status of information is also highlighted by the appearance of its evil twin, misinformation, the theme of the 2019 Sackler Colloquium. Science communication specialists now

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talk increasingly of active sources of misinformation preventing audiences from following science-based policies (Iyengar and Massey 2019), so the problem becomes one of “inoculating” audiences with the correct information before they can be misinformed (van der Linden et al. 2017). A rhetorician would be inclined to talk of scientific argumentation rather than scientific information, and of weaker to stronger arguments, including demonstrative proofs, rather than of information and misinformation. With that change in terms would come the entire analytical understanding of argumentative structures, stases, topoi or argument schemes, and more. On a stasis model, for example, arguments are categorized by the distinct issues they address (fact/definition, cause, evaluation, proposal), a taxonomy that aligns with the forensic, epideictic and deliberative speech genres (Fahnestock and Secor 1988, 1990; Kock 2011). Where science communication specialists see information, a rhetorician sees an argument that “the facts are as claimed” in the first or conjectural stasis. If no premises are offered, then default support comes only from the source of the claims. In a stasis model, arguments are also seen as hierarchically organized, the higher stases assuming the lower and the lower implicating the higher. Thus in certain contexts, audiences can infer deliberative outcomes from first-stasis arguments, but it would come as no surprise to a rhetorician that deliberative proposal arguments require more than first-stasis support from the scientific “facts” involved. Audiences can agree on the science and disagree on the policy. 4.2 Framing Working with scientific information as the basic content, science communication specialists, as social scientists, next typically describe how “information” is presented in terms of frames, and choosing the right frame is strongly recommended in the science communication literature. Framing has long been featured in mass media research to characterize the slant in a news story. Communicating Science Effectively defines framing as “casting information in a certain light to influence what people think, believe or do” (2017, p. 36), but it offers no account of lines of argument that might actually influence “what people think, believe or do.” Nisbet (2010), for example, offers a list of frames that presumably appear often in sciencesourced policy debates including social progress, economic development, morality/ ethics, scientific uncertainty, runaway science, the middle way, conflict/strategy. From a rhetorical perspective this list, in order, is a mixture of standard consequence arguments (the first three, typical in evaluations), an assessment of modality, the slippery slope fallacy, the tactic of mediating an antithesis, and a general label for identifying opposing positions. A strong thread of framing research has been concerned with what is called gain/loss framing, casting an issue in terms of positive or of negative consequences, though meta-analyses show no consistent effects from either on its own (CSE, p. 37). From a rhetorical perspective there would be nothing unusual in a proposal argument that used both appeals, as observed in the thirteenth of Aristotle’s 28 lines of argument (Kennedy 1991, p. 198) or in The New Rhetoric (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 1969, p. 266).

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Not surprisingly the concept of a frame has been the subject of recurring definitional debates and recent calls for its abandonment (Krippendorff 2017) or rescue (Kim 2019). Scholars of science communication have followed the definitional arguments of Cacciatore et al. (2016) who distinguish emphasis framing, choosing among different approaches (as in Nisbet above), from equivalence framing, expressing the same approach in different terms.10 A potential overlap between framing and rhetoric has been pursued by Kuypers (2010) and Franzosi and Vicari (2013, 2018), but their work is not cited and their more language-analytical approach is not prevalent in the science communication literature. Instead non-equivalent frames, choices of “casting,” are pursued as in Nisbet and Mooney’s (2007) advice published in Science urging scientists to “actively ‘frame’ information to make it relevant” with examples from Nisbet’s list offered at different points in this article. The predictable appeals offered by Nisbet and Mooney such as “social progress” or “economic development” were rejected as manipulative in the responses of some scientists to their proposal (Holland 2007). Ten years later in 2017, the CSE calls for more square-one research with larger samples and competing messages “to determine the extent to which framing of an issue matters and when it is best done” (p. 38).11 4.3 Narrative A strong thread in the science communication literature promotes addressing nonexpert audiences through narrative or story-telling (both terms are used). This recommendation is on display in two PNAS articles derived from the second Sackler colloquium (Downs 2014; Dahlstrom 2014). Though differing somewhat in their definitions of narrative,12 both studies base their advice on research arguing that narratives are easier to understand and remember as well as inherently more interesting, persuasive, and difficult to refute. Since in this view narratives have almost irresistible powers of insinuation, their use raises ethical problems. Dahlstrom reviews these concerns but concludes that “persuasion may be appropriate in contexts where social benefits are large enough to outweigh individual choice—so any narrative needs to be carefully aligned with the appropriate goal for the situation” (p. 13617).

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  Cacciatore, Scheufele and Iyengar’s article is a perfect example of a definitional dissociation argument as described in Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s The New Rhetoric. The authors start with a confused concept, frame, and dissociate it into two variants under conveniently alliterative labels (emphasis and equivalence), subsequently evaluating one of the pair more positively than the other. Once the pair are in place, they are further separated in a series of antitheses. On this difference see Druckman and Lupia (2017, p. 3). 11   For an analysis of Carbon Capture and Storage campaigns in terms of “information frames” interacting with other frames see Whitmarsh et al. (2019). 12   In one of the articles, Downs defines narrative as a narrator’s voice setting up a conflict followed by action over time to a resolution (2014, p. 13627) while in another Dahlstrom defines narrative as a structure of cause and effect relationships between events over time that impact particular characters, and he stresses narrative as the antithesis of “logical-scientific communication” (2014, p. 13614). Each article cites a different meta-analytical study showing inconsistent results from narratives (Downs, 13628; Dahlstrom, p. 13615). Reprinted from the journal

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There have been questions from scientists about the validity of narrative when it leads to the suppression of results that do not fit a story arc (Katz 2013), and further discomfort with narrative as a journalistic practice periodically surfaces as in a 2018 panel at the University of Sydney, “Is storytelling bad for science?13 Meanwhile, the communication professionals who deliver workshops and seminars strongly emphasize storytelling, often drawing on biology professor turned film producer Randy Olson’s popular Houston, We Have a Narrative (Olson 2015) for a set of basic plots. Narrative, of course, has a firm place in the rhetorical tradition. Aristotle’s paradeigmata are events narrated in a way to make their parallel applicability obvious (Kennedy 1991, pp. 179–181). The advice on constructing the narratio as the second of the standard five parts of an oration emphasizes the role of circumstantial detail and plausibility in creating a convincing story (Cicero 1981, pp. 25–29), and the Progymnasmata’s first exercises teach narrative reordering for differing effects (Kennedy 2003, pp. 28–42). But all of this advice is offered in the awareness of potentially competing narratives that can construct different versions, causal explanations, and implicit evaluations of events. Hence narratives do not replace arguments but are tools of argument in rhetoric. 4.4 Trust and Credibility In 2014 Dahlstrom noted that “Trust is receiving growing attention as one of the central issues in science communication” (p. 13617), and indeed the overview in Communicating Science Effectively includes a section on “Trust and Credibility” which it partitions into the three elements of competence, integrity, and dependability, further noting that people tend to find sources with shared interests and expertise more credible (CSE, pp. 43–44). Here the science communication scholars have rediscovered rhetorical ethos, the appeal from the character of the speaker or source (Kennedy 1991, pp. 37–38) whose components in Aristotle’s account are good sense or practical wisdom, virtue or good feeling, and good will (pp. 120–121). The science communication version acknowledges that trust is conferred by the audience, but then these constructs part ways. For while rhetorical ethos acknowledges extrinsic factors, it is largely a product of textual choices projecting the arguers’ understanding of the material, their probity, and their positive attitudes toward the audience. The social scientific account, on the other hand, emphasizes perceptions about the social placement of the source in relation to the audience including “race or ethnicity, income, religiosity, social capital, education and knowledge” (p. 44). The CSE once again calls for more research into the assumption that “people associate a message with a source and come to believe the message based on trust in that source” (CSE, p. 47). That trust in a source means accepting their claims suggests an exclusive efficacy beyond what proponents of rhetorical ethos would claim. Furthermore, the social scientific version of ethos emphasizes trustworthiness or credibility as a static pre-condition,

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not as a product of the argument itself. It therefore puts a premium on preserving scientists and scientific institutions from any perception of fallibility. 4.5 Audiences The science communication literature is filled with overt declarations against a “deficit model” of audiences as simply lacking knowledge and the emphasized “engagement” model suggests respect. Nevertheless, past these disclaimers, the “recipients of information” are characterized in terms of their potential deficiencies. Paraphrasing the negative view of nonexpert audiences conveyed in many of the chapters of The Oxford Handbook of the Science of Science Communication, Felicity Mellor writes in a review, “the public—superficial, inattentive and innumerate—are handicapped by all sorts of cognitive biases, misguided by prior experience and easily swayed by their emotions. Despite the move away from an information deficit model…it seems the public is still construed as an obstacle, only this time failing in their rational capabilities rather than their knowledge” (2018, p. 750). In the science communication literature, such characterizations abound and are warranted by frequent citations to research in psychology and social psychology (the very fields most implicated in the replication problems cited above). In dealing with such deplorable audiences, segmentation and then “tailoring” of messages is recommended (CSE, pp. 56–57). But how should audiences be segmented? Obviously, audience profiles in terms of attitudes or beliefs on particular issues would be useful, and social scientists specialize in profiling audiences and measuring attitudes on issues– or in short at assessing endoxa. But more often in the science communication literature, typical social labels are once again the preferred criteria of audience analysis: race, gender, ethnicity, age, level of education, religious identity and increasingly, partisan affiliation (Kahan 2012): e.g., “groups with higher socioeconomic status process and absorb new information more efficiently than groups with lower socioeconomic status” (CSE, p. 79). Hence audience subcategories have to be managed with expertly packaged information tailored to fixed identities. Is this demographic descriptivism any different from what one would find in rhetorical advice on audiences? After all, even Aristotle thought it was worthwhile segmenting male citizens into age brackets: the young, the old, and those in their prime (1991, pp. 164–172). However, the very multiplicity of social categories that can be used in such analyses obscures the complex mixture that any individual represents. Furthermore, this “essentializing” downplays the constructive possibilities in rhetorical discourse where the advice has always been to create a role for an audience member in the discourse itself. This orientation is difficult to grasp, but in rhetorically astute discourse, people should be addressed primarily as an audience for an argument, who are capable of making inferences between stated or implied premises and who, sometimes to the detriment of the arguer, can recognize the motives in the discourse addressed to them.

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4.6 The Nature of Science The source of the scientific information communicated to nonexpert audiences, science itself, is characterized in this literature as a sui generis enterprise: e.g., “The methods scientists use to understand the world are unlike the ways people typically think on a day-to-day basis” (CSE, p. 12); “People who are deeply versed in the methods, theories and facts of a particular scientific discipline use mental models quite different from those of nonexperts” (CSE, p. 32). And again, debates among philosophers aside, “Science offers a unique, rule-governed method for producing reliable knowledge about the world” (CSE, p. 27). In short in the science communication literature, science is by definition an activity that produces scientific information. This characterization exists alongside an acknowledgement that the results of science can be “insufficient, ambiguous or uncertain” (CSE, p. 12), and indeed experts on the social communication of science have a great deal to say about “uncertainty” as a feature of science communication, and in the case of controversies they are especially concerned that the level of uncertainty “can be misunderstood and misrepresented in public discourse” (p. 61). But “uncertainty” tends to be decoupled in this discourse from claims in the scientific literature, and from an acknowledgement that most scientific arguments are probable arguments, inevitably somewhat “uncertain,” whether controversial issues are involved or not. As a result of the proposed unique methods and mental procedures used by scientists to create information, an unbridgeable gulf opens between expert and nonexpert audiences. Inevitably scientists cannot argue with people who think differently. Of course, the notion that scientists’ brains may work differently from non-scientists’ brains poses an interesting problem for evolutionary biology. Meanwhile, the use of ordinary genres of public discourse (editorials, high-end journalism) as well as popular media (blogs and twitter) by scientists to debate scientific issues with each other receives no recognition (Buehl 2016). If by definition science is a body of factual knowledge produced according to rigorous and transparent methods, then problems like retractions, irreproducibility, and statistical misapplications should not occur. They are serious errors that have crept into the literature and that require correction. Hence science communication specialists recommend countering the “science is broken” frame, mentioned above, with a “science is self-correcting” frame as in the chapter reviewing “Threats to Science’s Reputation” in the Proceedings of the Third Sackler Colloquium (National Academy of Sciences 2018). To promote this frame, Hilgard and Jamieson recommend, for example, the use of phrases like “99.9% of published scientific essays have survived scholarly scrutiny” (2017, p. 91; a claim that begs for a definition of “scholarly scrutiny” since any published paper, including those retracted, has presumably gone through the scrutiny of pre-publication review). In a PNAS article, Jamieson argues that the media’s attention to the “science is broken frame” comes in part form scientists using “crisis language” to push for reforms (2018, p. 5), and she recommends that they instead “signal corrective efforts in both the titles of their publications and opening sentences of their opinion pieces in news outlets” (p. 6). Again, one “corrects” facts and information based on accepted axiomatic categorizations. One does not “correct” arguments; one strengthens or refutes them.

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5 Prospects and Conclusion Scholars of science communication are clear on what they need: more funding for more research into what actually works in science communication (CSE, p. 98). Again and again, Communicating Science Effectively claims that “research is needed” into the basic features of convincing discourse, and in its final chapter on the field’s research goals it asks “What are the particular structures and processes for public engagement that enable science to be communicated effectively?” (CSE, p. 91). A rhetorician would be inclined to answer that those structures and processes have long been available in rhetorical theory. In the twentieth century’s greatest work on rhetorical argumentation, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca point out that their recovery of rhetoric could have been a branch of psychology, but that first it was necessary “to characterize the different argumentative structures, the analysis of which must precede all experimental tests of their effectiveness” (1969, p. 9). It is very unlikely that a rhetorical view of scientific communication will gain any traction with representatives of scientific organizations where the investment in the science of science communication model is firm. And among scientists it is safe to say that the “R word” still has the same negative connotations that it has in general usage (Fahnestock 2013, p. 7). Furthermore a rhetorical perspective on argument, requiring more than a superficial understanding of invention, arrangement, and style, is not a quick fix, and it requires some background of language awareness which is almost completely absent from the science of science communication literature. But prospects are brighter for a rehabilitation of “argument.” No doubt scientists know they are arguing as the term appears frequently in scientific discourse in ways that one would expect as a label for the nature of the discursive activity that scientists are engaged in. And among signs of this change is the educational reform, started in Europe in the early 2000s, of teaching “science as argument,” a movement now with a firm base in STEM curricular innovations in the US from middle school through high school and into college. Multiple articles in journals like The Science Teacher (e.g., July 2013) and Science Education (e.g. July 2016) and elsewhere stress this goal. Most of the students taught science in this approach will not become scientists, but they will presumably be a more prepared audience. There are also signs of a change in view on how best to communicate with the public. Tamsin Edwards, an outspoken British climate scientist, responded in a BBC interview to the problem of expert disagreements: “the problem is that science is always sold as facts and it’s not. It’s process and that process is mainly arguing” (Edwards 2017). A change is even evident in comments from Bruno Latour, French sociologist of science and provocateur in the 90 ’s science wars, who said in a 2017 interview that he now wants to improve the public’s trust in science. The method, he said, would be to make the uncertainties and controversies explicit in order to give the public “a more realistic image of scientific

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knowledge” (de Vrieze 2017). And in a (2017) column in Nature, Anita Makri called for a different approach to the public communication of science: “This is not about manipulating or persuading the public to accept decisions, but rather providing them with the tools with which to make sense of the evidence, put the uncertainties in perspective and judge for themselves” (p. 261)—in short, treating the audience as respected partners in rhetorical deliberation. The model of public engagement presented in the science of science communication literature, on the other hand, offers a dim prospect for rhetorical citizenship. The discourse it promotes in some ways invites the criticisms that Plato leveled against pandering rhetoric in the Gorgias that is addressed to the worst proclivities of its audiences and that ultimately demeans them (Hamilton 1986, pp. 108–113). In the spirit of Kock’s updating of the response to Plato’s criticisms (2017), what is needed is a rhetorical approach to scientific communication that does not essentialize, demean, or manipulate its audience, that promotes substantive arguments over framing angles and stories, and that reflects the actual processes of science. Clearly the heart of the issue of informed rhetorical citizenship on scientific and technical matters is the quality of the rhetorical argumentation addressed to the public.

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Argumentation (2020) 34:389–397 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-020-09514-2 BOOK REVIEW

Frans H. van Eemeren and Bart Garssen (Eds.): From Argument Schemes to Argumentative Relations in the Wild: A Variety of Contributions to Argumentation Theory Cham (CH), Springer (= Argumentation Library, 35), 2020, 289 pp Fernando Leal1 Published online: 10 March 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020

The book under review is a by-product of the Ninth International Conference on Argumentation, that took place in July 2018 in Amsterdam; but it is emphatically not a volume of proceedings. It would be far too short for that. The event in question was huge, and in fact the proceedings as such were published by Sic Sat in 2019 in an over twelve-hundred-page volume, and even that volume did not contain all contributions to the event. Out of the mass of presentations at ISSA 2018, the organizers, and now editors, selected two groups, of sixteen items each, for a more formal publication, according to whether the authors had an orientation towards general theoretical issues or were more interested in particular argumentative practices within particular communicative situations. The authors in both groups were asked by the editors to work their conference contributions out into longer, substantial essays. The book reviewed here contains the sixteen ‘theoretical’ essays, whereas the sixteen ‘practical’ essays have been published as volume 17 of the series Argumentation in Context by John Benjamins (van Eemeren and Garssen 2019). Reviewing a book of this kind has a certain difficulty in that each chapter has a different orientation. Thus, the usual duty of a reviewer, first to describe the contents of a book, then to evaluate it, can hardly be done in the space of a book review, for it would imply fulfilling both tasks for each book chapter. But there is another way. The subtitle of the book says ‘a variety of contributions to argumentation theory’—and there is indeed a huge variety here, a bouquet if not a banquet. But this is precisely its peculiar strength, for we can see it as a microcosm of the current situation in argumentation theory, where different approaches abound, and perspectives run, as it were, in all directions. I am therefore going to propose a classificatory scheme organized by four distinct aspects of the theoretical activity observable in Chapter 8 was originally published as Leal, F. Argumentation (2020) 34: 389–397. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s10503-020-09514-2.

* Fernando Leal [email protected] 1



Department of Education, University of Guadalajara, University Center for the Social Sciences and the Humanities (Belenes), 150 José Parres Arias Avenue, 45132 Zapopan, Jal., Mexico

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F. Leal

argumentation studies, which may help understand the current variety both in this book and in the whole field of argumentation studies. To avoid repeating the titles of the chapters and their authors and to facilitate referencing for the following discussion, I enlist this information in Table 1 (with exclusion of Chapter 1, which is the introduction by the editors). Table 2 shows three aspects of the classificatory scheme proposed here as applied to the chapters of the book under review. The fourth aspect will later on appear as Table 3. Let’s then proceed to the scheme proposed here. First comes the target of theorizing about argumentation. Most theories of argumentation assume that there are certain objects, called arguments.1 People can certainly disagree about the ontological status of such objects. Are they strings of words? Are they sequences of propositions? Are they complexes of speech acts? Preferences may run in the direction of syntax or semantics or pragmatics. Yet, despite these differences, the target of theorizing is in all cases a kind of object, an entity, a thing. More particularly, an argument is a set, usually ordered, of one or several premises and usually one conclusion (both premises and conclusion can be conceived as sentences, utterances, propositions, or speech acts, as indicated above). When confronted with an actual piece of oral or written argumentation, these theorists are all intent on extracting that delicate object—the Argument—from all the ‘clutter’ that surrounds it and to study that object by itself, discarding, for the purposes of the theory, all that extra material (this conception, including the word ‘clutter’ is set forth in Johnson, 1981). Such theories can rightly be called argument theories (A-theories). In this book, seven chapters (3, 9, 11, 14–17), a bit less than half the book, are A-theoretical in that sense. This approach often is accompanied by logical formalization or quasi-formalization (chapters 3, 9, 15) and diagramming (9, 14, 17), and the discussion is often conducted in an abstract way, with few or no concrete examples of arguments (3, 9, 14) or only with schematic ones (15, 16). The influence of a training in formal logic in A-theorists is clear and detectable. In contrast, other theories of argumentation accept to some extent that one can talk about arguments as objects, but they are rather more interested in the particular way those arguments are actually formulated and presented in a given communicative situation. For such theorists, argumentation is different from argument because it implies a particular manner of presenting things. For ease of reference, we can here talk of argument delivery theories or D-theories. Compare an arguer X who formulates an argument like ‘p because q’ with an arguer Y who says: ‘p because q, although r’. These two arguers have in a sense presented the same argument, and it is not unlikely that an A-theorist would go so far as to delete the although-clause as ‘clutter’. For a D-theorist, however, there is a world of difference between arguer X and arguer Y, precisely because arguer Y is contemplating, in the way the argument is presented, another argument that runs to some extent against the original

1

  In English, as opposed to other European languages, the word ‘argument’ can also refer to the process of arguing and even to a particular kind of communicative situation in which the arguers are aggressive or uncivil to each other. This being a quirk of English, I propose to ignore it here and go with the majority of languages.

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J. B. Freeman

Is “Conductive Argument” a Single Argument?

On the Logical Reconstruction of Conductive Arguments

The Legitimacy of Conductive Arguments: What Are the Logical Roles of Negative Considerations?

Deploying Machine Learning Classifiers for Argumentative Relations “in the Wild”

14

16

17

Argumentative Abduction in the Interpretation Process: A Pragma-Dialectical Study of an Ironic Utterance

13

15

Arguing for Questions

Expressives in Argumentation: The Case of Apprehensive Straks (‘Shortly’) in Dutch

11

12

Assessing Connection Adequacy for Arguments with Institutional Warrants

On the Logical Ways to Counter an Argument: A Typology and Some Theoretical Consequences

9

10

D. Hample

Eudaimonistic Argumentation

Worries About the Prospects for Community Argument

7

8

F. E. López

O. Cocarascu and F. Toni

Y. Liao

Y. Xie

I. Fairclough

A. Duarte

R. Boogaart

D. Hitchcock

H. Marraud

A. Aberdein

J. Galindo

Evaluation in Philosophy: Fallacies as Strategic Maneuvering

Dialogical Sequences, Argumentative Moves and Interrogative Burden of Proof in Philosophical Argumentation

S. Oswald and T. Herman

5

Give the Standard Treatment of Fallacies a Chance! Cognitive and Rhetorical Insights into Fallacy Processing

4

H. V. Hansen

F. H. van Eemeren and B. Garssen

Authors

6

Argument Schemes: Extending the Pragma-Dialectical Approach

In Search of a Workable Auxiliary Condition for Authority Arguments

2

3

Title

Chapter

Table 1  The chapters of the book under review (chapter 1 not included)

UK

China

China

UK

Spain

Netherlands

Canada

Spain

USA

USA

USA

Spain/Mexico

Argentina

Switzerland

Canada

Netherlands

Country

Frans H. van Eemeren and Bart Garssen (Eds.): From Argument…

13

F. Leal Table 2  Distribution of chapters according to target, focus, and style of theorizing Chapter

Main theoretical target

Main theoretical focus

Main theoretical style

2

Process

Evaluation

Abstract

3

Arguments

Evaluation

Abstract

4

Presentation

Analysis

Example-driven

5

Presentation

Evaluation

Example-driven

6

Process

Analysis

Example-driven

7

Process

Evaluation

Abstract

8

Process

Evaluation

Abstract

9

Arguments

Evaluation

Abstract

10

Presentation

Evaluation

Example-driven

11

Arguments

Evaluation

Example-driven

12

Presentation

Analysis

Example-driven

13

Presentation

Analysis

Example-driven

14

Arguments

Analysis

Abstract

15

Arguments

Analysis

Abstract

16

Arguments

Evaluation

Abstract

17

Arguments

Analysis

Example-driven

argument (this idea was ably defended in Anscombre and Ducrot 1983). In other words, arguer Y is presenting her argument as related to a counter-argument, thus in effect comparing their mutual strength. In this book, five chapters are like that (4–5, 10, 12–13). The influence of disciplines that study language (chapters 5, 10, 12–13) or the mind (chapter 4) on D-theorists, as opposed to the logical bent of A-theorists, is unmistakable. Please note also that all five chapters conduct their discussions not in the abstract but on the basis of concrete examples. This is in accordance with their targeting the way arguments are presented. Finally, some theories of argumentation, apart from having some interest both in arguments and in argument delivery, have as their theoretical target the whole communicative situation in which arguments are presented. In other words, these theories concern the argumentative process as such: they are process or P-theories. In contradistinction to the two groups described above, P-theorists are sharply aware that, when people argue, they do not only present arguments, whether in this way or that way. For P-theorists, as for D-theorists, argumentation is different from argument, but not only because of the manner of presentation, but also because arguers do many other things apart from delivering arguments. Arguers may in fact may tell stories, express the need to obey a certain rule, propose a break, and other things which are different from argument presentation but nonetheless contribute a lot to the purposive activity they are engaging in (whether it is persuasion or inquiry or whatever). The paradigmatic P-theory is, of course, pragma-dialectics, an approach where we can find a concern for arguments as well as for their delivery, but also for many other things besides. In fact, the main theoretical construct of pragma-dialectics, the ideal model of critical discussion, both in its standard and extended version, offers a very broad view of argumentation as a complex process. In this book, four

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Artificial intelligence

Psychology

Cognitive science

Linguistics

Analytic philosophy

Informal logic

Formal logic

Pragma-dialectics

+

2

Chapters

+

3

+

4

+

+

5

Table 3  Distribution of theoretical frameworks among chapters

Theoretical framework

+

+

+

6

+

7

+

8

+

+

9

+

+

+

10

+

+

11

+

+

12

+

+

13

+

+

14

+

+

15

+

+

16

+

+

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chapters (2, 6–8) are P-theoretical in this sense, although only one (chapter 2) fully follows the model of critical discussion, whereas two others refer to it only in passing (chapters 6 and 8). One very important thing people do when arguing is the raising of questions. The role of questions in argumentation is a relatively neglected topic in our field: some researchers, such as Douglas Walton and Michel Meyer, have written extensively about questions (see especially Walton 1989; Meyer 1986, 2008), yet questions have never reached the importance of other topics, as witnessed by their total absence in the indices of the two most recent and excellent handbooks (van Eemeren et al. 2014; Bongiovanni et al. 2018). It is therefore a very agreeable surprise to find that three chapters (4, 6, 11) of this book are about questions. Now, the fact that these three chapters are very different in their treatment of questions confirms the importance of the distinction in theoretical targeting I have just described: • We have an A-theoretical chapter (11), in which, naturally enough, questions

are treated as premises or conclusions; as might be expected, the inspiration is a formal-logical system (the logic of erotetic inferences developed by Wiśniewski 1995, 2013), interpreted by the author in a certain way. • Then, we have a D-theoretical chapter (4), in which questions are used by an arguer as part of an indirect way of delivering an argument. In this case, questions function as a rhetorical technique (which the authors of the chapter interpret from the cognitive-science perspective of information processing) to produce a persuasive effect that assertions would never achieve. • Finally, we have a P-theoretical chapter (6), in which questions are seen as dialectical maneuvers in a philosophical discussion which illustrates argumentative moves typical of philosophers. In this case, questions are neither parts of arguments nor are they just a method of presentation of arguments but rather acts which allow the argumentation to go forward. Now, it is virtually impossible to theorize a given target without touching, even if superficially, on another target. One should probably conceive the three theoretical targets as circles in a Venn diagram, with multiple overlaps, so that a given theoretical treatment may occasionally be located at the intersection of two or even the three circles. This does not destroy the fact that theorists are usually more interested in one target rather than in another. Thus, when the chapters of the book under review are classified as A-, D-, or P-theoretical, what I mean is just that the main thrust of those chapters concerns one of the three targets. Secondly, consider the focus of theorizing. It has been widely recognized in our field that argumentation theories, of whatever kind, can focus either on description and analysis of what goes on in argumentation or rather on evaluation and criticism. In this book, we have seven chapters mainly focused on description and analysis (4, 6, 12–15, 17) and nine on evaluation and criticism (2–3, 5, 7–11, 16). Having said this, one should be aware of the fact that theoretical focus is orthogonal to theoretical targeting. Out of the seven descriptive chapters, three concern arguments (14–15, 17), another three concern argument presentation (4, 12–13), and only one concerns the argumentative process (6).

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Again, four chapters evaluate arguments (3, 9, 11, 16), two evaluate their delivery (5, 10), and three evaluate process (2, 7–8). The fact that target and focus are two dimensions of theorizing throws some light on a distinction that has become a commonplace in argumentation studies: the distinction between product, process, and procedure. I find this distinction inadequate for three reasons: • First, ‘argument as product’ corresponds roughly to what I simply call ‘argu-

ment’ in the sense of most languages. The word ‘product’ is not, however, particularly accurate. If arguments are products, then it is the theorist not the arguer who produces them through abstraction from argumentative activity. This of course does not detract from the fact that arguers can on occasion act the part of theorists by becoming aware of what they are doing and commenting on that activity—they can even argue about it (this is one of the meanings of ‘metaargumentation’). • Secondly, ‘argument as process’ conflates ‘argument presentation’ and ‘argumentative process’, as I have argued earlier on: the latter phrase covers a wider range of phenomena than the former, e.g. the assignment of roles as theorized in pragma-dialectics. • Thirdly, ‘argument as procedure’ has to do with the distinction between evaluation/criticism and description/analysis, which, as just indicated, applies across the three targets of argumentation theory. It is obviously very difficult to evaluate without describing, and whoever describes sooner or later does some evaluation. This means that chapters classified as descriptive or normative are understood, again, as mainly not exclusively one thing or the other. Thirdly, we should talk about theoretical style. Some books in argumentation theory are conducted at a high level of abstraction, with only a few examples thrown in for the purpose of illustrating its theoretical points. Other books contain dozens if not hundreds of examples. The two contemporary books commonly considered as inaugurating the current field of argumentation studies (Toulmin 1958; Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 1958) are almost perfect examples of one and the other style. Journal papers can be observed to follow the same division into a high-road, abstract style of theorizing and a low-road, exampledriven style. Theoretical style in this sense is of course a matter of degree: some authors can manage to fill page after page of pure theory without giving us the respite of an illustration, whereas other authors glory in their huge samples; these are extremes between which one can find intermediary positions. Still, the distinction holds, and this book contains a fully balanced distribution: eight instances of the abstract style of theorizing (2–3, 7–9, 14–16) and eight instances of the example-driven style (4–6, 10–13, 17). Now, what is the source of the examples of argumentation used by the several authors of the book chapters use, when they do use examples, in order to illustrate a theoretical point or to extract a theoretical lesson by means of analysis? Most Reprinted from the journal

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of them come either from everyday life or from the media, including now the social media. These two sources are, after all, the main reservoir of examples for our field. In two chapters, 5 and 6, however, we are confronted with argumentations taken from philosophy, mainly in its analytic tradition, whose methods have great importance for argumentation studies, hitherto somewhat unacknowledged. As for legal argumentation, an increasingly visible source of examples, it only makes an appearance in chapters  4 and 17, in the shape of fictitious courtroom film scenes. This is as far as Table 2 goes. There is, however, still the matter of the theoretical framework to consider. There will probably be a fair amount of disagreement about how many theories of argumentation we have and which they are; but the looser expression ‘theoretical framework’, which I am here proposing, is perhaps less controversial. In the humanities and the social sciences, the expression usually refers to a more or less sophisticated conceptual apparatus paired with certain methods of analysis and certain more or less explicit models. Among the academic disciplines that provide argumentation theorists with some or all of those the following four stand out: • formal logic (highly developed, although argumentation theorists usually rest

content with its simplest aspects),

• informal logic (a congeries of methods and ideas rather than a theory, see Puppo

2019),

• pragma-dialectics (a full-fledged theory with 40 years of continuous research by

a large team, see van Eemeren 2015, 2018), and

• linguistics (with many branches, although practically only exploited by pragma-

dialectics and argumentative semantics).

To these I would first add: • analytic philosophy, because it has always been concerned with the quality of

arguments and has developed some arguably notable methods of analysis (which is why it is called ‘analytic philosophy’ in the first place).

Finally, we might include: • psychology and cognitive science (here taken as one discipline, although there is

room for disagreement about their unity), as well as

• artificial intelligence (increasingly important in argumentation studies).

Some readers may also want to mention rhetoric, whose tradition goes back over two millennia, and which has experienced some sort of revival in recent times. I leave here rhetoric aside because no chapter in the book under review makes any serious attempt to engage either the classical inventory or any modern proposal, not because it has no potential—on the contrary (see e.g. Rubinelli 2009; van Eemeren 2010). The same is true, mutatis mutandis, of dialectics.

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Theoretical frameworks are not included in Table 2 for a simple reason: although five chapters in this book rely on just one of these disciplines (2–4, 7–8), the rest feed on two or more of them, as shown in Table 3. And with that last attempt at putting some order in the rich theoretical offerings contained in this book, my work is done. I hope to have shown that, despite the considerable variety contained in this volume, it can be proudly held up as a mirror of the different aspects of theorizing that we can observe in our field. The fact that this book has been written by researchers from nine different countries (see Table 1) is an encouraging sign of the increasing internationalization of the theory of argumentation and only adds to the pleasure.

References Anscombre, J.-C., and O. Ducrot. 1983. L’argumentation dans la langue. Brussels: Pierre Mardaga. Bongiovanni, G., G. Postema, A. Rotolo, G. Sartor, C. Valentini, and D. Walton (eds.). 2018. Handbook of Legal Reasoning and Argumentation. Dordrecht: Springer. Meyer, M. 1986. De la problématologie. Brussels: Pierre Mardaga. Meyer, M. 2008. Principia rhetorica: Une théorie générale de l’argumentation. Paris: Fayard. Perelman, C., and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca. 1958. Traité de l’argumentation: La nouvelle rhétorique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. [English: The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, translated by J. Wilkinson and P. Weaver, Notre Dame, IN, University of Notre Dame Press, 1969]. Puppo, F. 2019. Informal Logic: A ‘Canadian’ Approach to Argument. Windsor (ON): Windsor Studies in Argumentation. Rubinelli, S. 2009. Ars Topica: The Classical Technique of Constructing Arguments from Aristotle to Cicero. Cham (CH): Springer. Toulmin, S. 1958. The Uses of Argument. Cambridge (UK): Cambridge University Press. van Eemeren, F.H. 2010. Strategic Maneuvering in Argumentative Discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. van Eemeren, F.H. 2015. Reasonableness and Effectiveness in Argumentative Discourse: Fifty Contributions to the Development of Pragma-Dialectics. Cham (CH): Springer. van Eemeren, F.H. 2018. Argumentation Theory: A Pragma-Dialectical Perspective. Cham (CH): Springer. van Eemeren, F.H., and B. Garssen (eds.). 2019. Argumentation in Actual Practice. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. van Eemeren, F.H., B. Garssen, E.C.W. Krabbe, A.F. Snoeck Henkemans, B. Verheij, and J.H.M. Wagemans. 2014. Handbook of Argumentation Theory. Dordrecht: Springer. Walton, D.N. 1989. Question-Reply Argumentation. New York: Greenwood Press. Wiśniewski, A. 1995. The Posing of Questions: Logical Foundations of Erotetic Inferences. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Wiśniewski, A. 2013. Questions, Inferences, and Scenarios. London: College Publications.

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Argumentation (2020) 34:399–402 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-020-09518-y BOOK REVIEW

Eddo Rigotti and Sara Greco: Inference in Argumentation. A Topics‑Based Approach to Argument Schemes 2019, Springer, Cham Christophe Geudens1  Published online: 13 March 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020, corrected publication 2020

The volume under review contains a study of what in the scholarship is known as the Argumentum Model of Topics (AMT for short). The AMT, which builds on the pragma-dialectical approach to argumentation that was developed by van Eemeren and Grootendorst (see esp. van Eemeren 2018; van Eemeren and Grootendorst 2004), is a model for the study of argument schemes. It provides an account of the inference relation (or the “standpoint-argument relation”, as the authors prefer) in argumentation that is based on the concept of locus (loci plural). Rigotti and Greco both stood at the cradle of the AMT, and they have published extensively on the subject for more than a decade. This volume, which is the first book-length discussion of the AMT, presents a précis of research they have jointly carried out since 2004. The locus, which is rooted in Aristotle’s Topics and Rhetoric (384–322 BC), is an artefact from ancient logic and rhetoric, and it formed an integral part of these two disciplines from Antiquity well into the Early Modern period. The AMT is an ambitious attempt to revive the locus in present-day argumentation theory. The volume is thus unsurprisingly a diptych. On the one hand, it gives an outline of premodern theories of loci, which, as the authors rightly emphasize in the preface (viii), remain understudied today; and, on the other hand, with the AMT it also develops an account of the inference relation in argumentation that is based on certain core concepts from these premodern theories and is tailored to the needs of present-day argumentation theorists. The AMT is introduced in Part II, which consists of Chapters 6–8. The historical survey is given in Part I, which consists of Chapters 1–5 and takes up two-thirds of the volume. Part I covers the period from Greek Antiquity to the dawn of modern argumentation theory in the 1950s and 1960s and discusses The original version of this article was revised due to the acknowledgement section has been published incorrectly. Now the same has been provided in the correction. Chapter 9 was originally published as Geudens, C. Argumentation (2020) 34: 399–402. https://doi.org/ 10.1007/s10503-020-09518-y.

* Christophe Geudens [email protected] 1



FWO/Research Foundation Flanders, KU Leuven - University of Leuven, Blijde‑Inkomststraat 21, Box 3309, 3000 Leuven, Belgium

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the accounts of, among others, Severinus Boethius (c. 475-c. 525; Chap. 2.2), Peter Abelard (1079–1142; Chap. 3.5), Rudolph Agricola (1444–1485; Chap. 4.2) and Stephen Toulmin (1922–2009; Chap. 5.2). It ends with a discussion of how the locus-based approach that characterizes the AMT fits in with other recent research on argument schemes, such as the work of Manfred Kienpointner (Chap. 5.3) and Douglas Walton (Chap. 5.6). The authors emphasize in the preface that Part I should not be read as a history of theories of loci, but rather as an overview of “those contributions that” they believe “should be included in contemporary dialogue” (viii). Part I is nonetheless one of the most wide-ranging historical studies of theories of loci that has been published to date. To my knowledge, only three comparable surveys are available at present: Biard and Mariani Zini (2009), Green-Pedersen (1984) and Stump (1989). These three studies, however, focus exclusively on the logical tradition of the loci and leave the rhetorical tradition out of consideration. Moreover, Green-Pedersen (1984) and Stump (1989) only address the ancient and medieval periods and do not treat Early Modern accounts. Rigotti and Greco deserve recognition for their efforts to include both the rhetorical and the logical side of the story and to cover a period that spans two millennia. These features make this volume the first of its kind. This being said, the volume would have benefitted from a more thorough engagement with the existing scholarship on the history of topical logic (or dialectic), as the authors sometimes take a rather controversial or unusual position on certain matters without marking this position as such. For instance, only few Aristotle scholars would agree with the claim that the Topics “presupposes the conceptual framing” from the Prior Analytics (7). The received view holds that the Topics (or at least books II–VII) predate the Prior Analytics, and there are certainly important respects in which Aristotle’s account of deductive inference (sullogismos) in the Topics differs from his account in the Prior Analytics (see esp. Malink 2015). Also, the authors rightly stress that one of the core principles in the theory of loci from Boethius’ On Topical Differences (De topicis differentiis; De top. diff. for short) is the quaestio or question. The quaestio, so they state (68), is the disjunction φ? ∨ ¬φ? of a formula φ and its negation, where both φ and ¬φ have an interrogative force. This interpretation certainly occurs in Boethian scholarship (see, e.g., Magnano 2018: 56–57). But the matter is debated. There are reasons to believe that, for Boethius (as for his medieval successors, for that matter), a quaestio is simply a subject-copula-predicate sentence with an interrogative force. The assertion of a quaestio can occur as the conclusion in a categorical argument like a syllogism, for instance, as Boethius says at De top. diff. I, 1174B, which is difficult to reconcile with the notion that quaestiones are typically disjunctions (see, e.g., Stump 1988: 187–188). If, with our authors, we accept the disjunctive reading, then the quaestio becomes a precursor of the present-day notion of issue, as the authors indeed emphasize (see, e.g., 68, 73, 76, 85); but if we accept the non-disjunctive reading, then the quaestio becomes a precursor not of the issue, but rather of the standpoint. Furthermore, it is questionable whether Peter of Spain (fl. c. 1220–1250) would have agreed with the claim that particular-affirmative (I) and particular-negative (O) propositions have existential import, while universal-affirmative (A) and universal-negative (E) propositions do not, as the authors write when they discuss Peter’s account of the categorical square

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of opposition (114). Peter, along with most medieval logicians, ascribed existential import to universal and particular affirmatives, though not to universal or particular negatives (see esp. Ashworth 1973; Copenhaver 2014: 79–80; Klima 2001). Thus, in predicate logic, the A-proposition should not be rendered as an implication, as our authors suggest, but rather as a conjunction; and the O-proposition should not be rendered as a conjunction, but rather as a disjunction, as follows:

∙ ∙ ∙ ∙

(A) “Every S is P” (E) “No S is P” (I) “Some S is P” (O) “Some S is not P”

=df =df =df =df

∃xSx ∧ ∀x(Sx → Px) ∀x(Sx → ¬Px) ∃x(Sx ∧ Px) ¬∃xSx ∨ ∃x(Sx ∧ ¬Px)

This account also validates the different opposition and entailment relations in the square, while the authors’ account does not. (For instance, the subalternation relations A ⊨ I and E ⊨ O fail if the I- and O-propositions have an import, while the A- and E-propositions do not.) My point is that Part I contains occasional inaccuracies and claims that might require further backing or argument. It would be unfair, however, to press this point too much, since the authors do not aim to provide a philologically-grounded and historical reading of the sources in the first place. In the preface, they emphasize that their focus is contemporary (viii), and they stay true to this principle throughout the different chapters. Their goal in Part I is to develop a framework that integrates theories that were developed in contexts as different as medieval scholasticism and analytic philosophy into one coherent narrative and that can also serve as the basis for the systematic (non-historically oriented) discussion in Part II. In this the authors certainly succeeded. The volume is well structured, and it is written in a clear and lucid style, although the reader might occasionally be hindered by anacolutha and typos, which are unfortunately rather numerous. The volume is recommended not only for argumentation theorists, who are the intended readership, but also for historians of rhetoric and logic, who will find in it an engaging discussion of how concepts from a distant past can be put to use in present-day systematic research. Acknowledgements  The author acknowledges the financial support of FWO/Research Foundation Flanders Grant 1160017N.

References Ashworth, E. Jennifer. 1973. Existential Assumptions in Late Medieval Logic. American Philosophical Quarterly 10: 141–147. Biard, Joël, and Fosca Mariani Zini (eds.). 2009. Les lieux de l’argumentation. Histoire du syllogisme topique d’Aristote à Leibniz. Turnhout: Brepols. Copenhaver, Brian P. et al. (ed., trans.). 2014. Peter of Spain: Summaries of Logic. Text, Translation, Introduction, and Notes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Green-Pedersen, Niels Jørgen. 1984. The Tradition of the Topics in the Middle Ages. The Commentaries on Aristotle’s and Boethius’ Topics. München: Philosophia.

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C. Geudens Klima, Gyula. 2001. Existence and Reference in Medieval Logic. In New Essays in Free Logic in Honour of Karel Lambert, ed. Edgar Morscher and Alexander Hieke, 197–226. Dordrecht: Springer. Magnano, Fiorella. 2018. Boethius: On Topical Differences. Barcelona: Fédération Internationale des Instituts d’Études Médiévales. Malink, Marko. 2015. The Beginnings of Formal Logic. Deduction in Aristotle’s Topics vs. Prior Analytics. Phronesis 60: 267–309. Stump, Eleonore. 1988. Boethius’s In Ciceronis Topica. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Stump, Eleonore. 1989. Dialectic and Its Place in the Development of Medieval Logic. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Van Eemeren, Frans H. 2018. Argumentation Theory. A Pragma-Dialectical Perspective. Cham: Springer. Van Eemeren, Frans H., and Rob Grootendorst. 2004. A Systematic Theory of Argumentation. The Pragma-Dialectical Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Argumentation (2020) 34:403 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-020-09520-4 CORRECTION

Correction to: Eddo Rigotti and Sara Greco: Inference in Argumentation. A Topics‑Based Approach to Argument Schemes Christophe Geudens1  Published online: 28 April 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020

Correction to: Argumentation https​://doi.org/10.1007/s1050​3-020-09518​-y In the original publication of this article, the acknowledgement section has been published incorrectly. It has been rectified in this correction. Acknowledgements The author acknowledges the financial support of FWO/ Research Foundation Flanders Grant 1160017N.

Publisher’s Note  Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

The original article can be found online at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-020-09518-y.

Chapter 10 was originally published as Geudens, C. Argumentation (2020) 34: 403. https://doi.org/ 10.1007/s10503-020-09520-4.

* Christophe Geudens [email protected] 1



FWO/Research Foundation Flanders, KU Leuven - University of Leuven, Blijde‑Inkomststraat 21, Box 3309, 3000 Leuven, Belgium

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