Arts and Humanities Commons^™

What Makes Us Change Our Minds In Our Everyday Life? Working Through Evidence And Persuasion, Events And Experiences., Jens E. Kjeldsen

OSSA Conference Archive

We know almost nothing about the reasoning that makes people change their minds in everyday life. Which role do arguments play in contrast to personal relations and ethos? Are people persuaded to change, or does change rather follow personal experiences? This paper examines the epistemologies people use to rhetorically work through their opinions, when moving from one conviction to another. The paper is based on research interviews with people who have changed their minds.

Broadening “In Situ” For Improving Argument Evaluation?, Haavard Koppang

OSSA Conference Archive

The psychology of argumentation (PSA), has added new insight into argumentation theory and informal logic, fields that so far have been strongly influenced by the philosophy of argumentation (PHA). One assumption with regard to the PSA is that reasoning is argumentative and constructed to persuade. Thus, the successful outcome of reasoning is the ability to persuade for action to adapt to specific situations. Whereas biased beliefs – generated by mechanisms such as confirmation bias and motivated reasoning – might sway production and evaluation of arguments significantly. Arguers do not primarily activate reasoning for logical purposes; they do so rather to …

Assessing Evidence Relevance By Disallowing Assessment, John Licato, Michael Cooper

OSSA Conference Archive

Guidelines for assessing whether potential evidence is relevant to some argument tend to rely on criteria that are subject to well-known biasing effects. We describe a framework for argumentation that does not allow participants to directly decide whether evidence is potentially relevant to an argument---instead, evidence must prove its relevance through demonstration. This framework, called WG-A, is designed to translate into a dialogical game playable by minimally trained participants.

Persuading And Convincing, Adelino Cattani

OSSA Conference Archive

I’ll propose a distinction based on historical, theoretical, and linguistic considerations between:

- two different ways of inducing a change of mind, that is persuading and convincing.

- two different ways of proving, that is rhetorical argumentation and logical-experimental demonstration.

There is a tendency to keep a distance from persuasion in favor of conviction. In everyday language, the difference between the two terms appears clear, and it is a distinction developed theoretically by many authors from Plato and Kant to Perelman. In particular:

1. Persuasion is centered chiefly on the speaker: it enhances one’s will and ability to modify …

Emotional Legal Arguments And A Broken Leg, Rubens Damasceno-Morais

OSSA Conference Archive

We intend to examine ways that emotions may be intertwined within argumentative legal discourses. From the transcript of a brief trial in a Court of Appeal in Brazil we have the opportunity to observe how the emotional and rational reasoning live together in a deliberation among magistrates. “The leg broken case” allow us to examine how judges define the value of compensation to be paid in cases of moral damage. We show that not only technical arguments are the compounds of one decision; subjectivity is also important in that legal context. We would yet confirm what jurists and …

The Emotional Life Of Reason: Exploring Conceptions Of Objectivity, Robert C. Pinto, Laura E. Pinto

OSSA Conference Archive

This paper extends Pinto’s (2011) “Emotions and Reasons” (in which he argued that emotions provide reasons for action in so far as the beliefs and desires which make up reasons are constitutive elements of emotions) by exploring relationships between emotions-as-reasons and in (re)conceptualizing objectivity as naturalized to address the evaluative dimension. The paper addresses the emotional character of reason with respect to subjective and normative validity by shifting analysis to socially situated practices.

Argumentative Virtues And Deep Disagreement, Chris Campolo

OSSA Conference Archive

The theoretical possibility of deep disagreement gives rise to an important practical problem: a deep disagreement may in practice look and feel like a merely stubborn normal disagreement. In this paper I critique strategies for dealing with this practical problem. According to their proponents these strategies exhibit argumentative virtue, but I will show that they embody serious argumentative (and even moral) vices.

Arguing Or Reasoning? Argumentation In Rhetorical Context, Manfred Kraus

OSSA Conference Archive

If dialogue is a necessary condition for argument, argumentation in oratory becomes questionable, since rhetoric is not a dialogically structured activity. If special norms apply to the ‘solo’ performances of rhetoric, the orator’s activity may be more appropriately described as reasoning than as arguing. By analyzing in what respect rhetorical texts can be interpreted as dialogue-based and subject to criteria of Informal Logic, the virtues of rhetorical argumentation in contrast to logic and dialectic emerge.

Evolution, Cognition And Argumentation, Cristian Santibanez Yanez, Michael A. Gilbert

OSSA Conference Archive

Sperber and Mercier (2009, 2010) maintain that argumentation is a meta-representational module. In their evolutionary view of argumentation, the function of this module would be to regulate the flow of information between interlocutors through persuasiveness on the side of the communicator and epistemic vigilance on the side of the audience. The aim of this paper is to discuss this definition of argumen-tation by analyzing what they mean by “communicator’s persuasiveness” and “audience epistemic vigilance”

Evidence-Based Practice And Toulmin, Tone Kvernbekk, Robert C. Pinto

OSSA Conference Archive

There is a vast literature on evidence-based practice (EBP) in education. Both critics of and adherents to EBP seem to think of evidence largely as quantitative data, serving as a foundation from which practice could and should be derived; in Toulminian terms, evidence is treated solely as data/grounds. I argue in this paper that it is better in educational reasoning to view the function of evidence as backing of the warrant.