Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Why Missing Premises Can Be Missed: Evaluating Arguments By Determining Their Lever, Jean H.M. Wagemans

OSSA Conference Archive

By taking an argument to consist of one premise and one conclusion, the Periodic Table of Arguments (PTA) excludes from its conceptualization the element traditionally called the ‘connecting premise’ or ‘warrant’ – which is often missing from the discourse. This paper answers the question of how to evaluate the underlying mechanism of an argument by presenting a method for formulating its ‘argumentative lever’ based on an identification of its type.

Bias In Legitimate Ad Hominem Arguments, Patrick Bondy

OSSA Conference Archive

This paper is about bias and ad hominem arguments. It will begin by rehearsing some reasons for thinking that there are both legitimate and illegitimate ad hominems, as well as reasons for thinking that biases can be both justified and unjustified. It will explain that justified biases about people with certain social identities can give rise to both legitimate and illegitimate ad hominem attacks, while unjustified biases only give rise to illegitimate ad hominems.

The paper will then describe Audrey Yap’s view that even when an unjustified bias is made explicit and shown to be unjustified, it can still make …

Damed If You Do; Damed If You Don’T: Cohen’S “Missed Opportunities”, Sharon Bailin, Mark Battersby

OSSA Conference Archive

In his paper, “Missed Opportunities in Argument Evaluation,” Daniel Cohen has in his sights a “curious” asymmetry in how we evaluate arguments: while we criticize arguments for failing to point out obvious objections to the proposed line of reasoning, we do not consider it critically culpable to fail to take into account arguments for the position. Cohen views this omission as a missed opportunity, for which he lays the blame largely at the metaphorical feet of the “Dominant Adversarial Model” of argumentation – the DAM account. We argue here that, while Cohen criticizes the DAM account for conceptualizing arguments as …

Evaluating Narrative Arguments, Khameiel Al Tamimi

OSSA Conference Archive

This paper addresses the question of how to evaluate narrative arguments. I will be discussing how to evaluate narrative arguments as process as opposed to arguments as product, as with dominant accounts of argument appraisal such as informal logic. The first part of this paper will show that dominant accounts of argument evaluation are not fit for narrative arguments because they focus on the product of argument. The second part of the paper will develop an account of argument evaluation for arguments as process, that is the virtuous audience, which will combine the rhetorical understanding of audience with virtue argumentation

Commentary On Khameiel Al Tamimi's "Evaluating Narrative Arguments", Paula Olmos

OSSA Conference Archive

No abstract provided.

On The Norms Of Visual Argument, David M. Godden

OSSA Conference Archive

While pictures can persuade, can they do so rationally – by offering reasons? Existing debate has focused on whether images are – or can be – arguments. Yet, from a normative perspective, a more pressing question concerns how the persuasive operation of images ought to be evaluated. By analyzing the concept of argument as necessarily involving reasons the paper argues that the possibility of visual arguments requires no revision to our existing normative theories of argument.

Modeling Critical Questions As Additional Premises, Douglas Walton, Thomas F. Gordon, Scott F. Aikin

OSSA Conference Archive

This paper shows how the critical questions matching an argumentation scheme can be mod-eled in the Carneades argumentation system as three kinds of premises. Ordinary premises hold only if they are supported by sufficient arguments. Assumptions hold, by default, until they have been questioned. With exceptions the negation holds, by default, until the exception has been supported by sufficient arguments. By “sufficient arguments”, we mean arguments sufficient to satisfy the applicable proof standard.

A Unitary Schema For Arguments By Analogy, Lilian Bermejo-Luque, George Boger

OSSA Conference Archive

Following a Toulmian account of argument analysis and evaluation, I offer a unitary schema for, so called, deductive and inductive types of analogical arguments. This schema is able to explain why certain analogical arguments can be said to be deductive, and yet, also defeasible.