Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Where Do You Place Your Argument?, Christina Pontoppidan

OSSA Conference Archive

Toulmin’s logical approach to argumentation affects the purpose and design of his argument model. The author argues that, even though the model has proven useful and influential in the rhetorical tradition, it misses the most central aspects of persuasive argumentation and the rhetorical role of the topics. The author outlines a rhetorical argument model that takes the metaphor of places seriously and shows the process of building a persuasive argument guided by different types of topical places.

Should Logos Be Opposed To Ethos? Commentary On Adelino Cattani’S ‘Persuading And Convincing’, Marcin Koszowy

OSSA Conference Archive

No abstract provided.

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 …

Dialectic Of/Or Agitation? Rethinking Argumentative Virtues In Proletarian Elocution, Satoru Aonuma

OSSA Conference Archive

This paper explores the possible rapprochement between Marxism and argumentation attempted in Proletarian Elocution, a 1930 Japanese publication. Against a Western Marxist commonplace that “[a]s far as rhetoric is concerned,… a Marxist must be in a certain sense a Platonist” (Eagleton, 1981), the paper discusses how this work seeks to takes advantage of the inquiry and advocacy dimensions of argumentation for the Marxian strategy of “agitprop” and rearticulate it as part of civic virtues.

Interpretative Dilemmas, David Botting

OSSA Conference Archive

In this paper I claim that the reason we are reluctant to call many informal fallacies fallacies of relevance is because we can interpret them as providing contextual information about how the argument is to be interpreted. This interpretative dilemma is that the logical form is determined in part by whether the analyst wishes to be charitable to the proponent or the opponent. The evaluation of the argument is nonetheless purely logical.

Rhetoric, Dialectic And Logic: The Triad De-Compartmentalized, Charlotte Jørgensen

OSSA Conference Archive

Taking Blair’s recent contribution to the debate about the triad as its starting point, the paper discusses and challenges the effort to reduce the intricate relationship between rhetoric, dialectic, and logic to a single criterion or watertight trichotomy. I argue that such efforts obscure the complexities within the fields, their differences being partly due to disciplinary traditions. They neglect the intermingling properties of the fields as well as the possibilities for theoretical bridging between them.

What Argumentation (Theory) Can Do For Philosophy In The 21st Century, Henrique Jales Ribeiro

OSSA Conference Archive

The author holds that the old theory according to which philosophy is the matrix of argumentation studies must be entirely reviewed currently. He argues that argumentation theory, as an interdisciplinary domain, may start playing, in new terms, the role which ― in the Cartesian tree ― was that of philosophy as the trunk of the different branches of human knowledge, as long as a set of requirements, which he lists, were met.

Critical Thinking And Informal Logic: Neuropsychological Perspectives, Paul Thagard

OSSA Conference Archive

This article challenges the common view that improvements in critical thinking are best pursued by investigations in informal logic. From the perspective of research in psychology and neuroscience, human inference is a process that is multimodal, parallel, and often emotional, which makes it unlike the linguistic, serial, and narrowly cognitive structure of arguments. Attempts to improve inferential practice need to consider psychological error tendencies, which are patterns of thinking that are natural for people but frequently lead to mistakes in judgment. This article discusses two important but neglected error tendencies: motivated inference and fear-driven inference.

Are There Methods Of Informal Logic?, Hans V. Hansen, Daniel H. Cohen

OSSA Conference Archive

This presentation seeks to understand informal logic as a set of methods for the logical evaluation of natural language arguments. Some of the methods identified are the fallacies method, deductivism, warrantism and argument schemes. A framework for comparing the adequacy of the methods is outlined consisting of the following categories: learner- and user-efficiency, subjective and objective reliability, and scope. Within this framework, it is also possible to compare informal and formal logic.

Inference As Growth: Peirce’S Ecstatic Logic Of Illation, Philip Rose, John Woods

OSSA Conference Archive

For Peirce, logic is essentially illative, a relation of inferential growth. It follows that inference and argumentation are essentially ecstatic, an asymmetrical, ampliative movement from antecedent to consequent. It also follows that logic is inherently inductive. While deduction remains an essential and irreplaceable aspect of logic, it should be seen as a more abstract expression of the illative, semiological essence of inference as such.

The Formal Failure And Social Success Of Logic, William Brooke, Andrew Aberdein

OSSA Conference Archive

Is formal logic a failure? It may be, if we accept the context-independent limits imposed by Russell, Frege, and others. In response to difficulties arising from such limitations I present a Toulmin-esque social recontextualization of formal logic. The results of my project provide a positive view of formal logic as a success while simultaneously reaffirming the social and contextual concerns of argumentation theorists, critical thinking scholars, and rhetoricians.

Whose Toulmin, And Which Logic? A Response To Van Benthem, Yun Xie, Minghui Xiong, Hans V. Hansen

OSSA Conference Archive

In a recent paper, “One Logician’s Perspective on Argumentation”, van Benthem expressed his reservations on Toulmin’s diagnosis and abandonment of formal logic, and argued that Toulmin was wrong for leading the study of argumentation apart from formal approach. In this paper we will try to reveal two se-rious misunderstandings of Toulmin’s ideas in his discussions, and thereby make an apology for Toulmin.