Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Agenda/Schedule, University Of Windsor

Know Your Rights! A Community Symposium on the Charter / Connaissez vos droits! Un symposium communauitaire sur la Charte

No abstract provided.

Piggybacking In? A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Argumentation Schemes, Harmony Peach

OSSA Conference Archive

In this paper, Douglas Walton’s Argumentation Schemes and corresponding critical questions are taken through Thomas Huckin’s (1997) Critical Discourse Analysis in order to further demonstrate that a schematic-pragmatic approach to argument evaluation needs to account for bias in and of itself. Building on the work of Audrey Yap (2013, 2015) and Ciurria and Al Tamini (2014) which demonstrates how the schemes have not addressed, and may even intensify, various disadvantages people with systemic identity prejudices face, Huckin’s approach offers additional nuance as to how these concerns can be exacerbated by the schemes. As the schemes have been devised through observations …

Commentary On Jens Kjeldsen’S “What Makes Us Change Our Minds In Everyday Life?”, Harry Weger Jr.

OSSA Conference Archive

No abstract provided.

Commentary On "The Problem Of Mission Creep", Curtis Scott Jacobs

OSSA Conference Archive

No abstract provided.

Commentary: Peitho And The Consolation Of Philosophy: A Reply To Blake D. Scott, G Thomas Goodnight

OSSA Conference Archive

No abstract provided.

Doing Things With Arguments: Assertion, Persuasion, Performance, Blake D. Scott

OSSA Conference Archive

In “Three Perspectives on Argument,” Wenzel argued that scholars should orient their research around the well-known triad of rhetorical, dialectical, and logical perspectives on argument. Despite the success of Wenzel’s triad in orienting pluralistic research, he nonetheless maintained that an “eventual synthesis” of the three perspectives was both possible and desirable. In this paper I reconsider Wenzel’s idea by asking what might be preventing such a synthesis today. I argue that one obstacle to this is a common philosophical assumption about rhetoric that opposes assertion to persuasion, truth to effectiveness. Following Barbara Cassin, I challenge this assumption and consider how …

Exploring Gendered Nonverbal Behavior In The 2016 U.S. Presidential Debates, Harry Weger Jr., John S. Seiter

OSSA Conference Archive

The purpose of our paper is to explore the gendered double-bind in political communication. Research by argumentation scholars and others point to a double standard in media portrayals of nonverbal behavior by male and female politicians. Our analysis will rely on primarily strategic maneuvering to examine closely the ways in which gender stereotypes were enacted by U.S. Presidential candidates during televised debates in 2016.

Evidence In Health Controversies, Sally Jackson

OSSA Conference Archive

Health controversies involve the now-familiar complexities of polylogue: multiple positions, multiple players, and multiple places. A vexing issue that cuts across many health topics is what counts as evidence. Several different expert fields may each try to enforce their own evidence standards, and lay participants (whose well-being depends on any expert consensus that may form) often bring their own distinctive forms of evidence. This presentation examines disagreements over evidence within a series of case studies.

Commentary On: Jianfeng Wang’S “Deep Disagreement, Deep Rhetoric, And Cultural Diversity", Jean Goodwin

OSSA Conference Archive

In this cogent paper, Wang urges argumentation theorists to pay attention to the myriad things that are happening whenever someone makes an argument. To do this he updates and extends the classical rhetorical cannon of style. He documents the importance of argumentative style through a case study of deep disagreement, showing how one arguer’s choices served to reconstruct an otherwise abusive situation. I urge him to continue the project by providing an equally cogent account of explaining why an arguer’s stylistic choices lead to the desired audience’s response.

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.

Commentary On: Michael Gilbert’S “Understanding The Embrace Of Fallacy: A Multi-Modal Analysis”, Jean Goodwin

OSSA Conference Archive

If the goal to inquire into, understand, and respond to what it for someone to be “anti-vax,” the concept of fallacy seems the wrong tool to pick up.

Commentary On: Linda Carozza’S “Diversity, Conflict, And (Dis)Agreement”, Sally Jackson

OSSA Conference Archive

No abstract provided.

Developing Critical Thinking With Rhetorical Pedagogy, Elizabeth Ismail

OSSA Conference Archive

The development of critical thinking skills is emphasized as a fundamental attribute of successful graduates (Ritchhart & Perkins, 2005; Willingham, 2008). Some critical thinking textbooks inform students to “see beyond the rhetoric to the core idea being stated” (Moore and Parker, 2009, p. 21); however, other scholars have begun to suggest that rhetoric is intrinsically interrelated to critical thinking and plays a pivotal role in everyday interactions (Saki, 2016). This paper explores the later.

Institutional And Institutionalized Fallacies: Diversifying Pragma-Dialectical Fallacy Judgments, Menno H. Reijven

OSSA Conference Archive

To improve argumentative discourse, it is necessary to make fallacy judgments which take into consideration the social practice in which argumentation occurs. In this paper, I propose four meta-categories for fallacies to study the connection of fallacies to their institutionalized discourse. Using the first 2016 U.S. Presidential Debate as a case study, I show how this framework can be used to propose improvements to argumentative contexts.

Canadian Infrastructure For A “Canadian School” Of Informal Logic And Argumentation, Takuzo Konishi

OSSA Conference Archive

This article comments on Federico Puppo's position that a 'Canadian' school of argumentation exists. Based upon archival research, oral history interviews and published documents on the informal logic movement in the 1970s and 1980s, it is argued that Canadian infrastructure for informal logic and argumentation existed, in which a Canadian school of argumentation could exist.

Harmony In Diversity. On The (Possible) Existence Of ‘The Canadian School Of Argumentation’, Federico Puppo

OSSA Conference Archive

By looking at the birth and evolution of the informal logic movement, and by clarifying which kind of relations in a diversity we need in order to understand what “school” means, we would like to consider the hypothesis that there is something which could be called ‘the Canadian school of argumentation’ or, at least, of a Canadian tradition amongst those that make up the greater field of the study of argumentation.

The Paradox Of Imprecision In Language, Henry R. Bauer

Critical Reflections

The Paradox of Imprecision in Language

Abstract

This paper investigates philosophical questions bearing on the relationship between language and mind, through an analysis of the phenomenon of “efficient imprecision” in language. It is argued that language users’ ability to intuitively connect allegedly imprecise linguistic expressions with definite conceptual information presents a paradox that might lead philosophers, linguists and cognitive scientists alike to reconsider the relationship between the computational machinery of human language and its function as the vehicle of conscious thought.

Like the puzzle about the identity relation which Gottlob Frege presents in the seminal Sense and Reference (1892), which …

The Polysemy Of ‘Fallacy’—Or ‘Bias’, For That Matter, Frank Zenker

OSSA Conference Archive

Starting with a brief overview of current usages (Sect. 2), this paper offers some constituents of a use-based analysis of ‘fallacy’, listing 16 conditions that have, for the most part implicitly, been discussed in the literature (Sect. 3). Our thesis is that at least three related conceptions of ‘fallacy’ can be identified. The 16 conditions thus serve to “carve out” a semantic core and to distinguish three core-specifications. As our discussion suggests, these specifications can be related to three normative positions in the philosophy of human reasoning: the meliorist, the apologist, and the panglossian (Sect. 4). Seeking to make these …

Conspiracy And Bias: Argumentative Features And Persuasiveness Of Conspiracy Theories, Steve Oswald

OSSA Conference Archive

This paper deals with the argumentative biases Conspiracy Theories (henceforth CTs) typically suffer from and pursues two goals: (i) the identification of recurring argumentative and rhetorical features of conspiracy theories, which translates into an attempt to elaborate their argumentative profile (see Hansen 2013); (ii) the elaboration of a cognitively-grounded account of CTs in terms of their persuasiveness.

To fulfil goal (i), I examine online instances of different cases of CTs (the Moon hoax, 9/11 as an inside job, chemical trails). Building on the general rhetorical features of CTs identified by Byford (2011: 88-93), I elaborate a first argumentative profile surveying …

Commentary On “Strategies Of Objectification In Opinion Articles: The Case Of Evidentials”: A Call To Study Evidentials In Argumentation, Susan L. Kline

OSSA Conference Archive

No abstract provided.

Argumentation In Large, Complex Practices, Mark Aakhus, Paul Ziek, Punit Dadlani

OSSA Conference Archive

Differences arise in macro-activities, such as the production of energy, food, and healthcare, where the management of these differences happens in polylogues as many actors pursue scores of positions on a variety of issues in numerous venues. Polylogues are essential to the large-scale practices that organize macro-activities but present significant challenges for argumentation theory and research. Key to the challenge is conceptualizing the variety of argumentative roles that go beyond the classic normative definition of protagonist and antagonist. A macroscope is devised for identifying argumentative roles in the communicative work of organizations, and the communicative work of the network of …

Commentary On “Inducing A Sympathetic (Empathic) Reception For Exhortation”, Sally Jackson

OSSA Conference Archive

People often have conflicting values, goals, and beliefs, and these present special challenges for those who seek to influence them. Kauffeld and Innocenti suggest that these situations of conflictedness are opportunities for a speaker to “exhort” the audience to resolve the conflict in favor of their highest principle. Exhortation, in their view, has high-mindedness as a constitutive feature. At Cooper Union, Lincoln exhorted Republicans to face their fear of disunion and steadfastly maintain the evil of slavery—a confirming example for the Kauffeld and Innocenti account. But looking at a broader set of examples, it seems clear that exhortations do not …

America Vs. Apple: The Argumentative Function Of Metonyms, Ilon Lauer, Thomas Lauer

OSSA Conference Archive

: Our study of public argumentation surrounding iPhone encryption addresses the argumentative function of the metonym. Metonyms accomplish general and specific argumentative purposes. Generally, metonyms help define and redefine the argumentative framework for a dispute. Within a controversy, metonyms operate as inference generators. We isolate and analyze several metonyms and elaborate their warrant-generating valences. Metonyms are inference generating tools capable of instantiating normative frameworks, invoking flexible and indeterminate senses of causality.

Compassion, Authority And Baby Talk: Prosody And Objectivity, Leo Groarke, Gabrijela Kišiček

OSSA Conference Archive

Recent work on multimodal argumentation has explored facets of argumentation which have no obvious analogue in the written arguments which were emphasized in traditional accounts of argument. One of these facets is prosody: the structure and quality of the sound of spoken language. Prosodic features include pitch, temporal structure, pronunciation, loudness and voice quality, rhythm, emphasis and accent. In this paper, we explore the ways that prosodic features may be invoked in arguing.

Altruistic Argument In The Demand-Withdraw Pattern In Interpersonal Disputes, Susan L. Kline, Wen Song Sichuan University

OSSA Conference Archive

The demand-withdraw pattern in interpersonal disputes is associated with negative outcomes. Yet altruistic argument, viewed as prosocial evidence and reasoning, may affect the demand-withdraw pattern. Using multiple goals communication theory, multiple goal perceptions are hypothesized to mediate the relationship between two pattern types (using/not using altruistic argument), and interaction outcomes. US young adults (N=322) evaluated an interaction that varied in pattern type and relationship type. Mediation analyses confirmed the three hypotheses.

Couples’ Dialogue Orientations, Dale Hample, Ioana A. Cionea

OSSA Conference Archive

Walton has distinguished among several sorts of argumentative dialogues (persuasion, negotiation, information seeking, deliberation, inquiry, and eristic). This paper continues the project of measuring individuals’ self-reported preferences for each dialogue type. In this study, long-term romantic couples were surveyed to examine if their dialogue preferences matched, and whether their preferences were, in turn, related to their relational satisfaction.

Demonstrating Objectivity In Controversial Science Communication: A Case Study Of Gmo Scientist Kevin Folta, Jean Goodwin

OSSA Conference Archive

Scientists can find it difficult to be seen as objective within the chaos of a civic controversy. This paper gives a normative pragmatic account of the strategy one GMO scientist used to demonstrate his trustworthiness. Kevin Folta made his talk expensive by undertaking to answer all questions, and carried out this responsibility by acting as if every comment addressed to him—even the most hostile—was in fact a question in good faith. This presumption of audience good faith gave in turn his audience good reason to presume his good faith, and a situation of reciprocal distrust was transformed into one with …

Don’T Worry, Be Gappy! On The Unproblematic Gappiness Of Alleged Fallacies, Fabio Paglieri

OSSA Conference Archive

The history of fallacy theory is long, distinguished and, admittedly, checkered. I offer a bird eye view on it, with the aim of contrasting the standard conception of fallacies as attractive and universal errors that are hard to eradicate (section 1) with the contemporary preoccupation with “non-fallacious fallacies”, that is, arguments that fit the bill of one of the traditional fallacies but are actually respectable enough to be used in appropriate contexts (section 2). Godden and Zenker have recently argued that reinterpreting alleged fallacies as non-fallacious arguments requires supplementing the textual material with something else, e.g. probability distributions, pragmatic considerations, …

Explicating And Negotiating Bias In Interdisciplinary Argumentation Using Abductive Tools: Paper, Bethany K. Laursen

OSSA Conference Archive

Interdisciplinary inquiry hinges upon abductive arguments that integrate various kinds of information to identify explanations worthy of future study or use. Integrative abduction poses unique challenges, including different kinds of data, too many patterns, too many explanations, mistaken meanings across disciplinary lines, and cognitive, pragmatic, and social biases. Argumentation tools can help explicate and negotiate bias as interdisciplinary investigators sift and winnow candidate patterns and processes in search of the best explanation.

Argumentation Mining In Parliamentary Discourse, Nona Naderi

OSSA Conference Archive

In parliamentary discourse, politicians expound their beliefs and goals through argumentation, and, to persuade the audience, they communicate their values by highlighting some aspect of an issue, an action which is commonly known as framing. The choices of frames are typically dependent upon the speaker’s ideology.

In this proposed doctoral work, we will computationally analyze framing strategies and present a model for discovering the latent structure of framing of real-world issues in Canadian parliamentary discourse.