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71.More information
ABSTRACTThis study examines the processes of prolepsis, concession and refutation when they serve to minimize or reject, by anticipation, the argumentative force of a potential counter-argument. Our goal is to determine the characteristics, fundamentally diaphonic, of a productive aspect of argumentation, namely the explicit prevention of an objection which may be produced by the interlocutor. We first discern the relationship between prolepsis, concession and refutation. We conclude that prolepsis is a four-part argumentative strategy which must be analyzed as the expression of the tension to which speakers are subjected during the construction of a text coherent with their belief system and of an acceptable relationship with their interlocutor.
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Harry Frankfurt characterised bullshit as assertions that are made without a concern for truth. Assertions, however, are not the only type of speech act that can be bullshit. Here, I propose the concept of argumentative bullshit and show how a speech acts account of bullshit assertions can be generalised to bullshit arguments. Argumentative bullshit, on this account, would be the production of an argument without a concern for the supporting relation between reasons and claim.
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This study tested the effects of linguistic qualifiers and intensifiers on the number and types of replies elicited per argument and per challenge posted in online debates. To facilitate collaborative argumentation, thirty-two students (22 females, 10 males) enrolled in a graduate-level online course classified and labeled their messages as arguments, challenges, supporting evidence, or explanations prior to posting each message. The findings showed that qualified arguments elicited 41 percent fewer replies (effect size = -.64), and the reduction in replies was greatest when qualified arguments were presented by females than males. Challenges without qualifiers, however, did not elicit more replies than challenges with qualifiers. These findings suggest that qualifiers were used to hedge arguments, and such behaviors should be discouraged during initial stages of identifying arguments (more so in all-female than in all-male groups) in order to elicit more diverse and more opposing viewpoints needed to thoroughly and critically analyze arguments.
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This paper studies emotional inferencing triggered by emotion terms using Pragma-Dialectics and the Argumentum Model of Topics. The corpus, in French, is an excerpt of a video-recorded testimony in which a middle school teacher evokes her experience of being in class the day after the Charlie Hebdo attack, thus presenting a case of argumentation in context. The analysis focuses on the argumentative structure and on the rhetorical strategies that trigger emotional inferencing. The emotional inferencing derives from a Locus of Ontological Implication, which links a situation and an emotion (and vice-versa), while the culture-bound elements tend to be part of the endoxon.
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AbstractTranslation quality assessment (TQA) models may be divided into two main types: (1) models with a quantitative dimension, such as SEPT (1979) and Sical (1986), and (2) non-quantitative, textological models, such as Nord (1991) and House (1997). Because it tends to focus on microtextual (sampling, subsentence) analysis and error counts, Type 1 suffers from some major shortcomings. First, because of time constraints, it cannot assess, except on the basis of statistical probabilities, the acceptability of the content of the translation as a whole. Second, the microtextual analysis inevitably hinders any serious assessment of the content macrostructure of the translation. Third, the establishment of an acceptability threshold based on a specific number of errors is vulnerable to criticism both theoretically and in the marketplace. Type 2 cannot offer a cogent acceptability threshold either, precisely because it does not propose error weighting and quantification for individual texts. What is needed is an approach that combines the quantitative and textological dimensions, along the lines proposed by Bensoussan and Rosenhouse (1990) and Larose (1987, 1998). This article outlines a project aimed at making further progress in this direction through the application of argumentation theory to instrumental translations.
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This comment to Leo Groarke`'s "Auditory Arguments: The Logic of ‘Sound’ Arguments" is a contribution to the better understanding of an auditory argument as a part of analysis of an argumentative discourse. The emphasis is on human sound i.e. prosodic features of spoken language and its argumentative function. Paper presents sort of “auditory dictionary” which might be of use in sound analysis. It also gives one possible solution of translating sound into words by using visual images as mediators.
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78.More information
The paper tries to show that when the deepest or foundational aspects of truth are at issue, both consequentially logical argument and rhetoric that aims to establish truth or justified conviction must engage with the being, or the irreplaceable particularity, of its audience’s members and also that of the arguer, what we refer to in ordinary language as who the person is. Beyond the existing discussion of existential rhetoric, the paper argues that this engagement with being is necessary to establish not only truth that directly concerns or turns on the arguer’s and audience’s being, but also truth or justification about fundamental aspects of things and issues in general. Further, the address of being requires us to suspend both our own and our addressees’ familiar conceptual frameworks in order to allow being to emerge in its own terms. As a result, in contrast with our usual understanding of argumentation, the rhetorician’s initial aim and procedure will be to achieve a genuine suspension of conviction and even of the appropriate concepts under which to proceed, and so to produce a fundamental confusion. The paper then outlines some consequences for rhetoric and reasoning and also the structure of the process of working with this fundamental confusion.
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The sociology of expertise has shown us that the recognition of expert status relies on claim-making practices, through which individuals attempt to convince others of their credibility. However, the recognition of the expertise of social work practitioners may be hindered by a turbulent relationship with theory and by challenges of “knowing how to speak.” Inspired by writings on pragmatic theorization and on the sociology of the implicit, this research is interested in the pragmatic analysis of social issues by social work practitioners, the knowledge they use to make sense of social problems, and the discursive strategies they employ to assert their expertise. More specifically, this research adopts Hilgartner's interactionist perspective to analyze the media statements of social work practitioners when they comment on social issues they describe as “crises,” focusing on the argumentative strategies they use to “stage” their expertise. The findings reveal four forms of knowledge (organizational, proximity, external data, and subjective/citizen) that inform three narratives on social crises: an organizational narrative, a narrative of social ties and a structural narrative. These narratives are communicated and defended through three types of strategies: 1) communicating a professional stance and generalizing one's perspective; 2) asserting a truth and factual statements; and 3) persuading the public of inacceptability and engaging the public. These findings show the production of an expertise on one's own practice, and the use of a self-directed perspective and of a defensive argumentation. This research informs us on the self-conceptualization of social intervention and suggests avenues for research to better understand the “threat” in response to which a defensive staging of expertise is deployed.
Keywords: Crises, analyses pragmatiques, mise en scène de l'expertise, analyse des médias, argumentation, Crises, pragmatic analysis, staging of expertise, media analysis, argumentation
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80.More information
In response to commentaries by Eckstein and Kišiček, I argue that the study of auditory arguments is very much in keeping with the critical thinking (and epistemological) ideals that motivate informal logic. In the process I support further research on sound figures and the meaning of sound (and a possible “auditory dictionary”) that would enhance our ability to analyze auditory arguments.