Local Theories of Argument

Dale Hample, Dale Hample

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000361667
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Argumentation is often understood as a coherent set of Western theories, birthed in Athens and developing throughout the Roman period, the Middle Ages, the Enlightenment and Renaissance, and into the present century. Ideas have been nuanced, developed, and revised, but still the outline of argumentation theory has been recognizable for centuries, or so it has seemed to Western scholars. The 2019 Alta Conference on Argumentation (co-sponsored by the National Communication Association and the American Forensic Association) aimed to question the generality of these intellectual traditions.

This resulting collection of essays deals with the possibility of having local theories of argument – local to a particular time, a particular kind of issue, a particular place, or a particular culture. Many of the papers argue for reconsidering basic ideas about arguing to represent the uniqueness of some moment or location of discourse. Other scholars are more comfortable with the Western traditions, and find them congenial to the analysis of arguments that originate in discernibly distinct circumstances.

The papers represent different methodologies, cover the experiences of different nations at different times, examine varying sorts of argumentative events (speeches, court decisions, food choices, and sound), explore particular personal identities and the issues highlighted by them, and have different overall orientations to doing argumentation scholarship. Considered together, the essays do not generate one simple conclusion, but they stimulate reflection about the particularity or generality of the experience of arguing, and therefore the scope of our theories.

PART I

The Project of Local Theories of Argument

1

Do We Need Local Theories of Argument?

Dale Hample

University of Maryland

Though we know better when we stop to consider it, most of us casually think of ourselves as having inherited a coherent tradition of rhetorical and argumentation theory. The combination of an Aristotelian idea with a remark by Kenneth Burke is received without blinking. The theme of this book is the possibility of local theories of argument, work that calls into question the historical and global continuity of the theories we work with. The idea is that it may be necessary to generate local theories—local to a particular time, or place, or group identity. That the content of arguments differs along those dimensions is obvious. The question we confront is whether the ordinary understandings or formal theories of argument are different as well.

The simplest way to exemplify the potential issues is to consider vertical and horizontal coherence/incoherence. The vertical dimension is historical: should we consider that we have had different theories over time, given similar geographic and linguistic circumstance? The horizontal dimension moves across cultures or groups in approximately the same time period. For instance, does it make sense to approximate Japanese rhetorical thought as a Western system? Should we match classical Greek theories to modern European understandings? A scholarly showing that we have coherence over vertical or horizontal variance should be welcome, as will an argument suggesting that we need to acknowledge or develop local theories in respect of different histories or cultures. Kennedy (1998), for instance, has written a foundational study of rhetorical understandings across epochs and cultures.

Some vertical distinctions are well known. For example, Cicero (1960) gave considerable attention to the order of the parts in a speech, along with specific directions as to desirable argumentative content in each part. But when sermon models and instructions were written in the Middle Ages, quite a different pattern was specified (e.g., Murphy, 1971, pp. 109–215; 1974, ch. 6). What happened to Cicero’s teachings, which were well known in Europe at that time? Why was Aristotle’s typology of forensic, epideictic, and deliberative speech allowed to evaporate in favor of the arts of preaching, letter-writing, and poetics? (cf. Aristotle, 1984; Murphy, 1971). Closer to our own era, Richard Weaver (1953) contrasted the conciseness and simple expressiveness of then-current rhetorical practice with the expansiveness and “spaciousness” of American rhetoric from earlier times. He considered that one rhetoric could depend on a homogenized system of values and knowledge but the other could not, and that this generated different valuings of embellishment and reasoned celebration of the uncontroversial.

Examples of horizontal distinctions may seem somewhat less common in our scholarly community, but we have several of those as well. Interest in Asian public talk has been both assimilated to and distinguished from modern Western rhetoric in book-length treatments by Robert T. Oliver (1971) and Xing Lu (1998), as well as in specific work by other scholars more focused on argumentation in particular (e.g., Xiong & Yan, 2019). Does Chinese argumentation theory differ from Western thought in kind or degree? Is it perceptive or presumptuous to call what the ancient Pharaohs did “rhetoric?” (Fox, 1983). When we understand contemporary Arab orientations to interpersonal arguing from the platform of U.S. theory, are we sure we are looking at the same phenomenon in both regions? (Rapanta & Badran, 2015).

Horizontal distinctions might also be available when examining different identity groups within the same time and nation. Bowers and Ochs (1971) long ago distinguished between the rhetorics of agitation and control. Are the same base understandings of public argument used by opponents of different standings, or are they implicitly working from different rhetorical theories? Were Protestant and Catholic pamphlets in the early Reformation simply using different premises or did they have contrasting understandings of what would count as legitimate argumentation? (Edwards, 1994).

Another sort of horizontal analysis might focus on argument forms and channels. Some scholars have already debated whether the explicit linear models appropriate to propositional verbal arguments are also suitable to what appear to be visual or narrative arguments (e.g, Birdsell & Groarke, 1996; Fisher, 1987). Should we apply the same argumentation theories to elaborate edutainment stories and to abrupt tweets? Should we have been theorizing mass/social media messages from unknowable sources in the same way we theorize the remarks of an easily identifiable public speaker or conversational partner? If we need form- or channel-local theories of argument, how can we understand which features require such treatment?

If analysis supports our casual assumption of a coherent intellectual inheritance, that will be comforting. But if reflection and study suggest that we have more traditions than we commonly recognize, how can that be handled by our community? Can local theories of, say, Korean argumentation be generated by native Dutch, American, or Canadian scholars? If not, how can we recruit local scholars, with their intuitive appreciation of their own culture and history, to the intellectual projects that we value? Do we in fact need local theories, constructed by local scholars? Are we sure that they need them?

Many contributors to the volume were comfortable with something like these vertical and horizontal distinctions, but others instinctively oriented to others sorts of locality. Some found the locality issue imbedded in particular sorts of bodies (e.g., female or white male). Others regarded particular sets of values or political ambitions to be the frames that allowed interrogation of whether a general theory of argumentation was being implemented (e.g., Jewish identity or regional political power). Some found legal or academic forensics settings to be those that suggested that some sort of specialized argumentation was being institutionalized or expected.

From all this work, I think it is fair to say that no clear consensus emerged as to the urgency of developing local theories of argument. Most of the papers here unequivocally show that particular controversies required distinctive arguments. Quite a few of the chapters indicate that a special (but still Western-recognizable) kind of arguing was necessary in relatively unfamiliar contexts. Others found clear irreconcilability. Many scholars took up the volume’s theme whole-heartedly, and made strong efforts to reconcile or distinguish the basic understandings of argument they discovered from those that began for most of us with Aristotle. This was an expectable set of outcomes. Not finding a great need to distinguish French from American arguing has no weight against the insistence that ancient Chinese understandings were unaligned with ancient Greek views, or that women and men hear arguments differently in the contemporary West.

Simply bringing the question of locality into the light is a sentinel against comfortably occupying our own cultural and educational niches as we think. When we find equivocation, is it a Western fallacy or an Eastern subtlety? Is anger an emotional flight from reason, or a way of conveying one’s thinking properly? Questions such as these should make us hesitate to see the history of argumentation theory as uninterrupted and clearly channeled, like an epochs-old aqueduct still traversing all human civilization. Even if a reader ends up deciding that most of “argumentation” is basic and universal, that decision will have proceeded from its own arguments rather than from assumption.

References

Aristotle (1984). Rhetoric. W. R. Roberts (trans.). In J. Barnes (Ed.), The complete works of Aristotle, 2 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Birdsell, D. S., & Groarke, L. (1996). Toward a theory of visual argumentation. Argumentation and Advocacy, 33, 1–10.

Bowers, J. W., & Ochs, D. J. (1971). The rhetoric of agitation and control. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley.

Cicero, M. T. (1960). De inventione. H. M. Hubbell (trans.). Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library.

Edwards, M. U., Jr. (1994). Printing, propaganda, and Martin Luther. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Fisher, W. R. (1987). Human communication as narration: Toward a philosophy of reason, value, and action. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press.

Fox, M. V. (1983). Ancient Egyptian rhetoric. Rhetorica, 1, 9–22.

Kennedy, G. A. (1998). Comparative rhetoric: An historical and cross-cultural introduction. New York: Oxford University Press.

Lu, X. (1998). Rhetoric in ancient China, fifth to third century BCE: A comparison with classical Greek rhetoric. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press.

Murphy, J. J. (1971). Three medieval rhetorical arts. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Murphy, J. J. (1974). Rhetoric in the middle ages: A history of rhetorical theory from St. Augustine to the renaissance. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Oliver, R. T. (1971). Communication and culture in ancient India and China. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

Rapanta, C., & Badran, D. (2015). Same but different: Perceptions of interpersonal arguing in two Arabic populations (UAE & Lebanon). Journal of Media Critiques, 4, 119–129.

Weaver, R. M. (1953). Ethics of rhetoric. New York: Regnery.

Xiong, M., & Yan, L. (2019). Mencius’s strategies of political argumentation. Argumentation, 33, 365–389.

2

(Counter) Mapping the Place and Time of Local Argument

Ronald Walter Greene

University of Minnesota¹

To appreciate the local in local argument this paper will attend to how questions about space and place have influenced the doing of rhetorical analysis.² Traditionally, a rhetorical perspective on argument, as Wenzel (1990) notes, is focused “on the symbolic means (primarily language) by which people try to influence one another’s beliefs, values and actions” (p. 15). This perspectival orientation organized argumentation studies into the trinity of the logical, the dialectical, and the rhetorical. Inspired by Browne and Leff’s (1985) encouragement to study paradigms of rhetorical artistry, Wenzel (1987) later advocated moving the rhetorical perspective on argumentation toward close textual readings of argumentative practices. Yet, there is a tension between the two approaches. A strong perspectival approach (inherited from Brockriede, 1990) allows argument critics to attend to a plurality of symbolic actions (whether primarily in language or not) as arguments. It globalizes the object domain of argumentation studies since “the critical process determines how a particular object will be comprehended as an argument” (Greene, 1998, p. 27). A perspectival approach does not require approaching argumentation as discourse (language in use) or as a speech act in the traditional sense. In contrast, an approach focused on rhetorical artistry tries to domesticate the global reach of argument and rhetoric to their status as exemplars of language use in action (Leff, 1987). The trouble is that neither a perspectival approach with its ability to see argument anywhere nor one that emphasizes the rhetorical artistry of exemplars alone can make room for rhetorical approaches that embrace the different modalities of space and place.

I will explore the local in local argumentation through three material orientations: First, I will attend to the local as a governing strategy emphasizing arguments about the local for regulating human action. Second, I will turn to recent methodological investments in field methods as a way to explore the materiality of rhetoric in situ. Third, I will attend to how different methodological interests in critical mapping provide alternatives for exploring the rhetorical perspective on argumentation. I will conclude with a question/claim: What if a future theory of local argument must begin with local resistances to argument?

The Local as a Governing Strategy

For six years, I was the Parish Council President of Holy Trinity Orthodox Church (HTOC) in St. Paul, Minnesota. Members of the parish expressed a desire to more securely embed the church (which is to say the parishioners) into the Payne-Phalen neighborhood. This desire to be sensitive to local relations was especially timely as we completed a new fellowship hall and inaugurated a remodeling of the church. In discussion with the parish council, I was informed of an Orthodox call to have parishioners explore moving their residence into the parish neighborhood. No different than many other urban Orthodox churches throughout the Midwest, the vast majority of parishioners of Holy Trinity no longer lived and worked in Payne-Phalen or the surrounding neighborhoods of East St. Paul, as did the Russian and Serbian immigrants that had built and cared for the church at its founding over 100 years ago. As a convert to Orthodoxy living in Northeast Minneapolis, I had to confront the fact that I was driving twenty minutes to East St. Paul to attend HTOC, instead of attending St. Mary’s Orthodox Cathedral, a major landmark of Northeast Minneapolis, located in the Holland neighborhood a few blocks west of my current home. Though I could easily put on the agenda of the Parish the ways we might better attach the mission of Holy Trinity to the people and places of the Payne-Phalen neighborhood, it quickly occurred to me that if I was going to need to move to East St. Paul or alternatively, leave Holy Trinity for St. Mary’s, I was not likely to meet the challenge of the local.

Why exactly was the Church calling us to embrace a more local orientation? Luckily, in the age of digital platform and the podcast, it was not too difficult for me to find two sermons by Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick (2012a, 2012b) advocating localism. Fr. Damick describes localism as a dedication to place made possible by cultivating rich human relationships. By attending to the richness of human relationships, a place is transformed into a community and he defines a community as a “group of people who all live, work, and worship in the same place” (2012a). A community of people sharing the same place enhances the capacity of individuals to come together into a common life, or communion. The problem, as described by Fr. Damick, is that the forms of connectivity brought about by mobility and its technological affordances like the automobile and the internet preven...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• PART I The Project of Local Theories of Argument
• PART II Bodies and Identities
• PART III Contemporary United States
• PART IV Historical United States
• PART V China
• PART VI Japan
• PART VII Other Parts of the World
• PART VIII New Media
• PART IX Dinner
• PART X Local Places
• PART XI Pedagogy and the Modern University
• PART XII Legal Issues
• PART XIII Argumentation Theory
• Alta 2019 Volume Acceptance Rates