Abstract
In their book Commitment in Dialogue, Walton and Krabbe claim that formal dialogue systems for conversational argumentation are “not very realistic and not easy to apply”. This difficulty may make argumentation theory less well adapted to be employed to describe or analyse actual argumentation practice. On the other hand, the empirical study of real-life arguments may miss or ignore insights of more than the two millennia of the development of philosophy of language, rhetoric, and argumentation theory. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology for adapting such theories to serve as applicable tools in the study of argumentation phenomena. Our approach is both theoretically-informed and empirically-grounded in large-scale corpus analysis. The area of interest are appeals to ethos, the character of the speaker, building upon Aristotle’s rhetoric. Ethotic techniques are used to influence the hearers through the communication, where speakers might establish, but also emphasise, weaken or undermine their own or others’ credibility and trustworthiness. Specifically, we apply our method to Aristotelian theory of ethos elements which identifies practical wisdom, moral virtue and goodwill as components of speakers’ character, which can be supported or attacked. The challenges we identified in this case and the solutions we proposed allow us to formulate general guidelines of how to exploit rich theoretical frameworks to the analysis of the practice of language use.
Highlights
Despite attempts at employing rich philosophical and rhetorical theories as conceptual frameworks to capture everyday argumentation, the robust methodology, which would systematically link those theories with the practice of language use, is still lacking
Following Aristotle’s theory of rhetoric, we investigate ways in which speakers appeal to three ethos elements: practical wisdom, moral virtue and goodwill
Accuracy for our corpus was 57% which we assessed as not reliable enough to annotate ethos elements in conversational argumentation and to treat the results in Table 2 as satisfactorily grounded
Summary
Despite attempts at employing rich philosophical and rhetorical theories as conceptual frameworks to capture everyday argumentation, the robust methodology, which would systematically link those theories with the practice of language use, is still lacking. Among various kinds of evidence for the lack of robust methods to bridge theories with data, there are two examples related, respectively, to the application of a theory of formal dialogue systems to evaluating natural dialogues (Walton and Krabbe 1995), and to the application of a theory of argumentation schemes to annotating ethos for argument mining [(Habernal et al 2018) (see (Hinton 2021))] on the role and importance of argument corpora for studying argumentation]. This section first describes textual material of parliamentary debates and the original annotation of ethos supports and ethos attacks in these data As a textual material for the study of the language of ethos elements, this work selects the UK parliamentary debate record, Hansard, which stores all the sessions in the British government dating back to 1800 (available at http://hansard.millbanksystems.com). The dataset covers transcripts of 90 parliamentary sessions, with a total of 90,990 words
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