The Alta Conference: Negotiating the Disciplinary and Cross-Disciplinary Study of Argumentation

Abstract

In dropping back now eighteen years to the first Summer Conference on Argumentation, I am moving in synchrony with the actions taken in July in 1979, when in my keynote address (Gronbeck 1980) I dropped back fifteen years to 1964. I was a bit uncomfortable doing that keynote, knowing that I (1) was in the job because Stephen Toulmin was unavailable, and (2) unlike fellow keynoters David Zarefsky and W. Scott Nobles, had suspect credentials in argumentation. Certainly in the United States, the center of argumentation as a field was institutionalized in the American Forensic Association and a covey of other professional associations, all tied to one degree or another to competitive forensics, especially debate. By 1979, I had published three pieces in JAFA, though two were book reviews of philosophical works and the other a pedagogical piece on ways to study argumentation in graduate programs - hardly solid ties to the debate community (Gronbeck 1970, 1972, 1973). To meet the exigencies of that situation, I constructed a quasi-mythic narrative of transformation. The transformation featured argument, as a rationalized unit-of-proof, being re-essentialized as argumentation, understood as a process of discursively securing assent. The helpers in this myth were representatives from various other fields of study: philosophers of action (Maurice Natanson and Henry Johnstone, Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca), a rag-tag collection of qualitative sociologists and social critics (Kenneth Burke, Mary Douglas, Harold Garfinkle, Aaron Cicourel, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, and others), linguists such as Noam Chomsky and Raymond Gumb, and the informal logician, s/practical reasoning folks (e.g., Nicholas Capaldi as well as Toulmin, Richard Rieke, and Allan Janik). Such moves in 1979, thus, sought to historicize a series of changes in argumentation that would broaden the field significantly by making it a manifestly cross-disciplinary study area and that would plead with the forensic community to rhetoricize itself. Zarefsky's keynote (1980) gave much the same advice to the forensic community, though in a good deal more disciplined and disciplinarily sensitive manner. The message constructed the forensics community - built more insistently by Charles Willard (1976, 1978, 1979, 1980a, 1980b, 1980c)than by either me or Zarefsky - was dual: theorize your own practices and establish connections between your work and that of a much broader set of scholarly communities. It was little wonder that Willard did more papers at the first Alta conference - three - than anyone else. The worlds of speech communication particularly and the human sciences more generally were ready systematic and concerted studies of argument theory and practice. The very idea of a general conference - as opposed to the invited, elite workgroups of the sixties and seventies - in and of itself was an exciting prospect in 1979. The fact that the second Alta conference in 1981 had about twice as many participants is a sign that the original fifty-eight conferees were not disappointed. The notes that Zarefsky and I struck that Thursday afternoon the first Alta conference were in obvious harmony with many other teacher-scholars of argumentation. Why? I would suggest two answers to that query. First, the Alta conference was assembled, as director Jack Rhodes (1980, n.p.) noted in his Preface, for maximum choice between specialization and diversity of That is to say, it was conceived to be a setting both pointed inquiry into topics of interest to particular segments of the academy even as it sought to present work on issues of concern to the entire congregation of students of argument. It was set up to bridge the gap between disciplinary and cross-disciplinary studies. The conference would have both a centrifugal force to encourage specialized inquiries and a centripetal force to amalgamate communal interests. …