Style Of Argument Research Articles

Doubts about an argument from doubt

ABSTRACT The purpose of this paper is to debate a version of the Cartesian argument from doubt for mind–body dualism which has been proposed recently by Ari Maunu in this journal (Inquiry, 61/4). After introducing Maunu's argument, one section is devoted to the critique of his argument. In this section, in addition to some other criticisms, we will consider a methodological parallel to Maunu's argument that is like his style of argumentation but is intended to draw the opposite conclusion. The discussion section includes Richard Swinburne's critical commentary on these two contrasting arguments. It also examines Swinburne's amended version of a Cartesian argument, which he believes to offer support for Maunu's position.

Persuading the emperors: a quantitative historical analysis of political rhetoric in traditional China

The study of rhetoric has a long history in the Western intellectual tradition. However, only minimal efforts have been made to rigorously examine the cultural evolution of various rhetorical strategies in argumentation over time. In this study, we harness the power of fully digitized Chinese dynastic history to systematically analyze how different rhetorical strategies were used to persuade superiors throughout the past two millennia. By leveraging existing literature on Chinese rhetoric and argumentation styles, as well as engaging in extensive consultation with historians of ancient China, we identify and classify rhetorical strategies into distinct categories. We then examine their recorded success in persuasion and any temporal changes in frequency. Our findings point to a cumulative payoff-biased cultural evolution where later dynasties tend to demonstrate higher recorded persuasion success, with the notable exception of the Ming dynasty. Additionally, we detect a temporal decline in the frequency of rhetorical strategies associated with persuasion failures, such as analogy and the use of auspicious/inauspicious signs.

The Discursive Dimensions of Pernicious Polarization. Analysis of Right-Wing Populists in Western Europe on Twitter

The objective of this research is to explore the political discourse of West European right-wing populist leaders in the perspective of pernicious polarization, focusing on their positions and argumentation styles. To achieve this, over 50,000 tweets from right-wing populist leaders in Western Europe (Italy, France and Spain) were collected for a period spanning from 2 July 2019, which marks the beginning of the 9th legislature of the European Parliament, to 2 July 2023. Employing Text Mining and Topic Modeling techniques, this research will reconstruct and comparatively analyze the topics addressed by the leaders from different countries and the dynamics of polarization discourse proposing an exploratory study aiming to locate the words of pernicious polarization used by each leader.

Mobilization, self-expression or argument? A computational method for identifying language styles in political discussion on Twitter

PurposeThis study develops a computational method to investigate the predominant language styles in political discussions on Twitter and their connections with users' online characteristics.Design/methodology/approachThis study gathers a large Twitter dataset comprising political discussions across various topics from general users. It utilizes an unsupervised machine learning algorithm with pre-defined language features to detect language styles in political discussions on Twitter. Furthermore, it employs a multinomial model to explore the relationships between language styles and users' online characteristics.FindingsThrough the analysis of over 700,000 political tweets, this study identifies six language styles: mobilizing, self-expressive, argumentative, narrative, analytic and informational. Furthermore, by investigating the covariation between language styles and users' online characteristics, such as social connections, expressive desires and gender, this study reveals a preference for an informational style and an aversion to an argumentative style in political discussions. It also uncovers gender differences in language styles, with women being more likely to belong to the mobilizing group but less likely to belong to the analytic and informational groups.Practical implicationsThis study provides insights into the psychological mechanisms and social statuses of users who adopt particular language styles. It assists political communicators in understanding their audience and tailoring their language to suit specific contexts and communication objectives.Social implicationsThis study reveals gender differences in language styles, suggesting that women may have a heightened desire for social support in political discussions. It highlights that traditional gender disparities in politics might persist in online public spaces.Originality/valueThis study develops a computational methodology by combining cluster analysis with pre-defined linguistic features to categorize language styles. This approach integrates statistical algorithms with communication and linguistic theories, providing researchers with an unsupervised method for analyzing textual data. It focuses on detecting language styles rather than topics or themes in the text, complementing widely used text classification methods such as topic modeling. Additionally, this study explores the associations between language styles and the online characteristics of social media users in a political context.

Analysis of Islamic University Counselor Interpersonal Communication Skills

Indonesia data – National Adolescent Mental Health Survey (I-NAMHS) 2022, provides information about mental health conditions in Indonesia. The survey results stated that as many as 15.5 million (34.9 percent) teenagers experienced health problems. However, there are still very few teenagers who seek formal help by consulting a professional. This research uses a qualitative approach with a descriptive type with data collection obtained through in-depth interviews with 6 pairs of peer-client counselors. The data analysis technique uses interactive analysis with data validity testing using source triangulation. Through the Student and Alumni Development Institute (LPKA), UMY is committed to improving student welfare and health. Based on internal research, the team found facts about the many mental health disorders experienced by UMY students. The campus responded to this phenomenon by establishing a “peer counselor” program to assist students who have potential and have experienced mental health problems. This requires the counselor’s communication skills, both verbal and non-verbal, as well as the ability to overcome obstacles. However, some student clients still complain that counselors are less able to establish intimacy in the counseling process. In UMY peer counselors, counselors are proven to carry out effective communication skills so that clients feel satisfied in the healing process for students. Several communication styles chosen by peer counselors include attentive, relaxed, friendly, precise, and argumentative styles. The counselor’s verbal communication skills have been combined with non-verbal communication. The counselor’s communication style is related to interpersonal communication skills, including paraphrasing, reflecting feelings, interpreting, and summarizing. Counselors’ verbal skills appear to be more effective when they combine them with non-verbal skills which include facing the client squarely, adopting an open posture, remembering that it is possible at times to learn toward the other, maintaining good eye contact, and trying to be relatively relaxed or natural in these behaviors. The application of communication skills by UMY peer counselors has been proven to internalize Islamic values written in the Al Qur’an, which include: QS Ali Imran ayat 159: gentle, careful in verbal intonation, emotional management, and dialogic. QS An-Nisa ayat 46: listening, paying attention. QS An-Nisa ayat 46: humble, cool, and calming expressions.

Eleştiri ve Polemiğin Ötesinde: Çevrimiçi ve Dışı Kamusal Tartışmalar Üzerinden Bakım Etiğinin Sınırlarının Sorgulanması

This article investigates the state of public communication on and offline as a test case for the viability of care ethics to deal with the fundamental disagreements that characterize our communicative interactions. The argument proceeds in four steps. First, I adumbrate two styles of argumentation that I link with two influential modern ethical theories, the critical-deontological and the polemical-utilitarian. I claim that restricting ourselves to these four terms imprisons us to oscillations between two apparently incompatible frameworks that picture public communication either in normative terms or in terms of power politics. Second, I claim that care ethics offers promising conceptual and normative resources to overcome these oscillations between critique and polemic. Third, I show how this is the case because of the unique way in which care ethics seeks to overcome the opposition between dependence and independence by reconfiguring the standard picture of the separation between morality and politics. Finally, I claim that the real limitation of care ethics is not to be found in its lack of universalizable norms or precise standards, but rather in its insufficient questioning of the extent to which disagreement as dissensus might characterize contemporary politics.

On the question of the linguistic and cultural features of the Eastern Argumentative Model in Political Ecology

The article discusses the issues of argumentation of the environmental agenda, which occupies a significant place in the modern linguistic society and is implemented in various discursive practices. The authors proceed from the fact that the environmental problem is a universal topic that is approved by all people. Therefore, the discussion of environmental problems has a great unifying force. The reaction of the audience to the discussion of environmental plans is always predictable, this topic is approved by all segments of the population. It can be said that the media and politicians always make the most of environmental issues. The combination of political speech and ecology, covered in the media, is a synergistic effect when the sum of the components is greater than a simple addition: 1+1+1→5. The synergy of politics and ecology is the object of this work, and the subject of the study are argumentative structures that provide this synergy. The article contains a review of works showing the specifics of logic and the philosophical tradition of China, which were the basis for specific models of reasoning that make up the Eastern model of argumentation. The purpose of the work is to analyze the argumentation in the speeches of Chinese politicians on the environmental topic and to monitor the implementation of the Eastern or Western model of argumentation. The main conclusions of the article are conclusions about the universality of the Western style of argumentation, which is implemented in arguments about environmental problems. The authors also point out the undesirability of leveling argumentation styles. The novelty of the work lies in the fact that these conclusions, being projected on the field of political ecology, allow us to conclude that the linguistic and cultural characteristics of each country affect the implementation of environmental policy. The authors' contribution to the research of the topic consists in a comparative analysis of the Eastern and Western styles of argumentation and in observing the implementation of one of them in ecological topos in Chinese.

Joan Robinson through the lenses of sixty years of book reviews

Abstract In this paper, we discuss Joan Robinson’s views through the lenses of her 127 book reviews, an activity which she engaged in throughout her life. A complete list of them—so we hope—is presented with full reference to the original place of publication, in the form of tables arranged by decade. We follow her work in chronological order, taking each decade as the framework to analyse what she was working on at the time and show how her reviews were—at times loosely, at times closely—connected with her scientific and political concerns. In some cases, the reviews amounted to review essays, which she reprinted in her Collected Economic Papers, but even in the short reviews she managed to give full expression to her views on the topic or author, and thus they offer us additional insights into her mode of thought, examples of her crisp prose and forceful style of argument. Her reviews ranged over a great variety of topics, reflecting over 60 years of the development of economics, or at least those aspects and topics which she deemed relevant at the time, and so they come to form part of her intellectual legacy, as much as her published work.

Understanding the Paradoxical Effects of (Environmental) Activists and Their Discourses: When and How are They Penalized for Seeking Change?

ABSTRACT Activists are often negatively stereotyped and appraised, yet they can also influence the change they seek. This suggests that the dimensions and processes involved in their stereotyping and their influence are still unclear, as are the impacts of their argumentative style and the level of social consensus about the cause they defend. We focus on clarifying through an experimental study (n = 226): (1) how the argumentative style – radical or moderate – environmental activists employ and the level of societal consensus about their cause affect how they are viewed in three stereotypical dimensions (warmth, competence, and trustworthiness); (2) how these dimensions are associated with a general appraisal of the activist and with (3) respondents’ pro-environmental behavioral intentions. Results both corroborate and challenge previous findings, suggesting that activists are penalized on warmth, but not competence, that trustworthiness elicited by (radical) activists, and societal consensus play relevant roles. Suggestions for more nuanced communication strategies informed by these findings are discussed.

The significance of skepticism

AbstractThere is a recurrent sort of skeptical character in philosophical debates who believes that some social practice must be abolished because it involves a false presupposition about how things ‘really’ are. I examine this style of skeptical argument, using the moral responsibility skeptic as my main illustration. I excavate two unstated and un‐argued for premises that it requires (which I call Undistorted Truth and Privileged Conception). This exposes the full extent of the argumentative burdens that such a skeptic must discharge. I aim to make progress by offering skeptics and anti‐skeptics alike a way forward: the skeptic is provided a clear agenda, while the anti‐skeptic is provided a diagnostic tool to assess this style of skeptical arguments at key junctures.

Teologi Islam: Argumen Alexander Treiger tentang 'Ilmu Kalam

This article examines the ideas of Alexander Treiger in conceptualizing the origins of Kalam in the debate culture of Late Antiquity. Treieger's ideas refer to Michael Cook and Jack Tannous who argue that the Kalām style of argument originates from Christological debates which are then absorbed into Muslim practice through the mediation of Arab Christian circles in Syria and Iraq. Treiger reviews the Science of Kalam on ontological historical aspects and terminological debates, which are rarely highlighted by Muslim scholars. From the results of the analysis of what was studied by Treiger, it was concluded that Treiger argued that the originality of Kalam was divided into three parts namely; the origins of the kalam argument, the debate about Qadar (human free will versus God's destiny) and in the final section discusses three Muslim texts on Qadar which are associated with Hasan bin Muhammad al-Hanafiyah, Umar bin Abdul Aziz and Hasan Al-Bashri. Alexander Treiger is of the view that the science of kalam in general is the influence of Muslim-Christian interactions in Syria. However, unfortunately Treiger does not have enough argumentative data to support his assumption that theology has been influenced by Christianity.

Cultural-Historical Jurisprudence: Institutes and Concepts

The topic of the article concerns the evolution of jurisprudence in the definitions of the language of sociocultural of its historical time. Among the factors of changes in legal analytics and the style of argumentation, the key place is occupied by the category-concept of concept. Concepts express basic ideas concerning the mental and cognitive foundations of the development of law and the science of law. As part of the approaches to the study of law and the science of law, a special place is occupied by cultural and historical jurisprudence, analytical the toolkit of which is designed to identify, describe, and explain conceptual and institutional shifts and transitions in the development of legal systems. Each historical epoch of the evolution of law and the science of law exists and defines itself within the framework of its legal and psychological picture of the world, its basic concepts, and the normative grammar of proper or improper law and order. The language of socioculture, constituting simultaneously the plan of expression of the conceptual picture of the world and the plan of content of its actual meanings and meanings, not only reflects the legal reality, but also shapes it. Each historical epoch speaks the language of its socio-culture, which is analytically and practically reflected both in the composition and definitions of legal science and in the legal constructions of the existing legal order.

An inexplicably good argument for causal finitism

Causal finitism, the view that the causal history of any event must be finite, has garnered much philosophical interest recently—especially because of its applicability to the Kalām cosmological argument. The most prominent argument for causal finitism is the Grim Reaper argument, which attempts to show that, if infinite causal histories are possible, then other paradoxical states of affairs must also be possible. However, this style of argument has been criticized on the grounds of (i) relying on controversial modal principles, and (ii) providing a false diagnosis of the paradoxes involved. In this paper, I develop a new kind of Grim Reaper argument immune to these criticisms. I show that, by using insights from the literature on time travel, causal finitists should instead argue that infinite causal histories are problematically inexplicable, as they entail the possibility of unexplained foiling mechanisms. The fruits of this paper are that (i) a novel supporting argument for the Kalām is developed, and (ii) along the way of building this argument, it is shown that the literatures on time travel and causal finitism are deeply and intimately connected.

Featuring Fiqh: the Representation of Islamic Law in Egyptian Historical Dramas

Abstract Although they may have learned the norms and practices of fiqh at home and in school, most Muslims have scant knowledge of the ways in which their religious laws and mores were practiced in pre-modern times. Indeed, when it comes to imagining and understanding the role of fiqh in earlier Muslim societies, many contemporary Muslims get their information through fictional treatments, particularly from films and television dramas. For Arab Muslims, the relevant medium here is the musalsal, the 30-episode Ramadan drama. This article is a preliminary investigation into the role of fiqh in Egyptian historical films and musalsalāt. Based on collected scenes of fiqh – judges passing sentences, muftis issuing fatwas, teachers instructing, and student discussions – it identifies the issues at stake and analyzes the style of argumentation, the exercise of authority, and the general image of a fiqh-based society created in films and dramas. While the fuqahāʾ only play a minor role in Egyptian film, they are prominent in Arabic historical and religious musalsalāt, often, but not exclusively, produced in Egypt. In these two genres, we have biopics of major religio-legal figures, such as the founders of the four legal schools, major theologians, 19th century reformers, and a few modern ʿulamaʾ. Tracing the evolving treatment of fiqh and fuqahāʾ from the early dramas of the 1980s up to today, this article focuses on the themes of judicial independence, justice for the poor, corruption, and the intellectual process behind rulings. It argues that, overall, the lesson of the musalsalāt is a positive one: Shariʿa works, authoritarian rule has the capacity to be enlightened, and the key to effective leadership is appointing the right people to govern, or judge. The article concludes by discussing these messages in a contemporary Egyptian setting.

The Many and the One: A Philosophical Study of Plural Logic

<i>The Many and the One: A Philosophical Study of Plural Logic</i>

On the defence of antifascist Italy in Alcide De Gasperi’s 1946 speech to the Paris Peace Conference

Faced with the gradual rise of neofascist parties in Europe, the present paper looks back at the past to analyse a speech delivered by one of the founding fathers of the European Union, namely Alcide De Gasperi. The investigation is part of a broader project on the analysis of Italian antifascist discourse. The speech that De Gasperi delivered at the 1946 Paris Peace Conference is reconstructed with the help of the pragma-dialectical model of a critical discussion, focusing on the passages in which the speaker dealt with Italy’s non-fascist identity and its wrong perception by the audience. Emphasis is laid on the argumentative pattern underlying De Gasperi’s discourse and the argumentative style characterising his address. Moreover, reference is made to the notion of argumentative equivalence to examine the translation of De Gasperi’s speech into English; published in the New York Times the day after he delivered his address, it cast a shadow over the impartiality of the drafters of the English version of the speech, which nevertheless managed to go down to history as an argumentative classic.

A functional diversity of argumentative styles

In dealing with the different ways in which argumentative styles manifest themselves in various communicative practices from several communicative domains, van Eemeren and Garssen start from a definition of argumentative style that is connected with the pragma-dialectical notion of strategic maneuvering. Depending on the argumentative moves that are made, the dialectical routes that are followed, and the strategic considerations that are brought to bear, they make a general distinction between detached and engaged argumentative styles. In this article, they report on recent research in which it is examined to what extent the argumentative styles that are prototypically used in different institutional macro-contexts from the political, the diplomatic, the juridical, the faciliatory, the academic and the medical domain belong to these two categories. In the analyses they discuss, the authors combine specialized and domain-specific background knowledge with pragma-dialectical insight into the properties of argumentative discourse that determine the argumentative style.

A Time of Novelty: Logic, Emotion, and Intellectual Life in Early Modern India, 1500–1700 CE, by Samuel Wright

Samuel Wright has written an excellent and subtly argued book about the intellectual culture of nyāya authors in early modern India. The early modern period, roughly the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, has been the subject of several studies of Indian intellectual history in the last two decades. Nyāya, the Sanskrit discipline of logic and epistemology, has usually been studied by philosophers and historians of philosophy, who aim to track the new developments within that tradition at this time. This book mostly discusses scholars who lived in Bengal, not only because they produced the disproportionate majority of nyāya works in the subcontinent at the time, but because they self-consciously articulated a distinct sense of novelty in their writing. Wright skilfully turns our attention from the content of that newness to its form and social context. It is not only ‘intellectual novelty’ but ‘affective novelty’ that characterises the new nyāya. If nyāya intellectuals saw themselves as belonging to a philosophical community constructed around ‘argument, rationality, and logic’, they also organised themselves around ‘certain feelings and evocations’ that should be understood as aesthetic responses to nyāya philosophy itself (pp. 15–16). ‘The new’ here is not just a matter of intellection—the new style and content of argumentation—but of emotion, of the very attitudes, dispositions and comportments with which one situates oneself in a philosophical community. ‘What emerges in this process’, Wright argues, ‘is a novel taste for consuming and producing “the new” as a constituent part of nyāya intellectual practice and in constituting the relationship between reading community and text’ (p. 192). This could be understood, to use a word that Wright does not, as a matter of scholarly habitus, the structuring structure that organises practices. Wright prefers theories of emotion, and for good reason: they can be found in the annals of Sanskrit literary theory, which lend themselves to theorising the inner life of a scholar, both ‘as expressed in that scholar’s writing’ as well as ‘projected out to other nyāya intellectuals’ (p. 17). Wright’s focus on the genre of the vāda, pamphlet-size publications of essays on individual topics, opens up a fresh perspective on the life of Sanskrit intellectual culture.

Infinite Regress Arguments asper impossibileArguments in Aristotle:De Caelo300a30–b1,Posterior Analytics72b5–10,PhysicsV.2 225b33–226a10

AbstractInfinite regress arguments are a powerful tool in Aristotle, but this style of argument has received relatively little attention. Improving our understanding of infinite regress arguments has become pressing since recent scholars have pointed out that it is not clear whether Aristotle’s infinite regress arguments are, in general, effective or indeed what the logical structure of these arguments is. One obvious approach would be to hold that Aristotle takes infinite regress arguments to beper impossibilearguments, which derive an infinite sequence. Due to his finitism, Aristotle then rejects such a sequence as impossible. This paper argues that this obvious approach does not work, even for its most amenable cases. The paper argues instead that infinite regress arguments involve domain-specific infinities, and so there is not a general finitism which underpins infinite regress arguments in Aristotle, but rather domain-specific reasons that there cannot be an infinite number of entities in each domain in which Aristotle invokes an infinite regress argument.

Arguing in their own way or adapting to the masculine world? An analysis of male and female argumentative styles in the Czech Chamber of Deputies

ABSTRACT This article is focused on the differences in argumentation of male and female MPs and the impact of parliamentary experience and party ideology. Our pragma-dialectical analysis of argumentation encompasses 150 parliamentary speeches in the Czech Chamber of Deputies (2017–2019). The results show that gender does not influence the number of concrete arguments in the speeches, but women use slightly more abstract arguments. Speeches of senior female MPs have a larger number of both, abstract and concrete arguments. Moreover, senior male MPs use a greater number of concrete arguments but a smaller number of abstract arguments. Finally, leftist female MPs create more abstract arguments and fewer concrete arguments than rightist female MPs. The findings add to the discussion about political socialisation and accommodation of female MPs in male-dominated parliaments and extend the geopolitical scope of previous research.