Narrative Argument Research Articles

Scaling the value of multilingualism: ‘Common-sense’ narratives of growth and inequality in an expert report to the U.S. Congress

I examine the powerful institutional scaling project of the 2017 American Academy of Arts & Sciences report, America’s Languages: Investing in Language Education for the 21st Century. I analyze the scalar configurations emerging in the report’s narrative argumentation with the goal of denaturalizing its scale-making narratives in the production of a ‘common-sense’ regimentation of the value of language learning and multilingualism in the United States. These configurations show how social inequalities in access to language learning are reinforced through the ideologically mapped categorizations of language to sociocultural domains and kinds of speakers. Nomically- and reportively-calibrated, future-oriented narratives present figurations of growth and progress that mix nationalist ideologies of US expansionism, neoliberal and raciolinguistic logics, and even utopian visions. By focusing on scale, and in particular on interscalar processes of comparison, the resonances across these sometimes contradictory ideological frames are brought into focus.

With me it is exactly the same: second stories and their argumentative function in child talk

Conversation circles in kindergartens can foster discursive abilities such as argumentation. This paper analyzes argumentation in conversation circles in a kindergarten with respect to the function of narrative argumentation. We focus on second stories as a specific narrative form that is characterized by relating in content and form to a before told narrative thereby displaying similarity and alignment. In this paper, we will analyze videographed conversation circles in a kindergarten. Our methodological approach is interactional and qualitative, informed by conversation analysis and narrative analysis. We will argue that preschool children use second stories for argumentative purposes in cooperative argumentative exchanges and through them produce interactional alignment.

Exploring the dynamics of design thinking in management education and training: a critical review, taxonomic analysis and practical implications

PurposeApplying critical analysis as the methodological framework for assessing the literature, the review seeks to present a summary and evaluation of the existing body of knowledge. This approach helps to establish the basis for developing forthcoming recommendations.Design/methodology/approachThe articles were selected through a Systematic Literature Review following the PRISMA guidelines, and utilising Scopus, Web of Science, Science Direct, and the Education Resources Information Center database. Field taxonomy is presented based on the outcomes.FindingsThrough a critical review, we offer narrative arguments that document the shortcomings in the existing literature by scrutinising study designs and highlighting suboptimal approaches. Finally, we issue a call to action for future research, envisioning its potential to reorient and reconstruct the field while enhancing the quality of future studies. This proactive stance aims to foster the development of more competent and insightful perspectives, theories, and policy recommendations within design thinking in management education and training.Practical implicationsThe research in this field holds significant potential for providing valuable practical and policy insights, contingent upon the rigorous and thorough execution of studies.Originality/valueThis article presents a robust critical review of 57 state-of-the-art articles investigating design thinking in the context of management education and training.

Policy narratives in forest fire management

As the risk of forest fires increases around the globe, the issues of how to control, suppress, and prevent them are the subjects of growing public and political attention. This study focuses on the political debate in Germany regarding forest fires and provides insights into the conceptualization of forest fires and forest fire management at the federal and state policymaking levels. By examining forest fire narratives through the policy lens, this case study takes an exemplary extreme weather event exacerbated by climate change as an opportunity to examine the policy response to this problem. In this way, we examine the role of policy narratives in civil and environmental protection and disaster management. The findings reveal that all politicians examined in this study agree that forest fire management is an urgent matter that needs to be supported. In the prevailing human-centered narrative, policymakers see active forest management and use as tools to improve forest resilience to fire and other calamities. Those who advocate a nature-based narrative assert that it is natural processes in protected forest areas that most effectively enhance resilience. The policy solutions derived from these views include financial support, recognition of the work of foresters, forest fire managers, and civil protection agencies as well as, depending on the type of narrative argument favored, either increased forest management or improved protection of forest ecologies. This suggests that narrative analysis may illuminate the rationales underlying previous policy decisions and the framework for future ones. This contribution throws light on how narratives shape policymaking and, by extension, disaster management. Future studies should therefore take into account the influence of prevailing narratives when it comes to evaluating the potential that policymaking can offer for disaster management in the future.

Visual Argument Structure Tool (VAST) Version 1.0

We present the first version of the Visual Argument Structure Tool (VAST), which may be used for jointly visualizing the semantic, conceptual, empirical and reasoning relationships that constitute arguments. Its primary purpose is to promote exactness and comprehensiveness in systematic thinking. The system distinguishes between concepts and the words (“names”) that may be used to refer to them. It also distinguishes various ways in which concepts may be related to one another (causation, conceptual implication, prediction, transformation, reasoning), and all of these from beliefs as to whether something IS the case and/or OUGHT to be the case. Using these elements, the system allows for formalizations of narrative argument components at any level of vagueness vs. precision that is deemed possible and/or necessary. This latter feature may make the system particularly useful for attaining greater theoretical specificity in the humanities, and for bridging the gap between the humanities and the “harder” sciences. However, VAST may also be used outside of science, to capture argument structures in e.g., legal analyses, media reports, belief systems, and debates.

“The Netherlands in Indonesia, 1945-49”: An Analysis of Argument Narrative Structure in Indonesian History Textbook

History textbooks influence students' interpretations through the structure of arguments and the meanings they contain. This article attempts to answer the question, what is the narrative structure of argument and meaning in the textbook? This article explores narrative arguments using Toulmin's model framework and the use of lexicogrammatical features to detect diction and word choice to identify the contrasting language in textbooks. We explore the Indonesian history textbook in senior high school class XI (eleven). The material analysed is the confrontation between the Netherlands and Indonesia from 1945-49. The study found that the textbook narrative argument identifies the claim that the early conditions of Indonesian independence were fraught with obstacles. The textbook claims that the arrival of the Allies and the Netherlands caused resistance, so the Indonesian struggle occurred in two ways: war and diplomacy. Indonesian history textbooks have become a tool of persuasion to benefit students' national identity formation. Using lexicogrammatical features also reinforces the claim that the Netherlands is on the "bad" side and Indonesia is on the "good" side. Thus, the narrative argument validates the official state-sanctioned history of the Netherlands as a colonialist state and exhibits antagonistic behaviour toward the Indonesian people's decision for independence.

Resisting Narrative Closure: The Comparative and Historical Imagination of Evsey Domar

Abstract This article explores the peculiar approach to narrative argumentation taken by the MIT economist Evsey Domar (1914–97). Combining biography and textual analysis of his academic work reveals that Cold War themes permeated Domar's later research in comparative economic systems, Soviet economics, and economic history—and yet, Domar employed these themes in ways that challenge traditional understandings of postwar American social science. Against the heady partisanship and epistemic self-confidence that characterized his milieu, Domar offered conclusions that emphasized ambiguity, complexity, and open-endedness. He achieved this, the article argues, by thinking not only comparatively but also historically and speculatively. This article takes a journey through a number of Domar's historical and speculative narratives to demonstrate that what Domar was ultimately doing in many of his works was resisting normative, literary, and scientific closure.

In the name of the nobility of the cause, what I did is right

Abstract Discourse-focused analyses of political communication show a complex interplay between narration and argumentation. Yet, current analytical tools fall short of accounting for the multifarious ways in which narratives perform as arguments. This paper adopts the notion narrative argument, developed in argumentation theory, to examine the ways the ‘hero-protector’ narrative serves as argument. The paper analyzes four speeches given by Donald Trump and Joe Biden, whereby the use of force on foreign grounds is justified via the ‘hero-protector’ narrative. The analytical framework combines the argumentation strategies of the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) with pragma-dialectics’ argumentation schemes. The analysis shows that each narrative sequence constituting the ‘hero-protector’ narrative constructs specific argument schemes, and the logical connections between these sequences link arguments in chains to collectively justify the rightness of claims. The paper, thus, seeks to illustrate the possibility of conceptualizing narrative discourse as an effective way to argue for or against a claim.

Avançando no campo da neuroliderança: uma revisão sistemática e integrativa

Abstract Scholars and managers have long discussed the best profile for successful leadership, which can influence employee performance and organizational growth. Despite leadership being the focus of many studies and continuous training, what explains leaders’ effectiveness within institutions and companies remains unclear. To better understand this phenomenon, we perform a comprehensive review of empirical studies and theoretical essays (N = 93) exploring the application of neuroscience in an organization’s practices and leaders’ development. We conducted a systematic review using these references and built narrative arguments organizing understudied areas and defining a process to classify and integrate trends. The study is different from previous research in identifying groups of research areas such as the biological, brain, psychological, management, emotional, and cognitive approaches, as well as research topics such as culture, decision-making, engagement, ethics, and human development. Moreover, we suggest a theoretical framework comprising those approaches and the main research topics to stimulate the move of the field forward. The article contributes to the literature by organizing the state of the art of research and presenting neuroleadership as a construct. We conclude with suggestions for future research that we hope will address existing gaps and contribute to building relevant theories and policy recommendations.

Aesthetic Bliss: How Vladimir Nabokov Uses Unreliable Narration in Lolita to Create Better Readers

In his most famous novel<em>, Lolita, </em>Vladimir Nabokov created one of the most intricate, memorable, and maddening narrators in literature. By firmly positioning Humbert Humbert as a mis-handler of fact and purveyor of his own skewed perspective, Nabokov encourages the perceptive reader to reject the narrator and actively seek out the truth of the story for themselves. Subtle yet undeniable clues (such as holes in the narrative arguments, clear exaggerations, and logical fallacies) saturate this story, undermining the credibility of the first-person perspective and pointing toward its deception. Once we as the audience recognize that Nabokov is guiding us away from his grasp, we are free to wander through the world the author has created and interpret its meaning for ourselves, and as such, evolve into more attentive and thoughtful readers of fiction.

Rowing in the Breca Episode from a Narrative Perspective

Rowing in the Breca Episode from a Narrative Perspective

The Issue of Compatibility Between Philosophy and Religion from Ibn-Rusheds Perspective

It is true that, from the beginning, philosophy and religion were two separate areas and subjects; each of which interacted with contemporary problems and issues in its own way and worldview. If they were not compatible then, they did not oppose each other. In other words, the connection between religion and philosophy did not become a problem from the beginning. This was because each of them independently worked on their own issues and problems by themselves. However, with the advent of Islam and its opening up to the outside world, it came into conflict with the thinking and philosophy of other nations in the region, especially with Greek thought and philosophy; this also became an important issue and a clear problem for Islamic scholars and philosophers and divided them into two separate factions. One of them was completely hostile to philosophy and rejected any compromise and interaction between Islam and Greek philosophy, considering only religion as the main source of science and knowledge, and outside of religion, they did not accept anything. However, the other faction, most of whom were Islamic philosophers, advocated a compromise between religion and philosophy, seeking to create a kind of compromise and coexistence between them, and to show the fact that there is no incompatibility or opposition between the two. Within this context Ibn Rushd had a clear and important role in this regard. He made great efforts to make everyone aware of the fact that philosophy and religion do not have any incompatibility and conflict between them, and they are able to exist or occur together. To this end, he resorted to a set of important rules such as rational and narrative arguments in order to be able to tell all opponents that they have made a mistake in rejecting and opposing philosophy. He also showed everyone through these rules that philosophy and religion are friends and compatible with each other, that is, philosophy and religion are complementary to each other and they are inherently friends and internally have the same soul.

Reinventing argument: How games persuade through performative enthymemes

The multimodal affordances of games show how space and objects performatively construct enthymemes to form argument and invention. Within this article, I examine qualitative surveys and interviews with writing teachers within rhetoric, writing studies, and technical communication about how they use games to teach nontraditional, multimodal arguments, specifically digital storytelling, to examine how games use space and embedded objects to invent performative enthymematic narrative arguments: through games of progression, branching narrative path games, sandbox environment games, and player-designed sandbox environment games.

Domestic Disputes: Examining Discourses of Home and Property in the Former East Germany by Necia Chronister

Reviewed by: Domestic Disputes: Examining Discourses of Home and Property in the Former East Germany by Necia Chronister Nicole G. Burgoyne Domestic Disputes: Examining Discourses of Home and Property in the Former East Germany. By Necia Chronister. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021. Pp. x + 223. Cloth $99.99. ISBN 978-3-11-067335-7. In a new monograph entitled Domestic Disputes, Necia Chronister offers a diverse but deep study of property relations in the former East Germany of the 1990s and early 2000s. Her primary sources range from made-for-television and theatrical films to a short story and novels. The overarching theoretical constellations of the monograph are issues of Heimat and materiality; however, her exploration of the legal basis of property conflicts in the early years of reunification, as well as her precision in defining terms such as "neoliberalism" (3), "deterritorialization" (103), and "crises of masculinity" (150) in the context of her primary sources are equally helpful. The intricacies of legal disputes regarding property in East Germany, which Chronister details in her first chapter, introduced competing claims of those expropriated by the Nazis and those whom post-Socialist privatization of East German property put at a disadvantage. The history of Nazi appropriations of property mentioned above does not impact every story discussed in this monograph, yet its centrality to the texts [End Page 197] in chapter 6 of Chronister's work demonstrates that it is not a topic that has faded by the 1990s. Chronister also introduces newspaper narratives depicting the sheer number of competing claims on individual homes in the former East, in addition to the complications of establishing property ownership, such as poor records from the period of Soviet occupation and the GDR, as well as historical idiosyncrasies like changing street names. In this context, she emphasizes the informative aim of the made-for-television films she introduces in chapters 2 and 3. Chronister examines two of six made-for-television films produced by the East German DEFA studio, commissioned by a West German television channel in a gesture towards promoting reunification. In addition to portraying both sides of property disputes between Westerners and Easterners, Chronister writes that the films, which debuted in 1991 and 1992, "imparted key policy information to the German viewing audience of the time" (39). One trope that unites films made by DEFA and those made by others such as Uta Stöckl's The Same Old Song is the narrative argument that working to maintain a property lends its inhabitants credibility. Chronister analyzes this topos with the theory of intra-activity (13). In her analysis of two further films in chapter 3, Chronister makes the most direct argument in the monograph concerning neoliberalism: "Whereas The Brocken concludes with the spread of the market into every facet of life on the island of Rügen while simultaneously positing that personal relationships and a peaceful home life can thrive there, Buck's road comedy [No More Mr. Nice Guy] imagines a rather utopian space at its conclusion that lies outside of capitalism's reach" (97). Chronister emphasizes the uncertainty regarding the scope of neoliberalism that is visible in theoretical discussion of the term and the primary source material she has surveyed. A decisive strength of Chronister's monograph is the persuasive quality of her focus on property relations and the space of a home in all eleven of the fictional stories under consideration. As elaborated above, the films specifically addressed competing claims between Easterners and Westerners on properties with homes. In most of the prose texts covered, similar situations of taking possession of property and the dynamics of home life make contemporary gender roles of central importance. For example, in a chapter contrasting Judith Hermann's short story "Summer House, Later" (1999) with her novel Where Love Begins (2014), Chronister offers important nuance to topoi of the intervening time: "The dissolving binaries of place as thematized in 'Summerhouse, Later' have thus resulted in an unsettling sense of dislocation in Where Love Begins, and the sexual and gender fluidity at stake in 'Summerhouse, Later' has given way in Where Love Begins to heteronormative gender relations and reproductive sex" (101). Chronister utilizes the normativity of the later...

Methodology of the Austrian School of Economics from the perspective of Georg Henrik von Wright’s philosophy of science

Abstract Through this article we will try to get into the way of thinking of one of the most important economic schools, namely the Austrian School. Over time, many mistakes have been made by various economic schools because the fundamentals of thinking were not clear or the concepts used were not properly defined. Here we will try to clarify the foundation in general of the socio-human sciences and in particular of the mentioned school. Building theories or opinions on a fragile foundation will certainly give rise to a friable architecture. Among the various philosophers who have approached science, we believe that von Wight has a direct and clear approach to the type of human social thinking. From the information we have we do not know an approach similar to this article. The Austrian School has hitherto been understood as a methodology from the perspective of Aristotelianism. The question is whether a new perspective can make more sense. The methodology of presenting the article is narrative argumentation. The questions we try to answer in the conclusions are those related to understanding the present moment and discerning the future moment through the fog. The conclusions will be critical regarding the use of mathematics in the socio-human sciences, and the socio-human sciences must be understood only from the perspective of human motivations and intentions. Clarifying the starting point in economic thinking makes us more modest in drawing conclusions and making predictions about the future.

Credible as Evidence? Multilayered Audience Reception of Narrative Arguments

Building on a view of both narration and argumentation as dynamic concepts, this paper considers ways of assessing the credibility of narrative arguments constructed in empirical examples of conversational discourse. I argue that the key in any such exercise is to pay close attention to both structural and pragmatic details, particularly how conversational storytelling gets embedded in the surrounding discourse and how the way this is discursively accomplished vis-à-vis the narrators’ multilayered audience may be reflective of their argumentative goals.

&amp;lt;i&amp;gt;La Commedia Scientifica&amp;lt;/i&amp;gt; – Dante and the scientific virtues

Abstract. The ethical challenges facing contemporary science range from scientific misconduct to the rightful treatment of people, animals and the environment. In this work, we explore the role of virtue ethics, which concern the character of a person, in contemporary science. Through interviews with 13 scientists, eight of whom are geoscientists, we identify six virtues in science (honesty, humility, philia, innocence, generosity and reticence), paired with vices, and construct a narrative argument around them. Specifically, we employ the narrative structure of the late medieval poem The Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri, and draw on its moral universe to explore the scientific virtues. Using this narrative device, we make the case for virtue ethics being a reliable guide for all matters scientific. As such, this work lays out a modern code of conduct for science.

Adding limits to argumentative reconstruction: the case of taste in argumentation

This paper questions the use of the argumentative reconstruction technique as a criterion for identifying arguments. To perform this, I stress a type of argument that appeals to taste. I proceed as follows: first, I relate such a technique to the ways in which pragma-dialectics and informal logic have defined argumentation. Second, I present some borderline cases to reconstruction technique such as argumentation through directives, expressives and commissives speech acts, narrative argumentation, and visual argumentation. Third, I add to these cases that of an argumentation that appeals to taste by analyzing a dialogue. Fourth, I conclude the article by offering reasons to study cases such as the one presented and by introducing some problems derived from the present study.

Bookending the Enlightenment: Scandinavia’s first novel and the Anthropocene condemnation of its TV adaptation

Niels Klim’s Underground Travels (1741) was the European breakthrough for the Norwegian Enlightenment polymath Ludvig Holberg. The emerging novel format inspired Holberg to trust his readers to use their own rationality to decide on the contentious issues of their era. The intellectual contrarian had always been sceptical of his contemporaries’ ability to reason, but he died content that his writings had made a positive impact. Over two centuries later, a Danish TV adaptation of Niels Klim casts a more misanthropic verdict. The mini-series concludes that humanity lacks reason and is an environmentally disastrous mistake. This article compares narrative and thematic argument in these two works to explore the evolution of Western views on rationality, nationality, gender, and environmentalism. If it is the case that, as the TV adaptation and many modern critics suggest, human reason is unlikely to solve the twenty-first-century’s existential threats, what is the alternative for humanity?

The Complex Relationship Among Truth, Argument, and Narrative

ABSTRACTWhat are the obstacles to believing that narratives can argue? How can we be assured that narratives argue well? This article will explore major objections to accounts of narrative argument and literary truth, and explore a theory of narrative reasoning that emphasizes identification as a vital part of argument. In exploring the account of narrative offered by Walter Fisher in light of concerns with narrative in rhetorical studies and philosophy, I explicate a renewed sense of identification and narrative reasoning that can meet many of these objections to giving narrative a role in human communication and argument. Of particular interest are the resources available in narratives for active identification by an auditor or reader as good reasons for action or belief in their own extratextual activities.