Monologue, dilogue or polylogue: Which model for public deliberation?

“Reasonable hostility” is a norm of communicative conduct initially developed by studying public exchanges in education governance meetings in local U.S. communities. In this paper I consider the norm’s usefulness for and applicability to a U.S. state-level public hearing about a bill to legalize civil unions. Following an explication of reasonable hostility and grounded practical theory, the approach to inquiry that guides my work, I describe Hawaii’s 2009, 18-hour public hearing and analyze selected seg-ments of it. I show that this particular public hearing raised demands for testifiers on the anti-civil union side of the argument that reasonable hostility does not do a good job of addressing. Development of a norm of communication conduct for this practice, as well as others, must engage with the culture and time-specific beliefs that a society holds, beliefs that will shape not only how to argue but what may be argued and what must be assumed about particular categories of persons

Assessing presumptions in argumentation: Being a sound presumption vs. being presumably the case

This paper is an attempt to identify and provide the normative conditions for presumptions and for presumptive inferences. Basically, the idea is adopting the distinction between epistemic and ontological qualifiers proposed in Bermejo-Luque (2011) in order to explain the difference between something being a correct presumption and something being presumably the case

Introducing pragmatic criteria to analyse whole-class interactions

UIDB/00183/2020 UIDP/00183/2020Argument-based teaching, broadly defined as the use of argumentation as part ofthe teacher’s everyday pedagogical toolkit, implies dialogic teaching, meaning a shift in teacher’s attitude from being authoritative to being more open to student’s talk and agency. Nonetheless, the limits between allowing students to talk and enabling them to think argumentatively are still not well-defined. Thisempirical work addresses thatgap through looking at an extended corpus of teacher-mediated whole-classinteractions.publishersversionpublishe

Walton's types of argumentation dialogues as classroom discourse sequences

UID/FIL/00183/2013 DL 57/2016/CP1453/CT0066Dialogic argumentation has thus far been proposed as a way to analyse, understand, and promote meaningful classroom interactions. However, currently there is a lack of systematic proposals for conceptualising argumentation dialogue goals as part of teachers' pedagogical repertoire. Our main goal is to operationalise an existing framework of argumentation dialogue types, the one proposed by argumentation theorist Douglas Walton. To do so, we first identify a set of epistemic criteria for meaningful, from an argumentation point of view, discursive interactions, which we use as ‘framing indicators’ to enrich Walton's existing typology of four argumentation dialogues (information-seeking, inquiry, discovery, persuasion). We applied the resulting pragmatic framework to teacher-student interactions found in 20 transcripts of both science and social sciences secondary education lessons. We found that affordances for these four types of dialogues were also present in teacher-student discourse, where the implied argumentation goal was not fulfilled. We discuss these findings in terms of the need to be able to identify the dialogic potentiality and accountability within teacher-student interactions so that the argumentative potential of these interactions can be fulfilled, resulting in productive classroom discourse within secondary education classroom settings.publishersversionepub_ahead_of_prin

Modeling critical questions as additional premises

This paper shows how the critical questions matching an argumentation scheme can be mod-eled in the Carneades argumentation system as three kinds of premises. Ordinary premises hold only if they are supported by sufficient arguments. Assumptions hold, by default, until they have been questioned. With exceptions the negation holds, by default, until the exception has been supported by sufficient arguments. By “sufficient arguments”, we mean arguments sufficient to satisfy the applicable proof standard