The Dimensions of Argumentative Texts and Their Assessment

The definition and the assessment of the quality of argumentative texts has become an increasingly crucial issue in education, classroom discourse, and argumentation theory. The different methods developed and used in the literature are all characterized by specific perspectives that fail to capture the complexity of the subject matter, which remains ill-defined and not systematically investigated. This paper addresses this problem by building on the four main dimensions of argument quality resulting from the definition of argument and the literature in classroom discourse: dialogicity, accountability, relevance, and textuality (DART). We use and develop the insights from the literature in education and argumentation by integrating the frameworks that capture both the textual and the argumentative nature of argumentative texts. This theoretical background will be used to propose a method for translating the DART dimensions into specific and clear proxies and evaluation criteria

Bargaining Without Law

Like a professional athlete on growth hormones, legal bargaining scholarship has transformed itself over the years. Once an amateurish assortment of war stories and folk tales, now it is a hulking behemoth of social science surveys and studies. There is a lot to like in this transformation. Much of the new writing is insightful, sophisticated, and spirited, with things to tell even the most experienced bargainer. But it also is missing something important: law. Bargaining scholars now routinely write about dispute settlement as if the strength of the parties’ competing legal claims is of no consequence. Rarely do they discuss substantive legal argument. And when they do, it usually is in terms of whether the argument is strategically “framed,” or “anchored,” rather than whether it is well reasoned and supported by evidence (i.e., persuasive). This is a serious mistake. At its core, a legal dispute is a disagreement about the meaning of law, and it must be resolved on substantive grounds if the resolution is to be legitimate and lasting. Psychological and social workarounds may paper over a dispute, or suppress it, for a time but they will not resolve it. If it wants to be helpful, bargaining scholarship needs to describe how legal claims are argued conversationally, without polarizing relationships, producing lingering animosities, and provoking recrimination spirals. This is the heart of bargaining; the rest is sideshow. In this article I attempt to describe how this might be done

a Review of Instructional Approaches

UIDB/00183/2020 UIDP/00183/2020 DL 57/2016/CP1453/CT0066 PTDC/FER-FIL/28278/2017Over the past 20 years, a broad and diverse research literature has emerged to address how students learn to argue through dialogue in educational contexts. However, the variety of approaches used to study this phenomenon makes it challenging to find coherence in what may otherwise seem to be disparate fields of study. In this integrative review, we propose looking at how learning to argue (LTA) has been operationalized thus far in educational research, focusing on how different scholars have framed and fostered argumentative dialogue, assessed its gains, and applied it in different learning contexts. In total, 143 studies from the broad literature on educational dialogue and argumentation were analysed, including all educational levels (from primary to university). The following patterns for studying how dialogue fosters LTA emerged: whole-class ‘low structure’ framing with a goal of dialogue, small-group ‘high structure’ framing with varied argumentative goals, and studies with one-to-one dialectic framing with a goal of persuasive deliberation. The affordances and limitations of these different instructional approaches to LTA research and practice are discussed. We conclude with a discussion of complementarity of the approaches that emerged from our analysis in terms of the pedagogical methods and conditions that promote productive and/or constructive classroom interactions.publishersversionepub_ahead_of_prin

Argumentation and disagreement:a pluralistic approach

In our everyday life and in the public sphere, we often find disagreements that the parties cannot resolve nor even overcome. We might call them persistent disagreements. The main question of this thesis is: “What can the parties do to overcome disagreements reasonably, especially when disagreements are persistent?” I argue that the most reasonable way to deal with disagreement is by using argumentation, whereby I approach argumentation pluralistically. This pluralistic approach implies an expansion of traditional approaches to argumentation like pragma-dialectics or informal logic. According to this pluralistic approach, rational persuasion need not be the only goal of argumentation, because it rarely succeeds, especially in the case of persistent disagreement. Therefore, a pluralistic approach to argumentation implies: a) that the parties might overcome their disagreements by reasonable means different from persuasion - among these means we can consider deliberation, negotiation and settlement; b) that if those means revolve around presenting reasons, they should be considered under the concept argumentation; c) that sometimes persuasion is necessary, but that even then, if the setting of the dialogue is sub-optimal, as in the persistent case, we need a general or nonspecific normative approach to evaluate the contributions of the parties; d) that when fallacies are presented, the proper response to them will depend on certain circumstances of the dialogue, considering the goal of overcoming disagreements reasonably; e) that for overcoming disagreements the parties may need to shift between different dialogue types, and that those shifts have special conditions of their own

Dialogical intentions and customization of recommendations for the assessment of medical deliberation

UIDB/00183/2020 UIDP/00183/2020 PTDC/FER‐FIL/28278/2017 PTDC/MHC-FIL/0521/2014Dialogue moves are a pragmatic instrument that captures the most important categories of “dialogical intentions.” This paper adapts this tool to the conversational setting of chronic care communication, characterized by the general goal of making reasoned decisions concerning patients’ conditions, shared by the latter. 7 mutually exclusive and comprehensive categories were identified, whose reliability was tested on an Italian corpus of provider-patient encounters in diabetes care. The application of this method was illustrated through explorative analyses identifying possible correlations between the dialogical structure of medical interviews and one of the indicators of personalized decision-making, namely the specificity of the recommendations given by the provider (“customization”). The statistical analyses show a significant correlation between the exchange of personal information and very specific and customized recommendations for change. It suggests how the creation of common ground, exceeding the boundaries of the paternalistic or patient-centered models, can lead to highly effective communication.authorsversionpublishe

Judicial decision-making and extra-legal influences: Neurolinguistic Programming as a candidate framework to understand persuasion in the legal context

Jurister försöker påverka rättsliga beslutsprocesser med hjälp av övertalning, men den befintliga litteraturen om övertalning i rättssalen är förvånansvärt begränsad med fokus på enskilda tekniker i isolering; inga omfattande integrerade ramverk finns tillgängliga. Vi föreslår en populär kommersiell metod för övertalning, Neurolingvistisk Programmering (NLP), som startpunkt för att utveckla en modell som kan fylla detta gap. Först presenterar vi en bred analys av rättsliga beslutsprocesser och utomrättsliga faktorer som påverkar dem. Därefter utsätter vi centrala aspekter av NLP för noggrann granskning. Slutligen syntetiserar vi dessa trådar i en mångfacetterad bedömning av NLPs potentiella användbarhet som ett omfattande och integrerat ramverk för att förstå och beskriva juristers övertalningsprocesser i rättssalen. Vi hävdar att NLP kan beskriva dessa beteenden och strategier både genom en självreflexiv logik, som ett resultat av dess breda inflytande, men också för mer generella övertalningsprocesser tack vare ett stort antal överensstämmelser mellan NLP-begrepp och resultat från vetenskaplig litteratur. Även om dessa överensstämmelser är ytliga, tyder det faktum att NLP integrerar sina förenklade koncept i ett sammanhållet ramverk, som spänner argumentations- och presentations-dimensioner för övertalning, att det förhållandevis enkelt kan anpassas till en praktisk modell för att beskriva och förstå övertalning i rättssalen. Vidare forskning är indikerad.Trial advocates seek to influence the outcomes of judicial decision-making processes using persuasion, but the existing literature regarding persuasion in the courtroom is surprisingly piecemeal, focusing on individual techniques in isolation; no comprehensive frameworks for integrating these techniques, or for systematically analyzing advocates’ attempts to enact persuasion in the courtroom, have been developed. We propose a popular commercial technology for persuasion, Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP), as a candidate framework that might be modified and adapted to fill this gap. First we present a wide-ranging, discursive analysis of judicial decision-making processes and extra-legal factors that influence them. Next, core aspects of NLP theory are subjected to careful examination. Finally, these threads are synthesized into a multifaceted assessment of NLP’s potential utility as a comprehensive and integrative framework for understanding and describing how litigators enact persuasion in the courtroom. We argue that NLP can describe these behaviors and strategies both by way of a self-reflexive logic resulting from its popular influence, but also as a more general, context independent model by virtue of a large number of correspondences between NLP concepts and findings from the scholarly literature. Although these correspondences are superficial, the fact that NLP integrates its simplified, folk concepts into a coherent framework spanning argumentative and presentational dimensions of persuasion suggests that it might readily be adapted into a useful descriptive model for understanding persuasion in the courtroom. Further scholarly attention is indicated

RESCUING PUBLICNESS FROM ORGANIZATION STUDIES

Does publicness still make sense as an issue for further research? Classic organizational sociology (or standard theory) has provided a breakthrough for understanding public administration and management, but has not fully explored the agenda. Publicness is analytically characterized by the ownership of two production functions: efficiency (outputs), effectiveness (societal outcomes). While similarities may exist between public and non-public entities on some aspects of their organizational models, the effectiveness function they are accountable for is quite specific. Such a perspective allows public administration and organizational scholars to explore new perspectives such as organizing and organized (or the agenda of extended theory).organizational analysis; publicness; organized; organizing; public administration