Normative Practical Reasoning via Argumentation and Dialogue

Postprin

Evidence-Based Dialogue Maps as a research tool to evaluate the quality of school pupils’ scientific argumentation

This pilot study focuses on the potential of Evidence-based Dialogue Mapping as a participatory action research tool to investigate young teenagers’ scientific argumentation. Evidence-based Dialogue Mapping is a technique for representing graphically an argumentative dialogue through Questions, Ideas, Pros, Cons and Data. Our research objective is to better understand the usage of Compendium, a Dialogue Mapping software tool, as both (1) a learning strategy to scaffold school pupils’ argumentation and (2) as a method to investigate the quality of their argumentative essays. The participants were a science teacher-researcher, a knowledge mapping researcher and 20 pupils, 12-13 years old, in a summer science course for “gifted and talented” children in the UK. This study draws on multiple data sources: discussion forum, science teacher-researcher’s and pupils’ Dialogue Maps, pupil essays, and reflective comments about the uses of mapping for writing. Through qualitative analysis of two case studies, we examine the role of Evidence-based Dialogue Maps as a mediating tool in scientific reasoning: as conceptual bridges for linking and making knowledge intelligible; as support for the linearisation task of generating a coherent document outline; as a reflective aid to rethinking reasoning in response to teacher feedback; and as a visual language for making arguments tangible via cartographic conventions

Reflective Argumentation

Theories of argumentation usually focus on arguments as means of persuasion, finding consensus, or justifying knowledge claims. However, the construction and visualization of arguments can also be used to clarify one's own thinking and to stimulate change of this thinking if gaps, unjustified assumptions, contradictions, or open questions can be identified. This is what I call "reflective argumentation." The objective of this paper is, first, to clarify the conditions of reflective argumentation and, second, to discuss the possibilities of argument visualization methods in supporting reflection and cognitive change. After a discussion of the cognitive problems we are facing in conflicts--obviously the area where cognitive change is hardest--the second part will, based on this, determine a set of requirements argument visualization tools should fulfill if their main purpose is stimulating reflection and cognitive change. In the third part, I will evaluate available argument visualization methods with regard to these requirements and talk about their limitations. The fourth part, then, introduces a new method of argument visualization which I call Logical Argument Mapping (LAM). LAM has specifically been designed to support reflective argumentation. Since it uses primarily deductively valid argument schemes, this design decision has to be justified with regard to goals of reflective argumentation. The fifth part, finally, provides an example of how Logical Argument Mapping could be used as a method of reflective argumentation in a political controversy

The false promise of the better argument

Effective argumentation in international politics is widely conceived as a matter of persuasion. In particular, the ‘logic of arguing’ ascribes explanatory power to the ‘better argument’ and promises to illuminate the conditions of legitimate normative change. This article exposes the self-defeating implications of the Habermasian symbiosis between the normative and the empirical force of arguments. Since genuine persuasion is neither observable nor knowable, its analysis critically depends on what scholars consider to be the better argument. Seemingly, objective criteria such as universality only camouflage such moral reification. The paradoxical consequence of an explanatory concept of arguing is that moral discourse is no longer conceptualized as an open-ended process of contestation and normative change, but has recently been recast as a governance mechanism ensuring the compliance of international actors with pre-defined norms. This dilemma can be avoided through a positivist reification of valid norms, as in socialization research, or by adopting a critical and emancipatory focus on the obstacles to true persuasion. Still, both solutions remain dependent on the ‘persuasion vs. coercion’ problem that forestalls an insight into successful justificatory practices other than rational communication. The conclusion therefore pleas for a pragmatic abstention from better arguments and points to the insights to be gained from pragmatist norms research in sociology

A probabilistic analysis of argument cogency

This paper offers a probabilistic treatment of the conditions for argument cogency as endorsed in informal logic: acceptability, relevance, and sufficiency. Treating a natural language argument as a reason-claim-complex, our analysis identifies content features of defeasible argument on which the RSA conditions depend, namely: change in the commitment to the reason, the reason’s sensitivity and selectivity to the claim, one’s prior commitment to the claim, and the contextually determined thresholds of acceptability for reasons and for claims. Results contrast with, and may indeed serve to correct, the informal understanding and applications of the RSA criteria concerning their conceptual dependence, their function as update-thresholds, and their status as obligatory rather than permissive norms, but also show how these formal and informal normative approachs can in fact align

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: NL

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: N

The philosophical significance of binary categories in Habermas’s discourse ethics

The philosophical programme associated with the discourse ethics of Jürgen Habermas has been widely discussed in the literature. The fact that Habermas has devoted a considerable part of his work to the elaboration of this philosophical programme indicates that discourse ethics can be regarded as a cornerstone of his communication-theoretic approach to society. In essence, Habermas conceives of discourse ethics as a philosophical framework which derives the coordinative power of social normativity from the discursive power of communicative rationality. Although there is an extensive literature on Habermas’s communication-theoretic account of society, almost no attention has been paid to the fact that the theoretical framework which undergirds his discourse ethics is based on a number of binary conceptual divisions. It is the purpose of this paper to shed light on the philosophical significance of these binary categories in Habermas’s discourse ethics and thereby demonstrate that their complexity is indicative of the subject’s tension-laden immersion in social reality