Disputation by Design

In normative pragmatics, a kind of empirical discourse analysis organized by normative theory, the analysis of any communication process begins with an idealized model of the discourse that can be compared with actual practices. Idealizations of argumentation can be found, among other places, in theoretical descriptions of \u27critical discussion\u27 and other dialogue types. Comparing ideal models with actual practices can pinpoint defects in the models (leading to theoretical refinements), but it can also identify deficiencies in practice. This latter possibility invites redesign around well-justified idealizations. This paper outlines an approach to the design of discourse processes and illustrates the approach with contrastive analysis of several recently developed protocols for discussion and debate on the worldwide web

Commentary on: Mark Aakhus, Smaranda Muresan and Nina Wacholder\u27s Integrating natural language processing and pragmatic argumentation theories for argumentation support

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Commentary on “Inducing a Sympathetic (Empathic) Reception for Exhortation”

People often have conflicting values, goals, and beliefs, and these present special challenges for those who seek to influence them. Kauffeld and Innocenti suggest that these situations of conflictedness are opportunities for a speaker to “exhort” the audience to resolve the conflict in favor of their highest principle. Exhortation, in their view, has high-mindedness as a constitutive feature. At Cooper Union, Lincoln exhorted Republicans to face their fear of disunion and steadfastly maintain the evil of slavery—a confirming example for the Kauffeld and Innocenti account. But looking at a broader set of examples, it seems clear that exhortations do not always fit the pattern of appeal to higher principles. Exhortation may occur for any conflictedness the speaker imagines the audience as having, including mundane matters of self-interest (such as what to eat or how much exercising to do). A speaker\u27s attributions of belief, goal, motive, or other cognitive state to an addressee is always rhetorically risky, and these attributions may themselves become a space for disagreement. We can learn from speakers who manage this rhetorical risk well, but also from the much greater number of speakers who do it poorly

Evidence in Health Controversies

Health controversies involve the now-familiar complexities of polylogue: multiple positions, multiple players, and multiple places. A vexing issue that cuts across many health topics is what counts as evidence. Several different expert fields may each try to enforce their own evidence standards, and lay participants (whose well-being depends on any expert consensus that may form) often bring their own distinctive forms of evidence. This presentation examines disagreements over evidence within a series of case studies

Keynote Address—Black Box Arguments and Accountability of Experts to the Public

Contemporary deliberation depends on an infrastructure of expertise the way travel depends on transportation infrastructure. Like other forms of infrastructure, the inner workings of expertise become less visible to its users, even as expertise itself becomes more indispensable. Accountability is an essential design requirement for any such system

Relationships among Birds, Willows, and Native Ungulates in and around Northern Yellowstone National Park

Although the impacts of livestock and human activities on riparian zones and associated wildlife have been well documented, little is known about the impacts that browsing by large native ungulates such as elk and moose may have. In the northern Yellowstone area, some willow stands experience intense browsing by elk and moose whereas others experience medium or very low amounts of browsing. The objectives of this study were (1) to compare the species and densities of birds among willow stands that have experienced different intensities of browsing by native ungulates, (2) to measure the relationship between five species of birds and aspects of habitat structure, and (3) to develop and evaluate predictive models that relate presence or absence of the five species to habitat characteristics. In 1989 and 1990, I measured densities of nesting songbirds and aspects of habitat structure in eight large willow stands that have experienced different intensities of browsing. The densities of five focal species (Common Yellowthroat, Lincoln\u27s Sparrow, Warbling Vireo, Wilson\u27s Warbler, and Yellow Warbler) varied considerably among sites. Only two sites had all five species and only one species--the Lincoln\u27s Sparrow\u27was found in all eight sites. The proportion of severely browsed willows in the eight sites ranged from 3.5% to 100%. The nonlinear relationship between total bird densities and frequency of severe browsing suggests that birds have a threshhold of tolerance for browsing, beyond which bird numbers and total numbers of species drop. Principal Components Analysis of 14 habitat variables indicates that the study sites varied in terms of distances between shrubs, shrub heights, height heterogeneity, foliage density at various height intervals, and frequency of severely browsed willows. Browsing does appear to affect the assemblages of breeding birds in these sites, but site- and landscape-level factors such as food abundance, willow species composition, hydrology, type and gradient of adjacent community, and riparian zone width and elevation also play important roles. such variables should be incorporated into future predictive models to improve model performance. (82 pages

One-loop Corrections to the S Parameter in the Four-site Model

We compute the leading chiral-logarithmic corrections to the S parameter in the four-site Higgsless model. In addition to the usual electroweak gauge bosons of the Standard Model, this model contains two sets of heavy charged and neutral gauge bosons. In the continuum limit, the latter gauge bosons can be identified with the first excited Kaluza-Klein states of the W^\pm and Z bosons of a warped extra-dimensional model with an SU(2)_L \times SU(2)_R \times U(1)_X bulk gauge symmetry. We consider delocalized fermions and show that the delocalization parameter must be considerably tuned from its tree-level ideal value in order to reconcile experimental constraints with the one-loop results. Hence, the delocalization of fermions does not solve the problem of large contributions to the S parameter in this class of theories and significant contributions to S can potentially occur at one-loop.Comment: 28 pages, 7 figure

Higgs Triplets, Decoupling, and Precision Measurements

Electroweak precision data has been extensively used to constrain models containing physics beyond that of the Standard Model. When the model contains Higgs scalars in representations other than SU(2) singlets or doublets, and hence rho not equal to one at tree level, a correct renormalization scheme requires more inputs than the three needed for the Standard Model. We discuss the connection between the renormalization of models with Higgs triplets and the decoupling properties of the models as the mass scale for the scalar triplet field becomes much larger than the electroweak scale. The requirements of perturbativity of the couplings and agreement with electroweak data place strong restrictions on models with Higgs triplets. Our results have important implications for Little Higgs type models and other models with rho not equal to one at tree level.Comment: 23 page