Be reasonable!

Journal of Pragmatics, 2007

Political interviews are interactionally organized media events in which the co-participants employ argumentative sequences to present themselves and their standpoints as reasonable to an audience and to each other. Against this background, an investigation of the communicative functions of appeals to reasonableness is carried out, with special reference given to how this fundamental premise of argumentation is accessed and controlled. The contribution adapts Habermas's conception of argumentation as a form of conversation based on differences of opinion to the contextual constraints and requirements of a political interview. Contrary to the conception of argumentation as a source of knowledge, argumentation in political interviews is not primarily employed as a means of finding or proving the validity of an argument, but rather as a means of persuading the audience. In a micro-analysis the linguistic representation and distribution of references to reasonableness is examined. Here, the interactional organization of reasonableness follows standard procedure, viz. it is assigned a presuppositional status. In critical situations, however, references to reasonableness are exploited to trigger a conversational implicature which signifies that the co-participant's performance has not been reasonable. Thus, appeals to reasonableness primarily occur in negotiation-of-validity sequences in which the validity of one or more political positions and their presuppositions is at stake.

OSSA 12 Proceedings, 2020

This paper reflects on the tension between institutional and argumentation theoretical norms for reasonable argumentative behaviour. It is a commentary on Menno Reijven's paper "Institutional and institutionalized fallacies" delivered at OSSA 12: Evidence, Persuasion & Diversity.

Wilfried Hodges’s (2001, 2013) criticism of dialogical logic and even more generally of the contribution of the games perspective to logic has been influential and echoes of it are ubiquitous in the literature in the field. His scepticism that seems to adopt a strategy level perspective, wonders on the “story” that might motivate a game theoretical approach. The conclusion of Hodges is that dialogical logic and other game theoretical approaches might have some psychological – if any – rather than a philosophical or formal or mathematical result. Some defenders of the dialogical approach bit the bullet and reminding us of the fine-grained analysis of Argumentation contained in traditional Rhetoric, expanded on the psychological and cognitive features of the dialogical interpretation of inferences, understood as adding persuasive explanatory power to deductive steps obtained by applying, for example, Gentzen-style rules, rather than only producing a sequence of those steps. One of most recent forms of such kind of response, called the Built-in-Opponent (BIO) conception of deduction, stresses, among other issues, the contribution of the dialogical interpretation of the structural rules, which yields a table of rankings from most plausibly revisable to least plausibly revisable, a ranking that is not reliant on ad hoc paradoxes driven decisions – see Duthil Novaes&French (2018) and Duthil Novaes (2021, pp. 78-84). BIO also developed into a new brand of the Dialogical Pluralism launched by Helge Rückert, Laurent Keiff and myself. BIO-Pluralism; if I may call it so, highlighted some important social and cognitive features of the dialogical approach under the background of a general perspective on argumentation. The rationale behind is that if deductive rationality is declined as dialogical interaction and deductive rationality is governed by the general properties of the inference-relation shaping this interaction, disagreeing on such standards of rationality amounts to disagreeing on the structural rules that shape inference. Hodges, who complains about the lack of philosophical foundations but at the same time is sceptic about such foundations – though apparently, he did not read the extensive philosophical, historic and systematic, work of Kuno Lorenz –, misses one of the main points of the dialogical approach. Indeed, as pointed out by Per Martin-Löf, the main philosophical tenet of the dialogical approach is that invites to re-examine the usual order between meaning and pragmatics (and knowledge): it is not the case that a pragmatic force is attached to an already given semantic core, but judgemental content amounts to the pragmatic notion of a task to be solved. More precisely, the dialogical perspective emphasises the point that the validity of an inference emerges from the fact that knowing how to execute the task attached to the premisses leads to knowing on how to execute the task at stake in the conclusion – Martin-Löf (2019, 2020). This formulation is of course a reappraisal of Kuno Lorenz’s (1987), pp. 70-71, repr. (2010, pp. 78-79) formulation of meaning as the mastery of an action schema. In such a context a judgement, or an assertion, is correct if and only if the agent making it knows how to (is able to, can) perform the task that constitutes its content – Klev (2022, section 5). Actually, Martin-Löf, inspired by the formal rule that characterizes one of the main forms of games within the dialogical approach, introduced a weaker notion of assertion, namely assertoric knowledge, that does not require demonstration but is based on overtaking responsibility in behalf of the interlocutor. More generally, and in short, the contribution of the dialogical framework to knowledge and meaning is the fundamental role given to the deontic dimension. Nevertheless, Martin-Löf’s perspective focus on assertions: assertions take place at the strategy level, which encode the task to be accomplished. Plays, engage moves that are not to be understood as assertions, but moves that commit to other moves prompted by the thesis and prescribed by the local and global rules of meaning, in order to develop a zero-sum play on that thesis. We call such moves statements (some alternatives in the literature have been posits, claims) : the main target of the play is to produce the set of moves that brings to the fore the (local) reason behind the stating of the thesis. Furthermore, from the dialogical point of view, strategies are constituted by Plays, such that the strategic objects won by a process of “recapitulation” – one of the first recorded meanings of the term syllogism –, on those plays, encode the set of moves which need to carried out in order to accomplish the task associated, now indeed, to the assertion at stake. In fact, when Paul Lorenzen and Kuno Lorenz introduced the notion of play, they conceived the structural rules at work as the strategy level, as emerging from development rules prescribing the interaction of challenge and defences. These development rules determine the so-called global meaning of the expressions occurring in a play, by shaping the sequence of moves from the thesis up to the elementary statements that result from such an interaction. This bottom up procedure, which is a crucial trait of the dialogical framework, and which distinguishes it from the top-down (axiomatic) construction of Gentzen-style inferences, has been overlooked by many of the criticisms and particularly so in relation to the understanding of the dialectical stand on some structural rules such as reflexivity. Coming back to the deontic feature of the dialogical setting let me stress that it includes two different levels of imperative, a weaker (permissibility) and a stronger one, the imperative, whereas the first affect the play level the second affect the strategy level. In fact, I fully share the view put forward by the BIO understanding of the dialogical stance, as offering a framework for the development of a particular form of social practice were cognition is at work. However, I would like to take the chance here to put the things right and elucidate some misunderstandings that, on my view, are the source of criticisms of the dialogical framework. I will recall the “old-ways” to structural rules and explore new further developments that integrate some of the instruments of fully interpreted languages in the style of Per Martin-Löf’s Constructive Type Theory within the bottom up play level perspective for material and formal dialogues that we call Immanent Reasoning. Immanent Reasoning allows us to untangle an ambiguity in relation to grounding: grounding an assertion does not only refers to the material and formal links to another assertion or set of them, but also refers to the type-token relation that constitutes the pair local reason-proposition at the play level or proof/strategy-object at the strategy level. TALK AT THE UNIVERSITE EUROPEENNE D’ETE 2022. 21 EDITION DE L’UNIVERSITE EUROPEENNE D’ÉTE DU RESEAU OFFRES. ““LA MECOMPREHENSION PRODUCTIVE” LILLE, 4-12/07/2022 https://collectif-mepro.univ-lille.fr

Reason, Bias, and Inquiry: New Perspectives from the Crossroads of Epistemology and Psychology. , 2020

A longstanding and influential thought is that for democracies to function well—or perhaps to function at all—they need vigorous but reasonable public discourse. The ideal is that they should be spaces of reasons—spaces where reasons for policy decisions can be exchanged and maybe even listened to. Yet there is mounting evidence suggesting that not only are human beings subject to biases and errors in reasoning, but we are also particularly bad at spotting when they are affecting us. As a result, one might suspect that we should be deeply skeptical about whether public discourse can ever be reasonable. In this paper, we follow this suspicion to its logical conclusion, raising a novel skeptical argument based on the problem of what we’ll call “bad-bias.” This skeptical argument, we believe, raises a serious challenge to the possibility of reasonable public discourse. Even so, reflection on the argument also points us toward new ways of confronting this challenge—a challenge that arguably goes to the heart of democracy itself.

Argument cultures: Proceedings of OSSA 2009, 2009

People argue to reconcile differences of opinion, but reconciliation may fail to happen. In these cases, most theorists assume arguers are left with the same disagreement from which they started. This is too optimistic, since disagreement might instead escalate, and this may happen because of the argumentative practice, not in spite of it. These dangers depend on epistemological, pragmatic, and cultural factors, and show why arguers should be (and are) careful in picking their dialogical fights.

1999

2015

Mind, 1993