Abstract
This paper challenges the view that arguments are (by definition, as it were) attempts to persuade or convince an audience to accept (or reject) a point of view by presenting reasons for (or against) that point of view. I maintain, first, that an arguer need not intend any effect beyond that of making it manifest to readers or hearers that there is a reason for doing some particular thing (e.g., for believing a certain proposition, or alternatively for rejecting it), and second that when an arguer is in fact trying to induce an effect above and beyond rendering a reason manifest, the effect intended—the use to which his or her argument is put—need not be that hearers “do” what the stated reasons are reasons for “doing.” Where the actual or intended effect of making a reason R for “doing X” manifest is something other than “doing X,” I call it an oblique—as opposed to a direct—effect of making that reason manifest. The core of the paper presents an overview or map of the main categories of effect which arguments can have, and the main sub-types within each category, calling attention to the points at which such effects can be indirect or oblique effects. The purpose of that typology is to make it clear (i) how oblique effects can come about and (ii) how important a role they can play in the conduct of argumentation.
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Notes
Several dictionaries list “convince” or “convincing somebody of something” as one of the meanings of ‘persuade’—see the entries for ‘persuade’ in Encarta and in Random House.
However, there is a view, sometimes attributed to Campbell and to Whately, according which persuading should contrasted with convincing on the grounds that the former is based on an appeal to emotion or will and the latter on an appeal to reason. That view will play no part in what I say.
See also the discussion of persuading and convincing in van Eemeren and Grootendorst (1984: 48), which contains a faint echo of the idea that persuading, but not convincing, involves an appeal to “the will.” However, these authors say that for their purposes “[the] difference between persuading and convincing is not important.”
It is tempting to suspect that the attempt to make a sharp distinction between persuading and convincing may be connected with a point about usage that is no longer in favor. Some have held that while persuade can be followed by ‘that,’ ‘of,’ and ‘to,’ convince can only be followed by ‘that’ or ‘of.’ See the usage notes on ‘convince’ in Random House and in Encarta, both of which reject this grammatical point.
On p. 43, the essential condition for the illocutionary act complex of pro-argumentation requires that advancing a constellation of statements “counts as an attempt by S to justify O to L’s satisfaction, i.e., to convince L of the acceptability of O,” and the essential condition of contra-argumentation requires that advancing a constellation of statements “counts as an attempt by S to refute O to L’s satisfaction, i.e., to convince L of the unacceptability of O.” The same claims about the essential conditions or pro- and contra-argumentation are found in van Eemeren and Grootendorst (1992, p. 31). The account of Pragma-Dialectics and critical discussion in Chapter 10 of van Eemeren et al. (1996, p. 290, note 29) references precisely these two passages for an account of “the speech act definition of argumentation.” See also of van Eemeren et al. (1993, pp. 4–5) where an identical account is given of the essential condition of the speech act of pro-argumentation, as well as van Eemeren and Grootendorst (2004, p. 2).
My interest here is not in the relationship between persuasion and either (i) the practice of argumentation (see for example Johnson [2000, esp. pp. 154–156 and the definition of that practice on p. 168], or (ii) the various sorts of dialogue or discussion within which such “units of argument” occur (see for instance Walton’s work, especially Walton and Krabbe 1995). Though I am very sympathetic to Goodwin’s (2007) view that “argument has no function”, I am not here addressing the broader issues that she addresses in that paper.
O’Keefe’s view is “that a paradigm case of making an argument-1 involves the communication of both (1) a linguistically explicable claim [he’s thinking of the conclusion of the argument-1] and (2) one or more overtly expressed reasons which are linguistically explicit.”
By a general account of reasons I mean an account which (i) explains what it is for one thing to be a reason for something else, (ii) recognizes the vast array of different sorts of things for which there can be reasons, (iii) explains how reasons can be put into words, and (iv) clarifies the various conditions under which putting reasons into words gives rise to explaining, to justifying and to arguing.
Offering reasons can be a matter of giving an explanation as contrasted with presenting an argument. In general, when I offer reasons for doing something as part of an argument, the reasons that I offer are reasons for the person whom I am addressing to do what those reasons are reasons for doing. In explanations, that is usually not the case. For example, very often when I give you reasons for me to do something, I am explaining to you, or in other cases attempting to justify, what I did or why I am about to do that thing. But if I give you reasons for you to do something, I am typically presenting you with an argument for doing it. In what follows, I will confine myself to cases in which reasons offered are reasons for the addressee to do something.
It is perhaps worth noting that even explanatory reasons can play a crucial role in carrying a discursive interchange forward to a successful conclusion. Consider what happens in negotiations, when A states her reasons for rejecting an offer that B has made. A is offering an explanation rather than an argument, but presenting the reasons for rejection is crucial to the process of negotiation (and in some jurisdictions failure to provide them will be considered evidence of bad faith bargaining), since they make it possible for negotiators to move toward an agreement. Only by knowing A’s reasons for rejecting earlier offers can B know how to make subsequent offers which are more likely to be accepted. (Moreover, if even A’s explanation is false—doesn’t give the “real” reason why the offer was rejected—it has an impact on the future course of negotiations, since it tends to limit the reasons A can give in response to future offers that B makes.)
In my account of reasons (see especially Pinto 2009; Sects. 2, 3), the force of reasons is essentially a normative force. Having a reason all things considered for doing X makes it reasonable for a person to do X, but is no guarantee that a person who has such a reason will in fact do X. In other words, reasons need not be causes. And therefore presenting Sarah with an argument which gives her a reason all things considered to do X need not have the result that she does X, even if that argument makes it clear to her that she has a good reason all things considered for doing X.
But I am prepared to admit that, as Davidson (1963/2001) has rightly insisted, under the right circumstances reasons can be causes. Discussing the account of “intentional explanation” in Dennett (1978), Brandom (1994) first points out (p. 56) that
[a]ttributing a normative status or propriety such as having beliefs and desires that amount to a reason for opening one’s umbrella supports prescriptive conclusions about how the subject of those attributions ought (rationally) to behave
but does not by itself license any prediction about how that subject will behave. But Brandom is quick to add (pp. 56–57) that Dennett
supplies the additional premise, in the form of a substantive rationtionity assumption, to the effect that agents generally do what one ought (rationally) to do, what one is committed by one's intentional states to do. To be rational in Dennett's sense is to act as one rationally ought, to act as one's intentional states commit or oblige one to act. In order to derive predictions of actual behavior from attributions of intentional states, it is necessary to add the assumption that the subject to which those states are attributed is rational in this sense.
I myself have suggested (Pinto 2009, p. 281)
…to say it is OK [e.g., reasonable] for a person to do something is to make a normative claim. There is no guarantee that the person in question will do what he or she has a good reason all things considered to do. However, we might want to borrow a phrase from Siegel (1988, p. 2) and say that a person who is “appropriately moved by reasons” is likely to do what he or she has a good reason all things considered to do.
It is worth noting that the first feature O’Keefe (p. 3) identifies as paradigmatic for persuasion is that “when we say that one person persuaded another, we ordinarily identify a successful attempt to influence.” However, O’Keefe recognizes that
it is entirely understandable that someone might say, “I accidentally persuaded Mary to vote for Brown” precisely in the circumstance in which the speaker does not want the hearer to draw the usual inference of intent; absent such mention of accident, the ordinary inference will be that the persuasion was purposeful.
For purposes of this paper, my remarks about persuasion will emphasize the fact that through persuasion we induce others to do, or not to do, various things. I will treat it as an open question whether and to what extent persuasion requires an intention on the part of a speaker to bring about such effects.
Note also what O’Keefe (2002, p. 5) says about the possibility of constructing a “definition” from the five features of paradigm cases of persuasion that he has identified: “These shared features of exemplary cases of persuasion can be strung together into something that looks like a definition of persuasion: a successful intentional effort at influencing another’s mental state through communication in a circumstance in which the persuadee has some measure of freedom. But it should be apparent that constructing such a definition would not eliminate the fuzzy edges of the concept of persuasion. Such a definition leaves open to dispute just how much success is required, just how intentional the effort must be, and so on.”
I will consider a context communicative only if the “sender” is not identical with the “audience”—something I jot down to remind myself to do something, a “note to self”, or a diary intended for the writer’s eyes only will not count here as communicative contexts.
Which may be may be a “remark” that someone makes in a conversation, or a speech, or a written communication such as a letter, book, article or academic paper, and so on.
This is intended as a first pass at explaining what an oblique effect is. Later on I will severely restrict the class of “secondary effects of interest” to which the labels ‘direct and ‘oblique’ can apply. See Sect. 4.2.3.
On this reading, Smith has given Jones a reason not to accept that it’s raining, and the result is that Jones does not accept that it’s raining for, and in response to, that very reason.
I am assuming that an argument has merit if its premisses are acceptable and the premisses call for acceptance of the conclusion in the absence of countervailing evidence. Jones can concede that Smith's premisses are acceptable and call for his conclusion, but refuse to draw the conclusion on the basis of countervailing evidence.
I use the word ‘manifest’ here in a sense that is close to the sense in which Sperber and Wilson (1995, p. 39) introduce for that term when they say, “To be manifest, then, is to be perceptible or inferable. An individual’s total cognitive environment is the set of all the facts that he can perceive or infer: all the facts that are manifest to him…. It consists of not only all the facts that he is aware of, but also all the facts that he is capable of becoming aware of, in his physical environment.” Where an argument is presented clearly and audibly to an audience in a language they understand, the reason central to that argument has been rendered manifest to that audience, whether or not they take the trouble to attend to it.
It is perhaps worth pointing out that acceptance is not a doxastic attitude since it is neither full belief nor an alternative to full belief. One can both believe a proposition and also accept it, whereas doxastic attitudes other than belief are defined as attitudes toward a proposition that we hold when we do not fully believe the proposition to be true.
As, for example, when an argument for accepting p leads me to withdraw my acceptance of not-p.
It was Jean Goodwin who pointed out to me the crucial importance of getting a receiver to pay attention to an argument that one puts forward. See Kauffeld (1998) (especially the section on “proposing”) and Goodwin (2002) for a remarks about some of the ways in which speakers provide hearers with incentives to listen to what speakers have to say.
I’m indebted to Peter Loptson for calling my attention an error I made in an earlier version of this paper on this point—I had overlooked that fact that understanding an argument is not something that lies directly within my power to do or not to do.
In the empirical literature on persuasion, there has been extensive discussion of how hearers “process” messages that contain arguments, and of the factors that influence how they process them—see O’Keefe (1996 , 2002, Chapter 6), for a summary and discussion of some of that literature, in particular dual process accounts of persuasion. Despite controversy over how such processing is best understood, it is apparent that hearers accept or decline to accept arguments on the basis of some kind of assessment of the argument and the issues surrounding it.
An argument that is completely ignored is neither accepted nor declined.
Considerations that undermine aren’t, as such, reasons for not doing X. Suppose, for example, that someone has offered the fact that Mary is a Canadian citizen as a reason for believing that Mary is able to speak either French or English. The additional information that Mary is only 13 months old undermines that reason (since quite a few 13-month-olds don’t speak any language yet). But it isn’t a reason for refusing to believe that Mary speaks French or English, since (a) quite a few 13-month-olds have begun to speak and (b) the fact that this reason doesn’t “float” does not preclude the possibility that the addressee has other reasons for believing the proposition in question. For more on the distinction between undermining and overriding, see Pinto (2001: 14, 28 and 102–103).
There are several varieties of rebuttal or rejoinder: showing (i) that an argument is defective or (ii) that it should be bracketed or (iii) that it is undermined or overridden by additional information. See the discussion of rejoinders in Pinto (2007). See also the distinction between “Type I” and “Type II” criticisms in Pinto (2001: 103).
For example, A offers an argument for accepting a proposition q, several other participants (B, C and D) who are not persuaded by that argument to accept q nevertheless don’t know how to rebut the argument and consequently forego any attempt to object to q. A’s argument prevents B, C and D from objecting to q even though that argument hasn’t persuaded them of anything.
For example, a defense attorney who rests his case on “reasonable doubt” may be able to raise reasonable doubt by means of arguments whose conclusions are not accepted by the jury, but are effective because the reasons they embody counterbalance the reasons available to support a guilty verdict.
The possibility of non-linguistic responses—applause, booing, throwing tomatoes—does not, in my view, render a transactional context truly or fully interactive. Moreover, it is wise to suppose that only permitted linguistic responses will render a context interactive. For example, in some contexts (e.g., a university lecture) heckling is “against the rules” and its occurrence doesn’t render the transactional context interactive. In other cases, heckling is tolerated or encouraged, and its occurrence would render a context interactive in such cases. The distinction between interactive and non-interactive transactional contexts is not terribly sharp, but it is no less useful on account of that.
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Acknowledgments
I am indebted to Jean Goodwin, to Peter Loptson and to J. A. Blair for comments on earlier versions of this paper, as well as to feedback from two of Argumentation’s anonymous referees. In addition, I should acknowledge the fact that this paper grew out of an idea that was planted in my mind by Goodwin several years ago—the idea that arguments are often used for purposes other than achieving what I have called direct effects. Goodwin herself has presented something very much like that idea in Goodwin (1999).
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Appendix: Features of Transactional Contexts
Appendix: Features of Transactional Contexts
As indicated in Sect. 2.3 above, some transactional contexts make possible interactions in which parties produce messages that are responses to the messages of other parties. I call contexts that provide little or no scope for responses non-interactive Footnote 28; and call contexts that provide scope for response interactive. Since transactional contexts can be either two-party or multi-party (i.e., involve more than two parties, we can capture four “basic types” of transactional context in the following table.
Non-interactive | Interactive | |
|---|---|---|
Two party | Private communication | Dialogue |
Multi-party | Broadcast | Forum |
Additional features of transactional contexts can be important to understanding the give and take of argumentation in those contexts.
1.1 Jointly Acknowledged Purposes
Occasionally—but clearly not always—there will be one or more purposes which the participants jointly understand their communicative interaction to have. When they exist, such purposes should be considered key features of a transactional context. Such purposes can have their roots in an institutional context (as legal proceedings, or annual general meetings called for by the bylaws of an organization, typically do), or in an explicit agreement among several individuals to meet for some specific purpose (e.g., to work out arrangements for a wedding reception). Of course, though individual participants will typically communicate with others with some purpose in mind, probably the great majority of communicative interactions have no jointly acknowledged purpose.
1.2 Participant Roles
The participants in a transactional context frequently have differing roles within that context—the roles sometimes being a function of acknowledged purposes which structure communicative interaction (as in a criminal or civil trial, for example, or the communications that take place during a class offered at a university). Such roles may impose certain obligations on participants, and may structure which sort of messages are appropriate for communicators who have a speaking role. Examples of roles that occur in different contexts are: doctor and patient; teacher and student; confessor and penitent; judge, jury, defense counsel, prosecutor; labor, management and mediator (in contract negotiations), and so on.
1.3 Rules and Conventions
Typically, the participants recognize, at least implicitly, formal or informal rules or conventions governing some aspects of their interaction. There are almost always either rules or informal practices governing who may speak and when, and there are sometimes rules that filter the content of messages (for example, rules against hearsay evidence in judicial proceedings, or rules that prohibit accusing another member of parliament of lying, etc.). Any such rules or conventions which are jointly recognized by the participants should be considered key features of the communicative context, especially in those special cases in which there are mutually acknowledged purposes of the transactional context that are furthered by such rules.
Of course, additional features of transactional contexts—such as the medium in which communication takes place (face-to-face oral interchange, telephone, print, electronic, hand-crafted letter, etc.), the genre to which the messages belong (letter, books, conversational turns, formal speeches, etc.), the immediacy of message transmission (from face-to-face dialogue to the production of the books that comprise the literature on a topic)—are also important to understanding and appraising what is transpiring in a communicative context.
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Pinto, R.C. The Uses of Argument in Communicative Contexts. Argumentation 24, 227–252 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-009-9174-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-009-9174-7