Argumentation and Rhetoric
Argumentation and Rhetoric is a research programme at the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Amsterdam. The research undertaken within this programme builds on two important developments that have taken place in the last fifteen years. The first development consists in the integration of rhetorical insights into the pragma- dialectical theory of argumentation, with the help of the notion ‘strategic manoeuvring’. The second and most recent development is a further contextualization of the study of argumentation by focusing on specific conventionalized argumentative practices and by investigating the role of argumentation in specific applications.
The research programme combines qualitative and quantitative research on a series of interrelated themes:
1. Argumentative contexts and applications
Participants: Corina Andone, Bart Garssen, Eveline Feteris, José Plug, Bert Meuffels, Francisca Snoeck Henkemans, Jean Wagemans, Lotte van Poppel
Phd-researchers: Ingeborg van der Geest, Roosmaryn Pilgram, Eugen Popa, Jacky Visser, Renske Wierda
In this project cluster the institutional preconditions for strategic maneuvering are being investigated in four domains: the political, legal, medical and academic domain. Within each of these domains, particular institutional argumentative practices or ‘communicative activity types’ that serve specific institutional goals are investigated. Examples of such argumentative activity types are the political interview, a political debate, the plea of the defense, the medical consultation and the scholarly review. Another aim of the research within this cluster is to investigate the role argumentation can play in specific (computational) applications that are instrumental in different domains such as the legal and the medical.
2. Presentational aspects of argumentation
Participants: Eveline Feteris, Charles Forceville, José Plug, Assimakis Tseronis, Francisca Snoeck Henkemans
The research in this project cluster focuses on the presentational characteristics of argumentative discourse. In this endeavour, use is made of insights from classical rhetoric and modern stylistics in the analysis of both verbal and visual argumentation. There are three projects within this cluster.
3. Evaluative perspectives on argumentation
Participants: Frans van Eemeren, Bart Garssen, Bert Meuffels
The Fallacies as strategic maneuvers project within this cluster focuses on the deceptive nature of violations of discussion rules. In the pragma-dialectical argumentation theory fallacies are defined as violation of discussion rules, but at the same time, they are seen as derailments of reasonable discussion moves. Because in many cases fallacies and their reasonable counterparts look exactly alike, it is often hard to determine whether a specific argumentative move is fallacious or not. In practice arguers make use of this similarity between fallacies and their reasonable counterparts by making use of special kinds of strategic maneuvering in order to conceal the unreasonable properties of a specific fallacious move. In this project, an analysis of fallacies and their reasonable counterparts is given and hypotheses are formulated in which expectations about the effectiveness of these fallacious strategic maneuvers are taken into account. Next, these hypotheses are tested by means of systematic experimental research. In this way we hope to find a theoretically sound explanation of the deceptive nature of fallacious move that has been tested empirically.â