Page 133 - Žagar, Igor Ž. 2021. Four Critical Essays on Argumentation. Ljubljana: Pedagoški inštitut.
P. 133
summary
civilisations, religious texts, art, and even more modern stories. These re-
current and repetitive motifs or leitmotifs would be then labelled literary
topoi.
The same year that Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca published their
New Rhetoric, Stephen Toulmin published his Uses of Argument, proba-
bly the most detailed study of how topoi work. Actually, he does not use
the terms topos or topoi, but the somewhat judicial term ‘warrant’. The rea-
son for that seems obvious: he is trying to cover different ‘fields of argu-
ment’, and not all fields of argument, according to him, use topoi as their
argumentative principles or bases of their argumentation. According to
Toulmin (1958/1995: 94–107), if we have an utterance of the form, ‘If D then
C’—where D stands for data or evidence, and C for claim or conclusion—
such a warrant would act as a bridge and authorize the step from D to C.
But warrant may have a limited applicability, so Toulmin introduces quali-
fiers Q, indicating the strength conferred by the warrant, and conditions of
rebuttal (or Reservation) R, indicating circumstances in which the general
authority of the warrant would have to be set aside. And finally, in case the
warrant is challenged in any way, we need some backing B as well.
If the DHA analysis would proceed in this way, applying all these steps
to concrete pieces of discourse each time it wants to find the underlying
topoi—their lists of topoi in the background would become unimportant,
useless, and obsolete. Text mining, to borrow an expression from compu-
tation al linguistics, would bring the text’s or discourse’s own topoi to the
surface, not the prefabricated ones. And there is more: Toulmin’s scheme
allows for possi ble exceptions or rebuttals, indicating where, when, and
why a certain to pos does not apply. Such a reconstruction can offer a much
more complex account of a discourse (fragment) under investigation than
enthymemes or static and rigid lists of topoi.
2
The second chapter, Fallacies: do we ‘use’ then or ‘commit’ them, is a fol-
low up to the first chapter. In the first one, I was analysing the use of to-
poi in DHA, a branch of CDA, in the second one, I am looking at how fal-
lacies are used by DHA. In view of this goal, I propose a rhetorical reading
of Austin, an Austinian interpretation of Hamblin, and a hybrid Austino-
Hamblinian perspective on fallacies.
I am asking three questions: what are fallacies? Are there obvious and
unambiguous fallacies in natural languages? Aren’t we forced to commit
133
civilisations, religious texts, art, and even more modern stories. These re-
current and repetitive motifs or leitmotifs would be then labelled literary
topoi.
The same year that Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca published their
New Rhetoric, Stephen Toulmin published his Uses of Argument, proba-
bly the most detailed study of how topoi work. Actually, he does not use
the terms topos or topoi, but the somewhat judicial term ‘warrant’. The rea-
son for that seems obvious: he is trying to cover different ‘fields of argu-
ment’, and not all fields of argument, according to him, use topoi as their
argumentative principles or bases of their argumentation. According to
Toulmin (1958/1995: 94–107), if we have an utterance of the form, ‘If D then
C’—where D stands for data or evidence, and C for claim or conclusion—
such a warrant would act as a bridge and authorize the step from D to C.
But warrant may have a limited applicability, so Toulmin introduces quali-
fiers Q, indicating the strength conferred by the warrant, and conditions of
rebuttal (or Reservation) R, indicating circumstances in which the general
authority of the warrant would have to be set aside. And finally, in case the
warrant is challenged in any way, we need some backing B as well.
If the DHA analysis would proceed in this way, applying all these steps
to concrete pieces of discourse each time it wants to find the underlying
topoi—their lists of topoi in the background would become unimportant,
useless, and obsolete. Text mining, to borrow an expression from compu-
tation al linguistics, would bring the text’s or discourse’s own topoi to the
surface, not the prefabricated ones. And there is more: Toulmin’s scheme
allows for possi ble exceptions or rebuttals, indicating where, when, and
why a certain to pos does not apply. Such a reconstruction can offer a much
more complex account of a discourse (fragment) under investigation than
enthymemes or static and rigid lists of topoi.
2
The second chapter, Fallacies: do we ‘use’ then or ‘commit’ them, is a fol-
low up to the first chapter. In the first one, I was analysing the use of to-
poi in DHA, a branch of CDA, in the second one, I am looking at how fal-
lacies are used by DHA. In view of this goal, I propose a rhetorical reading
of Austin, an Austinian interpretation of Hamblin, and a hybrid Austino-
Hamblinian perspective on fallacies.
I am asking three questions: what are fallacies? Are there obvious and
unambiguous fallacies in natural languages? Aren’t we forced to commit
133
