Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/301660276
Argumentation, Political
CITATION READS
1 33
1 author:
Ruth Wodak
Lancaster University
230 PUBLICATIONS 4,996 CITATIONS
SEE PROFILE
All in-text references underlined in blue are linked to publications on ResearchGate, Available from: Ruth Wodak
letting you access and read them immediately. Retrieved on: 04 August 2016
Argumentation, Political
RUTH WODAK
Lancaster University, UK
The International Encyclopedia of Political Communication, First Edition. Edited by Gianpietro Mazzoleni.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118541555.wbiepc080
2 A R G U M E N TAT I O N, PO L I T I C A L
and communication. “Doing politics” (Wodak, 2011, pp. 113 ff.) consists of manifold
communicative activities, such as reporting, briefing, preparing, formulating, summa-
rizing, negotiating, forming coalitions, and also convincing others to align with one.
Many activities thus require rhetorical and persuasive skills, frequently involving
argumentative moves and schemata. It is important to emphasize that much political
work is certainly of a persuasive nature and thus necessarily linked to argumentation.
However, many domains of the profession of politics consist of other activities and
demand huge flexibility of all political entrepreneurs as they fulfill the daily institu-
tional requirements of “politics as usual.” Symbolic interactionism, interpretative policy
approaches, the paradigm of discourse analysis, rhetoric, as well as sociolinguistics have
all amply illustrated that politics is enacted and performed on frontstage and back-
stage; politics is also realized in a plethora of genres, from orally delivered speeches
and press conferences to written and disseminated party programs and policy papers,
from negotiations to parliamentary debates, and from visual posters to Internet home-
pages, employing “traditional media” such as TV and radio or “new social media” such
as Facebook and Twitter.
It has both a gross, anatomical structure and a finer, psychological one. When set out explicitly
in all its detail, it may occupy a number of printed pages or take perhaps a quarter of an hour to
4 A R G U M E N TAT I O N, PO L I T I C A L
deliver; and within this time or space one can distinguish the main phases marking the progress
of the argument from the initial statement of an unsettled problem to the final presentation of a
conclusion. These main phases will each of them occupy some minutes or paragraphs, and represent
the chief anatomical units of the argument- its ‘organs’ so to speak. But within each paragraph, when
one gets down to the level of individual sentences, a finer structure can be recognized, and this is the
structure with which logicians have mainly concerned themselves. It is at this psychological level
that the idea of logical form has been introduced, and here that the validity of our arguments has
ultimately to be established or refuted.
Modality (probably)
Harry has an itchy scalp Argument from Negative Scalpicin would make
Value Harry’s scalp no longer itchy
Harry needs something that
would make his scalp less itchy
A bad condition is
An itchy scalp is a
something which should be
bad condition
removed if possibie
I have a goal G.
G is supported by my set of values, V.
Bringing about A is necessary (or sufficient) for me to bring about G.
Therefore, I should (practically ought to) bring about A.
The discourse historical approach (Reisigl & Wodak, 2001; Wodak, 2011) which has
been applied to many dimensions of politics (speeches, right-wing populist rhetoric,
identity politics and politics of the past, organizational politics, etc.) draws on the con-
cept of topos, apart from employing and elaborating Toulmin’s model. Kienpointner
(1996) defines topos as “search formulas which tell you how and where to look for
arguments. At the same time, topoi are warrants which guarantee the transition from
argument to conclusion” (see Figure 3).
Argument Claim
In this vein, Walton (2007) claims that a topos “is a device to find arguments that can
be used to prioritize their strategic strength.” Moreover, Rubinelli (2009, p. 13) argues
that topoi are strategies of argumentation for gaining the upper hand and producing
successful speeches. Topoi can be made explicit as conditional or causal paraphrases
such as “if x, then y” or “y, because x” (Reisigl & Wodak, 2001, pp. 69–80).
Focusing on these conclusion rules, Kienpointner (1996) distinguishes between var-
ious content-abstract (i.e., formal) argumentation schemes which occur frequently in
argumentations, such as the topos of definition, the topos of the species and the genus, the
topos of comparison (topos of similarity versus topos of difference), the topos of the part
and the whole, the topos of authority, the topos of example, and the topos of analogy. For
example, the topos of authority can be deconstructed as follows:
Topoi Warrants
Topos of advantage or If an action under a specific relevant point of view will be
usefulness useful, then one should perform it.
Topos of uselessness or If one can anticipate that the prognosticated
disadvantage consequences of a decision will not occur, then the
decision has to be rejected.
Topos of threat or danger If there are specific dangers or threats, one should do
something against them.
Topos of humanitarianism If a political action or decision does or does not conform
to human rights or humanitarian convictions and
values, then one should or should not perform or
make it.
Topos of burdening or If a person, an institution or a country is burdened by
weighing down specific problems, one should act in order to diminish
these burdens.
Topos of finances If a specific situation or action costs too much money or
causes a loss of revenue, one should perform actions
that diminish the costs or help to avoid the loss.
Topos of reality Because reality is as it is, a specific action/decision
should be performed/made.
Topos of numbers If the numbers prove a specific topos, a specific action
should be performed/not be carried out.
Source: Adapted from Reisigl & Wodak, 2001.
Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969) draw on and elaborate the Aristotelian rhetoric
and develop the so-called “New Rhetoric.” Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca describe
New Rhetoric as “the study of the discursive techniques allowing us to induce or to
increase the mind’s adherence to the theses presented for its assent” (p. 4). Hence, Perel-
man and Olbrechts-Tyteca describe argumentation schemes that can be developed as
argumentation techniques only if they are accommodated to the premises of the eval-
uating audience. The premises are divided into two categories: premises relating to the
real and those that relate to what is preferable. The first category is, they maintain,
accepted by the universal audience, while the second one is related to the preferences
of a specific audience and linked to loci. Following Aristotle, Perelman and Olbrechts-
Tyteca distinguish between loci of quantity and loci of quality: loci of quantity justify why
a particular action should be preferred because most people would benefit; loci of qual-
ity explain why an action should be implemented because it is the best (pp. 85–93); in
this way, values and a normative stance are introduced. Hence, loci are argumentation
schemes that are based on value hierarchies and are used as justification for statements
insofar as they express the preferences of a particular audience.
Pragma-dialectics was originally proposed by van Eemeren (for an overview, see van
Eemeren, 2010). Van Eemeren (2010) provides argumentation with an everyday life
dimension in his pragma-dialectical approach: He claims that both oral and written
8 A R G U M E N TAT I O N, PO L I T I C A L
argumentations are integral parts of our daily routines. Thus, argumentation is not
restricted to epistemological or scientific functions; quite the contrary, it could be a
part of authoritative or political discourse regarding the “Other” insofar as it aims to
persuade the audience of the validity of a statement and in this way carves out in-groups
and out-groups. This approach “enables the analyst of argumentative discourse to
make a normative reconstruction of the discourse that results in an analytic overview
of all elements that are pertinent to a critical evaluation” (van Eemeren & Houtlosser,
2006, p. 381). More specifically, pragma-dialectics is defined as a method for dealing
in a systematic way with critical exchanges in verbal communication and interaction;
rhetoric, however, is defined as the theoretical study of the potential effectiveness of
argumentative discourse to persuade an audience (p. 383). The authors introduce the
concept of strategic maneuvering in order to bridge the gap between dialectics and
rhetoric.
Following Aristotle’s argumentation theory in general, they present three aspects of
strategic maneuvering (the strategic maneuvering triangle): topical potential, audience
orientation, and presentational devices (2006). Van Eemeren (2010, p. 95) claims that
these three dimensions run parallel to the three areas of classic rhetoric (i.e., ethos, logos,
and pathos). The study of the system of topics is similar to topoi or loci, the study of
audience orientation is linked to endoxa, and the study of presentational means can
be used as stylistic devices in the pursuit of reasonableness and effectiveness. Another
element of Aristotelian thought that is reformulated by strategic maneuvering is the
important concept of fallacy. According to van Eemeren (2010, p. 76), “in Aristotle’s
dialectical perspective fallacies are false moves employed in the attacker’s efforts to
refute the defender’s thesis”; the role of fallacy in strategic maneuvering is perceived
as “violations of critical discussion rules that come about as derailments of strategic
maneuvering” (van Eemeren & Houtlosser, 2006, p. 387).
SEE ALSO: Citizenship; Civil Society; Communication Theory; Critical Theory; Delib-
eration; Discourse Analysis; Discourse Ethics; Language, Political; Narrative, Political;
Persuasion, Political; Political Discourse; Rhetoric, Political
References
Billig, M. (1987). Arguing and thinking: A rhetorical approach to social psychology. Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press.
Boukala, S. (2013). Greek media discourse and the construction of European identity: Suprana-
tional identity, fortress Europe and Islam as radical otherness. PhD Thesis, Lancaster University,
UK.
Fischer, F., & Gottweis, H. (Eds.). (2012). The argumentative turn revisited: Public policy as com-
municative practice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Habermas, J. (1984). Theory of communicative action. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Kienpointner, M. (1996). Vernünftig argumentieren: Regeln und Techniken der Argumentation.
Hamburg, Germany: Rowohlt.
Kopperschmidt, J. (2000). Argumentationstheorie zur Einführung. Hamburg, Germany: Junius.
Perelman, C., & Olbrechts-Tyteca, L. (1969). The new rhetoric: A treatise on argumentation. Notre
Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.
A R G U M E N TAT I O N, PO L I T I C A L 9
Reisigl, M., & Wodak, R. (2001). Discourse and discrimination: Rhetorics of racism and anti-
semitism. London: Routledge.
Rubinelli, S. (2009). Ars topica: The classical technique of constructing arguments from Aristotle to
Cicero. Berlin, Germany: Springer.
Stone, D. (1989). Causal stories and the formation of policy agendas. Political Science Quarterly,
104(2,) 281–300.
Toulmin, S. (2003). The uses of argument. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
van Eemeren, F. (2010). Strategic maneuvering in argumentation discourse: Extending the pragma-
dialectical theory of argumentation. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Benjamins.
van Eemeren, F., & Houtlosser, P. (2006). Strategic maneuvering: A synthetic recapitulation.
Argumentation, 20, 381–392.
Walton, D. (2007). Dialogical models of explanation. In ExaCt 2007: Papers from the 2007 AAAI
workshop, Vancouver, July 21–22 (pp. 1–9). Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press.
Wengeler, M. (2003). Topos und Diskurs. Tübingen, Germany: Niemeyer.
Wodak, R. (2011). The discourse of politics in action: Politics as usual. London, UK: Palgrave.
Further reading
Hajer, M., & Wagenaar, H. (Eds.). (2003). Deliberative policy analysis: Understanding governance
in the network society. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Kienpointner, M. (2011). Rhetoric. In J. Ostman & J. Verschueren (Eds.), Pragmatics in practice
(pp. 264–277). Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Benjamins.
Walton, D. (1996). Argumentation schemes for presumptive reasoning. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates.