Rhetorical argumentation in popular science discourse: Features and prospects

Authors

  • Marina N. Volf Institute of Philosophy and Law of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Science

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21638/spbu17.2020.301

Abstract

The nature of popular science discourse in recent decades has acquired a convincing function, while it is addressed to an audience that is not always loyal to science. There are new requirements for writing argumentative popular science texts and they must contain arguments that depend on the target audience. The need for a broad mastery of the skill of writing well-reasoned popular science texts is associated with the issues of understanding how successfully their function has been implemented to convince the audience and thе explication of technologies that help make these texts convincing, including the creation of a database of typical basic arguments. It is believed that the methods of computer analysis used in computational rhetoric can be used to study the argumentative specifics of popular science literature, and rhetorical argumentation should be the most productive approach to argumentation in a popular science text because only it provides ways of interacting with the audience. However, there are constraints for the development of this direction that make it difficult to find and annotate arguments in a popular science text, namely: an ambiguity in understanding the argument and argumentation, modeling various arguments depending on the understanding of their structure and function, and finally, the target audience modeling. Explication of arguments in the text is possible through linguistic markers, but there is a problem of establishing the boundaries of the argument. Identifying the internal structure of text segment relationships solves this problem, however, annotating the text is sensitive to certain methods of modeling argumentation. Based on the basic model of Toulmin’s argument, the special aspects of modeling rhetorical argumentation and its dependence on the target audience are illustrated. It is proposed that the concept of a universal audience can hardly be adapted to practical tasks, and criteria that are consistent with the format of truths and the format of audience values, the implementation of which could bring the target audience closer to an universal one. The author demonstrates the features in the pragma-dialectical approach, which, despite its popularity in computational rhetoric, do not allow it to be fully adapted to popular science discourse.

Keywords:

popular science discourse, argumentation models, rhetorical argumentation, text annotation, modeling, audience

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.
 

References

Литература/References

1. Simons, H. W. (ed.) (1990), The rhetorical turn: Invention and persuasion in the conduct of inquiry, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

2. Russian National Corpus (2019). Available at: http://www.ruscorpora.ru/ (accessed: 16.02.2019).

3. Lippi, M. and Torroni, P. (2016), Argumentation Mining: State of the Art and Emerging Trends, ACM Transactions on Internet Technology (TOIT), vol. 16 (2), pp. 1–25, https://doi.org/10.1145/2850417.

4. Bench-Capon, T., Freeman, J., Hohmann, H. and Prakken, H. (2004), Computational models, argumentation theories and legal practice, in Reed, Ch. (ed.), Argumentation Machines. New Frontiers in Argument and computation, Springer Science + Business Media Dordrecht, pp. 85–120, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0431-1.

5. Eemeren, F. H. van (ed.) (2001), Crucial Concepts in Argumentation Theory. Amsterdam: Sic Sat.

6. Davidson, D. (1993), On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme, in Dadidson, D. Analiticheskaia filosofiia. Izbrannye teksty. Moscow: Izdatelstvo MSU Publ., pр. 144–159. (In Russian)

7. Mercier, H. and Sperber, D. (2011), Why do humans reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, vol. 34 (2), рр. 57–74, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X10000968.

8. Eckle-Kohler, J., Kluge, R. and Gurevych, I. (2015), On the role of discourse markers for discriminating claims and premises in argumentative discourse, Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language, Lisbon, Portugal, 17–21 September, pp. 2236–2242, https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/D15-1267.

9. Perelman, Ch. and Olbrechts-Tyteca, L. (1971), The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.

10. Dung, Phan Minh (1995), On the Acceptability of Arguments and its Fundamental Role in Nonmonotonic Reasoning, Logic Programming and n-Person Games, Artificial Intelligence, vol. 77, iss. 2, pp. 321–358, https://doi.org/10.1016/0004-3702(94)00041-X.

11. Toulmin, S. (2003), The uses of argument. Updated edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

12. Perelman, Ch. and Olbrechts-Tyteca, L. (1958), Traité de l’argumentation. La nouvelle rhétorique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

13. Groarke, L., Tindale, C. and Fisher, L. (1997), Good reasoning matters!: a constructive approach to critical thinking, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

14. Tindale, C. (1999), Acts of arguing, a rhetorical model of argument. Albany, N.Y.: State University Press of New York.

15. Tindale, C. (2015), The philosophy of argument and audience reception. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316181645.

16. Grasso, F. (2003), A mental model for a rhetorical arguer, in Schmalhofer, F., Young, R. and Katz, G. (eds), Proceedings of the European cognitive science society conference. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.

17. Kjeldsen, J. E. (2018), Audience Analysis and Reception Studies of Rhetoric, in Kjeldsen, J. E. (ed.), Rhetorical Audience Studies and Reception of Rhetoric: Exploring Audiences Empirically, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 2–4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61618-6.

18. Gross, A. (1999), A theory of the rhetorical audience: reflections on Chaim Perelman, Quarterly Journal of Speech, vol. 85, iss. 2, pp. 203–211, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335639909384254.

19. Bentahar, J., Moulin, B. and Bélanger, M. (2010), A taxonomy of argumentation models used for knowledge representation, Artificial Intelligence Review, vol. 33, iss. 3, pp. 211–259, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10462-010-9154-1.

20. Reed, Ch. (ed.) (2004), Argumentation Machines. New Frontiers in Argument and computation. Dordrecht: Springer Science + Business Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0431-1.

21. Crosswhite, J., Fox J., Reed, Ch. etc. (2004), Computational models of rhetorical argument, in Reed, Ch. (ed.), Argumentation Machines. New Frontiers in Argument and computation. Dordrecht: Springer Science + Business Media, pp. 175–210, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0431-1.

Downloads

Published

2020-09-30

How to Cite

Volf, M. N. (2020). Rhetorical argumentation in popular science discourse: Features and prospects. Vestnik of Saint Petersburg University. Philosophy and Conflict Studies, 36(3), 426–440. https://doi.org/10.21638/spbu17.2020.301

Issue

Vol. 36 No. 3 (2020): Vestnik of Saint Petersburg University. Philosophy and Conflict Studies

Section

Philosophy

License

Articles of "Vestnik of Saint Petersburg University. Philosophy and Conflict Studies" are open access distributed under the terms of the License Agreement with Saint Petersburg State University, which permits to the authors unrestricted distribution and self-archiving free of charge.