The treatment of fallacies in argumentative situations during mediation sessions.

• Author: Vasilyeva, Alena L.
• Position: Report

THE TREATMENT OF FALLACIES IN ARGUMENTATIVE SITUATIONS DURING MEDIATION SESSIONS

The interest in fallacies and the importance of studying them are determined by the fact that deviation from the standard practices can shed light on the process of normative argumentation and provide interactants with techniques that will enable them to make interaction more effective. Fallacies have been the focus of many scholars from ancient times (see, for example, van Eemeren, Grootendorst, & Snoeck-Henkemans, 1996, and Walton, 1992, for historical background). Researchers in two major streams, monologic (Ikuenobe, 2004; Johnson, 1995; Lumer, 2000) and dialectical (van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 1992; van Eemeren et al., 1996; Ruhl, 1999; Walton, 1992) have been concerned with the issue of what a fallacy is and what types of fallacies exist. Both approaches, however, have shortcomings. The monologic approach starts with assumptions about the fallacy and abstracts this phenomenon from the process of communication. Some types of fallacies, however, are context-dependent (van Eemeren et al., 1996). By contrast, the dialectical perspective treats argumentation as a dialogic process and stresses the necessity of considering "the communicative and interactional context in which the fallacies occur" (van Eemeren et al., 1996, p. 21). Although the dialectical approach is more valid, the research tends to overemphasize the role of the speaker who commits a fallacy and the intentionality of this action. It also overlooks the orientation of interactants themselves to the fallacy.

I adhere to the perspective that to understand interaction processes, it is necessary to look at communicative practices themselves and study them in naturally-occurring conversations. This study employs the constitutive view of communication, according to which a conversation is a collaborative activity. Seeing arguments as an interactional process, Hutchby (1996) states, "it is important to look not only at how arguments are made, but also at how their recipients respond to them" (p. 21). In line with this interactional perspective, the aim of the present study is to discover how interactants respond to fallacies in argumentative discussions during mediation sessions and what moves the interactants treat as fallacious. This will shed light on the nature of fallacies, how they are achieved, and what they are accomplishing in the course of interaction.

WHAT IS A FALLACY?

Fallacies enjoy a special place in the field of argumentation. There is no unified view on what fallacies are, however. Researchers conceptualize them in different ways depending on their perspective on this phenomenon. Two major approaches to fallacies are monologic and dialectical.

Monologic Approach to Fallacies

Adherents of the monologic perspective (Ikuenobe, 2004; Johnson, 1995; Lumer, 2000) treat fallacies as a psychological-semantic concept. Fallacies are understood as arguments that seem to be valid but are not. In their view, these logically incorrect arguments can be abstracted from the context of interaction and analyzed regardless of the circumstances of their occurrence in the argumentation discussion as "purposes and pragmatics exist already on the level of monological argumentation" (Lumer, 2000, p. 406). This approach, however, leads to the situation when certain traditional types of fallacies that are inherently dialogical have to stay out of the list of fallacies. One of them is the fallacy of many questions, a classic example of which is "When did you stop beating your wife?" (van Eemeren et al., 1996). This question can be quite a legitimate move. For instance, if it is established from the preceding moves that a husband had indeed treated his wife in this abusive manner and then stopped, and if this kind of question is followed by a proper answer (e.g., "last year", "two months ago"), then no fallacy has been committed.

Dialectical Approach to Fallacies

The dialectical concept of fallacy is reflected in two modern approaches: pragma-dialectics (van Eemeren et al., 1996) and dialectical shifts (Walton, 1992).

A pragma-dialectical approach. Pragma-dialectics views argumentation as a specific type of communicative activity and focuses on specifying the rules and conditions for one type of idealized dialogue, namely, a critical discussion (van Eemeren et al., 1996; van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 1984; van Eemeren & Houtlosser, 2006). It seeks to bridge the gap between descriptive and normative views of argumentation and to interweave the two perspectives. As ways of interacting and ways of reasoning are linked to each other, pragma-dialectics attempts to develop certain hales and procedures that can enforce disputants to resolve their conflict in a highly rational way.

A fallacy from the pragma-dialectical perspective happens when the rules for critical discussion are violated. Parties involved in a critical dialogue ideally should follow ten basic principles to resolve the difference of opinion. In a real situation, however, parties do not always stick to these rules but can make moves that hinder an argumentative discussion. These moves that are not in agreement with the rules (e. g., preventing the other party from expressing his/her standpoints or making an ambiguous statement that misleads the other party) are considered to be fallacies (van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 1992; van Eemeren, Garssen, & Meuffels, 2002).

According to pragma-dialectics, the ideal model of critical discussion consists of four stages: the confrontation stage, the opening stage, the argumentation stage, and the concluding stage (van Eemeren et al., 1996). As different rules are applied to different stages of the discussion, types of fallacies vary depending on the stage it occurs. For example, according to Eemeren and Houflosser (2006), the freedom rule can be violated at the confrontation stage. Both the protagonist and the antagonist can obstruct the expression of standpoints by threatening a person (argumentum ad baculum) or undermining an opponent's credibility (argumentum ad hominem), for instance.

The pragma-dialectical approach has a number of advantages over the traditional (monologic) view of fallacies. First of all, pragma-dialectics provides a better explanation for traditional fallacies by employing a dialogical approach that emphasizes the necessity to consider the context for identifying and analyzing fallacies. Other approaches start with a traditional list of fallacies as a point of their departure without a systematic treatment of them. By contrast, pragma-dialectics offers norms and rules of critical discussion, thus providing criteria not only for traditional fallacies but also their sound counterparts (van Eemeren & Houtlosser, 2002).

This approach has the capacity to bring to light discussion moves that hinder the critical discussion by violating its rule or rules but that are not included in the list of traditional fallacies. Thus, pragma-dialectics allows for identifying new fallacies (e.g., declaring a standpoint sacrosanct, denying an unexpressed premise, distorting an unexpressed premise, to name a few). For instance, the fallacy of denying an unexpressed premise occurs when the protagonist tries to avoid responsibility for an implicit premise that can be correctly reconstructed from what he or she says, thus violating the first part of rule five (the unexpressed premise rule) (van Eemeren & Houtlosser, 2006).

Walton's theory of fallacies. Walton's work is an attempt to bring communication ideas into a theory of informal logic. The researcher's perspective on argument is pragmatic because it considers the context and the goal of an argumentative exchange. It is dialectical because it treats an argument as dynamic and incorporates the idea of interactive reasoning. Participants take into consideration each other's knowledge base, and reasoning takes the form of a dialogue (Walton, 2000). As kinds of dialogue vary, so do the ways people reason, which is, in some way, consistent with the idea that the social epistemology aspect of interaction is not the same for different types of talk (Drew & Heritage, 1992).

The concept of types of dialogue is one of Walton's main contributions. Walton understands a dialogue as "a verbal exchange between two parties, according to some kind of rules, conventions or expectations" (Walton, 2000, p. 333). According to Walton (1998, 2000), dialogues have different schemes and vary in terms of goals. What is appropriate or inappropriate in a certain type of dialogue depends on its goal. Violations are moves that divert interactants from achieving the primary goal of interaction (e.g., negotiation).

Another Walton's important contribution is the idea of dialectical shifts. Different types of dialogue can occur in one argumentative discussion. In this case, there occurs a dialectical shift, that is, "a change from one context of dialogue to another" (Walton, 1992, p. 23). For example, interactants can be initially involved in a scientific inquiry, and, at some moment, they can shift to a persuasion type of dialogue, and then they may or may not come back to the initial one. Sometimes dialectical shifts are quite distinct. In other cases, shifts occur gradually, and in still other cases, types of dialogue can overlap (Walton, 1998).

The concepts of types of dialogue and a dialectical shift are important with respect to Walton's theory of fallacies. According to Walton, a fallacy is "an argumentation technique, based on an argumentation scheme, misused to block the goals of a dialogue in which two parties are reasoning together" (Walton, 1995, xi). The fallacy is then not the argument as such but the use of the argument; fallacies are procedural and context-dependent. Situating a fallacy in a dialogue setting, Walton states that one and the same argument can be fallacious and non-fallacious depending on the context. According to Walton...