Abstract
Argumentation is a cognitive category. Texts cannot be said to be argumentation, nor can argumentation be said to lie in texts. This is an almost trivial semiotic point of departure, but it is quite relevant nevertheless. In this contribution, three reasons are developed to emphasize and to articulate the semiotic component of argumentation to show that it is a crucial element that cannot be disregarded. Two of these reasons are mentioned only in passing as other contributions in this volume deal with them more substantially. The third reason, being that argumentation requires an exchange of discourse worlds and that consequently the mimetic construction of these discourse worlds is part of the argumentation, is discussed in some detail in this paper. It will be argued that a lack of attention for the mimetics of argumentation is regrettable, both theoretically and practically. Focusing on the mimetics raises questions concerning the dominant ‘propositional’ format of argumentation assumed to be essential for argumentative assessment.
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Notes
In this contribution, we disregard the very special situations in which participants are arguing orally about an issue that is immediately present in the situation and therefore available for deictic expressions as well as for direct sense impressions. An example would be a situation in a courtroom where a discussion develops about the reliability of a witness who is present on the spot. In such exceptional situations, the semiotic process is still relevant but is in some respects different and even semiotically less complicated compared to the text-mediated discourse types that we predominantly discuss here.
It is trivial in the sense that it is a semiotic point of departure for all categories of ‘meaning’. The discussion about argumentation here is similar to that about narratives in narratology where the issue is whether certain texts are narratives while others are not (as reviewed in Ryan (2004)). It is no coincidence that the latter discussion is reviewed in a book about narratives across media and that the present parallel discussion about argumentation should take place in a special issue about multimodal arguments.
There is nothing wrong with using metonymic expressions; we use them all the time because they are efficient and appealing. However, sometimes it is good to remind ourselves of what the metonym actually represents.
I use argumentative discourse here as a theoretical term to refer to a mental representation of a discourse world, its (merged) mimetics and diegetics, as well as the relations the audience represents between this world and its perceived reality. See also Van den Hoven (2012b) and Van den Hoven and Yang 2013.
In fact this issue of this text format being considered widely now as prototypical deserves a lengthy discussion. One might argue that considering this is typical for our post-Enlightenment society in which justification by means of reason is dominated by inference from logically related propositions, suppressing storytelling, anecdote, creative metaphor as means to reason, ranking argument schemes such as argument by analogy or argument by example relatively ‘low’, or secondary.
Compare in this volume for (a) and (b) for example Blair who presents perfectly intelligible interpretations of text materials that far removed from the prototypical formatting. Compare for the more challenging, additional criterion (c) Van den Hoven and Yang (2013).
Even partly non-discursive structures may guide an audience to the representation of an argument. Looking out of the window, watching a massive demonstration someone may ‘see’ an argument for a standpoint that there is massive support for (or opposition against) measure X.
This happened during the Windsor 4th Summer Institute On Argumentation: Multi‐Modal Arguments: Making sense of images (and other non‐verbal content) in Argument, May 27–31, 2013. Of course I can only give my personal reconstruction of this debate.
I use argumentation for a standpoint with justifying or refuting reasons and argument for a justifying or refuting reason.
In this article, ‘pictorial’ is preferred to denote a specific, visual, not verbal text modality, written language being visual too, still this is a very rough indication of a group of sources of information in a discourse (compare Kress 2009).
This does not mean that assessment criteria formulated on the most general level, for example acceptability and relevance of the argument, do not apply to all conceivable forms of argumentation; in that respect the position taken here is not necessarily incompatible with Blair’s position in this volume.
Notice how many of these mediating elements that require to consider the discourse world a complex mime of the reality it claims to be relevant for also apply to many if not all forms of verbal discourse that invite an audience to construct an argumentation.
Compare for this discussion about the relation between the dominant paradigm in argument theory and the (cognitive) processing of extended metaphors as well for the cognitive aspects of metaphorical mapping in argumentative discourse (Oswald and Rihs 2014).
This is also the main point in Wagenaar et al. (1993); narratively organized facts invite diegetic elements; if one person is presented as factually good, his opponent tends to be evaluated as bad without supporting facts being adduced, and so on.
This does not imply by the way that in these approaches the full consequences are drawn from the semiotic insight that the discourse world is necessarily a complex mime of the ‘reality’ it claims to be relevant for, nor of the insight that mimesis and diegesis are strongly intertwined. On the contrary (see below, Sect. 5), also legal (argument) theory often maintains a strict distinction between issues of evidence and issues of legal interpretation, a distinction that in practice turns out time and again to be untenable.
This debate is given a strong new dimension, in my view. In a crucial publication by Jackson (1988), in which it is argued that the presentation of seemingly propositional facts is actually guided by the pragmatics of a narrative act. Following this publication, there are important contributions from forensic psychology showing how narrative structures determine the frame in which facts are placed, selected, completed, evaluated (Crombag and Israels 2008; Wagenaar and Crombag 2005; Wagenaar et al. 1993; with an important comment by Twining (1995)). Bex 2009 tries to combine an ‘argumentative’ approach with a narrative approach while Kjus, building on Jackson (1988) as well as on Bennett and Feldman (1981) and Brooks and Gewirtz (1996), elaborates on the more fundamental thesis that narratives are arguments.
This literature is discussed in Van den Hoven (2010). Important are the reviews in Bright and Goodman-Delahunty (2004, 2006) as well as in Douglas et al. (1997) and Feigenson (2010). A typical study in which the argumentative value of images is analyzed as a problem is Kassin and Garfield (1991). A synthesis can be found in Feigenson and Spiesel (2009).
Ad Herennium 1.8.11–1.9.16; Cicero. De Inventione. 1.19-21; Quintilian 4.2.
From a cognitive semiotic point of view, such statements because they necessarily ‘interpret’ the mimesis are diegetic statements or at least contain a diegetic element. “Socrates is a human” as a replacement of an image of Socrates is, in the argumentative function it fulfils in the prototypical example, a diegetic element, interpreting the image (unless of course, it is felt to be entirely trivial—which seems to be the case and explains why this example is always felt to be no serious argument; premise minor as well as major are trivial).
Later, however, he seems to acknowledge that the image as well as its interpretation together are the argument (p. 231, rejecting fig. 15.3). Sometimes it is not easy to ascertain whether scholars advocate the possibility of multimodal or purely visual arguments.
This puts also the statement of Blair into question: “(…) the conditions of interpretation of visual expression are indeterminate to a much greater degree than is the case with verbal expression” (Blair 2012: 210). Generally speaking, this seems to be incorrect as far as conveying mimetics is concerned. For a detailed discussion of the ‘hidden’ paradigm that seems to be Blair’s reference point when making his statement, see Van den Hoven (forthcoming).
In practice, however, this turns out to be untenable, or, to express this in a rather more nuanced way: when codified in criminal procedural law, for instance, the distinction gave rise to many complicated dogmatic nuances in attempts to ‘maintain’ the distinction, and to this day there are many technical procedures involved in determining which way to best interpret the codified distinction (compare also Footnote 16).
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Acknowledgments
I want to thank Jens Kjeldsen, Hans Verhulst, Joost Schilperoord and my anonymous reviewers for their valuable remarks.
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Van den Hoven, P. Cognitive Semiotics in Argumentation: A Theoretical Exploration. Argumentation 29, 157–176 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-014-9330-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-014-9330-6