Abstract
The relationship between conflict and argumentation presents an interesting ambivalence, both in ordinary language and in theoretical models: although argumentation is often depicted as a discursive practice aimed at reasonable resolution of an initial conflict, arguments are also frequently perceived as inherently conflictual engagements, more akin to vicious fights than to rational discussion. In this paper, I argue that a decision-theoretic approach to argumentation allows to make sense of this tension, and I review some empirical evidence in favor of this claim. In turn, this highlights the complex role that conflict plays in orienting our argumentative moves. I conclude by offering some implications, both theoretical and practical, of this particular view of arguments, conflicts, and decisions.
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- 1.
But not always, e.g., in instances of what Walton (1998) labels eristic confrontation, where the dialogical goal is to vent one’s feelings at the opponent, not to solve any underlying conflict of opinion—on the contrary, often with the reasonable expectation of exacerbating it.
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- 3.
The studies presented in this section refer to persuasion dialogues (Walton 1998), in which each party tries to prove a point that the other party is resistant to accept. Such focus on persuasion will result in frequent reference to the notion of “winning the argument” as a criterion for success. This does not imply that winning is invariably the purpose of arguing in general: as it is often emphasized in the literature (Walton and Krabbe 1995; Walton 1998; Paglieri and Castelfranchi 2010), arguing can be motivated also by other goals, personal or dialogical. Nonetheless, arguers are still concerned with success, defined in terms of whatever goal they are striving to achieve.
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The reason why the argument happens to be prolonged will also affect the arguer’s choice: that is, argument quality and argument duration are not entirely independent from each other. Consider for instance counter argumentation, that is, arguments from the other party aimed at undermining or undercutting one’s own arguments (see Pollock 1992; Prakken 2000; Besnard and Hunter 2001). Given extant evidence on how preexposure to counterarguments affects resistance to persuasion (e.g., Petty and Cacioppo 1977), the amount of counter argumentation experienced so far is likely to matter for deciding whether and how to terminate the exchange.
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In group discussion, this interacts also with polarization, as an effect of being exposed to novel arguments (from other like-minded arguers) in favor of one’s previous position: as it has been repeatedly shown in social psychology (for a review and discussion, see Myers and Lamm 1976; Isenberg 1986; Sunstein 2002), this leads groups of like-minded people to develop positions far more extreme than those previously held by their individual members. The interplay of radicalization and polarization explains why multiparty argumentation, e.g., debates on social media, easily produces partisanship, that is, the predominance of relatively few views, each quite extreme and fanatically opposed to any dissenting voice.
- 7.
Incidentally, the findings reviewed in Sect. 7.3.1 provide preliminary support to lexicographic decision making in argument engagement, since arguers consider only a very limited and rigidly prioritized subset of considerations in deciding whether to enter an argument or not.
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported by the project PRISMA—PiattafoRme cloud Interoperabili per SMArt-government, funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR) and by the research network SINTELNET—European Network for Social Intelligence, funded by the European Union. I am indebted to Cristiano Castelfranchi, Jean Goodwin, Dale Hample, Marcin Lewinski, Steve Patterson, and Frank Zenker for their helpful comments on some of the ideas detailed in this paper and to the organizers and participants of the events where this work was presented and discussed: the OSSA conference on “Virtues of argumentation” (Windsor, May 23–25, 2013), the workshop on “Computational models of natural argument” (Rome, June 14, 2013), the conference on “Conflict and communication” (Rome, October 29–31, 2013), and the ArgLab workshop on “Argumentation and rational decisions” (Lisbon, December 5, 2013). While I greatly benefited from debating my ideas with other argumentation scholars, I take full responsibility for any lingering defect of this work.
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Paglieri, F. (2015). Arguments, Conflicts, and Decisions. In: D'Errico, F., Poggi, I., Vinciarelli, A., Vincze, L. (eds) Conflict and Multimodal Communication. Computational Social Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14081-0_7
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