Abstract
When discussing dialogue, argumentation researchers rarely draw the distinction between the story world and interactional world. While mediators often help to shape the interactions among agonists in the emerging flow of spoken discourse, writers of postulated dialogues narrate them, constructing a story world that depicts the agonists, depicts their utterances and their circumstances. In this paper, I ask where the agonists of the dialogue model of argument interact, and I show that they often interact in the story world of postulated dialogues. Postulated dialogues are story problem conversations. Common in textbooks, exams, and standardized tests, story problems create hypothetical situations to illustrate formal relationships among variables, and are designed to be read in a theoretical attitude that treats the characters, objects, and circumstances that they depict as given. When argumentation researchers examine postulated dialogues, they tend to adopt a theoretical attitude, limiting their analysis to the conversation between the agonists depicted in the story world. Reading this way makes it easier to overlook the interactional world where the writing and reading of the texts takes place, obscuring the fact that they are narrated dialogues, often written by researchers. Reading this way also makes it easier to confirm the traditional participation framework of the dialogue model of argument.
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Notes
I use the term “agonist” here and elsewhere in this paper to indicate someone who advances or defends arguments in controversy. This level of specificity is necessitated by a larger problem involving participation in the analysis of controversy (Cramer 2012, 2013). In traditional accounts, the status of participant is often restricted to those who advance or defend arguments in controversy; the problem with this is that there are many participants in controversies who do not occupy the role of agonist. The term allows me to distinguish those who are actively arguing and defending positions in controversies from participants who are playing other roles. On the other hand, the term is also useful as an umbrella for the various roles occupied by people involved in advancing or defending arguments in controversy. Lorenzen distinguishes between a “proponent” and “opponent”, for instance, but also refers more generally to these participants as “partners in dialogue” (Lorenzen 1987, p. 14). Crawshay-Williams distinguishes between “advocates and opponents” for instance, but also refers more generally to them as “protagonists” (Crawshay-Williams 1957, p. 3). In a similar way, the many roles of advocacy and opposition, heroic or otherwise, are meant to be covered by my term.
The traditional participation framework is a dyadic model depicting two agonists who intervene in, advance standpoints in, or try to resolve controversies.
Participants who act as narrators—as well as those acting as mediators and agonists—could be said to occupy a particular footing. For Goffman, a change in footing involves “a change in the alignment we take up to ourselves and the others present as expressed in the way we manage the production and reception of an utterance” (Goffman 1981, p. 128).
Following Levi, I use the term “story problem” here and elsewhere in the paper to refer to the genre in which hypothetical situations are created to represent formal relationships among variables (Levi 1996). Alternative terms, “word problem”, used by Gerofsky, and “verbal logic problem”, used by Scribner, are more strictly accurate, as not all things called “story problem” feature plot, a conventional feature of narrative. The propositions of syllogisms, for instance, tend to depict states of affairs rather than events. To complicate matters further, not all “story problems” prompt the reader for a solution. Writers regularly use the genre when they illustrate key concepts in textbooks, where the mode is expository and the goal is instruction rather than testing. Despite these limitations, I use the term “story problem” because it is canonical and familiar to many.
With a syllogism like this, for example, the story problem used by a teacher to elucidate knowledge can be identical in form to the one used to prompt a student for a display of knowledge, the difference being which parts are provided by the teacher and which parts are provided by the student. Compare with the examples from Scribner and Luria later in this section.
Gerofsky notes that “Word problems imitate and recall other word problems, not our lived lives” (Gerofsky 1999, p. 37).
Postulated dialogue is a particular kind of “constructed dialogue” a term Tannen uses to describe a wide range of narration in which characters are voiced as if they are speaking for themselves: “What is commonly referred to as reported speech or direct quotation in conversation is constructed dialogue, just as surely as is the dialogue created by fiction writers and playwrights. A difference is that in fiction and plays, the characters and actions are also constructed, whereas in personal narrative, they are based on actual characters and events” (Tannen 1986, p. 311). Postulated dialogue is like the dialogue created by fiction writers and playwrights, where not only the utterances but also the characters and the actions are constructed. Unlike most writers of fiction and drama, however, writers of postulated dialogues aim to create characters, actions, and utterances that are generic and hypothetical. As with other works of fiction, the truth value of the narrative component of story problems is irrelevant (Gerofsky 1996, pp. 39, 40).
In his logic textbook, Copi also creates postulated dialogues involving agonists “White” and “Black” to illustrate various kinds of “verbal disputes”. Here is an example:
“BLACK: Helen lives a long way from campus. I walked out to see her the other day, and it took me nearly two hours to get there.
WHITE: No, Helen doesn't live such a long way from campus. I drove her home last night, and we reached her place in less than ten minutes” (Copi 1968, p. 95).
Johnstone offers this sort of heuristic about participants as part of her discourse analysis methodology (Johnstone 2008, pp. 128–161).
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Acknowledgments
Thank you to David Kloepfer for research assistance on this project and to the English Department of Simon Fraser University for supporting his work with a grant for small-scale research projects. Thanks also to Miles Bruce for bringing to my attention postulated dialogues in U.S. Supreme Court talk. I would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their many helpful questions and suggestions.
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Cramer, P. Story Problems: Where Do the Agonists of the Dialogue Model of Argument Interact?. Argumentation 30, 129–144 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-015-9358-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-015-9358-2