Abstract
Adversariality in argumentation is typically theorized as inhering in, and applying to, the interactional roles of proponent and opponent that arguers occupy. This paper considers the kinds of adversariality located in the conversational roles arguers perform while arguing—specifically listening. It begins by contending that the maximally adversarial arguer is an arguer who refuses to listen to reason by refusing to listen to another’s reasons. It proceeds to consider a list of lousy listeners in order to illustrate the variety of ways that the conversational role of listener can be performed adversarially. Because conversational roles, while not adversarial by nature, can be enacted adversarially, arguers are properly subject to praise and blame for their performances of these roles. Thus, the paper concludes, argumentation theory stands in need of an articulated normative vocabulary and theory to codify, apply, explain, and justify the norms of listening governing, guiding, and appraising arguers’ performances of listening in argumentation.
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Notes
Yes, we deliberately avoided the descriptor “listened to.”
As one reviewer rightly pointed out, the constitutionally-guaranteed freedom of speech in the United States has not been interpreted by the Supreme Court to include a corresponding obligation on others to hear you out or take what you have to say into account. That is, the freedom of speech, or the press might be distinguished from the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the Government, where the latter is a positive liberty but the former is only a negative liberty. We grant that, if one interprets this negative liberty to prohibit others from preventing you from making up your own mind by coercing or compelling you in matters of your thought or belief, then the freedom of speech is of value even if the obligation it places on others does not include hearing you out when you exercise this right. On the other hand, our point remains. The right to express one’s views would be of greater value if others could not simply choose to ignore those views as it suited them, but were under some obligation to hear them out and to take them into account when either making up their own minds of setting matters of policy.
‘Backchanneling,’ a term popularized by Victor Yngve in his work “On getting a word in edgewise” (1970: 568), refers to statements, expressions, or signals that communicate to a speaker the extent to which, and manner in which, a listener is engaged in what is being said.
By ‘social legibility’ we mean the hermeneutic accessibility a third party possesses to “read,” interpret, and evaluate the behavior and affect of another person in a public interaction.
Cf. Aikin’s (2020) discussion of the Owl of Minerva Problem as it relates to norms of argument. Very roughly: once we have an argumentative norm, it is available for abuse and exploitation by other arguers. Here we observe that the same problematic structure applies to norms of listening.
By ‘dogwhistle’ we mean a form of doublespeak by which speakers implicitly, whether covertly or overtly, signal to an audience some objectionable commitment while maintaining plausible deniability about that commitment in their explicit speech. Originally, dogwhistles were theorized as functioning by being legible only to a subset of one’s audience: the dogwhistle was conceived as a kind of coded speech that would be heard only by those one wanted to signal while going unnoticed by those to whom the signal was not directed. Yet, at this point this form of doublespeak has become codified and normalized such that it is now also used so as to be heard by all while retaining a “plausible,” if tenuous, deniability to the objectionable message content, thereby serving to activate one’s base while simultaneously enraging one’s opponents. (Cf. Jennifer Saul 2017, 2018, 2019.).
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Acknowledgements
Our names are listed in alphabetical order; Godden is lead author. Our collaboration began following Davis’s presentation “Against Pure Communication Roles in Speaker-Listener Distinctions” on the normative considerations of withholding or bestowing of attention during conversation presented in Prof. Michael O’Rourke’s Philosophy of Communication graduate seminar in the Fall of 2017 at Michigan State University. Davis’s presentation argued against unilateral accounts of conversational roles due to their propensity to elide or erase relevant contextual factors that shape the norms and outcomes of conversational exchanges. Godden recognized the importance and applicability of Davis’s work to argumentation-theoretic concerns. This is the second paper arising out of our collaboration. Our first paper, “The listeners” (in progress), discusses the complexity of listening as an activity, and the descriptive inadequacies of prevailing conceptions of listening in the argumentation theoretic literature. The present paper seeks to exhibit the normative salience of the activity of listening to argumention. Our next paper discusses the normative inadequacy of current argumentation-theoretic treatments of listening, and explores an improved normative account of listening as an activity that takes into consideration its complexity and normative salience. We thank two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and constructive remarks, and, especially, the co-editors of this special issue of Topoi on adversariality in argumentation, Katharina Stevens and John Casey.
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Davis, J., Godden, D. Adversarial Listening in Argumentation. Topoi 40, 925–937 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-020-09730-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-020-09730-1