Archive for the ‘argumentative discussions’ Category

QOTD: Storytelling in protest and politics

March 16th, 2020

I recently read Francesca Polletta‘s book It was like a fever: Storytelling in protest and politics (2006, University of Chicago Press).

I recommend it! It will appeal to researchers interested in topics such as narrative, strategic communication, (narrative) argumentation, or epistemology (here, of narrative). Parts may also interest activists.

The book’s case studies are drawn from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) (Chapters 2 & 3); online deliberation about the 9/11 memorial (Listening to the City, summer 2002) (Chapter 4); women’s stories in law (including, powerfully, battered women who had killed their abusers, and the challenges in making their stories understandable) (Chapter 5); references to Martin Luther King by African American Congressmen (in the Congressional Record) and by “leading back political figures who were not serving as elected or appointed officials” (Chapter 6). Several are extended from work Polletta previously published from 1998 through 2005 (see page xiii for citations).

The conclusion—”Conclusion: Folk Wisdom and Scholarly Tales” (pages 166-187)—takes up several topics, starting with canonicity, interpretability, ambivalence. I especially plan to go back to the last two sections: “Scholars Telling Stories” (pages 179-184)—about narrative and storytelling in analysts’ telling of events—and “Towards a Sociology of Discursive Forms” (pages 185-187)—about investigating the beliefs and conventions of narrative and its institutional conventions (and relating those to conventions of other “discursive forms” such as interviews). These set forward a research agenda likely useful to other scholars interested in digging in further. These are foreshadowed a bit in the introduction (“Why Stories Matter”) which, among other things, sets out the goal of developing “A Sociology of Storytelling”.

A few quotes I noted—may give you the flavor of the book:

page 141: “But telling stories also carries risks. People with unfamiliar experiences have found those experiences assimilated to canonical plot lines and misheard as a result. Conventional expectations about how stories work, when they are true, and when they are appropriate have also operated to diminish the impact of otherwise potent political stories. For the abused women whom juries disbelieved because their stories had changed in small details since their first traumatized [p142] call to police, storytelling has not been especially effective. Nor was it effective for the citizen forum participants who did not say what it was like to search fruitlessly for affordable housing because discussions of housing were seen as the wrong place in which to tell stories.”

pages 166-167: “So which is it? Is narrative fundamentally subversive or hegemonic? Both. As a rhetorical form, narrative is equipped to puncture reigning verities and to uphold them. At times, it seems as if most of the stories in circulation are subtly or not so subtly defying authorities; at others as if the most effective storytelling is done by authorities. To make it more complicated, sometimes authorities unintentionally undercut their own authority when they tell stories. And even more paradoxically, undercutting their authority by way of a titillating but politically inconsequential story may actually strengthen it. Dissenters, for their part, may find their stories misread in ways that support the very institutions that are challenging….”For those interested in the relations between storytelling, protest, and politics, this all suggests two analytical tasks. One is to identify the features of narrative that allow it to [p167] achieve certain rhetorical effects. The other is to identify the social conditions in which those rhetorical effects are likely to be politically consequential. The surprise is that scholars of political processes have devoted so little attention to either task.”

pages 177-8 – “So institutional conventions of storytelling influence what people can do strategically with stories. In the previously pages, I have described the narrative conventions that operate in legal adjudication, media reporting, television talk shows, congressional debate, and public deliberation. Sociolinguists have documented such conventions in other settings: in medical intake interviews, for example, parole hearings, and jury deliberations. One could certainly generate a catalogue of the institutional conventions of storytelling. To some extent, those conventions reflect the peculiarities of the institution as it has developed historically. They also serve practical functions; some explicit, others less so. I have argued that the lines institutions draw between suitable and unsuitable occasions for storytelling or for certain kinds of stories serve to legitimate the institution.” [specific examples follow] ….”As these examples suggest, while institutions have different conventions of storytelling, storytelling does some of the same work in many institutions. It does so because of broadly shared assumptions about narrative’s epistemological status. Stories are generally thought to be more affecting by less authoritative than analysis, in part because narrative is associated with women rather than men, the private sphere rather than the public one, and custom rather than law. Of course, conventions of storytelling and the symbolic associations behind them are neither unitary nor fixed. Nor are they likely to be uniformly advantageous for those in power and disadvantageous for those without it. Narrative’s alignment [179] along the oppositions I noted is complex. For example, as I showed in chapter 5, Americans’ skepticism of expert authority gives those telling stories clout. In other words, we may contrast science with folklore (with science seen as much more credible), but we may also contrast it with common sense (with science seen as less credible). Contrary to the lamentation of some media critics and activists, when disadvantaged groups have told personal stories to the press and on television talk shows, they have been able to draw attention not only to their own victimization but to the social forces responsible for it.

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QOTD: Sally Jackson on how disagreement makes arguments more explicit

June 19th, 2018

Sally Jackson explicates the notion of the “disagreement space” in a new Topoi article:

“a position that remains in doubt remains in need of defense” ((p 12, Sally Jackson. Reason-Giving and the Natural Normativity of Argumentation. Topoi. 2018 Online First. http://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-018-9553-5))

 

“The most important theoretical consequence of seeing argumentation as a system for management of disagreement is a reversal of perspective on what arguments accomplish. Are arguments the means by which conclusions are built up from established premises? Or are they the means by which participants drill down from disagreements to locate how it is that they and others have arrived at incompatible positions? A view of argumentation as a process of drilling down from disagreements suggests that arguers themselves do not simply point to the reasons they hold for a particular standpoint, but sometimes discover where their own beliefs come from, under questioning by others who do not share their beliefs. A logical analysis of another’s argument nearly always involves first making the argument more explicit, attributing more to the author than was actually said. This is a familiar enough problem for analysts; my point is that it is also a pervasive problem for participants, who may feel intuitively that something is seriously wrong in what someone else has said but need a way to pinpoint exactly what. Getting beliefs externalized is not a precondition for argument, but one of its possible outcomes.” ((p 10, Sally Jackson. Reason-Giving and the Natural Normativity of Argumentation. Topoi. 2018 Online First. http://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-018-9553-5))

From Sally Jackson’s Reason-Giving and the Natural Normativity of Argumentation. ((Sally Jackson. Reason-Giving and the Natural Normativity of Argumentation. Topoi. 2018 Online First. http://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-018-9553-5))

The original treatment of disagreement space is cited to a book chapter revising an ISSA 1992 paper ((Jackson S (1992) “Virtual standpoints” and the pragmatics of conversational argument. In: van Eemeren FH, Grootendorst R, Blair JA, Willard CA (eds) Argument illuminated. International Centre for the Study of Argumentation, Amsterdam, pp. 260–226)), somewhat harder to get one’s hands on.

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Evidence Informatics

January 20th, 2015

I sent off my revised abstract to ECA Lisbon 2015, the European Conference on Argumentation. Evidence informatics, in 75 words:

Reasoning and decision-making are common throughout human activity. Increasingly, human reasoning is mediated by information technology, either to support collective action at a distance, or to support individual decision-making and sense-making.

We will describe the nascent field of “evidence informatics”, which considers how to structure reasoning and evidence. Comparing and contrasting evidence support tools in different disciplines will help determine reusable underlying principles, shared between fields such as legal informatics, evidence-based policy, and cognitive ergonomics.

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Genre defined, a quote from John Swales

October 21st, 2014

A genre comprises a class of communicative events, the members of which share some set of communicative purposes. These purposes are recognized by the expert members of the parent discourse community and thereby constitute the rationale for the genre. This rationale shapes the schematic structure of the discourse and influences and constrains choice of content and style. Communicative purpose is both a privileged criterion and one that operates to keep the scope of a genre as here conceived narrowly focused on comparable rhetorical action. In addition to purpose, exemplars of a genre exhibit various patterns of similarity in terms of structure, style, content and intended audience. If all high probability expectations are realized, the exemplar will be viewed as prototypical by the parent discourse community. The genre names inherited and produced by discourse communities and imported by others constitute valuable ethnographic communication, but typically need further validation. ((Genre defined, from John M. Swales, page 58, Chapter 3 “The concept of genre” in Genre Analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge University Press 1990. Reprinted with other selections in
The Discourse Studies Reader: Main currents in theory and analysis (see pages 305-316).))

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Rating the evidence, citation by citation?

September 4th, 2014

Publishers from HighWire Press are experimenting with a plugin called SocialCite. This is intended to rate the evidence, citation by citation. Like this:

SocialCite at PNAS, HighWire Press from  http://www.pnas.org/content/108/14/5488.full#ref-list-1

SocialCite at PNAS, HighWire Press from http://www.pnas.org/content/108/14/5488.full#ref-list-1:

So far a few publishers (including PNAS) have implemented it as a pilot. Apparently the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery is apparently leading this effort, I’d be really interested in speaking with them further:

Find out more about SocialCite from their website or the slidedeck from their debut at the HighwirePress meeting.

I’m *very* curious to hear what peopel think of this — it really surprised me.

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Ph.D. viva – public talk

October 1st, 2013

Here are the slides from the public part of my Ph.D. viva (thesis defense), on “Enabling reuse of arguments and opinions in open collaboration systems”. There is also a downloadable PDF version of the slides. Or see the thesis/dissertation itself and its data (index page) (note added 2016-04-22).

Video to follow: thanks to Hugo Hromic for streaming & recording that!

Title: “Enabling reuse of arguments and opinions in open collaboration systems”

Abstract: The World Wide Web enables large-scale collaboration, even between groups of individuals previously unknown to one another. These collaborations produce tangible outputs, such as encyclopedias (Wikipedia), electronic books (Distributed Proofreaders), maps (OpenStreetMap) and open source software packages (Firefox). In such open collaboration systems, decisions are made through open online discussions in which anyone can participate, and those decisions are based on the written arguments and opinions that individuals contribute, sometimes in large volumes.

Sense-making and coordination is an important component of collaboration, but it is particularly challenging when individuals disagree. When large volumes of opinions and arguments are expressed, popular or emotive choices can be identified through coarse approaches such as sampling, sentiment, or voting. But these do not identify the reasons for disagreement, which may be needed in order to reach decisions. For example, about 500 discussions each week in Wikipedia concern whether a particular topic should be covered in the encyclopedia. Discussions may involve comments from 2-200 people, and some topics are contentious.

This thesis addresses the problem of analyzing, integrating, and reconciling arguments and opinions in goal-oriented online discussions. We emphasize the structure of arguments by providing a new, reconfigurable Web interface. Our interface improves the perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and information completeness, thus providing meaningful support for the discussion.

The thesis addresses the following three research questions:
– What are the opportunities and requirements for providing argumentation support?
– Which arguments are used in open collaboration systems?
– How can we structure and display opinions and arguments to support their use and reuse?

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Ph.D. defense, Tuesday October 1st

September 30th, 2013

My Ph.D. defense (viva voce) will start with a short public talk. You’re invited!

We’ll be streaming from Galway on our research institute channel:
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/insight-galway-live
on Tuesday October 1st, 9:30 AM Irish time (UTC/GMT +1 hour, same as British Summer Time) (show in other timezones). ((Thanks Hugo Hromic for taking care of this, and Deirdre Lee for asking about streaming!))

For more details, here’s a brief announcement from our institute mailing list:

Jodi Schneider will give a talk on her PhD work as part of her viva.
9.30 AM, Tuesday October 1st in the conference room.

Professor Simon Buckingham Shum (KMi, Open University) will be in attendance.
===============================================

TITLE “Enabling reuse of arguments and opinions in open collaboration systems”

ABSTRACT
The World Wide Web enables large-scale collaboration, even between groups of individuals previously unknown to one another. These collaborations produce tangible outputs, such as encyclopedias (Wikipedia), electronic books (Distributed Proofreaders), maps (OpenStreetMap) and open source software packages (Firefox). In such open collaboration systems, decisions are made through open online discussions in which anyone can participate, and those decisions are based on the written arguments and opinions that individuals contribute, sometimes in large volumes.

Sense-making and coordination is an important component of collaboration, but it is particularly challenging when individuals disagree. When large volumes of opinions and arguments are expressed, popular or emotive choices can be identified through coarse approaches such as sampling, sentiment, or voting. But these do not identify the reasons for disagreement, which may be needed in order to reach decisions. For example, about 500 discussions each week in Wikipedia concern whether a particular topic should be covered in the encyclopedia. Discussions may involve comments from 2-200 people, and some topics are contentious.

This thesis addresses the problem of analyzing, integrating, and reconciling arguments and opinions in goal-oriented online discussions. We emphasize the structure of arguments by providing a new, reconfigurable Web interface. Our interface improves the perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and information completeness, thus providing meaningful support for the discussion.

The thesis addresses the following three research questions:
– What are the opportunities and requirements for providing argumentation support?
– Which arguments are used in open collaboration systems?
– How can we structure and display opinions and arguments to support their use and reuse?

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Discourse community

August 6th, 2013

“Discourse community” seems to be a good summary for a concept that I need. But I’m not happy with how to define it. One summary for my purposes might be: “a group with shared goals, a mechanism for communication, certain patterns of discussion, and enough members who have relevant expertise in the topic and how to argue about it”. That loses some of the richness but also manages the complexity of the full definition.

According to Swales, ((Swales, John. Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge University Press, 1990.))
a discourse community:

  • has a broadly agreed set of common public goals.
  • has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members.
  • uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback.
  • utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims.
  • in addition to owning genres, it has acquired some specific lexis.
  • has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise

For a more recent summary, read Borg ((Borg, Erik. “Discourse community.” ELT journal 57.4 (2003): 398-400.)) (who however seems to advocate the term “Community of Practice”, which seems to me far less well-defined, perhaps since I’ve not gone looking for a definition).

Swales presents a really interesting case study of a discourse community in his book: a stamp collection society–and explains rhetorical (genre-fit) mistakes he made in his first forays into the community.

I’d expect this definition to be more famous than it is. For common use, it has some flaws: technical terms such as ‘genres’ and ‘lexis’ should be described, as should ‘discoursal expertise’ and perhaps ‘participatory mechanisms’.

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Defining open collaboration systems

July 27th, 2013

“Open collaboration systems” has lately become part of the (working) title for my thesis. I had tried talking about “purposeful online conversations” when scoping my work. I had in mind online conversations where people argued in order to find common ground and take action. By contrast, I explained, while people argue in many online venues, characterizing those arguments is challenging: what shall we say (in general) about the arguments on Twitter, or in comments to blog posts? But the phrase “purposeful online conversations” seemed to mean little to anyone but me.

I latched onto a new definition to use in my thesis: “open collaboration systems”. In an open collaboration system, “people form ties with others and create things together” ((Forte, Andrea, and Cliff Lampe. “Defining, Understanding, and Supporting Open Collaboration: Lessons From the Literature.” American Behavioral Scientist 57.5 (2013): 535-547. doi:10.1177/0002764212469362)), ((The article, published this May, is their introduction to a special issue in American Behavioral Scientist. ABS 57(5), published May 2013. As a side note, the definition seems to have arisen out of need; I’m grateful. The original CFP for the issue explained what they were looking for more generally: “By open collaboration we mean the development of novel social structures supported by technologies including wikis and other content management systems that allow people to share and build content.”))

Forte and Lampe define a “prototypical open collaboration system” as

an online environment that

  1. supports the collective production of an artifact
  2. through a technologically mediated collaboration platform
  3. that presents a low barrier to entry and exit, and
  4. supports the emergence of persistent but malleable social structures. ((Forte, Andrea, and Cliff Lampe. “Defining, Understanding, and Supporting Open Collaboration: Lessons From the Literature.” American Behavioral Scientist 57.5 (2013): 535-547. doi:10.1177/0002764212469362))

I’m chagrined to say that it hadn’t occurred to me to quote the definition and then slightly redefine it. That is, until today when I chanced upon Andrew West’s thesis, “Damage detection and mitigation in open collaboration applications” ((Andrew West “Damage detection and mitigation in open collaboration applications” Ph.D. thesis, University of Pennsylvania. May 2013.)), about his large body of work on vandalism in Wikipedia, and the robust tool for vandalism reversion that he developed, Stiki. Very interesting since, as the title suggests, he creates a variant definition, Open Collaboration Applications (OCAs), where he liberally applies the “low barrier to entry and exit” to exclude moderation (for instance Github, which requires “proactive moderation” from repository owners, is excluded in his definition). He also stresses collective production more than most. But most interestingly to me, West very explicitly excludes voting-oriented collaborative filtering, based on the independence of the action taken by each voter. ((To clarify his modified definition of Open Collaboration Applications (OCAs), West says (in part):

We proceed by discussing familiar examples that are not OCAs. Append only and monotonically growing content/discussion repositories fail to qualify because they are not collectively produced at any granularity. This includes applications like YouTube, Flickr, forums, and blog/article comments regardless of the fact their content is user generated (these are aggregated independent artifacts). Collaborative filtering applications like Reddit, Digg, and Slashdot are also insufficient. Therein, community voting determines the acceptance and/or prominence of individual content items (“posts”) towards composing a public facing artifact. These fail in two dimensions: (1) Voting is an append only action, and (2) supposing participants could fully “edit” the ordering, this presentation is nonetheless a meta-artifact of independent posts – failing the atomicity constraint.

))

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QOTD: Heinlein’s truth-telling language, Speedtalk

July 14th, 2013

Inventing languages is a past-time both of philosophers and science fiction storytellers. It spotlights the relationships between language and thought and language and culture. ((Apparently Wikipedia keeps a list of constructed languages and has nearby discussion on the purpose of some of these.))

Yesterday I ran across Heinlein’s truth-telling language, Speedtalk. A few lines were really striking:
“In the syntax of Speedtalk the paradox of the Spanish Barber could not even be expressed, save as a self-evident error.”
“The advantage for achieving truth, or something more nearly like truth, was similar to the advantage of keeping account books in Arabic numerals rather than Roman.”

Here’s a longer quote:

But Speedtalk was not “shorthand” Basic English. “Normal” languages, having their roots in days of superstition and ignorance, have in them inherently and unescapably wrong structures of mistaken ideas about the universe. One can think logically in English only by extreme effort, so bad it is as a mental tool. For example, the verb “to be” in English has twenty-one distinct meanings, every single one of which is false-to-fact.

A symbolic structure, invented instead of accepted without question, can be made similar in structure to the real-world to which it refers. The structure of Speedtalk did not contain the hidden errors of English; it was structured as much like the real world as the New Men could make it. For example, it did not contain the unreal distinction between nouns and verbs found in most other languages. The world—the continuum known to science and including all human activity—does not contain “noun things” and “verb things”; it contains space-time events and relationships between them. The advantage for achieving truth, or something more nearly like truth, was similar to the advantage of keeping account books in Arabic numerals rather than Roman.
All other languages made scientific, multi-valued logic almost impossible to achieve; in Speedtalk it was as difficult not to be logical. Compare the pellucid Boolean logic with the obscurities of the Aristotelean logic it supplanted.

Paradoxes are verbal, do not exist in the real world—and Speedtalk did not have such built into it. Who shaves the Spanish Barber? Answer: follow him around and see. In the syntax of Speedtalk the paradox of the Spanish Barber could not even be expressed, save as a self-evident error.

Gulf, as printed in Assignment in Eternity – Robert A. Heinlein – Baen edition

This seemed to me to echo Leibniz’ symbolic language, in the “truthtelling” aspects — perhaps since I wrote a few months ago about Leibniz! ((For thesis Chapter 1, forthcoming; thanks to some comments from Adam Wyner. Ironically, my BA thesis was on Leibniz monads, but if I’d ever read the “Let us calculate” lines, I certainly didn’t have them in mind when thinking of argumentation!))
Leibniz was perhaps the first philosopher to write about a special language for expressing truth or making arguments evident. ((For more, see Roger Bishop Jones on Leibniz and the Automation of Reason.)) ((For references to the original, trace a discussion on the listserv historia-matematica, started by Robert Tragesser 1999-05-23, [HM] Leibniz’s “let us calculate”?, with responses over several months. Michael Detlefsen gives references to several of Leibniz’s writings, and a followup question about which quote is most widely known (1999-07-17, started by “L. M. Picard” with the subject [HM] Leibniz’s “let us calculate”) yields a very useful response from Siegmund Probst, quoting several variants with detailed references.))

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