RAIL

What do you do when you’re too busy to write a blog post?  You link to great posts that others have written, of course!   To weakly atone the fact that I am, in fact, being consumed by my current research obsessions, I shall therefore take this opportunity to launch a new occasional feature here on RAIL: “Stations”, a sort-of-monthly (or so) digest of the neat, cool, and generally click-worthy among recent articles and blog posts about argumentation.  Suggestions and additions in the comments are always welcome! Though argumentation is the focus, I’ll also be including posts from blogs about other issues and disciplines that I think are relevant (or at least that have potentially interesting connections) to the study of argumentation.  Here are some of the more interesting posts of the last couple of months that deal with argumentation or argumentation-related themes.  Without further ado then, here are the selections for this go around:

Argumentics: The Problems of Irony Part I and Part II

A really interesting and insightful look at irony and its uses in rhetoric from our good neighbor blog just across the street. Do check it out. Then stay and browse around see how great the rest of the blog is too.

Between Citizens and Scientists: The David/Goliath Fallacy

Jeanne Goodwin here puts her finger on a fallacy whose time I think has clearly come.  The dynamic she aptly names here is pervasive in politics, and in my (perhaps not so humble after all) view, is worth a lot of study.

These next three aren’t centrally about argumentation, but I think they have interesting applications that make them worthy of a look.

Less Wrong: Short Studies on Excuses

After a description of a few short hypothetical cases the author of the piece goes on to draw some lessons about rule-following, deviations from rule-following, and excuses.  Those of you out there working in a pragma-dialectic vein may find these observations interesting.

Bad Science: Evidence Based Smear Campaigns

Ben Goldacre is a doctor and an occasional writer for the Guardian in the UK who focuses his blog on issues around science reporting.  His blog is typically well written and might be generally interesting to those who attend to the rhetoric of science.  This particular post is of more general interest, however, as it discusses recent research from a political science journal in the UK that suggests that being corrected on our facts can actually reinforce the original (erroneous) belief targeted by the correction.  If this is true, it does seem to pose a pragmatic problem of some importance for at least some modes of communication.

Predictably Irrational: The Long-Term Effects of Short-term Emotions

And lastly there is this entry from the blog of behavioral economist Dan Ariely.  While it isn’t, strictly speaking, about argumentation, I think it contains observations of interest to those who study argumentation from a game-theoretic or strategic perspective.  In this post, Ariely reports on an experiment the results of which suggest that people will often choose more costly strategies than they need to because those strategies inflict damage on others who are seen to be in need of punishment for some transgression.  Tu quoque anyone?