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Archive for the ‘Argumentation’ Category

Post Doc Postion in Argumentation and Explanation

Posted in Argumentation, Computation, Job Openings, tagged , , , on May 10, 2012| Leave a Comment »

The Scrutable Autonomous Systems (SAsSy) project aims to enable the scrutiny of autonomous systems by allowing agents to generate plans through argument and dialogue, while justifying the purpose of each step within the joint plan. Humans or agent can then critique these plans by suggesting and justifying alternative courses of actions as needed, thus driving the planning process. In this way, a scrutable autonomous system can allow for both the collaborative generation of a plan, and for its simultaneous verification.

To achieve its goals, the SAsSy project seeks a post-doctoral researcher who will investigate argumentation and dialogue based approaches to generate, represent and reason about plans, factoring in explicit norms and goals. Argumentation provides a natural way of explaining the rationale for decisions and their justifications, while dialogue will allow for their incremental generation and modification. (more…)

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Critical stakes

Posted in Argumentation, Critical Thinking, Discourse Analysis, tagged , , , on April 27, 2012| Leave a Comment »

I keep hearing from colleagues in other disciplines that the stakes are incredibly low in contemporary psychology.  Requests for explanation get me no further than utterances of despair over the stranglehold caused by increased ethical standards for research on humans.  There will be no more Stanford prison experiments or Milgram authority tests.  All that is left are either peculiar lab objectifications of the social or discourse analysis.

I don’t understand the despair:  we’ve learned what we needed to from Zimbardo and Milgram, surely.  The new social psychology involved with cognition and discourse provides good fodder for argumentation studies (or at least it can).  It encourages critical thinking that will be informed by empirical analysis of what works, rather than armchair speculations.  All this feeds democracy.

Argumentation and discourse analysis (of which I have only the vaguest understanding) seem especially important given the current proliferation of discourse.  Discourse may also be the site of some of the most persistent stumbling blocks to social justice.  Micro-inequalities and implicit bias impede women’s and minorities’ social and political participation.

Cecelia Ridgeway suggests implicit bias may be a central cause for the stalled gender revolution:  despite the massive improvements for women in wealthy countries during the 20th century the progress stalled around 1990.  On the major markers of social status (income, wealth, and political participation as I recall), we are still where we were 22 years ago!

While Ridgeway argues we cannot directly affect our cognitive biases, given their deep and unconscious operation, we can certainly affect their impact on our discourse, watch for it, and compensate.  We can revise our hiring and promotion practices, we can change more casual standards too perhaps, e.g. by making direct eye-contact with marginalized people.  That could be part of critical thinking too, and might aid its impact. Attention to micro-inequalities may be critical too in the sense of necessary to push beyond the stall, and psychology is helping us sort them out.  The stakes remain pretty high for women and minorities.

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ArguBlogging

Posted in Argumentation, Computation, Connections, tagged , , , , , , , , on April 12, 2012| 1 Comment »

The ever-industrious folks at ARG:Dundee (the group behind the popular argument diagramming software Araucaria) have a lovely new tool for keeping track of and participating in argumentation on the “blogosphere”.  They call it “argublogging“. I think it’s an impressive extension of the work they’ve done on the Argument Interchcange Format, or AIF. The video below gives a demonstration of how ArguBlogging works.  If you use argument diagrams in class and discuss the kinds of current events that get discussed on blogs then this program may well be your new best friend. Have a look. Try it out.  Send them feedback.  This is work worth supporting.

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CFP: Special Issue of Argument and Computation

Posted in Argumentation, CFP, Computation, tagged , , on April 12, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Call for papers:

Argument and Computation – special issue on Argumentation for Consumers of Healthcare

Abstracts due May 15, 2012
Full papers due September 1, 2012.

Topics include but are not limited to computationally-oriented treatments of:

  • Theories of argumentation for health system design,
  • Persuasion for health-behavior change or health management,
  • Negotiation with patients about treatment regimens,
  • Lay-oriented justification of diagnosis or proposed medical interventions,
  • Effective risk communication and meeting other patient education needs via argumentation,
  • Argument source attributes, e.g., establishing credibility and trust,
  • Argument medium attributes, e.g., engagement and immediacy through interaction with conversational agents or multimodal systems,
  • User modeling, i.e., leveraging computational models of the message recipient’s (initial or evolving) attitudes for content selection and presentation design,
  • Assistance for consumers in finding and evaluating evidence, possibly conflicting, in the medical literature or with respect to direct-to-consumer medical advertisements,
  • Tools for training health professionals in argumentation theory and practice,
  • Argumentation-theory based tools for training patients and consumers in critical thinking.

For more information see call for papers for special issue on
the journal’s web site:  http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/tarc

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Posted in Argumentation, Connections, Fallacies, Uncategorized on March 23, 2012| Leave a Comment »

It seems to me that these reasons are not sufficient to prefer men (or white, straight, wealthy, able-bodied, etc. people) over other people. It’s not sufficient because the sorts of impressions addressed here while quite ubiquitous are of minor relevance to what makes a good …. whatever the issue is. Speakers need more than an authoritative voice, and also a social significance that can be parsed in many different ways. Track records can also be assessed in different ways and being established by track record in any case may also indicate entrenchment in outdated approaches and even burnout or over-exposure. The person who attracts an audience is also not necessarily the person who makes the greatest impression on an audience.

Yet it seems argumentation theory ought to be able to provide a clearer means for dismissing these sorts of appeals.  In a hierarchical society hierarchical social categories such as gender and race are sometimes relevant, but how can we show the (severe) limitation of that relevance?  Is generic status ever sufficient reason to promote or prefer a person?

annejjacobson's avatarFeminist Philosophers

In a sexist society where there is a very long tradition of women being excluded from a wide range of desirable public roles, we should expect many of the following things to be said of men and these roles:

People expect a man to be doing X.
People associate manliness with important features of this role. (E.g., a male voice has more authority.)
Men have much more of a proven track record at X.
(Some) men will have much more of an audience than any woman does.

So what do we think of appealing to such beliefs as a reason to favor picking only men for such roles? One response is to label it as the ‘Sexism Wins’ strategy, with the implication that the actions are sexist. What would you suggest? Notice that the strategy is different from the frequently false response to the effect that there just aren’t any…

View original post 90 more words

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Psychology, Emotion, and the Human Sciences

Posted in Announcements, Argumentation, Critical Thinking, Informal Logic, Rhetoric, Seminar/Workshop/Program Announcements, tagged , , , , , , on March 23, 2012| Leave a Comment »

The program for the University of Windsor symposium on Psychology, Emotion and the Human Sciences is now available at http://www.thehumansciences.com/programme/.  Registration should be available in a few days.

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CFP: Symposium on Influencing People with Information

Posted in Argumentation, CFP, Computation, Connections, tagged , , , , , , , on March 5, 2012| Leave a Comment »

First Announcement and Call for Papers

Symposium “Influencing People with Information”
University of Aberdeen, Wednesday 25 April 2012.
How can a web site help you decide how best to travel? Can a computer explain your patient record to you? Does instant feedback on petrol use change how people drive? This symposium will ask how information can influence people, and how the manner in which the information is presented can make a difference. It will bring together researchers working on natural language generation, information presentation, behaviour change, argumentation and decision support.
For the last 5 years, researchers at the University of Aberdeen have investigated how information expressed in natural language can affect a recipient in terms of his/her knowledge, actions and emotions. Now, a Symposium supported by the Scottish Computer Science and Informatics Alliance (SICSA) will widen the focus from language, addressing a range of research questions about the ways in which information, and the presentation of information, can influence people. The aim of the symposium is to hear a range of views on this topic, including both established and young (e.g., PhD student) researchers, and to explore ideas for future research and funding in this mutidisciplinary area. The symposium aims to cover empirical as well as computational work (e.g., including experimental psychology).

We solicit submission of 500-1000-word abstracts in pdf format. Submissions should be submitted using Easychair at https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sipi2012

 

For further information, see the above-mentioned Symposium web site.

 

Feel free to forward to interested parties.

 

Submission of abstracts: 28 March 2012
Symposium date: 25 April 2012

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The joke’s on the proliferation of discourse

Posted in Argumentation, Critical Thinking, News on March 2, 2012| 2 Comments »

I had thought that the increasing strategy of reductio ad absurdum in US politics was because so much of US politics is verging on the absurd.  However, the picture may be more complicated than that, and it’s nice to think there is some source for the problem we might address systematically.

A series of “joke amendments” provide reductios to abortion bills that have recently surged.  These “jokes”, such as the suggestion that vasectomies be illegal, are a serious move, argues Jessica Ogilvie in The Gloss.  They reveal inattention to the medical nature of abortion procedures.

“Legislating against it is just as fucked up as, say, legislating against heart surgery. Or prostate cancer surgery. Or…vasectomies.”

How does this happen?  She suggests it’s political inflation:

“When we talk about abortion, we get so caught up in the politics of it, as well as the philosophical questions it brings up (questions that would be better addressed in a house of worship or a college class than on a Senate floor, for the record), that we tend to lose sight of one important fact: abortion is a medical procedure.”

But what is the source of this inflation?  Everyone likes to think he or she is a moral expert and may caught up in the headiness of the debate.  How many philosophers avoid teaching the abortion debate because it is just so very heady?  Too many, I’d say.  I concur with Ogilvie that that’s a proper venue, and I’d add underused.

What allows us to lose sight of the medical nature of abortion, and the fact that it is a rare law that prohibits people from choosing what to do with their bodies, right or wrong, is the proliferation of discourse.  Politics has become self-sustaining and spun off from the concrete contexts that give it significance; likewise medical decisions can be assigned to physicians (as abortion used to be in Canada) instead of patients.  Such divergent discourses are harder to avoid in a classroom, or in the personal decision (as this joke card makes clear).

Thank goodness feminist lawyers are trained in critical thinking and strategic argumentation that aids the revelation of assumptions, such as the assumption that abortion is not a medical procedure.

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Cartwright on argumentation? Rock on!

Posted in Argumentation, Connections, tagged , , on March 1, 2012| Leave a Comment »

I couldn’t quite believe my eyes!  But it’s true.  Nancy Cartwright, bad-girl of philosophy of science, denier of laws of nature, champion of singular causation, is giving a lecture on argumentation on March 8 at Western’s Rotman Institute for Philosophy.  To me it’s as if Gaga were to take her lyrics from Wittgenstein.

The lecture will be streamed live and available later on-line.

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FEMMSS 4: Sessions on argumentation and communication

Posted in Announcements, Argumentation, Seminar/Workshop/Program Announcements on February 27, 2012| 1 Comment »

The schedule is now available for FEMMSS 4, the fourth biennial conference of the Association for Feminist Epistemologies, Methodologies, Metaphysics and Science Studies, to be held at Penn State (Nittany Lion Inn) May 10-12, 2012. The program includes a 2 1/2 hour plenary session on feminism and argumentation, plus a concurrent session on narrative and testimony, both on the last day. (These themes occur periodically throughout the conference.) See session details below.

Registration is active on-line and the fee is fairly comprehensive, including a late continental breakfast and lunch on-site each of the three days, plus a dinner reception at Nancy Tuana’s house on Friday night. Please see http://femmss.org.  It is also possible to register for just one day. We recommend paying by cheque or electronic transfer, but if you prefer then for an extra fee Paypal will be available shortly.

On-line you will also find travel and accommodation information.

Saturday May 12
10:30-1 Plenary in Ballroom C
Feminism and Argumentation

Catherine Hundleby (Windsor). Feminist Epistemology and Argumentation Theory.

Moira Howes (Trent). Poisoning the Well, Community Intellectual Virtue, and Feminism.

James C. Lang (Toronto). The “Will to Ignorance” as a Block to Engagement with Feminist Theory.

Khameiel Al Tamimi (York). A Feminist Critique of the Universal Audience.

Maureen Linker (Michigan-Dearborn). Whose Argument? Whose Credibility?: Challenging Bias in the Context of Debate.

Linda Carozza (York). (Emotional) Arguments and Feminist-friendly Resolution Mechanisms.

2-3:50 Concurrent Sessions
What She Said: Communication, Narrative and Testimony (Ballroom C)

Sara Hottinger (Keene State College). Visualizing Rationality: An Examination of Portraits in History of Mathematics Textbooks.

Shari Stone-Mediatore (Ohio Wesleyan). Ignorance and Oblivion: A Decolonial Perspective on the Epistemologies of Ignorance.

Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor (Pennsylvania State) and Deborah Tollefsen (Memphis). “Falling Off the Roof”: Menstruation, Body Illiteracy, and Epistemic Injustice.

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