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CFP: First Croatian International Conference on Rhetoric

November 17, 2011 by SP

The First Croatian International conference on Rhetoric (in honor of  Ivo Skaric) will be held April 19th – 22nd 2012 on the island of Brac (Postira) in Croatia.  Scholars working in the field of rhetoric and neighboring disciplines are invited to submit.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Abstracts should be submitted no later than 15th January 2012 by email to dis@ffzg.hr. Following a peer review process, notifications of acceptance will be sent by 15th February 2012.
Abstracts should be written in Croatian or English and should not exceed  500 words, excluding author details (name and affiliation) and references.   Abstracts should include a description of the research, aim and method and the most important results.  Conference papers will be published in the Proceedings.

Conference Themes include, but are not limited to:

  • Argumentation and Law
  • History of Rhetoric
  • Rhetoric and Philosophy
  • Media Rhetoric
  • Rhetoric of Political Discourse
  • Rhetoric of Religious Discourse
  • Rhetoric of Scientific Discourse
  • Rhetoric in Education
  • Argumentation Theory

More information can be found at the conference website: http://www.ffzg.unizg.hr/dis/

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Third Workshop on Complex Networks

November 8, 2011 by SP

3rd Workshop on Complex Networks

 Call for Papers/Abstracts

This international workshop on complex networks (CompleNet 2012) aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners working on areas related to complex networks. In the past two decades we have been witnessing an exponential increase on the number of publications in this field. From biological systems to computer science, from economic to social systems, complex networks are becoming pervasive in many fields of science. It is this interdisciplinary nature of complex networks that this workshop aims at addressing.

Authors are encouraged to submit previously unpublished papers/abstracts on their research in complex networks. Both theoretical and applied papers are of interest. Specific topics of interest are (but not limited to): Continue Reading »

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Improvisation and Argumentation

November 6, 2011 by SP

Ah, the wonders of Twitter. In a chain of argumentation that wandered around quite a bit today, the question of improvisation (what it is, how best to characterize it, etc.) came up. For those RAIL readers who are classically trained rhetoricians, this question will no doubt call to mind Book Ten of Quintillian’s Institutio Oratoria, which deals with extemporaneous speech. This led to the contribution of the video below by one of the participants.

The expansive talk herein is by George E. Lewis, the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University. The general gist of it is that much of human interaction is understandable as improvisation (as understood in a manner analogous to the sort that occurs in musical performance). If this were right, then interesting consequences would follow for argumentation, at least when argumentation is considered as a dialectical process between two or more persons.  For starters, one such consequence would be that argumentation needs to be seen more as a cooperative than a competitive phenomenon. Accordingly, many of the “moves” of various participants would have to be understood outside the scope of strategies for “winning”.  There are other potential results too, I think, but they’re likely to appear differentially according to the approach to argumentation one takes. (For example, I find myself wondering with great interest how those working within the framework of normative pragmatics would understand improvisation in argumentation, but I’ll leave the answering of that wonder to those more qualified than I to speak on it.)

It is an interesting talk, but be warned: it is a little on the longish side and it’s general orientation from within a Continental philosophical framework may not be everyone’s cup of tea. If, knowing that, you’re not scared, then have go at it!

I would be remiss if I did not thank consummate jazz musician Vijay Iyer 1) for getting involved in our Twitter conversation at all and 2) for posting the above video in the hopes of enlightening us as to the nature and power of improvisation.  In return, I post this video of his wonderful trio covering Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature” in which they, yes, improvise delightfully.

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Items of Interest in The Reasoner

October 29, 2011 by SP

For those who may not be aware of it yet, The Reasoner is wonderful, interdisciplinary, monthly publication devoted to matters that fall largely within the sphere of formal logic and research on reasoning.  Because the focus is so often on formal methods this may not seem, at first, to be the kind of thing that most argumentation theorists naturally would be inclined to look at, but I find it often contains vignettes, short articles, and interviews that ofter serious food for thought to those with interests in informal logic, argumentation, and critical thinking.

A case in point is the most recent issue (vol. 5 no. 11), which contains a fascinating interview with mathematical logician Wilfrid Hodges and a sharp little essay attacking the distinction between critical and creative thinking by A. Minh Nguyen. (Readers of this blog may recall similar ruminations offered in this post from April of 2010).  To whet your appetite, here’s a quote from the Hodges interview:

I have no patience at all with the view of Kant, followed by Frege and some modern writers, that logic studies how we ought to think and psychology studies how we do think. A logician can tell you that if you reason by rule X, then you will sometimes find yourself deducing false conclusions from true premises. It does follow that if you want never to deduce false conclusions from true premises, you ought not to use rule X. So for example you ought not to use rule X in a research paper in pure mathematics. But in real life, where time and memory are often limited and premises are often dubious in one way or another, rule X might be for practical purposes exactly what you need. One of the major achievements of logic of the last fifty years is to start taking seriously the constraints under which we reason, and the different aims that we can have in our reasoning. This expansion of logic gives many openings for collaboration between logicians and cognitivists [i.e. cognitive scientists].

The interview moves from considerations like this one to a discussion of the relationship between logic and cognitive science, and includes an interesting discussion of the logic of the medieval Arab philosopher Ibn Sina.

The Reasoner is an open access publication. Its present and past issues as well are all downloadable in .pdf format free of charge.

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Open Access to THEORIA Symposium Issue on Bermejo-Luque’s “Giving Reasons”

October 22, 2011 by SP

The journal THEORIA has just published its 72nd issue with a symposium on Lilian Bermejo-Luque’s, Giving Reasons (Springer, 2011. Argumentation Series). The discussants are John Biro, Harvey Siegel, James B. Freeman, David Hitchcock, Robert C. Pinto and Luis Vega.

In Giving Reasons, Bermejo-Luque attempts to set out and defend an original approach to argumentation theory that hinges on what she calls “argumentation as a second order speech-act complex”.  The discussion that emerges between Bermejo-Luque and her distinguished panel of respondents about this approach to argumentation theory  is an interesting one.  Click here to view the journal page, from which all articles can be accessed free of charge: http://www.ehu.es/ojs/index.php/THEORIA/issue/current.

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CFP: Rhetoric in Society 4

October 22, 2011 by SP

Call for Papers

Rhetoric in Society 4

“Contemporary Rhetorical Citizenship:

Purposes, Practices, and Perspectives”

Department of Media, Cognition, and Communication

Section of Rhetoric

University of Copenhagen

January 15-18, 2013

This is the first bulletin of the fourth biennial Rhetoric in Society Conference to be held January 15-18, 2013 at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

With this bulletin, we want to invite you to do two things: mark your calendars and start thinking about how you might contribute to the conference with your scholarship.

Below, we introduce the theme of the conference and provide basic information about the various presentation formats.

Within a few weeks, we will contact you again with more information about the conference program, key-note speakers, and how to submit an abstract.

In the planning of the conference we wish to promote discussion among conference attendees. One way is to set time aside for discussion in all meetings, another is to allow for regular breaks, and a third way is to arrange social gatherings suitable to networking and amicable conversation. We hope you will come and be part of the discussion!

Theme

The theme for this fourth conference on Rhetoric in Society is “Contemporary Rhetorical Citizenship: Purposes, Practices, and Perspectives”.

With the concept of rhetorical citizenship we want to draw critical attention to the ways in which being a citizen in a modern democratic state is in many respects a discursive phenomenon. Citizenship is not just a condition such as holding a passport, it is not just behavior such as voting; citizenship also has a communicative aspect: Some perform citizenship when they watch a political debate on TV or discuss a program about homeless people with their colleagues over lunch – or when, one day, they don’t duck behind the fence but engage their cranky neighbor in conversation about her views on city street lighting. Others enact citizenship when they engage in political debates on Facebook or Twitter or join their friends in coming up with the most poignant wording for a protest sign the day before a street demonstration. And for others still, “rhetorical citizenship” is a distant ideal far from the realities of their everyday life; because the legal citizenship, literacy, and media access that such a conception of citizenship often presupposes aren’t within their reach, their experience with rhetorical citizenship is one of exclusion.

Rhetoric, with its double character as academic discipline and practice, stands in a unique position to engage the linguistic and discursive aspects of collective civic engagement. Drawing on and in collaboration with neighboring fields of inquiry such as political science, discourse studies, linguistics, media studies, informal logic, practical philosophy and social anthropology, scholars of rhetoric are able to study actual communicative behavior as it circulates in various fora and spheres – from face to face encounters to mediated discourse. With our diverse theoretical and methodological backgrounds we hold many keys to pressing concerns such as the alleged polarization and coarsening of the ‘tone’ in public debate, the turning away from political engagement toward smaller spheres of interest, and the general difficulty in making politics work constructively in many parts of the world, not least the EU.

We invite attendees – scholars, teachers, students, and citizens across a range of disciplinary traditions – to extend our knowledge of the social roles of rhetoric through theoretical and critical study, and to consider our roles as public intellectuals: how are we to name, describe, criticize, analyze, and, indeed, undertake or teach rhetorical action on matters of communal concern whether locally, nationally, or internationally?

Continue Reading »

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CFP: Loughborough Anniversary Conference on Discourse, Rhetoric, Culture and Media

October 16, 2011 by SP

An ANNIVERSARY CONFERENCE to celebrate
25 years of the Discourse and Rhetoric Group
10 years of the Culture and Media Analysis Research Group
March 21st-23rd 2012

Call for individual papers
Please submit your Abstract via Loughborough University’s Conference Administration page: http://www-staff.lboro.ac.uk/~ssca1/DCconf2012/DC2012home.html

We encourage submissions that engage with empirical and theoretical topics in communication studies, discourse analysis, conversation analysis, media studies, social interaction, or cultural studies. Preference will be given to papers that address in original ways the promises and challenges or research in any of these (inter)disciplinary areas.

Abstracts should be up to 350 words in length and written in English. Only one abstract as single / first author will be accepted from any one individual.

Deadline for Abstracts: 1st November, 2011

Looking forward to meeting you in Loughborough!
***
Dr. Sabina Mihelj
Senior Lecturer in Communication and Media Studies
BSc Communication and Media Studies Programme Director
Department of Social Sciences
Brockington Building
Loughborough University
LE11 3TU Loughborough
UK
Url: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ss/staff/mihelj.html

Click link for more information…
http://diskursanalyse.net/wiki.php?wiki=en%3A%3AEvents&id=538

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Informal Logic vol. 31 no. 3

October 6, 2011 by SP

Miss OSSA? Here's your chance to catch up!

 

RAIL is pleased to announce the appearance of a new issue of Informal Logic.  This issue features the keynote papers and the paper that won the J. Anthony Blair prize for best student paper.  Those who followed my postings here or on Twitter during the conference will recall my mentions of Karen Tracy’s fascinating keynote address. Here’s a chance to read the paper itself. While you’re at it I also highly recommend Moldovan and Smith’s Blair Prize paper “Arguments as Abstract Objects”.  Together with Geoff Goddu’s AILACT Prize paper (highlighted in a post of its own here on RAIL not too long ago), I’d say Moldovan and Smith’s paper marks the distinct emergence (some would say re-emergence) of an interesting metaphysical sub-field in informal logic and argumentation theory. It will be interesting to see how others respond to the arguments marshaled in these two papers. At any rate, there’s no denying that the gauntlet has been thrown down!  Happy reading. 🙂

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In Praise of the Doodle (and Visual Literacy and Critical Thinking through Creative Means)

September 28, 2011 by SP

As anyone who has attended one of Erik Krabbe‘s talks knows, doodles, sketches, and cartoons are signs of great genius. I first had the pleasure of seeing his drawings in a CRRAR summer seminar a few years ago. I have to admit that being engaged by the various drawings he used there, and in the talks of his that I’ve had the good fortune to attend since then, has inspired me to re-incorporate that sort of visual element in my own classes. Being a former art major with a drawing background before converting to philosophy, I had used drawings as what I then thought of as a crutch when I first started teaching. I later abandoned the practice when I felt more secure in my role as a teacher. It turns out that I may have been terribly wrong to toss out such a powerful pedagogical tool. My drawings, it seems, were in no way a crutch. On the contrary, if Sunni Brown (the speaker in the video) is right, they are a pedagogical enhancement.  Not only are doodles often funny and engaging, she claims, but they enhance focus as well as other dimensions of critical thinking too.

While the pedagogical dimensions are interesting, equally if not more interesting is the claim that human beings may have an innate “sense” of visual literacy that develops in a regular and predictable way.  Those working on visual argumentation may find this part of the talk very salutary indeed.

All in all, it’s an interesting 6 minutes of video.  Enjoy.

Edit: Today this video popped up in my Twitter feed courtesy of @LilyLivingstone. It perfectly illustrates the pedagogical power of the doodle in mathematics. Good stuff!

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Alvin Goldman and Jennifer Lackey on Social Epistemology

September 23, 2011 by SP

In this interesting installment of the always wonderful PhilosophyTV, Alvin Goldman and Jennifer Lackey discuss the up-and-coming subfield of social epistemology.  Their discussion ranges from the history of the subfield to some of its current topics. It is worth watching for argumentation theorists–especially those based in philosophy–because it represents what amounts to a completely different way of thinking about the epistemic import of human interaction–especially disagreement–than one typically finds in argumentation theory. Whereas there might have been a time when those in the informal logic movement could have rightly claimed to be the only group of philosophers working on these sorts of issues, things have changed dramatically in the last 10 years.  This, I think, is something those of us who know, love, and believe in informal logic should consider fairly seriously. The growing philosophical consciousness of subfields like social epistemology, the logic of belief revision, and non-monotonic logics in general over the past decade or so has definite methodological implications for the work that we do.  At the very least it is a substantial change in a key subset of the audience to which we often address our claims.  Might a change in the rhetoric of informal logic be in the offing?

The video is roughly an hour and fifteen minutes long.  Enjoy!

Posted in Connections, Informal Logic | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments »

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