For those who may have missed it, or for those who may want to revisit the experience, the conference organizers have posted some pictures of goings on at the Seventh ISSA conference. Those of you who were in attendance will be happy to know that we all look remarkably comfortable despite the heat wave. Perhaps argumentation theorists just know how to keep their cool…
Browsing the Argumentation Blog today turned up this announcement of an interesting website devoted to argument mapping, created by argument mapping guru Tim van Gelder. The site is aimed at university level educators, and offers a kind of clearinghouse of information and resources on the subject of argument mapping, including links to trial versions of van Gelder’s mapping software. I’ve added the link to the “Other Resources” section here on RAIL (see the right hand column near the end), but thought that it might be of enough interest to warrant an announcement here too given that summer is the time that many of us prepare for our Fall teaching obligations.
Posted in Teaching | Tagged argument diagramming, argument mapping, Argument Maps/Diagrams, Argumentation, van Gelder | Leave a Comment »
Cognitive dissonance is one of the best established notions in psychology. Simply put (perhaps too simply) the idea is that people in general will go to almost any length to hold onto a cherished belief, no matter how strong the evidence against it is, and no matter how irrational the attempt to do so may seem (or actually be). In a recent posting on his blog Ben Goldacre talks about a recent article in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology that focuses on this effect in cases where subjects dismiss well-founded scientific data that contradicts their beliefs.
While reading this discussion I kept returning in memory to a session I attended at ISSA a couple of weeks ago on deep disagreement. Two of the papers presented focused extensively on strategies for resolving deep disagreements. David Zarefsky presented a battery of strategies none of which, interestingly, involved a direct attack on the belief(s) at the heart of the disagreement. Manfred Kraus’s proposal was that deep disagreement be dealt with by “anti-logical” reasoning after the fashion of the Sophist, Protagoras. I’m no expert on the Sophists but as I understood the paper Kraus seemed to be suggesting that in anti-logical reasoning it’s not so much the partisans of the contradictory views that work out their disagreement as it is the audience to the dispute, who act in the role of judge.
Posted in Connections, Discussion, Rationality, Rhetoric | Tagged cognitive dissonance, Deep Disagreement, Goldacre, ISSA, Kraus, polarization, Sophists, Sunstein, Zarefsky | Leave a Comment »
October 7-9, 2010
Diego Portalés University
Santiago, Chile
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:
Eveline Feteris, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Chris Reed, University of Dundee, Scotland
Luis Vega, UNED, Spain
Michael A. Gilbert, York University, Canada
The International Conference Logic, Argumentation and Critical Thinking II is a new academic effort of our Centre to continue what was started with the first Conference in January 2008. Just as with the first Conference, in which we were together with researchers from Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Paraguay, Spain, The Netherlands, United States, and Uruguay, in this second conference we are not only trying to deepen and update the production of knowledge in the fields that this conference covers, but we are also trying to contribute to a positive valuation of different proposals that develop critical thinking and promote social debate with a standard of reasonableness.
This Conference, organized by the Centre for the Study of Argumentation and Reasoning (CEAR) of the Faculty of Psychology at Diego Portales University, would like to generate tools, approaches and solutions to apply in those fields in which the uses of reason is fundamental: communication, law, education, etc.
We do not have an official theoretical position, but rather we value the diversity of angles and proposals. We invite the scientific international community, which works in the topics of the Conference, to participate and share its knowledge, experience and current challenges.
The organizing committee invites proposal for papers in logic, informal logic, argumentation theory, rhetoric, critical thinking.
ABSTRACTS prepared for blind refereeing must be submitted electronically no later than August 16, 2010, to Cristián Santibáñez: cristian.santibanez@udp.cl
Abstracts should be between 200 and 250 words long, in APA format.
Official languages of the Conference: Spanish and English.
Posted in CFP | Tagged CEAR | Leave a Comment »
August 10-12, 2012
Sponsored by the Japan Debate Association (JDA)
Keynote Speakers
David Zarefsky, PhD Yoshiro Yano, PhD
Northwestern University Chuo University
CALL FOR PAPERS
The 4th Tokyo Conference on Argumentation will be held August 10-12, 2012, in Tokyo, Japan. The conference is sponsored by the Japan Debate Association (JDA). The conference is designed to encourage exchanges of views on the theory, practice and instruction of argumentation across the disciplines. Presentations related to the convention theme “The Role of Argumentation in Society” are encouraged, but proposals are not restricted to it. Potential topics of interest include: argumentation and rhetoric, forensic pedagogy, the philosophy and psychology of reasoning, practical studies, and studies of historical argumentative texts. Qualified papers will appear in our Proceedings to be distributed at the Conference.
On-line submission of abstracts will be accepted starting December 15, 2010. Submit your title, affiliation and abstract (200-300 words) by January 15, 2012, on our web site at: http://japan-debate-assoociation.org/tokyo_conference/ Acceptance will be notified by February 20, 2012. Accepted authors who wish to have their papers considered for publication in the Proceedings must submit full manuscript by May 20, 2012. If you have questions, please contact Planning Committee Chair Takeshi Suzuki, School of Information and Communication, Meiji University, 1-9-1 Eifuku, Suginami, Tokyo 168-8555 JAPAN, or ask your question at: http://japan-debate-organization.org/form/question.html
Posted in CFP | Tagged JDA | Leave a Comment »
So, about that “live from ISSA” thing…
Yeah, that kinda didn’t happen. Perhaps it was the punishing heat, abnormal for Amsterdam at this time of year. Perhaps it was jetlag. It may even have been that the papers were so incredibly interesting that the poor writer’s brain simply collapsed under the strain at the end of each day. Or it might have been bewitchment at the charm and beauty of this famous city. Perhaps it was all of these. We will never know. All that can be done at this point is to beg the good reader’s indulgence. It was rather more challenging to find the time to write than I expected.
Prior to coming here I had heard many things about what to expect, and it turns out that all of the nice things I heard were true. The Dutch are friendly and relaxed, the cafes are excellent, and the city truly is beautiful by day and by night, offering enough history, art, and architecture to make one wonder just why there is so much activity in that one part of town, anyway. The city certainly deserves to be on everyone’s travel agenda. It is lovely.
ISSA too, was pleasant and highly rewarding. I spent most of my time over the three days in sessions on rationality and reasonableness and argument schemes. I heard quite a few interesting papers. I may write about some of them later here once I’ve had time to sit down, look over my notes, and think through them again. In addition to the papers, there were a great many conversations, at lunch and at receptions and informal gatherings too at which I learned a good deal. These, in addition to being remarkably pleasant despite the heat, and a testament to the fundamental good will of argumentation theorists generally, were often as enlightening as the sessions themselves.
All in all it was a great conference in a fine city. With any luck I’ll be able to make a return trip in 2012. That is, of course, provided the Aztec god doesn’t jump out of the Mexican jungle and devour the world before then. It would be a shame if that did happen. Those pancakes really are fantastic. 🙂
Posted in Connections, Discussion | Tagged ISSA | Leave a Comment »
Hello all,
As many of you are no doubt aware, ISSA 2010 is but a couple short weeks away. I will be there, and hope to do some postings live from the event (IF I can find free or at least very cheap wi-fi access). The aim of these posts will be to give those who cannot attend ISSA a snapshot of the goings-on there, as well as to provide a forum for continuing conversation for participants and attendees.
Certainly I’ll be including summaries of keynote presentations as I will be present for all of them, but I’m curious to know which other aspects of the conference you might be interested in reading about here. If no one posts anything you’ll just get my take on the papers I want to see (caveat emptor!). 🙂 If there seems to be a lot of interest in particular topics or papers though I’ll make an effort to get to those sessions and write about them too.
So, is there anything in particular at this year’s ISSA conference that you’d like to see covered here at RAIL? If so, post here and I’ll do the best I can to honor the requests with the most support. If this goes well, I’ll do something similar for OSSA 2011 next year too.
Posted in Discussion, News | Tagged ISSA 2010 | 2 Comments »
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?
Posted in Connections, Discussion | Tagged Argumentation | 5 Comments »
Many of us teach service courses called “Critical Thinking” in our colleges and universities. Exactly what ‘critical thinking’ means, however, is and has been the source of much vexation. Reading this blog post by neuroscience researcher and popularizer Jonah Lehrer put me in mind of a discussion I’ve sometimes heard bits and pieces of in this context: on whether and how critical thinking bears any relation to creative thinking.
Broadly speaking I’d suppose that most people understand critical thinking as a br0adly analytical enterprise. Whether one is extracting an argument for evaluation, analyzing a discussion according to pragma-dialectic rules or critiquing a speech according to rhetorical canons of interpretation, the effort seems to be one in which the task is to “look underneath” the surface phenomenon of the linguistic artifact (the argument or dialogue as it is found “naturally”, in its own discursive “habitat”, say) to structural, prescriptive, and other such properties. Creative thinking seems less to be about analyzing images or bits of text, and more about the realization of hitherto un-thought-of possibilities that arise from them, or perhaps about the ability to associate freely between different sorts of families of word or image.
It would be easy to pigeonhole critical thinking and creative thinking into wholly different mindsets by saying that critical thinking is about analysis and creative thinking is about expression, but I think this would be misleading. Critical thinkers learn to prize clarity of expression and to be clear when the occasion requires it. Creative thinkers also engage in analysis, for example, in the visual analysis of whether a composition or a choice of color is apt given what the artist is trying to express. Despite the apparent differences, I’m inclined to think that creative and critical thinking aren’t wholly disparate. Important to both, for example, is the ability to resist framing problems and other dynamics that artificially close off avenues of interpretation or understanding. Both, I think, also require the development of character traits like intellectual independence. Certainly neither is possible without a good deal of open-mindedness. Freedom of thought and expression seems essential for developing both sets of skills too.
This is not to say that we can collapse the two. I don’t think we can or should. I do think, however, that it might be interesting from a pedagogical point of view to consider what critical thinking would look like if taught from a creative perspective, and vice versa. What kind of classroom environment would best combine both? What skills, ideally, would the student leave such a class with that he or she doesn’t leave a critical thinking class with now?
Though I am here thinking mostly of pedagogical concerns, I can’t help but wonder if thinking along these lines might not be helpful in sorting out the relationship between rhetoric and argumentation too.
Posted in Connections, Discussion, Teaching | Tagged analysis, classroom, creativity, critical thinking, Jonah Lehrer, Teaching | 4 Comments »
CMNA X
The 10th International Workshop on
Computational Models of Natural Argument
in association with ECAI 2010
16 August 2010
Lisbon, Portugal
AIMS AND SCOPE
The series of workshops on Computational Models of Natural Argument is continuing to attract high quality submissions from researchers around the world since its inception in 2001. Like the past editions, CMNA 10 acts to nurture and provide succor to the ever growing community working on Argument and Computation, a field developed in recent years overlapping Argumentation Theory and Artificial Intelligence.
AI has witnessed a prodigious growth in uses of argumentation throughout many of its subdisciplines: agent system negotiation protocols that demonstrate higher levels of sophistication and robustness; argumentation-based models of evidential relations and legal processes that are more expressive; groupwork tools that use argument to structure interaction and debate; computer-based learning tools that exploit monological and dialogical argument structures in designing pedagogic environments; decision support systems that build upon argumentation theoretic models of deliberation to better integrate with human reasoning; and models of knowledge engineering structured around core concepts of argument to simplify knowledge elicitation and representation problems. Furthermore, benefits have not been unilateral for AI, as demonstrated by the increasing presence of AI scholars in classical argumentation theory events and journals, and AI implementations of argument finding application in both research and pedagogic practice within philosophy and argumentation theory.
The workshop focuses on the issue of modelling “natural” argumentation. Naturalness may involve, for example, the use of means which are more visual than linguistic to illustrate a point, such as graphics or multimedia; or the use of more sophisticated rhetorical devices, interacting at various layers of abstraction; or the exploitation of “extra-rational” characteristics of the audience, taking into account emotions and affective factors.
Contributions are solicited addressing, but not limited to, the following areas of interest:
- The characteristics of natural arguments: ontological aspects and cognitive issues.
- The use of models from informal logic and argumentation theory, and in particular, approaches to specific schools of thought developed in informal logic and argumentation.
- Rhetoric and affect: the role of emotions, personalities, etc. in models of argumentation.
- The roles of licentiousness and deceit and the ethical implications of implemented systems demonstrating such features.
- The linguistic characteristics of natural argumentation, including discourse markers, sentence format, referring expressions, and style.
- Persuasive discourse processing (discourse goals and structure, speaker/hearer models, content selection, etc.).
- Language dependence and multilingual approaches.
- Empirical work based on corpora looking at these topics are especially welcomed.
- Non-monotonic, defeasible and uncertain argumentation.
- Natural argumentation and media: visual arguments, multi-modal arguments, spoken arguments.
- Models of argumentation in multi-agent systems inspired by or based upon theories of human argument.
- Empirically driven models of argument in AI and Law.
- Evaluative arguments and their application in AI systems (such as decision support and advice giving).
- Issues of domain specificity, and in particular, the independence of argumentation techniques from the domain of application.
- Applications of computer supported collaborative argumentation, in realistic domains in which argument plays a key role, including pedagogy, e-democracy and public debate.
- Applications of argumentation based systems, including, for example, the pedagogical, health-related, political, and promotional.
- Methods to better convey the structure of complex argument, including representation and summarisation.
- Tools for interacting with structures of argument, including visualisation tools and interfaces supporting natural, stylised or formal dialogue.
- The building of computational resources such as online corpora related to argumentation.
PROGRAMME COMMITTEE
Workshop co-chairs:
Chris Reed, University of Dundee, UK
Floriana Grasso, University of Liverpool, UK
Nancy Green, University of North Carolina Greensboro, USA
This year’s programme committee is to be confirmed, but will be similar to the PC for 2009:
Leila Amgoud, IRIT, France
Katie Atkinson, University of Liverpool, UK
Guido Boella, University of Turin, Italy
Karl Branting, The MITRE Corporation, Hanover, MD
Giuseppe Carenini, University of British Columbia, Canada
Chrysanne DiMarco, University of Waterloo, Canada
Tom Gordon, Fraunhofer FOKUS, Berlin, Germany
Marco Guerini, FBK-IRST, Trento, Italy
Helmut Horacek, Universität des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken Germany
Anthony Hunter, University College London, UK
David Moore, Leeds Metropolitan University, UK
Fabio Paglieri, ISTC-CNR, Rome, Italy
Vincenzo Pallotta, University of Fribourg, Switzerland
Cécile Paris, CSIRO, Sydney, Australia
Paul Piwek, Open University, UK
Henry Prakken, Universities of Utrecht and Groningen, The Netherlands
Sara Rubinelli, University of Lucerne, Switzerland
Patrick Saint-Dizier, IRIT-CNRS, Toulouse, France
Oliviero Stock, ITC-IRST, Trento, Italy
Doug Walton, University of Windsor, Ontario
Simon Wells, University of Dundee, UK
Adam Wyner, King’s College, London, UK
SUBMISSIONS
The workshop encourages submissions in three categories:
- Long papers, either reporting on completed work or offering a polemic discussion on a burning issue (up to 10 pages)
- Short papers describing work in progress (up to 5 pages)
- Demonstration of implemented systems: submissions should be accompanied by written reports (up to 3 pages). Authors should contact the organisers to ensure suitable equipment is available.
It is highly recommended to submit papers using the final camera-ready formatting style specified in the ECAI style guide (except for the number of pages) available at http://ecai2010.appia.pt/
Paper submission will be handled by the Easychair conference system: please visit http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cmna10
Deadline for long papers submission: 9 May 2010
Deadline for short papers submission: 6 June 2010
Notification to authors: 14 June 2010
Camera-ready version: 26 June 2010
CMNA 10: Monday 16 August 2010
Authors of accepted papers will be invited to submit a revised version for the Routledge/Taylor & Francis journal, Argument and Computation.
Posted in CFP | Tagged AI, argument, Argumentation, Computation, dialogue, ECAI, visual argumentation | Leave a Comment »
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