Arguing: Exchanging Reasons Face to Face (Lea's Communication Series)

ARGUING Exchanging Reasons Face to Face

LEA’S COMMUNICATION SERIES Jennings Bryant/Dolf Zillmann, General Editors

Selected titles in Language and Discourse (Donald Ellis, Advisory Editor) include: Carbaugh • Cultures in Conversation Ellis • From Language to Communication, Second Edition Fitch/Sanders • Handbook of Language and Social Interaction Glenn/LeBaron/Mandelbaum • Studies in Language and Social Interaction: In Honor of Robert Hopper Haslett/Samter • Children Communicating: The First Five Years Locke • Constructing “The Beginning”: Discourses of Creation Science Ramanathan • Alzheimer Discourse: Some Sociolinguistic Dimensions Sigman • Consequentiality of Communication Tracy • Understanding Face-to-Face Interactions For a complete list of titles in LEA’s Communication Series, please contact Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers at www.erlbaum.com

ARGUING Exchanging Reasons Face to Face

Dale Hample Western Illinois University

2005

LAWRENCE ERLBAUM ASSOCIATES, PUBLISHERS Mahwah, New Jersey London

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Copyright © 2005 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of the book may be reproduced in any form, by photostat, microfilm, retrieval system, or any other means, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers 10 Industrial Avenue Mahwah, New Jersey 07430 www.erlbaum.com

Cover concept by Erin Lain Cover design by Kathryn Houghtaling Lacey

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hample, Dale, 1949– Arguing / Dale Hample. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8058-4854-1 (h. : alk. paper) 1. Interpersonal conflict. I. Title. BF637.I48H36 2005 168—dc22 2004056423 CIP

ISBN 1-4106-1348-8 Master e-book ISBN

To my family, my debate coaches, and my teachers

Contents

Preface

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1 Definition of Argument

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Argument Substructure 5 Kinds of Argument 9 Explicit Definitions of Arguing 13 Conclusions and Prospectus 19

2 Frames for Arguing: What Do People Think They’re Doing When They Argue?

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Naïve Actors’ Understandings of Arguing 23 Frames for Arguing 33 The First Frame: One’s Primary Goal 34 The Second Frame: Connecting With the Other’s Goals 40 General Orientation 42 Cognitive Processes 46 The Third Frame: Reflecting on the Experience of Arguing 51 Soundness, the Logical Perspective 52 Effectiveness, the Rhetorical Perspective 54 Appropriateness and the Dialectical Perspective 56 The Three Frames 59 Conclusions 60

3 Invention of Argumentative Substance The Rhetorical Heritage Topoi 62

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Stasis 70 Inventional Capacity Conclusions 83

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4 Editing Arguments

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A General Model of Message Production 88 Situation 89 Goals 94 Plans 99 Messages 105 A Specific Model of Editing Arguments 110 Wilson’s Cognitive Rules Model 111 Meyer’s Theory of Editing 114 Combining Wilson and Meyer 120 Conclusions 123

5 The Emotional Experience of Arguing

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The Absence of Emotions in Argumentation Theory 126 The Importance of Emotionality in Arguing 135 Situations and Argumentativeness 136 State Studies of Taking Conflict Personally 140 A Beginning to Focused Research 142 Emotional Displays While Arguing 143 Felt Emotions While Arguing 171 Prospects for the Study of Emotions While Arguing 174 Conclusions 174

6 Individual and Situational Differences in Arguing Whether to Argue 177 Constructing the Situation 184 Situations and Goals 185 Life Spaces 189 Interpersonal Life Spaces 191 Content Life Spaces 193 Individual Differences 209 Editing One’s Arguments 216 Situational Features 218 Individual Differences in Editing 221 Interaction of Situation and Individual Differences Public Arguing 231 Quantity of Arguments Produced 232 The Appropriateness of Argument 235 The Effectiveness of Argument 236 The Technical Quality of Argument 238

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The Ethical Quality of Argument 238 Knowledge About Public Argument 239 Conclusions 240

7 Arguing in Conversations

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A Normative Theory of Interpersonal Arguing 242 Episodic Structure 243 Required Speech Acts 245 Rules for a Critical Discussion 250 Discussion Rules and Fallacies 253 A Description of Conversational Arguing: Microanalysis 255 The Three-Turn Sequence 255 Preference Organization and Adjacency Pairs 261 Politeness 265 Competence Begging 271 A Description of Conversational Arguing: Macroanalysis 280 Conclusions 298

8 Impossible Arguments

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Pseudoevidence 303 Reflexive Argument 313 Conclusions 326

9 A Closing Editorial About the Importance of Arguing

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References

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Author Index

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Subject Index

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Preface

Arguing—exchanging reasons—is something that we do every day, with nearly everyone we know or meet. Many arguments are individually inconsequential. Where should we move the couch? What should we have for dinner? What magazine should we subscribe to? Collected together, however, they go a long way toward explaining how we navigate through our lives. Argumentation, the study of argument, has a long history, going back to Aristotle. For more than 2,000 years, it has developed in many hands, in many eras, always in touch with its historical and thencontemporary traditions. I regard myself as one heir of all that thinking. The history of argumentation certainly deserves a book of its own, but not this one. Late in the 20th century, a few American argumentation scholars began to take interest in interpersonal arguments. They drew on the centuries of theory and observation about arguments in public oratory, but they found that they needed to develop their own theoretical and methodological apparatus as well. Two threads in this work—minor threads for many years—are cognition and emotion, as these are related to conversational arguing. This book is mainly concerned with those matters: our thoughts, our feelings, and our conversations. One need only flip through the bibliography to get an idea of how much relevant material exists on these topics, but this may be the first full-length effort to draw it together. The work comes not only from the argumentation community but also from studies of message production, interpersonal interaction, personality psychology, conversation analysis, conflict managexi

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ment, persuasion, cognitive science, and rhetoric. I don’t suppose that this book will constitute the last word on the sorts of scholarship that are relevant to the study of interpersonal arguing, but perhaps it will at least serve as a provisional template for the next person to undertake the task. Although I’ve been working on this manuscript for several years, in a sense my involvement goes all the way back to the 1960s, when I first joined a debate team. I debated in high school and college and coached for several years during and after graduate school. Those experiences have certainly formed and continuously reshaped my understanding of arguing, perhaps in ways that I don’t fully grasp, even now. Debating taught me that arguing is a skill, a skill based on secure evidence, and I valued it on that basis in my early years in forensics. In graduate school, I began to realize, mostly though the influence of Joseph Wenzel, that argumentation is a profoundly complex area of study. I oriented myself to it and continually found connections to my studies in persuasion, interpersonal communication, rhetoric, and other areas. I have persevered in that mode for some decades now. I’ve written about attitude change, conflict management, rhetorical theory, interpersonal communication, and other matters, but for me, it has always all been about arguing, whether I was successful in conveying that article by article or not. Ordinarily, a book focused on this general area would have argumentation in its title, or at least argument. I chose arguing—a verb, not a noun (or at least a gerund)—because I want to emphasize from the first that we are considering an active human effort. The products of arguing derive from thinking, feeling, perceiving, anticipating, and experimenting, and I am frankly more interested in exploring those actions than in their effects. Thus most of the book is about argument production, and only a few chapters at the end concentrate on the actual arguments. Readers more interested in the products, or perhaps also interested in them, might want to read books about debate, informal logic, rhetorical practice, or critical discussion. Still, I have covered those topics at least slightly, and such readers may not be completely disappointed.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I have a number of debts to acknowledge. Don Ellis, Mike Allen, Jim Dillard, and Janet Meyer all read portions of the manuscript and provided me with helpful and encouraging responses. Over the years I’ve been the beneficiary of different varieties of support from many people, both here at Western Illinois University and in the scholarly community at large, but they are too numerous to name. My daughters, Jessica and Kelsey, have been intrigued by the idea that I might write a book (possibly they

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don’t think I know that much), and my wife and colleague, Judi Dallinger, has done more than her share of parenting while I worked. My graduate students have helped me carry out a number of studies, particularly in these last years when I found gaps that needed to be filled in the literature. I have fond memories of all the students who debated with me and for me. And I particularly want to name my debate coaches, and the people with whom I coached: Arlene Akerman, the late Harold Lawson, Don Stanton, Charlie Willard, Judy Hample, and the late Vince Follert.

Chapter

1

Definition of Argument

An argument is a conclusion supported by a reason. Normally, the conclusion is something that is controversial (or at least not obvious) before the argument is absorbed. Consequently, some element of the reason— the part normally called the evidence or the data—should be immediately acceptable. That way, the argument moves from the known to the unknown, or from the taken-for-granted to the doubtful. Arguing is something that can only be done by people. Paragraphs do not argue, and neither do propositions. Arguing is a fundamental human activity, perhaps the primary means of coming to new understandings. Argumentation began its academic life as a part of rhetoric and did not really take on any distinct academic identity until the final decades of the 20th century. Consequently, its heritage and definitions derive from several ancient traditions. One of these is rhetoric, of course, but its contributions are intertwined with those of the other disciplines. Dialectic is an important contributory literature. For Aristotle, rhetoric was an offshoot of dialectic (Rhetoric, 1354a). This remark has been the subject of much discussion. Dialectic is a mode of philosophical inquiry, in which (prototypically) two people try to work out the solution to a deep problem—for instance, what is the nature of justice? Although each dialectician may begin with a point of view, once a position is expressed, neither person advocates. Instead, each interlocutor takes the standpoint as something to be tested argumentatively. Definitions are exposed and tested, evidence is sought, and all reasoning is explicit and available for criticism. Nothing personal is supposed to be involved, so the parties’ status, reputations, prior commitments, and other attributes are set 1

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aside. Knowledge is shared, rather than being husbanded as a rhetorical resource. The object is truth, not victory, and the means is clear argumentation. Dialectic, then, is supposed to be purified argumentation. The arguers do not seduce, they do not entertain, and they do not express themselves remarkably. Stylistic figures, in particular, are often seen as out of bounds. To the degree possible in a human conversation, dialecticians exchange logical propositions. They follow the standards for formal logic (which, in fact, were often contained in books about dialectic, frequently having a title like Topics). The precision with which dialecticians are required to define gave rise to elaborate treatments of definition as well as fallacies and logical form. Logic was for millennia seen as the skeleton of argument. Aristotle identified two main sorts of rhetorical argument, the enthymeme and the example. These are both varieties of logical forms, varieties often thought to be inferior to their models. Even today, some philosophers are contemptuous of ordinary argument on the grounds that syllogistic deductions and explicit inductions are superior. The enthymeme is modeled on the syllogism. Perhaps a logician would say, “The United Nations is an assembly of people with disparate interests; no assembly of people with disparate interests can reach firm conclusions; therefore, the United Nations cannot reach firm conclusions.” That, of course, is a fully explicit syllogism. A rhetor, on the other hand, would probably express an enthymeme, perhaps “The United Nations is an assembly of people with disparate interests, so it has no chance to reach any firm conclusions.” Unexpressed in this instance is the logician’s second premise. For centuries, enthymemes were commonly defined as incomplete or truncated syllogisms, and this view was sensible. However, that definition misses the key point. The interesting thing about enthymemes is that audiences fill them in (Bitzer, 1959). This idea has been understood for centuries, although not so clearly expressed as in Bitzer’s classic paper. For instance, Averroës, the great 12th century Arab commentator on the Rhetoric, says about enthymemes: The forms of syllogisms become conclusive according to unexamined opinion by not being strict with regard to them and by omitting from them the thing which causes the conclusion to follow necessarily, the way the multitude is usually content (to do) when speaking to one another. (Averroës, Rhetoric, sec. 5)

Simply to understand the rhetor’s enthymeme, listeners or readers need to supply something much like the logician’s second premise. Enthymemes are the core of human arguing, and so the act of arguing is a human one, involving two active people rather than a series of propositions.

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Examples are rather like inductions because a conclusion is drawn from one or two specific instances. “I’m going to start by outlining my essay because the last time I did that the writing was easy” reasons from a single example. A fully defensible induction may involve application of the scientific method, a sampling of many writers, and comparisons to other composition methods. However, whereas a logician or dialectician seeks a firm, generalizable conclusion, an ordinary arguer is trying to achieve only enough reason to move forward. An example does not serve very well as the basis for theory, but it will often do as a foundation for action, particularly when the stakes are low. Enthymemes and examples, then, are intended to satisfy the needs of people who, situated as they are, need to advance either in thought or in action. Neither sort of argument is essentially aimed at meeting formal standards of validity or science. One of the most fundamental things about humans is that we are cognitive misers: We do not think hard if we can avoid it. Once we have enough reason to satisfy ourselves, we don’t really wish to have more. This reality is what gives birth to enthymemes and examples, yet it puts people at risk of drawing poor conclusions. Syllogisms and inductions generate more secure conclusions than enthymemes and examples. Logicians test syllogisms with truth tables, and scientists test inductions against the standards for empirical investigation. Arguers test arguments against one another. Arguments of importance are always part of an ongoing conversation. Even in a public speech, an argument is a moment in a political controversy or continuing public dialogue. Arguments are answered by other arguments, and arguers by other arguers. The sociality of argument makes it self-correcting. Some examples are genuinely persuasive, and these arguments survive. Some enthymemes make illegitimate leaps, and these arguments are eventually exposed or set aside. Whereas logic and dialectic focus only on the propositional content of an argument, argumentation takes the people seriously as well. Arguments take on their full meanings only when the way people fill in enthymemes is accounted for, and arguments are sound when they provide a satisfactory basis for thought or action. Rhetoric and argumentation go one step further in distancing themselves from their drier brethren: They also take the arguers’ language seriously. Logic insists on the use of sterile, purified vocabulary. For instance, one can syllogize about all of something, none of it, or some of it, but not about most or quite a few. If one thing occurs, then another must, but “if/maybe” confounds logical analysis. Synonyms have to be done away with, and pronouns replaced. Figures are not permitted, so “your eyes are like the constellations of the night” has to be rendered as something like “your eyes have positive aesthetic value.” Both of these issues—the lim-

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ited vocabulary for key terms, and the effort after stylistic neutrality— are serious problems with logic as applied to people. The problem of limited vocabulary is perhaps obvious, but the other requires some comment. Figures of speech and thought are not mere decorations; they express content and therefore constitute or contribute to arguments. Getting rid of a metaphor, for instance, may purify an argument into nonexistence (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1969, sec. 87). I provide an example. One of the earliest surviving English speeches, originally preserved by Bede, was made in 627 to the court of Edwin of Diera by a man now known only as the Alderman. He advocated Christianity, still new to the people. Here is the whole speech: The present life of man on this earth, oh king, in comparison to that existence which is not revealed to us, appears to me like the very swift flight of a sparrow, which for a moment flies through the room in which you, your leaders, and ministers on a wintry day are seated at supper around a warm fire, while out of doors rage the whirling storms of wintry rains and snows; the bird entering through one door quickly passes out through the other. For the brief moment it is within the room, it is safe from the wintry blast, but after a moment of calm from the storm, it quickly returns from winter to winter, and slips away from sight. So, for such a little time, seems this present life of man. But what has gone before, and what comes after, we know not. Therefore if this new doctrine can dispel the mystery, there seems to be merit in following it. (Bryant, Arnold, Haberman, Murphy, & Wallace, 1967, p. 7)

Does anyone seriously believe that this speech can be converted to a series of literal propositions, and still have all its meanings preserved? An informal logician would probably say that the last two sentences are the whole of the real argument. Perhaps these express the main ideas of the argument, but what has happened to the sense and feel of the argument? These topics are not incidental because they provide nuance, emphasize humility, and situate the appeal in the natural condition of humankind. Metaphors are condensed analogies and arise from the ratios of two things, the theme and the phoros. For example, the metaphor “this is a bankrupt idea” is a reduction of “as financial value is to bankruptcy, so is intellectual value to this idea.” Purcell (1987, 1996) showed that the doctrine of transumptio, especially well developed in several medieval artes poetriae, is an essentially syllogistic way of passing meaning from one term to another. Thus, the phrase snowy teeth operates by transferring the unstated “white” from “snow” to “teeth.” In its full form, an enthymematic argument is made by a stylistic figure. In its condensed form, the same thing should be apparent. Rhetorical figures can highlight

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things otherwise expressed, but they can also make assertions, connections, and claims. To understand human arguing, one must not study it in ignorance of the full range of human expression.

ARGUMENT SUBSTRUCTURE Considerations such as those just summarized led Toulmin (1958) to suggest that formal logic does an inadequate job of representing ordinary language arguments. He proposed instead what has come to be known as the Toulmin model of argument. Although his departure from formal logic is not as complete as is often supposed (Hample, 1977b), his model is a genuine advance in the effort to understand the elements of arguments. His model specifies six parts of a full argument: the claim, the qualifier, the data, the warrant, the backing, and the reservation. None of these parts requires any translation from ordinary language into the strict formulae of logic. The elements appear in the model in the same form as they had when expressed or understood. No part of an argument, in Toulmin’s theory, has a particular propositional form. To begin, I examine the six elements individually. The claim is the conclusion of the argument—its point, its persuasive or epistemological goal. As with any other part of the argument, it may or may not be explicit in discourse. However, it must be understood, or the discourse is not recognized as an argument at all. Normally, the claim is at least somewhat controversial and is true or false in some degree, not absolutely (absolutely true or false conclusions are better modeled by formal logic). Therefore, Toulmin included the qualifier, or modal term, as a part of the model. Qualifiers express the force with which claims are made. Something may be probably so, or perhaps so, or in effect only on Tuesdays. The qualifier is not arbitrarily chosen. It reflects the strength of support the rest of the argument provides for the claim. A technically good argument is one whose qualifier precisely matches the strength and applicability of the reason. A key component of the reason is the data, the evidence that supports the claim. The data must be less doubtful than the conclusion because the object is to make the claim more secure than it was prior to the argument. Toulmin described the data as factlike, which is helpful so long as one does not worry much about defining fact. The argument must begin with data that the hearer or reader is willing to take for granted. If the arguer wishes to use controversial data, they must be established as the claim from a prior argument. Thus one can anticipate the possibility of chains or lemma organizations for elaborate arguments. Also, the reli-

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ability of the data is established by the receiver, not by any appeal to philosophical standards. One hopes, of course, that people reason well, but even within this analysis of the substructure of argument, people have the focal role. Regardless of its propositional form (or lack of it), regardless of its inductive or syllogistic rationale, evidence is only evidence if the receiver sees it as such. The warrant links the data to the claim. No matter how it is expressed, the warrant always has the function of asserting that if the data are so, then the claim is so. The warrant declares the relevance (and at least hints at the sufficiency) of the evidence to the conclusion. If, on hearing an arguer’s data, a listener were to object, “What has that to do with the claim?” the arguer’s answer should express a warrant. For example, if “everyone uses computers for all their work today” were offered as evidence for the claim that “computers have systematically wrecked the quality of handwriting of everyone I know,” the warrant is something like “people have little practice at handwriting today and little need to be legible.” In ordinary exchanges, warrants are rarely bare statements that if the evidence is so, then the conclusion is so. Usually warrants have substantive content themselves, as in the handwriting example, and therefore may be controversial. Toulmin therefore included backing in the model. Backing supplies reason to accept the warrant. Toulmin originally said that backing, like data, is factlike. However, the backing really needs to be a complete argument for the warrant and therefore must contain both subordinate evidence and a subordinate warrant (Hample, 1977b). The backing is aimed only at the warrant, not at any other element of the argument. The final element of Toulmin’s model is the reservation or rebuttal. This part of an argument expresses exceptions to the warrant. A reservation suggests that even if the warrant may generally be so, in at least some circumstances it may be inapplicable. In Toulmin’s examples, reservations typically begin with unless, and this is a useful way to understand their function. Like backing, reservations are focused only on the warrant. The qualifier is supposed to reflect the quality of support that the reason provides for the conclusion. The qualifier should therefore display the degree of confidence that an arguer should have in the data and the warrant and may directly reflect some reservation. The Toulmin model focuses quite a lot of attention on the warrant (both the backing and reservation concern themselves exclusively with it). This is because the evidence is assumed to be acceptable in the first place, not because the warrant is more important, more complex, or potentially more vulnerable.

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It is important to emphasize that these six elements are not kinds of statements; rather, they are functions. They must somehow happen when a full argument is made or reconstructed. One cannot examine propositional form and determine that some statement is evidence or a warrant. People naturally think of arguments as verbal things, but a gesture or photograph can serve as a reason or conclusion, too. Although I know of little literature on the topic, I suspect that the qualifier function is often accomplished through vocal pauses, volume, or gestures in ordinary talk. People have a sense of how insistent a conversational partner is, and this sense is stimulated by all of the partner’s behaviors, not merely the verbal ones. An important implication of this emphasis on function, rather than propositional form, is that arguments need not be linear. A linear argument moves straightforwardly from premise to premise, substituting one notion for another, until a novel statement is attained. A syllogism is linear. The simple categorical syllogism “all dogs are affectionate; Rover is a dog; so Rover is affectionate” begins with a general premise, then substitutes “Rover” into the class of “all dogs,” and then adds “affectionate” to what is assigned to Rover in the second premise. Formal logic is clearly linear, and informal logic has a nearly irresistible tendency to be linear as well (but see Gilbert, 1997, for an exception). Stories, in particular, do not work this way, yet they can serve as arguments. In a book far too rarely read, one of the major logicians of the late 19th century made these remarks near the end of his career: The natural procedure in argument does not appear to resemble linear inference. It is a common observation that syllogisms do not occur either in conversational discussion or in argumentative treatises. . . . When a barrister opens his case, or a theorist introduces us, in his initial statement, to the basis of his doctrine, we do not as a rule find ourselves confronted with the first premises of a chain of syllogisms. We find something quite different. An exposition is set before us which at first sight reads more like a description than an argument; and it is only as we enter further into the proposed construction that we observe it to be in fact the development of a subject, intended to introduce us to a scheme of consequences which, if we accept the initial description, we shall be unable to deny. (Bosanquet, 1920, p. 105)

A narrative without discernible linear structure can lead to conclusions. This point has been very nicely illustrated in studies of Senator Edward Kennedy’s Chappaquiddick speech. Kennedy had been driving home from a party and had an accident; a passenger was killed. He neglected to inform police for some time, and this became a delicate political issue for him. He made a speech in which he explicitly took responsibility for the

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accident. However, Ling (1970) and Kneupper (1981) showed that the central narrative of the speech is structured in such a way as to move guilt from Kennedy to the circumstances. Ling and Kneupper both made use of K. Burke’s (1969) pentadic description of human behavior. Every act, according to Burke, has an agent, an agency, a scene, a purpose, and a name. In describing an act, one can form ratios of these five elements to feature one over another, to make one foreground and another background. Kennedy’s speech is full of concrete descriptions of the road, the bridge, the night, the water, and so forth, which overwhelm the much more limited descriptions of himself. In other words, he created a scene/ agent ratio that emphasized the setting. In this way, Kennedy managed to suggest that the blame for the accident lay in the scene, even though he said he took responsibility. The disconnect between his explicit acceptance of blame and the situational conclusion his audience is naturally drawn to makes him seem noble, taking blame where he may not need to. Fisher (1987) offered an elaborate treatment of the argumentative possibilities of narrative. A storyteller presents a sound argument to the degree that the narrative has fidelity (i.e., each part seems true or probable) and coherence (i.e., it is consistent with other discourse elements, other stories, and the characters of the actors involved). Fisher’s claim that the narrative is the fundamental sort of human communication and that other forms need to be assimilated to it has been controversial, and need not detain me here. It is enough to see that storytellers argue, that stories are nonlinear, and that evaluative standards for them are nonetheless available. Although Goodwin (1990) did not apply Fisher’s analysis, her commentary on a children’s exchange invites it. A group of boys are playing, and one initiates a reasonably linear challenge–response sequence with another boy: Tony: Why don’t you get out my yard. Chopper: Why don’t you make me get out the yard.

After several predictably fruitless exchanges of this sort, Chopper interrupts himself (“No you won’t you little—”), with an in-turn initiation of a damaging story about Tony, alleging Tony’s cowardice. After the story has been told in outline, Tony begins to protest that he did not do certain of the (no doubt exaggerated) actions Chopper describes. Chopper reasserts his narrative claims, and these are certified by the laughter of the other boys. In Fisher’s terms, Tony disputes the fidelity of some elements of Chopper’s story. Although I have not illustrated it, when one reads Goodwin’s transcripts, it is clear that Chopper defends himself implicitly by saying that his version is coherent because it matches Tony’s cow-

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ardly character. A claim is at stake—that Tony acted cowardly—and it is both disputable and disputed. Fisher’s critical apparatus is straightforwardly applicable, but it would be little trouble to identify data, claim, warrant, and other argumentative functions in the exchange, even if most of these functions are implicit. Some believe that the possible argumentativeness of a story requires that a separate analytical system be applied to narrative, but I am not convinced. In my judgment, it is possible to identify the same argumentative functions in a narrative (an understood narrative) as there are in a more linear text. That narratives take on very distinct discourse form (often nonlinear) has, I believe, misled people into thinking that more linear theoretical models cannot be used for argumentative analysis. One can certainly summarize Kennedy’s speech in a linear way, and in fact both Ling and Kneupper did so. Although one cannot find in the speech anything like “I’m faultless, and the narrowness of the bridge is really to blame,” Ling, Kneupper, and other readers have no trouble finding that functional value in what Kennedy said and how he said it. The same sort of thing can be said about the boys’ exchange that Goodwin reported. Let me make my perceptual bias plain: To see something as an argument means that one has seen data, warrant, claim, and other argumentative functions. This analytical stance, I admit, may be reductionistic, but a functional understanding of the substructure of argument permits analysis of narratives and rhetorical figures as well as discourse forms that are more obviously arguments. What I miss with this strategy will no doubt be supplied by other scholars.

KINDS OF ARGUMENT Armed with this basic vocabulary describing the elements of arguments, I am now prepared to move forward and consider somewhat more detailed questions. In this section, I explore the different types of argument and the different analytical perspectives one can use to criticize arguments. Brockriede (1975) inadvertently began the discussion of types of argument in a classic essay entitled “Where is Argument?” He began by expressing the sentiment that “arguments are not in statements but in people” (p. 179), a thought that motivates this book. He then specified six characteristics of argument: It involves an inferential leap from one or more prior beliefs to a new one; it includes the rationale seen as justifying that leap; implicitly or explicitly, it always involves a choice between two or more competing claims; its aim is to regulate uncertainty, usually by trying to reduce it; the arguer must expose himself or herself to the possibility that one’s own beliefs will be refuted; and the arguers need to

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share a frame of reference to understand one another. There is much to be endorsed in this list. However, the immediate value of Brockriede’s essay is the quality of response it stimulated. D. O’Keefe (1977) argued that Brockriede’s analysis is flawed because Brockriede elided two different kinds of argument in his discussion, and it is O’Keefe’s distinction to which people need to attend. O’Keefe wrote that the word argument has two different senses in ordinary usage. The first, which he labeled argument1 (normally oralized as “argument-one”), refers to something a person makes. Thus, a person may make an editorial, or several people may jointly make the text for a marketing campaign. Prototypically, however, an argument1 is something done alone and usually involves the creation of a public text. The second sense is argument2, which refers to something that two or more people have. Thus, a couple may have an argument about what home to buy, or two friends may argue about which baseball team is better. This second sense most naturally refers to interpersonal or conversational argument, and records of such arguments are often audiotapes or transcripts. O’Keefe’s analysis was historically pivotal because it ushered in a whole new interest in studying interpersonal argument rather than public speeches. Some years later, I revisited this exchange to suggest yet a third thing, argument0 (Hample, 1985b). Argument0 is the cognitive argument that exists in the arguer’s mind prior to utterance and the (possibly different) argument that exists in the mind of anyone who receives the argument. This idea sets up clear distinctions between private arguments and public ones, guarding against the natural assumption that texts are the final standards for what someone means or understands. Because human cognitive systems handle verbal and nonverbal materials and do both linear and nonlinear processing, the idea of argument0 opens up the field of argumentation considerably. Lastly, although I have less to say about it in this book, I would be remiss if I did not share my conviction that there is also a fourth type, the enacted argument (Lake, 1983, 1990). In his studies of the American Indian Movement (AIM), Lake discovered that much of the rhetoric has a substantial character as consummatory ritual. AIM speakers enact the warrior persona, which was a considerable part of their message. Such a persona is the implied actor, who “both argues for a claim and enacts a role, thereby inviting audiences to ‘be as I am’ ” (Lake, 1990, p. 70). The textual message is enacted by ritual performance to reinforce the same claim (or, in case of satire, a different one)—in this instance, that listeners should take pride in their Native American heritage and resist further oppression. Every argument is made by a person, and that person always projects attitudes toward both the claim and the audience. This projection cannot be suppressed: “That is, all speakers . . . necessarily assume perso-

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nae that not only consummate a role but also instrumentally invite audiences to participate, to ‘be as I am’ ” (Lake, 1990, p. 73). Lake’s analysis goes beyond the more modest ambitions of this book, but his work underscores the importance of studying human arguing rather than the verbal texts of argumentative products. So the analytical object of this book turns out to be several related things at once. Arguments may be public or private. They may be singly authored or conversationally emergent. They may be found in written texts, in cartoons, in performance, or in the air between two people. They may be fully explicit or largely enthymematic. What they all have in common is the essential structure discussed earlier: claims, reasons, and their functional elements. The largest burden of this book is descriptive: to explain where arguments come from and what they look like. However, normative and critical judgments are needed as well. Purely descriptive orientations do not lend themselves to those sorts of analysis. Scholars must have some further development on the nature of argument, this time in terms of what critical stances people may take in regard to its study. This analysis is provided by Wenzel (1980, 1990), who specified three perspectives an analyst of argument may use. The word perspective is important. Wenzel did not say that there are three different sorts of argument. He said instead that people may study the one thing from three different vantage points, rather as one may look at an automobile from inside the passenger compartment, from beneath the car, or from within the engine compartment. Depending on what one wishes to say about a car, one of those perspectives may be enormously more relevant than the other two. Obviously, to learn a variety of things, one may want to take several of the perspectives in turn, possibly trying to integrate the insights that are achieved. What are Wenzel’s three perspectives? They are the rhetorical, the logical, and the dialectical stances. In taking a rhetorical perspective, the critic inquires as to the effects an argument has. Is it persuasive? Here, one naturally looks to the interaction between the argument and its audience. The object is to see which features of the argument have discernible effects on its receivers. If an argument has attractive language, does this make it more effective? If an argument has a fallacious form, does this enhance or damage its ability to move people to action? This is the traditional stance of the rhetorical critic. It must be said, however, that the usual way of doing this sort of criticism is to match a text to an effect and then to speculate on which textual features are implicated in whatever was observed to happen in the audience. One can immediately see the usefulness of some additional experimental work using social science methods to help sustain these sorts of critical judgment.

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Wenzel’s second perspective is the logical one. By logic, Wenzel did not mean syllogisms, for he absorbed the critique of formal logic offered by Toulmin, Perelman, and others. Instead of insisting that people hold arguments to the standard of validity, as a logician would, Wenzel preferred the criterion of soundness, which is also that of the informal logicians. By sound, Wenzel meant more or less that the argument should satisfy the requirements implied in the Toulmin model. The claim should be properly qualified to reflect its support, the data should be acceptable, and the evidence should be linked to the conclusion by a warrant that is both supportable and applicable. A sound argument need not be an effective one. Soundness is a feature of the argument, as expressed or reconstructed. Effectiveness is a characteristic of the pragmatic relation between the argument and its audience. A sound argument may deserve to be effective, but that is all that can be said about persuasiveness from the logical standpoint. The final perspective is the dialectical one, and both Wenzel and I attach some special importance to it. The dialectical, or procedural, stance examines the rules by which an argument is conducted. These rules may be explicit, as they are in jurisprudential systems, but most often they consist of unspoken understandings. For example, a study of a dinnertime family argument in a 1950s situation comedy may show rules such as mother initiates the issues, children cannot whine, and father speaks last. Although a natural reaction to the discovery of these rules may be to make sociological observations about power, status, and roles within the family system, these rules also have argumentative importance. They specify who can frame an issue (mother), who can discuss it (anyone), what form the discussion cannot take (whining), and how the argument is to be resolved (by the father’s pronouncement). Wenzel, however, was less interested in this sort of empirical description than in determining the ideal standards for critical discussion. The point of the criticism he envisioned is to say whether or to what degree participants respect the procedural rules necessary for genuinely critical reflection, requiring that he theorize what those rules are, rather than how people act. “In its purest idealization, dialectic transcends the mundane world of social action, suspends the constraints of situated social reality, and treats its subject-matter as hypothetical and abstract” (Wenzel, 1979, p. 84). The dialectical stance therefore requires the critic to see whether the participants argued fairly, whether they were explicit in their commitments, whether they were willing to follow the evidence wherever it led, and so forth. Jackson and Jacobs (2000) expanded on these ideas by specifying three common practices incompatible with the ideal standards: failure to engage arguments critically, failure to disclose one’s reasoning fully, and failure to yield to the better argument.

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Regrettably, Wenzel’s papers on the dialectical stance have not explicitly led to a great deal of critical work (although the efforts of the Amsterdam school discussed in chapter 7 may be filled in on that point). However, this is the perspective that most encourages us to examine things like power relations, shyness, floor control, possession of argumentative resources such as information, the possible use of superior arguing skill as an offensive weapon, and many similar topics. These subjects, of course, are well studied in a variety of disciplines. My interest is in how they affect the conduct of an interpersonal argument. To see this requires some sort of “hypothetical and abstract” model of how an argument should go. Contrasting practice to theory shows how people themselves steer their discourse in directions that may or may not be those attracted by the magnetic forces of rationality. I began this section by quoting Brockriede’s observation that arguments are in people, not in texts. It may be well, therefore, to ask of the argument types and stances, where are the people? Quite clearly, one can do a lot of work without taking much notice of the arguers. Informal logicians do so, and, oddly enough, so have many rhetorical critics. Arguments, especially arguments1, are frequently treated as nothing but textual products, and this is where the danger is. Texts do not argue, campaign speeches do not press points, and documents do not prove. Only people can do any of these things. Although people may look at a paragraph or transcript, these are little more than the artifactual residues of human action and the stimuli for others (Hample, in press). Obviously, people are far less likely to fall into the textual trap when looking at conversations or enacted arguments, but the development of argumentation studies has unfortunately built up a lot of text-thatargues vocabulary and assumption. Application of various critical standpoints may also tempt scholars to ignore the people. Wenzel’s rhetorical stance requires an understanding of the arguments0 that the text stimulates, but the logical perspective is naturally person free, and the dialectical stance only invites consideration of people when behavior is compared to the ideal. It is a mistake to lose sight of Brockriede’s admonition for very long.

EXPLICIT DEFINITIONS OF ARGUING So as to have a place to start, I began this chapter by stipulating a definition of argument: a conclusion supported by a reason. I intended that starting point to be relatively uncontroversial and to permit the discussion to emerge from common ground. In this last part of the chapter, I explore some leading definitional conceptions of argument and propose

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a subsumptive definition, at once more general and more pointed than the simple one with which I began. This book is not entirely within the usual tradition of argumentation studies (see W. Benoit, 1992; Cox & Willard, 1982a, 1982b), and I therefore emphasize its points of connection and divergence. The American rhetorical tradition, from which argumentation studies grew, is fundamentally sited in Aristotle’s original perspective. Aristotle did not offer a formal definition of argument, although he treated the enthymeme and example. His definition of rhetoric, however, is well known: “Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion” (Rhetoric, 1355b26). It is fair to say that rhetorical scholars have studied the last part of the definition (“means of persuasion”) while almost completely ignoring the first (“faculty of observing”). This partial focus leads inevitably to a concern for texts (the means) and a neglect of invention (the faculty of observing what means are available). This orientation is reinforced, I suspect, by what I later argue is the fundamental sterility of what Aristotle and most other classical authors had to say about invention. At any rate, what has been extracted from Aristotle is this, more or less: The aim of argument is persuasion, and its means are the enthymeme and example. I next skip ahead several thousand years to see how the modern scholars have defined argument. Many of them are quite consistent with what Aristotle said, even if they use modestly different terms. What I call the standard definitional paradigm contains some sort of means or substructure description (e.g., the claim-with-reason proposal with which this chapter began), usually conjoined with a statement of purpose, for example, that an argument is intended to persuade. I begin with some representative examples of the standard definition to show how it varies. A leading informal logician began her admirable textbook by saying that an argument “. . . is a set of claims a person puts forward in an attempt to show that some further claim is rationally acceptable” (Govier, 2001, p. 3). This definition does not specify much about the set of claims, notably declining to say anything about evidence, types of premise, or anything of the sort. It is silent on the topic of mechanism except for making the welcome point that arguing is something that a person does. However, the idea of “claims” rather presupposes text, and the book as a whole is clearly oriented to the use of propositions, whether explicit or unstated. The telos of argument is rational acceptability, which is an idea not much discussed in her book. It seems to mean “based on cogent arguments,” which, although perhaps unobjectionable, does not really advance the definitional project. This idea avoids the need to navigate among persuasion, conviction, uncertainty regulation, and knowledge,

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which are perhaps the leading candidates to be the goal or function of argument in other definitions. American argumentation studies grew out of forensic activities (mainly interscholastic debate), and the leaders of that movement have several times come together in an effort to specify what they do. Forensics, they indicate, uses an “argumentative perspective in examining problems and communicating with people. An argumentative perspective on communication involves the study of reason giving by people as justification for acts, beliefs, attitudes, and values” (McBath, 1984, p. 5, italics omitted). This statement is an equation of argument with reason and a clear statement of the very human point of arguing: to provide justification for the whole range of thought and action. Again, it emphasizes means (i.e., reason) and end (i.e., justification), although in somewhat different terms. The human origin and point of arguing also are highlighted. In their pivotal New Rhetoric, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969) said about their project, “. . . the object of the theory of argumentation is the study of the discursive techniques allowing us to induce or to increase the mind’s adherence to the theses presented for its assent” (p. 4). In one way, this is a restrictive definition because discursive techniques is like Govier’s (2001) set of claims in that it commits to the exclusive study of text. Also like Govier, the authors did not spell out the techniques in the definition, although both books may themselves be considered such specifications. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca made several unusual points about argument, however. For instance, it is directed to the mind, which of course is only a part of a person. Also, the mind only does one thing: It assents or not. Emotions, intuitions, visceral reactions—none of these topics appear on the New Rhetoric’s radar screen (see Gilbert, 1997, for what these omissions cost). In spite of their commitment to the study of discourse, their further insistence on mind and adherence invite the analysis of cognition and psychological processes. They themselves did little of this sort of thing, and in fact one wonders a bit about the passivity and simplicity of judgment involved in the undifferentiated idea of assent. This definition only describes the means of argument by saying that it works discursively, but it specifies the goal as being adherence and sites that goal within the human mind. Another more or less standard approach to defining argument, but with a clear programmatic purpose in mind (favorably discussed in our chap. 7), emerges from the Amsterdam school: Argumentation is a verbal and social activity of reason aimed at increasing (or decreasing) the acceptability of a controversial standpoint for the listener or reader, by putting forward a constellation of propositions intended to justify (or refute) the standpoint before a rational judge. (van Eemeren,

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Grootendorst, & Snoeck Henkemans, 1996, p. 5, italics omitted; a similar definition is in van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 2004, p. 1)

These scholars’ commitment to propositions is utterly intentional, and they even regarded the application of psychology to argumentation studies as an unfortunate mistake (p. 198). In that view, arguments are shaped for the rational judge, who is unimpaired by human emotions or instincts. Arguments appear only in controversial domains, which, as is discussed later, means that an argument used for identity display (as when one shows off one’s depth of understanding or fundamental commitments) is out of bounds. The goal of arguing is clearly stated: It is for changing the acceptability of a position. The definition says that arguing is verbal and social, the first descriptor committing again to propositions but the second at least acknowledging that arguments are made by people and that face-to-face interaction is prototypical. Only reason is implicated by the act of arguing, however. In several respects, the specification of the goal of arguing is like that of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969), and the description of means is similar to that of Govier (2001) and other informal logicians. Several scholars are somewhat unhappy with the identification of arguing as some sort of textual event and wish to make people more prominent. One leader is Willard, who offered this definition: Argument “is a form of interaction in which two or more people maintain what they construe to be incompatible positions” (Willard, 1989, p. 1). This definition says little about the means of arguing except that it is a species of interaction, but observe the centrality of people in this conceptualization. Argument is nothing but interaction, and it is stimulated by perceived incompatibilities. These incompatibilities are perceived by the arguers, of course, and it is interesting that more than one arguer is implied here. None of the passivity of assent appears. Even the word position is interesting. Earlier, Willard (1983, pp. 280–281, n. 4) had used propositions at that point but altered his view because he came to appreciate that arguing can involve nondiscursive elements. This view shows the orientation to controversy that I have discussed, but at least it also has no restriction to the effect that people aim only at a rational faculty when they argue. It is free of text and pointed toward the richness of interaction in seeking the means of arguing. Also focused on interaction were Jackson and Jacobs (1980), who carefully specified both the function and the structure of argument. Function has some genuine advantages over goal, which is perhaps the more common term. To say that someone has a particular goal for an argument implies that the person has that objective in mind, but to say that an argument has a specific function only indicates that the argu-

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ment does the thing, without regard to whether it was intended. The function of conversational argument is that “arguments are disagreement relevant speech events; they are characterized by the projection, avoidance, production, or resolution of disagreement” (p. 254). Regardless of the arguers’ goals, arguments accomplish the negotiation of disagreement. The authors noted, “arguments appear as a variety of structural expansions of adjacency pairs. They may involve turn expansions or sequence expansions focusing on either pair part, but they occur within the interpretive frame provided by a dominant adjacency pair” (p. 254). An example of an adjacency pair is question–answer. Here is a fictional illustration of an expansion, in the second and third turns: A: B: A: B:

Will you go to the grocery for me? I don’t have much time. How much stuff do you need? Just some milk and bread. Okay. I’ll go in a minute.

The first and fourth turns are the dominant adjacency pair, and they have been expanded by a subordinate question/answer pair within their framing structure. B obviously has some hesitations about A’s initial proposal, and the second and third turns resolve that disagreement. This approach is presented in more detail in chapter 7, but for now I suggest that the definition is restricted to text, but conversational discourse, not textbook syllogisms. Arguments are necessarily disagreement relevant, but sometimes their point is to avoid an explicit confrontation, making controversy evaporate. The structure of argument is derived from some general principles of conversation, not from a species of formal or informal logic. Even reasons are not required for what these scholars call primitive arguments, quarrels involving the exchange of disagreeing assertions, as in the start of Goodwin’s report of the boys’ dispute mentioned earlier. However, in prototypical arguments one encounters grounds for supporting or objecting. This definition, firmly focused on interacting people, offers a new structural elaboration on what reasons look like and suggests that it is necessary to look to function rather than goal. Last, for I concede that this may be getting tedious, I offer the definition of Kuhn (1991), who is outside the discipline but nonetheless wished to understand how people argue. She noticed two different strands of definition. The first is a dictionary definition that argument is “a course of reasoning aimed at demonstrating the truth or falsehood of something” (p. 12). This is rather like argument1. She called this the rhetorical argu-

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ment, and perhaps I should just pass by her use of this term, as well as the appearance of truth as a goal, without discussion. The second understanding, which she called the dialogic argument, “entails juxtaposition of two opposing assertions.” In a dialogic argument, at a minimum one must recognize an opposition between two assertions—that, on surface appearance at least, both are not correct. Evidence must then be related to each of the assertions, and, ideally, if the argument is to move toward resolution, this evidence needs to be weighed in an integrative evaluation of the relative merits of the opposing assertions. (p. 12)

Dialogic argument presupposes, or perhaps contains, rhetorical argument. In spite of the prominence of assertions in this definition, Kuhn regarded argumentation as a central feature of thinking, and her book is a study of how well people think and what they think as they argue. Once evidence is given, it must be weighed and integrated into the relevant portions of one’s cognitive system. The point of arguing is to move toward resolution; it is stimulated by the perception of opposition, and its means are evidence, weighing, and integration. In exploring these definitions, my purpose has been to highlight and comment, not to refute. As Rowland (1987) showed, any scholar’s definition of argument is stipulative, and it largely serves to carve out what that scholar wishes to study. Thus, the definitional insistence of the Amsterdam school that arguments must be textualized before they can be studied (van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 1983a, pp. 4–7) is perhaps as informative about the scope of their theory as about the scope of the phenomenon. Every scholar has the right to define the domain of his or her study. In making these comments, however, I also indicate what I find fruitful and what I see as needlessly restrictive. It is time to offer a definition, one that indicates what this book is about. I also think that this definition is a subsuming one that accounts for the other views without excluding any of them. Following Rowland’s (1987) thoughts, I also think it is important to specify both the form and function of argument. The form of argument is that of reason in support of conclusion. I do not think that arguments are only discursive, and I do not say that arguments have to be composed of text, statements, or propositions. Instead, they are made out of beliefs. Some of these are beliefs about the world (e.g., “The United Nations is an assembly of people with disparate interests”) and some may be about self (e.g., “Talking to him about school makes my stomach ache”). These beliefs may well be expressed in writing or conversation, but they may also be no more than private thoughts.

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Reasons do not have to be good ones. They can be awful, just up to the point of incoherence. A bad argument is still an argument. The specification that we have a reason–conclusion form means that the belief system of the arguer is organized, so that the reason-beliefs connect subordinately to the conclusion-belief. Regardless of whether the argument has been publicly deposited in some form or not, one must always be able to account for its cognitive origins and its comprehension. Arguments are in people, not in statements, as Brockriede (1975) said. Several different functions and goals for argument have been proposed. Aristotle said it is persuasion, Brockriede (1975) claimed it is uncertainty regulation, McBath (1984) asserted it is directing human thought and action, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969) nominated rational assent, Jackson and Jacobs (1980) indicated that it is disagreement negotiation, and Rowland (1987) found a scholarly consensus that it is to discover knowledge. I suggest that all these proposals can be collected under the idea that the function of argument is to create meaning. The conclusion of an argument is the whole point of the enterprise, and the conclusion must be new in some respect, or no one would bother to argue. Whether an argument produces a new thought about conduct, about a disagreement, or about some scientific process, a new meaning has been created within one or more people. Should an argument fail to create one of these things, it was a bad argument, one that failed in its function.

CONCLUSIONS AND PROSPECTUS This book is not merely about arguments. It is centrally about arguing, a broader topic. People must create arguments, alone or together, and these arguments must be understood both by their originators and by their audiences. To identify something as an argument at all means that claiming, evidencing, warranting, and similar functions are clear. This is so whether the form is an editorial, a moralizing fable, or a remarkable turn of phrase. I have suggested that four kinds of things are arguments. They can be things made, exchanges shared, thoughts absorbed, or commitments performed. To examine any of these things, one may want to inquire about the rhetorical effectiveness, the logical soundness, or the procedural quality of the argument. After some reflection and review, a two-part definition of argument seems useful. The form of argument is that of a conclusion supported by a reason, and its function is to create meaning. An argument need not be discursive because many more things than text can suggest a reason or claim. The meaning that is the object of an argument can be a revised at-

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titude, a different prioritization of values, an energizing intention, or a new belief. In a Panglossian world, arguers would aim toward rational standards, but an advertiser’s intentional distortions and exaggerations are arguments too, even if they are bad ones. To organize the study of these considerations, I have divided the rest of the book into two major sections. In the hope of making my exposition clearer, I try to keep the sections from overlapping very much, but in fact both topics are always in play all the time. The division is not entirely arbitrary, but it is also not very descriptive of the reality of argument. The first large section deals with argument production, and its motivating question is, Where do arguments come from? Arguments are fundamentally about content, and scholars must account for the meanings to understand arguing. The first consideration is to see what people think they are doing when they argue (chap. 2). It makes a difference, for example, whether a person sees an exchange as a fight or as a discussion. Having taken some notice of people’s framing predilections, I address invention in chapter 3. The content must be created, and thus I discuss people’s capacity for invention and the cognitive processes that nominate meanings for utterance. In chapter 4, the topic is how that nominated material is edited because people (or at least many people) do not say everything that occurs to them. The transition from private thought to public statement is both important and revealing. Arguing is not merely an intellectual exercise—it is also an emotional experience. This view is utterly obvious to ordinary social actors but rarely examined by scholars. In chapter 5, I undertake the project of trying to describe the emotional side of argument production. Chapter 6 deals with individual differences in arguing behavior and how situational elements affect what people say. The second main part of the book is about the public argument. When an argument is written or spoken, it becomes an objectifiable text, and one can say some useful things about it. Chapter 7 is an examination of what arguments look like and an elaboration of what I have said about reasons in the present chapter. Consequently, it deals with conversational structure. I look at the microsociology of interactional arguments, considering adjacency pairs, turn structure, and the requirements of conversation itself. There, too, I deal with the macrostructure of conversational argument as topics evolve and tactics play out in longer passages. Chapter 7 also has a summary of pragmadialectics, the best exposition of the dialectical perspective on argumentation. Procedural rules for good dialectic have been worked out, and I discuss how violation of these standards makes conversation less reflective. Chapter 8 deals with what I call impossible arguments, arguments whose public forms deflect rationality but in a remarkably seductive way. The argument looks like it ought to work, but in fact it is guaranteed not to.

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Throughout all the chapters, I am concerned with argument reception. I take a pragmatic perspective, inquiring how the reception of an argument changes the person who hears it. I look at how people understand evidence and how the substantive elements of an argument are processed cognitively. My treatment of the emotional experience of arguing tries to show that supposedly nonrational effects are part of arguing. Individual and situational differences are important to both argument production and reception. At several points, I track how these factors affect understandings and other reactions to having been in an argument. Much of the material in this book either is new or is being newly applied in argumentation studies. Some of the topics have well-developed literatures, but others (particularly the emotional material) are in their beginning stages of investigation. Nonetheless, I hope to provide a description of arguing that has enough scope to show the nature of the process.

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Frames for Arguing: What Do People Think They’re Doing When They Argue?

This chapter is the first of five on argument production. The overall goal of this portion of the book is to explore the process of invention. That is, why do people argue what and how they do? The goal is to understand the general orientations that people have toward arguing as well as the specific orientation they have toward a particular topic or argumentative moment. The general orientation is important to one’s expectations about the interpersonal relationship in which the argument will occur and the specific orientation may be in control of what content is thought of, or made public. Classical authors identified invention as the first canon of rhetoric, providing some descriptive detail about what orators’ content looked like and where it seemed to come from. They discussed various sort of topoi (i.e., places where information is found) and stases (i.e., turning points in controversies). I defer discussion of that heritage until the next chapter, however, because it fits there better and turns out to be of limited helpfulness for my purposes. This chapter is concerned with a topic that seems to have been taken for granted by the classical authors: What do people think they’re doing when they argue? An actors’ understanding of arguing is preliminary to any actual argumentative action. These frames have fundamental effects on what people do and how they feel about it. Especially in the case of arguing, people’s emotional experiences are important. Many see arguing as a punishing sort of episode, full of opportunities for hurt and humiliation. Others see it as a way of dominating another person, forcing someone else to concede and admit blame. A few think arguing is fun, and 22

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they seek out opportunities for it the same way others look for chances to joke or sing. Frames are preliminary expectations and so can be expected to have considerable influence on how a person begins to argue. Beginnings can be ratified, so that an argument is aggressive and close-minded just because it started that way. Many writers on argumentation and conflict management advise clearly (and correctly) that people should approach controversies with open minds and no personal animosity. When reading that advice, however, one quickly gets the idea that these authors think that people who don’t do this are simply making a crude mistake in their framing and can fix their orientations just by taking the advice to heart. This analysis fails to mark a fundamental thing about deleterious frames, namely, that they are probably accurate descriptions of a person’s life history of arguing (see Hample, 1999). A person who expects arguments to be nasty and contentious probably starts off too defensively or too aggressively and therefore invites (or, at the extremes, demands) an aggressive or defensive response in return. Fortunately, it can happen the other way, too. An arguer who starts with positive expectations will begin politely and optimistically and is likely to see similar behaviors from his or her partner. Frames can be self-fulfilling prophecies. People cannot be expected to change their frames easily because their expectations are probably accurate summaries of their interpersonal experience. In this chapter, I start by exploring the literature that directly details what people think “arguing” means. The word is not well regarded, and people’s negative views are widespread. However, the undesirable meanings are, by and large, misunderstandings, even if they are reflections of people’s personal histories. The other large portion of the chapter deals more systematically with the available frames for arguing. This discussion has normative implications, for it can guide people toward more constructive understandings of this fundamental human activity.

NAÏVE ACTORS’ UNDERSTANDINGS OF ARGUING The research in this section straightforwardly asks people what they think an argument is. Some of it was originally intended to generate an empirically obtained definition of argument. The idea was that arguers, not scholars, ought to be outlining our domain of study so that our theories would more immediately translate into the reality of ordinary action and thought. If typical actors think that personal hurt is omnipresent in argumentative interactions but that resolved controversy is irrelevant, that should also control the parameters given to argument by scholars. Although this impulse made a certain amount of sense, the re-

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sults of the research are rather disheartening in fundamental ways and might have left argumentation scholars mainly studying humiliation, mindless aggression, and unreasoning exchanges of loud demands. Nearly all of us decided to use academic definitions instead. The real contribution of this line of research has therefore been to encourage scholars to understand more clearly where ordinary actors begin in their thinking, without forfeiting any commitment to the task of explaining what arguers ought to be thinking when they argue. Regardless of why the research was conducted, however, it has generated a rather consistent portrait of arguing from the standpoint of the participants. This naïve theory of argument is important because it is in control, at least partially, of what people are thinking, how they are feeling, and what they are doing when they argue. P. Benoit (1982) undertook a simple study that produced interesting results. She asked 100 of her students to give free-form answers to several questions. Half the respondents were asked to recall an “argument” they had recently experienced with a parent, friend, or roommate, and the other half were instructed to answer in terms of a recent “discussion.” From a scholar’s vantage point, these two terms are not much different, if they contrast at all. Either an interpersonal argument or a discussion should be oriented toward some point on which the interactants differ (or on which one person has no view at all), and ideally either should involve reasons in support of one’s positions. Nonetheless, Benoit’s students distinguished rather sharply between the terms. Those students who were writing about an argument consistently mentioned five features, according to Benoit. The first is overt disagreement. The idea of disagreement is clear enough, but the importance of “overt” should not be ignored. The point at issue needs to be explicit. If a difference of opinion is in the background, if it is the unexpressed idea that one is trying to avoid bringing to the surface, naïve actors do not count the interaction as an argument, although scholars certainly would. Second, Benoit’s students commonly mentioned either vocal volume or tone. “Loud voices” and bitterness appear repeatedly in her data set. These, of course, are nonverbal cues associated with escalating, hurtful confrontations. They are held out as descriptive of arguments, even though researchers would certainly be eager to include pleasant, polite exchanges of reasons as arguments. Third, arguments typically involve irrational or emotional displays. One of Benoit’s respondents wrote that the recalled argument was “out of control” and had an outpouring of emotion, and the emotions reported were negative ones, such as anger. No argumentation scholar would say that losing one’s temper is inherent to arguing. Fourth, people said that arguers are typically one sided: They are close-minded and do not listen well or appreciatively to what their

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partner says. The idea that one is right and the other is wrong—terms that do not invite delicate distinctions of degree—is common in the protocols. Finally, the students often mentioned negative relational messages. One wrote, “I felt like I made him feel that he had stupid ideas and he had insulted me.” Respondents were quite aware that arguments can damage interpersonal relationships, but they showed little appreciation for the opposite possibility. These five features were not present when students were asked to describe a discussion. Benoit found three themes in these materials. First, discussions are characterized by expression of views. This is a far more neutral formulation than the idea of overt disagreement that is used to describe argument. Second, Benoit’s informants saw the function of discussion to be problem solving. “We’re examining a problem and we’re both going into greater depth until we reach a conclusion,” wrote one respondent. What more could one wish from a dialectical argument? Last, the students consistently remarked that discussions are two-sided. The idea of sides is more than a little problematic, as any thorough treatment of conflict management immediately reveals, but here the notion is typically qualified by the further consideration that the two sides are cooperative: “Individuals are responding to each other, not just carrying on two monologues,” as one student expressed it. The contrast between naïve actors’ views of argument and discussion is highlighted further by the students’ answers to one of Benoit’s followup questions. She asked them to say what they thought were their partner’s goals in the episode. For argument, the leading attributions were: My My My My

partner partner partner partner

wanted wanted wanted wanted

me to understand his or her view (21.65%). to convince me he or she was right (16.49%). me to feel guilty (15.46%). me to admit I was wrong (15.46%).

The third and fourth items on the list are entirely consistent with the students’ negatively toned descriptions of argument. For discussion, however, the parallel results are these: My partner wanted me to understand his or her view (21.21%). My partner wanted me to acknowledge his or her view as reasonable (14.14%). My partner wanted to compromise (13.13%). The first attributed goal is the same as for argument, but the second is expressed less forcefully and is more open-minded. The third item is not

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seen as a primary goal for argument at all. Also, the third and fourth attributions for argument are not especially relevant to discussion in the descriptions of Benoit’s respondents. Benoit’s report has one last result here. She asked her respondents if they were satisfied with the episodes. As one might suppose, people were more satisfied with discussions than arguments. They generally believed that their partners in discussions were satisfied, too, but they had less knowledge of whether their argument partners were pleased or not. When students wrote they were content with an argument, their most common reason (32%) was that their partner gave in. Satisfaction in discussions, however, was due to having resolved the problem (69%). Thus arguments have to be won, whereas discussions come to cooperative resolutions. Some of Benoit’s leading conclusions have recently been replicated by Dallinger and Hample (2002), who asked 136 undergraduates to make simple ratings of “argument” and “discussion” on scales drawn from Benoit’s report. The descriptor scales are loud and negative voices, cooperation, positive relational outcomes, close-mindedness, successful problem solving, irrational emotional displays, negative relational outcomes, hostility, genuine exchanges of views, and physical violence. Whether the scales are analyzed individually or together, results consistently show significant differences between the argument and the discussion ratings. In every case, argument is the more punishing experience: Voices are more offensive, participants are less cooperative, relationships are more likely to be damaged, people are more close-minded, the problem is less likely to be solved, displayed emotions are more irrational, interactants are more hostile toward one another, views are less likely to be genuinely exchanged, and the chance of physical violence is noticeably higher. The point about physical violence is an important one. Scholars (e.g., Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1969) consistently see arguing as an alternative to fighting or warfare, but ordinary actors perceive quite a different connection. P. Benoit and Hample (1998) asked a number of their students to keep argument diaries in which they made notes on one or more arguments they experienced during a week or two. We had a number of goals for the study, but the topic of violence had not occurred to us. Consequently, we were quite surprised at how often actual or potential violence showed up in the accounts. Even when nothing violent actually happened, respondents often seemed to orient to the possibility. The more explicit the disagreement was, the more violence seemed to be a salient consideration. We felt that these results were interesting, so we conducted two follow-up investigations. In the first (Hample et al., 1999), we collected some additional diaries and coded them quantitatively. Among the things

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we examined were the explicitness of the arguments (i.e., was the disagreement expressed or avoided?) and their destructiveness (e.g., was there a fight or threat? were feelings hurt?). After coding the diaries for these two variables, we reported that explicitness and destructiveness correlate at r = .80. This association is extraordinarily high for the social sciences and suggests that explicitness and destructiveness are so fully interrelated that people seem to assume that, in arguments, one thing means the other. Frankly, that correlation seemed too high to be plausible. We worried that it was somehow artifactual. Perhaps something in our instructions led the diarists to keep notes only on the most obvious and extreme sorts of argumentative episodes. So we designed an experimental study (Hample & Benoit, 1999). We took several of the diarists’ vignettes and revised them so that we had several examples of four things: explicit destructive arguments, explicit nondestructive arguments, implicit destructive arguments, and implicit nondestructive arguments. This time, instead of coding explicitness and destructiveness ourselves, we asked our respondents to make these ratings for each vignette. Our experimental design implied that when we associated destructiveness and explicitness across all the conditions, the correlation would be zero. The stimuli were written so as to make the two variables completely orthogonal. Nonetheless, when we correlated respondents’ actual ratings, r is approximately .50. In spite of how the experimental materials were constructed, respondents persisted in seeing destructiveness as an inherent feature of any explicit argument. A similar conclusion appears from a very different sort of research methodology. Some graduate students and I were interested in identifying the memory organization packet (MOP) for interpersonal conflict (Hample, Dean, Johnson, Kopp, & Ngoitz, 1997). Roughly speaking, a MOP is the cognitive script one has for performing a behavior. In the standard example, the MOP for eating in a restaurant may list these consecutive lines of action: enter the restaurant, be seated by a server, receive a menu, read the menu, wait for the server to return, and so forth. MOPs are studied by asking people to imagine they are in a typical episode of the given sort (e.g., being served in a restaurant) and to list in order the things that may happen. When we asked people to do this for episodes of interpersonal conflict, more than 40% of our respondents mentioned some sort of physical violence. Hitting and kicking are the most commonly mentioned lines of action in this category. Almost two thirds of the sample had a slot for yelling, about 10% mentioned obscenities, and 5% listed threats. These results do not mean that these things always (or even often) happen during face-to-face conflicts, but people commonly orient to them and even know at what point in the argument these overt aggressions are to be expected.

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Some further detail on what people think about arguing emerges from a series of papers detailing the connection between argumentativeness and beliefs about argument. Argumentativeness (Infante & Rancer, 1982) is a trait variable discussed in considerable detail in chapter 6. The argumentativeness scale has two subscales, one measuring the motivation to approach arguing and the other the motivation to avoid it. People high on argumentativeness have a greater motivation to approach. Importantly, these individuals want to argue about positions or claims; they do not attack the other’s self-concept. The line of research begins with Rancer, Baukus, and Infante (1985), who sought to determine how the belief systems of people who score either high or low on argumentativeness differ. After categorizing their sample as high, low, or moderate argumentativeness, the researchers elicited an open-ended essay answer to the question, “Why do you feel the way you do about arguing?” After coding the essay answers, the researchers reported that certain beliefs discriminate between people having different levels of argumentativeness. Two functions were discriminative. People high on the trait also had more positive responses on the cultivation function. In other words, people with high scores had generally positive reactions to the activity of arguing, often remarking that it is fun. They saw arguing as a test of their intellectual and communication skills and as a route to further personal development. The last element in the cultivation function is learning, and those individuals with high scores saw argument as having an epistemic function. The second discriminant function was antagonism, and again three subscores were significant. The first had to do with the argumentative situation; the authors reported that people moderate in argumentativeness oriented to their partners and their topics in deciding whether to approach or avoid, but those scoring high or low did not. Second, individuals high on argumentativeness saw arguing as a way of reducing conflict, whereas those scoring low regarded it as something that escalates disagreements. Finally, the hostility subscale showed that people low in argumentativeness perceived arguing as something that increases interpersonal hostility, whereas those categorized as high did not. These results are interesting because they seem to suggest that the most negative understandings of arguing are held by people low in argumentativeness. People higher in this trait tend to have more constructive frames for the activity. This observation is generally supported by a second study that approached the same general topic (Rancer, Kosberg, & Baukus, 1992). Using a set of Likert items to represent beliefs, the authors were again successful in discriminating between people who were high and low on argumentativeness. People who are mainly motivated to approach arguments reported higher enjoyment for the activity

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and saw it as a constructive way of resolving conflict. The opposite holds for people categorized as low argumentatives. Some nice detail is added to this work by A. Johnson (2002), who showed how important it is to distinguish between public and personal arguments in research. Public issue arguments are those about things like politics, the environment, or capital punishment. Personal issue arguments have topics such as doing household chores, the status of the interpersonal relationship, or how to deal with in-laws. As Johnson observed, most work on interpersonal argumentation tends to use personal topics, but researchers almost never keep track of this distinction. Johnson asked her respondents to fill out the argumentativeness scale and to answer questions, separately, about personal and public arguments they had had. She reported that public topic arguments were rated as more enjoyable, regardless of people’s argumentativeness scores. Personal arguments were seen as more likely to produce constructive settlements than public topics, but they also produced lower feelings of self-concept. People low in argumentativeness said that personal issue arguments produced negative relational consequences more than public ones did. The personal topics are more ego-involving, as we might expect. Although argumentativeness did not moderate as many of these outcomes as Johnson had hypothesized, she found that those who are high in argumentativeness reported more enjoyment in arguing about public issues, more optimism about constructive outcomes in personal arguments, and more positive views of self in either sort of argument. It is appropriate to say that low argumentatives have the most negative understandings of what it means to argue, whereas people more eager to argue approach the constructive views that scholars have. I am aware of no evidence that permits us to say whether the argumentativeness or the positive frame for arguing is causally prior; either direction of causality is quite plausible. Johnson’s work makes it clear that we should attend to the argument topics. Personal issues are more involving and have higher risks for self and relationship. They also hold out more chance of benefit, however, because these are the topics on which interactants are more likely to come to a conclusion, possibly because the stakes are higher or more immediate. People rate public arguments as more enjoyable than personal ones, perhaps because the intimate arguments are those most likely to damage self-concept or the interpersonal relationship. Recall that P. Benoit’s (1982) students responded in terms of what were probably personal issues, and this was generally true of the other studies reviewed as well. So far I have mainly been concerned with people’s global understandings of arguing, and many of these have highlighted emotional feelings. A few studies have looked at naïve actors’ detailed understandings of ar-

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gument structure and features. These results close this section of the chapter. I have already mentioned (see chap. 1) Jackson and Jacobs’ (1980) important article on face-to-face argument, how it serves to repair infelicities in conversation and takes on a structure founded in adjacency pairs. Jackson and Jacobs made liberal use of conversational extracts and drew qualitative conclusions from them. Trapp (1986b) wondered whether naïve actors would identify the extracts as being arguments, as Jackson and Jacobs (1980) did, and whether ordinary people would see the same features in them as the scholars did. Trapp took the transcripts Jackson and Jacobs had published in the 1980 paper and others, added a number of his own, and asked 141 college students to respond to them. He reported that transcripts labeled as prototypical arguments by Jackson and Jacobs were often not recognized as arguments at all by his respondents (Martin & Scheerhorn, 1985, report a similar result). In fact, the students were far more likely to label primitive arguments, those involving simple exchanges of claims or demands without reasons, as being arguments. Trapp reported that non-interactional arguments1 were also unlikely to be identified as arguments. Apparently the presence of reasons had far less weight than the absence of explicit interpersonal disagreement. When he classified his examples as his respondents did, the presence of neither reasons nor disagreement seemed criterial in people’s labeling, although a failure to resolve the disagreement was telling. Trapp summarized his results by saying that the paradigm case of interactional argument is “an event that occurs when two or more parties intentionally engage in disagreement over some incompatible goals and are unable to resolve their differences” (Trapp, 1986b, p. 32). Trapp’s conclusions did not go uncontested, however, and the responding study (Jackson, Jacobs, Burrell, & Allen, 1986) gave remarkably detailed information about what naïve actors think an argument is. Jackson et al. reported five carefully designed experiments in which respondents were given Trapp’s transcripts, sometimes with modifications, and were asked to make distinct ratings of various possible argument features and to categorize each passage as an argument or not. Jackson et al. showed that unresolved disagreement (as opposed to the presence of any other kind of disagreement relevance) was not important to respondents’ judgments, contradicting Trapp’s findings. Depressingly, Jackson et al. also showed that adding reasons to transcripts that lack them or deleting reasons from the extracts that have them did not significantly affect respondents’ categorizations. When the transcripts were altered to make disagreements stronger and more explicit, people were increasingly likely to call the exchange an argument; the reverse finding appeared when the expression of disagreement was softened.

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A very interesting finding is that even though Trapp’s (1986b) respondents felt that certain extracts were not arguments, Jackson et al. (1986) demonstrated that people can see that an argument is being made in them: “Uniformly, examples were more likely to be classified as containing arguments than to be classified as being arguments” (p. 50). The implication is that people can identify an argument1 in an exchange without immediately recognizing it as an argument. Perhaps argument2 is at the source of the identification problems. Although I find Jackson et al. (1986) more convincing in regard to whether disagreement needs to be unresolved for people to recognize a passage as an argument, I still draw some conclusions about what features naïve actors orient to. Disagreement is certainly criterial, and the more obvious the disagreement is, the more recognizable is the argumentative quality of the exchange. People can see reasons offered or exchanged, but this perception seems to have little to do with whether or not they apply the label “argument.” Possibly they have “discussion” in the backs of their minds. Some of the work reviewed here was conducted in pursuit of what is called representational validity for the concept of argument. Scholars using the same terms and identifying the same phenomena as everyone else “would help to assure that the resulting model is one that could be returned to the everyday world of ordinary actors from whence it came and could make sense to the people that inhabit that world” (Trapp, 1986b, p. 24). This approach certainly has admirable ends and would make a lot of sense if naïve actors use definitions that are reasonably close to scholars’ constitutive rules, but the argument gulf is simply too wide to be negotiated in this way. To put it bluntly, ordinary actors are wrong—wrong too often and wrong in too fundamental a collection of ways. To show what would be lost in the understanding of what an argument is, if scholars were to adopt respondents’ views, I summarize the leading elements of this portion of the chapter. I do so by highlighting some key differences between scholars’ and actors’ perceptions and understandings. 1. Naïve actors require disagreement to be overt, and scholars do not. Arguments are about disagreements, potential or actualized, expressed or avoided. Disagreement relevance is a more inclusive and productive idea than disagreement explicitness. 2. Naïve actors use nonverbal indicants of anger or other negative emotion to point out arguments. Scholars acknowledge that some interpersonal arguments can get out of hand in this way but are committed to showing that other arguments are polite, constructive, and nicely dialectical.

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3. Naïve actors believe that arguments are characteristically irrational, consistent with their common focus on terrible arguments, and in contrast with scholars’ equal interest in good arguments. It also misses the idea that arguments are supposed to have reasons in them. 4. Naïve actors believe that arguers are close-minded. Sometimes they are, but much of the point of studying dialectical procedures is to learn to be open to reason and to follow the evidence wherever it leads. 5. Naïve actors focus on the negative emotional outcomes of arguing, such as the relational damage and the hurt feelings. Scholars consider this, too, but they do not regard hurtfulness as a defining feature of argumentative interaction. 6. Naïve actors think that arguments are competitive enterprises in which one person not only tries to win the issue at hand but may also want to hurt the other person. Scholars, in contrast, try to emphasize that this is only the case in bad arguments and that arguing skill requires both effectiveness and appropriateness. 7. Naïve actors associate arguing with violence, believing that arguments lead to violence and that violent episodes are arguments. Scholars insist that argument is an alternative to violence. 8. Naïve actors believe that the more explicit an argument is, the more destructive it is. Scholars teach that issues may often have to be publicly clarified before they can be resolved and that avoidance may be an unproductive course. 9. Naïve actors are convinced that arguments escalate conflicts and increase hostility. Scholars emphasize the opposite possibilities. 10. The unfortunate beliefs are more likely to be held by people low in argumentativeness. Scholars’ views are much closer to those high in argumentativeness, people who actually enjoy arguing. 11. The unfortunate beliefs are more likely to come into play on highly involving personal issues. These issues are precisely the ones that interpersonal scholars wish people would argue about more competently. 12. Naïve actors do not regard the presence or absence of reasons as critical in identifying something as an argument or not. For most scholars, this issue is defining and the source of the epistemic value of an argument.

These contrasts make it clear that if argumentation studies were to take on the usual naïve theory of argument as its own, the idea of argument

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would actually have to be reinvented to study the ways reasons can improve conclusions. Rather than studying the exchange of reasons, scholars would examine only “a hostility laden event where sharply contrasting expressions of opinion, loud voices, intense emotion, anger, frustration and namecalling characterize the interaction” (Martin & Scheerhorn, 1985, p. 718), which describes the domain for ordinary arguers.

FRAMES FOR ARGUING The materials reviewed to this point display our most general portrait of what people think they are doing when they argue. However, not everyone shares these various perceptions. People high in argumentativeness, for instance, do not, and neither do argumentation scholars. Other professionals—lawyers, perhaps?—may also have different views. Also, the severity of people’s disaffinity for arguing is affected by whether the topic is personal or public. Although none of these considerations nullify the findings, they underscore the general, cumulative nature of the conclusions. The conclusions are general in another regard as well. For the most part, they reflect an essentially emotional set of thoughts, or a prejudice. These belief systems are not very detailed in some important respects. Nor can we implicitly trust some of naïve actors’ essential distinctions. The contrast between arguing and discussing is an obvious example. In ordinary usage, one implies competition and the other cooperation, but in the area of argumentation studies, a problem-solving discussion is not differentiated from an interpersonal argument at all. While maintaining a focus on what ordinary arguers think they are doing when they argue, in this section I impose some technical distinctions upon people’s belief systems and general orientations, highlighting some matters that advance understanding of argument production. The generalizations from the previous section are an important resource for this one, but so is an additional idea, the notion of argumentative competence. Interpersonal communication competence is normally regarded as having two elements, effectiveness and appropriateness (Spitzberg & Cupach, 1984). Trapp (1986a; Trapp, Yingling, & Wanner, 1987) operationalized these variables for interpersonal argumentation. In the case of arguing, however, a third component, soundness, should also be considered (Hample, 2003a). Effectiveness is the essential rhetorical consideration, as Wenzel (1980, 1990) showed. Appropriateness means that the interaction should be polite and respectful of one’s own face, the other’s face, and the interpersonal relationship (Brown & Levinson,

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1987). Soundness refers to the standard for Wenzel’s logical perspective, the idea that the evidence must be well established, the warrant strong, the conclusion properly qualified, and so forth. These basic ideas provide a standpoint from which we can press ordinary conceptions of arguing into theoretically useful models. People orient to effectiveness and appropriateness in different ways and balance them against one another in different measures (Hample & Dallinger, 1990). The three general frames presented next, which I first detailed in an earlier paper (Hample, 2003a), reflect these tensions. These three frames are not necessarily alternatives to one another. In many people, all three are in play simultaneously. I think that they are in order of sophistication, however, so that if later research shows them to be acquired in a particular developmental sequence, I suspect that my order of presentation will reflect it. The frames turn on how people orient to their basic task, how they try to relate to other people, and finally, how they reflect on what they are doing. The First Frame: One’s Primary Goal This first orientation is most directly reflective of what people say they are doing when they argue. Suppose I happened to overhear half of a telephone conversation in which a friend is explaining why the other party should stop by a grocery store and pick up some milk on the way home. If I were to ask my friend after the phone is hung up, “What were you doing just then?” I would expect a reply like, “Getting Terry to pick up some milk.” Unless the friend is a social scientist of some sort, I would be surprised to hear answers like, “pursuing my instrumental objective,” “asserting dominance in a face-saving way,” or “laying out a cogent argument.” Olson and Golish (2002) interviewed 31 people who reported having had conflicts that involved actual or threatened aggression (verbal or physical) in their romantic relationships. The topics of these conflicts are partner’s problematic behavior (22%, including alcohol use, drug use, staying out late, finding work, or finishing school), life changes (16%, involving moving, a new job, a new marriage, losing a baby, getting pregnant, or dissolving the relationship), third party problems (15%, covering friends or former romantic partners), extended family issues (10%, regarding difficulties in connecting with own or other’s extended family), parenting (10%, including step-children and discipline), finances (9%), and communication issues (9%, involving conflict management practices, intimacy, and the state of the relationship). Throughout the list, and even noting the communication issues, the goals of these difficult arguments have to do with daily life, not with anything that is explicitly or primar-

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ily about the details of arguing. Participating effectively, appropriately, and soundly in these sorts of exchanges is obviously a means toward a better life. Argument goals really aren’t special. They are life goals and are not immediately experienced in some communication-theorized way. People argue to accomplish things in their daily lives, and the pursuit of these accomplishments is what is salient to the actors. Arguing is an essentially instrumental activity, done with a practical object in mind and almost never done for its own sake (arguing for fun would be an example of the latter). The primary goal of arguing is often to get milk, to get a raise, to talk a friend into attending a movie with you, or some other objective of these sorts. By “instrumental,” I mean that the goal of the argument is what it appears to be on the surface. Coser’s (1956) classic distinction between realistic and unrealistic conflicts is close to what I have in mind. Instrumentally motivated arguments are realistic: Their object is to persuade, to clarify, to discover, to resolve. These arguments are not platforms for something else, such as catharsis, aggression, or the expression of relational discontent. It is tempting to end the discussion of the instrumental goal here, but that would leave me in the position of only having thought about one of the arguers. The other person in an interpersonal argument has goals, too. Some of those are not specifiable at this point because they could be anything (e.g., to show off one’s newly acquired mastery of the word precocious). However, the other person who engages the topic only has a few available sorts of responses to an instrumental argument. She or he can accept the other’s reasons and claims or may resist them. Either, although particularly the second, may be done by means of another argument. Of course, the interlocutor may simply agree or disagree without giving reasons. In other words, he or she can participate in an argument2 without producing an argument1. One very likely candidate for the primary goal in an argumentative episode is the instrumental one, and it may be met by either of the countervailing goals, acceptance and resistance. It turns out to be a mistake, however, simply to assume that the instrumental goal is always most important. Dillard, Segrin, and Harden (1989) studied the various goals that come into play during interpersonal persuasion attempts. They postulated influence as the primary goal and reported a number of secondary goals as well—maintenance of identity and relational definitions, management of arousal, and so forth. The primary goal in this formulation is the one that defines the situation as persuasive, dialectical, concessive, and so forth (Dillard, 2004). It is not necessarily the most powerful motivational force. Fur-

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ther research shows that the primary goal is not always rated as the most important one by the persuaders (Schrader & Dillard, 1998) and does not always exert the most influence over the content of the messages (Schrader, 1997). What has happened is that, even though the researcher has defined an experimental situation as requiring influence, ordinary actors participating in the experiment have other priorities as well, and sometimes these are more pressing. In arguing, one may suppose that people most often orient to the goal of influence, but sometimes their chief goal is something else. What may those other goals be? In the case of arguing, I suggest a need to think about at least three more: asserting dominance over another person, projecting self identity, and playing. The commonness of the dominance goal is indicated by the view that argument implies competition, win–loss orientations, and power assertion. The previous section presented clear evidence of this sort of understanding. Seiffert and Brown (2000) collected the most common metaphors used by ordinary actors to describe conflict or arguing and reported that many metaphors refer to war, competitive contests, or pain. That the phrase killer argument even makes sense is a signal that these metaphors run deep. Perhaps the most carefully formalized forums for arguing in the United States are courts of law and interscholastic debate tournaments. Arguments in those sites take place within a clearly institutionalized win–loss orientation. Neither lawyers nor debaters are primarily committed to finding the truth. Both are simply enjoined to win, to supply the best possible case for or against a given proposition. Truth is no more than a useful resource in these contests because the real objective is to overwhelm the opponent to obtain a favorable decision. (Whether or not the truth is safeguarded by well-equipped argumentative opposition, as Aristotle hoped, is a topic too complex to explore at this point.) That these activities are attractive to many people and seem natural to others makes our cultural interest in domination clear. The impulse to overcome the other is also common in more personal settings as well. Sometimes arguers pick fights just to display their dominance. Many people are verbally aggressive, hurtfully attacking the other’s identity rather than the other’s position (Infante & Rancer, 1996; Wigley, 1998). Schutz (1960) said that interpersonal behavior can be modeled by attending to three needs: inclusion, affection, and control. The last of these can, at one extreme, represent the impulse to dictate others’ behavior. Many people have tied up a considerable part of their selfdefinitions in the belief that they are superior and controlling, and even those without such a personal identity may orient to a particular interpersonal relationship in that way. Some managers (i.e., superiors) prefer

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pressuring tactics or other dominance displays in dealing with subordinates, perhaps in part because the use of these tactics proposes that the other is in fact subordinate (see Fairhurst, 2001). The allocation of power is a fundamental exogenous variable in communication theory about the family (Fitzpatrick & Badzinski, 1994), explaining why some messages are produced to maintain power, others to establish it, and still others to reallocate it. Dominance issues are sufficiently central to communication behavior that they are the sole focus of 1 of 19 chapters in the second edition of the Handbook of Interpersonal Communication (Berger, 1994). A dominance goal can be met in several ways. It can be answered with submissive behavior or with a countering dominance impulse, or it can be ignored. These three choices represent the standard avenues of confirmation, rejection, and disconfirmation (Watzlawick, Beavin, & Jackson, 1967). The first indicates that the second arguer’s responsive goal is acceptance, and the second (and perhaps the third) indexes the cointeractant’s own dominance goal. Acceptance is confirming, and this response should result in a mutually satisfying interaction. Reciprocal aggressiveness, however, can lead to escalation, which is unlikely to satisfy either party (Folger, Poole, & Stuttman, 1997; Gottman, 1998; Watzlawick et al., 1967). Withdrawal is another behavioral possibility, either through physical departure or something more subtle, such as a topic shift. This strategy is a form of disconfirmation, and it can lead to frustration and relational damage. The ubiquity of dominance issues means that such matters are always relevant, and thus the withdrawal can anticipate the dominance display. The result is what Cloven and Roloff (1993) called the “chilling effect,” which refers to the unwillingness of one relational partner to raise an issue with the other. In addition to instrumental and dominance goals, a third goal is identity display. As Watzlawick et al. (1967) explained, every message has both content and relational meaning. Dominance is one specific example of a relational message, but I have something more general in mind here. Everything people say projects definitions of self, other, and relationship (Goffman, 1959). For instance, a father says, “Clean up your room right now because I say so.” This command proposes a number of personal and relational definitions. The father’s argument is that he is dominant, an authority figure whose word should never be questioned. He is projecting a definition of the child as subordinate, one who must submit immediately and without question. He is also indicating that the relationship between the two of them is strongly hierarchical, with himself in the superior position. If the argument is reconstructed as having the claim, “clean up your room now,” and the evidence, “I say so,” the available warrants (which explain why “because” is sensible) all depend on these definitions of self, other, and relationship. This hypothetical episode con-

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trasts with that of a father who approaches the same issue with, “Please clean your room now because the bug exterminator is coming tomorrow and needs to have a clear field of fire in your room.” Readers may perhaps be reminded of Lake’s (1983, 1990) discussion of the enacted argument here. Both content and relational meanings are conveyed simultaneously, and both are important to any interaction, argumentative or otherwise. Sometimes definition of self is the primary goal for an arguer. Arguments can be used to display one’s commitments. An avid environmentalist addressing a meeting of the local Sierra Club chapter may spend some time giving his or her reasons for lobbying Congress. On the assumption that everyone in the audience already agrees, the point of this argumentative display is really to show that the speaker’s commitments are sincere and well-founded. Nothing dominating is going on, nor is anything instrumental necessarily being pursued. As another example, a student writing an essay in which she or he tries to express the ideas of a professor or textbook is really trying to show how bright she or he is. Neither persuasion nor dominance is at issue. Persuasion theorists note that one function of attitudes is to express one’s values (D. Katz, 1960; for current thinking, see Hullett & Boster, 2001; Lapinski & Boster, 2001). Expression of values is also one of the functions of arguing and may become the primary goal. When a person presents an argument for identity display, another person can meet this goal with the usual triad of choices: confirmation, rejection, and disconfirmation. For instance, suppose that on a first date a man is expressing his reasons for a firm commitment to feminism (assume he is sincere and has no instrumental objectives for his argument). His date can accept his words with a smile, but she may also question his sincerity and press him on several points. Alternatively, she may regard the whole display as unacceptably transparent and immediately change the topic. The goal of assent should, as usual, produce mutual satisfaction. Rejection, with or without a countering argument, can lead to genuine dialectical exchanges or to escalation. Disconfirmation, as always, is likely to lead to frustration. The last primary goal I discuss is to play. People who are high in argumentativeness see play as one reason to argue. The mass media sometimes offer television or radio shows whose entertainment value comes from the energetic exchange of arguments (see Hutchby, 1996, for an extended analysis of the arguments in a British radio show). In the days before electronic media, sometimes a whole town turned out enthusiastically to watch a local trial or political exchange. Jack Matthews, an English professor and book collector, once found a speech, probably from Cincinnati in the 19th century (to my regret and Matthews’, he lost the citation), in which a defense attorney began his address to the jury in this way:

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May it please the Court and gentlemen of the jury—while Europe is bathed in blood, while classic Greece is struggling for her rights and liberties, and trampling the unhallowed altars of the bearded infidels to dust, while the chosen few of degenerate Italy are waving their burnished swords in the sunlight of liberty, while America shines forth the brightest orb in the political sky—I, I, with due diffidence, rise to defend the cause of this humble hog thief. (Matthews, 1986, p. 44)

How can we possibly explain this florid argument, except by referring to play and entertainment? Interscholastic debaters volunteer to participate in intensive arguing and get enjoyment from the activity. This attitude toward arguing does not make sense to everyone. As a longtime teacher of argumentation and debate at the college level, I know that some students are eager to debate in class and others are horrified at the prospect. Because this attitude is incomprehensible to some people, playful arguments are fraught with relational danger. An outrageous argument offered for fun is supposed to gain a reply formed in the same spirit, but this reply requires that the playfulness be recognized. Instead, the argument may be taken seriously, and perhaps the arguer will be regarded as a domineering or unevolved boor. The playful arguer does not have an instrumental influence goal but may still be seen as trying to persuade. She or he does not have a dominance goal, but one may be perceived. No identity goal may be motivating the argument, but identity attributions may nonetheless occur. The initiator must be expecting a response shaped by a parallel goal of having fun but may encounter the disappointment of meek acceptance or withdrawal. The first arguer wants rejection so that the argument can develop collaboratively and become a fulcrum for enjoyment and companionship. I have highlighted here the four primary goal sets. The instrumental goal is met with an acceptance or resistance goal. The dominance goal calls out submission, reciprocal dominance moves, or withdrawal. One replies to identity displays with confirmation, rejection, or disconfirmation, and the same set of countervailing goals (with addition of cooperative play) appear for playfully motivated arguments as well. Before I leave the topic of this first frame, however, some important remarks need to be made. First, a primary orientation to one goal does not imply that others are irrelevant. B. O’Keefe and Shepherd (1987) closely analyzed conversational arguments, line by line, and coded whether each line addressed a single goal (i.e., the instrumental one in their study), pursued one goal but then attended to politeness issues in the same line, or simultaneously dealt with instrumental and politeness issues. By far the most common result was the first possibility, in which a conversational turn moved toward a single goal. However, the other

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possibilities were also clearly represented in the results. The singularity of the goal orientation of the messages suggests, although it does not prove, that arguers tend to have only one goal in mind at a time. However, even if it is common for arguers to orient only to their primary goal, they often immediately amend their utterances to address a secondary consideration, and the most skilled arguers can do several things at once. The line-by-line methodology also raises a second key point: Goal orientations are labile during an exchange. An arguer may be moving forcefully toward a conclusion at one point, may retreat to assuage hurt feelings a moment later, may cooperate for an instant and then try to dominate thereafter, and so forth. A very important element in goal orientation is how the other person is acting. Aggression calls out aggression or withdrawal, for instance (Hample, 1999). In a conversational setting, goals, like nearly everything else, are emergent and mutually coordinated, and they may not be static. The first frame for arguing, therefore, is orientation to the primary goal. This notion is closest to consciousness or most immediately rationalized. Arguments can be primarily intended to do quite a few things. The four broad categories I have discussed—instrumental, dominance, identity display, and play—are not the only ones, but they strike me as being most common and most interesting. I have concentrated on the initiator’s goal orientation in this section but hope to have made clear that the other person’s goals are just as important, even if I have treated them as primarily responsive in this subsection. However, all these primary orientations have in common that they are focused on self: getting what one wants, asserting one’s dominance, displaying one’s identity, or entertaining oneself. In this first frame, the other person is relevant mainly as a foil or a means. Self is clearly in the foreground. The Second Frame: Connecting With the Other’s Goals The second possibility for framing the activity of arguing requires that the other arguer be integrated into the initiating arguer’s appreciation of the activity. Arguers may consider how (e.g., cooperatively, dogmatically, explicitly, contemptuously) to coordinate their own goals with those of the interlocutor. Although coordination is encouraging, it does not always improve either the rationality or the relational satisfaction of the encounter. Before moving into any details, however, I note that not everyone tries to coordinate; not all people make use of this second frame. The constructivist research program was for a long time centrally concerned with the degree to which people adapt their messages to other people (Applegate, 1990; Burleson & Caplan, 1998). These researchers found

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that although people with high interpersonal construct differentiation do this remarkably well, less differentiated people adapt poorly and sometimes not at all. B. O’Keefe (1988) reported that some people, labeled expressives, understand communication to be no more than the process whereby one makes the private public. These people do not edit or adapt to any perceptible degree. If they think it, they say it. Hart and colleagues (Hart & Burks, 1972; Hart, Carlson, & Eadie, 1980) similarly identified people as noble selves, who, on principle, do not adapt what they say to their interlocutor’s needs or nature. Noble selves are contrasted with others who say only what their listeners want to hear and with yet another group who try to adapt what they think to what is socially appropriate and likely to be effective. Personality researchers have developed several instruments that may be predictive of the tendency to adapt. Snyder’s (1974; see Dillard & Hunter, 1989) self-monitoring scale measures the degree to which people observe others’ reactions and try to steer their remarks into welcome channels. Swap and Rubin (1983) studied otherorientation, which straightforwardly assesses the degree to which people attend to others and try to adapt to them. Some people are high on these and similar measures; other people are low. Several strands of research justify the claim that some among us are blurters. They think that their words are, and should be, transparent windows into their minds. They seem never to have internalized the basic idea of good manners, that some things are better left unsaid or only addressed by white lies (e.g., “The liver-and-peach stir-fry was wonderful, Mrs. Wilmington”). Such people demand great tolerance from their conversational partners. They may be as likely as anyone to argue effectively but are not nearly so prone to argue appropriately. Having noticed that some people do not participate in this second frame, I next address those who do. Research on conflict and argumentation shows that some people argue in ways that are influenced by their partner (Drake & Donohue, 1996; Hample, 2000a; Hample & Dallinger, 1987b, 1990). As discussed in chapter 4, arguments are often suppressed or revised because of how the arguer projects they would have been received. Editorial work can also be done out of self-concern, but even those cognitive processes often feature the other person or the interpersonal relationship. For one’s argument to be affected by the cointeractant, certain things must take place. First, the other person must be noticed in a perceptive way. This possibility is perhaps best assessed by the Role Category Questionnaire, the primary research instrument in the constructivist research program (Burleson & Waltman, 1988). The degree to which one is sensitive to the other’s relatively enduring nature is an upper limit on the extent of effective other-adaptation. Second, the arguer

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must be able to identify the other’s goals, needs, and intentions in the moment. This capability is probably also tapped by the Role Category Questionnaire, and the motivation to do so is assessed by self-monitoring or other-orientation scales. Some of the other’s goals and needs are idiosyncratic or relationally defined, and only perceptive experience with that person in that interpersonal situation can supply the needed information. Other goals and needs are sufficiently general that they can be taken for granted with little risk of error. People all have face issues, for instance (Brown & Levinson, 1987; Lim & Bowers, 1991). The needs to be liked, respected, and free to act appear to be present in all human cultures. Third, the arguer should recognize the emerging definition of the relationship and understand the other’s stance in regard to it. The assumption that the other is committed to the relationship is also a general one. This mutual understanding is so standard that when one person intentionally tries to destroy the relationship, the other party often resists, as if unable to believe that the relationship is actually coming under fire (Kellermann & Lee, 2001). Given that the arguer has been perceptive about the other’s nature, the other’s goals, and the immediate interpersonal relationship and, further, that the arguer is not a blurter and therefore can connect own goals with other’s, how may this be done? Two general types of answer to this question are possible, and I explore both. First, I look at the arguer’s overall orientation to the other’s goals, and then I review research on the cognitive processes involved in connecting one’s goals to the other’s. General Orientation. Perhaps the most obvious place to begin is by noticing that when the initial arguer’s chief goal is to resolve an issue, he or she may connect cooperatively or competitively with the other person. Cooperation is the motive emerging from a win–win orientation, and competition indexes a win–loss view of the interaction. Most real-world conflicts have a mixed motive; that is, they make both orientations tempting (Deutsch, 2000). These two intentional frames naturally produce different sorts of discourse. A competitive frame often calls out competition in response, and the result is a verbal fight (with or without reasons). This sort of exchange is traditionally called eristic (Aristotle, Topics, I.1, 100a25-101a17; Sophistical Refutations, II, 165a34-165b9; Hample, 2000b). Eristic argumentation may or may not be regulated in a well-mannered way. Young children’s eristic exchanges (e.g., “Gimme truck”; “My truck”; “Gimme truck!” “My truck”) often are not, and angry adults sometimes do no better. However, the centrality of competition in our culture has required that we learn to discipline it in important settings in which competitive reasoning is structurally required or invited. For instance, when an attor-

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ney cross-examines a hostile witness, or when a United States Senator aggressively presses a witness during a committee hearing, these interactions are eristic but politely contended. In these two examples, and in all thoughtful eristic ones, the appeal is explicitly or implicitly directed to a third party. The lawyer tries to persuade a jury or judge, not the witness; the interscholastic debater expects a decision from the judge, not from the opponents; even the Senator implicitly appeals to the voting public, not to the lobbyist who is testifying. Well-regulated eristic always has an onlooker in mind. One sign of thoughtless eristic is that there is no third party; success is imagined to be the argumentative destruction of the interlocutor, with a prize something like unconditional surrender in the back of the aggressor’s mind. Competitive interactions conjoin the two arguers’ goals but not in a very constructive way. Excellent arguments1 are entirely possible in eristic, if they are judged only according to their soundness. They are not very likely to be appropriate, however, and often generate unsatisfying arguments2 from the viewpoint of one or both arguers. Eristic may have high social costs because a truly mutual conclusion is neither possible nor aimed for. The initiator’s object is a win that counts as a loss for the other. Cooperative frames tend to invite cooperative responses, generating what Gilbert (1997) called coalescent argumentation (also see Mallin & Anderson, 2000; J. Stewart & Zediker, 2000). The idea is that each arguer accepts the other’s goals as being just as weighty as one’s own. In fact, the other person’s goals become argumentative resources that can be used to evaluate both own and other’s positions. The arguer is working from a win–win orientation and does not unreasonably press an unfair advantage. This view is part of the dialectical attitude. Examples of coalescent exchanges include a young married couple deciding together whether one of them should seek a job or a graduate degree and two scholars deciding on the design to implement in an experiment. Because there is an argument, the arguers likely begin with divergent positions, but each perceives and confirms the other’s needs and desires. Neither arguer will accept a solution that does not satisfy the other arguer’s standards for an acceptable outcome. Cooperative frames conjoin the two arguers’ goals in a constructive way. The coalescent exchange that is likely to grow from this intentional orientation is not unusually likely to produce sound arguments1. However, the potential for appropriate behavior is far greater than for eristic interactions, and the arguments2 tend to be more satisfying to each party individually and to both as a union (Deutsch, 2000). Most arguments are between people who have a relational history and a relational future. Arguers commonly need to live with one another after the

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argument is over (Deutsch, 1998). Coalescent arguers act as though they understand this. Most scholarship on the competitive and cooperative orientations comes from the conflict management literature, which is naturally focused on issue resolution exchanges. That focus has also been the assumed basis for argument in the discussion to this point. However, these two ways of connecting with the other’s goals are also pertinent to other primary goals. Arguments can be used as, or in service of, dominance displays, as discussed earlier. The initiator makes an argument to project superiority over the interlocutor. This superiority may reference intellect, status, power, moral authority, or any other wellspring for pride. The terminal goal for this sort of behavior is dominance, and being right about the apparent topic is, at best, just a means to that end. Inherently, then, the initiator has a competitive frame. One person can be higher in a hierarchy only if the other person is lower. However, there are two arguers, and my attention here is mainly on the responding person. The interlocutor can be dominant in return (i.e., competitively rejecting), can withdraw (i.e., perhaps disconfirming), or can join in the display (i.e., cooperatively confirming). As long as the real issue (i.e., dominance) is seen as one of relative power, the main response choices are competition and concession. If the cointeractant can reframe the real issue as one of personal worth, not relative worth, confirming actions become mutually rewarding. This scenario requires that the respondent project the interaction as being about how smart (or well born, or rich, etc.) the initiator is, setting the comparative elements of the argument aside. Two people can be perceptive at the same time, two prom dresses can both be exquisite, and two people can each have remarkably clever financial strategies. Both parties can engage in endless dominance displays in this way, without stimulating defensiveness or passivity on the other’s part. I have witnessed this sort of cooperative exchange of boasts and expressions of self-esteem between two spouses, two debate partners, and two scholarly collaborators. No dominance display is refuted, but each draws out a similar self-projection, with no implication that one answers the other. What may superficially appear to be an argument2, largely because the production of reasons is taking place conversationally, is actually a succession of thematically related arguments1. This situation can only happen if both parties accept the cooperative definition of the interaction. An interesting and common situation takes place when issue resolution and dominance goals are simultaneously at issue. Arguers operating within this second general frame not only must decide how to connect their goals with the other’s but also must navigate around the question

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of whether face or substance should be the main interactional focus. Although people make both kinds of choices, sometimes attending to face and sometimes addressing mainly the apparent issue, the literature on this matter is quite clear. The personal issue, dominance in this case, must be given priority. Once a face threat appears (and a dominance display threatens both negative and positive face), the parties move toward it almost magnetically (Folger et al., 1997, ch. 5). Insistently trying to set it aside to focus on the substantive issue is hopeless unless the two parties have the self-discipline of professional negotiators. Given the appearance of both a realistic and an unrealistic topic (Coser, 1956), the unrealistic issues interfere with the substantive ones until the former are resolved. A classic finding in the small groups literature is that the more emotional a discussion is, the worse the decisions of the group are (Collins & Guetzkow, 1964). Deft arguers can sometimes address both sorts of concerns simultaneously (B. O’Keefe & Shepherd, 1987). Less skilled arguers may stubbornly try to keep on track, effectively preventing the argument2 from producing a mutually satisfactory conclusion. Face issues nearly always need to be addressed in a confirming, cooperative way. Competitive sallies are hurtful and often result in escalation of or withdrawal from both the substantive and the personal issues. The third primary goal discussed in the prior section is that of identity display, and only a few things need to be said about that objective here. The norm for response to such an argument (e.g., “I’m a fervent, lifelong Baptist because the Gospel is the revealed Word”) is generally to be politely cooperative. Competitive replies are available, however. The first possibility is to reframe the interaction into one of dominance (e.g., “I’m a better Baptist than you are”), in the manner previously discussed. The other competitive path is one of refutation (e.g., “You’re not a true Baptist because you don’t go to church” or “The Bible is no more authoritative than any other book written thousands of years ago”). This approach problematizes the substructural features of the identity display argument and makes the interaction into one concerned with issue resolution. The last primary goal for arguing is to play. This goal is quite interesting here because the desired responding orientation is competition. The initiator’s frame is one of playful aggression, and the game cannot take place unless the interlocutor shares that disposition. If the second arguer agrees with the first’s claims, there is no play at all, and the initiator is disappointed. If the interlocutor contends, but does so seriously and intently, the competition begins to have real implications for identity and relationship, although this outcome was never desired. In fact, playful arguers sometimes mistake genuine competition for the playful responses they hoped for, resulting in dissatisfaction and social inappropriateness.

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Cognitive Processes. The second arguing frame, thus, is focused on the general question of how one arguer connects his or her goals to those of the other person. As I said previously, one way of addressing this question is to examine general orientations, as I have done. Competition and cooperation are not the only available general dispositions, but they are of unquestioned importance in people’s views of what they are doing when they are arguing. The other way of studying how people conjoin goals, however, is to examine their cognitive processes, and I do that now. The first approach to this question begins from the standard observation (e.g., Wilson, Greene, & Dillard, 2000) that people often address multiple goals in their interactions. An arguer may be responding to the goals of persuasion, protecting the other’s face, and minimizing the level of emotional arousal involved in the episode, for example (Dillard, 1990a, 1990b; Dillard et al., 1989). Ohbuchi and Tedeschi (1997, p. 2177), studied the goals undergraduates have in their interpersonal conflicts (defined as “overt or covert opposition or disagreement with others”). They reported six general categories of goals, listed here in order of importance to the respondents: justice, relationship, identity, personal resources, power, and economic resources. Ninety-five percent of the respondents indicated that they were sensible of more than one goal during the recalled interaction, and 87% acted in response to three or more. B. O’Keefe and Shepherd (1987) pointed out that arguers have three main strategies open to them in the face of multiple objectives. They may pursue only one goal, neglecting the others. They may address one goal exclusively and then take on the next one, within a single turn at talk or throughout a series of exchanges. Finally, the deftest arguers can address more than one goal at a time, perhaps by making a persuasive appeal in a confirming way. I have added some small detail to this account, focusing on how the arguer structures the goal environment perceptually (Hample, 1992a, 1997). Supposing for simplicity that the arguer is alert to two goals, three means of goal achievement are possible, depending on how the goals are understood. First, the arguer may see the two goals as overlapping in his or her life space (Lewin, 1951): A single conversational movement, successfully aimed at the region of overlap, simultaneously meets both needs. For instance, persuading a friend to resign from a hateful job may achieve the instrumental (persuasive) objective and reduce the friend’s emotional arousal by giving him or her closure. This simultaneity is genuine, and pursuits of the two goals are not traceable to two different utterances or even two parts of one utterance. Second, the arguer may see both goals clearly but may not believe that they overlap at all. In this instance, the goals must be addressed in a sequence. The sequence

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may be spread out over a conversation or implemented within a single phrase. To continue the example, suppose the arguer said, “You should quit the job right now, and then you’ll feel better.” The first clause pursues the instrumental goal, and the second immediately (but not simultaneously) addresses the second. The last possibility is that the second goal becomes visible only after the first has been dealt with. Even though the arguer is pursuing both goals, the goals are perceived successively, not together. Even this sequence can occur within a single turn. Suppose the hypothetical arguer says, “You should quit the job right now,” but at about the time she or he says “quit” the listener seems to be starting to cry. Noticing this and hiding his or her surprise, without missing a beat, the arguer may continue, “You’ll feel so much better.” The combination of the initial account from B. O’Keefe and Shepherd (1987) and these additional points anticipates several distinct cognitive structures for goals. The first possibility is that the arguer simply blunders through the conversation, moving toward no goals at all. Such an arguer is not really participating in either of the two general frames—she or he has no primary argumentative goal and is not engaging in an effort to connect own goals with other’s. Second, the arguer may perceive a single goal, address it, and consider that the episode is essentially complete unless the listener initiates something in return. This arguer has framed the episode in the first way by having a primary goal but, on the assumption that the primary goal is idiosyncratic rather than interpersonal, is not conjoining own goals with other’s. Third, the arguer may perceive one goal but immediately upon reaching it notice another, pursuing that one in turn. Because the secondary goals are almost always concerned with identities and relationships (Dillard, 1990a, 1990b; Dillard et al., 1989), the other’s needs are probably taken into account. Fourth, two or more goals may be initially perceived, but their lack of contact generates the need to take them on in sequence. Still, goal connectedness is apparent in such an effort. Finally, two or more goals are seen at once, but a region of overlap is also perceived; the arguer can accomplish both things in genuine simultaneity. This situation shows integration of other’s goals into own intentions because the secondary goals in the research record are mostly oriented (at least in part) to the other person. The second approach to an arguer’s cognitive structure for conjoining goals is due to Bruce and Newman (1978). They began by pointing out that, even as an interacting person has a goal, other interactants infer that goal by observing behavior. Goals are implemented by plans, and evidence of the plan (i.e., observation of behavior) is taken as evidence of the goal. Conjoining goals thus requires that plans be coordinated. One interesting element of Bruce and Newman’s very detailed analysis is their dis-

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tinction between real and virtual plans. Sometimes, they noticed, people have a real plan that implements their true goals, but they wish to disguise this. Therefore, they generate a public plan, a virtual plan that serves as a cover for their real intentions. Bruce and Newman (1978) illustrate their theory by examining the Hansel and Gretel story. Briefly, the children’s parents decide that they cannot support Hansel and Gretel and resolve to lose them in the woods, where they will die. However, the children overhear the parents’ plan and generate one of their own. They leave a trail of pebbles in the forest, so that they can find their way out. Figure 2.1 simplifies the story and presents it in a simpler form than Bruce and Newman did. The figure has three columns. The first and third are the real plans of the parents and children, respectively. The middle column shows their joint virtual plan. The jagged lines indicate a competitive relation between two things. These lines connect one party’s private goals or desired outcomes to the equally private items of the other party; they represent cognitive relationships, not public ones. The curved lines show relations of pretense. They connect the public behavioral plan to its real origins and expected consequences. The only public, observable matters are the two in the center column: going into the forest and gathering firewood. The parents propose this as a real plan: The family needs firewood, and they will all go to collect it. It is actually a virtual plan; the parents’ real plan is in the first column. The children propose that they are really cooperating, but, again, this cooperative behavior is only virtual. In fact, the whole family cooperates publicly and goes together into the forest. Normally, an arguer must try to figure out the other’s private goals by observing no more than what is in the central column. In this story the children do not need to do this because they have listened to the real plan and believe what they overheard. The parents needed to infer private states from public behavior but did not do this accurately. Thus the children fooled them. In an earlier example in this chapter, I briefly described a man on a date producing a profeminist argument as an identity display. One possible reaction I mentioned was that his date may react badly to this argument on the grounds that it is unacceptably transparent. In that scenario, the woman must decide whether the man’s public display is real or virtual. She may, as I suggested, regard it as virtual and undesirable. Another woman in the same situation may also think it is virtual but may receive it as charmingly transparent. Yet a third woman may decide the man is sincere and judge that the display directly reflects the man’s real goals and that he may be taken at his word. The interesting idea here is transparency. People are all puzzles to one another, perpetually trying to see through public behavior to get a privileged view of the other’s internal states (Berger & Bradac, 1982). When

FIG. 2.1.

Real and virtual plans in the Hansel and Gretel story.

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people (rightly or wrongly) think that public behavior is transparent, they believe that they have done this. People also think that they have achieved insight when they judge that the publicly displayed goals are the real ones. In trying to connect arguing (or other) goals to those of another person, people may be trying to do two things at once, just as Hansel and Gretel did. Individuals perform the pretense of connecting behaviors with the public proposal, and they may do this cooperatively or competitively. However, actions are controlled by real goals and only appear to be in service of virtual ones. (I do not suggest that people always have virtual plans. Sometimes people are exactly what they seem to be, which makes a more certain foundation for responding to their arguments.) How do we decide whether to take an arguer’s message at face value? The use of the Hansel and Gretel story reminds us of K. Burke’s (1969) view that all human behavior can be understood as a drama. When people participate in an interactional argument, they are performing a plot. Fisher’s (1987) narrative principles of fidelity and coherence naturally come into play. Because of what they overheard, Hansel and Gretel believed that their parents’ public plan lacked fidelity. This information was pivotal for the children because the plan was otherwise coherent, and no false note would have been sounded until the children looked for their parents and did not find them. The hypothetical woman listening to the man’s identity display on a date has a more complex task. Assuming that the man knows enough about feminism not to make any improbable reasoning or claims about it, the woman’s attention is on the coherence of the argument. Are his claims consistent with one another? With what she knows about him? With what she knows about men on dates? Her judgments about coherence probably dictate her understanding of the man’s real goals. If she believes that the display is sincere (because it has both fidelity and coherence), she can produce public behavior that connects with what he has said, confident that she is also responding to his real goals. Should she believe that the display is inauthentic (perhaps because it is not coherent with his perceived character), she must then produce public behavior that reasonably responds to his argument but that also connects with what she believes his real goals are. Perhaps she will leave a trail of pebbles to the taxi stand. Let me summarize what I have said about the cognitive processes involved in an arguer connecting his or her goals to the interlocutor’s. The first issue has to do with the reality of multiple goals. The initiating arguer may have more than one objective, and the secondary goals commonly involve interpersonal matters of identity and relational definition. The arguer may act as though she or he has only one goal (and may in fact have only the one), or the arguer may take on several goals in se-

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quence. The most skilled possibility is that the arguer can satisfy more than one goal simultaneously. The second issue involves projecting a public argument that may or may not veridically reflect the arguer’s real goals. Each arguer must make inferences from the other’s behavior, seeking a transparent window into the other’s goals and character. People try to generate arguments that advance their private goals, connect with the other’s public argument, and respond to what they see as the other’s private goals. In addition, this second frame of connecting with other’s goals involves general orientations. The chief ones are competition and cooperation. Competition invites eristic argumentation, and cooperation makes coalescent arguing more likely. These two general orientations are applicable to any primary goals, whether instrumental, dominance, identity display, or play. The Third Frame: Reflecting on the Experience of Arguing One way to frame arguing is in terms of one’s primary goal, and another is to understand it in terms of goal connection; the third is to form a reflective theory of arguing. This involves recalling argumentative experiences and abstracting general principles from them. Another supportive route to reflective theory is study or formal instruction. This book, for instance, is supposed to be advancing the reader’s own reflective theories. Unlike this subsection, the first large part of this chapter examined people’s naïve theories of arguing. Some people in the studies presented in that section showed fairly advanced understandings of the activity, and some had no doubt been exposed to classwork in argumentation. Generally speaking, however, neither of these things is true of the respondents in toto. My view is that the naïve theories stand in need of correction. My view may be an academic, elitist prejudice, and the reader is of course entitled to draw that conclusion. However, it is clear that the naïve theories are dramatically different than those of argumentation studies scholars, and that is the standard that I have in mind by my use of the term reflective. An advanced frame for arguing should show appreciative mastery of two tripartite sets of distinctions. They almost match up, but not quite. The first list is the general criteria for good arguing: The argument should be sound, effective, and appropriate. The second list is Wenzel’s (1980, 1990) three perspectives, discussed in chapter 1: logical, rhetorical, and dialectical. Wenzel’s theorizing is explicitly in terms of stances a critic may take, but he clearly envisioned what the arguer ought to be doing, and those implications are important here. The logical standard is

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soundness, and the rhetorical stance orients to effectiveness; in these places, the match between the two lists is nearly exact. However, Wenzel’s third stance, the procedural or dialectical one, is broader than the appropriateness standard. The latter criterion emerged from the literature on interpersonal communication and is oriented to matters of politeness, facework, and social norms. The procedural view of arguing absorbs these considerations and further specifies the conditions under which the best arguing takes place. Good arguers are polite, but more is required to approach the ideal of dialectic. Soundness, the Logical Perspective. The basic idea here has already been developed to some degree in chapter 1 and is simply stated: A sound argument has good evidence that is strongly connected to a properly qualified claim by a good warrant. These general considerations are given more detail by the informal logicians’ specification that a good reason has premises that are acceptable, relevant, and sufficient (e.g., Govier, 2001). However, the talk of premises can mislead people into thinking that these three things are textual features of the argument. Acceptable can mean different things in different hands: One theorist may say that the premise needs to be acceptable to the immediate audience, another that the premise should be acceptable to the universal audience (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1969), a third that the premise should be acceptable to the critic. Other formulations are possible, too. Acceptability is a human judgment, an attribution, not a directly observable discourse characteristic. Relevance and sufficiency judgments are similar in that respect. Both require a great deal of knowledge that is external to the argument text. For instance, an example of a bad argument that fails on the relevance criterion is, “The St. Louis Cardinals have a striking red logo, so they will probably win their division this year.” Assuming that the logo premise is acceptable, someone can immediately see—but only those who know things about baseball—that the quality of a logo is irrelevant to success on the field. A good argument should be sound (or valid, or cogent, or probative, or well-structured). Specifying what soundness is, however, requires many assumptions about humans and how they think. As far as I can tell (Hample, 1981b), none of the main analyses of soundness are wholly satisfactory. None can sustain every detail of what they presuppose about people, language, reasoning, or epistemology. A specific argument can only be sound in a particular time and place, even if that is the only time and place imaginable. This realization came forcibly to me one day when, out of curiosity, I read Adam Smith’s (1980) 18th-century essay on the classical physics of earth, air, fire, and water. As I read the paper, I knew that the old theory was wrong, but I

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found myself drawn into it anyway. Supposing that phlogiston exists, it is a simple matter to measure it: Weigh a stick, burn it, weigh the ashes, and subtract to determine the weight of the expended phlogiston. It is science, and it gives a plausible account of basic physical processes. I suppose I could say that the best Western minds for more than a thousand years unanimously participated in unsound arguments, but it seems more reasonable to say that their arguments were sound—those from scholars today are just better. A sophisticated frame for arguing appreciates this distinction at some level, without disintegrating into the cynical chaos of complete relativism. Some arguments are obviously tight, and others are obviously irrational. In between, one can expect intelligent disagreement. Severe relativism is unsupportable anyway. Imagine a skinny male post-rationalist, dressed all in black with a razor-sharp short beard, driving along a busy road. He has this argument occur to him: “Driving on the right side of the road is safe; safety is good; so I should drive on the right side of the road; but this conclusion derives from an argument whose soundness only follows due to an intellectually repugnant colonization of me by a person-numbing cultural imperialism; therefore, I should assert my authenticity by driving on the left side of the road, right now.” This line of argument and action may raise questions of sanity, not epistemology. Some arguments are sounder than others, and this reality is the basis for how people live daily lives. To live intelligently but to write relativistically is a kind of pretentious hypocrisy. How are the in-between questions settled? By reasoning. Ideally, two people can work out consensus judgments by exchanging assumptions, definitions, critiques, knowledge, and reasonings. Participating in something that approaches the dialectical ideals for argumentative conversation generates the best available decisions, on a case by case basis. If people are fortunate, they may even be able to generalize some decisions into reliable principles. I believe that this is how people got logic and argumentation theory in the first place. An individual argument may be hard to judge in isolation, but arguments (in the plural) should be selfcorrecting. Should no dialectical partner be available, the only recourse is to think hard. In doing so, people are not walking on the firm ground of fact and truth. Instead, they are swimming in an environment of reason that moves around them, covers and recovers the leg that kicks, pushes back when one strokes forward, and separates person from ground. Allen, Berkowitz, Hunt, and Louden (1999) reported a meta-analysis that shows people experience noticeable improvement in critical thinking skills after taking a public speaking course, completing an argumentation course, or participating in interscholastic forensics. These activities

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are ordered in terms of the intensity with which students engage arguments and equally in terms of the benefit to their critical thinking performance. People can swim. Effectiveness, the Rhetorical Perspective. A good argument must also be effective, which normally means that it be persuasive in a genuine controversy, impossible to disregard in a dominance display, informative in an identity performance, or stimulating in a play episode. However, effectiveness cannot be pursued in isolation, and reflective people should understand this. The effort after soundness, for that matter, must also be tempered—by listeners’ disinterest in or lack of capacity for hearing all the premises and all the proofs. What constrains effectiveness? To begin my answer, let me start by admitting something reluctantly. In an argumentative exchange two of the more effective things a person can do are to lie or to threaten. Both topics are too large to explore here in much depth and not the sort of thing I want to study in detail anyway, but I offer a quick example of each. Some years ago, I undertook a study of lying (Hample, 1980). Among the things I did was to ask people to recall a lie they had told and to tell me about it. Most lies were unique, but one in particular recurred. In my sample, it was always told by female undergraduates speaking to their mothers. Usually over the phone, the mother said something like, “I tried to call you all weekend, but you were out. What were you doing?” In reality, the women had spent the weekend with their boyfriends. They didn’t want to say so, however, and so told a story in support of an unexpressed claim something like, “Everything is fine, Mom; don’t worry about what I’m doing here at school.” The lie was that they had spent the weekend with a girlfriend, and sometimes the lie took the form of an ordinarily detailed narrative. My informants clearly indicated that the lie had been effective. As to the threat of force, I mention Spain’s decision in 1492 that all Jews must convert to Christianity or leave (see Lea, 1906, vol. 1, ch. 3). The conditions under which they could emigrate imposed poverty because the Spanish did not want to see the wealth leave along with the Jewish people. Emigration was hard to arrange, and more than a few Jews were killed as they sought a seaport or refuge. Lea (p. 142) mentioned one set of figures that, although probably not very accurate (see Kamen, 1998, ch. 2), may give us some idea of what happened, at least proportionately: 165,000 emigrated, 50,000 were baptized, and 20,000 died. Focusing attention on the 50,000, I acknowledge that their decisions may have been guided by some valid and practical syllogisms, whose major premises could have been something like, “If I convert, I will live

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and keep my possessions” and “If I don’t convert, I will die or lose my possessions.” The application of force, usually called the fallacy of ad baculum, was effective in perhaps 50,000 instances, at least in the short term (many left Spain later and returned to their original faith; see Pullan, 1983). Effectiveness, then, should never be a solitary consideration. A good argument must also be ethical and moral. Weaver (1953, ch. 1) wrote that the best rhetoric is founded in dialectic. Before deciding what argument to make and how to make it, the responsible speaker first inquires as to the truth and the philosophical defensibility of various claims. Someone properly arguing that capital punishment is unjust will have expended some real effort to understand what “unjust” means. Wallace’s (1963) classic essay on good reasons shows how a good argument not only must be structurally sound but must also proceed from good motives and aim at good ends. In Wallace’s analysis, “good” is taken seriously as a dialectical concept. These points are also made nicely by Ehninger’s (1970) phrase, the “restrained partisan.” Ehninger’s idea is that even though the arguer is an advocate and is trying to “purify” the listener’s beliefs or attitudes, she or he should put forth reasons to be evaluated rationally and openly. The restrained partisan is not a propagandist, who will say anything to change the audience, and is not a “neutralist,” who simply makes a case without much concern as to whether or how it is received. Here is the reflective frame of the restrained partisan: In contracting to submit his directive to examination and rebuttal, he sets his case on its own legs—asks that it be given only that degree of credence which upon study it is found to deserve. Instead of avoiding or short circuiting the reflective process, the protagonist addresses it head on, and in this sense stands poised between the desire to control and the conviction that whatever control he achieves shall be achieved only in the right way and for the right reason. (p. 104)

The partisan is restrained precisely in his or her pursuit of effectiveness. The advocate wants the listener to accept the conclusion, but there is an equal need for the listener to accept the conclusion for the right reasons. The best arguments2 are bilateral (Brockriede, 1975; Ehninger, 1970; Johnstone, 1982): The person who initiates an argument places self at the same risk of change as she or he puts the listener. If one wishes to persuade a friend to vote for a particular candidate, one should also be open to having the friend persuade him or her to vote against that candidate. Assuming that the interlocutor is at essentially the same intellectual level as the initiator (e.g., an adult arguer is not trying to advise a small child), the reasons that persuade the partisan should also be the reasons

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she or he offers to the listener. Reasoning that cannot stand the light of refutation should not be put forth, just as it should not be the basis for one’s own position in the first place. Effectiveness is a legitimate objective for an argument and is one of the main characteristics of a good argument. However, this goal is constrained by the golden rule of arguing: “Argue unto others as you would have them argue unto you.” Effectiveness, in short, must be subordinated to the ethical requirements of bilaterality and dialectic. People may thus miss short-term opportunities for success by lying, threatening, misleading, distracting, or obscuring. In the long run, however, if both arguers in an exchange have the advanced understanding of effectiveness described in this section, the essential ability of arguments to be socially self-correcting should deliver exactly the degree of success that is deserved. Appropriateness and the Dialectical Perspective. Wenzel’s (1980, 1990) third stance for the criticism of arguments is the dialectical one. Here, the argument critic pays attention to the procedures under which the argument is conducted. Sometimes these rules may be explicit, as they are in formal legal proceedings. More often, they are implicit understandings of how people should act when they disagree. Reflective arguers should have the best understandings and try to implement them in argumentative action. Such an intellectualization would avoid the mistakes present in naïve actors’ theories of argument. Among other things, a proper dialectical perspective results in social appropriateness because the best procedures require fairness, respect, and equality in arguing. Even the most reflective arguers are unlikely to be thinking in terms of procedural rules. More natural, I suppose, are generalized attitudes toward arguing and arguers. A positive set of predispositions allows people to look forward to a particular promotive climate for arguing, thereby helping to create it (because climactic expectations tend to be selffulfilling prophecies). People need not be able to articulate the elements of Habermas’ ideal speech situation, for instance, to direct themselves toward it. Two reflective orientations are involved here, although they are intimately connected. One has to do with the preparations for arguing (i.e., the conditions of it, the nature of an arguing episode), and the other concerns the details of argumentative performance. The most general issues are those surrounding the arguing episode. Here Habermas is the guide (Burleson & Kline, 1979; Goodnight, in press; McCarthy, 1973; Wenzel, 1979). He described the ideal speech situation, which is theorized to promote rational consensus, and supplied normative rules that encompass the whole enterprise of arguing. The general notion is that communication must flow freely, unimpeded by social inequalities or by any distortions inherent to the type of communication

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performed. His most basic specification, that of symmetry, is that all arguers must have equal opportunity—opportunity to argue, opportunity to initiate or respond, opportunity to express agreement or disagreement, opportunity to obtain and describe relevant information, opportunity to examine argument details or implications. The exchange can have no external constraints, such as a deadline, that may interfere with its coming to a natural conclusion. Nor can the argument be controlled by internal constraints, such as ideology, that put certain issues out of bounds. Power, status, education, background information, domination, personality—none of these, ideally, has any influence. The exchange is regulated only by free reason and thus guarantees justice to its participants. Arguers are always and insistently accountable for the truth and rationality of everything they say but never for their interests, histories, or standing, for these are always ideally irrelevant. Through the free exchange of reason, arguers arrive at a grounded consensus. Readers are no doubt well aware that these conditions rarely hold, but that is not the point. The ideal speech situation is partly a goal and partly a set of expectations. Christians do not believe that they can achieve sinless lives, but that does not prevent them from trying. Similarly, the ideal speech situation holds out standards that let people see where they fall short. This stimulus is important for reflection about arguing. The sincere intention to create circumstances that accord with Habermas’ recommendations generates sensitivities and actions that improve the precision with which people seek these conditions in their lives. I add some detail to these preparations for arguing by considering the rules for critical discussion (van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 1992). These rules have the same ideal flavor as Habermas’ formulation and the same value as a set of standards people can apply to themselves. They are also consistent with Habermas’ work. They differ in that they are much more focused on the actual argumentative exchange, rather than the preparations for the discussion. Here are the rules: 1. Parties must not prevent each other from advancing standpoints or casting doubt on standpoints. 2. A party that advances a standpoint is obliged to defend it if the other party asks him to do so. 3. A party’s attack on a standpoint must relate to the standpoint that has indeed been advanced by the other party. 4. A party may defend his standpoint only by advancing argumentation relating to that standpoint. 5. A party may not falsely present something as a premise that has been left unexpressed by the other party or deny a premise that he himself has left implicit.

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6. A party may not falsely present a premise as an accepted starting point nor deny a premise representing an accepted starting point. 7. A party may not regard a standpoint as conclusively defended if the defense does not take place by means of an appropriate argumentation scheme that is correctly applied. 8. In his argumentation a party may only use arguments that are logically valid or capable of being validated by making explicit one or more unexpressed premises. 9. A failed defense of a standpoint must result in the party that put forward the standpoint retracting it and a conclusive defense in the other party retracting his doubt about the standpoint. 10. A party must not use formulations that are insufficiently clear or confusingly ambiguous and he must interpret the other party’s formulations as carefully and accurately as possible. (van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 1992, pp. 208–209) These rules are more specific than what Habermas says, but they express the results of both parties striving for an ideal speech situation. The freedom to argue and the symmetry of the arguers’ opportunities are spelled out in Rules 1 and 2. The irrelevance of everything except reasons is indicated by Rules 4, 7, and 9. The requirement that the arguments be sound ones appears in Rule 8. Rules 3, 5, 6, 8, and 10 each forbid some sort of distortion or trick. One interesting facet of these rules is that they are connected with the standard fallacies (van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 1992, passim, summarized in ch. 19; a more recent treatment is van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 2004). Violations are detectable, and their consequences can be traced in actual discourse. For instance, the ad baculum fallacy mentioned earlier in the chapter violates Rule 1 because force is used to restrict what one arguer is permitted to say. Rule 2 excludes argumentum ad ignorantiam (e.g., “I must be right because you can’t prove that I’m wrong”) because this move improperly shifts the burden of proof from the advocate to the respondent. Begging the question is forbidden by Rule 6 because this fallacy involves appearing to present a reason but only restating the conclusion. The straw man fallacy, in which one distorts what the other person said and then attacks the distortion, violates Rule 3. van Eemeren and Grootendorst analyze quite a few other fallacies in this way, including some newly identified ones, but these are probably enough to illustrate the general point, namely, that imperfect conduct produces imperfect reasoning. The dialectical perspective on arguing highlights the conditions and conduct of the interaction. Theoretically, sound and effective arguments

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are the inevitable outcome of a perfect set of procedures. Of course, the sound and effective arguments may be those of the interlocutor, but an arguer who has genuinely internalized what has been said here will be entirely open to that possibility. An awareness of what is involved in an ideal speech situation and what is required by the rules for critical discussion makes an arguer more perceptive about his or her own arguing experiences. The blemishes in own and other’s actions will be more apparent, and they will be apparent in a more perceptive way. Thus, the reflective frame involves an abstract understanding of all three of Wenzel’s (1980, 1990) perspectives. Soundness is his logical criterion, and it requires adaptation to the other without sacrifice of an external set of rational standards. Effective arguing, the rhetorical perspective, is restrained by ethics. These are at some level the general ethics of civilized life, but many of the prescriptions emerge from the nature of arguing itself. The goal of good dialectical procedures assures symmetry between the arguers. This dynamic supplies the social appropriateness that is a feature of good arguing, but dialectical commitments also generate the arguers’ essential equality, their freedom to argue, and the justice and rationality of their consensus. The Three Frames In this section of the chapter, I explored three ways of orienting to the activity of arguing. The frames are ordered in several respects. As I mentioned earlier, they increase in sophistication through the sequence. This is in part due to a second underlying continuum, which concerns the arguer’s understanding of the other. In the first frame (one’s primary goal), the other is an object, present but of entirely subordinate concern. The interlocutor is a target, a means of getting what the arguer wants. The arguer may want more than one thing and may have a range of objectives, but the only relevant motivational energies are one’s own. However, in the second frame, the cointeractant becomes a real person, acknowledged as a full partner or competitor in the search for a conclusion. Two sets of goals and plans are always in play, and the arguer now sees that they must be connected in an intimate way. In fact, the interlocutor’s objectives can even become an argumentative resource for the initiator, permitting one to say that such and such a position is weak because it does not really achieve what the other person wants. Finally, in the third frame, the reflective one, the arguer is able to rise above own goals and even above the reality of another person to form an abstract appreciation for the interpersonal conditions of arguing. The actions of two people are contained in an understandable episode type, which is a more theoretical idea than just a perceptive participation in an interaction. Soundness is

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understood in a nuanced way, and people may recognize its roots in the moment while appreciating its transcending objective. Effectiveness is not determined solely by own and other’s goals but is seen as operating under the general constraints of ethical life. Appropriateness is achieved not merely by displaying good manners but by committing to the best procedural standards. Movement through the three frames, then, requires progress from self, to self and genuine other, to episode type. Each jump requires another level of understanding. Thus, the frames are ordered by their sophistication.

CONCLUSIONS This chapter addresses the question, “what do people think they’re doing when they argue?” in two ways. My first tack was to review the research showing directly what ordinary people think an argument is. The emergent naïve theory of argument describes it as a punishing emotional experience, dangerous to relationships, potentially violent, and essentially unreasoned. The contrast between ordinary people’s views and those of the argumentation studies community could not be more stark. The second approach was partly descriptive and partly normative. I examined three frames for arguing. One is a simple orientation to one’s own goals. The second connects own goals to those of the other person, and the third is a reflective appreciation of arguing. The frames are descriptive, and some people have each of them. Perhaps the more insistent point is normative: People should be able to function in each orientational context and should try to achieve all three in some measure. The research describing the naïve theory of arguing suggests that most people either are using the first frame or believe that everyone else does. People need to achieve the other two frames as well, particularly the third.

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Invention of Argumentative Substance

The previous chapter dealt with the preconceptions people have, or should have, about arguing. Those frames both reflect and predict the emotional orientation people experience when anticipating an argument and may lead to a self-sustaining climate for the interaction. People’s goals, the degree to which they integrate their own ambitions with those of the cointeractant, and the quality of their reflections on arguing, all conspire to direct a person’s attention and energy while arguing. However, those considerations indicate very little about the specifics of what people say. Noticing, for instance, that one person is likely to be eristic and another coalescent is important and may lead to some very general predictions about arguing behavior. Even if a person can project the feel of another’s contribution, that person still cannot specify the content. Although research on this subject has not progressed far enough to make secure specific predictions about content, predicting is the goal of this chapter anyway. As far as the literature permits, I describe and predict what people say. The chapter, then, is about invention, Aristotle’s faculty of discovery. Arguments are, and are about, content. Arguers must supply those meanings. A central insight is that people do not necessarily say everything that occurs to them. Simply observing what a person said is a very incomplete description of what she or he was able to create in that circumstance. Invention is a cognitive process, even when it is also interactive. A picture of the process is needed, one that includes ideas that are suppressed or altered as well as those actually expressed. Two fairly discrete bodies of writing are relevant to this project. The first portion of the chapter focuses on the classical rhetorical heritage for 61

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invention. Some of those ideas are interesting but ultimately unhelpful, whereas others continue to have value. The classical authors had an instructive purpose in mind when they wrote, lending their work a consistent normative flavor. As I work through those ideas, however, I gradually approach a more descriptive orientation. The second part of the chapter covers some recent social science research, and there the descriptive commitment is very clear. I try to explain why people think of various things, how many they think of, and—to the degree possible—what those things are.

THE RHETORICAL HERITAGE Aristotle’s Rhetoric is, in retrospect, only a partial theory of public speaking. He dealt elaborately with invention, gives less attention to organization and style, and gives none to memory or delivery. Gross and Dascal (2001) showed that organization and style meld into argumentation in the Rhetoric. The standard contextualization of invention appears in the Rhetorica ad Herennium (from about 80 B.C.), which ceased to be attributed to Cicero in the late Middle Ages. The now-anonymous ad Herennium (I. 2) says that rhetoric has five canons: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. “Invention is the devising of matter, true or plausible, that would make the case convincing” (Rhetorica ad Herennium, I. 2. 3). Devising (excogitatio, the action of thinking out) is similar to Aristotle’s “discovery,” and points again to the recognition that invention is an active cognitive process, a sort of thinking rather than a sort of product (also see Kennedy, 1991, p. 36, n. 34, for comments on Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric). Invention is the first canon because it generates the content to be organized, phrased, remembered, and delivered. The classical authors’ accounts of invention fall generally into two domains. Beginning with Aristotle, most rhetorical theorists discussed topoi (loci in Latin), which are the places or sites at which arguments can be found (see Leff, 1983, for the Roman theorists). Another Greek writer, Hermagoras (about 150 B.C.), developed the doctrine of stasis in a work unfortunately lost. Stases are the critical points in a dispute, the key issues that determine the outcome of the argument. I explore both these traditional topics. Topoi Aristotle (1984a) identified two sort of topoi, or commonplaces. One group is common to all sorts of oratory, and the other kind relates to specific speech types. He explained:

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Take, for instance, the commonplace concerned with “the more or less.” On this it is equally easy to base a deduction or enthymeme about any of what nevertheless are essentially disconnected subjects—right conduct, natural science, or anything else whatever. But there are also those special commonplaces which are based on such propositions as apply only to particular groups or classes of things. Thus there are propositions about natural science on which it is impossible to base any enthymeme or deduction about ethics, and other propositions about ethics on which nothing can be based about natural science. (Rhetoric, 1358a14-20)

I respect this division. The three types of speech are deliberative (e.g., a legislative policy debate), forensic (e.g., a murder trial), and epideictic (e.g., a funeral oration). I begin, then, with the specific topics associated with each type of speech and take deliberative argument as an extended illustration. The discussion focuses on the usefulness of the topoi system, either in prescribing or in describing invention. Aristotle said (Rhetoric, I. 4) that deliberative speakers have recourse to five topics: ways and means (e.g., taxes), war and peace (i.e., whether to wage war or not), national defense (tactics, logistics, etc.), imports and exports (especially regarding food), and legislation (i.e., the forms of government and when they prosper). This list reflects Aristotle’s own observations in the Greece of his day and is culturally informative in that way. His list resonates with contemporary experience, for all these things are still legislative concerns. However, he said nothing about welfare, crime, education, abortion, or any of a multitude of other current subjects. Every age—perhaps every Congressional session—would need to revise this list. That is hardly an objection to what Aristotle says, but the proposal to revise the list is mildly stimulating. How would one do that? I suppose that I would begin by making a list of possible bills in the Congress. I would include those formally proposed as well as those being discussed but not introduced for action. I may even try to categorize topics raised in political speeches or commentaries. I imagine that this is roughly what Aristotle did to generate his own list. Yet this is all after the fact. In other words, the inventions—of bills, cases, speeches, editorials, and so forth— have already taken place before I devise my set of deliberative topics. These topoi only categorize inventional products. They do not, in the first place, describe or recommend inventional processes. But perhaps they do, in the second place. Suppose a legislator sought material for a speech. Could she recur to a list like Aristotle’s? To do so would be very odd practice indeed. The list consists only of categories of speech topics, although it hints at sources of development. For example, if the general topic is ways and means, the speaker needs to have knowledge about finance. Even supposing that the hypothetical legislator just wanted to give a speech—any speech—selecting a topos would supply a

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general subject but not any specific arguments. If the legislator began this inventional process with a speech topic already in mind (e.g., should we raise personal income tax rates?), the topical list just categorizes her choice, without advancing her at all. Recognizing this, Aristotle (1984a) continued in a more useful way, supplying premises for the deliberative orator to use. Though a few fit Greece better than present times, one can nonetheless get a sense of what is involved from a sample of them. Still discussing deliberative oratory, he wrote: For all advice to do things or not to do them is concerned with happiness and with the things that make for or against it; whatever creates or increases happiness or some part of happiness, we ought to do; whatever destroys or hampers happiness, or gives rise to its opposite, we ought not to do. (Rhetoric, 1360b9-12)

The deliberative speaker must argue from happiness: “X will make the nation happy; we ought to do that which secures happiness; so we ought to do X.” Aristotle then specified the constituents of happiness: good birth, plenty of good friends, wealth, many good children, an enjoyable old age, health, beauty, strength, athleticism, fame, honor, good luck, and excellence (I. 5). Among the various excellences are justice, courage, temperance, and generosity (I. 6). This strategy may work. Suppose the issue is war and peace. The orator searches through Aristotle’s suggested premises, seeing which are immediately salient in the circumstances (i.e., the faculty of observing, as that part of Aristotle’s definition is often translated). These premises function as warrants (Bird, 1961), and thus the arguer, in considering the situation for the speech, searches for data that the warrants can use to authorize claims. By reading the Rhetoric, the orator knows that “good birth” for a state refers to whether its race is ancient and historically distinguished. By his or her knowledge of the circumstances, the arguer may also realize that the putative enemy is such a people. Honor is acquired by doing or preserving some good, and nobility of a race surely qualifies. The orator may then argue, “The proposed enemy is a noble race; to war against them would be dishonorable; so we must maintain peaceful relations with them.” Looking back more than two millennia, however, one can see a problem: People care less about nobility in present-day America than the ancient Greeks did. Some (e.g., think of the Klingons, the only race in the Star Trek universe that, legendarily, killed their own gods out of annoyance) may actually find more honor in attacking a noble enemy than a common one. Even in contemporary American culture, Philipsen (1992) discerned that some groups live by a code of honor, but others en-

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dorse a code of dignity instead. Ancient Greeks, Klingons, present-day Americans—each group needs different premises. Granting that Aristotle’s suggested premises worked as good warrants in Greece, and granting further that people could create an equally accurate set for contemporary times, I cannot help noticing that the most creative activity is the development of the list. The arguer who uses the premises as an aid is certainly engaging in invention, but I want a theory that also accounts for how the list is invented. Aristotle gave similar developments for epideictic speeches (I. 9) and forensic disputes (I. 10), but there is little need for me to discuss these; I would have the same things to say. The topoi themselves are nearly useless, descriptively and normatively, because they do not connect with the cognitive processes that yield meanings. They are only post facto categorizations. The elaborating premises, however, are productive (or, in some cases, were productive in Aristotle’s lifetime). These premises must be tailored to each age and culture, however, and Aristotle gave little hint as to how we might do so. Some matters are dialectical (e.g., what is beauty?), but the answers are so specific (e.g., “For a man in his prime, beauty is fitness for the exertion of warfare, together with a pleasant but at the same time formidable appearance”; 1361b12-13) that they do not strike the modern reader as being the sort of timeless conclusions dialectic is supposed to produce. The lists, if available at all today, must emerge from education and reflective experience. The War College, the Wharton School of Economics, a career of settling disputes at work—these are the places (topoi) one must look for premises. Cicero and Quintilian knew this and insisted on the education of the whole person. One cannot get a single list of premises this way, however. One economist teaches that lower tax rates at the highest brackets will stimulate the economy and cause its benefits to trickle down, and another insists that only higher tax rates will pay off the budget deficit so that the economy will stabilize, benefiting everyone. A list of premises like Aristotle’s cannot be taken as given. Every arguer has to check his or her own inventions against those prescribed by the list maker. These lists are most impressively an inventional product and only tentatively part of an inventional process. The arbitrariness (or, more charitably, the cultural instability) of Aristotle’s set of premises means that his advice ends up meaning no more than that arguers must select their warrants carefully. However, the Rhetoric also has another kind of topos. Those we have been examining are specific to one kind of argument (i.e., deliberative), but others are generally relevant to any kind of speech. The three topoi of universal applicability are the possible and impossible, past and future fact, and magnitude (II. 19).

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Regarding possible and impossible, Aristotle explained how to prove the possibility of one thing, given that another relevant thing exists. Relations that count as relevant can be of several kinds, such as part–whole, simple–complex, and so forth. He developed this idea only by illustration; some of his examples follow: It would seem to be the case that if it is possible for one of a pair of contraries to be or happen, then it is possible for the other: e.g. if a man can be cured, he can also fall ill; for any two contraries are equally possible, in so far as they are contraries. That if of two similar things one is possible, so is the other. That if the harder of two things is possible, so is the easier. That if a thing can come into existence in a good and beautiful form, then it can come into existence generally; thus a house can exist more easily than a beautiful house. That if the beginning of a thing can occur, so can the end. . . . That those things are possible of which the love or desire is natural; for no one, as a rule, loves or desires impossibilities. That things which are the object of any kind of science or art are possible and exist or come into existence. . . . That where the parts are possible, the whole is possible; and where the whole is possible, the parts are usually possible. . . . That if a whole genus is a thing that can occur, so can the species; and if the species can occur, so can the genus. . . . That if one of two things whose existence depends on each other is possible, so is the other; for instance, if double, then half. . . . That if a thing can be produced without art or preparation, it can be produced still more certainly by the careful application of art to it. . . . That if anything is possible to inferior, weaker, and stupider people, it is more so for their opposites. . . . As for impossibility, we can clearly get what we want by taking the contraries of the arguments stated above. (II. 19)

Perhaps the first thing to notice about this list of sample argument templates is that they can produce arguments that are clearly wrong. For instance, unicorns were an object of medieval art and science, but they have never existed. Unless the word natural is a tautology (e.g., “those things are possible of which the love or desire is natural”), many objects of desire simply can never happen (e.g., a little girl wanting to be Mary Queen of Scots). Even the apparently tightest illustration, the one about halves and doubles, does not always work because it fails to encompass things that can only exist in singularity: One can have half a pumpkin and two pumpkins, but although half a universe is certainly possible, two of them are not. In each case, the wrongness of the argument appears only by considering external material—the fictionality of unicorns, the death of Queen Mary, and so forth. Aristotle’s argument templates generate reasoning that is plausible on its face, and many of the specific arguments may prove to be sound. However, they need to be tested further by empirical

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investigation or dialectical reflection before they can be offered with confidence. That the topos of possible and impossible is not a complete inventional solution is not an objection to it, for argument production can be expected to be a multistage process. This is an encouraging result; I therefore move on to the other two general topoi. The next one is past fact and future fact. Aristotle listed argument templates that are almost causal. Because Aristotle is hardly naïve about causality, however, these passages are more nuanced than those about the possible and impossible. Again, he taught by illustration: Questions of past fact may be looked at in the following ways. First, that if the less likely of two things has occurred, the more likely must have occurred also. That if one thing that usually follows another has happened, then that other thing has happened; that, for instance, if a man has forgotten a thing, he has also once learnt it. That if a man had the power and the wish to do a thing, he has done it; for every one does do whatever he wants to do whenever he can do it, there being nothing to stop him. . . . Again, that if a thing was going to happen, it has happened; if a man was going to do something, he has done it, for it is likely that the intention was carried out. That if one thing has happened which naturally happens before another or with a view to it, the other has happened; for instance, if it has lightened, it has also thundered. . . . Of all these sequences some are inevitable and some merely usual. The arguments for the non-occurence of anything can obviously be found by considering the opposites of those that have been mentioned. How questions of future fact should be argued is clear from the same considerations: that a thing will be done if there is both the power and the wish to do it. . . . That if the means to an end have occurred, then the end is likely to occur. . . . (II. 19)

From his qualifications (e.g., “Of all these sequences some are inevitable and some merely usual”), it appears that Aristotle understands that this system simply nominates plausible arguments. It does not confirm their soundness. Still, he draws attention to particular kinds of relations between two events: relative likelihood, reliable sequencing, motivation and result, means and ends, and so forth. These relations can be useful in generating probabilistic arguments that can be tested further, either by private meditation or by public dialectic. The last of the general topoi is magnitude, or greatness and smallness. In this chapter (II. 19) he mainly suggested that the developments of possible and impossible, and past fact and future fact, can be reapplied to magnitude, but perhaps that is because he had already discussed this topos. Observing that sometimes people argue over which of two good things should be preferred, or which of two bad things should be more

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firmly condemned, Aristotle suggested that the idea of magnitude produces an effective strategy: A thing which surpasses another may be regarded as being that other thing plus something more, and that other thing which is surpassed as being what is contained in the first thing. . . . Again, if the largest member of one class surpasses the largest member of another, then the one class surpasses the other; and if one class surpasses another, then the largest member of the one surpasses the largest member of the other. Thus, if the tallest man is taller than the tallest woman, then men in general are taller than women. Conversely, if men in general are taller than women, then the tallest man is taller than the tallest woman. . . . Again, where one good is always accompanied by another, but does not always accompany it, it is greater than the other, for the use of the second thing is implied in the use of the first. . . . A thing productive of a greater good is itself a greater good than that other. . . . Again, if one of two things is an end, and the other is not, the former is the greater good, as being chosen for its own sake and not for the sake of something else. . . And of two things that which stands less in need of other things is the greater good, since it is more self-sufficing. . . . And when one thing does not exist or cannot come into existence without a second, while the second can exist without the first, the second is better. (I. 7)

The worse of two acts of wrong done to others is that which is prompted by the worse disposition. Hence the most trifling acts may be the worst ones . . . The converse is true of just acts. This is because the greater is here potentially contained in the less: there is no crime that a man who has stolen three consecrated half-obols would shrink from committing. Sometimes, however, the worse act is reckoned not in this way but by the greater harm that it does. (I. 14)

This is nearly hopeless. The argument about the height of men and women is awful, that about self-sufficient goods seems arbitrary, and the suggestions about using motivation or consequences to judge bad acts seem to vacillate. Others of the templates are more persuasive, and I have omitted some of Aristotle’s further illustrations in these two chapters of the Rhetoric. All that I can honestly extract from this last general topos is that comparative claims are often important and that some underlying standard must exist for any such judgment. One can use Aristotle’s warrants (e.g., X is better than Y because X is an end in itself, whereas Y is only a means to Z), but not with much confidence (e.g., “Eating fruit pies is better than international negotiation, because we eat pies for no other end, but negotiation is only a means toward world peace”). Things can be compared on

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so many grounds, and the grounds are so domain specific, that Aristotle may have been ill advised even to try to illustrate the topos of magnitude. The Rhetoric has many other large sections that may be understood as being like those just summarized, although they are not often classified as being about topoi. For instance, Aristotle offered many usable propositions about the emotions and how to excite or damp them down (II. 211), how the arguer may adapt his or her apparent character to various sorts of audience members (II. 12-17), and what sorts of things a speaker needs to say or display about self to be regarded as credible (II. 1). Some premises strike a modern chord (e.g., that credibility is composed of good sense, good character, and good will toward the audience; 1378a7-9). Others (e.g., “we ought always to inflict a preliminary punishment in words: if that is done, even slaves are less aggrieved by the actual punishment”; 1380b18-20) are reminders that the book is 2,400 years old. What can one take from Aristotle and his successors on topoi? The lists of specific topics (e.g., war and peace) may or may not summarize current practice and are no more than post facto category systems anyway. Some premises that develop those topics still seem sound, but others are unreliable, and all seem to admit exceptions. The general topoi (e.g., possible and impossible) certainly are common issues, but I see no reason to suppose that those three are anything like an exhaustive list. There, too, the particular premises are quite variable in their usefulness: Aristotle’s work on the possible and the impossible still seems good, that on past and future fact reasonable, but that on magnitude unreliable. Quintilian’s (1921) judgment still seems appropriate: Such in the main are the usual topics of proof as specified by teachers of rhetoric, but it is not sufficient to classify them generally in our instructions, since from each of them there arises an infinite number of arguments, while it is in the very nature of things impossible to deal with all their individual species. (Institutio Oratoria, V. 10. 100)

Setting aside Aristotle’s specific content, one can discern four general points: that particular categories of argument (e.g., deliberative) have more specific sub-topics associated with them; that certain premises resonate with audiences on particular subjects; that some forms of argument (e.g., magnitude) are common; and that some general premises may be used as part of those argument templates. Put this way, all four of those conclusions are vacuous, they are essentially empirical once given detail for a particular time and place, and they are not especially theoretical. They summarize observation of current practice and opinion. A contemporary arguer may be helped by exploring recent scholarship on a given topic, such as international rela-

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tions, but ultimately the arguer has to go it alone. She or he must select a topic, which may or may not be a common one. Then the arguer must find premises, which, even if they are generally unobjectionable, must still be checked against the instant circumstances. Aristotle’s topoi, although they may have been remarkably perceptive about Athens in his day, are only accidentally applicable to contemporary situations. Neither in terms of specific content nor in terms of general approach does this system seem to offer much promise for the study of invention. The topoi neither describe nor advise with any authority. The Rhetoric can still be read with profit on all these points, but the benefit depends at least as much on the reader’s perceptiveness as on Aristotle’s. His great contributions are the enthymeme and the three modes of artistic proof, not the topoi. Stasis The other important part of invention’s rhetorical heritage is the idea of stasis (status in Latin). The word means “a standing still” and represents an analogy from physics. In that context, following Aristotle, “stasis is that which disrupts, or severs motion and robs it of its continuity” (Dieter, 1950, p. 349). If a ball rolled uphill with such precision that it stopped, balanced, at the very tip of the hill, the apex would be the stasis point. From there, the slightest force will cause the ball to roll either backward or forward. In a dispute, the stasis points are the key issues. The controversy must pause at each point and resolve it to determine the direction of the dispute. The doctrine of stasis has roots at least as far back as Aristotle’s Rhetoric (Dieter, 1950, p. 347; Nadeau, 1958, p. 63). It took on its canonical form with Hermagoras of Temnos in about 150 B. C. Hermagoras’ work has been lost, but enough fragments survive to reconstruct his system. Stasis was a common element in the theory of invention throughout the classical period (Nadeau, 1959). Hermagoras’ is the primary theory that was conveyed through the centuries, due largely to its transmission by the Rhetorica ad Herennium and Cicero’s De Inventione. I begin with that standard system but then move forward through the centuries and finally discuss several contemporary versions of stasis theory. “Every subject which contains in itself a controversy to be resolved by speech and debate involves a question about a fact, or about a definition, or about the nature of an act, or about legal processes” (Cicero, De Inventione, 1.10). The basic classical theory is that there are four stases: fact, definition, quality, and legality. Some other writers omit the fourth. The theory is often presented as applying mainly to forensic arguing (e.g., ad Herennium), although Cicero said clearly that the system applies

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to controversies of any sort (but see Hultzén, 1958, pp. 104–108), even if many of his own illustrations are from the courts. Brief explanations and hypothetical examples of each stasis follow. 1. Fact. Did the event occur? Examples: Did A kill B? Was Hitler legally elected Chancellor? Did Kennedy himself write Profiles in Courage? 2. Definition. What label is properly applied to the act, given that it occurred? Examples: Did A “murder” B? Was Hitler’s election “legal”? Did Kennedy commit “plagiarism”? 3. Quality. What is the character (good or bad) of the act? Examples: Was the killing in self-defense? Was Hitler’s election a true reflection of German democracy? Was Kennedy’s action the normal practice for aspiring politicians? 4. Legality. Is this the proper place to adjudicate the issue? Examples: If this was a criminal act, why are we in a civil court? Should the legality of Hitler’s Chancellorship be decided in a German court or in a scholarly book of history? Why should we pay any attention to allegations by political opponents, when they are not constrained by peer review or the legal rules of evidence? I state the definitions as questions, and this is appropriate, for each stasis represents a key issue. The system makes most immediate sense in a forensic controversy, but questions of fact, definition, quality, and legality also arise in deliberative and epideictic matters as well. Lincoln even addressed the appropriateness of his forum (the fourth stasis) at Gettysburg: We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground.

How does this compare with the topoi? Although stasis theory may also have derived from careful observation of oratory, it is far more productive. The stases represent a theory of controversy, not merely a classification system for it. The prospective orator is not given a laundry list of choices that can be taken or not based on the arguer’s judgment. All the stases must be addressed, all the time. Only one may turn out to be pivotal in a given matter, but only because the others have obvious and consensual resolutions. In a specific instance, the general stases may be defined more precisely. An illustration is the following part of the Uniform Act for the Extradi-

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tion of Persons of Unsound Mind, as it appears in the laws of Illinois (405 ILCS 10/3). Sec. 3. A person alleged to be of unsound mind found in this State, who has fled from another state in which, at the time of his flight: (a) he was under detention by law in a hospital, asylum or other institution for the insane as a person of unsound mind, or (b) he had been theretofore determined by legal proceedings to be of unsound mind, the finding being unreversed and in full force and effect, and the control of his person having been acquired by a court of competent jurisdiction of the state from which he fled, or (c) he was subject to detention in such state, being then his legal domicile (personal service of process having been made) based on legal proceedings there pending to have him declared of unsound mind, shall, on demand of the executive authority of the state from which he fled, be delivered up to be removed thereto.

This section of the statute defines the circumstances in which such a person must be extradited. The person must have fled from another state, must be demanded by the other state, and must further satisfy one of three conditions: a) The other state had legally detained him or her as “a person of unsound mind”; b) The other state had found the person to be of unsound mind, and a court had control of his or her person; or c) The person was in the process of having his or her soundness of mind determined in court. These, then, are the three key stases for this potential controversy: flight, soundness, and demand from the other state, with three alternative argumentative approaches to the second issue. These stases bear mainly on the matter of definition. The issue of fact is normally decided by judge or jury in the trial court. Matters of quality arise if the statute admits any mitigations or aggravations (this one doesn’t seem to do so, but an example of mitigation is self-defense in a murder law). Jurisdictional domains are defined by Constitution, statute, and decision. Any criminal law can be analyzed in these terms. Furthermore, the stasis system can be used as a general guide in writing a law. What acts must be proved to bring the behavior under the authority of this law? Do all qualifying acts have the same quality, or are mitigation, exception, and aggravation possible? What court has jurisdiction? Both the legislator and the advocate can benefit from letting stasis theory guide their inventions. Neither the standard Ciceronian system nor the specific systems respecified in each law are the whole of stasis. The idea is so appealing— stock issues that can be relied on to be exhaustive and decisive—that adaptations have been made to a variety of subjects. Prill (1988) argued

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that medieval theologians had a stasis system for Biblical interpretation (also see Smalley, 1964), and Purcell (1996, p. 119) found another in Gervasius of Melkley’s medieval organization of stylistic figures. Before moving to the modern day, however, I discuss only one other classical theory, recognized as a stasis theory for narrative, although it is not often mentioned by argumentation scholars. In classical treatments of forensic oratory, the narrative was typically the second part of the speech, following the introduction and preceding the argument. The advocate told the story of what happened in a persuasive way. Naturally, persuasiveness requires that audiences have the sense that a complete account has been given, with all potential points of controversy satisfied; the stases outline what is required. Stories, of course, can appear in nearly any sort of oratory, and they can constitute nonlinear arguments (see chap. 1). From Quintilian (Institutio Oratoria, V. x. 32-33) come these instructions: I now pass to things [from persons, the other main source of arguments]: of these actions are the most nearly connected with persons and must therefore be treated first. In regard to every action the question arises either Why or Where or When or How or By what means the action is performed.

Because actions are “connected with persons,” the issue of who is taken for granted. What we have, then, is a system for telling a complete story, a set of stases for shaping or defending a narrative to one’s own ends. This system does not compare unfavorably to the better known modern system, K. Burke’s (1969) pentad: act, agent, agency, scene, and purpose. Why connects to purpose, where and when detail the scene, how and by what means have to do with agency, and who is the agent. Burke’s insight that the naming of the act is critical was not foreseen by Quintilian but in other respects reflects a similar understanding of human action. For the next stasis theory, I move, somewhat abruptly, to the 20th century and the topic of policy debate. Propositions for interscholastic debate are ordinarily classified as being propositions of fact (e.g., did Lee Harvey Oswald act alone?), value (e.g., is the U.S. welfare system a force for good or ill?), or policy (e.g., should the United States intervene in African civil wars?). Every debatable proposition must be phrased so as to call for change—in belief, in value, or in action. Policy propositions are characterized by their inclusion of the words should or ought, for they specify some action to be taken. American interscholastic debate throughout the last century tended to specialize in policy propositions. As the century went forward, coaches and debaters developed a number of theories, subjected to a brutal Darwinian process in the eristic caul-

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dron of tournaments. Stable versions of these theories were expressed in argumentation textbooks. Unfortunately, these texts are not often well footnoted, and I am frankly unsure where, when, or by whom the doctrine of policy stases originated. These issues are normally called “stock issues,” and I believe that the undergraduate debaters probably had as much or more to do with the theoretical development as did their coaches or textbook authors. Someone needs to do a careful historical study of these developments, although Harpine (1984) provided a nice start. With the informal help of a number of other argumentation scholars, I have undertaken a preliminary sketch. Any reasonably full discussion of deliberative speaking will include comments that can be assimilated to the stock issues theory, and thus one can easily find pertinent remarks in Aristotle or Whately, for instance. However, the first contextually relevant appearance of the phrase stock issues seems to be in work by O’Neill, Laycock, and Scales (1917). They identified two such issues: 1. Is the present unsatisfactory? Are there evils in the existing situation? Is there a cause for action? Is there a disease? Do we need a change? etc. 2. Is the proposed action an improvement? Will it cure the evils? Is this the action we should take? Is this the proper remedy? Is the proposed change the right one? (pp. 56–57) The stock issues are not named, but the authors anticipated all of what are now regarded as the stases for policy propositions. By 1958, the current theory had begun to take on its final form. Hultzén (1958, pp. 109–110) named four stock issues: malum (ill), sanibilitas (reformability), remedium (remedy), and pretium (cost). These are not the terms scholars tend to use today, although I was interested to find his suggestion that they could be taught as “ill, blame, cure, cost” (pp. 109–110, n. 26), terminology later adopted by Ziegelmeuller and Dause (1975, pp. 32–37). Hultzén cited Shaw (1922, p. 151) as a source, and in fact these ideas are to be found there, albeit unlabeled. Hultzén’s suggestions did not immediately win unanimous approval. For instance, only three stock issues appear in the influential Ehninger and Brockriede (1963, ch. 14) and Freeley (1966, p. 50) texts. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, competitive tournament practice caused the theory to coalesce into its present form and terminology. The standard account of the stock issues for policy analysis follows. The four stases correspond to those of Hultzén (1958) and Shaw (1922) but have different labels.

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1. Significant harm. Is there a problem with the present system? Is the problem a substantial one? 2. Inherency. Is the problem necessary? That is, is it causally connected to the present system, considered either structurally or motivationally? Is the problem curable, given the current ways of doing things? Is it presently unavoidable? 3. Plan meet need. Will the proposed solution remove or substantially reduce the problem? 4. Disadvantages. Does the proposed plan have problems of its own? Do these costs outweigh the benefits of the plan?

As a brief example, suppose an arguer wants to reform the U.S. tax system. She or he may argue as follows. The current tax system is unfair because rich people and corporations pay proportionally less than middle class people (i.e., significant harm). This unfairness is intentional and explicitly required by the tax code (i.e., inherency). A flat tax without deductions would ensure proportionately equal contributions by everyone (i.e., plan meet need). The financial challenge of this tax plan for the poor can be repaired by transfer payments from the government (i.e., disadvantages). All four stock issues have been given considerable development in the argumentation literature, and those matters are too detailed to explore here. Interested readers should consult current textbooks and journals or, better, a current debate coach for the nuances of the analytical system. These four stock issues constitute a stasis theory, oriented particularly to policy issues. If the classical stases are most representative of forensic speaking, the stock issues are the parallel formulation for policy-oriented deliberative controversy. In fact, either set can be applied to disputes in many settings. For example, a eulogy of a statesman may explore how he was right about some public policy or particularly prescient about the writing of some bit of legislation. Recent decades have seen the debate community develop an interest in value propositions, and naturally a set of stock issues rose up in that context as well. The stases for value debate are simple. First, an appropriate value criterion is advocated, and second, the circumstances are shown to satisfy the standard. For instance, to argue that secondary education in the United States is awful, the arguer’s case may be, first, that educational systems must be evaluated primarily on the basis of students’ standardized test scores, and second, those scores in the United States are too low. Making proper allowance for the well-regulated eristic requirements of tournament debate, this set of stock issues constitutes a pure application of dialectical inquiry to circumstances, at least in principle.

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These stasis theories have considerable value, both descriptively and normatively. They characterize fully developed public controversies. For example, Putnam, Wilson, Waltman, and Turner (1986) studied 10 hours of collective bargaining between a teachers’ union and a school board and found that the stock issues for policy analysis served well as an analytic frame, even though the researchers had no reason to suppose that any of the negotiators had been trained in the policy stases. A full exploration of a complex policy issue naturally touches each stock issue. The normative value of the system should also be clear. Continued reflection on any of the stasis systems should make a person more perceptive about the rational requirements of controversy. The stasis theories summarized to this point, although they have considerable generalizability, are all really aimed at one sort of discourse, mostly forensic or deliberative. This division of arguments into forensic, deliberative, and epideictic traces back to Aristotle’s Rhetoric and is certainly not exhaustive. With the decline of the Roman Republic, for instance, the civic place for deliberative discourse became quite constricted in many governments. The Christian control of the intellectual life of Europe during the Middle Ages caused rhetorical theory to become more and more focused on its theological applications, particularly evangelism, Biblical exegesis, and homiletics (Caplan, 1961; Murphy, 1974). The poor fit between preaching and Aristotle’s three types of oratory (simple instruction does not match very well either) is a dramatic clue to the need to find a stasis theory that is not constrained by that old category system. Such a theory is to be found in Kline’s (1979) study of speech acts. A speech act, to echo Austin’s (1962) phrase, is something done with words. For instance, when a properly qualified minister or judge says, “I pronounce you husband and wife” at a wedding ceremony, the speaker has accomplished marriage. When a supervisor says “you’re gone,” the manager has done firing. The words, their meanings, and the grammar are obviously relevant, but the speech act is something more. Nothing in the classical example of an indirect speech act, “can you pass the salt?” is a literal clue that a request is being made, rather than a question. A speech act is a pragmatic accomplishment, not a semantic or syntactic one (Levinson, 1983, esp. ch. 5; Searle, 1969). People and their circumstances are involved, as are symbol systems. Every speech act has felicity conditions, the requirements for the “happy” (or correct) performance of the speech act, which are the key to Kline’s (1979) stasis theory. In a nutshell, she shows that each felicity condition is a stasis point. If one wishes to make a rational argument against a speech act, the objection must connect to the felicity conditions. An arguer wanting to perform a speech act correctly must be prepared to offer reasons bearing on each felicity condition.

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Every speech act has four classes of felicity conditions. The first, propositional content, refers to the semantic and syntactic elements that make the speech act recognizable as such. For instance, in a request, the speaker must express the idea that the hearer should do a particular thing. The preparatory conditions refer to the circumstances that are required for the act: The requester must believe that the hearer is able to do the thing, that she or he would not do it without being asked, and that the speaker has a right to make the request. The sincerity condition is that the speaker intends to make the apparent speech act. Thus, the request is not a joke or a classroom example. Finally, the essential condition is that what is said “counts as” the speech act. If the speaker’s intent is clear, saying “there’s a draft” counts as a request to close the door. Continuing the example, one can see how a person may form an objection to, say, the request to loan his or her car to a friend. The first person says baldly, “Can I borrow your car tonight?” How could the request be refused? The hearer may do a number of things: pretend to misunderstand or mishear (i.e., relevant to the propositional content rule), treat it as a joke (i.e., sincerity condition), or take it as a literal question to be answered just before flight with the car keys (i.e., the essential condition). Probably the hearer will refuse on grounds related to the preparatory conditions. One of these is the requirement that the hearer be able to do the act. The refuser may thus say, “It’s not running right,” “I’ve already got plans myself,” “my insurance won’t cover you,” or something of the sort. For all these reasons, the relevance is immediately understood as connecting to the ability to lend the car. Another preparatory condition is that the speaker has the right to ask, leading to refusals such as “you never lend me anything of yours” or “I don’t trust your driving.” Every distinct sort of speech act has its own specific propositional, preparatory, sincerity, and essential requirements. “The conditions of a particular kind of speech act such as requests can be understood to be the stases or the structural conjunctions around which listeners address their disagreements. Speakers tacitly use these stases to determine a listener’s potential objections” (Kline, 1979, p. 100). This stasis theory is completely general, because everything people say is a speech act. A further advantage of this formulation is that, although it applies to oratory, it does not refer only to public speeches. It applies quite readily to the conversational arguments that dominate daily interpersonal exchanges. It is both descriptive and normative—descriptive because this theory locates where many (although not all) disagreements are formed; normative because the disagreements that connect properly to felicity conditions are intelligent and rational. I summarize what I have said about invention’s rhetorical heritage in this way. The topoi, although their development is interesting and worth

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studying, do not constitute either a usable description or a theory of invention. The categorizations of argument topics are after the fact, and they do not exclude anything at all. A new topic for arguing is simply added to the list. The premises that can be used to develop the topoi or their constituents are unreliable. Stases, on the other hand, are both descriptive and normative. The classical systems have stood the test of time, and the modern theories are equally good. Usable theories are immediately applicable to forensic and deliberative arguments, either linear or narrative in form. Kline’s (1979) work gives assurance that stasis theory may be applied to any sort of interpersonal controversy. Given a proper understanding of the key speech act in dispute, one can identify the arguable issues, see whether the interactants are arguing relevantly, and prescribe lines of reasoning that are appropriate.

INVENTIONAL CAPACITY Invention has been studied not only from the vantage point of rhetorical theory. It has also been a concern in modern social scientific theories of message production. These theories are not as well developed as those just reviewed, but the commitment to descriptive accuracy is more pronounced, as is the interest in interpersonal arguing rather than public speaking. In message production research, the idea of repertoire is recurrent. Most theories take it as a starting point. The compliance-gaining tradition, for instance, uses explicit lists of messages; respondents look over the lists and choose the items they would be willing to utter (see Wilson, 1997, 2002). Greene’s (1997a) action assembly theory identifies messages as having been assembled from repertoire components stored in memory. Berger (1997) wrote that people speak from plans that contain pre-existing messages. Kellermann (1995) showed that people have memory organization packets (MOPs) for episodes; these little theories of what may happen contain what can be said at each anticipated point. A MOPs study of interpersonal arguing was discussed in chapter 2 (see Hample et al., 1997). Hample and Dallinger (1987b, 1990) presumed that people have repertoires of possible arguments and that they select the ones that best suit the actor’s immediate goals. Several theorists, such as Dillard (1990a, 1990b, 2004) and Meyer (1997), make use of the goal–plan–action model. This theory is that goals activate pre-existing message plans, which contain the messages. B. O’Keefe and Lambert (1995) argued that messages take their content from a reading off of the thoughts stimulated by the interaction. Several scholars (Berger, 1997; Hample, 2000a; Waldron, 1990) have noticed that the messages may not

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come cleanly out of the repertoires because some sort of modification or polishing may be needed. The common thread in all these theories is the idea that the repertoires exist prior to the episode and that messages are activated by circumstances. This is mostly a theory of recall, not of invention. A welter of accounts describe how materials are used, once they have been discovered in memory. In 2,400 years, the discipline has done very little to study how content can be freshly created. Nor have scholars done much in the way of predicting the nature of people’s repertoires. The inventional capacity research program has the goal of eventually redressing these two deficiencies (Hample, Grismer, Brown, Andrews, & Summary, 2000; Hample, Hammond, Hopphan, & Venvertloh, 2002; Hample, Quinton, Moulin, & Blood, 2000; Hample & Wang, 2001). Inventional capacity refers to the size of one’s message repertoire. The elements of the repertoire can be recalled exactly from memory, recalled and edited, or created for the first time (for the last, see Jung-Beeman et al., 2004). A fundamental ambiguity in the operationalization of the construct is that it does not distinguish among these three routes to invention. The measurement of inventional capacity is reasonably simple. Respondents are presented with a description of a stimulus situation and are asked to imagine that they are participating in it and then to list up to 15 things that they could say in that circumstance. The measure of inventional capacity (IC) is the number of items listed. Most work has been done with persuasion situations, although some studies have examined comforting, initial acquaintance, and forgiving. These latter stimuli sometimes, but not always, invite arguments. They are included in the research program both for their own sake and to contextualize the results for the persuasive situations, which consistently call out argumentation. All the stimuli end by indicating the goal (e.g., “You initiate a conversation to forgive him or her”). Here is an example of one respondent’s material. A senior undergraduate, she was asked to imagine that she was in this situation: You are sure that you are getting the flu because you really feel awful, but you realize that you have book due at the library TODAY. You don’t want to walk it over there so you want to get your roommate to return it for you.

This scenario is one of the persuasive situations used in the research program. The instrumental goal is explicit in the last line. After she read the situational stimulus, the respondent was instructed in this way: What could you say to your roommate? Please list as many things to say as you can think of. We realize that you probably wouldn’t say some of

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these things, but we’d like you to list them all anyway. List as many as you can in 5 minutes, but no more than 15.

She wrote four things in response (with some minor editing for punctuation): 1. 2. 3. 4.

Would you please return this book for me? Are you going in the direction of the library? If so . . . Hey roomie, I’m sick. Return this book. Nicole, I’m sick. Will you do me a favor?

All four take on the instrumental goal (in some tasks, a few people write mainly things to set up the situation, such as “How are you doing?”). All have some evident face work: Response 1 is conventionally polite; Response 2 addresses the most likely obstacle to the request (see Francik & Clark, 1985; Roloff & Janiszewski, 1989); Response 4 gives a reason and then a conventionally polite request; even Response 3, the most abrupt, gives a friendly salutation and a reason just prior to the imperative. The reasoning in the list is not particularly elaborate, but it is present in the last two responses. The absence of explicit reasons in the first two responses is a reminder that arguing is effortful and is not undertaken if an easier path (e.g., a simple request) is available and satisfactory. Several studies have investigated the idea of inventional capacity. These studies have been exploratory in nature and have mostly concerned the nature of the construct, which is understood as an individual differences variable. These first studies have clarified what sort of individual difference it is, explored whether it depends on the situation that calls for arguing, and investigated a few features of the repertoires themselves. Table 3.1 contains some descriptive results from the early studies, showing type of stimulus, sample sizes, means, standard deviations, and the percentage of respondents who listed 15 items. The stimuli are abbreviated as follows: P represents persuasion, F forgiveness, C comforting, and IA initial acquaintance. These results indicate a reasonable amount of variation in the means and also suggest that 15 is an acceptable upper limit for the listing task. People certainly differ in their inventional capacities. I defer much discussion of this fact until chapter 6, where the topic is individual and situational differences in invention. For now, permit me to say that inventional capacity appears to reflect ability rather than personality. A consequence is that inventional capacity is fairly consistent across situations. Exploration of the contents of people’s repertoires will probably prove to be one of the more interesting topics in the research program. Unfortunately, this work is in its infancy. However, I offer results bearing on

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TABLE 3.1 Means, Standard Deviations, and Percentage of Respondents With 15 Inventions Study Hample, Quinton, et al. (2000) Hample, Grismer, et al. (2000) Hample & Wang (2001) Hample, Hammond, et al. (2002)

Stimuli P P F P, C, IA

N

IC Mean

IC s.d.

% with 15

110 108 136 297

9.2 5.9 6.0 6.9

3.6 3.1 2.9 3.1

18% 4% 1% 2%

Note. For stimuli, P refers to persuasive situations, F to forgiveness situations, C to comforting situations, and IA to initial acquaintanceship situations. IC is inventional capacity.

several issues: the politeness of the repertoires, their creativity, and their relevance to arguing. The question of repertoire politeness was raised in a different research program. Hample and Dallinger (1998) tried to explain why people’s arguments become ruder after a rebuff. That is, if a person makes a persuasive appeal, has it refused, and decides to persist, the second message is more aggressive than the first one. Hample and Dallinger speculated that people’s editorial standards change after one or more rebuffs, so that arguers become less concerned about politeness issues. In fact, they obtained support for that hypothesis. However, they were aware that another independent explanation for the effect was also possible: The repertoire exhaustion hypothesis suggests that when people have to give a second or third argument, they must move down lower into their repertoires. If the prosocial messages are higher in the repertoires, as seems plausible, then perhaps the rebuff phenomenon occurs because people have run out of polite messages after being rebuffed. Repertoire exhaustion and changing editorial standards may both be happening simultaneously. Consequently, the finding that editorial standards change does not rule out the exhaustion hypothesis. Hample (2001b) analyzed the persuasive repertoires from the Hample, Grismer, et al. (2000) and Hample, Quinton, et al. (2000) studies. Each listed item was rated as to its politeness, and those politeness ratings were compared to the ordinal positions of the items. For the repertoire exhaustion hypothesis to be correct, the first-listed messages should be rated as more polite than those at the end of the lists. In general, however, the mean politeness ratings for the listed messages were essentially the same, regardless of whether the items were listed early or late in the repertoires. People did not sacrifice appropriateness to generate additional arguments. This is an interesting result. Other results bear on the creativity of the repertoires. In addition to listing what they might say, respondents were also asked to rate each

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listed item as to its usualness. Our original hope was that we would see clear breaks in the usualness scores as we moved down through the repertoires. We expected the first-listed items to have been easily retrieved from memory and the later items to have been invented with more difficulty. These considerations prompted us to compare mean usualness ratings within the repertoires (i.e., the usualness of the first item compared to the second, the third, and so forth). Hample, Quinton, et al. (2000) found a significant decline in usualness as one moves downward through the repertoires. Hample, Grismer, et al. (2000) replicated this result (eta2 = .05). The pattern does not appear in Hample and Wang’s (2001) study of forgiveness messages. Figure 3.1 shows the mean usualness ratings for the inventions cumulated from Hample, Quinton, et al. (2000) and Hample, Grismer, et al. (2000), who used persuasive situations as their stimuli. Even in Fig. 3.1, where a decline in usualness appears in the data set, we did not see the breaks we had hoped would give us guidelines as to how many arguments are normally retrieved, how many are retrieved and edited, and how many are genuinely invented in the moment. In every study to date, the mean usualness rating for every ordinal position (i.e., positions 1 through 15 on the elicitation instrument) is above the theoretical midpoint of the usualness scale, which has a range of 2 to 10.

FIG. 3.1.

Mean usualness ratings for inventions in each ordinal position.

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Because nearly all our respondents quit listing new arguments before they arrived at the limit of 15, we may have failed to generate a research design that captures or requires genuine inventions. The third bit of information about the content of the repertoires comes from another re-analysis of the Hample, Quinton, et al. (2000) and Hample, Grismer, et al. (2000) studies, conducted by Hample, Elliott, Kenady, Mezger, Shaw, and Wang (2003). Not everything listed in response to the inventional capacity instrument has to do with substantive arguments. Sometimes a respondent writes something like, “Hey, I really like your shirt.” This isn’t incompetent in any sense because a comment of this sort has the obvious communicative function of putting the other person at ease and in a responsive frame of mind. However, it doesn’t advance the substance of the argument at all. My students and I coded the items listed on the inventional capacity instrument to see how many actually involved arguing. Examining more than 1,500 inventions, we found that 87% were argumentatively relevant. Mostly, the items were reasons (63%), with an expectable proportion expressing conclusions (10%). Quite a bit of facework was present in the lists, too. This sort of response is communicatively competent without being argumentatively relevant. The important result is the 87%, however. Faced with persuasive stimuli, people reflexively argue, and their repertoires reflect this communicative reality. I have only begun to examine the contents of people’s argument repertoires. So far, I can say that extra inventional activity does not seem to sacrifice appropriateness. Somewhat more novel arguments appear at the ends of lists than at the beginnings of them. The inventional capacity instrument captures argument-relevant inventions.

CONCLUSIONS Inventional capacity is a new research program, of course, and its main contributions may still lie ahead. These early studies have some merit, however, in mapping the conceptual landscape. Arguing is a skill, which may be done well or poorly (Hample, 2003a). Both motivation and ability are critical in predicting a person’s skill level in a given circumstance. Inventional capacity is part of the ability component of arguing skill. Argumentation is, after all is said and done, mainly about content. To argue well, one must have good content, which means that one must have a repertoire with at least some high-quality items. One goal of the research program is to improve the descriptions of inventing. Classical rhetorical theory has somewhat variable relevance to the study of invention. The topoi theories do not seem very useful in ei-

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ther describing how people generate content or in giving prescriptive advice that can simplify the hard work of invention. The stasis theories, on the other hand, have considerable value in prescribing what content arguers ought to seek and also seem somewhat descriptive of what people actually do (although there is little literature on this last point). Contemporary theories of message production are mostly about recall and appear to have minimal interest in creativity. It is a commonplace dating from Cicero (Topica, II. 6) that the first canon of rhetoric includes both invention and judgment, but the community treatment of invention— whether rooted in classical theory or modern cognitive science—is rather sterile. Perhaps research on inventional capacity can help address this problem. Even if researchers are only at the beginning of genuinely detailed investigation of the cognitive processes involved in invention, one can still see its importance. The function of arguing is to create meaning, and every message is based on its content. A coalition of the scholarly communities studying arguing and message production may well advance both projects simultaneously, thus coming closer to a basis for predicting what people will say in a given circumstance (Hample, in press).

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Editing Arguments

The previous chapter explored the invention of arguments—the development of content, the generation of meaning—but even a full account of how arguers invent materials would not suffice to explain why people say what they do. As Cicero (1976) observed, “Every systematic treatment of argumentation has two branches, one concerned with invention of arguments and the other with judgment of their validity. . . .” (Topica, II.6; “validity” is merely the translator’s interpolation of what Cicero meant by iudicandi, or judging). This chapter is about what Cicero called the second branch. Arguers don’t always say everything that occurs to them. With the exception of habitual blurters, most people suppress some thoughts and alter others. They do so for many reasons, and only a few reasons have much to do with even a loose understanding of validity. I explore the reasons for suppression and alteration in detail later in this chapter, but for now perhaps several illustrations help to introduce the topic. Some years ago, I videotaped think-aloud protocols of people writing simple persuasive notes, either alone or in collaboration with another person. The basic task is to say one’s thoughts aloud while writing the note. Both thinking aloud and conversations with collaborators were helpful in exposing what the people were thinking when they generated messages. The nature of the task certainly forbids any assurance that everything is going to be said because people seemed to be working to capacity on two simultaneous verbal tasks, but what they did say is interesting. One respondent (R1), a male, wrote a note alone, asking an acquaintance to drop off some dry cleaning. At the end of the note, he was prompted by the investigator (I). 85

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506 S90; lines 33–42; transcribed by W. B. Hoon I: R1: I: R1:

Would you like to add anything else to what you would say? Let me read it here. Remember to say all your thoughts out loud. Oh, I’m thinking does this flow? Is this what I want to say, is this polite enough, does this allow him to get out, if they really don’t have time to do it. But does it make it clear that this would be something that would be—make them a nice person if they did it for me.

This respondent is conveniently explicit about some standards that he was applying while arguing. He wanted the note to flow, suggesting an alertness to textual coherence. He was clear that he needed to pursue his overall goal set (i.e., “Is this what I want to say”), and he attended to both main sorts of politeness constraints (Brown & Levinson, 1987)—to negative politeness, in his insistence that he leave an easy “out” for the other person; and to positive politeness, in his hope that the other would see acquiescence as a way of projecting a desirable identity. R1 saw that his task was not simply to make a structurally sound argument for the favor. He believed that he must simultaneously pursue his goals, be clearly understandable, protect the other’s wish not to be impeded, and acknowledge the other’s need to be seen in a positive light. Although R1 shared some considerations that took place behind the scenes during his invention, no editing is visible in the passage just quoted. Editing is visible in another snippet from that same data collection. This time, two women (R2 and R3) were collaborating on a note for the same dry cleaning request. In the joint protocols, it was common for one person to take responsibility for the writing, and that person’s comments tended to be dominated by what the other said, and what was written down. R2 did the writing in this session. This conversation occurred after most of the note has been composed, while R2 was reading it back, apparently deciding how to close it. 506 S90; lines 67–79; transcribed by M. P. Voss R2: ((rapidly)) Dear Neighbor. I remember that you have some shopping to do. If I leave this suit with you, could you drop it off at the cleaners, I will leave a message with the cleaner saying that I need the suit by five. ((ends reading)) What else do we need to say! I can’t do it by myself! I appreciate the effort I’ll bake you cookies—No! ((laughs, shakes pen, pauses)) walk your dog R3: ((without a break)) and I can drive your daughter you know uh uh to piano class anytime. R2: Okay ((laughs, then begins writing)). Okay. I can drive your daughter to piano class? anytime in return for the favor.

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This example shows a small inventional and editorial negotiation between R2 and R3. R2 apparently felt that the note should offer a counterfavor. Trying to think of one, she first considered baking some cookies but then immediately realized that something was wrong with that idea. She tried out “walk your dog” next. Without commenting on either the cookies or the dog (regrettably, because the comments would have revealed some sort of editorial criteria), R3 proposed offering a ride to piano lessons for the target’s daughter. R2 immediately accepted this suggestion and added it to the note. This exchange shows some potential inventions being discarded. The inventional process continued until a satisfactory idea occurred. The collaborative editing of the note is clear, although the editorial standards are not explicit, as they were in the first example. Finally, here is a third passage, one that displays both the editing and the standards simultaneously. R4 had drafted her dry cleaning note and was being prompted: 506 S90; lines 20–34; transcribed by D. Norton I: Would you like to add anything else to what you would say? R4: I can’t think of anything else because it’s just for a quick errand for a suit to be dry cleaned and it’s—it’s not anything that I would need to give him a lot of details it’s not like I would have to say well this is the only suit that I have that would really make a good impression or—mmm— nothing like that and it’s just—I, it’s someone that—I don’t know it’s just an acquaintance something that I’m not really good friends with so I don’t need to explain it, too much because if they’re not really good friends they wouldn’t understand the circumstances anyway, um. ((pauses)) I duh I don’t know if I would need to include directions to the dry cleaner or any special, or any special, uh directions on how it needs to be cleaned or—I could probably say thanks I owe you one or something like that.

This example reflects Grice’s (1975) maxim of quantity. R4 thought that additional material would be inappropriate, although she could think of some (e.g., that this is her only really impressive suit). She didn’t need to include additional information because it wouldn’t be understood anyway (her target is an acquaintance, not a good friend); this reasoning suggests Grice’s manner maxim. She expressed some uncertainty about whether to add practical details, such as directions to the dry cleaning establishment, but did not include them. Nor did she add the thanks she considered at the end of the passage, presumably feeling that the politeness issues that raise the issue of thanks had been adequately handled. Although it isn’t evident that any of this reasoning occurred to R4 during the composition of the note or whether it struck her only as a re-

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sult of I’s prompt, the note certainly may have been quite different. R4’s editing was all in the direction of exclusion, keeping the note compact. It is possible to read some unexpressed criteria into her reasoning (focusing particularly on what she thinks is expected by good friends as opposed to acquaintances, or what acquaintances and friends already know about her), but for now, my interest is in seeing the application of some standards (Grice’s maxims, here) in the process of deciding which of the available means of persuasion are to be included. These simple illustrations show the empirical relevance of Cicero’s second branch of argumentation. It is necessary to know both what inventional materials are available and which are chosen. Understanding both processes—invention and judgment—is of course a fundamental goal. Research on editorial processes divides itself neatly into two areas, which generate the organization for the rest of this chapter. First, I examine a general model of message production to locate editorial work within its larger processual context. Second, I examine the specific research on editing to see what the main editorial processes and criteria seem to be.

A GENERAL MODEL OF MESSAGE PRODUCTION Topics relevant to message production have long been explored, both in communication and in related disciplines. However, this work has only coalesced in the last decade or so, with Greene (1997b) being perhaps the pivotal publication that gave the divergent research traditions a common identity. As one might expect, different scholars have staked out particular areas of special expertise, notably Berger’s (1997) work on planning and Levelt’s (1989) more microscopic work on sounds and linguistic production. Scholars in this area are coming around to a consensus that work should be sited within the goal–plan–action (GPA) model of message production, first articulated in detail by Dillard (1990a, 1990b; Dillard et al., 1989). In general outline, in this model people are first stimulated to form interactional goals by their engagement in the immediate situation. Such goals may include persuasion, explanation, politeness, identity and relational negotiation, stress reduction, and other objectives discussed later. The goal or goals, in turn, lead to the formation of a message plan. A plan is a mental representation of a possible action or message. The planning process is the most obvious locale for editorial work (Berger, 2002a, pp. 203–205). The message (i.e., the action) emerges once the plan has been selected. In some theories, the message and plan codevelop, as when scholars discuss on-line planning, relatively unplanned discourse,

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and similar notions (e.g., Hobbs & Evans, 1980; Ochs, 1979; see Hample, 1998a, for a critical discussion of that conceptualization of “plan”). Here, too, the GPA model takes center stage, although I want to flesh it out in some respects. Some of Lewin’s (1951) insights provide useful supplementation (see Hample, 1997, 1999). The notions of climate, obstacle, and life space all help to give more texture to the often undetailed idea of situation in this research tradition. Meyer (1997) and Wilson (1990, 1995) worked out with even more precision the ways in which situational perceptions can be differentiated and thus connected to the formation of goals and plans. A last slight difference in approach has to do with the nonlinearity of the basic theory. Although the GPA model appears on its face to be a simple linear sequence, in fact people cycle back and forth through the different elements during the production process. Consideration of a message plan, for instance, may well highlight a previously unnoticed goal. Partway through the public performance of a message, people may suddenly find themselves reconsidering and editing what they had intended to say. Nonetheless, it is fair to indicate that what follows here is an elaborated version of the standard GPA. I explore it in sections, focusing in turn on goals, plans, and messages. First, however, I take some preliminary notice of situations. Situation All communication is situated. It grows out of some immediate felt stimulus to talk. People argue only if they have a reason to do so, and those reasons (conscious or unconscious) derive from the arguer’s understanding of the instant circumstances. Goals, in particular, are perceived as situational elements. In fact, some conceptualizations of situation straightforwardly conflate the ideas of context and goal. Thus, scholars (sometimes including myself, I confess) easily write about persuasive situations, comforting situations, or conflict situations, for instance. These descriptions refract the whole situation so that it seems to have the character of a single primary goal, with no other notable features. This tendency to elide the two ideas is illustrated by the Handbook of Interpersonal Communication. In the first edition, Cody and McLaughlin (1985) contributed a chapter entitled, “The Situation as a Construct in Interpersonal Communication Research.” When it came time to revise the material for the second edition, the chapter became “Situations and Goals as Fundamental Constructs in Interpersonal Communication Research” (L. Miller, Cody, & McLaughlin, 1994). The latter chapter justifies the assimilation of ideas, beginning with the expla-

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nation that goals appear to be a useful way of thinking about situations (pp. 162–163). However, “goal” may not have enough conceptual scope to capture all that is needed to consider in the construct “situation.” To say that something is a persuasive situation highlights only one element of the circumstances that may or may not give rise to argumentative messages. Berger (2002b, 2004), for instance, has begun an interesting research program on speechlessness. He asked students to recall an episode in which they were speechless and did some classifications of the episodes. He found speechlessness to be most common in interactions with friends or romantic partners and to take place most often at home or indoors on campus. These findings may reflect the most common communication sites and partners, of course, but surely it is possible that something about interacting with romantic partners (30% of the episodes) is structurally different than interacting with superiors or in other formal relationships (11%), for instance. My immediate point is that all these situations contained goals that the respondents regarded as reasonable motivations for communication. No one reported being speechless while walking past a tree; the accounts all involve circumstances in which people somehow thought they were prevented from speaking (e.g., by surprise, profound emotional arousal, etc.). The goals were there, but the communication wasn’t. All these situational features can perhaps be reduced into some sort of goal description, but to do so would be an extremely presumptuous move, presupposing rather than proving that all relevant factors are directly and solely motivational. In particular, reduction would cause people to miss the interpretive nature of perception, with the registrations and appraisals that researchers are just now beginning to recognize as important (e.g., Dillard, Kinney, & Cruz, 1996). It would also tempt people to miss the structural features (e.g., intimacy) that result in the different goal constraints that help distinguish chatting with a romantic partner from replying to a supervisor. Lewin’s (1951; see Hample, 1997, 1999) field theory is a detailed guide to theorizing about human action. Lewin noted that people do things in response to what they perceive, and nothing else. Life space is Lewin’s term for subjective situation. A person’s life space consists of the elements that a person notices. Particular life spaces differ from person to person, moment to moment, objective circumstance to objective circumstance. Lewin provided a good list of things that are likely elements in a life space. One of these things is a goal. The fact that other things are also likely candidates to be noticed is an immediate curative to the tendency to conflate situation with goal. The life space is subjective and so contains perceived elements. One such component may be the person (P). Whether the actor is aware of self

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has to do with self-consciousness in the moment (see Roloff & Berger, 1982). Two people may observe a child taking a nasty fall from a bicycle. One person’s life space may have in it the child, the bike, and the street. The other person may notice only the child and self, with the latter focus on what the person can do. Two people aware of circumstances that may call for arguing can differ analogously. One may have a life space full of only content issues, such as what the relevant facts are, what conclusions can be drawn from them, and so forth. The second person may be very aware of self and other, and perceptions may be completely dominated by issues of embarrassment, politeness, power, and self-image. Whether one argues or not, and what might be said, is controlled by the life space, and the objective circumstances do not entirely control what is there. Lewin saw the life space as being full of forces, which attract or repel. A goal (G) is an attractive force because it creates a tendency for P to move into the goal region. An unsatisfied goal creates a disequilibrium, which is resolved only by achieving the goal or turning one’s attention away, toward another life space. If a person (P) wants a soft drink (G), P may act (or “locomote”) toward G, by physical actions such as approaching a vending machine and inserting coins. An arguer may be attracted to the goal of dominating the other and may therefore try to produce messages that display superiority. People in general, and arguers in particular, often have more than one goal, and pursuing all the goals requires locomotion that moves P into the different G regions, either one at a time or simultaneously. I say much more about arguers’ goals in a few pages, but for now it is important to take note of their status as attractive force regions. An obstacle (O), in contrast, is a region of repulsive force. Lewin sometimes called it a negatively valenced goal, but the term obstacle seems less awkward. A region in the life space that P wishes to avoid is one that would be punishing in some known fashion. For instance, suppose that a husband has invited his wife to attend a football game, and she wants to give reasons not to go. Her life space contains herself (P), the utter boredom tainted by disgust that football games stimulate in her (O), and the desire to be on good terms with her husband (G). She needs to locomote into G without passing through O. (People try to maneuver around obstacles; this is only possible because they understand the obstacle.) She may argue as follows: “Honey, I’d really like to spend the afternoon with you (G), but sometimes football games annoy me (O), and that might make the afternoon unpleasant for you (G). Besides, I really wanted to visit my mother that afternoon, and I know you’d rather not go with me (G).” This example is pretty artificial, of course, and a real argument probably would not be so explicit about appealing to G and O. However,

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it shows how the reasoning and content (i.e., the argument) are done in light of what P perceives to be the immediate situation. Another likely element in a life space is a barrier (B). A barrier is an unknown impediment to achieving a goal (whereas an obstacle is understood). Every region in a life space has a boundary around it. Sometimes those boundaries are easily penetrable, but sometimes they are hard to pass through. Relatively impermeable boundaries are barriers. Suppose that two students both are unhappy about their typical grades on term papers. One student has learned that she has problems with subject–verb agreement, topic sentences, and depth of literature reviewed. She does not have a barrier, but she has obstacles; she understands her problems and, one hopes, can see ways to maneuver around them to reach her grade objectives. The other student does not understand why he is getting poor grades and continually makes remarks such as, “I just don’t know what the prof wants.” This student has a barrier. Because people cannot navigate around barriers, the only recourses are either to quit trying or to repeat the same actions more forcefully. Frustration and aggression are likely results. Sometimes people make an argument, perhaps in support of a request, but are rebuffed without explanation. If the arguer continues the episode, making further appeals, the later arguments are ruder and more aggressive (Hample & Dallinger, 1998). Barriers function in interpersonal arguing in this way. The last feature of a life space to be discussed here is climate. A climate is an atmosphere, or a feel for a situation. It is an emotional flavor or a sense of what the situation is like. Many sorts of climates have been studied, notably cooperative and competitive ones (e.g., Deutsch, 2000). Here it is enough to notice that climates can be facilitative or impedant. That is, a particular climate can make one sort of action easy or difficult. Arguing with hostile, aggressive people is impedant to relaxed, thoughtful reasoning, whereas arguing with polite, well-intentioned partners is more likely to be coalescent. This is partly due to the vibes of the interaction. The climate is always a perception. It represents a sort of emotional summary of the immediate circumstances. Notably, people carry climates with them to some extent. For instance, people low in argumentativeness are characteristically unwilling to argue, meaning that their argument-relevant climates tend to be impedant. The same is true of people high in communication apprehension. Sometimes, however, the perceived situation itself impedes communication, apparently regardless of the participants’ dispositions, as Berger’s (2002b, 2004) work on speechlessness suggests. Lewin’s (1951) idea of climate is closely related to the argument frames in chapter 2. A variety of expectations about arguing were dis-

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cussed: whether it involves one or more goals, what those goals may be, whether the other arguer is a salient consideration, what intellectualizations the arguer may have, and related issues. These frames indicate what a particular arguer may be alert to—for instance, opportunities to dominate or playfulness of episodes—suggesting not only what the arguer may naturally tend to include in his or her life space but also the affective orientation that is likely to be taken toward the whole episode. Whether the interaction is labeled as an argument or a discussion is itself consequential for the reasonableness and hurtfulness that are expected. Argument frame is a more detailed notion than climate and has implications for other elements of the life space as well, but knowing what frame a person tends to take should be at least generally predictive of the sort of climate that is anticipated. An arguer’s life space, then, may contain self, one or more goals, one or more obstacles, and one or more barriers, and it may have a particular climate. Figure 4.1 is a sample diagram of P’s life space. Suppose that P wishes to get James to find him a date (G2) while maintaining James’ respect for P (G1). These are the two goals. James knows many dateable people, so the goal of getting him to find P a date (G2) is easily penetrable. However, P knows that James is disdainful of those who cannot get dates themselves, and P cannot figure out how to dislodge this prejudice. Therefore, the other goal (G1, keeping respect) has a thick line around it, denoting that it has a barrier of some difficulty. P will either have to force through the barrier or quit the field because P is committed to the idea that G1 must be achieved before, after, or simultaneously with G2. The

FIG. 4.1.

Life space of P, with two obstacles, two goals, and one barrier.

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figure also shows two obstacles. One (O1) is P’s nervousness in making such a request, and the other (O2) is avoiding making the request when James is busy, distracted, or otherwise disinclined to help. P has learned that private rehearsal reduces his nervousness and so can avoid passing through the O1 region. P can also be attentive to James’ moods and activities, thus managing to avoid an inopportune time for the request (O2). Because P and James are friends, all this implies a facilitative climate, but P is nonetheless hesitant about the interaction, giving the situation an overall impedant flavor. This slightly stressful climate is represented in Fig. 4.1 by the shading, intended to suggest that P’s movement through the life space is somewhat difficult. From P’s point of view (the only one that counts in this analysis), the obstacles can be handled with a reasonable amount of effort. The major problem is the barrier around G1. P has to figure out how to generate an argument that gives a reason that James will count as a good one for the request, without seeming like an undateable loser. P’s lack of understanding of how to do this last thing is the barrier, and it might result in P either not asking for help at all or demanding it too strongly. This is not an ideal example because most competent adults have good understandings of how to negotiate own identity, so G1 would not really be impenetrable for any except the proudest and most opaque of us. However, Fig. 4.1 shows how people locomote around obstacles in their efforts to occupy goal regions. Some of this work is done by means of arguments (e.g., giving a reason for James to help), and some is done by nonargumentative means (e.g., waiting for the right moment). Situations, then, include goals, but also much more. These other features, although they may be somehow amalgamated into motivational descriptions, seem to have their own individual usefulness in understanding how people act and argue. These other potential components of life spaces prove to be helpful in understanding how people edit their arguments. Goals Arguments contain reasons and are generated for reasons. The two sets of reasons may not be the same. My interest here is in the second sort— those that motivate arguing. Goals are elements of life spaces, and those subjective situational perceptions also have elements (e.g., barriers, obstacles, and climates) that may result in no argument being made, even in the face of apparently appropriate motivations. The goals of an argument are the standards it is supposed to meet, the criteria for success. Those standards should be effectiveness, appropriateness, and structural

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integrity (Hample, 2003a), but it is necessary also to acknowledge immediately that the arguer sets his or her own standards, which may not be the ones that a scholar would posit. In this section, I review what is known about the goals that people pursue while arguing and then explore how those goals connect to inventional and editorial processes. In earlier chapters, I reviewed some main goals that arguers may orient to. These goals include effectiveness, which on its face is not very helpful. Effective in doing what? The usual assumption made by researchers—an assumption that I make here as well, unless noted otherwise—is that effectiveness refers to successful persuasion. This assumption presumes that the main thing the arguer wants to do is to change another person’s beliefs, attitudes, values, intentions, or behavior. However, persuasion is not always the motivating impulse behind arguing. One may argue to achieve or display dominance, for instance, or to project some other element of personal identity. Sometimes people argue for entertainment, to manage other’s identity, or to accomplish some sort of relational maintenance. As indicated in chapter 2, virtually any human motive can be a motive for arguing. This material does not need to be reviewed here again. The point is simply that the goal is subjectively determined, an element of the life space, and not necessarily what is supposed to be the obvious goal of an argument. Two lines of research have given some special insight into the goals people pursue when they seem to be persuading others (for other approaches, see Wilson, 2002, ch. 5). Both research traditions began with open-ended data and coded comments made by respondents. In the interests of efficiency, both sets of researchers almost immediately converted these categories into simple self-report measures, which has had the inevitable effect of reifying the researchers’ labels. Consequently, the results of the two programs look more different than they really are. I try to show how similar the resulting lists of goals are. The beginnings of the two research projects are Dillard et al. (1989; also see Dillard, 1990a, 1990b) and Hample (1984; Hample & Dallinger, 1985). The Dillard et al. (1989) work is centrally concerned with what the authors theorize as the primary and secondary goals involved in interpersonal influence attempts. The work began with a literature review that posited that the primary (or framing) goal is influence or persuasion. The rationale for this move is Dillard’s (1990a) view that “Influence goals are primary because they bracket the attempt and provide the explanation for the interaction. Influence goals also instigate consideration of secondary goals” (p. 45). The goal to persuade is held to be the stimulus to taking notice of the secondary goals (Dillard et al., 1989, p. 21). That is, if someone has begun to think about an effort to influence an-

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other person, at that point he or she begins to register other objectives (whether consciously or unconsciously). Prior research led the team to look for secondary goals, including identity goals (i.e., a set of positive prescriptions and standards), interaction goals (e.g., being socially appropriate, respecting Grice’s maxims, projecting a good personal impression), resource goals (i.e., obtaining or keeping valued relational or material assets), and arousal management (i.e., maximizing pleasure and minimizing suffering, such as that following from communication apprehension). Students were given simple persuasive stimuli (e.g., get a friend to repay a loan), along with a list of possible messages. The students indicated the candidate messages they might use and those they would not. For the rejected messages, respondents were asked to write their reasons for suppression (this is essentially the same method used in the Hample & Dallinger, e.g., 1990, work, discussed later). These justifications for rejection are the key data because they reveal the standards used to select or to reject messages. The simplest sort of editing, after all, is complete suppression, and the standards for that choice index the goals that are in play. Coders successfully classified the comments into the category system derived from the literature review. Fortyfour percent of the reasons had to do with the influence goal (e.g., “it won’t work”). The secondary goals are also clearly identifiable. The identity goal was used 34% of the time (e.g., “it’s immoral”; “it’s not my style”). Interaction matters appeared in 9% of the comments (e.g., “that would make me look bad”; “this is inappropriate for the situation”). Resource management was an issue 5% of the time (e.g., “this would cost me our friendship”; “I’d suffer for it”). Another 1% of the suppression rationales were coded as arousal management (e.g., “makes me too nervous”). The last 7% of the comments were uncodable (e.g., “this is stupid”), which is not an unnatural result. These outcomes led to the formation of a good set of self-report scales that have been profitably used by researchers for more than a decade. Each goal (e.g., influence, identity, etc.) is represented by three to five Likert items (p. 27). Obviously, some goals are more common than others. Influence and identity together accounted for about three fourths of the open ended comments, whereas arousal management was the code for only 1%. However, each sort of goal has its own theoretical interest, and so it is worthwhile to do research on all of them. The Hample and Dallinger research program (a summary of the early work is Hample & Dallinger, 1990) has a similar design. This work began a little earlier than the Dillard research and so did not profit from it. The first two studies (Hample, 1984; Hample & Dallinger, 1985) are the ones of interest here. These papers were considerably more exploratory in im-

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pulse than the Dillard program and do not begin with a literature review indicating what goals ought to be sought. Instead, respondents were given persuasive stimuli and lists of possible messages and asked to endorse or reject each message and to justify the rejections. The rejections were coded without any literature-driven expectations about the results. In the first investigation (Hample, 1984), I classified rationales into 13 categories, including endorsement of the message and a residual category. In the second study (Hample & Dallinger, 1985), we reduced the number of categories to 11, and in later work we finally settled on a list of 9, including endorsement and residual (see Hample & Dallinger, 1990). The 7 surviving substantive rejection criteria are these. Effectiveness comes into play when a message is rejected because the respondent feels it will not successfully persuade the other person. The second code, too negative to use, captures some people’s unwillingness to use threats or bribes, for example. Harm to self refers to people’s wish to protect own identity or to avoid some other sort of unpleasantness, such as embarrassment. Harm to other is the parallel code referring to the other person in the hypothetical interaction. Harm to relationship is the category that indexes people’s wish to protect or maintain the relationship between self and target. The two final substantive codes, truth and relevance, refer to people’s commitments to say things they can prove and that are regarded as relevant by self or other. The results of the two original studies can be combined retrospectively, omitting codes that were later dropped, to get some idea of the frequency with which the different standards were applied; 1,359 comments can be summarized in this way. Effectiveness is used surprisingly rarely in these early studies, accounting for only 5% of responses. Too negative to use is more prominent, at 12%, and 12% of the answers were coded as harm to self. Harm to other is 16%, and harm to relationship 5%. Truth is an issue 17% of the time, and relevance appears in 24% of the comments. The residual category has 9% of the rationales. A comparison of the Dillard et al. (1989) and the Hample and Dallinger (Hample, 1984; Hample & Dallinger, 1985, 1990) results is worthwhile because these two similar projects are both aimed at discovering the goals in use when people decide whether to utter or suppress a possible message. The two goal sets clearly refer to the same phenomena, although the authors’ terminology differs, and they divide the data into categories at different points. Influence and effectiveness are the same idea. (The massive difference in frequency of use is probably attributable to the differences in stimuli and respondents.) Dillard’s identity goal is also equivalent to the Hample and Dallinger harm to self code. The Likert operationalizations of this goal make it clear that it refers only to own identity and not to other’s (Dillard et al., 1989, p. 27).

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The remaining goals do not line up quite as nicely. Although one may suppose from the terminology that Dillard’s interaction goal may connect to the Hample and Dallinger harm to relationship standard, this isn’t so. The Dillard goal scales refer to projecting a good impression, being socially appropriate, and making certain that self does not look stupid. These topics are all coded as harm to self in the other research program, or perhaps as too negative to use. In the scales, Dillard et al. distinguished between relational and personal resources. The relational resource items have to do with preserving and strengthening the relationship, and these items correspond exactly to the concerns handled by the harm to relationship codes in the Hample and Dallinger work. However, relational resources also include the desire not to anger the other person, and Hample and Dallinger code this concern in the harm to other category. The personal resource items in the Dillard scales refer to own safety and being taken advantage of; Hample and Dallinger connect these sentiments with harm to self. The arousal management goal has to do with avoiding stress and discomfort for self, and these again are classified as harm to self by Hample and Dallinger. Several of the Hample and Dallinger criteria do not immediately surface in the Dillard results. Dillard originally expected issues such as truth and relevance to come up under the heading of interaction goal, but these matters did not appear in his data often enough to be included in the summarizing scales. These codes match the title and generating literature of the Dillard goal but not its Likert operationalization. Still, the conclusion that seems most attractive is that the two research traditions have simply cut the pie in different places. Hample (2000a) analyzed think-aloud protocols such as those with which I began this chapter and found evidence for nearly all the Hample and Dallinger editing criteria. However, that is what the project intended to do. Had the objective been to find evidence for Dillard’s goals, they would have been just as apparent in the data. The two research projects have different virtues and drawbacks. Dillard’s study was more theory driven, whereas Hample and Dallinger were more open to what the data seemed immediately to say. Both projects generated self-report scales that made further research much easier to do. The Dillard instrument is less elaborate to use; the Hample and Dallinger scales still require the presentation of message lists, whereas the Dillard instrument needs only the basic influence situation to be given. The Dillard program almost immediately moved away from message suppression and toward describing the goal systems persuaders work from. The Hample and Dallinger work has stayed focused on message editing. Still, the two sets of studies show recognizably similar motivational portraits of arguers. Both are based on the assumption that arguers ori-

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ent to influence in thinking about effectiveness and show that this is an important goal. However, evidence is clear that people also attend carefully to identity issues for self and other. Sometimes these worries resemble the classic Goffman (1959, 1967) descriptions of identity negotiation or the Brown and Levinson (1987) politeness phenomena. In other respects, identity is extended to include resources, whether material, chronological, or emotional. Arguers often orient to their relationships with partners, but sometimes this orientation is registered as concern about self or other, as opposed to explicit concern for the interpersonal connection itself. Emotional arousal is another fulcrum for message choices, whether the arousal is own or other’s. Truth, relevance, and other indicants of discourse competence are other goals. This summary of arguers’ goals is rather communication oriented. By that, I mean that arguers take on responsibility for matters that are central concerns to various communication theories. This is an inevitable result of translating life goals (e.g., getting a promotion, making a new friend, finding a true religion) into the context of communicative action. To see how this is inevitable, consider the hypothetical example of a baseball player trying to impress her boyfriend with her athletic ability. The life goal—impressing the boyfriend—has nothing to do with baseball. However, once she decides that baseball is her path, baseball goals modify everything she does. To impress him, she has to throw to the right base, make good contact with the bat, slide efficiently, cover a lot of ground in the field, and so forth. Through the alchemy of implementation, the life goal is transmuted into the usual series of baseball goals. A similar thing happens when a life goal (e.g., dominance, entertainment) is enacted by means of communication in general or argument in particular. A study of how people approach their life goals while arguing should generate a description of arguing goals, as presented here. Plans A plan is a mental projection of some action. Scholars differ on whether a plan has to be consciously noticed or in what detail it needs to be worked out to qualify for the label. My views on these matters are conservative, probably unusually so (Hample, 1992b, 1998a). I think that plan needs to be reserved for mental representations that are characterized by clear conscious foresight and some development of detail because these are genuinely interesting phenomena that deserve to be marked with their own unique term. What is called on-line or bottom-up planning (in which the “plan” develops concurrently with the action, not with forethought) certainly occurs, as does action proceeding from unrefined impulse (thereby lacking either forethought or detail). Because plan is the

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commonly accepted term for all these phenomena, I use it that way myself from time to time, but perhaps readers will permit me to mention two better ideas. The first is distinguished path, from Lewin (1936, 1951; Leeper, 1943). In his discussions of the life space, he distinguished between the planes of reality and irreality. The plane of reality is the one in which locomotion takes place. In contrast, the plane of irreality is a mental construction that can include daydreams, anxieties, plans, and so forth. The two planes may correspond very closely in the moment, as when a bridge player executes a carefully planned end play, or they may not connect very well at all, as when a student worries about a romantic relationship during a lecture on experimental design. The two planes are filled with the same sorts of things—goals, obstacles, and so forth—with the key difference that these elements are perceived in the plane of reality but imagined in the plane of irreality. Lewin’s idea of a distinguished path avoids the problems I see in promiscuous use of the term plan. First, let me explain his concept of path. A path is a series of locomotions that respond to the dynamic forcefield of the life space. These sequential actions tend to move naturally toward attractive regions of the life space (i.e., goals) and to avoid negatively valenced ones (i.e., obstacles). The individual actions are themselves regions in the life space, each occupied by the actor in turn, and take on their own valences. An action may have a positive valence because it is intrinsically pleasurable to perform, or it may take on such a valence because it moves the person closer to an adjacent region that has its own positive attraction. In the plane of reality, where the locomotions take place, may be a series of positive regions. For convenience, I call the final region the goal, but in fact any positively valenced region is a goal. A person may imagine a life space, thus operating on the plane of irreality, and in that imagining may project several lines of action to achieve a goal. In other words, the person can anticipate a path of regions through which she or he may locomote. If a person imagines several paths and prefers one, that one is the distinguished path. Although the idea of a distinguished path is not quite identical with that of a plan, it does the same theoretical service in the study of argument production, as far as I can see. Neither the term distinguished path nor anything else in Lewin’s theory make any presuppositions about consciousness. People can be aware of their perceptions or not, can realize they are daydreaming or not; these are not relevant matters in field theory. The level of detail in one’s distinguished path is purely an empirical matter, and researchers are encouraged to determine how many regions intervene between P and G and how well specified they are. If the plane of irreality contains only an impulse, it is described as having one goal re-

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gion and no intermediate ones, therefore not really containing a path to anything at all. Obviously, none of this changes the phenomena under study, but it avoids the dangers of having thinking hijacked by some common implications of plan. The other idea that I think is better than plan is that of memory organization packets (MOPs; Schank, 1982). This idea seems very useful as a further specification of the plane of irreality during or prior to argument production. The MOPs formulation is a revision of Schank and Abelson’s (1977) theory of scripts. On reflection, they decided that the original view was computationally untenable, requiring the same materials to be duplicated many times in memory. To take two of the standard examples, visits to doctors’ and dentists’ offices had to be stored as complete and separate scripts in the early theory. This distinction seemed unacceptably inefficient and failed to explain memory confusions between visits to the two types of office. The reformulation (Schank, 1982) divides these visits into chunks that are only stored once but are activated by both the doctors’ and dentists’ office scenarios. The chunks (e.g., announcing oneself to the receptionist) are scenes, smaller units (e.g., pronouncing one’s name clearly) are scripts, and the memory structure of the assembled scenes (which in turn assemble the scripts) needed for an entire visit is a MOP. Meta-MOPs are more abstract templates for larger categories of behavior. From most concrete to most general, then, the theorized sequence is script (e.g., turning the doorknob), scene (e.g., entering the office), MOP (e.g., going to the doctor), and meta-MOP (e.g., professional office visit). The relative hierarchy of this list is somewhat ambiguous, but it is not especially problematic because the sequence is operationalized from the bottom up, beginning with the scripts. The scenes are the real building blocks of memory because each is potentially common to several MOPs. Every scene contains a list of default behaviors, with the possibility of altering some of them based on experience. Each script and scene has implicit goals, and the MOP and meta-MOP have goals as well, although the goals are less concrete higher in the hierarchy. The basic operational procedure for studying MOPs is modeled on the design of Bower, Black, and Turner (1979). People are given a generalized description of some activity (e.g., going to a restaurant) and are asked to list, in order, up to 20 discrete behaviors they perform to do the activity. These behaviors are the scripts. Researchers then consider the frequency with which each action is mentioned within the sample and exclude those that are listed too rarely as idiosyncratic. The list orderings (e.g., first, second, third) of the surviving scripts are then averaged. Researchers then test and reflect on these means, chunk them into scenes, and label the chunks. The scenes form the MOP, which is also titled by the investiga-

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tors. Identification of a meta-MOP is primarily reflective, rather than data based. MOPs that seem to have the same pattern are collected, the pattern is given generalized labels, and the resulting meta-MOP is named. These procedures (usually extending only through identification of a MOP) have been applied to several communication behaviors. Kellermann (1991, 1995; Kellermann, Broetzmann, Lim, & Kitao, 1989) has studied a general MOP for conversation, even making the remarkable discovery of what MOP is followed when people participate in a conversation about a topic on which they know nothing. Honeycutt and his colleagues (Honeycutt, Cantrill, & Allen, 1992; Honeycutt, Cantrill, & Greene, 1989; see Honeycutt, 2003) have worked out the MOPs for relational development and disintegration. What is the connection between MOPs and distinguished paths? When a person imagines a sequence of behaviors leading to some overall goal, he or she is thinking about a series of scenes that form a MOP, whose overall objective is the actor’s primary goal. However, each scene has its own subsidiary goal as well. The point of Schank’s theory is that once the actor has imagined the overall goal, the MOP comes out of memory automatically. Once the MOP is cognitively active (consciously or unconsciously), the scenes appear, and the scenes reflexively fill in with scripts (or script possibilities, if there are defaults and other choices at various stages). Thus, the MOP describes the distinguished (i.e., default) path and may even imply the paths not taken. However, these results are cumulations and inevitably miss some detail that each individual provides. It is possible to examine individual responses and construct personal life spaces as well, but characterizing scripts as part of a scene, or scenes as constituting a MOP, requires data from samples of respondents. Hample et al. (1997) offered some insight into what people’s MOPs for one sort of interpersonal argument may look like. We studied how people believe face-to-face conflicts are enacted. Following the standard methodology, we eventually determined that the MOP for interpersonal conflict consists of four scenes: initiation, development, maintenance, and completion. The scripts and scenes are ordered as to their average percentage position in respondents’ sequences, so that a score of 50 means that the thing occurs, on average, exactly halfway through the episode. The initiation scene contains four scripts, according to our analysis. These are conflict begins (15), lack of agreement (23), verbal expressions (30), and escalation of conflict (31). The second scene, development, contains eye contact (33), angry looks (34), criticize (41), nervousness (44), become defensive (44), arm gestures (45), argue (45), negative emotion (45), yelling (46), discussion (46), involvement of others (46), thoughts during conflict (48), and silence (50). The development scene is followed by one we chose to label maintenance, including physiological reactions

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(50), name calling (51), irrelevant information (54), obscenities (55), feelings of anger (56), listen (58), and lastly, physical violence (66). The fourth and last scene is completion, which includes calm (69), understanding other’s viewpoint (70), compromise (77), apologizing (82), and conflict ends (84). Not all of these scripts occurred with equal frequency, and certainly all of them did not occur in any one respondent’s protocol. Even the four scenes were not always apparent in each individual’s responses to our questionnaire. However, it seems to me that the results have a certain resonance. The sequence seems familiar, and one can see the conflict begin, develop, escalate, and resolve. Many of the elements in the MOP do not seem to involve arguing, but others do. Lack of agreement and verbal expressions establish what is at issue, a way of proposing a controversial thesis. Escalation, criticism, and defensiveness may or may not be accomplished by means of arguing. The core events (from the point of view of this book, at least) that normally involve arguing are the ones labeled argue and discussion. Listening, understanding, and compromising also seem likely to require reasons. This research contextualizes argument in conflict episodes by showing where the arguing happens, what its immediate objective (e.g., criticism) may be, and what nonargumentative actions are near it in sequence. However, these results are generalizations from a sample. Individuals’ MOPs, or at least their sequence of potential scripts, are apparent in several of the original protocols. Here is one, from Respondent 49: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

Discuss problem One person misunderstands Other person becomes confused First person may become angry or irritated 2nd person then may be hurt, angry, or irritated 2nd person responds negatively with a question 1st person is already irritated so responds negatively Now both are angry 1st person explains original question 2nd person listens but is too worried about why 1st person was angry Both explain why upset Damage done, but now they understand finish solving problem

This example shows some initial argument-relevant moves (Items 1–3), followed by some emotional reactions (4–5) and then by several scripts that involve both content and affect (6–7). The argument begins to move

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constructively again (9–11) and finally comes to a joint conclusion (12–13). All the elements in a MOP do not necessarily occur. Respondents are simply indicating that their conception of a conflict contains slots for the scripts that are listed. Although this is potentially true of all the respondents’ protocols, it is particularly clear in Respondent 53’s: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

They make a time or place to meet or run into each other. They somehow start talking. One person starts telling their problems (their side) The other person tells how they saw the problem. They try to discuss it after both people say their thoughts But, it is hard for either party to see the other side. Then they either come to a conclusion & forget about it or become stubborn & don’t acknowledge each other again & go on.

The whole sequence from Item 8 to Item 12 shows that this person was thinking about contingencies and behavioral branches for interpersonal conflicts. The protocol does not contain explicit hints as to what path Respondent 53 preferred, but it is not hard to imagine a portion of the sequence from 8 to 12 projected as a distinguished path in an interaction. Figure 4.2 is a simple representation of this sort of possibility. It shows P’s plane of irreality, in which P is imagining how to locomote toward G. The first two intermediate regions, 1 and 2, are obvious. From Region 2, P faces a choice, whether to move into Region 3 or Region 4. I shaded the sequence 3, 6, 7 to indicate that P prefers that things work out this way and so will try to locomote into 3, not 4. Movement into Regions 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, and G is the distinguished path. Here is some hypothetical content for Fig. 4.2, matching the sort of things we found in the MOPs study of interpersonal conflicts (Hample, Dean, et al., 1997). Suppose that the argument is about whether people should be permitted to opt out of the Social Security system and invest their retirement monies in the stock market instead. P’s goal for the argument is to impress the other person with how intelligent, mature, and well-informed P is (not necessarily to persuade the other). P imagines that he or she will begin by explaining how stressed the finances of the Social Security system are (Region 1) and how important it is that the government assure a liveable income for retired seniors (2). From this

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FIG. 4.2.

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Life space (plane of irreality) for an argument.

point, P sees two tacks that he or she can take. P can say that all people are responsible for their own welfare (4) and then go on to punch the other person until he or she agrees that Americans should simply dismantle the whole government-run retirement system in favor of individual investment decisions (5). However, P appreciates that this behavior may make P seem unfeeling and perhaps not very thoughtful, generating a decidedly minimal level of achievement of G. This path is suppressed or edited out of the eventual messages and actions, and P thus prefers the other path—arguing that citizens have a special debt to those seniors who built the economy (3), giving this generation the obligation to do the best for them legislatively (6). The best, P reasons, means letting them participate in the stock market, which has a better long-term financial prospect than a government trust fund that earns minimal interest (7). In this hypothetical example, I have arranged things so that P’s distinguished path is the more enlightened course to G, but an immature or angry person may conceivably choose to take the other path (P, 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, G). Successful attainment of G is certainly not guaranteed by either path, even though P seems to think it is. P’s perceptions are the only things that control his or her actions, and real external constraints have to be assimilated to P’s subjective life space before they can have an effect on what P does or thinks.

Messages The final component of the GPA model is action (or message or argument). Because this whole book is about the message, one way or another, it is hard to decide what ought to be included in this section. Per-

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haps a few general remarks serve to fill out this review of the basic model of argument production. A message is not a static production but a dynamic one, and this dynamic nature makes editing such an important topic. Often in studying arguments, researchers look at a written passage or a few paragraphs from a speech, which tempts them into the unexamined assumption that the argument simply popped out, more or less as it appears in print. As introspection reveals, however, the production of an utterance or a sentence is a process that often involves micromomentary impulses, decisions, and changes of direction. To illustrate this idea is part of another think-aloud protocol, a nicely elaborated one. A male, R5, was writing to a same-sex friend to borrow $25 for 2 days. He had already begun, starting the note with “Tom, I have a monetary problem.” His deliberations continued: 311 F89; lines 12–23; transcribed by S. Amren Okay, I need, for this weekend for this weekend. I will put weekend? ((pause)) Okay. for my—all what do I need it, going out. For, I’m not going to tell him I am not going out though? For certain expenses that sounds good. ((pause)) Tom will never believe me. Expenses, he probably thinks I’m going to spend it on drugs or something—or beer some expenses I will tell him bills, lie to him. I have—certain bills—I have these bills—I don’t want to use certain too much. These bills or else he will think I am an idiot. These bills—that need! to be paid—that-need-to-be-paid. Tom’s never going to let me borrow this money—unless I give him something a need to be paid. I spelled paid wrong God!

The respondent was thinking, writing, and speaking at the same time, and this combination results in the usual jumble of written and unwritten items in the protocol. Regardless, the dynamism of the message production process is clear. The decision to say “weekend” is easy enough. R5 immediately felt the need to give an argument, here a justification, to support his request. First he considered saying that he was “going out,” but something was wrong with this thought. He then tried “certain expenses,” only to realize that that unqualified phrasing would give Tom too much leeway in interpretation. R5 expected, on evidence that one might prefer not to possess, that Tom’s most likely view would be that the money would be used for drugs or beer. R5 made the immediate judgment that it is better to lie than to be seen as using the money nefariously. He therefore qualified “certain expenses” by moving on to “bills,” tried out “certain bills,” and finally preferred “these bills.” This last wording is best, R5 seems to

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have thought, because he had already used “certain” in the phrase “certain expenses,” and reusing the same word so quickly would make him seem like an idiot. R5 strengthened his argument by implying some urgency when he said that the bills “need to be paid,” but he spelled paid wrong and denigrated himself about that error while he fixed it. This protocol can be used to summarize many of the key points I have made about the GPA model in its totality. First, it is possible to make some reasonable judgments about R5’s life space, as illustrated in Fig. 4.3. R5’s real goal was not to borrow money. It was to complete the experiment. The note, the talking, and the arguing are all in service of this immediate life goal. R5 realized that to finish the study, he must do two things simultaneously, talk and write. This point may seem simple, but it is an important one. Any taint of unrealism in R5’s note is likely to be traceable to the fact that the note is artificial. R5 was really participating in a study, not trying to borrow money. Figure 4.3 has two goal regions, however, not one. The terminal goal is finishing the experiment, and the writing/speaking region is simply a means to that end. The writing and speaking are somewhat effortful, and therefore the positive valence of the first region may be almost completely borrowed (and so probably diluted) from that of the final goal. The path here is a simple one: R5 moves into the first region and then arrives at the last one. The protocol does not give much evidence for obstacles, barriers, or climates, so none are illustrated. Figure 4.4 represents R5’s plane of irreality, somewhat simplified; here are the production details. This plane is one of irreality because R5 may most accurately be said to be imagining both that he is writing a real note and how Tom will react, and he is considering how he ought to proceed. (This is a somewhat delicate judgment; it is also reasonable to insist that

FIG. 4.3.

R5’s life space, plane of reality.

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FIG. 4.4.

R5’s life space, plane of irreality.

he really is writing a fictional note.) The artifacts of his planning (e.g., his comments, his decisions) are in the protocol. Everything in Fig. 4.4 is a virtual plan. R5’s real plan, of course, was to finish the study, as portrayed in Fig. 4.3. Figure 4.4 shows how R5 goes through the motions of apparently writing a persuasive note to borrow $25 from his friend, from the same point in the protocol. His final goal is to borrow money, and R5 must pass through a number of regions to get there. Making the request is an obvious first step, but what initially seems like the second step, giving a reason for the request, immediately proves to be problematic. R5 encounters obstacles, which are shaded in the figure to distinguish them from the positive goal regions. These obstacles include a problem with writing that he is going out. The protocol doesn’t clearly specify the problem: R5 may have just said, “I am not going out,” but the passage is confusing. At any rate, R5 clearly sees a problem, whatever it is. The more clearly articulated obstacles are R5’s desire not to seem bad (e.g., the sort of person who would borrow money and then spend it on drugs or beer) and his wish not to seem stupid (e.g., the sort of person who would use certain twice in two sentences or who cannot spell paid). These obstacles cause R5 to suppress some arguments (e.g., “I need the money because I’m going out this weekend”) and to revise others (e.g., “these” bills instead of “certain” bills, “bills” as an elaboration of “certain expenses”). Although it is not clear what is wrong with “going out,” it seems possible that Tom would know it isn’t true. The editorial criteria implied by

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the other two obstacles are more secure: R5 is protecting own face, managing his identity to avoid harm to self. Using either the Dillard or Hample and Dallinger terminology, it is evident that the obstacles are the reverse images of goals that affect R5’s editorial plan. That is, “seem bad” can be rephrased as “seem good,” which is the expression of a goal. The question is how R5 saw it—as an obstacle or a goal—not how the researchers prefer to state it. Also, these goals are in service to the terminal one, borrowing money, in this example. The goal series, “bills” to “these bills” to “need to pay,” is R5’s plan to reach “give reasons” while avoiding the obstacles just discussed. This is his distinguished path. Figure 4.4 does not indicate the other possible paths that occurred to R5, such as just saying “expenses” without further explanation; the figure is already complex enough. The discarded “going out” region is omitted for the same reason. The whole sequence from “bills” to “need to pay” is undertaken under the shadow of R5’s personal identity goals. Additionally, the argument materials are chosen with Tom in mind. The protocol gives evidence of audience analysis and other-adaptiveness: “Tom will never believe me,” “he will think I am an idiot,” and so forth. Tom is in the background of all this and may control the climate of the life space. If Tom were stingy, for instance, the arguments would be harder to get right. The protocol is uninformative about this sort of possibility, however, and so no climate is specified in Fig. 4.4. Having settled on a reason, R5 finished the note, imagining that he had successfully written a request that will result in being able to borrow money. The protocol ends with, “I need anything else? Put love [name] he will like that.” Many of the details of goal-plan-action are apparent. R5’s subjective understanding of his situation constitutes his goal system—his set of objectives, expectations, and means. Although his plane of reality is simple, his planning is not. He negotiated obstacles, considered different routes, tested out several potential reasons, and refined his presentation. It is easy to see a real plan (i.e., to finish the experiment) and several layers of virtual ones. One virtual plan is to pretend to write a real note, but even within that project, R5 offered the virtual plan (meta-virtual? microvirtual?) that he needed to pay bills, which was not true. One can almost see him circling through the possibilities for “give reason” while comparing them to his identity and other needs and projecting their effect on Tom. Wherever his inventions originated (e.g., has he made this appeal before? has he watched others do it successfully? has this sort of argument worked on him?), the process of composing a final version of the message is as much a matter of editing his thoughts and expressions as anything else.

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A SPECIFIC MODEL OF EDITING ARGUMENTS Given the general framework of GPA as a background understanding of argument production, I am now in a position to consider some much more specific work to explain the cognitive processes involved in editing. The key research is by Wilson (1990, 1995, 2002) and Meyer (1997, 1999, 2001a, 2001b). Wilson detailed how situational perceptions activate cognitive rules for message production, and Meyer traced how cognitive rules affect editorial behavior. The approaches have several things in common. The basic premise is that people possess cognitive elements that guide further cognition and behavior. The particular elements under study are rules that connect perceived situational features to directions for further processing. Rules can be expressed in an if–then form (Shimanoff, 1980, esp. ch. 2). Thus, “if something is hot, don’t touch it” is a simple rule. The “if” clause specifies conditions, and the “then” clause points to the further inference, behavior, or cognition. Shimanoff also pointed out that rules can specify whether something should be done, should not be done, must be done, must not be done, may be done, or may not be done. For the most part, this sort of qualification is not important in the work reviewed here because the scholars tend to assume rules of the form “if X is true, then Y must be done.” The sort of rule being sought has to do with message planning. “If you are talking to someone you like, be very sweet” is generally the sort of thing researchers are searching for. Another commonality, shared with the cognitive science community, is the assumption that cognitive elements (rules, here) come into play because they are activated, and they are activated because they are immediately accessible. This activation is not a conscious decision. Nor is it effortful. It is an immediate, automatic response to the recognition of the “if” conditions. In fact, accessibility can be measured with response time instrumentation, so that the thing most quickly produced is defined as most accessible. However, any situation has a limitless number of features, depending on what one happens to notice in the life space. Consequently, many rules are activated to some degree. The rule with the highest activation level is the one that is most accessible and therefore the one that takes precedence. Wilson’s (1990, 1995, 2002) work is focused exactly on the sort of ambiguities and interferences that may be encountered. Activation is influenced by three things. One is the frequency that a rule is used, sometimes described as its chronic accessibility or strength. A rule is chronically accessible if it represents a person’s consistent and primary orientation to something. Therefore, these rules are easy to retrieve from cognitive stores because they are used frequently. For example, a

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person who is unfailingly polite will have rules for being nice, being friendly, smiling, being attentive, and so forth, that are nearly always in play. A shy person may have avoidance rules that are chronically accessible. Verbally aggressive people may have to make special efforts to be pleasant during arguments because their politeness rules are so rarely applied that they are relatively inaccessible. Chronic accessibility is sometimes quite closely related to the idea of personality traits. The second factor influencing strength of activation is recency. If rule X has been used since any of its competitor rules have been, then rule X has some activation advantage. Recency has unusual importance in research because it can easily be manipulated by some sort of priming. Having people perform a task that requires a rule, exposing them to the rule somehow, or simply having them express the rule gives it a temporary increment to its normal strength of accessibility. This methodology is common in studies of accessibility (see Roskos-Ewoldsen, ArpanRalstin, & St. Pierre, 2002, esp. pp. 51–52). The last factor that influences activation levels is degree of fit. The “if” portion of the rule indicates the circumstances to which the rule applies. Situations fit the “if” specification to a greater or lesser degree. The more precise the correspondence between the perceived situation and that specified in the rule, the more accessible the rule is. I remember an occasion from my childhood (I may have been 4 or 5 years old) when I suddenly had to address my friend’s father. I had never called him anything, and it did not occur to me to call him Mr. Dafenos. I had had little experience addressing adults who weren’t related to me because I had always talked to them without naming or titling them. I stammered for a moment, and then I suddenly blurted out “Daddy.” I did not have a good message production rule, obviously, and my discomfort and inarticulateness show that I had nothing that fit very well. I used a rule that fit to a (very small) degree. Today, I have better rules and would have little difficulty accessing one that fit that situation better. Berger’s (2002b) work on speechlessness suggests, however, that rule systems may be incomplete. At any rate, fit, recency, and frequency are the main variables thought to affect ease of retrieval or accessibility. With this background established, I move on to consider the two research programs. Wilson’s Cognitive Rules Model Wilson (1990) set out to explore the process by which people generate interaction goals. His basic idea is that people store their available goals in cognitive networks, which include various possible interaction rules. These rules are roughly of the form “if the situation has feature X, then pursue goal A,” although multiple X specifications are probably com-

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mon. The perception of the situation occurs first, and its noticed features then activate the rules that match it. The most highly activated goals are then pursued. Thus, the sequence is theorized to be (a) perceive X in the environment, (b) rule R is activated, and (c) goal A becomes the objective. Although this model fits within the GPA tradition, it does not take goals as the starting point and requires concerted attention to the situation. To give a good test to this model, Wilson (1990) began the research program by examining both hard and easy cases. The easy cases are situations that are simple to recognize and therefore call up one or more rules without much unconscious uncertainty. The hard cases are ambiguous situations. These situations do not offer simple fits for the cognitive rules because they have contradictory cues or otherwise do not offer a pure, easy match between the perceived circumstances and the “if” clauses in the rules. All of Wilson’s situations involve asking someone to fulfill an unmet obligation. He wrote the situations to invite different attributions for the reason the obligation was unfulfilled (examples are in both Wilson, 1990, 2002). In some versions, he provided a number of external, circumstantial explanations for not meeting the obligation so that the target would not be blamed. In other versions, the explanations were internal; it was clear that the target’s character and dispositions are the problem and that she or he is responsible. In these conditions, cognitive rule activation was expected to be fairly straightforward. In a third condition, Wilson gave uncertain cues about responsibility: Some pointed to external explanations and others to dispositional problems. In this ambiguous situation, Wilson expected to discover a problem with the fit of the available cognitive rules. In addition to these manipulations, Wilson worked out a way of priming intimacy-related goals for people. Respondents read lists of words and wrote about the associations between the words. The word lists were variable, leading to several different conditions. One is the intimacy priming condition. These respondents received word lists that reflect interpersonal relationships (e.g., friends, trust, family). These people’s intimacy rules (i.e., those calling for loving, constructive interaction) should have a special accessibility advantage due to their artificial recency in the word list and writing task. Other people read only irrelevant words about weather or a message about astrology. These were the non-priming conditions. Respondents also completed the role category questionnaire (RCQ; see Burleson & Waltman, 1988) to give a measure of their interpersonal construct differentiation. In order, people first filled out the RCQ. Two or three weeks later, they did one of the priming conditions and then read the influence situation. Their experimental task was to write out the goals they would pursue, and these goals are the key dependent variables.

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Wilson (1990) coded respondents’ goals into several classes, and many of the results illustrate how cognitive interaction rules work. One group of goals is labeled supporting; it seems to be Hample and Dallinger’s (1990) harm to other and harm to relationship goals combined. People were significantly less likely to list such goals in the internal attribution condition, where the dispositions of the target are to blame. Attacking goals, which involve purposely trying to hurt the target’s feelings or selfimage, appeared frequently only in the internal attribution condition. Thirty-eight percent of respondents in the internal condition had such goals, whereas only 17% listed these goals in the ambiguous condition, and even fewer (10%) did so in the external attribution condition. The intimacy priming condition, which should have spread activation throughout the network of intimacy considerations, stimulated substantially more supporting goals in the ambiguous situations but not in the external or internal conditions because those were clear (one way or the other) to begin with (see also Wilson, 2002, p. 171). Further analyses show some special detail about the relation between the supporting goals and the priming conditions. Wilson (1990) reported that the intimacy priming task significantly increased the number of supporting goals that highly differentiated people listed for the ambiguous situations but did not affect people with low RCQ scores. In other words, priming helped highly differentiated people see their way toward supporting goals but did not help those who are less sophisticated in their perceptions of others. These results show that when situations clearly fit cognitive rules, the goals that are activated are easy to predict. When another person fails to fulfill an obligation out of spite, dishonesty, or some other negative characteristic, the rules about attacking him or her are very accessible. In contrast, the rules containing supportive goals are not very accessible at all. The effects of situational fit can be modified by priming, or what I have called the recency element in activation. However, Wilson (1990) found this effect only for highly differentiated people. In his follow-up work (see Wilson, 1995, for a summary), he concentrated on explaining this finding. He found that people lower in differentiation seem not to be as responsive to situational features in activating their interaction rules. One explanation he offered is that people low in construct differentiation have fairly crude cognitive organizations of interaction rules and so tend to say the same sorts of things almost regardless of the situation. People with higher RCQ scores, however, have complex organizations with many available rules and therefore have much more opportunity to activate multiple rules in a given circumstance. For them, priming offers a way out of their unconscious confusion because the priming elevates the accessibility of the primed rules. Priming doesn’t work on people with

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simpler organizations because they have less rule-to-rule interference to begin with and are not as easily led by the priming task. An unkind summary of the findings for low-RCQ people is that they are simply not primable. They have only one course and follow it sturdily. In fact, B. O’Keefe (1988) found that such people are unusually likely to be blurters. Arguments are edited in light of people’s activated goals. If no supportive goals are accessible, for instance, the person should not show editing that has the aim of making an appeal more constructive. If the situation does not activate an influence goal, even effectiveness is not a ground for revision. (I have found, by happenstance, that several of my own experimental stimuli do not always lead to influence goals. Some students have reported that they would never try to talk a professor into raising a grade or would never try to persuade a roommate to seek counseling, even though I had asked them to do these tasks.) On the other hand, if a situation makes aggressive goals more accessible, a person may try to revise an argument to make it more hurtful or to discard a polite message in favor of a nasty one. Wilson’s work helps to elaborate how the life space affects goals. Earlier in the chapter, I offered sample life spaces in which the goal regions were immediately present, as though they appear at first glance. Wilson shows us that there are intermediate stages. Situational features are noticed and become part of the life space. These features activate various rules, which then generate the goals. The goals, in turn, stimulate the paths and thus the locomotion toward the goal regions. The life space is not static, as Lewin (1951) emphasized, but is usually in a condition of dynamic development. The figures given earlier in the chapter are merely snapshots of ongoing perceptual registrations. Meyer’s Theory of Editing Meyer’s work is similar in spirit to Wilson’s but has a much more concerted interest in how people edit their own messages. Following Dillard’s view (1990a, 1990b; Dillard et al., 1989), she believes that if an influence goal becomes the arguer’s main concern, secondary goals often become important. These other goals join with the primary one to constitute the grounds or standards on which arguments are edited, and the message plans (or paths) are refined. The secondary goals Meyer usually studies are politeness considerations, but her analysis should generalize to any sort of second-stage goal, such as play or relevance. Like Wilson (1995), Meyer (1997) focused on the cognitive structure underlying message production, noting that the idea of rules (see Meyer, 1990) is a useful one. However, Meyer’s analysis of the rules is more detailed than Wilson’s, and she specified several different sorts of them. She

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classified the relevant cognitive structures into situation–action associations and action–consequence associations and further considered the separate cognitive storage of the goals themselves. The process of arguing begins with a situation schema, which is a cognitive representation of a situation type (cf. Dillard & Solomon, 2000). This life space would be familiar, experienced often enough for the arguer to have generated an abstraction of that set of circumstances. Importantly, Meyer pointed out that such a schema contains a core goal. This goal is a sort of framing element, something that unconsciously labels the situation and defines the context for message production: “Once activated, the schema organizes the speaker’s perception of the situation and raises the preconscious level of activation of behaviors appropriate in that situation” (Meyer, 1997, p. 75). She permitted both the schema and the goal to be of varying (but matching) levels of specificity. At one extreme, the schema can be so microscopic that it contains the goal to produce a specific speech act (e.g., “thank you”). At the other extreme, the schema may be so abstract as only to point to a metagoal (e.g., efficiency). Along with a goal, the schema also contains situation–action associations. These links between the situation type and message behaviors ordinarily occur in a specific context. These links are, in Lewinian terms, possible paths in the plane of irreality. In terms of rules, the situation features are the “if” clause, and the possible actions are the “then” part of the rule specification. For Meyer, the process begins when the speaker decides to pursue a particular goal. This (probably unconscious) decision activates the situation–action associations. Some situation perception is probably prior even to this step. This qualification is due to what Meyer meant by situation. Throughout this chapter, I have often used the term to refer to what is perceived, even before the moment in which the arguer realizes that she or he is going to argue. Meyer’s (1997) focus is a little different (but see Meyer, 1990, 2001b, 2001c, or 2002, for her attention to these other issues). She implicitly treats situation as referring to a somewhat later perceptual stage, the one in which the goal has already appeared, and the message is underway cognitively. Given her perspective, it makes good sense to say that the goal stimulates the cognitive construction of the message situation. Still, another life space, one earlier than that discussed by Meyer precedes the activation of a goal. Wilson’s (1990, 1995) work deals with the prior (non-Meyer) situation and shows how those perceptions give rise to the goals that are the starting points for Meyer’s theory. Once the arguer has passed from the stimulating life space (the one Meyer, 1997, assumes and doesn’t study), another life space spontaneously forms. It is centered on one goal; at this point in Meyer’s sequence the secondary goals are not yet in play. In this life space, a plane of

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irreality, the goal region automatically stimulates the appearance of various paths, which are the actions associated with the goal. “Situationaction associations become activated once a speaker has decided to pursue a goal” (Meyer, 1997, p. 75). In accord with Meyer’s flexibility about the specificity of these elements, the paths may be as precise as “mention the last census results” or as abstract as “make a good argument.” A particular goal may well stimulate more than one possible action, and the different actions naturally have different accessibilities. Only a tentative selection of message elements happens at this point, however. Meyer also noted that we have cognitive stores of action–consequence associations. Whereas the situation–action associations link the action to the stimulating situation–goal, the action–consequence associations link the actions to their expected outcomes. For instance, “if I confess, people will think I’m stupid” may be such a connection. These action–consequence associations can be acquired in several ways, especially by means of regrettable experience with the action (Meyer & Rothenberg, 2002). Because of the situation–action association, the action and its consequences are not thought about nakedly. They are contextualized by the goal to which they orient and anything else surviving in the arguer’s perception of circumstances. The expectation of outcomes is thus adapted to immediate circumstances. This contextualization explains why, if I say the same thing to my golf buddies as to my wife, I may expect different outcomes. Meyer (1997) also made some useful points about goals. Many are consistent with what I have said earlier about the goals that deserve our attention and how their activation works, and I do not review these ideas here. However, she has some other observations as well. Although she was not working in an explicit Lewinian paradigm, Meyer showed how one goal region can generate others: Primary goals often become conscious after being retrieved as actions for achieving a larger goal. For example, an individual might possess a situation–action association that associates the goal of getting home (and current features) to the action of asking someone for a ride. If the latter action is consciously retrieved, it may become a primary goal and act as the retrieval cue for a situation schema containing a goal to ask for a favor. Relational goals may sometimes become activated in a similar manner. (p. 77)

The first goal, getting home, generates related goal regions, such as asking for a ride. Asking for a ride is both a positively valenced region itself and (part of) a path to the other goal. The imagined favor request gets its valence from its proximity to the objective of getting home, making its status as a goal somewhat borrowed. The goal that is primary depends

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on the speaker’s instant perceptual focus, not on any external theoretical considerations. This idea that one goal can stimulate others is important. Much of Meyer’s empirical research on these points is concerned with relational goals, such as identity and politeness, that she regarded as very likely to become accessible when other goals (e.g., influence) are primary. Although not everyone has these person-centered goals in a well-developed state (think of small children, for instance), most adults have them in their cognitive systems; Meyer (2001b) called them habitual relational goals. For unfailingly polite people, these goals are highly accessible because of their frequency. Relational goals may be less easily accessible for blurters. Assuming that a message is planned before its utterance, rather than blurted, I summarize Meyer’s theory to this point. Not including the part of the process described by Wilson, the theory began with the moment that the speaker recognizes an unsatisfied goal. This goal becomes the originating centerpiece of a situational representation, a schema that contains a number of situation–action associations. These are rules, having the usual if–then form (e.g., “if I need money, I should ask Eddie”). The action, contextualized in the moment, has recognized outcomes. These, too, are rules (e.g., “if I ask Eddie for money, he will give me verbal abuse”). Every person has an enduring set of accessible goals, such as protecting own face, maintaining valued relationships, and so forth. Along with the primary goal, some accessible goals have probably received some (lesser) levels of activation early in the production process. This activation may happen directly, as when one goal stimulates others, or it may happen in a more amorphous way, as when omnipresent metagoals, such as efficiency and appropriateness (Berger, 1995; Berger & Kellermann, 1983), stimulate the now-contextualized goal system so that particular considerations become salient (e.g., strengthening a romantic relationship with the persuasive target). The action outcomes therefore project a set of anticipated consequences against this active background of secondary goals, which are ready to assert themselves if necessary. Finally, I have arrived at Meyer’s explicit statement of how editing happens. The situation–action associations constitute a tentative message production plan, which in turn activates the consequences of the actions. These consequences already hint at further goal considerations (e.g., “he will give me verbal abuse”). These hints are more or less relevant to secondary goals (here, protection of own face or avoidance of negative arousal). When the hint reaches some threshold level of relevance, the secondary goal is genuinely activated and can then become the grounds for suppression or revision.

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Meyer has put these ideas to empirical test in several studies. Several (e.g., Meyer, 1999) mainly addressed individual differences, such as personality traits; discussion of those studies is deferred until chapter 6. However, Meyer (2001a) offered nice evidence for some basic cognitive features of her model. She provided respondents with 16 simple communication situations (e.g., getting a birthday present you don’t really like), followed by a statement (e.g., “I don’t like it”). People had to say whether they found the message acceptable or would reject it. Rejected messages, of course, are those that are edited away prior to utterance. Meyer then explored the effects of goal accessibility on message editing in several ways. She designed an elaborate goal-priming task. In the first part of the study, respondents read a series of communication situations and rated the importance of several goals for each stimulus. The goals concerned making a good impression on the other, not offending the other, maintaining the relationship with the other, and respecting one’s own ethics. Of the situations, several made the impression management goal especially prominent (e.g., a job interview, an accidental encounter with a person you’d like to date). Others stimulated the goal of not offending the other (e.g., being served an awful meal, noticing a friend’s terrible haircut). Others were not intended to stimulate any secondary goals at all (e.g., a stranger asks you for the time; you order a soft drink in a restaurant). The combination of the goal-eliciting situation and the task of explicitly rating the goals served to prime the relevant goals. All respondents were exposed to all situations (i.e., impression, not offend, and no prime), but three priming situations were immediately followed by one of the target situations, with a message that the respondent had to accept or reject. When a message was rejected, people were asked to select the rationale for rejection from a list representing the usual set of effectiveness and identity-relevant goals. Thus, some people responded to a particular target situation and message after being exposed to an impression prime, others after a don’t-offend prime, and others after a noprime situation. The results support my claims about goal accessibility and editorial choices. When the impression goal was primed, it was commonly used as a reason for suppressing messages. Forty-six percent of impressionprimed respondents used impression goals as an editorial standard, compared to only 24% of the people who had not been primed. When the priming task made “don’t offend” especially salient, many more messages were rejected because they would damage the relationship: Fortyfour percent of the primed respondents used this criterion, compared to only 20% in the no-prime condition. The “don’t offend” priming was also tested against use of the “don’t offend” editorial standard, and although results were not statistically significant, they were in the expected direc-

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tion, with 55% of participants in the primed condition and only 39% in the no-prime condition using the criterion. These results are useful to us because they document several points. First, goals used in editing can be primed, confirming the effects of recency on accessibility. Meyer’s method of selecting respondents for whom the priming worked may have inadvertently also selected people for whom the primed goals were chronically accessible, but still, her interpretations seem plausible. Second, the accessibility of a goal affects its likelihood of use. Even when a particular goal had not been primed, some respondents made use of it anyway (frequency and fit, of course, are still relevant to respondents’ behavior). However, when accessibility is temporarily enhanced (by the priming task), the goal rises in power. The last point is a triangulation of the claim that the goals are, in fact, the basis of editorial choices. This complex study had another track as well, concerned with fit rather than recency. Respondents read eight more situations (without messages) and rated the importance of the usual list of goals for each stimulus. This procedure was done to measure which goals fit each situation for each respondent. Then people read the eight situations again, this time with a message appended. They accepted or rejected each message and indicated the reasons for rejection by selecting the most relevant goal rationale. The idea is that the first set of ratings shows how well the various goals fit the situation, and the accept-or-reject task shows whether the best-fitting goals are used for editing. In fact, that is what happened. The basic comparisons are between people for whom a situation makes a goal highly pertinent and those for whom the goal is not greatly activated by the stimulus. When the situation made the impression goal salient, people used that goal as a reason for rejection more often than did people for whom that goal was not salient, in six of the eight situations (and a seventh produced p = .052). People for whom the situation stimulated the don’t-offend goal were more likely than the non-stimulated people to use that editorial standard in seven of the eight situations. Fit to the don’t-offend goal also led to more common use of the relational maintenance rejection rationale in six (nearly seven) of the eight situations. When the own-ethics goal results are analyzed, the advantage occurs in only five of the eight situations. The fit of the relational maintenance goal led to its being used more often as a reason for suppression in six of the eight situations. Fit-caused stimulation of the relational maintenance goal also influenced use of the don’t-offend standard, showing an increment in seven of the eight situations. These results are interesting. Several of Meyer’s findings show that two goals, not offending the other and maintaining the relationship, seem to operate in pretty much the same way. Hample and Dallinger (1992) re-

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ported a similar result. Setting aside the implication that scholars may be insisting on a distinction that naïve actors do not always make, Meyer’s other results show how fit influences accessibility of the goals used for editing. Respondents’ ratings give evidence of the goals that fit each situation, and on a person-by-person basis, the goals that fit best also become more likely to be used as rationales for suppressing messages. Following the evidence bearing on the importance of recency and fit in activating goals that can be used in editing, only frequency remains. Meyer (2001b) has explored this topic as well, although not necessarily in the context of editing. She argued that different personality traits lead to certain interaction goals being habitual. The idea is that a continuing predisposition results in a person doing a characteristic set of things more often, thus pursuing particular goals more often. This is the link between personality and frequency. For instance, Meyer supposed that people high in verbal aggressiveness do not habitually pursue the goal of relational maintenance but habitually seek to dominate. In addition to measuring the degree to which her respondents possess certain personality predispositions, she gave them compliance gaining situations and asked them to rate the importance of various goals in the situation. Her results sustain her thinking on these points. People high in verbal aggressiveness are more likely to see the dominance goal as important and are less likely to see much relevance for the following goals: protect other’s face, maintain the relationship, and protect own face. People high in self-monitoring are unusually sensitive to other’s face, maintaining the relationship, and protecting own face. Although this study did not include any sort of editing task, the findings connect here. One’s personality is associated with the frequency with which one pursues the self-same goals that other studies have shown to be the basis for editorial decisions. Part of Meyer’s contribution, then, is to document the importance of recency, fit, and frequency to the accessibility of the editing goals. The other value of her work is to give a specific model of how the editing takes place. Combining Wilson and Meyer Figure 4.5 shows how the Wilson and Meyer theories combine into a model of editing that is jointly very comprehensive. There, I have sketched a sequence of life spaces that describe how a simple arguing situation may develop. Wilson’s cognitive rules theory describes what happens in the first two stages, A and B. Meyer’s work explains stages C and D and the point of message revision is stage E. In the first moment, the actor P suddenly becomes aware of two things—a threatening man with a weapon and the fact that P is in a

FIG. 4.5.

Life space sequence.

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physical location from which he or she cannot escape. The perception of a threat immediately activates the goal, save self. The two elements, threat and constraint, match the “if” clause of a rule that P knows: If threatened and unable to escape, be friendly. The first instant, A, is followed by the activation of a cognitive rule for saving oneself, in B. This part of the sequence is explained by Wilson’s cognitive rules model, which explains how people make the transition from a perceived situation to a behavioral rule that includes interaction goals. The next sequence is Meyer’s territory. The goals ground and dominate P’s understanding of the life space. The situation, and mainly the goals, immediately activate the situation–action associations. In C, these associations have spontaneously produced a possible action plan. The tentative path is as follows. First, P considers adopting nonverbal behaviors (e.g., smiling, holding out one’s empty hands) to make it clear that P is harmless; and then P will address the thug politely and appeal to his better side. These two actions are projected to move P into the “be friendly” region, which is in service to the final goal. Hoping that an acceptable relationship with the thug will thereby be established, P will then remark that police sirens are audible and perhaps the thug (“Sir”) should flee. In this way, P intends to protect self. The sequence involves arguing, or reason giving, at two points: the appeal for mercy and the reason for the thug to leave. The next instant, D, which still precedes any actual behaviors, shows some problems due to the action–consequence associations. Calling a thug “Sir” is demeaning, and appealing for mercy shows self’s incapability. These actions would result in harm to own face, P realizes. Although own face would not likely be an important consideration in these conditions, own identity is a habitual goal for most people, and this consideration is likely to flit through P’s cognitive system, even possibly rising to consciousness if P is remarkably concerned about own image. P also realizes, still perhaps unconsciously, that the appearance or threat of police may cause the thug to act precipitously and harmfully. P is worrying about effectiveness, not about person-centered goals such as identity and relationship. Based on these considerations (all probably unconscious), P settles on a distinguished path, in phase E. P decides to disregard the harm to own face, in light of the greater importance of arriving in “be friendly.” In this situation, the metagoal of efficiency is far more decisive than that of appropriateness, and politeness issues are set aside. The effectiveness matter cannot be ignored, however. Weighing the risk, P decides not to mention the police and so suppresses that whole line of argument. Nor can P think of anything else to say, any reason that may help him bridge between “be friendly” and “save self.” P must simply hope that friendliness can pro-

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tect him without any intermediary steps. In terms of his arguments, P is left only with the appeal to mercy, made more credible (P hopes) by the trusting good will P shows toward the thug.

CONCLUSIONS This chapter has been as full an account of how arguers suppress or revise their arguments as I can muster. Many details remain to be filled in. In particular, scholars have much more information about suppression than about revision. Still, the basic processes seem to be quite similar. Arguments begin in the circumstances that generate them. People act in response to their life spaces, the situations in which they think they are. Only features noticed by the arguer have any predictive or causal relevance to what the arguer does. Simply because a researcher designs what he or she supposes is an influence task does not mean that the arguer will see it that way. Instead, the arguer may orient entirely to face management, for instance, and intentionally forfeit any chance to persuade. The sophistication and differentiation with which arguers can perceive people (Burleson & Caplan, 1998) and messages (Daly, Bell, Glenn, & Lawrence, 1985; Hample 1993) are important research topics. The more detail a person notices in a potential arguing situation, the more nuanced the arguments she or he is presumably able to make. The quality of one’s perceptions establishes an upper limit for the quality of arguments one can make, except by accident. One possible element in a life space is an obstacle. The obstacle hypothesis (Francik & Clark, 1985; Roloff & Janiszewski, 1989) is that people design their messages to navigate around the most salient perceived obstacle. Thus, if an arguer is worried that a request may be unreasonable because it is too burdensome, she or he may say, “I really need a ride because my car has a flat tire. If it’s not too much trouble, could you take me to the gas station?” The obstacle is acknowledged in the phrase “too much trouble.” This behavior has two possible effects. The first is to give the other person an officially recognized reason for refusal, so that saying “I’m too busy right now” is advertised as being an acceptable refusal, with no repercussions. This possibility is envisioned by the obstacle hypothesis researchers. The second potential effect has to do with what Hopper (1980) called the rule of first-speak. Once the first person has spoken a topic, it becomes relatively unavailable to the other person. An example that makes the possible potency of this rule more obvious is, “I know you’re busy, but can you give me a ride anyway?” This way of addressing the obstacle makes it less feasible as a reason for refusal. How

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one phrases the mention of the obstacle appears to be the key to whether the obstacle is offered as an acceptable reason for refusal or the reverse. Life spaces may also contain barriers—simple bars to locomotion into a goal region, impedences that are not explained or understood. The person bounces back from a barrier, cannot enter the goal region, and does not know why. Barriers normally elevate the arguer’s levels of frustration and stress, and as Lewin (1936, ch. 17) knew, this results in the person becoming essentially de-differentiated. People say stupid things when they are mad. Subtleties disappear, both in perception and action. Among other effects, barriers tend to make arguers less competent. Hample and Dallinger (1998) showed that rebuffs make later arguments more aggressive. A related finding is what Berger (1997, ch. 4) called the hierarchy principle. In several experiments, Berger sent confederates to ask for directions, but on receiving them, they said simply, “I don’t understand,” without explanation. Rather than recasting the directions, speakers tended to repeat them more loudly and more slowly. They made the least possible revision in their plans, when more effortful editing would surely have been more effective. Climates may facilitate arguing or chill it before it begins (Hample, 1999, 2003a). People high in argumentativeness or who have a positive valence for conflict argue with little provocation. Shy people, those apprehensive about communication, and those who expect conflicts to be hurtful try to avoid arguing at all. Between these two extremes of approach and avoidance, the atmosphere of the interaction encourages either eristic or coalescent arguing. Goals are theorized to be the immediate stimulus for arguing in the GPA model. Several research traditions (chiefly those originated by Dillard, Hample, Dallinger, and Meyer) suggest that the main goals in play for arguers are effectiveness, identity issues, and relational issues. Others, such as play, discourse competence, and arousal management, are also interesting. Wilson (1990, 1995) showed how the goals are activated by matching situational perceptions to stored cognitive rules. The controlling goal may not remain constant during the interaction. Dillard, Solomon, and Samp (1996) reported that people momentarily highlight either dominance or affiliation issues during the course of an exchange. Even if an argument is originally provoked by a single unmet need, as Meyer (1997) theorized, arguers often find themselves responding to several goals at once. Sometimes these goals may seem inconsistent with one another, as when one needs to make a request but does not want to appear helpless. Samp and Solomon (1999) reported that when people notice more than one goal and when the goals seem mutually incompatible, their messages are longer and more elaborated. Meyer (1997) has shown how the secondary goals stimulated by cognitive representation of the

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consequences of potential arguments serve as editorial bases. The editing may involve only suppression, but it may also require simple revision or additional elaboration. The planning phase of arguing describes the emergence and alteration of the argument. Plans are done in service of goals but in light of obstacles, barriers, and climates. Meyer’s (1997) work is especially valuable in tracing how the first projected impulses stimulate awareness of their consequences. These consequences, especially if they are unfavorable, activate further goals. This sequence complicates the argument production process because it implies a need to edit the first path that flashes into possibility, but the effort must be worthwhile or people wouldn’t do it. The edited arguments are not guaranteed to be superior to the first impulse, of course, but everyone except blurters has learned that edited arguments tend to be better ones, with “better” defined in different ways for different people. As Cicero said, argumentation must encompass both invention and judgment. Not only critics but also everyday arguers need to judge their own arguments. Critics (e.g., friends) do so after people make thoughts public, but arguers also have a chance to judge and edit prior to utterance, and that has been the topic of this chapter.

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The Emotional Experience of Arguing

Regrettably, I must begin this chapter by warning the reader that it will be unsatisfactory. This is hardly an endearing rhetorical device, but it is only fair to face facts, or the lack of them. As Dillard (2004) remarked, “Research has yet to examine the relationship between argument and emotion . . .” (p. 199), and he was surely right. Argumentation is not alone in this neglect. Planalp (2003) discussed and tried to redress the insufficient attention to emotions in relationship theories, where one may suppose the need for emotional analysis would be even more obvious than in the more specialized study of arguing, with its logical heritage. In chapter 2, I reviewed a considerable body of evidence indicating that naïve actors very often have clear negative emotional reactions to the prospect of arguing. Even before those studies were conducted, however, it was certainly plain to teachers of argumentation that many of their students were apprehensive about debating in class. Research on conflict management (e.g., Collins & Guetzkow, 1964; Coser, 1956) has long been attentive to the emotional arousal that may occur as part of a conflict interaction, although emotions tend to be regarded as somewhere between nuisance and potential disaster in that tradition. Before I go much further, then, it is appropriate to speculate why emotions have not been much studied in connection with arguing. THE ABSENCE OF EMOTIONS IN ARGUMENTATION THEORY Perhaps the most fundamental problem is that our culture has inherited a persistent and bad idea, namely that rationality and emotionality are 126

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opposites (Booth, 1970, 1974). Arguing is identified with reason, which is held to be the opponent and discipline to passion. Even Perelman and Olbrects-Tyteca (1969), in one of the most genuinely humanistic rhetorics ever composed, shared this misapprehension: The great orator, the one with a hold on his listeners, seems animated by the very mind of his audience. This is not the case for the ardent enthusiast whose sole concern is with what he himself considers important. A speaker of this kind may have some effect on suggestible persons, but generally speaking his speech will strike his audience as unreasonable. . . . The apparent explanation for this viewpoint is that the man swayed by passion argues without taking sufficiently into account the audience he is addressing; carried away by his enthusiasm, he imagines his audience to be susceptible to the same arguments that persuaded him. Thus, passion, in causing the audience to be forgotten, creates less an absence than a poor choice of reasons. (p. 24)

One can see the prejudice that profound feeling interferes with the careful thought needed to address an audience properly and the further suggestion that clear communication of one’s emotion leaves listeners intellectually empty. At least Perelman and Olbrects-Tyteca acknowledged that the passionate arguer may have come to his or her position by means of reasons. Aristotle (1984a), in distinguishing pathos from ethos and logos, seems not to have had quite that same understanding. Kennedy (1991) noted that “Aristotle’s inclusion of emotion as a mode of persuasion . . . is a recognition that among human beings judgment is not entirely a rational act” (p. 39, n. 45). Aristotle’s view, that emotions are a persuader’s resource that can be used to alter what pure reason would have produced, is a recurrent and problematic one today. Why am I insisting that reason and emotion are not opposites, that they are not the contrasting anchors of some continuum of psychological experience? Because, simply put, people cannot reason without emotion and rarely experience emotion without reason. They are partners, not competitors. The driest example of pure reason I can conceive is a proof in geometry: the axioms, the postulates, the lemmas, the theorems. Yet I can recall my own enthusiasm when I worked out a challenging proof in high school. I argued, in the purest and most logical sense, because I was motivated to do so, and I got genuine pleasure out of a successful effort. Although I didn’t, I could even have read the proof to a friend with delight. One may rebut, saying that there is nothing emotional in the statement of the steps needed to prove the side-angle-side theorem, but that objection is irrelevant. The marks on the paper are not the argument at all—they are only the artifact of it. I did the arguing, and I did it out of and through an

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emotional experience. Perhaps other people had different emotional reactions to geometry, but those feelings make my point equally well. Nothing about geometric axioms entails frustration, but many high school students’ geometric arguments certainly partake of it. Not postulates, nor words, nor paragraphs argue; only people do. Everything else (e.g., “her article argues that . . .”) is merely a metaphor. Because arguing is a motivated human activity, reasoning always has an emotional element. Is it possible that emotion doesn’t have a rational substructure? In extreme cases, I suppose that is possible. People can be gripped by emotions so intense and overwhelming that they freeze because they literally cannot think for a moment (Lewin, 1936, ch. 17). That is rare, however, and is the province of clinical psychology, not argumentation. As long as people are acting and experiencing the world in an ordinarily human way, they are both reasoning and feeling. Here is an example I sometimes use in my classes. Suppose someone makes this little speech: “I can’t think of anything more horrifying than slavery. Therefore, we should impeach the President.” Certainly this example has plenty of emotional content, but the complete absence of plausible connection between the first and last parts of the utterance makes this nonsense, not just a bad argument. The logos is missing, and people should not recognize the speech as a coherent argument at all. When people argue, they argue emotionally, in nearly the same way that they argue biologically, electrically, chemically, and physically. It is all one thing, not two forces perpetually competing with one another. People each have only one mind, and they use the whole thing whenever they argue. Why people argue, how they conduct themselves while arguing, what they argue about, what conclusions they seek—all these have emotional origins and continuing emotional relevance. Willard (1979b) was one of the earliest of the modern argumentation scholars to take these realities seriously: My own view is that reason cannot be adequately described apart from the passions—the passions being the main ingredients of a person’s structuring of events. Aristotle had the seed of this view, although it was not integrated into his logic and was subsequently ignored by most philosophers. He thought that passions participated in reason because a man of practical wisdom could not exist sans emotion; he should experience anger, fear, and pity in the appropriate amounts. . . . Subsequent theorists, however, focused on the propositional elements of thought and tended to regard the passions as an essentially different aspect of human nature. (p. 22)

Scholars are perfectly welcome to analyze only the logical skeleton of arguments, but they are not entitled to say that they have thereby essayed the whole human experience of arguing (Gilbert, 1997).

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My first suspicion about the absence of emotion-centered research in argumentation is thus directed against the deep cultural conviction that rational argument, by definition, is independent of feeling (and, by an interesting twist of logic, therefore free of it). My second has to do with the recent sociology of research in argumentation. Although argumentation scholarship has a history of more than two millennia, nearly all those years were devoted to an understanding of either texts or public speeches. Only in the 1970s did a genuine interest in argument2, the idea of interpersonal argument, surface. This focus did not so much arise autochthonously within the argumentation community as it appeared as a natural application of the new interest in interpersonal communication within the communication discipline at large. That interest, in turn, has an informative history of its own. During the first half of the 20th century, the discipline was called “speech” and was oriented to the study of public speaking (e.g., Brigance, 1943). Ensconced in a tradition that informally defined rhetoric as “the art of public speaking” or “the art of persuasion,” scholars tended to study public speeches that had clear persuasive intent and to evaluate them in those terms. When the impulse to do empirical, quantitative research eventually spread to this discipline from the more advanced social sciences, such as psychology and sociology, the first and most natural application was to persuasion. The landmark book in the movement toward quantitative empirical inquiry was by Thompson (1967). In that work, Thompson summarized the results of quantitative research, often from psychology, to show that matters of interest to speech teachers had more or less objective evidence. The longest chapter in the book (ch. 3) is called “Rhetorical Theory and Practice” and has sections on each of the canons of rhetoric. Although other topics, such as small group communication and speech pedagogy, also received experimental attention, it is fair to say that persuasion became the central topic for quantitatively inclined scholars in the discipline beginning to reform itself into “communication.” A particular locus of study was Michigan State University, a program soon dominated by G. R. Miller, a towering figure in the discipline, a man impressively productive not only in his own research record but also in his output of outstanding Ph.D. students. When Miller began to interest himself in interpersonal communication (e.g., G. R. Miller, 1976; G. R. Miller & Steinberg, 1975), it was natural for others to follow. Perhaps equally expectable was Miller’s choice to begin by translating persuasion from the domain of public speaking to that of face-to-face interaction (G. R. Miller, Boster, Roloff, & Seibold, 1977). Because at this moment argumentation scholars began to study interpersonal matters, I pause to consider the scholarly worldview they inher-

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ited from persuasion research. In a horrifyingly detailed book, Glander (2000) documented the involvement of U.S. intelligence agencies in the creation of the discipline newly called “mass communications,” a term preferred to “propaganda,” which is what those scholars were straightforwardly doing, often knowingly. The two-step flow of communication, the semantic differential approach to measuring meaning, the diffusion of information—all these were research programs funded in order to give the U.S. government more skill in devising propaganda for the “masses” of other nations. Lazarsfeld’s Bureau of Applied Social Research and the Communications Institutes at both the University of Illinois and Stanford University were all supported, even financially dominated, by intelligence agency funds. Because Glander’s focus was on mass communications research, he did not take Hovland’s Yale School research much beyond World War II, but Hovland, Schramm, Lazarsfeld, Stoddard, Stouffer, Janis, Berelson, Gallup, Roper, and others all worked together during the war. They designed and tested propaganda, directed both to enemy populations and to the morale of American troops. At the end of the war, these researchers and the U.S. government felt a need for continuing propaganda because of the Cold War. After World War II, several important young men developed intellectually under the guidance of one or more of those cold warriors. Among them were a Schramm protégé, David K. Berlo, and a student of Stuart Dodd, Everett Rogers. Both men, particularly Berlo, were instrumental in shaping the beginnings of the Michigan State department (Rogers, 2001) and continued to fund their research with federal grants and contracts. What understanding of persuasion did they inherit from their teachers, and what was the role of emotion in it? The point of early mass communication research was to study the effects of media on target populations: . . . fundamentally, all of communications research aims at the study of effect. From the earliest theorizing on this subject to the most contemporary empirical research, there is, essentially, only one underlying problem— though it may not always be explicit—and that is, “what can the media ‘do’?” Just as the “model” we have examined poses this question, so, too, do the “clients” of mass media research. Consider the advertiser, or the radio executive, or the propagandist or the educator. These sponsors of research are interested, simply, in the effect of the message on the public. . . . We are suggesting that the overriding interest of mass media research is in the study of the effectiveness of mass media attempts to influence—usually, to change—opinions and attitudes in the very short run. (E. Katz & Lazarsfeld, 1955, pp. 18–19)

In this passage is a single-minded understanding of the point of mass communication media. They exist to persuade (not to entertain, to in-

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form, to enlighten, to inspire, or to connect). The media in question may be radio, newspapers, or public school textbooks, but all the “clients” (a literal term, given the funding for Lazarsfeld’s Bureau of Applied Social Research) have the same interest, effective propaganda. Discussing the importance of the work conducted in Lazarsfeld’s bureau, Delia (1987) observed, “many of the studies were to become the exemplars defining concretely what doing communication research meant” (pp. 53–54). The regnant theories of persuasion had little to say about the persuader’s genuine feelings, although they made some suggestions as to what emotions he or she should display. In contrast, about the audience’s emotions they had as much to say as the social science of the time permitted. The listeners’ or readers’ passions were to be carefully observed so that they could be used by the persuader in a sort of emotional judo. These scholars participated in the assumption that reason and emotion are opposites: “For the majority of individuals it may be true that motivations and attitudes are generally acquired without regard to rational considerations and are practically impregnable to new rational considerations” (Hovland, Lumsdaine, & Sheffield, 1949, p. 72). The cold warriors’ view of democracy made the essential irrationality of the public a desideratum, however. In discussing the various perceptual distortions that people have on political matters, Berelson, Lazarsfeld and McPhee (1954) wrote the following about their fellow citizens: People like to be reassured that they are right, in politics as in other matters, and, as a result, in this case they overrate the tendency of approved groups to vote their own way. . . . in the case of ethnic hostility, the data refine the notion of need as the basis of perceptual distortion: not only does political perception probably serve needs for social support but perhaps also it serves certain needs or tensions for aggression against the “outsiders.” Perceptual distortion has its consequences for the society, too. First, it must make political systems more workable by making individual decisions easier. If everyone saw the true complexity of politics and no one could make up his mind, no government would be possible. (p. 86)

People’s needs, prejudices, and distortions are convenient for the perceptive persuader, for these elements can be used to make complex decisions pass by in a simple, unexamined way. I don’t want to spend much more space on what is, after all, only background matter for this book, but I cannot resist one more indication of what modern communication scholars inherited. Participating in one of the Yale volumes, Rosenberg (1960) wrote one of the early chapters on balance theory. He reported the results of a remarkable experiment, one that may be telling in regard to those scholars’ attitudes toward the public and its emotions. Rosenberg recruited 11 Yale students who were

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found to be very susceptible to hypnosis. These students and a control group were given a preliminary instrument regarding their opinions on several topics. The students were tested to measure the internal consistency of their thoughts about the topics. Then the experimental respondents were hypnotized, and half were given the suggestion that they would have an “exhilarated feeling” about the prospect of “Negroes moving into white neighborhoods” or another high-interest issue, such as the right of labor to strike; the other half were told to feel negatively about the attitude object. “It should be noted that the subject is simply commanded to feel differently toward the attitude object but is not told to change any of his related beliefs” (p. 27; italics original). Results show that people did, in fact, reorganize their systems of beliefs to get a better fit to their new feelings. A persuader who can somehow manage to induce a particular passion in the audience, then, need not worry about audience beliefs: The audience will work out the beliefs themselves, without any need for genuine argumentation. One supposes that the intelligence agencies regretted having to persuade, rather than merely to hypnotize. In fact, the secret MKULTRA project, a wide-ranging investigation of various sorts of “mind control,” including LSD and propaganda, funded Osgood’s semantic differential research (Glander, 2000). This understanding of persuasion-as-manipulation was in the air, even in the classrooms of those who studied persuasion and then interpersonal communication in the discipline. Audience emotions are not respected for their own sake; they are another of the persuader’s weapons. Berlo’s (1960) classic book on communication theory innovated in many ways, not least of them being an early treatment of interpersonal communication. Here is one passage from that chapter: Feedback is an important instrument of affect. The reactions of the receiver are useful to the source in analyzing his effectiveness. They also affect his subsequent behaviors because they serve as consequences of his prior responses. If the feedback is rewarding, he perseveres. If it is not rewarding, he changes his message to increase the chances of being successful. An awareness and utilization of feedback increase the communication effectiveness of the individual. (p. 115)

Berlo’s book, partly written from talks he gave to the U. S. International Cooperation Administration, is explicitly indebted to two propaganda cold warriors, Osgood and Schramm (p. vi). This textbook is often considered a turning point in the movement of the discipline from humanistic to behavioral studies. The quoted passage shows how the rhetorical idea of audience analysis is translated into a set of guidance indices for the

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persuader, although it is supposed to be about interpersonal communication, not persuasion. At any rate, this perspective is what the interpersonally oriented argumentation researchers could look to as a local tradition in the 1970s. Still, there were other currents as well. Young graduate students were emerging from the Vietnam era, and many carried with them certain skepticisms. Quantitative work was attractive to many of those oriented toward interpersonal communication, but not to all. Some, and not just those mainly interested in the humanistic rhetorical traditions, felt that quantitative work was somehow coarse and dehumanizing. I have no sense that any of us knew the story about mass communications that I have just summarized (certainly I had no hint of it), but some of the graduate students seemed to have a kind of intuitive, visceral feeling that something was wrong. Certainly the field of argumentation could want no clearer repudiation of argument-as-manipulation than Brockriede’s (1972) essay on arguers as lovers. In retrospect, his essay can be understood as a rejection of the worldview underlying quantitative persuasion research at the time. I think it is fair to say that the interest in interpersonal argument was mainly nurtured at the University of Illinois in this period. Joseph Wenzel, a rhetorically and philosophically oriented argumentation specialist, taught many students in his graduate seminars on argumentation: Charles Willard, Sally Jackson, Scott Jacobs, Susan Kline, Brant Burleson, Daniel O’Keefe, Barbara O’Keefe, and myself. All of us overlapped, and all of us were in classes together. Many of us were also able to study with Wayne Brockriede, who visited one semester. In addition, Robert Trapp studied with Brockriede at the University of Denver, and both Pamela and William Benoit studied with Barbara O’Keefe at Wayne State. Nearly all of us were debaters and debate coaches, and it was obvious to us that arguing is something that people do face to face. It was, however, equally natural for us to focus on argument content and not to think much about emotional experiences; interscholastic debate is almost exclusively about content. These few people were the core researchers in the movement toward the interpersonal study of argument. With Wenzel’s encouragement, we all took distinctive paths, and few of these were especially dominated by Wenzel’s own work. Willard takes a rhetorical, political, and philosophical view of argumentation; Jackson and Jacobs initially did conversation analysis and now have integrated their work with pragmadialectics; Daniel O’Keefe wrote the classic analytical essay on interpersonal arguing and followed it with several more; Burleson replied to the O’Keefe essay and joined with Kline to bring Habermas to the specialty’s attention; Barbara O’Keefe, along with Pam Benoit, began some interesting work with children’s arguing (Cox & Wil-

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lard, 1982a, has representative work from most of these people; the proceedings from the early Alta conferences on argumentation have quite a lot more). Because of the other things going on at the University of Illinois at the time, we responded to influences other than Wenzel’s. Jesse Delia, for instance, was beginning to establish an impressive program of work in interpersonal communication. His theory of constructivism had little in common with the Berlo approach, which was persuasion dominated and more oriented to specific variables (e.g., dogmatism) than to general processes. Delia’s work pointed students toward perception processes and sited interpersonal communication within a rich theoretical tradition that owed nothing to mass communications. Outside the department, several students were taking classes from the sociologist Norman Denzin and becoming interested in the then-novel ideas of conversation analysis and qualitative methods. It is remarkable that everyone I have named in this little story (probably excepting Willard) has done quantitative work, and all of us (possibly excepting Burleson) have also done qualitative research. Naturally, we all have our preferences, but the variety of our research programs and the flexibility in our methodologies says something about the openness of the atmosphere in which we were educated. The problem is that none of us happened to be very interested in emotions. Some of our later research (I am thinking particularly of Burleson’s studies of comforting or my collaboration with Judith Dallinger on taking conflict personally) certainly has relevance to people’s feelings, but that is not the work we began in argumentation. Neither the main quantitative tradition in the larger discipline, with its orientation toward manipulation of passive others, nor Delia’s approach to understanding how we perceive one another particularly raised emotional issues. In the persuasion literature, emotion (e.g., fear) is an independent or moderating variable but never an outcome of interest, never a dependent variable. Only a few people were working on interpersonal argument, even including those with no special connections to Illinois, and we were moving in almost as many directions as there were researchers. The questions that seemed most fundamental to us—what is special about face–to–face arguing? What is its relation to traditional theories of argument? What are the conversational and cognitive processes involved?—simply didn’t involve emotions. With only a few people working for only a few years, not all the interesting questions get asked at first. So emotions were not a consideration in the early years. Our milieu did not encourage us to treat people’s emotional states as a topic worth investigating for its own sake. We did, however, see many topics that we found fascinating, and we pursued them. It just didn’t occur to one of the people who could have established an early interest in emotion to do so.

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THE IMPORTANCE OF EMOTIONALITY IN ARGUING Persuasion researchers have done quite a bit of work on audience emotions and how these emotions moderate opinion change (Dillard & Meijnders, 2002; Nabi, 2002). The basic idea is that the persuader does something to stimulate a mood, such as fear or joy, and this mood strengthens or weakens the base persuasive effect. This sort of thing is not my topic here. Instead, my interest is in people’s feelings, just for the sake of the feelings. It is certainly interesting to know if various emotional states lead to some other cognitive or behavioral action. However, the possibility that a person becomes angry during an argument is intrinsically consequential to the person, and therefore also to the researchers. Researchers also want to understand why another person argues with glee. People’s feelings represent a core part of their experience of interpersonal arguing, and so those moods and affective reactions are a legitimate focus for research. One only has to raise small children to understand how completely absorbing a strong feeling can be. Emotions, even if they are not instrumental in some further outcome, are proper dependent variables. Some scholars are resistant to this idea—I am indebted to Judith Dallinger for eventually teaching it to me in spite of my hardheadedness—but I suspect that the hesitations are a holdover from the manipulative worldview that many of us experienced in our early studies and have not entirely freed ourselves from. Unfortunately, this is precisely the point at which I have too little to say. Only a few studies have made much effort to capture the ongoing emotional experience of arguing, and those efforts are only approximate. Before looking at those few projects, I need to be clear that researchers want to explore all the emotional possibilities. The material reviewed in this book so far may suggest that the main emotional reactions are negatively valenced ones. A few quick reminders should serve to emphasize that positive emotions are also likely. The argumentativeness instrument (Infante & Rancer, 1982, 1996) contains two subscales: argument approach (e.g., “I have a pleasant, good feeling when I win a point in an argument”) and argument avoid (e.g., “When I finish arguing with someone I feel nervous and upset”). Many people seek out opportunities to argue, because their approach scores exceed their avoid scores. The valence subscale of the Taking Conflict Personally instrument (TCP; Hample & Dallinger, 1995) also has items of this sort (e.g., “Conflict is an intensely enjoyable kind of interaction”), and many people have positive valence for conflict. Finally, recall from the discussion of argument frames in chapter 2 that one of the primary goals for arguing can be to have fun. Both argumentativeness and TCP give valuable information about people’s relatively enduring predispositions about conflict. Both con-

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structs have always been theorized to have both trait and state aspects. That is, people are understood as having a given level of predisposition to approach arguments or to take them personally, but some immediate situational circumstance is still needed to engage those feelings. The predisposition (i.e., the trait) may or may not predict the immediate feelings (i.e., the state). Even a person who enjoys arguing may be put off by what appears to be going on in an exchange and may therefore not join in. Even a person who is extremely defensive may find a particular conflict so enticing that he or she cannot resist participating. One’s state depends on both the enduring tendencies and the immediate situation. Nearly all the work in both research programs focuses on traits. In fact, I have been unable to locate a single study of argumentativeness (or its nearly constant companion in these studies, verbal aggressiveness; Infante & Wigley, 1986) that examines moment-by-moment states of argumentativeness or verbal aggression. At best, the trait research gives only general guidelines as to how people may feel during an argument. The most immediately useful work for this chapter shows how situational features can influence the effects of the traits. The volume of successful research using these instruments at least encourages confidence in their validity (see Hample, 1999; Infante & Rancer, 1996) and therefore supports as conclusions the assumptions that the research programs made in the beginning: that some people are motivated positively by the prospect of an argument and others negatively; that people vary in the likelihoods that they will take conflicts personally or enjoy them; and that people make different estimates of the most common relational effects that a conflict can have. Although important, these generalizations add regrettably little to what an adult’s observation of social life would already have indicated. Nor do they do much more than hint at the feelings that an arguer may have—anxiety, depression, happiness, frustration, anger, fear, optimism, pessimism, and so forth. Nonetheless, I press forward. I divide the following material into two categories, the interaction of situations with argumentativeness or verbal aggressiveness and several state studies of TCP. The following section summarizes a modest research program showing how emotional states can be studied moment by moment during interpersonal arguments. This research offers the best available information on the emotional experience of arguing and shows how much more research needs to be done. Situations and Argumentativeness To my knowledge, no study explores how argumentativeness levels change as an interaction proceeds, although the theory of argumentativeness suggests they may do so. Argumentativeness is understood as a

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trait, a relatively enduring predisposition to approach arguments, that interacts with situational features to generate behavior. On the uncontroversial assumption that situations themselves reform from moment to moment, one may expect the effects and levels of argumentativeness to change as well. Furthermore, although trait argumentativeness is concerned with one’s general motivation to argue, scholars understand that one’s motivation to argue in a specific situation also depends on the immediate circumstances (e.g., Infante, 1987; R. Stewart & Roach, 1993). Therefore, both motivation to argue in the instant and the effects of trait argumentativeness on arguing behaviors may vary as an episode develops. Several studies encourage this hypothesis, which I certainly hope will soon be explicitly tested. These investigations connect argument-relevant traits to several situational features, such as the topic under consideration, the other person’s reactions, and one’s general perceptions of the situation itself. All these studies are quite limited from my point of view in this chapter, but all are suggestive. Naturally, a key feature of an argumentative situation is the topic of controversy. The issue may, in fact, be a decisive gateway to wishing to argue at all. Manuals of conversational advice have a very long history (see P. Burke, 1993, for an analysis reaching back many centuries), and they often recommend against arguing on certain topics or even arguing at all. Della Casa’s (1990/1558) courtesy manual, Galateo, is one of the more famous medieval efforts. He explained in chapter 11 that one must avoid frivolous, sordid, arcane, sad, or offensive topics and must flee from any hint of blasphemy. In the same vein, controversy is also inappropriate to polite conversation: “it is not proper to speak of things which are critical of present times and people, even if these things, in their own time and place, would be both good and respectable” (p. 18). Even more on point is a modern “art of conversation” (Cotton, 1954). In the second set of lessons, entitled “Getting Acquainted,” Cotton expressed her fourth principle: “Don’t start an argument!” She continued: “Discuss entertaining rather than argumentative subjects until you have ‘felt the temper’ of the people you have recently met” (p. 5, italics original). The argumentative topic has been a central concern in several studies. R. Stewart and Roach (1993) asked people of known trait argumentativeness and religiosity to respond to hypothetical topics, which were either religious or nonreligious. Respondents’ trait argumentativeness was positively related both to their willingness to argue about the topic and to their value expectancy (i.e., the product of their subjective probability of success and their subjective valuing of success in the argument), but not to their overall affective reaction to the prospect of arguing. The religious topic, however, consistently generated more positive valence than the nonreligious one. The use of only one topic of each sort and the fact that

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the “religious” topic was condom sales on campus should raise questions about whether religiosity of topic is an important consideration, but the study shows how topic can influence the ways in which one’s trait argumentativeness expresses itself in concomitant feelings and intentions. Infante and Rancer (1993), using a more generalizable set of topic categories, found that argumentativeness interacts with topic type to predict the frequency of self-reported arguing. They discovered that argumentativeness was not associated with how much arguing people said they did on several sorts of topics (e.g., family, sports, work, religion) but predicted reports of argument frequency on other matters (e.g., social issues, politics, other’s behaviors, personal behaviors, and moral or ethical issues). The relevance of these findings is that they suggest that the topic— and by extension, the path that its development takes—has an influence on whether people want to argue. Argumentativeness indexes one’s motivations, intentions, excitement, and enjoyment about arguing. All these, in some sense, are emotional orientations. The finding that topic and predisposition interact to influence one’s willingness to argue suggests that one’s composite feelings (i.e., in the sense that they reflect the application of circumstances to general inclination) are changeable during an interpersonal argument. Two other studies examine how the other person’s reactions to one’s arguments connect to argumentative behaviors. These investigations concern themselves with the rebuff phenomenon (Hample & Dallinger, 1998), which is the finding that people become more aggressive in their messages once their initial attempts have been refused. Lim (1990) showed how the flavor with which resistance is enacted influences the way arguers continue. Lim’s confederates rebuffed appeals in friendly or unfriendly, strong or weak ways. He coded arguers’ responsive messages for their verbal aggressiveness and found more personal hostility when the resistance was unfriendly and strong. Importantly, these effects occurred even after the arguers’ trait verbal aggressiveness was statistically controlled. Infante (1989) used a hypothetical situation in which respondents indicated likelihood of use for various strategies, including verbally aggressive ones. When Infante phrased the rebuff in a verbally aggressive way, his male respondents inclined toward verbally aggressive continuations, but the women selected argumentative messages. Both these investigations provide evidence that how the other person behaves is an important element in shaping one’s own messages. When the other is personal, aggressive, and rude, an arguer is pressured to respond in kind. Although it is possible that nearly everyone feels this temptation, not everyone (e.g., the women in Infante’s study) gives in to it. Trait levels of argumentativeness and verbal aggression indicate one’s

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thresholds for argumentative and hostile behavior patterns. People high in verbal aggression need little in the way of provocation, whereas others need more. The provocations are, of course, situational and last no longer than any other conversational moment. Finally, several argumentativeness studies investigate situation in more global terms. Darus (1994) compared general trait argumentativeness to that expressed in regard to one’s workplace. She discovered that these two measures are highly correlated (r = .81), and inspection of her reported means and standard deviations suggests that these two average levels of argumentativeness are not significantly different when the general case is compared to the work context. I mention this study because it seems to be the only counterevidence to the claim I am working toward, namely that predispositions and situational features interact to influence one’s feelings during an argument. Darus’ findings may mean that argumentativeness is essentially constant from one situation to another, as one might expect of an enduring predisposition, or they may simply suggest that people’s work lives are so central to self that general predispositions tend to have absorbed workplace orientations already. Another investigation, which has a more textured assessment of situation, indicates that immediate circumstances join with predisposition to generate one’s arguing frame. Infante (1987) obtained measures of trait argumentativeness from respondents and then played them a tape of a person making an argument. Infante asked people to estimate the probability that they would prevail in an argument with the taped advocate and to estimate the importance they would place on succeeding in the argument. He also obtained a measure of his respondents’ motivation to argue against the taped advocate. The correlation between trait argumentativeness and motivation to argue was r = .26. When the situational features (i.e., subjective probability and value of success) were added multiplicatively to the analysis, however, r = .64. One’s predisposition is thus relevant, but the genuinely strong prediction of motivation is grounded in the interaction of trait and situation. These studies do not provide what I really want—information about how people’s motivations, expectations, and feelings vary (or not) from instant to instant during an interpersonal argument, and why. However, they offer unmistakable clues that something affectively significant happens during argumentative interactions, so that one’s traits do not necessarily control behavior by themselves. This literature seems to show that predisposition interacts with situation to produce impulses to argue, avoid, or attack. The interaction can occur only in the moment (even if many of these moments are simulated in the designs of the studies just reviewed). The evidence suggests that the key feelings about arguing and about the other arguer may prove to be both situated and momentary

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and that the effects of trait argumentativeness are likely to be mediated by those feelings. More pointedly designed research would be quite valuable, in view of the very substantial body of knowledge we already have regarding argumentativeness and verbal aggression (for substantial reviews, see Infante & Rancer, 1996; Wigley, 1998). State Studies of Taking Conflict Personally Research on taking conflict personally (TCP) includes several studies that may be more satisfying. Like argumentativeness, TCP is understood as a reasonably enduring predisposition (actually, a set of them) that interacts with the situation to generate a range of immediate feelings. Together, the dimensions of TCP summarize one’s degree of feeling that conflict is a punishing life experience, personally hurtful in its nature. TCP has six components, each with its own subscale. Usually, the first three components are highly intercorrelated and may be thought of as core TCP. These are direct personalization, the view that conflicts are intensely personal in nature; persecution feelings, the sense that conflict partners intend to do one personal harm; and stress reactions, the physiological and emotional feelings of harm and anxiety. The next two components are opposites: positive relational effects, the projection that conflicts can improve work or personal relationships; and negative relational effects, the contrary expectation that conflicts can harm one’s relationships. The final component of TCP is valence, one’s overall positive or negative assessment of conflict. The bulk of research on TCP has treated these elements as traits, but two studies include state measures. Hample, Dallinger, and Fofano (1995) conducted a study in which people participated in a face-to-face conflict and filled out a version of the TCP instrument worded to refer to the interaction that had just ended. This procedure did not precisely provide a measure of state TCP because the measurement was after the fact rather than concurrent with the feelings. Nonetheless, it reflects the immediate situation, probably being most strongly influenced by the last or most salient feelings from the interaction. A main purpose of this study was to explore people’s aggressive and passive moves during conflicts. (The aggressiveness consisted mainly of challenges, pointed questions, and so forth, not necessarily the personal hostility involved in studies of verbal aggressiveness.) Trait TCP, a measurement taken before the conflict began, did a very poor job of predicting the aggressiveness of behaviors during the conflict, reinforcing an earlier finding (Hample, Dallinger, & Nelson, 1994). However, state core TCP—the post-conflict measure of the first three components—explained a range of arguing behaviors. Even so, the best predictor of arguing behavior in that study was the arguing behaviors of one’s partner,

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with a canonical correlation of RC = .79 between the two people’s argument batteries. Thus, a plausibly relevant trait has little to do with how one argues until it comes into contact with the instant circumstances. When it does, a state naturally arises, and the state turns out to be predictive. However, the situation itself—here, represented by the other’s behaviors—is the best predictor. This last result is quite similar in tone to those of Lim (1990) and Infante (1989), discussed previously. A further analysis of the data from Hample, Dallinger, and Fofano (reported in Hample, 1999, p. 190) shows that the two conflict partners’ state TCP feelings tend to be correlated. State core TCP for the two people was associated at r = .39, and their estimates of negative relational effects were also in reasonable accord, r = .38. This tendency of arguers to match one another’s feelings was also reported by Stamp, Vangelisti, and Daly (1992), who showed that partners’ defensiveness scores are highly correlated (r = .60). The possibility that arguers mirror each others’ emotions is one that is explored in the next section of this chapter. The data set also offers an estimate of the degree to which trait and state TCP are consistent. These correlations range from a high of .53 (for positive relational effects) to a low of .28 (for core TCP). Arguers’ predispositions remained in force during these interactions but were clearly changed by the experience of arguing. Although this investigation does not provide any moment-to-moment information about arguers’ feelings, it at least moves away from the trait tradition to show the centrality of emotional states and moods. The state measures are different from and more predictive of arguing behaviors than the trait measures. Felt emotions, rather than emotional predispositions, are thus the key elements in understanding the emotional experience of arguing. The other relevant TCP study, Hample (1996), dealt directly with momentary feelings and impulses. In that investigation, dyads were videotaped while arguing. In fact, two cameras were used, one behind the shoulder of each person. The videotapes were then replayed to each participant individually so that he or she could recover the original visual perspective. The video playbacks were stopped every half minute or so, and participants were interviewed about a number of different issues. These interviews were then coded for mention of TCP-relevant perceptions and feelings, and these codes were used to represent state TCP. Because participants also completed the standard trait measure of TCP (Hample & Dallinger, 1995) before the interaction, the correspondence between trait and state TCP can be examined. The correlations ranged from .34 (negative relational effects) to .16 (valence; this result is not statistically significant). The experience of arguing substantially refracts one’s predispositions.

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Aggressiveness and passivity were central research issues, as in the earlier study. In this investigation, neither trait nor state TCP effectively predicted aggressiveness during the interaction. However, the postargument interviews were also coded for aggressiveness, and state TCP was significantly associated with that measure, with correlations ranging from .50 to .70 for the core TCP constructs. State valence was also important (r = .46), but trait TCP generally was not (only the combination of direct personalization and persecution feelings was statistically significant, r = .28). Expectations about relational consequences are statistically irrelevant, suggesting that once the argument begins, participants attend to the relationship in front of them, not some generalized expectations about interpersonal consequences. The argumentative exchanges were coded for the degree to which arguers seemed to be addressing various goals. Trait TCP had little to do with these codes, but state TCP shows some connections. Pursuit of the instrumental goal, persuasion, was clearly associated with state persecution feelings, r = .43, and state expression of stress, r = .53. State valence correlates with protection of other’s identity, r = –.36, and relational maintenance, r = –.30. This study shows very clearly that state TCP, not trait TCP, is active during arguments. I have omitted results on quite a few topics from this very complex study, but the overall pattern is that trait TCP is generally ineffective in explaining arguing or interview behaviors but that state TCP is often quite predictive. Results were not analyzed moment by moment, which is unfortunate, but to do so may have exaggerated the degree to which the stimulated retrospection reflects true states, anyway. These two TCP studies reinforce the hints from the argumentativeness and verbal aggressiveness literature. Generalized predispositions are weak predictors of arguing behavior and are not much better in projecting moods. Decent correlations may arise if the arguing task is very brief or hypothetical, but for real interpersonal arguments of noticeable duration, people develop situated feelings. Traits probably indicate people’s starting points, but every argument has the potential to generate emotions that have inconstant relations to one’s initial predispositions.

A BEGINNING TO FOCUSED RESEARCH Emotions are momentary experiences, feelings that can deepen, dissipate, or even reverse in an instant. Getting access to data on these phenomena is not simple. Moment-to-moment interrogation of arguers no doubt runs considerable risk of interfering with the natural emotional (and conversational and substantive) experience of arguing. Physiological meas-

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urements (e.g., galvanic skin response) require intrusive equipment and generate measures of emotional intensity, not emotion type. After-thefact interviews run some risk of contamination by the interview interaction, and recollections may merge into halo effects, perhaps unnaturally influenced by the final feelings. Because all the obvious methodologies have equally obvious risks to the validity of their data, the study of momentary emotions during arguing certainly requires triangulation by the argumentation community. Emotional Displays While Arguing I begin by presenting a study (Hample, 2004b) that used what I believe to be the simplest and easiest methodology. If this research design is eventually shown to be valid—a suggestion that requires use of some other methods mentioned previously, and that I evaluate in a few pages—investigations of argument affect will be reasonably convenient, and the topic will invite the quantity of scholarly attention it deserves. The goal of the study was to gather moment-by-moment data on arguers’ feelings. The basic idea is to have people rate several discrete emotions by watching videotapes of interpersonal arguments. About 15 years before embarking on this study, a student and I collected videotapes of arguments for a project that never eventuated. We invited pairs of undergraduates to come into our lab to discuss a controversial topic. With participants’ permission, we videotaped the interactions. The topic involved in both videotapes I describe here was what should be done about African-American fraternities on our campus. In the previous year, our campus had unfortunately been the site of one or two race-oriented fights, partly involving members of our AfricanAmerican fraternities. In addition, our university administration had discovered some financial irregularities in the management of the fraternities and had some concern about hazing during the pledge process. The videotaped students were asked to take the role of making recommendations to the university president, advising him on what action should be taken. The formal statement of the topic indicated that the issue was whether the fraternities should be “thrown off campus”—that is, whether their official recognition should be revoked. Based on a pretest, the members of the arguing dyads disagreed on whether the fraternities should be disciplined. Both dyads, as it happened, involved a male and a female. In one argument, both participants were African-American. In the other, the male was Euro-American and the woman was AfricanAmerican. Each videotape was a little more than 10 min long. I brought the tapes to an undergraduate course I was teaching on research design and explained that students would be rating the tapes. (I

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taught this course by giving students a questionnaire or other instrument every two weeks or so and having them write reaction papers on their own scores and on the class data as a whole. This was another such assignment.) I explained the background of the arguments and where the tapes originated. I divided the class in two, with half rating the righthand person on the tape and the others the left-hand person. Conveniently, this division allowed everyone to rate one male and one female. The tapes captured the head and upper torso of each arguer. I played the tapes to the raters, stopping the playbacks at approximately 30-sec intervals to collect data. I had rough transcripts of each argument and ensured that the stopping points occurred at breaks in the exchanges. At each pause, students made the same five ratings. For anger, the scale was, “My person is expressing no anger at all/a tiny bit of anger/some anger/a lot of anger.” Parallel items were used for tenderness, sadness, and happiness. These four items were taken from Balswick’s (1988) expression of emotion battery, which measures one’s inclination to express hate, love, sadness, and joy. The fifth scale asked for this rating: “My person’s attitude toward the other person is very negative/somewhat negative/neutral/somewhat positive/very positive.” Eighteen students were present in class that day, yielding nine coders for each videotaped arguer (two additional students did some of the coding later). There were 12 ratings for the first tape, and 19 time segments for the second. The first question about the methodology is whether this is a reasonable rating task—that is, whether my students were able to do the ratings with any consistency. To address this issue, I calculated Cronbach’s alphas for each scale (e.g., anger). Each use of the item for a time segment is analogous to an item in a multi-item scale. Because Tape 1 had 12 time segments, for instance, the anger measure had 12 “items” and 18 “respondents” (i.e., the number of coders). Results are encouraging. For Tape 1, the alpha for the anger measure was .80, for tenderness alpha was .76, for sadness it was .78, for happiness it was .83, and for attitude toward other it was .69. For Tape 2, alphas were .79 for anger, .94 for tenderness, .94 for sadness, .67 for happiness, and .89 for attitude toward other. Several coefficients could have been increased by omitting one or two “items,” but because all were going to be used in the analysis, none were excluded. Reliability does not assure validity, of course, but these results suggest that my students had reasonable consistency in their use of the scales. If videotaped arguments did not provide information that connects with people’s perceptions of emotion, we would have found far lower alphas. In fact, when people notice another arguer’s emotions, they have information similar to that contained in the videotapes, including verbal con-

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tent, vocal tones, facial expression, posture, intensity of gesture, and so forth. Naturally, some people hide their emotional states with some effectiveness (Gross & John, 1997), but such disguise is probably not much easier on a videotape than in person. The act of making emotional inferences from a videotape does not seem obviously different than doing it face to face. The real questions here are whether the ratings generate interesting results and whether they seem to hold promise for large-scale investigation. Lacking much previous research to generate hypotheses or to suggest appropriate statistical tests, I simply look at the data qualitatively, investigating various points of interest in a loosely disciplined way. Tables 5.1 and 5.2 display the means of all the affect measures for the two tapes. However, simple line graphs are more immediately informative. One interesting issue is the degree to which the two arguers seem to track one another emotionally, and if so, how long the reaction lag is. For instance, if one person seems happy, does the other appear to react with happiness or withdrawal? Part of interacting with another person is to cohere with the other’s content, but another part is to engage the partner’s apparent emotions. For example, a person may grow calmer as the other gets angrier, or a person who intends to cause distress may grow happier as the partner becomes more depressed, but these interaction styles are surely rare. For the most part, one should expect some evidence of emotional continuity in the two arguers’ experiences (see Andersen & TABLE 5.1 Means for Observed Emotions, Tape 1 Emotions Person Anger Time 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Tender

Sad

Happy

Attitude

1

2

1

2

1

2

1

2

1

2

2.67 2.44 2.00 1.11 2.44 2.78 1.89 2.67 2.22 1.78 1.89 1.33

1.30 1.40 1.60 2.20 1.30 1.80 1.60 1.20 2.50 1.40 1.50 1.50

2.22 1.89 2.89 2.00 1.78 1.56 1.44 2.00 1.44 1.56 1.89 2.56

1.40 1.30 1.70 1.80 1.60 1.40 1.60 2.10 1.30 2.00 2.00 2.60

1.56 1.22 1.56 1.44 1.44 1.22 1.22 1.78 1.22 1.22 1.22 1.11

1.10 1.10 1.20 1.40 1.30 1.10 1.20 1.40 1.30 1.10 1.20 1.20

1.11 1.11 1.89 1.00 1.11 1.00 1.00 1.00 1.00 1.00 1.11 1.78

1.60 1.30 1.70 1.40 1.10 1.20 1.50 1.20 1.10 1.30 1.20 1.40

2.33 2.33 3.22 1.00 3.11 2.00 2.67 2.89 2.11 2.56 2.56 3.89

2.90 2.90 3.10 1.40 3.20 2.50 3.20 3.40 2.00 3.00 2.90 3.90

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Anger Time 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

Tender

Sad

Happy

Attitude

1

2

1

2

1

2

1

2

1

2

1.50 1.40 2.10 2.30 1.20 1.60 2.40 2.90 1.90 1.40 3.10 2.60 3.00 3.30 2.90 2.50 2.30 2.10 1.50

2.30 1.80 1.90 2.00 2.70 3.30 2.40 1.90 1.90 1.80 2.60 2.50 2.30 2.20 2.60 2.10 2.10 1.70 1.60

1.80 1.30 1.20 1.20 1.30 1.40 1.40 1.30 1.30 2.00 1.40 1.30 1.50 1.50 1.40 1.50 1.20 1.30 1.20

1.40 1.40 2.00 1.70 1.60 1.30 2.40 2.10 2.20 1.50 1.30 1.50 1.80 1.70 2.00 1.80 2.30 1.60 2.30

1.00 1.00 1.10 1.10 1.20 1.00 1.00 1.10 1.10 1.30 1.00 1.00 1.00 1.10 1.00 1.10 1.00 1.10 1.00

1.40 1.40 1.30 1.40 1.90 2.30 1.40 1.20 1.30 1.10 1.30 1.50 1.20 1.40 1.20 1.40 1.40 1.30 1.40

3.10 2.40 1.10 1.20 1.00 1.30 1.40 1.40 1.20 1.70 1.00 1.00 1.00 1.00 1.10 1.10 1.00 1.20 1.00

1.50 1.20 1.10 1.20 1.10 1.00 1.50 1.70 1.30 1.20 1.00 1.20 1.10 1.20 1.10 1.00 1.20 1.20 1.80

2.60 2.60 2.00 1.80 2.60 2.60 2.00 1.80 2.00 3.40 1.60 1.80 1.70 1.20 1.60 1.80 1.90 2.20 2.20

2.20 2.20 2.50 2.50 2.10 1.60 2.20 2.30 2.50 2.50 2.00 2.20 2.10 2.20 1.90 2.10 2.70 2.40 2.30

Guerrero, 1998, pp. 84–88; Planalp, 1999, pp. 54–67). Figures 5.1 through 5.10 show the two arguers’ mean ratings for the four discrete emotions (i.e., anger, tenderness, sadness, and happiness) and apparent attitude toward the other. Anger seems to show the most volatility in both tapes. Most scores are around 2 (i.e., “a tiny bit of anger”) but rise toward 3 (i.e., “some anger”) at various points. In Tape 1 (Fig. 5.1), the arguers begin at noticeably different levels of anger and then move together during the first few time segments. They both overshoot at Segment 4, however, and then overcompensate for the next minute or so. They nearly match at Segment 7 but then move in different directions. Although the emotional displays for Segments 1 through 7 may show some effort by the arguers to coordinate emotionally, the results at Segment 8 make it clear that, at least at that point, the two arguers are having individual, private reactions that are dissimilar. After the second arguer’s level of displayed anger rises to match that of the first arguer, their remaining displays are in accord.

147

FIG. 5.1.

Anger displays, Tape 1.

148 FIG. 5.2.

Anger displays, Tape 2.

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Tape 2 reveals some of the same features for anger (Fig. 5.2). After some initial coordination that results in fairly equivalent levels of anger display, a noticeable break appears at Segment 5. The second arguer displays more anger, and Person 1 soon rises to match and then to overshoot as Person 2 quiets emotionally. They generally move together for Segments 9 through 12, but another separation occurs at Segments 12 and 13. From Segment 14 to the end, they are closely matched, with anger dropping to minimal levels as the conclusion to the argument approaches. Later, I consider what was happening during the argument at various points, but looking at the ratings in ignorance of content encourages the idea that the emotional displays compose their own communicative system. The case of anger, an unusually important discrete emotion for arguing (e.g., Canary, Spitzberg, & Semic, 1998), suggests some effort to coordinate emotional displays, but this matching impulse takes place in a context in which the two individuals are free to move radically away from both their prior display level and that of the other arguer. Coordination of emotional displays also sometimes appears lagged by a 30-sec segment, but data from only two interactions hardly justify any conclusions on that point. Tenderness, too, shows some mismatching between the arguers. In Tape 1 (Fig. 5.3), the first arguer begins the interaction with a “tiny bit of tenderness,” briefly rising to “some tenderness.” The second person rises a bit but is not very expressive in this regard. Person 1 matches these displays, beginning at Segment 4. From this point on, the two arguers’ tenderness displays are closely matched. Interestingly, this match continues throughout the last nine time segments, although some noticeable changes occur in their display levels. Tape 2 shows a different pattern (Fig. 5.4). In that argument, Person 1 maintains a very steady, low level of tenderness throughout the interaction, except for a moment during Segment 10. Person 2, however, is much more reactive, with clear increases in displayed tenderness at Segments 3, 7 through 9, and near the end. The second arguer does respond in kind at Segment 10, perhaps lagging by a few minutes, but is unmoved at the end of the argument. The increases in tenderness shown by Person 2 cannot be due to the other person’s tenderness; they must be occurring for other reasons—perhaps in reaction to displays of other emotions or to the emerging content of the argument. Both sadness and happiness show mutual consistency in both arguments. In Tape 1, the two participants are closely matched on both emotional displays throughout the interactions (Figs. 5.5, 5.7). Sadness is itself fairly stable, but happiness shows a jump at Segment 3. Even there, however, the two participants move together. The participants in Tape 2

150 FIG. 5.3.

Tenderness displays, Tape 1.

151

FIG. 5.4.

Tenderness displays, Tape 2.

152 FIG. 5.5.

Sadness displays, Tape 1.

153

FIG. 5.6.

Sadness displays, Tape 2.

154 FIG. 5.7.

Happiness displays, Tape 1.

155

FIG. 5.8.

Happiness displays, Tape 2.

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are not in quite so close an accord (Figs. 5.6, 5.8). Person 1 begins the second argument with displays of noticeable happiness, but these are not matched by the second arguer. The dyad then stabilizes at a fairly low level until the end, when the second arguer is apparently more pleased at the interaction. These two people’s displays of sadness are quite close, except for Segments 5 through 7, when the second arguer shows a level of sadness higher than the emerging baseline for both people. This blip is short-lived, however, and the two participants soon return permanently to their normal low levels. Attitude toward the other person is coded as another affect display, but it is not a discrete emotion, as the other measures are. An attitude is a sort of affective summary of many considerations about the attitude object (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975). The other person’s point of view, appearance, behaviors—all these, and many other things, may be pertinent to one’s attitude toward the other. Because I am considering the degree of match between the two arguers, however, I focus next on whether attitude displays tend to be returned in kind. Tape 1 is a nice example of attitude matching over a variety of values (Fig. 5.9). Unlike the discrete emotions, whose codes could range from 1 to 4, a five-point scale was used for displayed attitude. In the first argument, the participants are somewhat guarded about one another, showing neutrality at first and then a clear moment of antipathy at Segment 4. After that paired expression, however, they move back toward neutrality tinged with negative affect. Only at the conclusion do the participants display pleasant feelings toward one another. The two arguers’ displays of attitude toward one another are rather nicely coordinated, especially considering the range of attitudes expressed during the episode. The pattern in Tape 2 is not as obvious (Fig. 5.10). For the most part, the two arguers stay in the somewhat negative to neutral range throughout the interchange. Person 1, however, has more variable displays, rising past somewhat positive at Segment 9, and dropping quite near very negative at Segment 14. The overall pattern can be viewed as displaying lagged matching and overshooting or as no evidence of matching at all. The attitude graphs of the two arguers continually cross, with differences in their mean ratings often being half a point or more. The first substantive question about this methodology was whether it permits an exploration of matching and lagging between participants’ emotional displays. With only two dyads, of course, I am not tempted to draw any conclusions about the basic facts of emotional display during arguments. If I had a larger sample, that sort of analysis would certainly be possible. Even with the tiny bit of data, however, I can see some dangers to hasty generalization. Few things are more individual than people’s feelings, and few more ephemeral than emotional connections. Cer-

157 FIG. 5.9.

Displays of attitude toward the other, Tape 1.

158 FIG. 5.10.

Displays of attitude toward the other, Tape 2.

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tainly it is appealing to answer various questions with generalizations: Which emotional displays are more strongly mirrored and which are most independent of the other? Which emotions exhibit lags and which elicit more immediate reactions? However, researchers must be especially on guard to leave room for individual variation and consistent exceptions to any generalizations. A second major issue of interest is whether these emotional displays are personally (as opposed to interpersonally) coordinated. Do happiness and anger move in opposing directions, for instance? Which of the displays is most indicative of attitude toward the other? Is everything moving only in its own direction? Figures 5.11 through 5.14 show the results, person by person. Although the graphs are a little busy, they provide all the information at once. In the first argument, Person 1 shows some interesting patterns (Fig. 5.11). Attitude toward the other is the only set of results that does not refer to a discrete emotion and is the only one that may somehow encompass the others. Attitude toward other tracks with both tenderness and happiness for the first four time segments. After that, happiness displays disappear for this arguer, except at the very end, where happiness and attitude toward the other again move together. Excepting Segments 5 and 7, tenderness continues to mirror attitude toward other throughout the interaction. Sadness, too, has a rather consistent relation to attitude, except that it has no peaks at Segments 5 and 12. Anger does not have an immediately explicable relation to attitude toward the other. The valences of the two items lead to an expectation that the means would move in opposite directions. Sometimes they do, and sometimes they move in parallel. There may be a lag here, with attitude rising just after anger drops, but that may be an overinterpretation. As to the discrete emotions, the figure shows an interesting tendency for sadness and tenderness displays to move together until the very end of the episode. Happiness is flat from Segments 4 through 11, in spite of noticeable movement in the other measures during that time span. Anger is not obviously moving with anything else. The end of the interaction is marked by a rise in the positively valenced measures and a drop in the negative ones. Plausibly, these changes may be due either to the completion of the task or to satisfaction with the substance of the conversation. Some of these same features appear for the other participant in this argument (see Fig. 5.12). Attitude toward the other largely has the same pattern as tenderness, except for Segment 4. Happiness does not have quite as close a correspondence to attitude as it did for the other participant, but some parallel is still apparent. Sadness also shows some shadowing, but again not as much as for the other arguer. Anger, however, shows a somewhat more consistent pattern of opposite movement to at-

160 FIG. 5.11.

All displays, first arguer, Tape 1.

161 FIG. 5.12.

All displays, second arguer, Tape 1.

162 FIG. 5.13.

All displays, first arguer, Tape 2.

163 FIG. 5.14.

All displays, second arguer, Tape 2.

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titude than in Fig. 5.11, suggesting that these emotions may be working toward connected but opposite feelings throughout the argument. The displays of the discrete emotions have some similarities with those of the first arguer. Sadness and tenderness tend to move together until the end of the argument, just as they did for the other participant. Happiness shows more variability here, and it has some movement in common with tenderness and sadness. Anger is again difficult to connect with the other discrete emotions. As before, the positively valenced emotions rise at the end of the episode, but here the negative ones, anger and sadness, are flat. To summarize, the first argument shows some coordinated movements between attitude toward the other on one hand and tenderness, sadness, and happiness displays on the other. Figure 5.13 shows the related results for the first arguer in the second argument. Tenderness shows movements similar to attitude for most of the episode, but they diverge near the end, at Segment 17. Sadness does not have much variability for the first arguer, but the pattern is similar to that for attitude until Segment 15, when attitude becomes more positive but sadness is flat. Happiness also tracks attitude, although the basement effect appears for several of the affect displays. Anger appears connected to overall attitude: The two measures tend to move in opposite directions without discernible lags. Because general patterns of movement with attitude toward the other appear for all four discrete emotions, their interrelations are implicit in this discussion. Tenderness, sadness, and happiness tend to change together, with anger often moving in the opposite direction. Arguer 1 seems to have two main displays during the episode, anger and attitude toward the other. Only these two displays are much above their minima. In the first argument, both participants had more than one discrete emotion that moved away from its basement values. The prevalence of anger for this arguer may suggest that anger swamps the other feelings when it takes high values. Frankly, after the conversation gets underway, anger and attitude are really the only salient displays for this arguer, possibly excepting Segment 10. Figure 5.14 shows that this last comment is not true for the second arguer. However, tenderness tracks attitude fairly well, except for Segments 13 through 16, and sadness does not parallel attitude for a substantial period. In fact, sadness changes in the opposite direction for most of the episode. Only for Segments 11 through 16 does happiness change in harmony with attitude toward the other. Anger moves in the opposite way for most of the argument, parallel only for the last few segments. This arguer appears to display different emotional dynamics than the other three participants.

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This distinction appears in other respects as well. Sadness and happiness, for instance, work in different directions during Segments 5 through 9 but then move together in the pattern shown by the other arguers. Tenderness, too, moves against sadness more often than not. Because happiness and tenderness have a rough correspondence, it appears that sadness is moving on its own. (This is always a possibility with discrete emotions, of course; that is why they are “discrete.”) Anger, which shows some high values, seems to change in parallel with sadness, tends to move against happiness, and has a very unclear relation to tenderness, if any. The observational methodology, then, seems to provide information that can be usefully interpreted on the personal matching of emotions. As noted, the sample is far too small to suggest any conclusions about internal correspondence, but I can limn a few things. Several of the emotional displays may ordinarily predict one another, but a generous allowance is needed for individual variations. The tendency of several of the emotions to hover around a rating of “none at all” raises the question of whether the right emotions were selected for study. Anger is perhaps the most puzzling and inconsistent affect display, but some indications are that it is quite important. Certainly, an understanding of the role of anger during arguments ought to be a research priority, once researchers have made some community decisions about methodology. To this point, I have discussed the affect displays as though they were their own communicative system, completely sheltered from other elements of the interactions. None of the analysis so far has really had much to do with the fact that both conversations were arguments. However, emotions are only one dimension of any conversation. The distinctive thing about arguing, as discussed in earlier chapters, is that it is concerned with content—with testing meanings, with contrasting meanings, with applying meanings, with coming to new conclusions. Even when the primary interaction goals are identity, dominance, or something other than issue resolution, the conversation plays out in terms of content. Therefore, I next re-examine the records of the affect displays to see what meanings were on the floor at various moments. Some selectivity is in order, however. The literature base is insufficient for much microinterpretation to be done with scholarly confidence. I rely on my own intuition as well as comments the coders made in discussion and in their assigned papers, and I need to restrict myself to fairly obvious matters. The real goal is simply to illustrate what potential this research design has, after all. Taking each tape in order, I briefly summarize the content of each exchange and then move on to particular points that appear to have been unusually interesting. In Tape 1, Person 1 is the woman, and Person 2 is the man. Both appear to be African-American. She begins by taking the position that elim-

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inating Black fraternities on campus is “an interesting idea,” and he replies by agreeing with the fact that some problems exist but that throwing the organizations off campus would be wrong. She asks why he resists, and he explains that the fraternities provide a relatively rare opportunity for organized African-American fellowship on campus. He maintains that the fraternities offer social service and maintain academic standards for their members. Without directly countering those claims, she suggests that more oversight is needed and that fraternities are mainly social in their aims, and she offers their parties as evidence. The nature of a campus organization, she maintains, requires that it be responsive to both administration and Greek guidance. He replies by suggesting that the leadership problems of the fraternities may be ameliorated if their officers had first held office in other organizations prior to election. Eventually, the man agrees to the possibility that some organizations may not be responsive to university guidelines and that, after being given another chance, if they don’t conform, they should be eliminated. Eventually, the two arguers reach an agreement that the fraternities should be given a probationary status and that if they fail to satisfy the conditions of the university, they should be closed down. For Tape 1, the most interesting points—those at which one or more affect displays changes markedly—are Segments 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, and 12. The first two segments mainly lay out the grounds for argument and are dominated by the man (Person 2), who is defending the fraternities. During Segment 3, the woman (Person 1) begins registering her reservations and suggests “guidance” and that “strings should be put on them.” Both people’s attitudes toward other perk up at this point. The woman shows increases in tenderness, sadness, and happiness, as well as a continuing reduction in anger while making her points. The man shows small increases in displayed anger, tenderness, and sadness on hearing her position. The fourth segment consists entirely of her elaborations for her preference for guidance over elimination. As the clarity of their disagreement becomes more evident, both people display very negative attitudes toward the other. The woman’s affect indices all drop, but the man’s anger rises, as does his sadness. Segment 5 is more of an exchange than Segment 4 was. The man says that oversight is not likely to work because the leaders won’t take initiative and that the university should not “run” the organizations. This politely contended clash corresponds with a return to positive attitudes toward the other for both arguers. The man’s other affect displays continue to slide downward, notably including a sharp drop in anger. In contrast, the woman displays much more anger on hearing his rejection of her plan, and her other affect displays move to low levels.

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During these three time segments, disagreement is met by a display of anger and an initial negativity toward other. Substantial engagement on the issues, conducted in a reasonably open way, enlarges or restores positive attitude but does not erase the anger displays. Because the woman’s anger dissipates as she explains her views, it may be that arguing in hopes of persuasion anticipates a smooth interpersonal reception. Both anger and attitude toward other seem closely matched to the content of the argument in these early exchanges. Segments 8 and 9 also show some affect changes. By the end of Segment 7, the man has suggested that fraternity officers should have experience in other organizations, and the woman has just proposed probationary status. During Segment 8, he begins by agreeing with her that whatever is done should apply to all campus organizations, not just the African-American ones. They continue, agreeing that many regulations aren’t properly enforced. He then suggests that the African-American fraternities are pretty much left on their own, without much external help, but she is noncommittal on this point. She displays an increasingly positive attitude toward him in Segment 8, along with rises in tenderness and sadness, but she also shows an increase in anger as she listens to his explanation that the African-American organizations need help. His attitude toward her also rises as he talks, with a sharp rise in tenderness and a continuing drop in anger. In Segment 9, she presses him to say clearly what should be done “if the whole mass is not being productive,” and he replies that a total solution is needed, banning them from campus. He expresses a willingness to ban each organization in turn, if it does not abide by the rules. The woman’s attitude toward the man drops at this point, as do her expressions of tenderness and sadness. However, her anger falls as well. His attitude toward her drops very markedly, as does his tenderness, and his anger display is more apparent. These two segments suggest that expressed agreement and disagreement are quite important to the display of attitude toward the other. Anger, too, seems to correspond with agreement, although it may also be somewhat influenced by whether or not one is allowed to talk. The final Segment, 12, is also one where changes in affect are fairly clear. The two arguers are making some effort to achieve coalescence. The woman offers that the man’s position can be somewhat “mixed” with her feelings, and he agrees. She then mentions the possibility of what has now become a “semi” probationary status, with the university clarifying the rules so that the fraternities can become more productive. The last two turns are explicit statements of agreement. The affect data show very bright increases in attitude toward the other for both arguers, as well as clear rises in tenderness. Anger is at a low level,

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showing a drop for the woman. Because nothing personal is apparent in the exchange, the most plausible explanation has to do with their successful mutual agreement. Although an observer may be hard pressed to provide the details of their joint plan, they, at least, feel that they have coalesced. Tape 2 is quite different. Here, Person 1 is a Euro-American man, and Person 2 is an African-American woman. I begin with another summary. He takes the position that the fraternities should be eliminated, expressing the idea in his first turn that “the reason you go into the fraternity is to get drunk.” She objects to this characterization, saying that “you can’t be drunk 24 hours a day.” They continue to discuss drinking, with him insisting that alcohol is characteristically abused in the fraternities and that philanthropic service is minimal. For the first minute, the exchanges concern fraternities, but early in the second minute, she asks him, “In a Black fraternity?” He replies, “Well, okay, that’s true, but I don’t think they would be any better.” She pursues quietly but pointedly, asking him for specifics of his knowledge of African-American fraternities, their service activities, the fights, and so forth. He says, “You hear about it.” In fact, he says, it’s significant that one never hears about any positive accomplishments. She suggests that the media are uninterested in promoting African-Americans and that coverage always focuses on the negatives. He says, “I don’t believe Whites are that prejudiced,” and she disagrees. After some discussion of prejudice, dominated by her, he changes the topic, interjecting that his image of Black fraternities is dominated by that of the Q-Dogs, a nickname for one of the fraternities, the one with the most alleged problems. He objects to their noisy music and parties that expand onto the street. She says that they generally stay inside, but he wonders why they “annoy the hell out of me” by playing loud music in the parking lots. She says that others also play music loudly, but he says he doesn’t. A little more than halfway through, he repeats his initial position that the fraternities should be eliminated. She says that she would be willing to talk to the administration to argue that the organizations do more good than bad. He alleges that they misuse their money, spending it on parties, but she denies it. After more exchanges about drinking, she defends the fraternity members, saying that they are diligent students. He says somewhat crudely that the grade point average requirements are fictional and that many cannot speak Standard English. She explains that she speaks Standard English when she needs to (as, in fact, she does throughout the argument) but uses slang with her friends, and she illustrates a few phrases of that sort. Your neighborhood is important, she explains. At this point, he says that he grew up in a neighborhood that was 60% Black (many of the coders heard this statement as a lie). Without pressing his claim, she continues

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to argue that one’s neighborhood equips one with language capabilities. He says they are getting off-topic and reasserts that the fraternities are “a waste.” She defends them as positive influences for African-American students. The last turn in the argument is hers, in which she says, “I can’t see where any of your arguments can possibly hold up.” The figures for this tape do not show patterns or points of interest as conveniently as the data for the other argument did. Still, some particularly interesting things seem to be happening at Segments 3, 5 and 6, 10 and 11, and 17 through 19, and I examine each passage in turn. The argument starts with the man (Person 1) making allegations about drinking and the woman replying rather softly. However, Segment 3 begins with her asserting herself politely, challenging him, “in a Black fraternity?” He backs away a little (“well, okay, that’s true”), and she presses him about whether he has sincerely inquired about AfricanAmerican fraternities and their activities. His attitude toward her drops from neutral to negative, his happiness plummets, and his anger rises. She shows a more positive attitude toward him at this point, along with a clear increase in tenderness. Her anger rises, but almost imperceptively. Segment 3 represents a clear shift in control of the conversation. The man has dominated to this point, with the woman replying quietly or strangely (she makes some comments about engineering fraternities, and the campus has neither engineering nor a fraternity for it). However, her question to him clearly puts him on the defensive, and he responds by backing down a bit. His affect displays, predictably, are less positive, and hers become more so. Her apparent rise in positivity for him may be a display of pleasure at finally having begun to advocate for her position, or it may be a nonverbal display intended to make her words more acceptable. In Segments 5 and 6, the man and woman are discussing media coverage and prejudice. She does most of the talking in Segment 5, saying that media will not give positive coverage to African-American fraternities. His only turn is a backchannel, “mmm,” in the middle of her explanations. During her talk, he displays a more positive attitude toward her, and his anger display drops as he listens. She, however, grows angrier as she continues, with her sadness increasing. She displays a more negative attitude toward him than in the two immediately prior segments. Segment 6 begins with the man saying that he doesn’t believe that many Whites are prejudiced against Blacks. The woman says, “they can be,” and he retreats to “I know that some of them are.” In an interesting moment, she says, “I can’t go and say ‘you’re prejudiced, you’re prejudiced,’ but there are still a lot of prejudiced people out there.” In context, her comments are generalizations, but the possibly direct address (i.e., “you’re prejudiced”) makes her phrasing both pointed and possible to

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pass by. She then makes up an extreme example about how the media may ignore a story about African-American heroism. Data show that his attitude toward her is unaffected (suggesting the possibility that her phrasing didn’t register). In fact, the only noticeable affective reaction he has is a small rise in anger. Her anger, on the other hand, peaks, and her sadness is also unusually high. Her attitude toward him drops sharply, as does her tenderness. Aside from the clear changes in her affect displays, perhaps the most interesting thing here is that he doesn’t seem to react to her challenges, affect displays, or implied content. He begins Segment 7 with a topic shift; perhaps he simply wasn’t paying much attention or thought that her comments about media coverage were irrelevant. One would expect rather flat reactions to irrelevance, suggesting boredom or unreceptive planning for one’s next turn. Segments 10 and 11 are also interesting. Segment 10 is the end of the loud music discussion. The man is explaining that he doesn’t play music loudly. The woman gets him to agree that he knows people (White people, by implication) who do. Then she asks, “does that annoy you as much as it does with Black fraternities?” He says, revealingly, “almost as much.” After a lengthy pause near the end of the segment, he repeats his initial position that “we should get rid of them.” Perhaps pleased with this self-assertion, he displays a very positive attitude toward her, along with rises in sadness, happiness, and tenderness. His anger drops. Her affect displays are relatively unchanged, however, showing only a noticeable decrease in tenderness. (At no time during the argument does her attitude toward him rise as high as neutrality.) Segment 11 begins with the woman announcing, in compliance with the pretense of the study, that she will meet with the administration to explain her views. He objects, saying that he has “read that Black fraternities have wasted their funds,” spending the money on parties rather than philanthropy. His disagreement with her plan is reflected in his affect displays. His attitude toward her drops by more than a point, and his anger rises by nearly two. His tenderness and happiness also fall. Her attitude toward him also drops, and her anger rises as well. Her other affect displays are at low levels. Again disagreement seems to have parallels in emotional expression. The last three segments are interesting in part because of their contrast with the other tape. Segment 17 contains the man’s (coderdoubted) claim to have been raised in a racially mixed neighborhood, with the woman explaining that African-Americans can speak Standard English when they wish. In Segment 18, she displays that she has mastery of both colloquial and standard codes, and he responds by saying that they have gone off topic. The final time period begins with her defense of the fraternities as useful to new students, contains a very long

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pause (about 15–20 sec) where a response from the man is expected and concludes with her judgment that his arguments are all flawed. As the argument closes down, his attitude toward her rises slightly, and his anger displays dissipate. Her anger, too, drops away, but her attitude toward him declines. She displays some tenderness at the very end, as well as some happiness. In contrast to Tape 1, which ended in agreement, this argument ends without real resolution. Perhaps the man is willing to let the woman have the last word, but he never volunteers any agreement. Nor is she very tolerant of his views, although she is noticeably well mannered throughout the episode, in spite of some provocations that are probably apparent to the reader. If we assume, against all evidence, that the man was perceptive about how the substantive content of the argument was going, perhaps his rise in attitude toward her during the last six segments is simply an expression of relief that the end was in sight. It is interesting that anger goes to basement levels for all four arguers in both tapes when the episodes end. Tape 1 ends with agreement, but even in the second tape, the anger data do not suggest any inclination to continue the exchange. This finding may have implications for the likelihood that arguers hold grudges after the conclusions. As before, far too little data are available for me to offer any conclusions about specific connections between content and affect displays. However, the evidence suggests that explicit disagreement is important. It seems to be connected to attitude toward the other as well as anger. Agreement, too, may have parallels in emotional expression. Some scattered evidence suggests that being able to talk is a positive experience, perhaps because of a cathartic effect, or perhaps because arguers are optimistic that what they say will bring agreement. Clear expressions of one’s position seem to be emotionally positive for the arguer (cf. D. Katz, 1960). These points may be pursued with more systematic studies, but the real issue here is whether or not the methodology offers much promise for connecting affect and content, and optimism on that point certainly seems warranted. Felt Emotions While Arguing Encouraged by the results and implications of this study, my colleagues and I conducted a second one to explore some further issues (Hample, Thompson-Hayes, Wallenfelsz, Wallenfelsz, & Knapp, 2004). The investigation had three broad goals: to see how various operationalizations of emotion during arguing converge, to discover the degree to which trait measures predict emotional states, and to examine the relations among own and partner’s affect.

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For this study, 84 undergraduates (42 dyads) came into our lab and were videotaped arguing about a topic on which they disagreed. Overthe-shoulder perspectives were used again. Prior to the conversations, everyone filled out several trait measures: the Berkeley Expressivity Questionnaire (BEQ; Gross & John, 1997), the Emotional Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ; Gross & John, 2003), and the Taking Conflict Personally scale (TCP; Hample & Dallinger, 1995). All three instruments have subscales, and with a single exception (alpha = .67), all displayed acceptable internal consistency. After the argument was completed (we aimed at 10-min exchanges, although several were shorter), participants individually saw the videotape of the argument, from their original perspective, divided into approximately 30-sec intervals (see Waldron & Cegala, 1992). At each stopping point, respondents made ratings of the same five variables used in the prior study (anger, happiness, etc.), once as a self-report and once as an estimate of the cointeractant’s feelings. Later, the tapes were viewed in the same 30-sec intervals by three coders, who made the same judgments about each person. The coding produced Cronbach’s alphas of .78 (anger), .94 (tenderness), .96 (sadness), .87 (happiness), and .78 (attitude toward other). Using the same sort of reliability assessments as in Hample (2004b), the Cronbach’s alphas for the self and partner ratings all exceed .80, and most are .90 or better. The first main question is whether the three observational methods— self-report, partner report, and coder report—give converging results. Generally speaking, they are not well correlated. Only the self-reports and partner reports have substantial associations. Making use of only the first 10 time segments, these correlations are about r = .45 for anger, r = .30 for sadness, r = .30 for tenderness, and r = .45 for attitude toward the other, and they are not significant for happiness. Although significant correlations appear for some scattered tests, the coder ratings generally failed to predict either self or partner estimates of affect (only happiness and attitude toward other seem to hold any promise in this respect). It is thus necessary to be careful in thinking about the operationalizations when studying emotions during arguments. Emotional displays are real things, even if they are not the same as felt emotions. Of course, people suppress and disguise their feelings while interacting. The display is put out to invite the cointeractant’s reaction and to project personal identity. Emotional displays can be as strategic as verbal ones, and neither necessarily corresponds to one’s private experiences. Just as a public rationale is distinguished from a private motivation, a similar theoretical move is needed in considerations of emotion. For some matters, the public display is the appropriate measure. For others, the private feelings or partner estimates are more on point.

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The second question is whether trait measures predict the emotion ratings. Confining the analysis to the self-reports shows substantial canonical correlations between the five ratings (anger, happiness, etc.) and the various trait subscales. Three roots appear, with RC = .90, .64, and .54, respectively. The first root is most interesting, of course (Stevens, 2002, ch. 12): All five self-reports load substantially and are particularly associated with negative expressiveness and positive expressiveness (from the BEQ), valence (from TCP), and reappraisal and suppression (from the ERQ). This root accounts for 54% of the variance in the self-reports and 21% of the variance in the trait measures. Detailed discussion of the results are to be found in the original paper, but of importance here is the conclusion that predispositions about conflict, emotional expression, and emotional suppression influence arguers’ feelings during face-to-face controversies. The last main issue addressed in this study is how the emotions interrelate, once they are cumulated across the sample. We were interested in how each emotion connects with itself across time segments and how the various emotions connect to one another in the same moment. To explore the first matter, we associated each self-reported emotion at time N to the same self-reported emotion at time N–1 and to the same emotion perceived in one’s partner at times N and N–1. Generally speaking, self-reported emotions were highly associated at the two time periods. This association is particularly striking for attitude toward the other, where the correlations generally exceeded .90. For the discrete emotions, correlations of .60 are low in this context, with most being in the range of .70 to .90. Felt emotions are quite stable, at least for 1-min segments. The connections between self-reports and own estimate of partner’s feelings show very clear evidence of mirroring. Here, a correlation of .50 is low, with most being in the range .60 to .80, regardless of whether the association is for partner at time N or N–1. These two findings—that felt emotions are stable and that they closely mirror one’s estimate of the cointeractant’s feelings—indicate that the emotional experience of arguing is closely coordinated, both with partner and within self. The last substantial question is whether the emotions connect to each other at the same moment in time. That is, we wanted to know whether an arguer’s self-reported anger connects to his or her sadness, to partner’s happiness, and so forth. Here, too, we examined self-reports and own estimates of partner’s feelings in tandem. Nearly all the variables were significantly related, generally at fairly substantial levels. The original paper provides detailed discussion, but it is clear that one’s felt emotions are very closely connected to one another and to what one supposes the cointeractant to be feeling. In sum, this study suggests several thoughts. Own, partner, and external observer ratings of an arguer’s feelings are likely to be quite dis-

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tinct. Self and partner are most likely to be in accord (however, nearly all our dyadic partners were well acquainted prior to the study). In particular, self-reports and coder estimates are poorly associated. Predispositions, at least those indexed by the trait scales used in this study, are predictive of private feelings during an argument, and one’s self-reported feelings tend to be both stable and mirrored during an exchange. Prospects for the Study of Emotions While Arguing These two studies, which were conducted to generate some substantial findings for this chapter, suggest some avenues along which the argumentation community may proceed. Several research methods seem to be workable, although I must stress that they are measuring different things. As always, methodologies must conform closely to the research questions. These preliminary efforts point to a number of interesting issues. How does content affect feelings? Some evidence suggests that expressions of agreement and disagreement may result in different emotional displays, and simply having the floor seems to make one’s displays more positive. The conclusions to the exchanges changed the displays as well, and researchers may pursue this matter in an effort to predict when arguments are really over and when they may recur (e.g., Trapp & Hoff, 1985). Several of the arguments in the first study have sensible connections to the emotional displays at those moments, but how should the content be categorized to produce generalizations? To what degree do own feelings change in a patterned way? Self-reported feelings are stable for modest periods of time (in a laboratory argument); the change seems to covary with change in other private feelings. The emotions under study here seem to be plausible candidates as summaries of leading feelings, but researchers certainly need to explore which discrete feelings are central to the experience of arguing. How do one arguer’s feelings mirror those of the interlocutor? Both studies seem to show quite a lot of correspondence between self and other. Is this due to the common influence of the emerging content, or there some sort of direct emotional contagion? Certainly I have asked more questions than I have proposed answers, but the general topic of the emotional experience of arguing ought to be a central one for argumentation theory, and researchers have only begun to explore these matters empirically. CONCLUSIONS Whereas symbolic logic seems to require no terms for the expression and application of emotions, actual interpersonal arguments are rife with them. The increasing orientation of philosophers to informal logic, the

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increasing focus of argumentation scholars on interpersonal exchanges, and the increasing curiosity of interpersonal communication specialists about arguing all have generated a contemporary surge of interest in the role of emotions in argument. A recent international conference on argumentation—one whose call announced no unusual interest in emotions—nonetheless spontaneously produced a number of papers connecting arguing to feelings (e.g., Gilbert, 2003; Haynie & Kubeck, 2003; Reygadas, 2003; Weinstein, 2003). All these writers noticed the relevance, if not the centrality, of emotions in arguing. Gilbert (2003), in particular, showed systematically how emotions at least color and may direct the progress of an argumentative exchange at every stage. Redressing the emotional sterility of argumentation studies for the last two millennia is a prospect that should be welcome. Arguing is a human activity, and people are moved by their urges, suffer epiphanies and depressions, and orient to other’s emotional expressions during and because of their arguments. To ignore emotion is to miss a great part of what makes arguing a distinctly personal and humanizing accomplishment. Scholars can either complain about the lack of pointed empirical information about this topic or can take encouragement that they stand at the beginning of an important scholarly task. Only a few lines of argumentation research have begun to redirect themselves toward emotions, but the wealth of information about argumentativeness, verbal aggressiveness, and taking conflict personally constitutes an inventory of findings that scholars should soon be able to draw upon, once the literature is connected to momentary feelings. New lines of work, clearly tailored to the investigation of emotional states, must be developed. Perhaps the methodologies I describe in this chapter will prove to be useful in that enterprise, but if not, others are available as well. Emotions are ephemeral and they feel so personal to each person that scholars have an instinctive aversion to the possibility of measuring them, the chance of collecting empirical data. However, the history of emotional investigations in the discipline of psychology gives clear evidence that we can expect success in the future. To edit the emotions out of interpersonal arguments converts those exchanges into a series of propositions and encourages analysts to focus on the connections between speech acts rather than the connections between people. Emotions contextualize arguments, instigate them, disguise them, interpret them, guide them, and resolve them. The understanding of what people are doing when they argue is probably more traceable to feelings about arguments than to any amount of formalized knowledge about them. The more researchers come to appreciate the varying roles of emotion in interpersonal arguing, the closer they come to adequate descriptions and theories about it.

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Individual and Situational Differences in Arguing

Two of the more obvious things about arguing are that different people argue differently, even in similar circumstances, and that the same person argues differently in different situations. Content, emotionality, expressiveness, and many other elements distinguish one argumentative episode from another. In this chapter, I try to sketch the present understanding of this variety. The ideal chapter would, I suppose, generate a master path model, moving from external variables such as sex and age, through situational and personality features, to argumentative behaviors. This is presently impossible. First, scholars don’t have enough data. Assuming conservatively that only 50 variables were relevant, researchers would need to know (or be able to approximate) the values for more than 1,200 zero-order correlations, and the knowledge base is simply not yet that large. This problem may well be overcome in the next few years as more research is done. The second reason is more troublesome: The dependent variable isn’t clear. In this way, argumentation contrasts sharply with research programs in some other areas. Consider persuasion, for instance, where a great deal of meta-analytic and path work have been done (e.g., Allen & Preiss, 1998; Stiff & Mongeau, 2003). There, one can safely assume that the dependent variable will always be attitude change, behavioral change, or something similar, because one can posit, more or less by definition, that the intended outcome of this sort of communication is always persuasion. Arguing, however, can have quite a few goals, as discussed in chapter 2, and in this book I regard arguing as a process rather than as a 176

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goal in itself or as a type of situation. Argumentative activity can be carried on in the service of many objectives, possibly an innumerable quantity. Even an effort to understand the effectiveness of arguing for each goal would miss other elements of argumentative competence, such as ethical considerations, technical quality, and appropriateness (Hample, 2003a). The nature of arguing implies that efforts probably should be piecemeal for now, with separate analyses of fairly specific questions. Accordingly, I divide this chapter into distinct sections, which cumulate into the best approximation I can make as to how individual differences and situational factors affect arguing. In the first section, I examine the decision to argue or not. Certain sorts of people are reluctant to argue at all, and some situational elements invite or discourage arguing. The second section is an exploration of how argumentative situations are understood, on the assumption that a person has decided to argue. Objective circumstances of a setting are far less important than how the context is perceived. These perceptions contain the goals and constraints to which the arguer will respond. Third, I discuss how arguments are initially generated and then edited (or not) by differing people in a variety of situations. Here I distinguish different “flavors” of arguing, such as hostility and politeness, and also attend to the arguers’ goals, which offer guidance as to likely content. Some of these general topics have been discussed in earlier chapters but without the attention to the personal and situational variables that are the primary concern here.

WHETHER TO ARGUE The first consideration, often overlooked in the message production literature, is whether a person will engage at all. Norms of reticence are in effect in several sorts of settings. For example, Elwood, Greene, and Carter (2003) reported that men who have sex with men in bathhouses have trouble persuading partners to use condoms because a code of silence exists. Prospective partners are discouraged from talking, disclosing, and arguing about safe sex. In the 13th century, Albertano of Brescia (2000) wrote Ars loquendi et tacendi (The Art of Speaking and the Art of Silence), which made a number of recommendations about when not to speak— when one is angry or uncertain, when one’s utterances would be hurtful or pointless, when one cannot be clear and truthful, and so forth. He warned, “Once let slip, words are beyond recall” (sec. 43). Although some arguers never seem to have encountered this sort of advice, others have never needed it. Many people need little provocation to argue, whereas others always seem to find somewhere else to go or something noncommittal to say. People have different thresholds for ar-

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guing. Thinking in terms of thresholds makes the need to consider circumstances and how they interact with people’s impulses immediately clear. The situation—or rather, the perceived situation—contains (or doesn’t) the trigger for the threshold. Some episodes seem almost irresistibly to invite arguing, others don’t stimulate it in anyone, and most are in between. These last are perhaps the most interesting because people react to them based on their individual thresholds and their interpretation of the context. The close study of this issue begins with an examination of three individual difference measures: communication apprehension, argumentativeness, and taking conflict personally. All three are substantially intercorrelated. To obtain the best estimate of the association between communication apprehension and argumentativeness, I conducted a meta-analysis of 11 studies, having a unique total sample size of 2,355 (Anderson & Martin, 1994; Hackman, 1995; Infante, 1985; Infante & Rancer, 1982, 1993; Irizarry, 1997; Loffredo & Opt, 1997; Neer, 1994; Nicotera & DeWine, 1991; Roberto & Finucane, 1997; Wigley, 1986). The mean sampleweighted correlation is r = –.25. Corrected for measurement error (using mean sample-weighted reliabilities from other studies for missing values), r = –.29. This result is not homogenous, c2(21) = 59.95, p < .001, indicating the possible presence of a moderator variable. The uncorrected correlations ranged from –.02 to –.82. These results should be preferred to those reported in Allen, Hample, and Preiss (2001), which suffer from recording errors. Highly argumentative people are less prone to apprehension about communicating. Less work has been done to connect taking conflict personally (TCP) with communication apprehension and argumentativeness. Myers and Bailey (1991) found an association between the core TCP dimensions and communication apprehension, r » .30. People who personalize conflicts are more likely to have high levels of anxiety about communicating, publicly or interpersonally. The correlation between the core TCP scales and argumentativeness was r = –.33 (my calculation from Hample & Dallinger, 1995, Table 2). Personalizers are more motivated to avoid arguments and less motivated to approach them. These three individual differences—communication apprehension, argumentativeness, and conflict personalization—are associated to a degree that gives rise to the suspicion that they have a latent variable or simple causal sequence in common. They all concern anxiety and avoidance motivations, either generally or in regard to arguments and conflicts. They also have in common the controversial finding that all are clearly related to personality factors that have been shown to be genetic in their origin (Beatty, Heisel, Hall, Levine, & La France, 2002; Dallinger & Hample,

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2003; McCroskey, Heisel, & Richmond, 2001; a general case for the approach is found in Beatty, McCroskey, & Valencic, 2001; for a sample of the controversy, see the January 2000 issue of Communication Education). Clear findings for one of these variables will justify the hypothesis that parallel findings will appear for the other two as well. High scores on any of these avoidant dispositions suggest that a person will not argue unless considerable situational pressure is applied. The clearest evidence on this point concerns communication apprehension. Beatty (1987) offered students a choice of how they might prove mastery of public speaking: by giving a speech, by taking a test, or by writing an essay. Regardless of whether communication apprehension was measured by the full Personal Report of Communication Apprehension (PRCA) or by the subscale dealing with public speaking, not a single student classified as highly apprehensive took the public speech option. These results are certainly in accord with the experience of public speaking instructors. My institution is like many others in that we require students to pass public speaking to graduate. When a student has started and dropped the course two or three times before, inevitably the student is highly anxious. Highly apprehensive people will not engage unless they are forced to, and even a graduation requirement is not necessarily enough coercion, at least in the short term. In the cases of argumentativeness and TCP, the evidence is not quite so direct. The usual methods of study mitigate against this possibility. Normally students are asked to participate in an experiment (either freely or for some incentive), and they simply follow directions, thus engaging the situation whether or not they would have done so in their ordinary lives. Data from respondents who do not complete the task are normally discarded from the data sets; these behaviors are not generally seen as a topic of investigation. However, on their faces, both instruments are measuring avoidance impulses. Argumentativeness scores derive from two subscales, motivation to approach arguments and motivation to avoid. TCP is a more complex set of subscales, but these subscales include a direct self-report that the respondent takes conflict personally, an indication that the respondent feels psychological or physiological stress during conflicts, the perception that others engage in conflict to have a chance to persecute the respondent personally, projections that conflict damages or promotes relationships, and an estimate of the valence of conflict. Both variables, in other words, reflect the avoidance motivations, the negative emotional reactions, and the unfavorable valence that arguing and conflict can have. Given what the instruments seem to measure and the substantial evidence of predictive and concurrent validity for both, it seems uncontroversial to conclude that people with low argumenta-

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tiveness or high personalization scores are less likely to engage in arguing, if they have any freedom in the matter. Empirical evidence, although not so clearcut as that for communication apprehension, is supportive of this conclusion. Several research teams investigated the connection between argumentativeness and the number of arguments produced, once the interaction has begun. None of the studies noted anyone declining to participate. Kazoleas and Kay (1994) reported that people who are low in argumentativeness (i.e., those with the greatest self-reported motivation to avoid arguments) produced fewer counterarguments and fewer statements overall when compared to other group members of moderate or high argumentativeness. Boster, Levine, and Kazoleas (1989) found an interaction, rather than a main effect. They reported that people high in argumentativeness produced a greater number of arguments, but only when they were also low in verbal aggression. This study also indicated that people high in argumentativeness had more diversity in their arguments (i.e., used a greater number of persuasive strategies) than people low in argumentativeness. Levine and Boster (1991) also did not find a simple main effect, reporting that own and other’s argumentativeness interact during conversation. The largest number of arguments appeared when an actor high in argumentativeness conversed with a person low in argumentativeness, and the lowest number appeared when two people low in argumentativeness interacted. Importantly, Levine and Boster reported that the correlation between the two people’s number of arguments is substantial (r = .33), suggesting that once the argument is under way, even people low in argumentativeness engage to a noticeable degree. Argumentativeness does not seem to have a main effect on arguing frequency, but few human actions are simple enough to be predicted by a single variable. In detail, argumentativeness interacts with other individual and situational differences, such as own verbal aggressiveness and other’s argumentativeness (a feature of the situation). If I were to make a simple summary statement, however, I would say that the pattern of results here supports the idea that people low in argumentativeness participate less energetically than those who are high in argumentativeness and are therefore less engaged in the arguments that they find themselves in. Data bearing on TCP present an equally complex picture. On one hand, high personalizers show a preference for passive, avoidant conflict styles (Dallinger & Hample, 1995), but this finding refers to people’s anticipation of an argument and should not be overinterpreted. The engagement decision needs to be made repeatedly during an episode because a person can argue or withdraw at many points. Once involved, either freely or under some compulsion, people high in personalization do not act in pas-

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sive ways. The early finding (Hample & Dallinger, 1993) that personalizers are more combative during conflicts has not been replicated because several studies show little such effect (Hample, Dallinger, & Fofano, 1995; Hample, Dallinger, & Nelson, 1994). Even in those later investigations, however, personalizers show no less aggressiveness than people with low TCP. Both of these last studies confirm that one’s aggressiveness is nicely predicted by other’s aggressiveness and not very well predicted by one’s predispositions. This finding is reminiscent of Levine and Boster’s (1991) finding that one person’s argument frequency predicts that of the other person. Thus, people who personalize conflicts show a consistent wish to avoid them, as evidenced by their preferred conflict styles and by the associations among TCP, communication apprehension, and argumentativeness. Once engaged, however, people are taken up by the flow of the interaction. Almost regardless of predisposition, people defend themselves and their positions. The question here is whether or not these predispositions—communication apprehension, argumentativeness, and conflict personalization—predict whether a person will engage or avoid an argument. Although the evidence is not very sharp, the data suggest that these three individual differences are associated with the choice to argue or withdraw and so may predict the decision to enter an argumentative episode or not. However, these predispositions are only thresholds, which are triggered by perceived elements of a situation. The importance of this distinction was brought home to me many years ago when I did a study in which I asked students to describe how they would persuade a professor to change a grade. Most students did more or less what I expected and indicated that they would use certain arguments and not use others, but to my surprise, several students simply wrote down that they would never seek a grade change because they thought it was inappropriate and disrespectful to ask a professor to change a grade. Even if they felt that they had been treated unfairly, they would simply move on. In other words, for some of the undergraduates in my sample, this situation didn’t invite arguing, in spite of the experimental instructions to do so. Looking at the data, I decided that the situational stimulus was inappropriate and did no further work with it. I regret that decision now because its opposite could have led me in interesting directions. However, in the work that Dallinger and I have done on argument editing, we eventually amassed a substantial amount of data on many situations. Near the end of the research program, we scaled the situations to determine their values on a standard set of situational dimensions (Hample & Dallinger, 2002b; the dimensions are from Cody, Woefel, & Jordan, 1983). An endorsement score from the editing instrumentation

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indicates the number of different appeals one would be willing to make in a given circumstance. By cumulating the data from many studies, we estimated the relation between endorsement (considered here to be an index of engagement) and the various features of the situation. Results are in Table 6.1, which summarizes the data set used by Hample and Dallinger (2002b), although these results are not reported there. The first thing to notice is that the effect sizes are small, and the correlations are significant mainly because of the large sample size. Regressing all the situational dimensions on endorsement yields R = .28, p < .001, which is also modest. However, considering that I am examining only one sort of thing, situational variation, and presently ignoring individual differences, content, topic, and other obvious matters, perhaps the ability to account for 8% of the variation in endorsement this way is not discouraging. The results indicate that people are more energetic about producing arguments in specifiable conditions and less engaged in others. The least engagement occurs when the target is expected to be compliant and the arguer believes that he or she has little right to attempt persuasion. People are also more reluctant to argue when the situation is intimate. In addition, the communicator’s projected apprehension in the episode, a lack of personal stakes for the arguer, and concern about relational consequences all point to fewer arguments being offered, although these are the weaker effects in Table 6.1. All this evidence would be more on point if substantial numbers of respondents had reported no endorsements, but virtually no one in the data set did that. These reports may be veridical with their actual behaviors; however, by endorsing something, the respondents probably thought they were following experimental instructions and these paper-andpencil experiments do not arouse the intensity of approach and avoid TABLE 6.1 Associations Between Endorsement and Situational Dimensions Situational Dimension Lack of personal benefits Lack of situational apprehension Expected resistance by target Source’s right to persuade Source’s dominance over target Intimacy of situation Lack of relational consequences

r

b

–.08*** –.12*** .16*** .14*** –.07** –.06* –.15***

–.02 –.09 .23*** .26*** .10* –.06* .02

ru –.10 –.16 .22 .19 –.10 –.08 –.22

Note. N = 1,692 for all results. ru, the unattenuated r, refers to the correlations corrected for attenuation caused by measurement error, with reliabilities from Hample and Dallinger (1987b, 2002b). *p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.

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motivations that real life does. It seems reasonable to regard these results as bearing on the question of when people engage an opportunity to argue and when they don’t. I emphasize that these situational features are not objective ones (Dillard & Solomon, 2000). The data summarize people’s rated reactions to the possibility of trying to persuade someone in those circumstances. Such ratings are not so much elements of the context as they are interpretations of it. Identifying a situation as anxiety provoking, or estimating that the target will be highly resistant, is a perceptual result. The situational variables just discussed are the products of an interaction between personality predispositions and the more or less objective features of the communication context. Highly anxious people, for example, see the conditions that provoke stress in situations where less anxious people do not. Perhaps the most important situational feature is the other arguer’s behavior. The other person’s aggressiveness is directly associated with one’s own. The number of arguments the other produces is also positively correlated with the quantity of one’s own arguing. These effects are more substantial than those in Table 6.1. The situational perceptions that have been studied have their main application in questions that deal with the first decision, to enter the argumentative situation or not. The moment-to-moment engagement decisions are more strongly influenced by the trajectory of the episode than by the arguers’ predispositions. What is missing in this literature review to this point is attention to the interaction of predisposition and situation. Little such work seems to have been done. However, a substantial exception is Berger’s (2003, 2004) work on speechlessness. When asked to recall and describe a situation in which they were speechless, quite a few of Berger’s respondents explained their inability to talk as due to the belief that what they were thinking “would have made things worse.” People perceived and appraised the situation and declined to engage. Most of Berger’s respondents, however, reported that they were speechless because of some sort of emotional wash—surprise, deep anger, unexpectedly intense positive affect, and so forth. These people seem to be reacting much more directly to their circumstances, and I am reluctant to conclude that they have carefully assessed the situation, as the suppressors do. Berger also connected these different reactions to precursor emotions and gross situational characterizations. This research shows that situation and individual differences interact to produce nonengagement. A more precise understanding of how the thresholds work, and when they are triggered, requires evidence on personality and context together, rather than the essentially separate summaries given here. A useful exception to the general lack of such work is by Infante (1987). He meas-

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ured students’ trait argumentativeness and, several weeks later, invited them to participate in a fictional debate with another person. Respondents saw a videotape of their apparent opponent and filled out a number of scales indicating their expectations about their likely performance as well as their motivation to participate. The correlation between trait argumentativeness and motivation to participate was positive, r = .26. When the situational perceptions (e.g., likelihood of winning, value of winning) were added into the model, r = .64, which is significantly higher. Infante also reported that when the situational features (some of which are probably influenced by trait argumentativeness, e.g., “participating in the argument would be good/bad”) were first entered into a hierarchical multiple regression to predict motivation to engage, trait argumentativeness added only 1.2% of variance to the amount accounted for by the situational perceptions (41.2%). Regrettably, the elements of the situation Infante’s respondents were orienting toward are unknown, but it appears that situation is highly important and trait argumentativeness influences people’s situational assessments. Much of the TCP research deals with personality variables, but no study has enough internal situational variation to make a summary of the work very productive for these purposes. Even in the areas in which these issues have been treated, such as speechlessness and argumentativeness, a fuller and more precise understanding of why people shun arguing in certain circumstances is needed.

CONSTRUCTING THE SITUATION The remainder of this chapter assumes that, for one reason or another, the person has decided to engage and become an arguer. The same general considerations—individual differences and situation—continue to be relevant, but in different ways. Once the argument has begun, most people leave behind their initial anxieties, in much the same way that a child habituates to the water temperature after finally screwing up enough courage to jump into the swimming pool for the first time that day. Although a few people continue to shiver and seek the first opportunity to leave, most arguers engage with some fullness of commitment. As discussed previously, both the quantity of one’s arguments and their aggressiveness are predicted more accurately by the other arguer’s behaviors (i.e., characteristics of the context) than by one’s predispositions (also see Olson, 2002, p. 10; Waldron, 1990, p. 195). All arguments are situated. That is, they originate in specific conditions and are generally motivated by a life goal, which is aroused by some felt exigence or predicament (Bitzer, 1968; Goodnight, in press).

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They proceed in allowable ways, or at least in possible ways, given the circumstances. In this section, I examine the initiating cognitions and feelings that make an argumentative thought public. Much of this discussion is connected to the situation and its interplay with individual differences. Before examining any of the empirical findings, however, I need to clarify two conceptual points. They both concern the problematic relation between situation and goal.

Situations and Goals Situations and goals are certainly connected, in the sense that situations contain, stimulate, or imply goals. In turn, the emergence of a new goal can result in a redefinition of the situation (e.g., imagine that during a friendly conversation one person suddenly acquires the idea of dating the other). However, some scholars’ thinking has resulted in a tendency to elide these two ideas. For example, in casual scholarly writing, researchers easily refer to “persuasive situations” or “comforting situations.” Persuading and comforting are goals, not situations. Apparently, for some purposes one has said enough about a situation when one has specified its primary or framing goal (Dillard, 1990a, 1990b, 2004). However, this is less a description than a synecdoche. Besides a framing goal, situations may also contain secondary objectives, climates, noticed obstacles to attainment of one or more goals, and barriers to goals (Hample, 1997). These elements may appear in what Lewin (1951) called the plane of reality, where public arguing takes place, but may also exist in the plane of irreality, where planning and imagining occur. In addition, a situation may be understood in such a way as to make the actor or other arguer salient or invisible. If present at all, both self and other can be temporarily constructed with more or less detail (Hample, 1997). Given the situated and reciprocal nature of arguing behaviors, a full description of a situation should also account for the other person’s messages. Several elements of the situation—own identity, other’s identity, and relational definition—may well be negotiated as the episode proceeds. In spite of this, several thoughtful scholars have intentionally conjoined the notions of situation and goal, to make them nearly synonymous. Perhaps two important examples will suffice. L. C. Miller, Cody, and McLaughlin (1994, pp. 174–176) acknowledged that “situation” is a broader concept than “goal” but nonetheless recommended attention to goals as a sufficient means of defining situations. They contended that people may have only 12 to 30 goals (p. 175), but hundreds of situations can probably be named. By figuring out the configuration of goals for an episode (i.e., Which are primary? Which others are in play?) researchers

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can generate more efficient theories of communicative behavior, in part because they believe that everything else about a situation—plans, resources, and beliefs—condenses into modifications or creations of goals (p. 176). This idea is analogous to the theory that meanings can be reduced to the projections of the words on the dimensions of evaluation, activity, and potency (Osgood, Suci, & Tannenbaum, 1957). About this view, I suggest that if it works to guide good research, as it has, scholars must admit that it is at least a productive conceptual shortcut. However, it is a shortcut. Whether barriers and differentiation for self affect goals is an empirical question, not one to be answered by assumption. In the operational crucible of empirically answering such a question, one would have to begin by acknowledging that barriers and goals, for instance, are different things, an acknowledgment that leads to nuanced connections. The L. C. Miller et al. (1994) view, it seems to me, takes the terminus of a causal process (e.g., “barriers alter goals”) as a summary for the whole causal sequence. This assumption is reasonable if one is studying only the effects of goals on arguments. It is not acceptable if one wants to describe fully how arguments emerge from situations. Both objectives are legitimate, but researchers should be careful to separate them and to distinguish their requirements more clearly than they have. The second example on this same point is Dillard and Solomon’s (2000) essay relating situations to “social densities.” The idea of social density is a pleasantly stimulating analogy to physical space, which is not uniform but spotted with concentrations (densities) of matter and gravity. Episodes are like that. Lives are full of little concentrations of communication, clumps of interaction that have recurrent features that make them nameable. Those social densities are important enough that people orient to them in action and generate knowledge structures in terms of them. Because situations are social creations, they must be studied from the viewpoint of social actors, although it is still possible to cumulate and summarize the views of an homogenous group of people. To this point in their argument, I have nothing but enthusiasm for the idea and am stimulated by the possibility of studying social topography. My hesitations arise as the idea is expanded; Dillard and Solomon took a turn similar to that of L. C. Miller et al. (1994). Although they noticed that situations contain obstacles and opportunities (p. 170), the discussion of social densities focuses almost exclusively on goal configurations. Dillard and Solomon noted that the primary goal frames and gives base meaning to an interaction and may also activate secondary goals. All these goals can vary in their insistence, and the whole matrix of goals identifies an episode type to a social actor. Even when Dillard and Solomon have given commonplace names to situation types (e.g., “routine

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activities,” “high stakes episodes”), the key features of the contexts are the goal constellations. As they summarized: Conceptions of context should be grounded in the subjective reality of social actors. That reality is structured by perceived social densities, which themselves reflect social regularities and in turn define the opportunities and constraints for social action. Thus, the contexts for message production can be meaningfully defined in terms of the goal structures that arise within social densities. (p. 173)

Their phrasing makes clear that social densities are not quite the same as the goal structures (the latter, after all, “arise within” the former), but like L. C. Miller et al. (1994), they seem to regard a full goal inventory as containing pretty much all one needs to know about situations. The Dillard and Solomon (2000) essay has admirable strengths. It is an important elaboration on Dillard’s (1990a, 1990b) idea of primary and secondary goals. It is centered on a heuristic metaphor that has the potential to generate a closely textured theory of human interactive life, and it commits scholars to studying social reality from the viewpoint of the participants. However, a social density is more than just a welter of wants. When people think about an episode, they remember who else was there, where it was, how they felt, what was said, and many other things. These things probably bear on the initial and emerging goals, but they are not very fully summarized by them. Equating situations with goal systems is a thoughtful move taken by many scholars. However, the two ideas are both conceptually and empirically distinct. For some research projects, this distinction may not matter, but fuller theoretical descriptions must avoid this synecdoche. This preliminary matter is the first I discuss. The second is an intriguing conception of the situation–goal relation, one that rejects the commitment to studying goals from a subjective standpoint. B. J. O’Keefe (1988, 1992; B. O’Keefe & Lambert, 1995) has suggested that goals be considered as more or less objective features of situations, rather than subjective impulses. If a person were trying to persuade his or her roommate to study harder, for example, the situation contains the needs to regulate the roommate’s behavior and to protect his or her positive face. These goals inhere in the circumstances, whether the arguer realizes it or not. This conception removes goals from the realm of the subjective, and places them in the domain of social facts. Durkheim (1938) originated the idea of social facts and explained: When I fulfil my obligations as brother, husband, or citizen, when I execute my contracts, I perform duties which are defined, externally to myself and

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my acts, in law and in custom. Even if they conform to my own sentiments and I feel their reality subjectively, such reality is still objective, for I did not create them; I merely inherited them through my education. . . . The system of signs I use to express my thought, the system of currency I employ to pay my debts, the instruments of credit I utilize in my commercial relations, the practices followed in my profession, etc., function independently of my own use of them. These types of conduct or thought are not only external to the individual, but are, moreover, endowed with coercive power, by virtue of which they impose themselves upon him, independent of his individual will. Of course, when I fully consent and conform to them, this constraint is felt only slightly, if at all, and is therefore unnecessary. But it is, nonetheless, an intrinsic characteristic of these facts, the proof thereof being that it asserts itself as soon as I attempt to resist it. If I attempt to violate the law, it reacts against me so as to prevent my act before its accomplishment . . . (pp. 1–2)

O’Keefe’s conception of situation-inherent goals is quite similar. If, in arguing with one’s roommate about study habits, the arguer fails to notice the inherent face threat (i.e., “you are not a good student”) and therefore does no remedial facework, the arguer will be punished—perhaps by lack of effectiveness, perhaps by a negative reaction from the roommate, perhaps by a feeling of embarrassment once the light dawns. These goals— requirements may be a better term—belong to the communication episode whether the arguers orient to them or not. They exert directive force on the needed sorts of argument and supply punishment if their mandates are violated, unheeded, or ignored. I previously discussed a kind of arguer, blurters (O’Keefe calls them expressives), who do not normally adapt their arguments to the face needs of the other person. Such people, by habit, nature, or decision, ignore the appropriateness goals for competent arguing. It is more than conceivable that these communicators are genuinely unaware that they need to be polite and may not even know how to express themselves in a more mannerly way. Their arguments naturally, inherently, arouse more resistance and resentment because they fail to satisfy the situational requirements. O’Keefe’s message is that people cannot always choose their goals. This idea makes a great deal of sense but is not very useful to my project in this chapter. I am discussing the argument production processes, and those are dominated by the arguer’s life space, not by his or her external social reality. One hopes that people perceive the world accurately, but if they do not, they act on their perceptions rather than on the basis of unnoticed social facts. If I am trying to be friendly to my daughter and fail to notice her grimacing at my little jokes and out-of-date expressions,

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I inevitably go forward, blundering enthusiastically through fatherhood, to her disdain. To understand why a person argued as he or she did, I need to know what subjective circumstances grounded the argument invention. To know why the argument was received as it was, however, O’Keefe’s theoretical apparatus becomes much more important. Although O’Keefe has been able to implement an interesting theory of message production within this theoretical frame, her idea of goals as social facts is out of step with the main theoretical current I am pursuing here. Therefore, I have less to say about this conception of the relations between goal and situation than about the view that goals should be regarded as subjective constructions of the actors. Following my effort to clarify these two fundamental points about the relations between situations and goals, the way is now open to investigate how individual differences and perceptions combine to generate an understanding of the situation in which one begins to argue. I start with perceptual issues and eventually show how individual differences affect the constructions. Life Spaces In several earlier papers (Hample, 1997, 1999; Hample & Dallinger, 1995) I have argued that Lewin’s (1936, 1951) concept of the life space offers a congenial way to understand actors’ constructions of the world in which they act. One’s life space consists of whatever the person notices about his or her circumstances, nothing else. Scholars cannot, as O’Keefe may prefer, specify in advance what stimulates or dissuades certain actions. They can, however, indicate the sorts of things that are the most likely elements of life spaces in general. How these things take form, or if they even exist in the moment, cannot be mandated theoretically, for the actor’s authority is always decisive. This theory of situation is fundamentally subjective. In chapter 4 I introduced the basic ideas, but perhaps a brief review is not out of order. The life space is a dynamic force field. The forces are due to the attractive nature of goals, the repulsive character of obstacles, and the disharmony that exists when goals are unfulfilled. When an actor becomes aware of an unsatisfied goal, he or she is motivated to achieve it. The actions he or she takes are called locomotion, to suggest that actions are movements. Even one noticed goal creates a force field, pulling the arguer toward the goal region (most of the elements of the life spaces are conceived of as regions; this idea is captured in Lewin’s, 1936, 1951, description of his theory as “topological”). Should more than one goal or obstacle be present, the various pushes and pulls create a more complexly dynamic field of forces, one that changes as the actor moves from region to region.

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Every element in a life space is optional, but goals are as close to essential as Lewin (1936, 1951) is willing to allow. These regions, by drawing movement, are the basic motive forces in field theory. Obstacles, as discussed previously, are negatively valenced goals. They repel, and so the arguer must navigate around them. Ease of movement is affected by two main things. One is the presence or absence of barriers. Every region has a boundary, and these boundaries vary from impenetrable to easy, in terms of the effort needed to cross into the region. Relatively impenetrable boundaries are barriers, and they require extra force if the arguer is to move into the goal region. The other key thing affecting ease of movement is the climate. Certain climates—intimidating ones, uncertain ones, stressful ones—make any kind of locomotion difficult and may, at the extreme, prevent any engagement with the argument. Other climates— playful, inviting, cooperative—encourage nearly any sort of argumentative move. Because arguing is a special class of action, particular climates may encourage or discourage specific kinds of discourse. For instance, formal climates (e.g., pleading a case at law) create an expectation that one will stay on point at all times, the friendly climate of a casual argument with a friend permits digression and encourages social niceties, and professionalized climates (say, at work) require extra care regarding both content and interpersonal relations. Lewin emphasized that all action takes place in the moment. This idea implies that only the instant life space is relevant to understanding an actor’s locomotion. However, Lewin also said that life spaces can extend forward or backward in time, depending on the actor’s thoughts, and that life spaces can be real or irreal. This last distinction is important. The plane of reality describes what is (seen to be) going on, such as what one has said, what the other has replied, how both arguers feel, or whether or not the chair is comfortable. The plane of irreality is an imagined life space, in which the actor can project or imagine various actions and reactions (cf. Honeycutt, 2003, for a compatible view that is not based on field theory). These two planes may be closely coordinated, as when one carefully plans out what to say next, or may be essentially unconnected, as when one romantic partner daydreams while the other complains about his or her day. When people argue mindlessly (Langer, 1978), either they have no plane of irreality or it is unconnected with the conversation at hand. In thinking about arguing, it strikes me that two different sorts of life spaces are likely to be relevant. One is the interpersonal life space, where personal and social considerations are prevalent. This one I have studied before, without noticing an alternative. The other kind of life space is contentful. It represents the ideas that are relevant to the argument and the connections between them. Either sort of life space can be focused on

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self or other. For instance, the interpersonal life space of a blurter presumably contains only that person’s own goals and desires, whereas the life space of someone with more advanced argument frames includes the other’s needs as well. Similarly, the content life space may specify all one’s own thoughts (this idea is similar to what B. O’Keefe & Lambert, 1995, envision in their local management of meaning theory of message production), or it may display one’s reception of the other’s argument. Thus there are four relevant life spaces, composed of the combinations of interpersonal or contentful and solitary or dual. It is unclear how these four life spaces are coordinated, if several happen to be present for an arguer. The best answer I currently have is that they flicker in and out of focus from moment to moment (a similar possibility is explored in Hample, 2000a, where focal life spaces are discussed). It strikes me, however, that they must modify one another. The climates particularly seem to be likely sources of contact. For instance, a stultifying interpersonal climate may make all the content regions less attractive, whereas great enthusiasm about one’s argument in the content fields may make interpersonal obstacles invisible. The idea of responding to the other person’s argument means that something from the other’s content life space has to be transferred into one’s own content life space, or they must be melded. Some sort of communication must exist among the life spaces, although I am unable to provide much detail. Given the lack of data on these points, I take the conservative flicker view here, noticing any required transfers from one life space to another. I hope that future research tests whether these life spaces are operating in parallel, because this solution may be more computationally plausible and may also show how something like spreading activation can explain the transferring functions. With these considerations in mind, I next explore what these four life spaces—situational constructions—may look like. I deal first with the two interpersonal life spaces and then with the two content ones. Because I have already discussed the interpersonal situations in an earlier chapter, I am briefer about them here. Interpersonal Life Spaces. Figures 6.1 and 6.2 display the two sorts of interpersonal life space I wish to discuss. Although an indefinite number of diagrams may be drawn to represent the key issues, I have chosen simple ones because I want to emphasize only the presence or absence of the other arguer. Figure 6.1 is a solitary life space, in the sense that the actor is not taking any apparent notion of the other person. It contains self, an obstacle, a goal, and a route toward the goal, all of which are inwardly derived. Although a face-to-face argument necessarily involves another person,

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FIG. 6.1. Interpersonal life space, solitary. P is the actor, O is an obstacle he or she notices, and G is his or her goal.

FIG. 6.2. Interpersonal life space, dual. P1 is the actor, P2 is the other person, O is an obstacle P1 notices as due to some preference of P2, and G is P1’s goal.

thoughts about the episode sometimes do not, in the moment. To flesh out the figure, I suggest this example. Suppose P wishes to display a socially attractive identity (G) and engages in an argument (the arrow showing locomotion), perhaps about national politics, to do that. However, P doesn’t regard himself or herself as terribly well informed about such matters and has not seen a newspaper in several days (O). Somehow, therefore, P must generate an argument that does not rely on any specific, recent information. This felt necessity is the reason that the path is curved: It must avoid the region referring to detailed support. P may present an argument something like, “Democrats are the party of the

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country’s productive workers, because the Republicans have been bought by CEOs and the idle rich.” Although this argument is not especially impressive—avoiding specific evidence has that result—it may still serve to make P seem politically perceptive in P’s circle. Figure 6.1 contrasts with Fig. 6.2, which contains the other arguer. For simplicity, the same goal is used in the example, but this time the obstacle has a different nature. P1 sees the obstacle as deriving from some aspect of P2 (the other arguer), signified by the overlap between the P2 and O regions. P1 regards P2 as an uninformed radical, who values conclusions that agree with his or her rebellious views but is bored by details and frankly offended by the thought that anyone would need evidence for what she or he regards as obvious (these views are studied in chap. 8). The obstacle is somewhat similar to that in Fig. 6.1, the necessity of avoiding concrete information, but it originates from quite different cognitive processes. Whereas the obstacle in the first drawing is due to P’s self-awareness, here it derives from his or her impressions of P2. The same argument may nonetheless be made, but with additional grounds—our assessment of P1’s person perception ability—to suppose that it may be effective. Often, the discourse gives valuable clues to the underlying cognitive dynamics, but this example suggests how dangerous it is to rely on only textual evidence to infer the details of the argument production process. Both diagrams may be made more complex by adding other goals, obstacles, barriers, climates, and even other people. An argument may need to occupy several different goal regions successively, or someone may perceive that one locomotion can simultaneously move P into two or more goal regions. However, for the points at hand—that interpersonal life spaces are based on the actor’s immediate perceptions and that these perceptions may or may not make the other arguer salient—perhaps these examples suffice. Content Life Spaces. The discussion of life spaces dominated by content is new ground, and more discussion is required. As before, the life space may be solitary or dual, but here the distinction is based on whether P is thinking about what she or he can say (i.e., the solitary field) or whether P1 is considering what P2 has said (i.e., the dual life space). Before giving explicit attention to the content items in either life space, I need to review where the ideas come from. They are retrieved from memory, of course. This may be short-term memory (STM) in the case of a dual content life space, in which the other’s statements are registered and understood with the help of long-term memory (LTM) stores. In a solitary content space, one draws arguments and thoughts from memory, possibly adapting them to a greater or lesser degree, and retrieval oc-

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curs due to the situation’s activation of various elements—one’s inventional repertoire—stored in LTM. The situations are recognized in terms of various features, which vary from person to person, depending on salience. Perhaps a situation activates one’s religious commitments, perhaps the arguer orients to a romantic relationship with the other person, perhaps a classroom setting frames the possible discourse. When a situation calls out an argumentative response, it does so by means of the goals and other cognitive elements it stimulates. A standard list of situation features is that of L. C. Miller et al. (1994, pp. 181–184). Intimacy refers to the emotional connection that the arguer perceives between self and other, and it affects the degree of activation for relational and image goals. Dominance issues are important because higher status arguers have more sorts of discourse at their disposal (e.g., Burgoon, Denning, & Roberts, 2002). The arguer’s perceived right to persuade affects the degree of assertiveness and combativeness that is appropriate. Personal benefits refer to the arguer’s stakes in the episode and therefore also index the amount of forcefulness that may be justified. Perceived resistance seems to be an appreciation of the combined effects of barriers and likely obstacles. Relational consequences have to do with the interpersonal stakes involved in the argument and should also affect the salience of relational and identity goals. Finally, situational apprehension immediately reflects the arguer’s anxiety about arguing and should therefore affect the climate of the argument as well as the arguer’s degree of engagement in it. These features are substantially intercorrelated (Hample & Dallinger, 2002b, Table 11.4). Some of the L. C. Miller et al. (1994) situational dimensions seem to have obvious implications for activating certain goals, whereas others do not. Intimacy and relational consequences are in the first category, with the other features largely in the latter. Resistance, for instance, is quite relevant to how the arguer pursues the interaction but does not seem to activate another goal. Similarly, right to persuade may intensify the salience of the utility goal but does not activate it in the first place. Some effort to connect these situational features to goals has been made (e.g., Hample & Dallinger, 2002b), but more focused work remains to be done. The L. C. Miller et al. analysis is certainly not the last word on situational characteristics, however. Among other things, it omits the important distinction between public and private topics (A. J. Johnson, 2002; Wenzel & Hample, 1975). Probably other elements of context will prove to be important as well, and these elements should be connected to the L. C. Miller et al. system to give coherence to theoretical understandings of how episodes are understood by arguers. As discussed in chapter 4, Meyer (1997, 2002, 2003) theorized that once a situation is perceived, it immediately activates both goals and

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what she calls situation–action associations. These associations connect the situation to message (i.e., action) elements so that once a circumstance is encountered, the arguer immediately has an activated repertoire of available content. How scholars should represent the content has been a matter of controversy. Probably the most common method has been to typify the content by identifying strategies, such as promise, threat, or altruism. However, the task of generating a list of all the available strategies now seems to be hopeless, on both conceptual (D. O’Keefe, 1990, ch. 12) and empirical (Kellermann & Cole, 1994) grounds. A more useful way to think about the available content is to use the inventional capacity approach discussed in chapter 3 and informed by B. J. O’Keefe and Lambert’s (1995) local management of meaning approach to message production. This approach has the advantage of looking at actual potential messages. O’Keefe and Lambert noted that when a person is in the early stages of generating a message, he or she has a private universe of available cognitions. Arguers then move attention through the repertoire, essentially saying whatever their gazes fasten upon, assuming that no editorial processes intervene. A communicator’s gaze is directed by goals, situational requirements, expectations, and the like. O’Keefe and Lambert’s research method is oriented to generalizing the available content for a substantial group of people at once, however. The inventional capacity research in chapter 3 is more oriented to the individual arguer and what occurs to him or her. Finally I have arrived at the point where I can begin to study the two content life spaces. The content is activated (i.e., recalled, adapted, invented) by the complex of situational perceptions and felt goals. This activation produces a repertoire of content from which messages are drawn. The eventual selection of specific messages also involves editorial processes (see chap. 4), which I do not discuss again until the next portion of this chapter. The solitary content life space is one that features only the arguer’s own repertoire. The size of the repertoire appears to be unaffected by personality traits (Hample, 2003c). Instead, inventional capacity is determined by one’s cognitive abilities and architectures. Repertoire size is associated with verbal ability, academic performance, creative ability, and interpersonal construct differentiation. It has not displayed any connections with argumentativeness or verbal aggression. Repertoire size is fairly constant across situations, although repertoire content is not. In fact, some situations generate more argumentatively relevant thoughts than others (Hample, Elliott, Kenady, Mezger, Shaw, & Wang, 2003), even though the total number of repertoirial elements remains essentially unchanged. An examination of a repertoire shows how an arguer may represent the content relevant to a situation. The following example was selected

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partly because it is brief. The respondent was asked to list what he could say to talk a friend into going to Padre Island with him for spring break. He wrote: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

This is your last year to be free! Just think of all the guys (if it were a girl) Just think of all the girls! It’s not that much [money], and what else have you to do? Come on, you’ve never done this and it could be fun If we go, I’ll promise you’ll have great time

This repertoire has several interesting characteristics. Items 2 and 3 are obviously alternatives and imply that at least one situational element— sex of the other person—needs to appear in the content space to make a selection. Item 4 has two bits of content, so closely connected that they appear as a single thought. The same is true of Item 5. Figure 6.3 is an attempt to sketch this life space. Because the inventional capacity research has shown that the most familiar items are listed earliest, I have assumed that these goal regions are more attractive. The strength of the valence (i.e., the goal to say each thing) of the region is represented by the thickness of the lines around each content region. These thicknesses represent intuitions on my part, although it is clear that the connected items need to have the same attractiveness. The connections are symbolized by the darker arrows. Because the repertoire mentions the arguer (e.g., Item 6: “I’ll promise . . .”), P appears in the fig-

FIG. 6.3.

Solitary content life space.

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ure as well, close to the only content item to which it seems relevant. The choice between “just think of all the guys” and “just think of all the girls” is indicated by the lighter arrows emanating from the “other’s sex” region, which has to be in this life space to choose or even consider either argument. I have not tried to guess the choices P may eventually make, so I have not attempted to represent his eventual utterance with a locomotion arrow (but it is clear at two points, the darker arrows, that if one thing is said, the next one will be, too). In spite of the appearance of other’s sex, Fig. 6.3 is a representation of a solitary content life space because it portrays only P’s direct thoughts— that is, argumentative materials that P generates more or less alone. When P’s life space is dominated by what the other arguer has said, a dual content space develops. How common are such dual life spaces? Persuasion researchers have clearly supported the finding that people attend carefully to an incoming message only some of the time. Research on both the elaboration likelihood model (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986; recent reviews are Booth-Butterfield & Welbourne, 2002, and Slater, 2002) and the heuristic-systematic model (Chaiken, 1980; a recent review is Todorov, Chaiken, & Henderson, 2002) has shown that people will only scrutinize another person’s message—really pay attention to its details—under certain conditions. Those circumstances are high motivation and sufficient comprehension ability. Some individual differences measures, such as need for cognition, have also been shown to be pertinent. My point here is that a dual content life space should appear only under conditions such as these. The research that supports this conclusion, however, mainly derives from studies in which people read a message or listened to a speech, with little implication that a reply was needed. One supposes that face-to-face arguments naturally have higher motivational levels than would arise in such experimental protocols. Limon and Mitchell (2001) reported that 96% of their sample offered refutations of a confederate’s arguments during interpersonal arguments. Obviously, refutation requires that the arguer scrutinize the other person’s message in some detail. Dual content life spaces should be quite common in interpersonal arguing. Before considering what such a space may look like, however, I expend some effort on a description of how another person’s argument is received, making the assumption that it receives a reasonable amount of attention from P. The available research permits summary of two different lines of work—how messages in general are perceived and more specific work on how evidence is perceived. The decisive thing is P’s understanding of the message, not its objective features. P operates based only on his or her reception (i.e., the gist of the message, including P’s inferences). I address this third issue specifically after reviewing the other two

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bodies of work. Only then is it reasonable to try to draw the dual content life space. Several researchers have tried to discern the dimensions along which people perceive persuasive messages. D. O’Keefe (1987, 1990, ch. 12) warned that messages may be accurately typified in an indefinitely large number of ways. Nonetheless, ordinary people seem to construe messages along only a few dimensions. Several other studies suggest that, from the receiver’s point of view, the three main facets of messages are directness, positivity, and logic (Dillard et al., 1989) or explicitness, dominance, and argument (Dillard, Wilson, Tusing, & Kinney, 1997). I am particularly interested in the third item in each list, logic or argument. These both refer to the presence of evidence and reasoning. Messages seen as high on this factor are also regarded as more clearly implementing the influence goal in persuasion (Dillard et al., 1989) and as being more polite (Dillard et al., 1997). Dillard’s theory of message dimensions is based on his reading of the literature. Consequently, I look at several studies that directly generate pertinent conclusions. Cody, McLaughlin, and Jordan (1980) asked respondents to write persuasive messages and then sorted those messages into categories. They report several clusters of messages, including one they referred to as reason. This cluster was important, accounting for the most messages in two situations (16% and 18%), and the third most (15%) for a third stimulus. Cody et al. found either eight or nine clusters of strategies for each of their stimulus situations and conducted multidimensional scaling to simplify their findings. They reported a twodimensional solution for each stimulus. The first set is direct-rational versus coercive (i.e., highlighting the contrast between reason and threat) and direct versus manipulation (with simple statements at the direct pole and hinting and deceit at the other). For the second situation, they reported that the dimensions were cooperation versus negative consequences (i.e., mainly distinguishing the cooperative cluster from threats and coercion) and inaction versus direct-rational (i.e., differentiating the inaction items from the reasons and simple statements). The third situation generated inaction versus manipulation (i.e., inaction items at one end and deceit and flattery at the other) and strong versus weak (which contrasts stronger reasons and weaker expertise claims). Because Dillard et al. (1989) were looking at this study, among a few others, the similarity between these findings and Dillard’s theory is not surprising. The fact that the respondents in this study were consistently sensitive to the presence or absence of reasons is encouraging. Even the other dimensions are based on differences in content, however, and must not be neglected. Roskos-Ewoldsen (1997) conducted a study that postdates both Dillard’s early work and the Cody et al. (1980) investigation. He began by

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searching the persuasion and rhetorical literatures for persuasion strategies. He and his colleagues identified 89 such tactics. These strategies were sorted into groups, and the resulting data were scaled multidimensionally. Roskos-Ewoldsen reported a two-dimensional solution whose interpretation is unusually well grounded because it is based on respondents’ additional ratings of each message (e.g., its effectiveness, its informativeness). The first dimension is association versus message-oriented. This dimension has appeals to friendship, consensus, and group affiliation at one pole and detailed, complex arguments at the other. The second dimension is social acceptability. Roskos-Ewoldsen’s respondents displayed sensitivity to the differences between sarcasm, fear, and attacking strategies (i.e., the negatively valued items) and credibility, empirical evidence, and common sense (i.e., the other extreme). Evidence and argument were decisive elements for both factors, possibly explaining the association between them (r = .44). Although respondents indicated generally that message-oriented strategies (i.e., arguments) are more likely to be used than association appeals, Roskos-Ewoldsen’s second study showed that this preference partly depended on whether the audience was thought to be knowledgeable. Association appeals become increasingly desirable as the other arguer’s perceived ability to process the material declines. What conclusions can be drawn about people’s construal of others’ arguments? First, individuals are (or at least can be, when properly motivated) very sensitive to content. All the research gives a prominent perceptual place to reason and evidence. An immediate and salient feature of an incoming message is whether or not it seems to be a cogent argument. Second, people track the sociality of the message. They notice whether it makes an affiliative appeal (e.g., “your friends would like you to do this”), whether it is polite, whether it is coercive or manipulative, and whether it is pointed or open ended. Third, these and other studies give some evidence that others’ arguments are received as immediately agreeable or disagreeable (e.g., Wenzel & Hample, 1975). This judgment is based partly on sociality and prior attitude but also partly on the degree to which the content of the message seems forcible and probative. These are impressionistic conclusions on the part of message recipients. Although presumably based on specific message elements (including content but also nonverbal delivery and other factors), they are globalizing judgments. Such impressions should enter into the framing of the interaction quite directly and so have implications for climate and related matters, such as cooperativeness. The presence or absence of striking evidence and reasons also has implications for what can be said in reply. A good argument can be engaged directly and in detail. A vague argument can be exposed as such, but the presence of one may also suggest that the

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response need not be very probative either. Whether strong arguments and social appeals tend to be answered in kind or not is an interesting topic that needs to be explored empirically. Some further information about perception of others’ messages may be found in several studies about evidence. People are sensitive to the presence or possibility of evidence in messages (Roskos-Ewoldsen, 1997; Wenzel & Hample, 1975). This is not surprising; argumentative exchanges should and do orient naturally to the support for differing claims. For the most part, however, evidence studies have made use of simple typologies, investigating things like statistical evidence, narrative evidence, or quoted evidence (for a review, see Reynolds & Reynolds, 2002). The typologies—for they are indeed plural—differ from textbook to textbook and have never been defended as having any phenomenal reality for anyone not taking an argumentation exam. Consequently, Hample, Baker, Luckie-Parks, Moore, Thorne, and Dorsey (2000) set out to discover the perceptual dimensions of evidence. They examined the literature and extracted 70 descriptions or typifications of evidence, then converted these descriptions into rating scales. They also found 13 explicit examples of evidence in prior work and used them as stimuli. These instances had been intended by their original authors to instantiate evidence varying in specificity and vividness, containing stories or statistics, and being qualitative or quantitative in nature. On their first pass through the data, Hample et al. reported 12 different perceptual descriptions: strong, clear, pointed, controversial, probative, vacuous, emotional, scientific, creative, masculine, novel, and politically biased. Many of these factors have substantial intercorrelations, however, so a second pass was conducted. A second-order factor analysis showed four factors: strength (contrasting strong, pointed, scientific, probative, and clear with vacuous and politically biased), emotionality (representing emotional, politically biased, and controversial), mundanity (contrasting uncreative and novel), and finally masculinity (composed solely of the first-order masculine factor). The 12 first-order factors successfully discriminate among the 13 evidence stimuli with a correct classification rate of 95%. Because many of the first-order factors had low internal reliability, I undertook a second study, which has not yet been prepared for publication or presentation. The goals of this investigation were to improve the reliability of the subscales and to see which dimensions of evidence are related to persuasive effectiveness. Some original rating scales were dropped, and others were added, bringing the total to 75. I abandoned the idea of trying to force highly specific factors, as in the first study, mainly due to their low reliabilities. I settled on a five-factor solution, using 37 of the items. The first factor is moral and effective (Cronbach’s alpha = .91),

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which combines scales such as wise, true, ethical, useful, I agree, factual, and so forth. Second is clear (alpha = .83), which consists of clear, not confusing, easy to understand, and similar items. The third emergent dimension is prejudiced (alpha = .64), which is composed of prejudiced, biased, sexist, politically biased, and racist. Fourth is artistic (alpha = .70), containing artistic, humorous, startling, and tells a story, for instance. The last factor is feminine (alpha = .92), which is composed of the scales, a female thing to say and not a masculine thing to say. The dimensions predict attitude change. All three topics in the study produced significant movement in opinions. Controlling for pretest scores, posttest scores are significantly correlated with one factor for each topic. For the crop rotation and free speech topics, the main predictor of persuasion is the first factor (partial rs = .34 and .37, respectively). For the gay marriage topic, the significant predictor is the femininity scale (partial r = .40). The factors may also be associated with other elements of the situation, such as arguer’s image (e.g., Dallinger & Hample, 2002) or credibility, but I have no data bearing on that possibility. The point has been to determine the perceptual dimensions of evidence, and the research seems promising in that regard. Some connections appear between the evidence factors and those discovered for messages. The directness and explicitness message characteristics seem to connect conceptually with the clarity result for evidence, the social propriety and affiliation issues for messages may be associated with the morality and prejudice dimensions of evidence, and the general argumentative aspects of messages may find additional detail in the findings regarding effectiveness and strength. To this point, I have made some progress in describing how people perceive the arguments that other people make. The general impressions arguers have for messages and evidence are helpful in understanding their dual content life spaces, but there is one more issue to consider before describing those content force fields. This final matter departs from the realm of impression to that of specific inference. The essential starting place is to recall that ordinary human discourse is enthymematic. That is, people’s arguments are nearly always incomplete, in some technical logical sense, and listeners complete them. Many theorists, prominently those of the Amsterdam school, have been concerned to figure out exactly how unexpressed materials should be filled in (e.g., Gerritsen, 1994, 2001; van Eemeren, de Glopper, Grootendorst, & Oostdam, 1994; van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 1982, 1983b, 1992). The main problem for these scholars is that, given any two elements of what could be a three-part syllogism, it is always possible to supply a missing premise that makes the whole argument logically valid. They believe that this assumption is too generous to make, how-

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ever, so they have worked out principles of charity and reasonableness to try to approximate what the arguer actually meant. However, this is in part a problem of the theorists’ own making, due to their commitment to studying only textualized arguments and converting unstated materials into text. In this book, I am far less concerned with filling in the text than with projecting what is understood by the listener. This projection, not the textual concerns, is the fundamental meaning of the aphorism, “arguments are enthymematic.” The problem is certainly no simpler, however. The first issue is the degree to which the text is relevant. When someone says something, the listener must translate the atmospheric vibrations into recognizable words, combine the words into sentences, resolve homonym problems, and so forth. However, what the listener hears is the meaning—the argument— and people think with the meaning, not the words and sentences (Christiaansen, 1980; Fillenbaum, 1966). People spontaneously fill in necessary elements to arrive at a satisfactory meaning. An illustration of this effect can be found in a study by Bransford, Barclay, and Franks (1972). They asked respondents to listen carefully to a number of sentences. A few minutes later, the experimenters read another list of sentences to them, and respondents said whether each sentence was one they had heard before. The sentences were systematically varied. An example follows, with the variations indicated in parentheses: “Three turtles rested (on/beside) a floating log and a fish swam beneath (it/them).” If the turtles were beside the log, then the only correct recognition answer—correct literally and in terms of gist—preserves the final pronoun. However, if the turtles were on the log, then the fish swam beneath both them and it. In this second case, a respondent who heard it but said that she or he had earlier heard them was technically incorrect but had preserved the essential meaning about the turtles, the log, and the fish. Bransford et al. reported that people are equally likely to recognize it and them in the second case. When no correct inference was available (i.e., the stimulus sentence contained beside), respondents nicely distinguished between the original sentence and a sentence with the wrong final pronoun. The point is, people hear meanings, not individual words. People may receive sentences with their ears, but they think with and remember their inferences. As the Bransford et al. (1972) study suggests, those inferences are rational. I have maintained elsewhere (Hample, 1986, 1987) that people’s reasoning is essentially logical. To be sure, people often make mistakes on logic tests (Evans, 1982; Wason & Johnson-Laird, 1972; Woll, 2002, ch. 9), but many of those errors disappear when people are working with their own understandings of the stimulus materials rather than the experimenter-supplied sentences (Ceraso & Provitera, 1971; Henle, 1962; Steinfatt, Miller, & Bettinghaus, 1974). With the in-

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clusion of unconscious processing, spontaneous inferences, semantic perception, spreading activation, and related matters, logic-based models of human cognition are ubiquitous and very successful (Hample, 1986, 1987). Researchers have developed an accurate model of the way people make inferences from the arguments they read or hear (Allen & Burrell, 1992; Allen & Kellermann, 1988; Hample, 1977a, 1978, 1979, 1981a, 1985a). This model revises Bayes’ Theorem into two hypothetical syllogisms (Hample, 1982), producing this equation: p(C) = b1 p(C|D) p(D) + b2 p(C|~D) p(~D). The model assumes that one is processing an argument whose conclusion is C and that the evidence (data) in the argument is D. The whole model is expressed in terms of the subjective probabilities (the p’s) that the argument recipient assigns to the various elements. The dependent variable is p(C), which is the probability that C is true, according to the recipient. This variable is predicted by two terms in a multiple regression equation, each having its own beta (b) weight. The first predictor is p(C|D) p(D), which is the probability that C is true, assuming that D is true (the | symbol means “given that”) multiplied by the probability that D is true. This predictor represents a simple syllogism, expressed or implied in the message: If D is true, then C is true; D is true; So, C is true. The truth of anything is estimated by its subjective probability because the subject matter of human discourse is contingent and probabilistic (Aristotle, Rhetoric, I. 14; Baird, 1965, ch. 4; Bryant, 1953). Both premises need to be true for the conclusion to be true; thus the probabilities are multiplied together. If someone argued, “You should move to California because the weather there is wonderful,” these values are needed: the listener’s estimate of the probability that California weather is wonderful, p(D), and his or her estimate of the probability that if California weather is wonderful, then one should move there, p(C|D). The product of these two terms gives the first predictor. It is based on, and expresses, the listener’s understanding of the argument of the message. The argument “Go to California and soak up some rays” provides the same materials, so long as the listener had understood the arguer to have meant, “You should move to California because the weather there is wonderful.”

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However, only a few people would move to a state purely because of its weather. Other considerations—considerations not mentioned or even implied in the message—are relevant, perhaps very relevant (McGuire, 1960; Wyer, 1974). This problem of having people’s views affected by things that experimenters and arguers cannot anticipate is the reason for the second predictor in the model, p(C|~D) p(~D). This expresses the product of two other probabilities: the probability that the evidence D is false (the ~ symbol means “not”) and the probability that the conclusion is true even though the evidence is false. This is also a syllogism, although it may be harder to appreciate: If D is false, then C is true; D is false; So, C is true. The key is the first premise. It really means, “even though D is false, C is still true.” In other words, this syllogism gathers up all the reasons except D that C is true. The clever thing—and it is Wyer’s (1974) insight, not mine—is that this term permits evaluation of all those other reasons without even knowing what they are. Even in an argument that offers only D as evidence, one can assess the relevance of a person’s private, unrevealed reasons for and against C. The two predictors, then, represent the way people spontaneously make inferences while consuming an argument. The first predictor is tightly connected to the listener’s understanding of the argument that is actually made. The second predictor is the accumulated importance of everything not in the argument, or its cognitive context. Each predictor has its own b weight. The weights are empirical, derived to maximize the quality of the joint prediction of p(C), but they have substantial interpretability, too. When b1 is greater than b2, the argument of the message, as understood, is more important to p(C) than all the nonargument considerations. When b1 is less than b2, the argument and its evidence have less to do with the listener’s eventual belief than those private, unspecified reasons do. This second thing happens when someone presents an argument that simply doesn’t connect with the audience or is unimpressive when compared to prior beliefs (Hample, 1981a). The model is empirically accurate. When making predictions about argument recipients’ data, R is about .60. When people are grouped together before applying the equation, R is about .97 (Hample, 1985a). If an arguer simply presents evidence and the warrant (i.e., “if D, then C”) is obvious to the listener, the inference—p(C)—can be projected with good accuracy. D. O’Keefe’s (1997, 1998) meta-analyses showed that explicit

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argument components are more effective than implicit ones, probably because they better guide listeners’ comprehensions. However, the discursive reality is that warrants, evidence, and conclusions are often unexpressed (not all of them at once, one hopes). Listeners fill them in, completing the elements of the equation given previously, with logical and predictable inferences. I am finally to the point where I can draw a dual content life space. Because it has been a few pages, I repeat that I have been trying to figure out how an arguer receives another person’s content during an argument. I have explored how messages in general are registered, how evidence is seen, and how inferences trump actual discourse perceptually. All this has been in service of describing the dual content life space, which is a perceptual and cognitive matter. I have not yet considered individual differences in constructing a situation. For a simple example, I return to an earlier one, in which one person— the “other” arguer now—says, “Democrats are the party of the country’s productive workers, because the Republicans have been bought by CEOs and the idle rich.” This argument is offered primarily to display a politically perceptive identity, and I assume that this goal is transparent, conveyed partly by context and nonverbal displays and recognized as such by P, who happens to know the arguer reasonably well. The content conclusion is explicit—“Democrats are the party of the country’s productive workers”—and leads to the further inference that “Democrats are better than Republicans.” This further conclusion assumes something like “being the party of the workers is better than being the party of the rich,” but this is a congenial thought to P, in this example. In Fig. 6.4, I have sketched out what this content space may look like. The other person’s statements about Democrats, workers, and Republicans are portrayed as having been received with reasonable accuracy. The real point of the argument as far as P is concerned, however, is the inference that Democrats are better than Republicans. This conclusion is very attractive to P because (a) it is P’s own conclusion, actively drawn during the exchange; and (b) the thought is immediately agreeable to P. Therefore the conclusion is sketched as sharing in P’s identity region. The thought needed to fill in in the argument—that a workers’ party is better than a rich people’s party—is so comfortable for P that she or he doesn’t even notice thinking it. This idea therefore doesn’t appear in Fig. 6.4, even though it is needed for the conclusion. Because P is pleased and familiar with this conclusion, all the content regions have a sort of positively valenced glow to them, which I have not tried to indicate in the diagram. If P were to draw an unhappy inference, I would need to indicate the points at which P begins to have a negative reaction. In that case, P may immediately identify some evidence as wrong but may also draw the fi-

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FIG. 6.4.

Dual content life space.

nal inference, become horrified, and then go back to scrutinize the argument elements unfavorably. Besides these content details, however, a number of globalizing judgments are made about the immediate argumentative situation. Continuing the example by exploring these judgments may provide a useful summary of much of the material previously discussed concerning one’s perceptions of the situation. The other’s goal—projecting a good impression—has been noticed, and P must therefore prepare to confirm, disconfirm, or reject the projection (see chap. 2). How is the message itself seen? Perhaps P senses that the argument is made in part as an overture to friendship, suggesting a bit of intimacy and raising the possibility of some relational consequences. Both the other arguer’s perceived goals and the substantial emptiness of the message suggest that this argument is not ferally contended, and P does not anticipate an eristic exchange. P does not notice any aggression in the argument, which means that P does not have any reflexive impulse to be confrontational. Little resistance is expected, should P decide to disagree or to press for better reasons. On the other hand, using an argument as a friendship overture is a somewhat playful gesture, implying not merely that P has a right to persuade in return but that the situation is being projected to be coconstructed in such a way that P is rather expected to argue semiseriously in response. The personal benefits at stake have to do with the possibility of improving the relationship between P and the other arguer. Power and dominance do not seem to be issues. Because the argument is reasonably clear and straightforward, it has no hint of manipulation or coercion. Nor is there anything inappropriate

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about it. In fact, P’s suspicion that the argument is really a cover for identity and relational negotiation suggests that the message may be especially friendly and appropriate. The message has an argument at its core, which is a point in its favor, but it also conveys some political bias. The possibility of bias is suggested by the lightness of the evidence. Perhaps the other arguer really is a superficial person, or perhaps she or he is so close-minded that careful reasoning is not a continuing concern. Concern for workers hints at a political morality, however, and perhaps P participates in the stereotype that Democrats are more feminine than Republicans. Obviously, I am fictionalizing all this, I hope plausibly. Empirical research would somehow gather P’s perceptions, of course, but I continue with this little narrative. In preparing to reply, P has to contend with both the content and interpersonal situations. Figure 6.5 displays what P (P1 now) may place into his or her life space. Both interpersonal and content elements are present, and both solitary and dual considerations appear as well. The other arguer’s content is undifferentiated in the diagram because P1 has an impression about the insubstantiality and unaggressiveness of P2’s argument and does not intend to take it on bit by bit. If the opposite had been the case, at least one content element would be highlighted— perhaps “Republicans have been bought by CEOs and the idle rich”—so that a pointed reply could be made (e.g., “There really aren’t many idle

FIG. 6.5.

P1’s situation and argument plan.

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rich anymore, and no CEO has even approached the level of contributions that labor unions make”). However, P1 accepts the intent of the original argument as projecting a positive identity for P2 and as a friendship overture, and P1 wants to confirm these moves. Detailed argumentation is therefore inappropriate because it may seem too aggressive, may reject P2’s projected identity, and may interfere with the coconstruction of the episode as one of friendship work. Instead, P1’s first impulses are to be friendly and playful; these objectives in fact confirm P2’s apparent goals (thus they overlap with the P2 region in the diagram). Given an interpersonal context in which a semiserious argument is on the floor, these first goals of P1 imply that she or he needs to respond to the argument and has a right to do so. A response displays that P1 is taking the argument as substantial. The answer must not be aggressive, however, and so that potential obstacle region (indicated by the repulsing arrows) has to be avoided. Thus P1 constructs P2’s argument as undifferentiated—more as an amorphous invitation to talk about the topic than as a case to be analyzed critically— and responds to the general point. P1’s reply needs to be both globally and topically relevant (McLaughlin, 1984, ch. 2). P2’s conversational goals and virtual plan are establishing his or her identity, projecting a friendly relationship, and offering to pursue these matters via argumentation. P1 must pick up on these goals at the same time that she or he displays uptake of P2’s actual content. Neither relevance, one of Grice’s (1975) maxims, nor any other standard conversational constraints are displayed in the life space because P1 is not thinking about these matters. Balancing with some delicacy among the needs to confirm P2’s identity and relational projections, to respond to the specific argument, and to avoid aggression, P1 selects this reply: “That’s a nice point. Is that just going on now, or has it always been that way?” The first part of the reply is confirming, and the second advances the argument. Phrasing it as a nonconfrontational question is less combative than making a counterassertion (e.g., “That’s just in the last few years, at best. The party of Lincoln has always been a party of the people.”) Nonetheless, the counterassertion may be at least vaguely available for P2 to consider. The question form also welcomes a reply from P2; that reply is very much in service of playfully continuing the argument to firm up the interpersonal relationship between P1 and P2. My point has been to indicate the general principles on which people perceive situations containing arguments and to illustrate the resulting life spaces. The life spaces are interpersonal or contentful or both, depending on the actor’s immediate orientation. They may also be solitary or dual, depending again on the actor’s attentional focus. These are, more or

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less by definition, the only perceptual considerations in arguing because these are the grounds on which arguments are invented. Individual Differences Every arguer is a unique person who has a unique understanding of a particular situation. However, research has shown some generalizable tendencies that suggest at least the general shape of an arguer’s perceptions. Happily, these individual differences do not require addition of anything to the life spaces. They merely aid the understanding of why one goal may be present rather than another, whether the climate is likely to be seen as coalescent or eristic, when the life space is solitary or dual, and so forth. Chapter 2 introduced the idea of argument frames, which are the expectations and understandings about arguing that people carry. These frames have implications for the climate one expects, the pleasantness of a typical argument, the degrees of inclination and ability to connect with the other person’s goals and plans, the aggressiveness of one’s impulses, and so forth. Frames differ from person to person, and these are the chief individual differences in this section. Developing self-report scales for the frames has been an unexpectedly difficult task, and two reports using scales with some deficiencies have been made (Hample, 2003b; Hample & Dallinger, 2002a). Although some connections with those earlier findings can be made, here I concentrate on the results from a more recent study (Hample, 2004a), which has had more success in generating psychometrically good sets of scales. As discussed in chapter 2, frames are theorized to fall into three general categories. The first, one’s own goals, involves the expectations that arguments have utility in getting things done, that they can be used to display personal identity, that they may have the function of asserting dominance, and that arguments can be used for play. The second frame deals with the question of whether the arguer sees that one’s own goals can be integrated with the goals of the other arguer. The first question here is whether any attempt to do so normally takes place. People who do not connect own to other’s goals habitually engage in blurting. Those who connect may do so with a view toward either cooperation or its opposite, competition. Related to this point and suggesting a transition to the third frame is the perception that arguing is either an uncivil or a pleasant, polite activity. The third frame is concerned with whether the arguer has generated an intellectualized personal theory of argument. The issue here is how close the arguer comes to having the same values and expectations as a professional argumentation theorist.

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In Hample (2004a), I asked approximately 200 undergraduates to fill out 63 self-report items about their general perceptions of what it means to argue. After they finished the scales, they wrote a response to B. J. O’Keefe’s (1988) Ron situation, in which the arguer tries to get Ron to reform and do his share on a group project. This response was coded for the level of message design logic (MDL) it contained. O’Keefe’s MDL theory specifies three different private theories of what messages are for, and each dictates a different way of designing a message. Expressives see communication as a way of saying whatever they think. They produce messages that do not necessarily pursue the assigned goal (i.e., getting Ron to do more work). Their messages instead may express the arguer’s abusive thoughts about Ron. Conventionals understand communication as a socially regulated activity, and they generate messages that obey the conventions of interaction. They design messages that pursue the goal of getting Ron to work more, but they make sure that they have done so politely and in a socially approved way. Finally, rhetoricals have the fullest appreciation for the possibilities of messages, for they understand that a well-crafted message can redefine identities and circumstances. They design messages to create new definitions that avoid the apparent pitfalls in the situation. Because these MDLs are in order of sophistication, we used the frames to predict them. Entering all eight frames into a multiple regression, we obtained R = .34. Only three of the frames had statistically significant beta weights: identity (b = .31), play (b = –.30), and utility (b = -.20). The professional frame was nearly significant (b = .15, p = .09). These results mean that more sophisticated MDLs are used by people who are more sensitive to the usefulness of arguments in creating personal identities, who are disinclined to argue playfully, and who have somewhat lower expectations about the utility of arguing. The more professional one’s understanding of argument, the more sophisticated a message is produced (this is the nonsignificant finding). The overall R is not especially high, but that was to be expected. We were, after all, trying to predict performance on a specific noninteractive argument with general expectations about face-to-face arguing. The general picture is that the more advanced one’s frames are, the more sophisticated are one’s arguments, especially in regard to their social features. This support is encouraging for the idea that the frames themselves have a sequence of sophistication. The more interesting results for the discussion presented here are those displayed in Table 6.2. This table contains the scale reliabilities, and the intercorrelations among the frames. The professional scale, expected to be expressing the most advanced understandings of face-to-face arguing, has noticeable associations with several of the other perceptual frames.

211

.77 -.46*** -.63 .30*** .43 .17* .22 .12 .15 .23*** .31 -.28*** -.38 .09 .12

-.25*** -.37 -.14* -.19 -.01 -.01 -.25*** -.35 .30*** .43 -.09 -.13

.70

Uncivil

.14 .20 -.15* -.21 .21** .31 -.23*** -.34 .21** .31

.64

Cooperative

.54*** .68 .48*** .65 .25*** .34 .38*** .51

.78

Identity

.16* .21 .30*** .40 .19** .25

.81

Play

.15* .21 .33*** .47

.71

Utility

.06 .09

.70

Dominance

.70

Blurt

Note. N ranges from 192 to 202. All significance tests are two-tailed. Cronbach’s alphas are in the diagonal. Observed correlations are first in each cell, with correlations disattenuated for measurement error in italics beneath them. *p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.

Blurting

Dominance

Utility

Play

Identity

Cooperative

Professional Uncivil

Professional

TABLE 6.2 Associations Among Argument Frames

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Respondents with high scores on this subscale regard arguing as a civil, well-mannered activity, show a cooperative orientation, see opportunities for identity work and practical utility, and are disinclined to use arguing to assert dominance. The perception that arguing is uncivil is associated with competitive and dominating impulses and also predicts little felt potential for other identity work or utility. Cooperatively inclined people don’t use arguing for play or dominance; they see the activity as practically useful. They are also inclined to say what is on their mind. Possibly, they think pleasant and cooperative things and do not need to edit very much, which may be why they self-report high blurting scores. Interest in doing identity work is positively correlated with playfulness and dominance (dominance is a type of identity work). Such people regard arguing as having high utility and indicate that they say what is on their minds. Here, too, blurting does not seem to be indexing ugly impulsive utterances; this distinction was part of the intent behind development of the subscale. Playful people are sensitive to the utility and dominance functions of arguing and also have higher blurting scores than other people. Utility is correlated with dominance uses and blurting. Many associations in Table 6.2 are quite substantial, especially after a correction for unreliability of measurement. They also replicate the sign and rough magnitude of all the statistically significant correlations found by Hample (2003b). That study (Hample, 2003b) also connects the frames (i.e., those for which reasonable subscales had been developed) with several other measures. Gender orientations, for instance, are connected with framing expectations. Masculine respondents showed unusually high scores for identity (r = .39), play (r = .48), and dominance (r = .27). Feminine people were low on play (r = –.40) and dominance (r = -.25) but high in cooperation (r = .30); they were also more likely to have high scores on the professional subscale (r = .17). These gender results are generally similar to those reported by Hample and Dallinger (2002a). In addition, Hample (2003b) correlated the frames to argumentativeness, verbal aggression, and taking conflict personally (TCP). Highly argumentative respondents were unusually likely to use arguing for play (r = .50). Verbally aggressive people indicated that they use arguing to display dominance (r = .57). They were competitive rather than cooperative (r = –.55) and had low scores on the professional subscale (r = –.28). Verbal aggression scores also predicted play (r = .31). This interesting result suggests that verbally aggressive people simply do not understand how hurtful their messages are. The TCP results are also informative. The TCP valence subscale indicates how much the respondent likes conflict. People with high scores on this measure saw arguing as playful (r = .45) and not uncivil (r = –.35).

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The three core TCP measures are direct personalization, persecution feelings, and stress reactions. Stress reactions were uncorrelated with the frames instruments (N for these tests is only 48). However, direct personalization was associated with identity work (r = .31) and incivility (r = .31). This finding suggests that perhaps personalizing conflict is connected to the feeling that one’s self-concept is on the line and is being abused. People who reported being persecuted during conflicts saw domination as a major reason for arguing (r = .41). None of the frames are associated with the expectation that conflicts can improve interpersonal relationships, but pessimism about relational outcomes (i.e., projection of negative relationship effects) is connected to incivility (r = .33) and low professional scores (r = –.32). Additional research would be useful in adding detail to these findings, but already a picture of how people understand arguing emerges. The frames are perceptual predilections. People set themselves to notice evidence of dominance (or not), to see competition everywhere (or not), to expect nastiness and incivility (or not), and so forth. Certainly, these beliefs may be self-fulfilling prophecies. As Meyer (1997) theorized, people register a situation in a way that activates possible messages in the first place. These results have some fairly clear implications for understanding who will spontaneously form dual life spaces. A cluster of intercorrelated perceptions may lead people to focus mostly on self. Wanting to dominate and compete, with their associations to verbal aggressiveness, these people do not invite a very full appreciation of the other arguer as an actual person. The other is mainly a target, a foil to be exploited for one’s own gain. The discourse is expected to be uncivil, and such a perception may well turn out to be an accurate prediction. Even the wish to use argument playfully is suspect in these people; their idea of playfulness may not be universal. In spite of their single-mindedness (or perhaps because of it), they may not see argument as a very useful practical enterprise. In many respects, utility is associated with the opposite understandings that arguing is cooperative and civil and that people can use it to create or reinforce their identities. This general orientation to self is characteristic of masculine individuals and is surely not the viewpoint of most professionals in the field. Life spaces that feature the other person are natural for people who have expectations similar to those of argumentation professionals. Arguing is civil, cooperative, and useful in their view. It should not be used for dominance, but it is very functional for other sorts of identity work. Feminine people tend to have this view, but verbally aggressive communicators do not. Among other things, this cluster of perceptions leads to a lack of pessimism about the relational consequences of participating in a conflict.

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Some approximation of expected climates for arguing can be seen in the associations with cooperativeness and incivility. Cooperative expectations, held by those who have views consistent with professionals, are associated with perceptions of civility, usefulness, a lack of domination activity, and a willingness to speak honestly. Competitive expectations, of course, are the opposite. Incivility—loud voices, insults, close-mindedness, etc.—occurs hand in hand with dominance. Arguments are not expected to be useful, nor is any good identity work likely to happen. People expecting incivility do not share professionals’ understandings of arguing; this distinction is one of the hallmarks of high contrast to argumentation specialists’ views. Although climates and expectations can reinforce themselves, the research mentioned earlier also indicates that the other’s arguments have a lot to do with one’s own. Naturally, content and topic pass from one person to another in an argumentative exchange, but so do aggressiveness, combativeness, and their opposites. Further work remains to be done on the frames instrument. Most pressingly, a state version needs to be constructed to assess how people see an argument that has just finished, is in progress, or is just about to begin. Additionally, the frames need to be held up against actual arguing behavior, outcomes, and emotions. Nonetheless, these expectations may guide the construction of perceptual life spaces, for better or worse. Many of the frames have immediate implications for what goals are salient (e.g., winning, making friends), what possibilities are seen as obstacles (e.g., embarrassment, anger), and what kinds of locomotion are possible (e.g., aggressiveness, honesty). People argue from their selfconstructed life spaces, and argument frames lead people to expect certain things to be present or missing in those dynamic force fields. Frames are expectations about what is likely to be present in a situation and so guide perceptions of what is happening during the argument. Once the argument is underway, however, arguers confront not merely an anticipated situation but a real one. Actual circumstances may confirm or disconfirm expectations, but only if the arguer is paying attention. Some people are less perceptive about what is going on than others. Wilson (1990, 1995) made this point with his research on the cognitive rules model, discussed in chapter 4. A key finding in Wilson’s (1990, 1995, 2002, pp. 168–173; Wilson, Cruz, & Kang, 1992) work is that interpersonal construct differentiation is an individual differences variable that predicts how responsive people are to the actual situation. The basic finding is that highly differentiated people are more sensitive to situational elements, at least the interpersonal ones. Wilson’s studies concern a compliance-gaining task in which another person failed to fulfill an obligation for experimentally varied

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reasons. When asked to say why the person had failed, highly differentiated people were far more affected by their awareness of possible intimacy with the other, their points of view (e.g., pretending to be the person who was wronged, the person who failed to fulfill the obligation, or an observer), and the attributional clarity of the situation. People with low differentiation scores are not as affected by these situational features. When asked to indicate relevant secondary goals (e.g., politeness, relational considerations), only the highly differentiated people consistently gave lists that varied by experimental conditions. Less differentiated people have the same, smaller list of secondary goals across conditions. These findings are consistent with stable results from the constructivist research program. Highly differentiated people are more listeneradaptive when trying to persuade others (Applegate, 1990; Burleson & Caplan, 1998). Differentiation is theorized to be associated with a greater sensitivity to multiple goals (B. J. O’Keefe & Delia, 1982), which permits more possibility of adapting to the other. If one does not notice a positive face goal for the other, for instance, appropriate facework can only be done by accident. The ability to take the other’s perspective is closely connected to interpersonal construct differentiation (r = .56; Allen, 2002). This mental flexibility results in perceptual work that invites dual life spaces and more complex perceptions of the situation. Interpersonal construct differentiation has been even more directly connected to the level of detail in one’s situational perception. Conversational differentiation refers to the number of constructs a person spontaneously applies in describing conversations and has been assessed in two ways. Daly, Bell, Glenn, and Lawrence (1985) asked respondents to write a short essay about positive and negative conversations, and Hample (1993) requested separate essays for good and bad conversations. The Hample study also included the Daly et al. measure and the standard Role Category Questionnaire (RCQ). The two conversational differentiation instruments correlate well (r = .57), and both are associated with the RCQ (r’s are .29 and .37, respectively). All three measures relate to people’s perceptiveness (i.e., their level of detail, the number of things they notice). The RCQ shows how textured one’s reception of other people is, and the other two instruments index the number of features one finds in conversations. These results combine with Wilson’s (e.g., 1990, 1995) work to show that differentiation for people is related to differentiation for conversation and, by extension, that these measures all tell something about how populated people’s life spaces for arguing are. Sparse life spaces are expected for people with low differentiation. They notice less about people, situations, and conversations and so naturally notice smaller numbers of goals and obstacles. The burden of high differentiation is that fewer

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things seem simple. Other goals and obstacles are more likely to be noticed, and in more detail. The ability, whether spontaneous or intentional, to take the other’s perspective leads to a recognition of more of the other person’s needs and expectations, which may populate the arguer’s life space with additional goals and obstacles. Research has not yet connected argument frames with differentiation, but the material just reviewed suggests that these two sorts of individual difference probably interact in important ways. One set of measures, the frames, represents expectations, feelings, climates, and intentions. The other set is an indicant of perceptive ability, an ability whose range is predetermined by the complexity of one’s cognitive architecture. Arguers create their situations and then react to the circumstances that they have defined. Standing outside someone else’s argument, one can confidently identify several real things in the situation—the disagreement, the topic, the other person, the combativeness of the other’s utterances. However, arguers vary in the notice they take of these things. Sometimes everything the other says slides away unnoticed; other times those statements become focal. Sometimes the other person is a key consideration; other times one argues in an interpersonal vacuum. Sometimes a potentially neutral climate is welcomed as encouraging cooperation; other times innocent comments are taken personally (Downey & Feldman, 1996). Sometimes a single goal dominates an arguer’s perceptions; other times a complexity of positive valences makes itself felt. The purpose of this section has been to describe the situations in which people argue. I have insisted that the situation be understood from the viewpoint of the arguer. The reason is that people argue out of the circumstances they believe they are experiencing. An understanding of what and how a person argues requires an understanding of the generative life space and not much else. Should attention turn to issues of effectiveness, appropriateness, and perlocutionary effects, however, analytical flexibility is needed to consider situational requirements that may or may not have been noticed by the arguers (cf. B. J. O’Keefe, 1992; B. J. O’Keefe & Lambert, 1995).

EDITING ONE’S ARGUMENTS Although many people simply say whatever occurs to them, and all people do that from time to time, arguments are often edited before they are let loose on the social world. Arguers frequently balance their personal id-like impulses with what needs to be said and with how it can be said most delicately. Many public arguments are compromises between what

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the arguer really wants to say and what will be heard with the least damage and most benefit. This sort of balancing requires perceptive attention to the other arguer, to social conventions, and to alternative elements in one’s own repertoire. Meyer’s (1997) two-stage model of message production addressed this balance. First, the situation is registered, activating situation–action associations. These associations link the perceived circumstances with actions (messages) that are immediately stimulated by various features of the emerging episode. This first stage has been the implicit topic of the preceding sections, in which I examined the arguer’s construction of his or her immediate life space. It describes how the arguer’s initial impulses come to be. The second stage is what Meyer called action–consequence associations. These link an activated (but still unexpressed) message with its expected consequences. The activated consequences are compared to the arguer’s goals in a cognitive process rather like a test–operate–test– exit (TOTE) unit (G. A. Miller, Galanter, & Pribram, 1960). Messages whose consequences satisfy the activated goals are produced, but messages that stimulate an expectation of an undesirable consequence are suppressed, revised, or uttered almost unwillingly, as a last resort. Meyer expected that the primary goal is operative in the first stage (i.e., generating a possible message), whereas secondary goals such as politeness dominate the second stage of processing, in which the editing takes place. As has nearly always been the case in this chapter, I am again looking at person–situation interactions. The arguer’s perceptual capabilities, prejudiced by his or her predispositions, expectations, and experience, combine with his or her motivation to engage the episode, to generate communicative impulses. These first glimmerings of a message may derive from firm habits, careful conscious consideration, or, most commonly, the in-between case in which a person lets his or her unconscious systems raise a thought almost to one’s lips. For blurters or those arguing under pressure, the thought immediately escapes into the public space. In other instances, the unconscious continues to mull over the possible utterance, measuring it against all the other considerations suggested by the perceived context. Revisions, suppressions, and replacements occur at this point, if at all. I begin by looking at situational features that affect editing. These characteristics of the argumentative episode are subjectively experienced rather than experimentally defined because the argumentative life space is determined from the actor’s point of view. Then I move on to consideration of various individual differences that have been shown to affect editorial choices. Finally, I try to see how situational perceptions interact with individual differences to affect editing.

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Situational Features The cognitive editing research program always had a dual interest in both situations and individual differences as potential explanations for the differences in the way people edit their arguments. Most studies had essentially the same design. Two or three situational stimuli were used, and several individual differences variables were measured. These two classes of variables can be used to explain differences in editorial orientations. Situational effects typically appeared in those studies, but because the stimuli were not systematically varied, the situations could only be dummy coded. This technique afforded an estimate of the effect of situation, which was often substantial. The finding that the dummy-coded situation variables explained 10% of the variance in editorial codes was not unusual, but this sort of result was not very interpretable because the differences between the situations had not been theorized. Eventually, however, it proved possible to cumulate all the data so that the situational effects could be interpreted. Using a set of goals somewhat similar to Dillard’s (Dillard, 1990a, 1990b; Dillard et al., 1989), Hample and Dallinger (2002b) connected the L. C. Miller et al. (1994) situational characteristics to use of the goals in editorial decisions. The goals are those developed in the cognitive editing research program, including effectiveness, own face, other’s face, truth, and others. When a possible message is suppressed on one of those grounds—say, because it would upset the other person—the goal is said to have been in use during the editorial process. A deficiency in the data is that the situations were not rated by the people whose editorial behavior was reported. Instead, after a number of studies on cognitive editing had been long completed, a separate sample of people responded to the original stimuli, indicating the degree to which the situations implied intimacy between arguer and other, the sort of dominance relations that were expectable, and so forth. These results were taken as representative of what the original respondents probably thought about the situations, too. Obviously, there is considerable slippage here and so the data should be regarded as probably underestimating the degree of relation between situations and argument editing decisions. Nonetheless, these data are the most informative on point, to my knowledge. Table 6.3, reported here for the first time, uses the Hample and Dallinger (2002b) data set to show the correlations between these situation features and editorial codes (omitting the residual one, which is rarely interpretable in theoretical terms). The editorial standards are understood as referring to activated goals. That is, when one uses the effectiveness criterion, she or he is thinking about utility; when one uses the

219

–.03 -.04 –.06* -.08 .11*** .15 –.03 -.04 .00 .00 –.03 -.04 –.08** -.12

.00 .00 .08*** .10 –.09*** -.12 –.05 -.07 .05 .07 .04 .06 .06** .09

Too Negative to Use –.02 -.03 .00 .00 –.09*** -.12 .01 .01 –.04 -.06 –.03 -.04 .07** .10

Harm to Self .07** .09 .09*** .12 –.13*** -.18 –.03 -.04 .07** .10 .00 .00 .10*** .15

Harm to Other .03 .04 .03 .04 –.06* -.08 –.04 -.06 .03 .04 .01 .01 .09*** .13

Harm to Relationship

.04 .05 .03 .04 –.05* -.07 .00 .00 –.02 -.03 .06** .08 .05* .07

False

–.03 -.04 –.04 -.05 .00 .00 .04 .06 –.06* -.08 .02 .03 –.02 -.03

Irrelevant

Note. N = 1,692 for all results. All significance tests are two-tailed. Observed correlations appear normally, while correlations corrected for attenuation due to measurement unreliability are in italics (reliabilities are from Hample & Dallinger, 1987b, 2002b). *p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.

Relational consequences

Intimacy

Dominance over other

Right to persuade

Expected resistance

Situational apprehension

Personal benefits

Effectiveness

TABLE 6.3 Associations Between Editorial Standards and Situational Dimensions

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harm to self criterion, she or he is worried about own identity; and so forth. Thus emerges a statistical picture of the sort of message–consequence associations that Meyer (1997) included in her theory. The most striking thing about Table 6.3 is how small the effects are. In spite of a very substantial sample size, fewer than half the correlations are significant. Only a handful of the effects amount to as much as 1% of the variation in editorial activity. Even the modest effects in Table 6.1, which relate the same situational dimensions to endorsement (conceptualized as degree of engagement), are larger than these. Still, relational consequences, expected resistance, and situational apprehension seem to activate a substantial number of the editorial goals. Multiple regressions, predicting each editorial code in turn from the situational features, produce overall measures of effect size for each editorial standard. They show the degree to which the L. C. Miller et al. (1994) situation dimensions affect use of the editorial strategies. These statistics are based on the Hample and Dallinger data set but are reported here for the first time. The results are modest but slightly more encouraging: for effectiveness, R = .14 (p < .001); for too negative to use, R = .15 (p < .001); for harm to self, R = .14 (p < .001); for harm to other, R = .17 (p < .001); for harm to relationship, R = .11 (p < .01); for truth, R = .12 (p < .01); and for relevance, R = .08 (ns). These results, which measure the simple main effects of situation alone, indicate that although editorial work varies from situation to situation, it does not do so dramatically. The most efficient summary of the overall relation between situational features and editorial activity is the canonical correlation, which relates all the situational dimensions to all the editorial choices simultaneously. Hample and Dallinger (2002b) reported three significant roots, with RC’s of .32, 22, and .11. These results include the endorsement and residual codes as well. In summary, all the editorial standards except relevance (which may always be in play, regardless of situation) are predictable by dimensions of the situation, but the extent of the associations leaves considerable variation in editing behavior to be explained. None of these sets of analyses show results as substantial as in many of the individual studies, where the situations are dummy coded but theoretically uninterpretable. Perhaps the L. C. Miller et al. (1994) dimensions do not capture all the situational features that are pertinent to editorial decisions. Three in particular that are important do not appear in the Cody et al. (1983) scales. The first is the expressed resistance of the other arguer. The Cody et al. system measures anticipated resistance, but this is not quite the same thing as experiencing a rebuff. Hample and Dallinger (1998) demonstrated that arguers’ editorial standards become more task oriented and consistently less person centered as the arguer endures a series of rebuffs.

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This result is a clear showing of how one situational element—rebuffs, which are reasonless refusals—creates substantial differences in the degree of activation for one’s editorially relevant goals. Another situational characteristic that does not directly appear in the L. C. Miller et al. (1994) system is the aggressiveness of the other arguer. As discussed earlier, an arguer’s own combativeness is better predicted by that of the other arguer than by one’s own predilections. Although data parallel to those of Hample and Dallinger (1998) have not been collected on this point, to my knowledge, it is certainly not far-fetched to suppose that one’s editorial standards change in the face of aggressive opposition, so that the task-oriented goals become more highly activated and the person-centered considerations decay into the background. Should the situation stimulate frustration and anger, mannerly impulses may disappear altogether. Finally, although the L. C. Miller et al. (1994) system includes relational intimacy, a more specific variable is liking for the other arguer. Dallinger and Hample (1991) showed that people edit differently when arguing with liked versus disliked peers. When trying to persuade a friend or loved one (compared to a disliked peer), people are less concerned with effectiveness and harm to self but much more oriented to protecting the other’s identity and the health of the relationship. Given a positive relationship, then, arguers are more concerned about other than self and are willing to suppress potentially effective arguments to maintain the interpersonal relationship. In interpreting the data in Tables 6.1 and 6.3, especially the effect sizes, one must also allow for the possibility that research relating one’s own situational perceptions to one’s own editorial activity may produce more substantial findings. Nonetheless, I am led to the conclusion that people alter their editing to some degree, depending on the situation. The lack of dramatic effect sizes does not suggest any criticism of the basic theory, which says that secondary goals appear in the message–consequence associations to affect editorial choices. However, these results suggest that differential activation of secondary goals is not well explained by consensual understandings of the nature of the argumentative situation. More precise research will no doubt clarify these findings in the future. Meanwhile, I turn my attention to individual differences. Individual Differences in Editing Different people argue differently in situations that seem similar. This difference is partly due to variations in their inventional repertoires, but some of the distinctions may also appear because of the arguers’ individualized editorial standards. One person may be quite task oriented,

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whereas another may be very conscious of relational and identity issues, for instance. The differing levels of activation for these secondary goals may be due to the different personalities, characters, and abilities of the arguers. The research that Dallinger and I have done on editing one’s own arguments has been attuned to these issues. Most of our studies included one or more individual differences variables. A summary of our results is in Table 6.4, which is considerably more detailed than the similar presentation in Hample and Dallinger (1990). The table indicates the investigations from which the results are drawn, but many of the correlations had to be recalculated from the data sets and are not in the original reports. These results can be roughly put into several categories. First are the traditional personality variables, such as argumentativeness. Second are two ability measures, grade point average and interpersonal construct differentiation. Finally the table gives information on several relational issues. These last issues may be considered as situational factors, but I discuss them here for convenience. Hample and Dallinger (1992) conducted a factor analysis on the editorial codes, and I keep those results in mind in the discussion of Table 6.4. The factors are Effectiveness (i.e., endorsement, effectiveness, and principled objection), Person-Centered Issues (i.e., harm to self, harm to other, and harm to relationship), and Discourse Competence (i.e., truth and relevance). The Discourse factor often combines with the Effectiveness factor. As the table indicates, most of the results bear on personality predispositions. I begin with a group that is intercorrelated: argumentativeness, verbal aggression, and taking conflict personally. Results suggest that several other measures also belong in this little group. As I work through the data, I point out how people orient to the effectiveness issues and the person-centered matters. Endorsement refers to the willingness to accept the listed arguments or, in other words, not to edit at all and is positively associated with both the motive to approach arguments and verbal aggression (Hample & Dallinger, 1987b). The only other element of the general effectiveness group of codes that is relevant here is the basic effectiveness criterion, which is especially used by verbally aggressive arguers. Both predispositions are sorts of assertiveness, and these results confirm that such people tend to be unusually oriented to putting forth arguments whose main virtue is that they may work. The person-centered codes deal with suppressions done to protect self, other, or the relationship. People who wish to avoid arguments are noticeably protective of other’s face, whereas verbally aggressive people are quite unlikely to pay attention to such an issue. Those who directly personalize conflicts are unworried about relational issues (Dallinger, Hample, & Myers, 1990), perhaps as a result of

223

H & D (1987c)

H & D (1987a)

H & D (1987d)

H & D (1987b)

Study

Machiavellianism

Social desirability

Argument appropriate

Argument effectiveness

Extroversion

Other-directedness

Self-monitoring

Interpersonal orientation

Verbal aggressiveness

Argument avoid

Argument approach

Variable

.22 .32 .22 .29

.18 .26

.25 .33

.19 .25

1

.11 .16

.34 .45 –.35 -.54

2

Effectiveness

.18 .32 –.19 -.30

3

4

.12 .17

.22 .31 –.23 -.31 .22 .34

5

Person-Centered

–.13 -.19

6

TABLE 6.4 Significant Associations Between Editorial Codes and Individual Differences

–.16 -.23

–.15 -.27

7

8

–.17 -.25

–.14 -.25

Discourse

(Continued)

.13 .18

–.19 -.26 –.19 -.25

9

Other

224

Sex, female high

Grade point average

Stress reaction

Direct personalization

–.10 -.12 .07 .09

.40 .61 –.21 -.31

1

–.08 -.10 .07 .09

.19 .26 .35 .53

2

.10 .12

3

.08 .10 .06 .07

–.16 -.22

4

.09 .11

–.19 -.26 .37 .56

.12 .15

5

Person-Centered

–.18 -.24

–.21 -.27 –.22 -.30 .46 .70

6

.45 .68

7

8

.18 .27

Discourse

.78 1.00

9

Other

Note. The code numbers are endorse (1), ineffective (2), too negative (3), harm self (4), harm other (5), harm relationship (6), false (7), irrelevant (8), and residual (9). The grade point average results are the mean sample-weighted correlations from the three studies, with .08 taken as a minimum for significance, for N of about 650. The first correlation in each cell is the raw Pearson correlation; the bottom one, in italics, is disattenuated for measurement error. Hample and Dallinger (1987b; also see Hample & Dallinger, 1987a) is used as the best available estimate of the reliability of the editing instrument; perfect reliabilities are assumed for sex and grade point average. H is Hample, D is Dallinger, and M is Myers.

H & D (1987a,c) D & H (1989a) D & H (1994)

Spouse’s editing

D, H & M (1990)

Marital satisfaction

Masculinity

RCQ, disliked peer

RCQ, liked peer

Variable

D & H (1989a)

D & H (1989b)

Study

Effectiveness

TABLE 6.4 (Continued)

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their focus on self or their slight tendency to get caught up in arguments and be combative (Hample, 1999). Those who have definite stress reactions to arguments are unusually oriented to the relevance criterion (Dallinger, Hample, & Myers, 1990), perhaps in an effort to limit the issues being argued about. Some other measures seem to display similar associations. Masculinity (Dallinger & Hample, 1989a) shows patterns similar to those just mentioned. People with a masculine gender orientation make special use of the effectiveness criterion and are remarkably unconcerned about own or other’s face or about the health of the relationship. However, biological sex (Dallinger & Hample, 1994) shows a different pattern for effectiveness, although here, too, men are less concerned than women with identity matters. High self-monitors, those who carefully watch how their messages are being received, are also likely to endorse quite a few candidate arguments (Hample & Dallinger, 1987d). This finding implies that at least some self-monitoring is done out of aggressive impulses (e.g., think of skilled salespeople working on commission). I thus offer this interim summary of the sorts of people who mainly orient to the practical effectiveness of their arguments, often to the cost of person-centered goals. People who are assertive—those who approach arguments and report themselves as verbally aggressive—belong in this group, as do masculine people, those who personalize conflicts, and high self-monitors. The effect of biological sex is somewhat equivocal, but its effect sizes are generally negligible. Table 6.4 also includes two individual differences that have to do with cognitive ability and architecture. These variables are interpersonal construct differentiation, which indicates how complex a system of perceptual categories one has for other people, and grade point average, which indexes academic achievement. These things are quite different, and it is perhaps no more than a coincidence that they show editorial patterns that have some small consistency. People with high construct counts for liked peers are unusually likely to suppress arguments that may harm the other arguer’s face or feelings (Dallinger & Hample, 1989b). On the other hand, people with high construct counts for disliked peers are notable for making rare use of the harm to relationship category. Perhaps an explanatory interlude is in order. Interpersonal construct differentiation is measured by the Role Category Questionnaire (RCQ), which asks for free-form impressions of a liked and a disliked peer (see Burleson & Waltman, 1988). The number of separate descriptors—the constructs—is counted. The usual measure is calculated by adding together these two construct scores. However, Dallinger and I recorded and analyzed the two variables separately because we have found that it

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sometimes makes a difference how a total score comes to be. Most people have higher scores for the liked peer than for the disliked peer, but a few have unusually large scores for the disliked peer. In reading those descriptions, we have often had the feeling that the respondent was dumping on the disliked peer—complaint after complaint, insult after insult. The disliked peer is portrayed in excruciating detail as Satanic, with no redeeming qualities and a multitude of nearly felonious impulses and character traits. We suspect that this unusual negativity is an interesting phenomenon itself, but we leave it to others to pursue the matter. A follow-up study (Dallinger & Hample, 1991), which is omitted from Table 6.4 because of important design considerations that make the simple correlations irrelevant, adds some detail to the findings about interpersonal construct differentiation. In this study, the situational stimuli (e.g., “do a favor for me”) are manipulated so that half the respondents are told to imagine they are addressing their arguments to the liked peer and half address them to the disliked peer. The most interesting results for the present discussion pertain to arguments aimed at the liked peer. The construct count for the liked peer, with the disliked-peer score partialled out, was associated with several of the editorial criteria. Those respondents with an unusually high liked-peer construct count (compared to the disliked score) were quite selective about the arguments they were willing to make (partial r = –.26, p < .01), very oriented to the chance of relational injury (partial r = .22, p < .05), and not very concerned about the truth of what they said (partial r = –.19, p < .05). When predictions are made from the disliked-peer score, with the liked score partialled out (still for the liked-peer target), a different result appears. People with unusually high construct counts for the disliked peer endorsed a high number of candidate messages (partial r = .17, p < .05). When the disliked peer was the target of the argument, none of the important partial correlations are significant, although some contrasts between the high liked-peer and high disliked-peer score results were significant. The two investigations together show an emerging and familiar picture. One sort of person—high overall RCQ scores and high construct counts for the liked peer—is person centered and selective about endorsement. These people are a rough match for those who are argument avoidant, unaggressive in their talk, and interpersonally oriented. The second group of people consists of those who have low overall RCQ scores or whose scores are unusually dominated by a high count for the disliked peer. These people endorse uncritically and eschew identity and relational considerations, out of indifference or imperceptiveness. They are similar to those who like arguing, are verbally aggressive, and believe themselves to be highly effective and appropriate arguers. This last result

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(Hample & Dallinger, 1987a) again suggests that verbally aggressive arguers are often oblivious to the interpersonal damage they do. The results for grade point average are smaller and perhaps less interesting (Dallinger & Hample, 1989a; Hample & Dallinger, 1987a, 1987b). Respondents with better college grades are more selective about what they are willing to say. Compared to the norm, they are less interested in the effectiveness of their arguments than the implications of their arguments for their own self-image. Better students, then, have more argumentative resemblance to people with high interpersonal construct differentiation than to those who are verbally aggressive. Finally, I turn to several relational issues that emerge from the one study whose respondents are not college students (Dallinger et al., 1990). This investigation concerned married couples, generally middle aged and in reasonably satisfying marriages. Both partners participated in the study and responded to stimuli with a presumption that they were trying to persuade one another. A key point of interest is whether the husbands’ and wives’ editorial habits converged. In fact, they did, often to a remarkable degree. Their orientations to selectivity of endorsement, argument effectiveness, harm to other, harm to relationship, and truth were all strikingly similar. Particularly notable is their correspondence on the residual category, which is ordinarily difficult to interpret. This study suggests that in long-term marriages (the average length of marriage in the study is 21.1 yrs), the partners work out idiosyncratic but shared rules for interacting. These editorial standards, known to them but not appearing on our checklist, would account for the huge degree of association between the partners’ uses of the residual category. The other relational issue has to do with partners’ reports of their marital satisfaction. The higher the satisfaction, the fewer arguments were utterable. This finding can be understood in two complementary ways. The healthier the relationship, the fewer things need to be said, or alternatively, the less selective the partners are, the lower their satisfaction. These results are consistent with a statistically nonsignificant trend in Dallinger and Hample (1991), namely that people endorse more messages when arguing with a disliked peer, compared to a liked peer. That study also showed that people have less concern for effectiveness and more protectiveness about other’s identity when trying to persuade a liked arguer. Although some kinds of people are probably more likely than others to be happy in a marriage and to make the sort of commitments needed for a marriage to last for 20 years, these relational issues may be better understood as situational features. It is noteworthy how much more substantial the effects in Dallinger et al. (1990) are than those in Tables 6.1 and 6.4, in spite of the appearance of intimacy as one of the situational

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dimensions. Of course, the married couples were using their own understandings of the relationship rather than a consensual one. Individual differences are important to the way people edit their arguments. To stand above the details, one can summarize by saying that arguments are edited (or not) from two different standpoints, by two different personalities. One is aggressive and task oriented. Less editorial work is done by those who share this orientation, and the suppressions that occur tend to have only effectiveness as their goal. The other general predisposition is person centered. This sort of person is selective about what he or she is willing to say and is particularly insistent that the arguments do not threaten the other’s face or the health of the relationship. The difference suggests a trade-off between effectiveness and appropriateness. To put this contrast into a clear frame, I have a question I sometimes ask my classes. “Suppose,” I say, “that you were in an argument with a romantic partner, and you were losing badly even though you knew you were right. Something occurs to you that would absolutely win the argument, but you know that saying it would hurt your partner’s feelings a lot. Would you say it anyway?” The responses tend to be about evenly divided, with some of the students looking intensely with disbelief at the classmates who put their hands up for the other choice. Readers may have already realized what their choice would be. Some may wish to review the chapter on argument frames. Interaction of Situation and Individual Differences The final point that needs to be made about the editing phase of arguing is that situational and personal elements interact. The literature reviews and reanalyses to this point have essentially focused on main effects. The situational conclusions have been drawn from summaries that neglect the individual differences among the respondents. The individual differences discussion has been based on results that ignore situational effects in the data sets. This is a theoretically unfortunate circumstance, but it is due to the practicalities of study design. We had to make a choice in each investigation. If we had insisted on testing for interpretable interactions between situational and individual differences, we would have needed enormous sample sizes and much more complex designs. Given our interests, we chose to focus on the individual differences and to introduce only enough situational variation into each study to make some generalization plausible. This basic decision resulted in our having dummy coded the different argumentative stimuli in the separate investigations. Eventually, we cumulated enough data, using enough situations, to produce the findings in Tables 6.1 and 6.3, but we repeated very few of the individual differ-

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ences measures. Consequently, we cannot cumulate any findings about interactions between situational and individual-differences variables. However, we can still get some indications of the relative importance of the main and interaction effects. Table 6.5 reports reanalyses of seven data sets (not all of the information was recoverable, so a few variables are omitted). Each investigation used three situations as stimuli. For every study, I calculated canonical correlations, using the nine editorial codes as dependent variables, for four different sets of predictors: the individual differences variables alone, the dummy-coded situational variables alone, the individual differences and dummy-coded situations together, and finally, the individual differences and situational main effects along with the interactions between each individual differences variable and each dummy-coded situation variable. In other words, the four columns in Table 6.5 correspond to the main effect for individual differences, the main effect for situation, the two main effects together, and then both main effects and their interactions. Not all the canonical roots are significant, but nonsignificant ones are included in the table for comparison and to contribute to the averages in the last two rows. One should take some care in drawing conclusions from the table. Its results depend on the selection of particular individual differences variables from an enormous universe of possible measures. Results are similarly dependent on the situations we happened to have written for the studies. The canonical roots are really not comparable from one study to another, in any detail. Only the most general impressions from Table 6.5 ought to be entertained. Inspection of the table shows that the situational and individual differences effects are roughly the same size and their combination is not additive. Particularly interesting is the contrast between the last two columns of results. When the individual differences by situation interactions are added to the predictor side of the equation, the percentage of explained variance increases by about a quarter. This percentage is a rough estimate of the importance of the interactions between personal differences and situational ones. In closing up this whole section on editing, then, I draw some general conclusions as well as the more specific ones that have already been mentioned. Editing is a cognitive process. Normally it has been examined in terms of argument suppression, but at least one study (Hample, 2000a) showed that people revise their arguments using the same criteria as have been shown to be important to suppression. The grounds from which people edit are essentially the goals that are in play for them while arguing: effectiveness, identity issues, relational maintenance, truth, and relevance. Which of the goals are most highly activated depends on three things: what sort of person the arguer is, the nature of the situation that

230

.07 .31***

.26** .23* .06 .12

.15** .12 .32***

.17 .06 .16 .13

root 2 H & D (1987b)

root 2 root 3 H & D (1987c) H & D (1987d)

D & H (1989a) root 2 D, H & M (1990)

root 2 D & H (1991) Average (root 1) Average (root 2)

.12* .20*** .14 .10

.13** .07 .20***

.04 n/a .06 .18***

.04 .10

.13***

Situations

.27** .21*** .23 .18

.20*** .14* .36***

.32* .27 .08 .20**

.12* .44***

.28***

Individual Differences and Situations

.34* .24 .29 .25

.26* .22 .45***

.46 .38 .14 .26*

.16 .62***

.32***

Individual Differences, Situations, and Their Interactions

sex, RCQ (liked peer), RCQ (disliked peer)

marital satisfaction, direct personalization, stress, persecution, relational effects

sex, Machiavellianism sex, self-monitoring, acting, extroversion, otherdirectedness sex, GPA, femininity, masculinity

argument approach, argument avoid, verbal aggression, interpersonal orientation

sex, GPA, argument effectiveness, argument appropriateness

Individual Differences Variables

Note. The average squared canonical correlations in the final two rows are sample-weighted. Only analyses with a second root are included in the second root average. H is Hample, D is Dallinger, and M is Myers. *p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.

.20***

H & D (1987a)

Individual Differences

TABLE 6.5 Squared Canonical Correlations for Individual Differences, Situations, and Interactions

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is calling out the argument, and the interactions between personal and situational features. The literature to date is fullest in regard to the individual differences. More than a few variables—argumentativeness, verbal aggression, interpersonal orientation, and masculinity, for instance—are clearly connected to editorial preferences. People seem to fall into two general groups: those who focus on utility and effectiveness and those whose identity and relational goals are chronically activated. Some tentative conclusions about situational influences on editing are also available, but most need to be explored with more pointed investigative designs. However, a very strong influence of one’s spouse’s editorial habits on one’s own is apparent. This finding may extend to friendships and intimate relationships of lesser duration than the marriages in that study. Lastly, these data suggest almost nothing about the interactions between individual differences and situations, in spite of the awareness that these interactions are almost as important as either the individual differences or situational main effects considered separately. That more research is needed is a commonplace in this sort of scholarly writing. In the case of argument editing, however, the outlines of what needs to be filled in are fairly clear.

PUBLIC ARGUING Most of the research summarized in this chapter stops short of investigating public arguments. When respondents choose something from an investigator-supplied compliance-gaining repertoire, the researcher assumes this selection is more or less what they would say. When they indicate that they endorse one argument but would suppress another, researchers assume the response is an index of what the people’s behavior would be. Obviously, these assumptions are pretty substantial, assumptions that would likely be wrong if examined in enough detail. As a general portrait of human arguing, at least the outlines should be reliable. Nonetheless, there is obvious merit in finally turning attention to the work that examines argument production. The traditions of rhetorical criticism and history of oratory are exactly about public arguments, and many of those essays were concerned with the situational and individual differences that have shaped the greatest or most interesting speeches in history. The relatively young journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs has reinvigorated that sort of scholarship, which regrettably fell out of favor in the last third of the 20th century due to an overweening commitment to theory. However, that traditional sort of case study analysis is designed neither to cumulate nor to connect with

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the social scientific research that has been the main focus in this book. Consequently, I do not find it immediately helpful in describing interpersonal arguing and do not discuss it further. Instead, I have collected the available social science research and organized it into five categories: the quantity of arguments produced, the appropriateness of those arguments, the effectiveness of them, their technical quality, and their ethics. I have tried to obtain work that includes the same variables that I have been exploring in this chapter. Regrettably, I found no research that connects the various phases of arguing together. That is, no studies are available to track the decision to engage to the initial construction of the situation to the editorial work to production of public arguments.

Quantity of Arguments Produced My first concern in this section is how much arguing takes place. Some people are reluctant to engage in arguing at all, others do so halfheartedly, some people endorse nearly any suggested argument, and others are more selective. What sorts of people are which? I have found nothing on situational effects. In fact, the studies I reviewed all had essentially the same sort of context: Respondents were asked to converse in some sort of experimental or educational circumstance, mainly because the researcher asked. Circumstances (e.g., relationship with other arguer, power differences) were not manipulated. Although this design is somewhat artificial, I have formed the impression in my own work that people seem to interact naturally in such a setting and are even bothered very little by the presence of cameras or tape recorders. Still, it is important to remember that experimenters generally do not ask people to undertake highly emotional arguments, probably because of ethical concerns. Several studies investigated the relation between argumentativeness and argument volubility. In a study of small group deliberation, Kazoleas and Kay (1994) reported a main effect for argumentativeness. They showed that participants who were highly motivated to approach arguing argued more. They were also more responsive, generating more counterarguments during the discussions. Other work modified this finding, indicating that argumentativeness interacts with other variables. Boster et al. (1989) indicated that people high in argumentativeness generate more arguments only when they are also low in verbal aggressiveness. Boster et al. also showed that people high in argumentativeness used a greater diversity of argument types (but see Neer, 1994). Levine

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and Boster (1991) reported that the largest number of arguments in their study was produced when a person who is high in argumentativeness interacted with someone low on the scale. However, they indicated that the condition with the smallest number of arguments was that in which two low-scoring people conversed. Although the presence of moderating variables is important, these studies generally suggest that people who have the highest motivation argue the most. Interpersonal construct differentiation has an even clearer connection to the quantity of arguments a person makes. Kline (1988) reported that, in a written task, highly differentiated people generated more arguments that those people who have lower RCQ scores. Similar findings appear throughout the constructivist literature (see Delia, O’Keefe, & O’Keefe, 1982, p. 163; D. O’Keefe & Sypher, 1981). B. J. O’Keefe and Delia (1979), for instance, reported a correlation of r = .69 between RCQ score and number of arguments made. Sypher and Sypher (1988) reported that the parallel association was r = .28. In that investigation, when frequency of interaction with the persuasive target was partialled out, r = .31. This latter finding seems to eliminate one alternative hypothesis for the general result (viz., that people generate more arguments when they know the target better). The superior perceptiveness of highly differentiated people, in conjunction with their greater ability to process social information, may make them both more able and more confident in arguing. As discussed in chapter 3, more differentiated people also have somewhat larger repertoires. Whatever the explanation, however, the literature shows that such people definitely generate more arguments. A general willingness to communicate with others may also predict the amount of arguing. Nussbaum (2002) explored the relation between extroversion and message production. In his first study, he selected eight sixth-grade students, four highly extroverted and four highly introverted but matched on verbal skills, and gave them a group discussion task. Each group had four students, homogenous on extroversion. The extroverted students produced more contradictions, counterexamples, and evidentiary messages than did the introverted students, whether the analysis was done on frequencies or percentages (the extroverts talked about twice as much as the introverts). The results suggest that extroverted children are far more likely to engage arguments and to pursue them. The introverted children, on the other hand, made more design claims (the topic concerned urban design, a subject from the students’ regular classes), and in fact these claims were their most common discussion move. The design claims in Nussbaum’s study were not simple assertions of a conclusion; they were substantial constructive arguments about how to accomplish something, and Nussbaum considered that

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they were conciliatory productions in this context. He concluded that the extroverted children were more conflictive and the introverted children more constructive in their argumentation. In support of this interpretation, he noticed that the introverted children were more flexible about changing sides during a discussion. Nussbaum then replicated the study using 16 preservice teachers as respondents. Using topics appropriate to the respondents’ teaching careers, the main results of the children’s study were replicated. He summarized both studies by saying that introverted respondents orient more to coconstructive discourse, whereas extroverted respondents are more conflictual. Although I have not found studies that are exactly on point, the research on loneliness is also suggestive. Bell (1985) asked lonely and nonlonely people to talk with one another to get acquainted. He reported that the lonely people talk less, interrupt less, are less attentive, and are less involved. Using self-report measures, Bell and Daly (1985) showed that loneliness is associated with less assertiveness, less openness, less attentiveness, and less responsiveness. This study also shows that loneliness is positively correlated with introversion and communication apprehension. Although quantity of arguing was not measured in either study, a pattern of correlates and effects for loneliness strongly supports the expectation that lonely people argue less often, less responsively, and less forcefully. The results for argumentativeness, extroversion, and loneliness constitute an interpretable pattern. McCroskey, Heisel, and Richmond (2001) showed that argumentativeness is positively associated with extroversion, as are assertiveness, responsiveness, compulsive communication, and tolerance for disagreement. Communication apprehension is negatively correlated with extroversion. Given the associations between loneliness, extroversion, and communication apprehension (Bell & Daly, 1985), one can conclude that the most outwardly oriented people also argue the most. To this, I add the realization that those who are most perceptive about others (i.e., are most interpersonally differentiated) are also prolific arguers. Although I am wary about combining a cognitive structure variable like interpersonal construct differentiation with personality variables like extroversion, I note some connections. One’s differentiation puts a cap on one’s capacity to notice the other in detail and so to respond to him or her. Communication apprehension and loneliness have similar empirical connections. Thus, the findings are fairly consistent. The most voluble arguers are those who are most eager to interact, most interested in arguing, and most capable of engaging another person.

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The Appropriateness of Argument Making a large number of arguments can be a curse or a blessing, depending on their quality. One element of competent arguing is to be appropriate—that is, to respect social conventions, to confirm the other’s projected identity, and to strengthen or maintain the interpersonal relationship between the arguers. Appropriateness is very much a situational consideration because some circumstances call for bluntness and others for delicacy and some people are tolerant of criticism whereas others are oversensitive. Unfortunately, the research on this point is chiefly oriented to individual differences. My main hope is that the universality of politeness phenomena (Brown & Levinson, 1987) permits some general conclusions. Perhaps the key measure is interpersonal construct differentiation. In the early years of the research program, the most recurrent dependent variable was what the investigators called listener adaptation or personcenteredness (for reviews, see Applegate, 1990; Burleson, 1989; Burleson & Caplan, 1998; Nicotera, 1995). The paradigmatic study involved first an assessment of people’s (often children’s) interpersonal construct differentiation, and then respondents produced a persuasive message. The messages were then coded according to a hierarchy of adaptiveness. Lowrated messages may or may not pursue the assigned goal and are selffocused (e.g., “I really, really want a pony”). Higher rated messages acknowledge and adapt to some feature of the other person (e.g., “If I had a pony, I’d be outside and you’d have more time to watch TV.”) The distinction reflects a change in the locus of the reason from self to other and presumably the adoption of a dual life space. This move makes the higher rated messages more adaptive. One of the most secure findings in all the communication literature is that differentiation and listener adaptiveness are positively associated. In a classic essay, B. J. O’Keefe and Delia (1982) suggested a reinterpretation of that body of findings. They pointed out that as one moves upward in the coding hierarchy, an inevitable consequence is that more and more goals are taken into account by the argument. At low levels, the arguer only pursues his or her own main life goal (e.g., get a pony). The higher levels, however, require that the other be appeased, pleased, or confirmed and that the appeal be made politely. This retheorization of listener adaptiveness as attention to multiple goals is entirely congenial to the approach I take in this book. (It does not preclude the point that the higher coded arguments actually are more listener adapted, of course.) This sort of conjoining of own with other’s goals is characteristic of those who use the more advanced arguing frames, as discussed in chapter 2.

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Notice of and adaptation to the other’s needs are nearly defining features of appropriate communication. Coalescent arguing is typically more appropriate than eristic, and the coalescence is partly about content and partly about interpersonal matters. Argumentativeness is also directly associated with appropriateness (for reviews, see Infante & Rancer, 1996; Rancer, 1998). Highly argumentative people are less likely to use inappropriate argumentative strategies or to exert their power to force compliance. They are better able to participate in highly emotional family conflicts without inviting or resorting to violence. They participate more openly in workplace discussions and encourage others to do so as well, without experiencing or instigating defensiveness. Highly argumentative people tend to produce more arguments and are more interested in engaging in argumentative exchanges. Plausibly, they have more experience in arguing—they have seen more of the good and the bad than shy people have. Whether this greater appropriateness is directly due to the positive motivations of people high in argumentativeness or whether it follows from more elaborate learning opportunity, many good reasons explain the basic result. Others perceive this distinction also; people generally prefer to argue with a person high in argumentativeness than with someone who is low. It is interesting that the measures reviewed in this section are associated with both a greater quantity of arguing and its greater appropriateness. Apparently, people make use of their experience—and the inclinations that led them to acquire it—to become not merely more effective or more courageous in conflicts, but also more pleasant to argue with. The Effectiveness of Argument When I sketched my plan for this chapter, without thinking about it very much I assumed that for this section on effectiveness I could simply summarize some of the leading results on personal and situational variables from the persuasion literature. Whatever makes someone more credible would be associated with more effective arguments, I thought. Now that I am writing, however, I realize that this summary is not even remotely possible. The best researched individual differences among persuasive sources are credibility, physical attractiveness, liking, and similarity (for reviews, see D. O’Keefe, 2002; Stiff & Mongeau, 2003). Generally speaking (very generally, for there are quite a few moderating variables), these things all make arguers more effective, but just because the arguer is more effective, the argument may not be. As Rudolph Agricola remarked more than half a millennium ago in his de Inventione Dialectica (ii. 3), “. . . there are

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many who believe the most incredible and contradictory things because they listen to the speaker, not his speech” (McNally, 1967, p. 408). The fundamental problem is that these source characteristics are now understood to be alternatives to arguments. The two main dual-process theories of attitude change (Chaiken, 1987; Petty & Cacioppo, 1986) both indicate that persuasion can occur in one of two ways (or both simultaneously). One way is strenuous and requires close attention to the argument and careful, critical evaluation of it. The other way is easy and involves taking notice of superficial cues that someone’s advice ought to be taken. The source characteristics are stimuli for the second process. Given the findings on argument appropriateness, it is not surprising that highly argumentative people are also more credible (Rancer, 1998, p. 157), that highly differentiated children are better liked by their peers (Burleson, Delia, & Applegate, 1992), or that more differentiated writers are regarded as more socially and physically attractive (but no more credible) than sources scoring lower on the RCQ (Powers, Jordan, Gurley, & Lindstrom, 1986). In other words, the very personal characteristics that are associated with more and better arguing experience are also connected with what are called peripheral or heuristic cues in the persuasion literature. People high in argumentativeness and interpersonal construct differentiation are more effective when arguing. But we do not know whether this is because they are more credible or attractive, or because they make better arguments. I should have realized all this in the first place because I know how source characteristics are paradigmatically studied. In a typical credibility experiment, one message is written and then attributed to two different sources, one high in credibility and the other low. Attitude changes are compared to the credibility conditions to see if credibility made a difference. The same methodology is normally used for attractiveness, similarity, and other variables as well. The point of the design is exactly to hold constant the argument—its appropriateness, its effectiveness, its technical quality. The literature on situational characteristics is no more helpful. For instance, the same message may be delivered in print, through audio tape, or in person; the same argument may be made with and without distraction, or it may be made first or last in an otherwise identical message. This general paradigm controls for arguments effects, and studies that hold arguments constant tell little about them. On the assumption that credibility, attractiveness, and liking are deserved, one may expect that such people would make better arguments, but disentangling the source and situational effects from those of the argument is a very substantial undertaking. Even the persuasion literature that seems on point—that dealing with argument strength or quality—is irrelevant because argument strength is operationalized by reference to

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people’s reactions to it, not by reference to anything having to do with the content of the argument (D. O’Keefe, 1995). Nor is the operationalization used in tests of the argument quality explanation for group choice shifts much better (e.g., Boster & Mayer, 1984). Studies that assess argument effectiveness directly and intrinsically, while accounting for source and situational variables, are needed. Only in this way will researchers discover what sorts of people, regardless of credibility and similar factors, generate the most effective arguments, and in what circumstances they do it. Until then, one can only hypothesize that the people who are most argumentative and most appropriate may also be most effective. The Technical Quality of Argument An argument that has high technical quality is one that deserves to be effective, whether it is or not. Providing evidence is a good thing, as is using a tight warrant and forming a claim that accurately reflects its degree of support. Fallacies are structurally bad arguments, even though they seem attractive. Given the research on effectiveness, it is not surprising that little work on this precise topic has been done, either. Limon and Mitchell (2001) reported that 58% of the participants in their study of face-to-face arguing provided no evidence at all (regrettably, they collected no data on individual or situational differences). This result implies the importance of studying such things directly and not taking for granted that a spontaneously generated persuasive message is technically competent. Researchers simply do not know at this point what sort of person makes the best arguments, although one assumption is that smarter people do, and evidence suggests that people trained or experienced in argumentation are at least better at identifying good arguments (Allen, Berkowitz, Hunt, & Louden, 1999). The Ethical Quality of Argument In addition to appropriateness, effectiveness, and technical quality, a final element of competent arguing is that it should be ethical (Brockriede, 1972; Wallace, 1963; Weaver, 1953). Quite a few ideas are implied by ethical, but a key one is that the argument should be true—at least insofar as the arguer can tell. For complex matters, the arguer should engage in a public or private dialectic and do the needed research before taking on the moral responsibility of trying to change another person’s mind or actions. In simpler matters, the arguer should know the truth and tell it fully, not that people necessarily do. Several investigations have shown that lying is quite common (e.g., Hample, 1980; Turner, Edgley, &

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Olmstead, 1975; for a review, see O’Hair & Cody, 1994). Most of the deceptions are white lies, however, and may not be regarded as harmful or unethical. Only about 21% of undergraduates believe that lying is always wrong (O’Hair & Cody, 1994). Situational characteristics seem unusually important in predicting deception because so many people believe that circumstances can justify a lie. Equivocal messages—not quite lies, but not quite clearly the truth, either—naturally arise when the arguer faces an avoidance–avoidance conflict or noticeable interpersonal uncertainty (Bavelas, Black, Chovil, & Mullett, 1990, ch. 4; Chovil, 1994). In fact, Bavelas et al. found situational effects so strong that they concluded that individual differences are probably irrelevant (p. 96). This conclusion seems a little too strong to apply to deception generally, but certainly people commonly adhere to a sort of situational determinism in assessing the propriety of lying (O’Hair & Cody, 1994). When deception would benefit the other, when it would protect a relationship, when it would smooth over a minor issue—in these circumstances people are ready to lie. Situational elements, then, seem critical to predicting the ethical quality of arguments. Surely some individual differences must enter into the equation as well. Some people, by inclination or circumstance, are more likely to know the truth (cf. Newman & Newman, 1969), which is obviously a precondition to telling it. At the extremes, some people are so mentally disturbed that they lie habitually or do not even know the truth about basic features of their lives. However, these considerations show how the construction of the situations, rather than personality differences, is likely to be pivotal in this element of argument production. Knowledge About Public Argument I have tried to summarize the relevance of individual and situational differences on five aspects of public arguments: their quantity, appropriateness, effectiveness, technical quality, and ethics. In this I have been only somewhat successful. For quantity and appropriateness, strong indications suggest that several personal variables—interpersonal construct differentiation and argumentativeness—are quite important. Situational features appear to be the dominating considerations in ethical matters. I have had little to say about either effectiveness or technical quality, however, due to a lack of relevant research. Considerably more information is required for a very full descriptive theory of how public arguments come to be and whether they are likely to satisfy our normative standards. For now, I rely on the research dealing with editing and generation and endure the assumption that what people select on checklists reflects their arguing.

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CONCLUSIONS In this chapter, I have traced individual and situational differences through four stages of argument production: the decision to engage, the first flash of possible arguments in a situation, the possibilities for editorial work, and the public appearance of the arguments. I have restricted myself to literature that bears fairly directly on arguing, omitting work that may suggest further hypotheses. Research on the chilling effect (Cloven & Roloff, 1993), for instance, suggests that uneven alternatives in romantic relationships cause the low-power partner not to engage in complaining. I have also omitted treatment of the literatures on selfdisclosure (Petronio, 2002) and comforting (Burleson, 2003), both of which fully parallel the topics covered here. I have left out these topics because of my uncertainty about the degree to which elaborated arguing necessarily takes place in complaining, disclosing, and comforting. These tasks could all be accomplished by means of reason giving, however, and so these literatures are likely places to look for suggestions about extending the understanding of arguing. Arguing, as any human production, requires both motivation and ability. Excepting person perception, ability has largely been taken for granted in this chapter, although it is important in generating argumentative repertoires in the first place (see chap. 3). Motivations derive from personal preferences and felt situational requirements. I have explored a host of personality variables and identified many important situational features. Several individual differences variables—interpersonal construct differentiation and argumentativeness, for instance—have repeatedly been focal matters. Other work should probably calibrate itself against these variables because they presently seem to be in empirical control of the theoretical descriptions. Research on situations is somewhat less secure. The L. C. Miller et al. (1994) analysis of situations has breadth and generality, but matters outside of that list seem to be important to the processes involved in arguing. No project in the humanities or social sciences is complete, and it is not worrisome that this review of research has displayed some gaps. Although additional work on these points would certainly be valuable, I am convinced that researchers already have a serviceable general description of arguing and possess valuable information about how differences among people and different qualities of social densities work separately or in combination to generate different sorts of arguing.

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Arguing in Conversations

Earlier chapters have examined the theoretical nature of arguing, the orientations people take toward the activity, the inventional and editorial processes they undertake, the feelings people have about arguing, the effects of situations on argument production, and the influence of individual differences on how people argue. Throughout, I have insisted, but sometimes hollowly, that arguing is an interpersonal phenomenon. Due partly to the organization I have imposed on all this material but also due partly to the content of previous research, I have mostly examined arguments one person at a time. This chapter explicitly redresses that inadequacy and finally moves to consideration of what public arguments look like. For a while, a small literature (Brockriede, 1977; Burleson, 1979; Hample, 1985b; Jackson, 1983; McKerrow, 1981; Willard, 1979a) pursued the question of the essential character of argument: Is it fundamentally a structure of interconnected meanings? Is it most basically a cognitive representation of those meanings? Is it most truly a thing that a person makes? Is it, at its core, an interpersonal cooperative enterprise? A case can be made for affirmative answers to each of these questions, and each bit of reasoning therefore counters the others (Hample, 1988). One’s personal experience of arguing is simultaneously structural, cognitive, emotional, authorial, and interactive. All these elements are present in every argumentative exchange. In this chapter, I use conversation as a lens to try to see all the factors at once. The chapter begins with a normative description of interpersonal argument. In that section, I explore what needs to be done for people to 241

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reach the best joint conclusion when they exchange reasons. The remainder of the chapter is descriptive. I discuss how people make small arguments during the tiniest moments of conversation and how whole interactive episodes are organized to work out disagreements. I do not restrict the discussion to matters of content and structure because of the foundational reality that people carry all their personal commitments and needs into any interaction, including argumentative ones.

A NORMATIVE THEORY OF INTERPERSONAL ARGUING From the Greek sophists onward, nearly every treatment of argumentation has carried a normative thread. Good arguments are valid, true, effective, aesthetic, practically wise, properly conducted, or several of these things at once. Of the many available choices for a normative theory, however, I feel that pragmadialectics is the richest and most immediately useful. Pragmadialectics is a late 20th-century theory developed at the University of Amsterdam under the leadership of Frans van Eemeren and the late Rob Grootendorst (leading statements are van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 1983a, 1992, 2003, 2004; van Eemeren, Grootendorst, Jackson, & Jacobs, 1993). The theory takes its name from two ideas. Pragma refers to pragmatics. Semiotics, the theory of signs, is divided into three studies, all of which are relevant to argumentation (see Littlejohn, 1978, ch. 4). Semantics considers the meanings of signs, the relation between a word and the world to which it refers. Syntactics concerns itself with grammar and structural connections among signs, the relation of a sign to other signs. Pragmatics is about the uses of signs, the relation of a sign with people. Persuasion, for instance, is a pragmatic topic because it deals with the way signs change people’s attitudes, beliefs, values, intentions, and behaviors. The study of communication in relationship formation is another pragmatic topic because this literature examines how messages affect definitions of self, other, and relationship. Because arguing is aimed at creating or changing people’s meanings, it is also a suitable topic in pragmatics. The second part of the theory’s title, dialectics, should require little elaboration by this point in the book. This term refers to the study of how people meet in argument to come to jointly reasoned conclusions. The topic of pragmadialectics is the way people should interact to experience the most reasonable exchange and test of arguments. Pragmadialectics has a rational bent, which leads researchers to consider only the reasons given and evaluated during exchanges and the conversational moves that are needed to contextualize the arguing. They also

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insist on the public textuality of arguments; the theory therefore is restricted to things that are said and what meanings those things commit arguers to hold. The theory, on purpose, excludes cognitive, relational, and emotional matters, but I redress those shortcomings later. The clear focus of pragmadialectics is useful because it directs attention to how the apparent content of an argument must be handled by two people who want to find an answer to some question. Episodic Structure The overall normative structure of an argumentative episode can be divided into four stages (van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 1983a, ch. 4). To display the structure cleanly, the pragmadialecticians normally confine themselves to a single topic of dispute, although the analysis has been extended to more complex discussions as well. Each stage must occur in order for the discussion to be wholly and ideally reasonable. Only one stage involves the exchange and testing of reasons. The other stages are needed to contextualize and establish the grounds and outcomes of the reason exchange. The stages are called confrontation, opening, argumentation, and concluding. The confrontation stage, which is more aggressively named than it may have been, is the simple presentation of disagreement. One person makes a claim, and the other individual casts doubt on it. That is, the second person expresses hesitancy but need not give counterreasons or even grounds for objection. In response, should the discussion move forward, the first person continues to hold his or her point of view, and the second person continues to express hesitation. The first assertion is confronted with doubt, in other words. No arguing is taking place (at least in the sense of reason giving), and the participants do not confront each other in a personal way. The mutual awareness of a disagreement sets up the possibility of the second stage. A number of things can happen when two people become aware that they disagree. Prominently, they can simply change the topic or otherwise leave the field. However, if an argument is to take place, they need to move on to the second stage of a critical discussion, opening. In this stage, the second person issues a challenge to the first person, a challenge to defend the disputed claim. The first person then accepts the challenge. This challenging does not need to be melodramatic and is often accomplished with a glance or a simple question. This stage thus includes an initial agreement, a joint decision to pursue the matter. Critical discussion is founded upon this essential cooperativeness. The opening stage also involves the two participants agreeing on the rules of the discussion. This agreement is hardly ever done explicitly because most arguers more or

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less assume that they know how a fair and thoughtful discussion needs to be conducted. However, a critical discussion needs a grounding in agreed-upon procedures, and these are settled (or more often, assumed) during the opening stage, before any topical arguing takes place. I return to these agreements later. The third stage, argumentation, is the one that contains arguing. The other three stages contextualize this one. In this stage, the original protagonist puts forth his or her reasons, and the antagonist either accepts them or not. The second person still does not have to issue constructive counterarguments of his or her own, in principle. He or she may simply question, press, or challenge what the protagonist says. (If the second person makes substantial arguments, we would need to examine the confrontation, opening, argumentation, and concluding stages for that argument as well. This potential complication is the reason that I am modeling a single line of argument.) The exchange of argument and response goes on as long as it needs to, and as many subordinate issues are examined as are required by the conversation. The dialectic is supposed to continue until it is rationally concluded, with one arguer acknowledging that the other is right. This outcome is expressed in the final stage, concluding. The protagonist reasserts his or her original claim, with the antagonist withdrawing the expression of doubt, or the protagonist withdraws the original claim due to an inability to defend it. The arguers jointly observe that agreement has been reached, cooperatively declare the outcome, and decide together to end the discussion. Concluding happens rather implicitly much of the time. This discussion is not supposed to be a description of what happens when two people argue. Instead, it is a description of what is supposed to happen, of what is logically required for a freely rational exchange. Even though many of the detailed agreements may not be explicit, the commitments still exist and arguers remain responsible for them. One cannot properly pursue an argument, for instance, in the absence of a mutual decision to do so. Nor can two people argue freely without a joint commitment to let both people talk or without a shared understanding that arguers have to defend what they say. The idea is not to describe what people inevitably do but to provide a set of standards that can be used to understand when and why an exchange has gone badly (e.g., Weger, 2001, 2002). In fact, the sequence is unremarkably simple: notice of disagreement, decision to engage, argumentative exchange, conclusion. The value of the pattern is not so much in the list of four stages but in the analyses that the list leads to. The pragmadialecticians presented the material in far more detail than I wish to, but I continue to explore three key analytical

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threads—required speech acts, required joint rules for the conduct of the discussion, and the fallacies that result when people do not carry out their commitments properly. Required Speech Acts Each of the four stages must be accomplished by certain speech acts. Only these acts are relevant (van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 2004, ch. 4), and each is required. For instance, the confrontation stage requires that the protagonist make an assertion, that the antagonist cast doubt, that the protagonist uphold the original assertion, and that the antagonist uphold the doubt. Anything else is rationally irrelevant to the critical discussion at this point. Each stage has its own short list of required speech acts (see van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 1983a, pp. 99–100, for a convenient summary; also see van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 1992, ch. 4). In chapter 3, I reviewed Kline’s (1979) adaptation of classical stasis theory to speech acts. Kline pointed out that every speech act has certain felicity conditions (e.g., assumptions about what must be so in the originating situation). These felicity conditions specify what is required, and therefore potentially arguable, about each speech act, and that is why she called them stases. Making an assertion requires that the speaker believe the assertion to be true, making a challenge requires that the speaker believe that the other person has not fully made his or her case, and so forth. Listing the required speech acts is a shorthand way of listing the two speakers’ commitments at any point of the discussion. This list in turn specifies what the rationally relevant grounds for argument must be. Utterances that can be traced to a felicity condition for a required speech act are rationally relevant. Utterances that do not connect in this way are at best irrelevant and at worst a threat to the capacity to reach a proper conclusion. If the analysis ended here, it would still be valuable, but the Amsterdam scholars also considered what turns out to be a very subtle question: What is the speech act we call arguing? It must be some sort of speech act because it is a human action done with words (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969). D. O’Keefe (1982) was among those to have confronted this question. He decided that neither argument nor arguing is quite right as a label for a speech act and ended with some real uncertainty about whether his preferred term, argument-making, is a speech act, either (see n. 6, pp. 12–13). The essential problem is that an argument is a network of things—claim, evidence, and a connection between them, at least. Making a claim is the speech act of asserting, and offering evidence and connecting evidence to claim are assertions, too. However, an assertion is not always an argument, and even a sequence of assertions may not add up

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to an argument, either (e.g., a joke may be a series of assertions). The network isn’t quite traceable to a particular, specific utterance. So what is the speech act of arguing, and what are its felicity conditions? The Amsterdam scholars said that arguing is an illocutionary act complex (van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 1983a), or, later, that it is a complex speech act (van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 1992). Under either label, they maintained that an argument is a speech act that is made up from ordinary, elementary speech acts. Arguing subsumes asserting and is not to be confused with it. Argumentation is a constellation of assertives, and the constellation is recognized as the argument. Even though they are complex speech acts, arguments have the same sort of felicity conditions as a simple speech act, divided most generally into identity and correctness conditions (van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 1992, ch. 3). The identity conditions must be felicitously satisfied for something to be recognized as an argument and include the standard propositional content and essential conditions for a speech act. Correctness conditions specify what needs to be so if the utterance is to be regarded as a competent argument. These conditions include the usual preparatory conditions as well as what the pragmadialecticians call the responsibility conditions (the more usual term is sincerity conditions, though I too prefer the term responsibility because it emphasizes that speakers are committed to certain things, just by virtue of having argued). Following are the formal definitions of the felicity conditions for an argument (van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 1992). The definitions refer to an arguer having made a sequence of assertions (1, 2, . . . , n) in support of a proposition (p) that represents the arguer’s overall claim or standpoint. 1. Propositional content condition: utterances 1, 2, . . . , n constitute the elementary speech acts 1, 2, . . . , n, in which a commitment is undertaken to the propositions expressed. 2. Essential condition: the performance of the constellation of speech acts that consists of the elementary speech acts 1, 2, . . . , n counts as an attempt by the speaker to justify p, that is to convince the listener of the acceptability of his standpoint with respect to p. 3. Preparatory conditions: a. The speaker believes that the listener does not accept (or at least not automatically or wholly accept) his standpoint in respect to p. b. The speaker believes that the listener is prepared to accept the propositions expressed in the elementary speech acts 1, 2, . . . , n.

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c. The speaker believes that the listener is prepared to accept the constellation of elementary speech acts 1, 2, . . . , n as an acceptable justification of p. 4. Responsibility conditions: a. The speaker believes that his standpoint with respect to p is acceptable. b. The speaker believes that the propositions expressed in the elementary speech acts 1, 2, . . . , n are acceptable. c. The speaker believes that the constellation of the elementary speech acts 1, 2, . . . , n is an acceptable justification of p. (p. 31) Nothing structural offers a clue as to how one set of assertives is recognized as an argument and another set isn’t. The idea is that the listener understands the illocutionary force (i.e., speaker’s intent) of the sequence and realizes that the set of statements is also something larger, a constellation of things whose meaningful relations constitute the sort of content network that is understood to be an argument. That people reliably make this sort of effort after coherence is due to the consistent drive to order things and to find patterns wherever possible. The widespread resonance of Toulmin’s (1958) layout of arguments, for instance, suggests that it is a pattern that is consistently recognized, and schemata like Toulmin’s may be used as descriptive supplements to what the list of specifications generally requires. The felicity conditions are fairly straightforward. The propositional condition simply requires that things be said, things that are understandable as simple speech acts, such as assertions. The key phrase in the essential condition, as always, is counts as. A competent speaker conveys and a competent listener perceives that the sequence of speech acts is a coherent constellation that includes a reason for the conclusion. Without satisfactory performance on these two general points, the speaker’s statements will not be heard as an argument. The speaker will not have given a bad argument; he or she will not have argued at all. The preparatory conditions acknowledge that arguing is done to change the listener in a particular way. Therefore, the speaker needs to believe that disagreement exists and that the listener will grant adherence both to the speaker’s individual speech acts and to the constellation they comprise. The speaker may be wrong in these assumptions, but he or she is committed to these beliefs anyway. Otherwise, the arguer would certainly have said different things. The last set of felicity conditions specifies that the speaker is responsible for whatever she or he says—for the overall conclusion, for the individual speech acts, and for their assembly into an argument. The preparatory and responsibility condi-

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tions combine to define the correctness conditions for arguing. Should a speaker not satisfy one or another of these specifications, she or he has argued, but badly. If a person argues, she or he is committed to all these specifications, whether they are explicitly mentioned or not. When people clearly do not accept these constraints, they are not really arguing or not arguing competently. For instance, when someone repeats a disagreeable argument to show how offensive it is, it is usually clear that the speaker is not committing to the propositions (Condition 1) and does not really support p (Condition 2). This situation happens when someone is being ironic or sarcastic (e.g., “Sure, I should clean up my room right now. I’m just a slave around here, and that’s what slaves do”). The fact of arguing carries with it the message that the listener does not already agree or understand (Conditions 3a, 3b, 3c), and so if a parent says obvious things to a child, the child may (perceptively) react to the utterances as poorly veiled criticisms rather than as constructive arguments. When a teacher explains an old theory to prepare for showing how a new one is better, the instructor is not taking responsibility for the statements or conclusions in the old theory (Conditions 4a, 4b, 4c). I have previously suggested that several sorts of noncontroversial things are still arguments, potentially good ones, but these arguments do not satisfy the felicity conditions. Earlier, especially in chapter 2, I have said that people can argue for fun or to display their identities. These sorts of activities do not meet the preparatory requirements because playful episodes and noncontroversial identity displays do not necessarily assume any disagreement or true reluctance on the part of the hearer (Conditions 3a, 3b, 3c). Nor, in the case of play, is the speaker really intending to take responsibility for what he or she says (Conditions 4a, 4b, 4c). Certainly the Dutch theorists have described the paradigmatic case of argument. Noncontroversial episodes, which I call good arguments although they would not, are presenting themselves as arguments rather than being standard arguments. They take the form and nature of arguments to propose a pretense of arguing, a sort of intellectual drama intended to shadow the spirit and shape of real controversy. The differences on this point do not strike me as especially important, although my view is more liberal than that of the pragmadialecticians. Even in a playful argument, the speaker ought to be proposing that the speech acts make up a coherent constellation, and even if the listener agrees, he or she may decide to pretend otherwise. In fact, one can refer to the felicity conditions to break up a playful engagement (e.g., “You don’t really believe that, do you?” [4]), or to interrupt an identity display (“Yeah, yeah. Old news.” [3]). The relevance of the felicity conditions to

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noncontroversial episodes, in fact, is one reason that I want to call them arguments. Having explained the pragmadialecticians’ treatment of felicity conditions for arguing, I move forward toward a point of more concerted interest—the respect in which these requirements also define the stases for arguments. The simplest way to discuss the topic is to recast the felicity conditions as stases, using the same outline as the previous one: 1. Propositional content stasis: What is the speaker’s illocutionary point in making each of these utterances (e.g., “What do you mean by that?”)? 2. Essential stasis: Do these speech acts add up to an attempt to give a reason for p (e.g., “How does all that hang together?”)? 3. Preparatory stases a. Does the speaker believe that the listener disagrees with p (e.g., “Why are you insisting on such an obvious thing?”)? b. Does the speaker believe that the listener agrees with the content of the individual speech acts (e.g., “Why would you ask me to assume such a dreadful premise?”)? c. Does the speaker believe that the listener will agree that the constellation of speech acts justifies p (e.g., “Why in the world do you think that p follows from all that?”)? 4. Responsibility stases a. Does the speaker believe that p is a reasonable thing to say (e.g., “Do you honestly believe p, or are you just trying to get a rise out of me?”)? b. Does the speaker believe that the content of the speech acts is true (e.g., “Do you really think that is true?”)? c. Does the speaker believe that the constellation of speech acts justifies p (e.g., “Do you really think that that’s enough reason to accept p?”)? Inevitably, I have had to express these stases, and even the sample questions, in a general way, but that is precisely what I am seeking—a general normative specification of what is relevant in an ideally rational argument. As with other sets of stases, if the protagonist cannot finally give a satisfactory answer to even one of these questions, then he or she is rationally required to withdraw the initial claim about p. If all the questions, in whatever forms, can be competently answered, then the antagonist ought to withdraw the position of doubt. In an actual argument, these subordinate issues are drawn in more specific ways, express-

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ing content that is related to the substance of the discussion, but all relevant matters are traceable to one of these stases because they derive from the defining features of the complex speech act, arguing. That, I think, is the foundational virtue of this part of the pragmadialectical theoretical apparatus. Rules for a Critical Discussion I am moving closer to a normative description of ideally rational argumentative exchanges. The next step is partly a further advance and partly an expansion of the implications of the topics previously discussed, including a specification of the rules for a critical discussion. As noted earlier, the two interlocutors commit to procedural understandings of how they are going to argue together. These understandings are rarely explicit, and frankly one or the other arguer often misunderstands what the proper procedures need to be or at least does not act in accord with them (Weger, 2001, 2002). Arguers empirically show some sensitivity to the rules, but their perceptions are imperfect, as may be expected (see van Eemeren & Meuffels, 2002). Still, the fact of participating in what is supposed to be a critical discussion commits the arguers to these rules and opens interlocutors to legitimate criticism if they do not consistently adhere to the standards. The list of rules has been revised several times, although its core commitments have never changed. van Eemeren and Grootendorst (1983a, ch. 7) offer 17 rules, many with subsections, organized according to the four stages of the discussion. A revised set of 10 rules (van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 1992, pp. 208–209) became the standard for more than a decade, but recently (van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 2003, 2004) a new list of 15 rules has been issued, and I work with these. These rules, like the earlier ones, indicate two sorts of things: when someone is entitled to do something and when someone is obliged to do something. If one participant violates a rule, the discussion diverts from a rational course. It may wander pointlessly, or the violation may result in a fallacy. The rules define the proper procedures for critical discussion, and a procedurally flawed exchange is unlikely to land on the right conclusion, except by accident. Wenzel (1980, 1990) understood this point and consequently gave procedure the pride of place among the rhetorical, logical, and dialectical standards for criticizing arguments. Because the rules are elaborate, many being full paragraphs long, I paraphrase them here. Interested readers should consult van Eemeren and Grootendorst (2003, 2004, ch. 6) to find more exacting expressions and richer formulations. These rules apply both to the main argument and to any subordinate arguments that develop during the discussion.

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1. People have the unconditional rights to express a standpoint or to cast doubt on one. Any content can be the focus of discussion, and any sort of person, in any circumstances, can participate. [confrontation stage] 2. A person who has cast doubt on the other person’s standpoint always has the right to challenge the protagonist to defend his or her position. [opening stage] 3. A person whose standpoint has been challenged is obligated to defend it, unless (a) the other person doesn’t adhere to the proper rules for discussion, (b) the standpoint has been retracted, or (c) the standpoint has already been successfully defended to this antagonist under proper conditions. [opening stage] 4. Arguers must take on the roles of protagonist or antagonist, according to whose standpoint is at issue, and must keep to those roles until the discussion is finished. [opening stage] 5. The arguers must agree on rules regarding how the defense and attack on the standpoint will be conducted and how the arguers will recognize the outcome of the exchange. These agreements must remain in force throughout the rest of the episode. [opening stage] 6. The only way a standpoint can be defended is by means of argument, and the only allowable attacks must be relevant to the content or force of the argument. [argumentation stage] 7. The propositional content of an argument is successfully defended only when the two arguers agree on the relevant information after joint scrutiny. If they agree that the content is wrong, the standpoint has been successfully attacked. [argumentation stage] 8. The force of an argument is successfully defended only when the two arguers agree on the full details (explicit and implied) of the argument and also agree that these cohere into a valid argument scheme. If they agree that the details do not combine to form a valid scheme, the standpoint has been successfully attacked. [argumentation stage] 9. The protagonist’s standpoint is conclusively defended if both its content and its force have been defended successfully. If either has been attacked successfully, the protagonist’s standpoint has been conclusively attacked. [argumentation stage] 10. At any time, the antagonist can attack either the content or the force of any protagonist’s argument that has not yet been successfully defended. [argumentation stage] 11. At any time, the protagonist can defend the content or force of any of his or her arguments that have been attacked but not yet successfully defended. [argumentation stage]

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12. The protagonist can withdraw any of his or her arguments at any time and then has no obligation to defend them. [argumentation stage] 13. An argument can be made only once, the arguers must take turns in the exchange, and only one argument can be made at a time. [argumentation stage] 14. Presuming that the rules for critical discussion have otherwise been followed, the protagonist must withdraw a standpoint, or the antagonist must withdraw doubts to it, according to the standards of Rule 9. If no conclusive attack or defense has occurred, neither party is obliged to withdraw anything in regard to the standpoint. [concluding stage] 15. Both parties always have the right to request clarification or to provide clarification. Anyone requested to clarify must do so. [all stages] The rules reflect certain themes, all of which are aimed at assuring optimal interpersonal arguing. Themes include freedom of expression, exchange, and thought as essential features of the normative system. These freedoms apply equally to both people, and so fairness is a corollary foundation. Anyone can argue at any time (e.g., Rules 1, 2, 10, 11), anyone’s contributions have to be respected and dealt with (3), and the standards of conduct have to be mutually agreeable (5) and must focus on the exclusive use of arguing to settle matters (6, 7, 8, 9, 14). The discussion has to stay on point (4, 12, 13) and be clear (15). Everyone has equal right to the floor (13). Issues can be brought up at any time until they are mutually settled (10, 11, 12). These rules refer fairly specifically to the actual conduct of a discussion. Accordingly, they are first-order considerations (van Eemeren et al., 1993, ch. 2). Realistically, they are unlikely to be achieved unless the people have certain capacities and orientations. Consequently, second-order conditions must be fulfilled as well: The arguers must be capable of arguing well and must have a dialectical attitude. Participants, in short, must have both the ability and the motivation to argue in a competent and truth-oriented way. Even more practically, the social environment must permit freedom of expression, insulation from power and coercion, and openness to the results of good argumentation. These last are third-order conditions. The fact that these first-, second-, and third-order conditions for critical discussion are often unsatisfied does not invalidate the normative theory. It only points to the grounds for proper critique—critique of a discussion,

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of participants, or of their interpersonal and political milieus. These analyses may take the form of a rhetorical criticism (e.g., van Eemeren & Houtlosser, 1999; Feteris, 1999) or a social critique (Hample, 2001a). The ability to use these rules as foundations for analyses is considerably enhanced by the final step in pragmadialectics that I review, namely the connection between the first-order rules and argumentative fallacies.

Discussion Rules and Fallacies The study of fallacies has a long history in argumentation, dating at least from Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations. Often included as the last book of his Topics, his interest in superficially appealing but bad arguments has persisted throughout Western intellectual life, up to the present day. Unfortunately, the lists of fallacies seem to have been constrained mainly by the imagination of the theorists and particularly by their facility in coining new labels. Several short lists of common fallacies are in wide circulation, notably the one developed by the Institute for Propaganda Analysis for dissemination in American public schools between the World Wars (name calling, glittering generalities, transfer, testimonial, plain folks, card stacking, and bandwagon; see Sproule, 1997, ch. 5, for a historical discussion). Still, by the late 20th century, theorists had lost patience with the ad hoc nature of the lists and began searching for some systematic way to understand fallacies. Among the many theoretical efforts is the pragmadialectical approach. Simply put, the basic idea is that violations of the discussion rules result in fallacies, and, in turn, all fallacies are violations of the discussion rules. On this view, fallacies are no longer just technical mistakes in the structural specification of arguments. Instead, they are organically connected to the nature of critical discussion. A nice implication is that, if a mistake is made during the interpersonal argument, interlocutors alert to the true character of dialectical exchanges can squeeze the fallacy out of the line of argument, whether anyone can name the construction error or not. This position was explored by van Eemeren and Grootendorst (1983a, ch. 8) and is most mature in a later book (van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 1992), which is wholly devoted to the topic (their conclusion, ch. 19, offers a schematic summary). That treatment is in terms of the 10 standard rules, not the newer list of 15 that I have summarized in this chapter. Because it is not my place to systematize their theory (see van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 2004, ch. 7, for their most current discussion), I restrict myself to a discussion of fallacy–rule matches that seem fairly obvious, given the new rule specifications. This focus should give the idea

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of how important procedural rules are for the quality of the arguing. Without trying to be comprehensive, I work through some of the more commonly listed fallacies and show which rules they violate. Consider ambiguity, the accidental or intentional use of misleading words or phrases. Ambiguity violates Rule 15, whose spirit requires clarity so that the arguers mutually understand one another. Making one’s arguments as transparent as possible is a basic principle of dialectical searches for the best solution to an issue. Several fallacies involve violations of Rules 1, 2, 6, 10, and 11, which permit full opportunity to argue to any party. Arguments ad baculum (i.e., applying pressure or attempting coercion) and ad hominem (i.e., rejecting an argument because of personal failings on the part of the arguer), for instance, attempt to close off one party’s ability to argue freely on the merits. Anything that restricts access to the argument is a fallacy of some sort. The argument ad ignorantium, which concludes that a proposition must be right because its opposite hasn’t been successfully defended, and the fallacy of shifting the burden of proof, which requires the antagonist to prove something when only the protagonist’s case is at issue, both violate discussion rules. Rule 3, which places the burden of proof on the protagonist, and Rules 7 and 8, which specify that a standpoint has only been successfully defended if its own content and force have been, are both grounds for rejecting these fallacious moves. Rules 6 and 9 indicate that the only relevant moves in a discussion are those directed at the protagonist’s content or force. These rules outlaw ignorantio elenchi (i.e., irrelevant arguments). Finally, Rule 8 says that the arguers must agree that a particular argument form is legitimate and so presumably disallows various sorts of bad reasoning, such as post hoc ergo propter hoc (i.e., confusing timing with causality), secundum quid (i.e., hasty generalization), false analogy, and errors in composition or division, for instance. Quite a few more fallacies can be discussed in this manner, and, in fact, careful consideration of the rules has generated notice of other reasoning problems that don’t seem to have been named on the traditional lists of fallacies at all (see van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 1992, pp. 209–211). Arguing is, in principle, self-correcting. Certainly people say wrong things all the time and make poor inferences, but with patient, capable, and well-motivated discussion, the errors are set aside, and truer courses are set. Where guidance is needed, the normative theory provides it. Although the theory may work more efficiently for those who have studied it, the simple application of intelligence and open-minded instincts goes a very long way.

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A DESCRIPTION OF CONVERSATIONAL ARGUING: MICROANALYSIS Patient, capable, and well-motivated discussion—does that sound like your life? I move on to the task of describing how people actually conduct themselves during interpersonal arguments. With the normative system in the background, I show how arguments are formed in conversation and how matters other than the rationally required ones are also at the core of how people argue. The rest of the chapter pursues various descriptive issues. In this section, I look at the smallest possible argumentative constructions—arguments that occur in one, two, or three turns at talk. In a later section, I discuss how whole episodes of arguing are structured. The Three-Turn Sequence A number of conversation analysts have undertaken studies of interpersonal argument, and each has taken a somewhat different approach (e.g., Coulter, 1990; Kopperschmidt, 1985; Schiffrin, 1985). Even their analyses of the basic structure of interpersonal arguing differ somewhat. Coulter (1990) offered a four-turn description, Hutchby (1996) said that the foundational structure is action–opposition, Jackson and Jacobs (1980) focused on a core adjacency pair organization, and Ilie (1999) studied a particular adjacency pair, question–response. I follow Muntigl and Turnbull (1998) in describing arguments as having three basic turns. This doesn’t mean that arguments always take that form; they can condense themselves into a single turn or can expand to dozens of exchanges. However, the three-turn sequence is a useful model to study the main moments. Before looking at the three turns, however, I note that the generative character of conversation is cooperative. It is not something that can be done alone, and when conversation is intended, each person must leave room for the other. This sharing is done in a variety of ways, but the basic idea is that each utterance creates a space for the next one. Turn taking is not an epiphenomenon of conversation; it represents the inherent character of the activity. Creating a space for response can be done in a fairly laissez-faire way, or can be quite pointed (Levinson, 1983, ch. 6; Sacks, 1992, v. 2, pp. 188–199). Directiveness is apparent in the creation of a slot in which only one thing can be said. Thus a question so insistently creates an answer space that nearly anything said after a question is heard as an answer. Other slots permit two things, as when a request can be followed

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by a grant or refusal, and unclear things are heard as refusals. When two replies are available, one is preferred (e.g., grant) and the other dispreferred (e.g., refusal). The other sort of directiveness has to do with topical space (see, e.g., Craig & Tracy, 1983; McLaughlin, 1984, ch. 2). By raising one or more potential topics in a turn, the speaker invites the other person to choose one of those matters to pursue in response. This response pattern creates local coherence, and its accomplishment may involve matches on ideas or words. Global coherence, in contrast, refers to whether a whole conversation is on point, comprehensibly pursuing a mutually recognized goal. Coherence is a cooperative accomplishment, and so conversants continuously invite others to comment relevantly, possibly even pointing out such opportunities with questions. Both structural and topical cooperation are needed for arguing, as they are for any sort of real conversation (Grice, 1975). Arguments are usually discussed as oppositional exchanges, but cooperations are the foundations for flashes of competition or disagreement. Interpersonal arguing is emergent, joint, and coconstructed, right up to the point where it overflows its limits and becomes a monological harangue. When two people argue, they bind themselves together with this basic sequence (Muntigl & Turnbull, 1998): T1: Person A makes a claim. T2: Person B disputes the claim. T3: Person A disagrees with Person B, by either supporting T1 or disputing T2.

The sequence does not have to run its course at all or in quite this way: T2 may not happen at all, or A may withdraw T1 in T3. On the other hand, considerable expansion is possible at several points (cf. Jackson & Jacobs, 1980). However, as a simple structural summary, this one will do nicely. An example makes things more concrete. A man and a woman, both probably undergraduates, were invited to be tape-recorded while discussing how intimate relationships are or should be initiated. This topic does not particularly call for argumentation. Nonetheless, small arguments are common throughout the whole corpus (this was not the only conversation we collected). S was a woman, and J was a man. The transcript makes it apparent that they had a relationship and talked about it at several points. I have somewhat simplified the original transcription details.

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410 S98, lines 2ff, transcribed by B. Cipolla and D. Hample 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

S How do you feel intimate relationships should be initiated? (4.0) T1 J Most intimate relationships that I know (1.0) started (1.0) er were never initiated by anything (2.0) the intimacy comes from growing to love a person? (2.0) learning to love a person (3.0) learning earning their friendship T2 S Yeah, but I think, I think like I don’t know (2.0) I don’t know (3.0) I I gu- I guess there’s different levels of intimacy (3.0) T3~1 J Our intic- our intic- intimacy (1.0) was never initiated (1.0) T~2 S Yeah but we talked about certain things (1.0) T~3 J But it was never initiated (1.0) it came with time when we ff, when we fell in love with each other. S uh huh (3.0) J I don’t think it was ever initiated (5.0) the intimacy in the relationship, came as we fell in love wi- f- fell in love with each other an (1.0) became best friends (2.0) cuz we were best friends before (3.0) before we became, intimate (8.0) S Well, the well like I said there’s like different levels of intimacy, I mean like (1.0) you and me like you know (1.0) When we started out we were like just friends an stuff like that an we really got to know each other an best friends an this an that an, you know an you you’re the first one you were the first one that said you loved me and I an I couldn’t say it right away remember? (1.0) J Mh hmm= S =An I told you that I couldn’t say it cuz I didn’t know! (1.0) An we ya know we talked about it an stuff like that an then (1.0) like even like before an then like when we started sleeping together (1.0) J Making love? S Yeah (3.0) Ye I mean we talked about it like long before it like ever happened ya know? (1.0) T~~1 J B-, talking about it isn’t really initiating it (1.0) Talking about it it’s just cleaning up issues we have

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39 with ourselves (1.0) 40 T~~2 S Yeah but it’s part °of it’s starting it° (5.0) [Right? 41 T~~3 J [I guess 42 so I guess so

The transcript shows several arguments, or more precisely, several versions of the same one. The first begins with 3, where J says that relationships aren’t specifically initiated by anything in particular. This is a T1. The T2 follows in 7, where S expresses some doubt. She also raises the topic of levels of intimacy, but this topic does not reappear until 22. Line 10 is T3, a restatement of T1, but also has the function of acknowledging S’s T2 and so displaying uptake. However, 10 may also be another argument initiation, which I label T~1. A different sort of T2 appears at 11. In the original T2 at 7, S mainly displays hesitancy, what the Amsterdam scholars call casting doubt. At 11, however, T~2 offers explicit disagreement (i.e., “but”) and gives counterreasoning (i.e., “we talked about certain things”). At 12, J reaffirms his original position in T~1. J does not dispute that “we talked about certain things,” which would have countered the T2 and is the other way of orienting a T3 (Muntigl & Turnbull, 1998). S then makes an ambiguous utterance in 14, which appears to be a display of continuing hesitation. For 3 s, S’s failure to be impressed with J’s reasoning sinks in, and then J gives some nice elaboration, beginning at 16. J’s talk from 12 through 20 is both a restatement of the T3 to the original argument and a T~3 to the one that begins again at 10. As 22 shows, however, S and J are still not in agreement. Perhaps no longer trusting the sort of ambiguity displayed in 14 to end the disagreement, at 22 S moves into an elaborate but topically relevant discursion that safely moves the couple to other ground for a while. After they cooperate in the retelling of what may be a common story for them, the argument resurfaces, with T~~1 appearing in 37. This T1 repeats J’s original position but in terms (i.e., “talking”) that S introduced, beginning in 11 and reinforced at 31. S continues to disagree with J’s claim, with T~~2 immediately following in 40. Her T2 offers a compromise, and she needs to prompt J to reply. This time, J’s T3 in 41 agrees with S’s T2. Quite a few things about this fragment are interesting. The T2s are each prefaced with some hesitation, especially noticeable in 7. Although all the T2s here are from the same person, S, this behavior is nonetheless fairly common (Pomerantz, 1984). Agreement is usually preferred and disagreement dispreferred in response to an assertion. Consequently,

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speakers signal their upcoming disagreement with various sounds (e.g., yeah, well, umm), nonsubstantive phrases (e.g., I dunno, you know, like, it’s like), or pauses to move the disagreement further to the right in the turn. In contrast, the T1s are expressed pretty straightforwardly. The fact that the argument goes through three cycles before the conversants are satisfied is also worth some comment. Vuchinich (1990) reported that most dinnertime family conflicts are not clearly resolved at all. Mostly, people just change the topic and move on. In this example, the movement from the first version to the second is nearly inevitable because 10 serves both as T3 to the first instantiation and as T~1 for the second one. S takes up the second version as readily as she did the first, immediately supplying a T2 at 11, just as promptly as she did at 7. However, at the end of T~3, S is noncommittal. This shows us that it was S, not J, who constructed 10 as a T1. Her behavior at 11 contrasts notably with that at 14. At 11 she supplies a T2, which made 10 a T1. Line 12 had just as much apparent chance to be a T1 as 10 did; the key difference is in how S replies. At 11 she engages, and at 14 she does not. Many things are potentially arguable (cf. Jackson & Jacobs, 1980), but the arguable nature appears mainly in retrospect, through an examination of how something is responded to. In other words, arguability is projected backward in the conversation and is controlled by the potential maker of T2, not by the T1 speaker. S’s choice not to engage is particularly noticeable at 22. J has strongly restated his standpoint, and a considerable pause ensues, underscoring their joint reluctance to continue in that vein. The T2 is what assigns the role of T1. Although the content in a three-turn sequence can simply be recycled endlessly, as children or angry adults sometimes do, the repetitions in this example do not do that. Each version of the argument is a little different, and it is gradually evolving toward the possibility of common ground. The first sequence (i.e., 3–10) mainly displays the disagreement. At 8, S introduces the idea of “levels of intimacy,” but J does not pick up on this topic as a way out of their differences. The second sequence (i.e., 10–13) reaffirms the differences but, due to S, is now framed in terms of “talking,” an idea that did not appear in the first incarnation. In 11, S conveys that “talking” is a critical consideration, but at 12, J’s turn essentially expresses the irrelevance of the idea. Irrelevance claims are a strongly face-threatening tactic (Muntigl & Turnbull, 1998). Immediately thereafter, S and J cooperate in a brief cooling-off period, and the argument does not restart until 37, where J has accepted the relevance of “talk.” This time, S’s T2 offers a middling position (i.e., “part” of initiation), and J finally agrees. The argument starts in an initial stage of simplicity, passes through an effort to introduce a new idea (i.e., talking), di-

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verts for a while to explore a missed topic (i.e., levels of intimacy, at 22), and finally, successfully, finds common ground, both on the importance of talking and consequently on the original standpoint. It is a little hard to see why J has changed his view on the relevance of talking. At 12, he obviously does not think that talking has anything to do with initiating intimacy. During the diversion S brings up the idea of talk again, at 31. J does not register any hesitation about her narrative, which gives talk a central role in the development of their relationship. When he finally comes to grips with the possibility that talk may be important (has he truly been influenced by the narrative, or is he simply looking for a way not to disagree?), he expresses his position in a mitigated way. At 37, he does not baldly say that talk is irrelevant. Instead, he says that talk isn’t “really” initiation. “Really” is concessive, for it allows that talking may seem relevant to initiation, even if its essence isn’t wholly involved. This response allows S to make a clever T2. She suggests, softly, that talk might be “part of” initiation. Something that is not really X can still be part of X, after all. The idea is close enough for J, and so he issues an agreeable T3 at 41, more or less withdrawing his initial standpoint, as the rest of the conversation suggests. Although J starts the argument and in fact restarts it twice, it may be that S ends up in control of the exchange. She is in what Hutchby (1996) calls second position. A person in second position can counterargue, can challenge without commitment, or can merely express doubt. It falls to the interlocutor in first position to give evidence, trace out reasonings, and so forth. In this fragment, S mainly responds with hesitation in the first go-round, at 7. She offers a comment about levels of intimacy, but she trails off without a point having been made. In the second argument, she offers an objection (11), which constitutes both a rejection and a reason for it. She is supplying clearly relevant argumentative substance for the first time. Although J finds her reason irrelevant at 12, the rest of the fragment is on her ground, not J’s. Both arguers have left room for agreement in the third try, with J’s “really” (37) and S’s “part of” (40). Although really left open the door for part of, it is the latter that is endorsed, if halfheartedly (“I guess”). To state formally the thing agreed upon, one must choose phrasing from S’s contribution at 40. This sort of role priority is not always expected, but Hutchby (1996) showed that arguers in second position have some considerable advantages in controlling the course of an exchange. This example does not, of course, illustrate all the possibilities. Muntigl and Turnbull (1998) systematically studied the sorts of things that can happen in T2 and T3. They said that four different sorts of T2 can display opposition to T1: claims of irrelevancy (e.g., “so what?”),

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challenges (e.g., “why do you say that?”), contradictions (e.g., “no, that’s just wrong”), and counterclaims (e.g., “Kansas is,” in response to “Nebraska is the most boring state to drive through”). Expressing doubt may be a fifth possibility, although it does not quite rise to the level of opposition. In this example, the first T2 (7) mainly expresses hesitancy whereas the second (11) and the third (40) make counterclaims. The same sorts of things can appear as T3s responding to T2s. The first T3 (10) is a contradiction, and the second (12) conveys irrelevancy. The third (41) is actually an agreement, which Muntigl and Turnbull have more or less defined out of the ambit of their analysis. These scholars make another point about T3s, however. T3s can have two different orientations. They can orient to T1, mainly involving a restatement of the original position, or can orient to T2, engaging the second person’s content. The first T3 in this example looks back to the T1, making no comment about the T2. The second T3 directly deals with the T2, and so does the third. I trust that readers can easily see the respects in which arguing and disagreeing are cooperative. Although other scholars may have good reasons for working with other structural sketches of arguing, the threeturn sequence seems to offer a reasonable summary of the main conversational positions taken during an interpersonal argument. The addition of assertion, doubt, and agreement to Muntigl and Turnbull’s (1998) irrelevancy, challenge, contradiction, and counterclaim produces a fairly inclusive description of the illocutionary acts involved in each of the three turns (see P. Benoit & W. Benoit, 1989, for more detail on forms of argument openings). With these foundations for the microanalysis of arguing, I next move to related topics. Preference Organization and Adjacency Pairs At several points, I have loosely mentioned that some speech acts are preferred and other dispreferred, but I have delayed explaining precisely what this means. Building on some of Sacks’ (1992) posthumously published ideas, Bilmes (1988) set out to clarify the meaning of preference, a key term in conversation analysis. In part, he tried to distinguish the everyday and technical uses of the term. In ordinary thinking, preference represents an affective leaning. That is, when I say that I prefer fruit pie to chocolate cake, I am expressing a personal sentiment and am indicating where my motivations point me. This is not the technical sense at all. Technically, to speak of preference is not to index personal desires. Instead, what researchers have in mind is the preference of Conversation, understood as a social institution inde-

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pendent of its users (I capitalize Conversation when I have this meaning in mind). Regardless of what one personally wishes for, Conversation prefers an acceptance to an invitation, an answer in reply to a question, a greeting just after a greeting. One finds evidence for what Conversation prefers by examining actual exchanges, particularly in the production of adjacency pairs. An adjacency pair is a two-turn sequence in which the second pair part is of a type that is strongly relevant to the first pair part and prototypically occurs next, in the adjacent position. Some adjacency pairs have only one option for the second pair part (e.g., question–answer), but others have two (e.g., request–grant or –refusal). When two second pair parts are relevant, one is typically preferred and the other dispreferred. Levinson (1983, p. 307) generalized that markedness is a key indicant of which part is which. Preferred second pair parts are unmarked. That is to say, they are done simply, without elaboration. Dispreferred second pair parts are marked in a variety of ways. They may be preceded by reluctance displays (Pomerantz, 1984) or delays, as in the T2s in the example presented previously. The turn containing the dispreferred part may include an account or explanation (Antaki, 1994; Turnbull, 1992). In fact, the explanation may even appear alone, leaving the listener to infer the omitted dispreferred part. When a relevant second pair part is not forthcoming, it is noticeably absent (see Boyle, 2000, for discussion), leading to the inference that the dispreferred second pair part is being conveyed. I illustrate these points with some fictionalized examples. I leave it to readers to compare these examples with their own native experience to judge their validity. 1 A 2 B

Come on along to lunch with me, okay? Um, I’m not sure I have the time. [reluctance marker, excuse, omitted dispreferred second pair part]

1 A 2 B

I think Buicks are remarkably well made. (.4) Well, my dad has always had trouble with his, so I guess I disagree. [delay, reluctance marker, explanation, reluctance marker, explicit dispreferred second pair part]

1 A 2 B

Will you lend me some change for a Coke? Sure. [unmarked explicit preferred second pair part]

The task of specifying exactly how scholars should detect preferred and dispreferred second pair parts is modestly controversial. Boyle (2000) suggested that two standards, noticeable absence and accountability, are

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better formulations than Levinson’s (1983) standard treatment, which I continue to find useful. Conversation’s preferences are conveyed structurally, with the presence or absence of markings of one sort or another. If in the first example, A really doesn’t want B’s company but feels obliged to offer an invitation, A may psychologically prefer a refusal whereas Conversation prefers acceptance. Importantly, Levinson (1983, p. 336) noted that when an assessment (normally an assertive) is offered, the preferred second pair part is agreement, and the dispreferred reply is disagreement. Boyle (2000) rightly took Levinson to task for this overgeneralization. Pomerantz (1984) pointed out that disagreement is preferred in response to self-deprecation (e.g., “I look so dumb in this shirt.” “No, you don’t.”). Kotthoff (1993) showed that once an argument is truly joined, disagreements can be unmarked because Conversation has become oriented to rebuttal. Replying to a compliment is especially complicated (Pomerantz, 1978), with one sort of preference (e.g., assessment–agree or –disagree) pointing toward agreement and another (e.g., praise–modesty or –immodesty) suggesting disagreement. In fact, replies to compliments often involve complex mixtures of agreement, downgrading, and reciprocation. Self-deprecations, assertions, rebuttals, and compliments can, in some conversations, become T1s. It is important for scholars to look for evidence of preference in the conversation itself, rather than simply assuming that agreement is always what Conversation wants. The point is that Conversation has preferences, and competent speakers know this. Thus these structural features, like all the others, become resources that speakers can use to accomplish things in conversation. One can say something unpleasant by not quite saying anything at all, for instance, and one can detect rudeness when dispreferred second pair parts are unmarked (e.g., “Time for bed.” “No.”). Speakers can use this preference organization to produce and understand conversational arguments. I owe this insight to Jackson and Jacobs (1980), whose classic essay first connected interpersonal arguing to adjacency pairs. Arguments are oriented to actual or potential disagreement between two people. When a dispreferred second pair part is produced or is in the offing, the specter of disagreement is raised. (Some elision occurs between Conversation’s preferences and those of people. As Bilmes, 1988, pointed out, the confusion in the literature occurs precisely because these two senses so often coincide empirically.) The function of argument is to repair the interaction, which has become in some sense damaged by the dispreferred second pair part and the failure to produce the preferred one. Here is one of their examples:

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Jackson & Jacobs, 1980, p. 260, fragment 12 1 2 3 4 5 6

L J L J

Can you be up by ten tomorrow? Ohh man. I dunno. Why? Uh, cause Larry has to come with the van in the morning rather than in the afternoon. Oh. Tch ((pause)) hhhhh I guess so. I’ll try anyway.

The request in 1, which takes the form of a question, creates a slot for either an affirmative or a negative answer. The affirmative answer is the preferred second pair part. The reluctance markers at the beginning of 2 signal that an unmarked preferred second pair part is not forthcoming, and J initiates an inserted sequence with “Why?” The answer appears in 3 and 4. This explanation increases the justification for the preferred second pair part invited by 1. Consequently, in 5 and 6, J finally provides the affirmative answer, although the last part of the turn suggests that J may be agreeing insincerely. The reasoning—the argument—in 3 and 4 is oriented to repairing the threatened breach (i.e., the anticipated provision of a disagreement). Because the fragment ends here, readers are invited to believe that J’s possible insincerity is overlooked, and the argument has, in fact, repaired the conversation. The involvement of preference is clear in this example. Arguing is about speech acts that are not preferred. The need for an argument becomes apparent at the same time that conversants realize that a dispreferred second pair part may be about to happen. The argument may take the form of an inserted sequence, as it did in the previous example, or it may appear as a presequence or even a postsequence. The reasoning may also appear in the same turn as the dispreferred second pair part or may substitute for it, as in the fictionalized luncheon invitation example (cf. Jackson & Jacobs, 1980). Adjacency pairs with optional second pair parts are the key locations for interpersonal arguing. Jackson and Jacobs identify disagreement regulation as the function of arguing; this is equivalent to saying that arguing serves to discipline the production of dispreferred second pair parts. In sum, preference organization, adjacency pairs, and arguing turn out to have intimate connections with one another. Adjacency pairs are the sites for arguments, preference organization calls them out, and arguments repair dispreferred second pair parts. The Jackson and Jacobs (1980) analysis permits an even more microscopic focus than Muntigl and Turnbull’s (1998) three-turn sequence because the former can also accommodate within-turn arguments.

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Even in that case, however, the utterance can be reconstructed analytically into all three turns. For example, if out of the blue someone said, “I’d like to play basketball with you, but my leg is broken,” a T1 (implied, explicit, or merely hoped for) can immediately be projected—something like “Let’s play hoops.” Otherwise, the speaker would not have needed the apologetic preface to a simple assertion about his or her leg. T2 is a dispreferred response to an invitation and offers a counterclaim about the desirability of playing. Taking it for granted that a broken leg is a sufficient reason not to play, one can also project that T3 will be a withdrawal of T1. Both of the fundamental understandings of conversational argument, the three-turn sequence and conversational repair, are at least generally consistent with one another. Politeness Conversation analysis is a structurally oriented study, aimed at discovering how Conversation contains, reflects, absorbs, projects, and creates the observable features of social life. That is why it is sometimes called microsociology. Most conversation analysts disdain psychology, and many are remarkably hostile to the human act of counting, although they still make casually quantitative remarks like “usually” or “ordinarily” (for some exceptions in the standard literature, see Schiffrin, 1987, e.g., p. 300; Tannen, 1993, e.g., p. 52). I don’t share those commitments. Qualitative analysis even of single examples can certainly lead to deep knowledge about human actions (Jacobs, 1986). However, I believe that some questions are more directly (perhaps only) answerable by means of counting and statistical analysis, and some very interesting questions about the conduct of conversation involve human cognition and psychology. Turnbull’s view, which he labels social psychological pragmatics (Muntigl & Turnbull, 1998) or a social pragmatic model of talk (Turnbull & Carpendale, 1999), permits both the study of psychology as it relates to discourse and the application of standard quantitative methods when needed. Humans do conversation for their own reasons and react to it in ways that shape their lives. Structural features are only part of the story of conversational argument. A key psychological element in arguing is politeness. Politeness has structural consequences for the conduct of an exchange (Brown & Levinson, 1987), but it derives from psychological needs to be unconstrained in thought and action (i.e., negative face) and to be well regarded (i.e., positive face). The projection, reception, and negotiation of face definition are the tasks that we collect under this heading (Goffman, 1967).

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The conversational manifestation of these desires gives rise to the structural features that bear on politeness. Instrumentally oriented arguing, the sort designed to persuade or dominate, makes face an unusually salient issue to the participants, unless they have set aside their persons with full commitments to the dialectical attitude. One way or another, an argumentative position can be reduced to the relational messages, “I’m right and you’re wrong” or “I’m better than you” (cf. Watzlawick et al., 1967). Even in arguments aimed at play (DiSanza, 1989) or identity display (Goodwin & Goodwin, 1987; cf. Goffman, 1969), the arguing takes its ritual form from the prototypical activity, which is instrumental argument. Almost inevitably, arguments challenge positive face by indicating that the interlocutor has wrong thoughts and affront negative face by trying to impose another cognition onto the listener’s mental system. By relationally conveying the arguer’s superiority, they also imply immodesty, which can be selfaffirming or self-threatening, depending on the arguer’s predispositions. Politeness phenomena may, in fact, be the kernel for all the emotional matters relevant to arguing. Trying to displace another person’s views inherently involves some measure of aggression and dominance, leading sometimes to the perception that all arguing is agonistic (Tannen, 2002) or eristic. Nor is instrumental arguing confined to attempts to alter the interlocutor’s dry cognitions. Gilbert (2001, 2003) showed how emotional messages are concurrent and essential to arguing and are sometimes the whole point of the exchange. Emotions are personal, and emotional displays can be intensely face-involving for both arguers. Because politeness is an omnipresent consideration in interaction, it influences the ways in which people go about conversation. In particular, plans (Schank, 1982) are formed in such a way as to accommodate face. Hayashi (1996) illustrated this with a study of how a supervisor undertakes a corrective conversation with an inexperienced teacher. The supervisor in Hayashi’s study used what appears to be a very productive plan for correcting the subordinate’s teaching activities. The three elements of the plan are listening sympathetically to the teacher’s problems, clarifying the key issues for the teacher, and eliciting ideas for improvement from the teacher. These three actions not only organize a whole interaction but also may be found in smaller particles of it. For example, clarification appears subordinately in the listening phase, and so forth. The supervisor clearly had points to make and saw to it that the reasons for those points were present in the conversation, but the overall plan—listen, clarify, and elicit—minimized face damage. The organizationally dominant power position of the supervisor could not be eliminated, and it contextualized the conversation (cf. Sillince, 1999), but dominance display, which would have threatened the teacher’s face, is

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certainly not a central goal of this plan. The supervisor enacted equality and even subordination—a pretense, but perhaps a pleasant one—by listening rather than commanding, by clarifying rather than correcting, and by eliciting rather than dictating. The character of this plan did not prevent the supervisor from being assertive, as this fragment shows: Hayashi (1996), p. 239, lines 38ff. S is the supervisor, and T the teacher 1 S 2 3 4 T 5 S 6

No, now think of what you just said. The lesson just bombed. ((“bombed” was introduced earlier by S, and T agreed to the characterization)) Yea. But the material still has to be covered. I’m asking you what’s the most important thing for the next lesson. . . .

This example shows a fairly aggressive description of the teacher’s problem (i.e., “the lesson just bombed”), but in context, this statement is designed to orient the teacher to the point. Line 5 is an irrelevance claim, which is very face-threatening (Muntigl & Turbull, 1998), but is again intended to center the teacher on the right issue. The teacher wanted to reteach the ill-received material, and the supervisor attempted to show that this effort would simply repeat the problem. The supervisor, however, elicited this statement rather than asserting it: Hayashi (1996), p. 240, lines 74ff. 1 2 3 4 5 6

S

T S T

Yea . . . which means you’re likely to have two “bombs” in a row. And, would that mean you still wouldn’t have accomplished what you set out to accomplish? No. No! You mean no? I mean, yeah you’re right.

Lines 2 and 3 show a fairly transparent rhetorical question (Ilie, 1999) that is difficult to understand clearly. Its very phrasing, however, requires that T, not S, actually ends up constructing the argument (4–6). This example emphasizes the cooperative nature of the exchange. Even at the end, when T finally realized what S thought should be done, the conclusion was elicited from T, not handed down by S. There is polite pretense in this (see 2) but also some small authenticity at the end of the excerpt.

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Hayashi (1996), p. 240, lines 84ff. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

T S T S T S T S

You tell me next week not to take this topic. I haven’t said a thing about that yet. I already told them I was. Just because I told them I was, doesn’t mean I have to, right? Oh . . . I’ll gladly take another topic next week. I see. And with what reason would you gladly take another topic next week? Hum. Because I don’t want the same, the same thing to happen. Fine.

The supervisor did not take a dialectical attitude in any of this exchange. In fact, the conversation is somewhat reminiscent of the passage in Plato’s (1961) Meno, in which Socrates tediously asks a slave boy leading question after leading question about geometry and then arrives at this tendentious conclusion: Socrates: Meno: Socrates: Meno: Socrates: Meno:

What do you think, Meno? Has he answered with any opinions that were not his own? No, they were all his. Yet he did not know, as we agreed a few minutes ago. True. But these opinions were somewhere in him, were they not? Yes. (85 b–c)

Thus Socrates proves that all people inherently know geometry. In a similar way, one may imagine S (ironically?) claiming that S’s opinions were somewhere in T all along and T merely had to be made aware of them. Not knowing the personalities of S and T, I cannot say for sure how well S’s overall plan was privately received, but I can at least suppose that the exchange may have been absorbed as helpful rather than directive. The whole plan has T’s face in mind from the start. The core realization that S was trying to be polite may have softened the argument for T. Other sorts of corrective exchanges, which may center on directives, threats, accusations, and other sorts of explicit face assaults, can be read into Hayashi’s transcript, but indirectness—leaving room for other interpretation—is a common move in accomplishing politeness (Brown & Levinson, 1987). The listen–clarify–elicit arguing plan leaves room for

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that sort of indirectness. Although S’s pretenses may have been detectable, politeness is often about pretense, and generous displays of it can be welcomed as good manners. To this point in the discussion of politeness in arguing, I have examined how an overall discourse plan can contextualize the small arguments of the exchange in a polite way. However, turn by turn, point by point, politeness needs to be enacted. Although a particular frame may make this enactment more likely, it still must be jointly accomplished. If it is not, one or another arguer is not speaking appropriately, and speaking appropriately is one quality of competent arguing. How is politeness coconstructed (or not) from moment to moment? Politeness is a species of alignment (Nofsinger, 1991, ch. 5). When conversants are polite, they are trying to align faces—own face with what is privately wanted, other’s face with what is apparently wanted. Because arguments inherently involve face threat, some delicate conversational work is needed for polite opposition. Several scholars have examined how face threats are delivered or mitigated at various points during an argument. T1, as discussed earlier, represents the opening phase of the three-turn sequence. P. Benoit and W. Benoit (1989) identified eight ways to accomplish T1, categorized as either aggravated or mitigated openings. The aggravated T1s include insult, command, accusation, and reasonless refusal. These T1s are more face affronting than the mitigated openings. The latter are request, indication of shared responsibility, reaffirmation, and reasoned refusal. The Benoits had found the aggravated forms in earlier work and constructed the mitigated ones to parallel them. Undergraduates were given vignettes containing different openings and were asked to rate their appropriateness. Results showed that the mitigated forms were received as substantially more appropriate than the aggravated ones, with aggravation or mitigation explaining between one fourth and one third of the variance in politeness judgments. The politeness of the T2 and T3 turns were studied by Muntigl and Turnbull (1998). As I mentioned earlier, they classified these turns into four categories: irrelevancy claims, challenges, contradictions, and counterclaims. On both theoretical and quantitative grounds, they gave good evidence that this order is also the aggressiveness order. That is, the most face affronting T2 or T3 is the assertion or implication that the other’s statement is irrelevant, and a challenge is an equivalent move in this context. Contradictions are next most aggressive, and counterclaims are the most polite way of showing disagreement. Hayashi (1996) described supervisors’ politeness tactics that presumably can occur at any point in the three-turn sequence. Disclaimers,

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which abjure an apparently negative implication, were used by the supervisor to protect the teacher’s positive face. Repetition of the teacher’s comments shows uptake, aligning the participants by displaying acceptance and rapport. Similarly, formulations, in which the supervisor condenses and re-expresses what the teacher has said, are used to summarize the talk to redirect it. Formulations display respect and the upshot of what has been said by the other arguer. Holtgraves’ (1997) investigation was similar to Hayashi’s study but was perhaps more systematic. He asked eight dyads to discuss an issue and searched through the transcripts for occurrences of Brown and Levinson’s (1987) positive politeness strategies. He found many of them, as well as some others. The three general categories are seek agreement (including safe topic, agreeing, and repetition), avoid disagreement (i.e., token agreement, hedges, discounting a position as being merely personal or admittedly somewhat distasteful, displacement with fillers or pauses, and selfdeprecation), and seeking common ground (by using the phrase you know). Although repetition and self-deprecation were rarely used (two and one participants, respectively), the others were reasonably common. Holtgraves reported that one arguer’s relative frequency of positive politeness moves was strongly correlated with the interlocutor’s (r = .81), indicating that positive spirals occur during arguments (I discussed evidence for negative spirals in earlier chapters). Based on ratings of both interactants and observers, Holtgraves concluded that the more polite strategies (e.g., seeking agreement is most face supportive) are received as less dominating, less assertive, and less directive than the less polite tactics. However, agreement is both a positive politeness tactic and a substantial accomplishment. Canary and Patterson (1989) asked 20 romantic couples to discuss eight problems and to make various ratings on a questionnaire. The transcripts were unitized, argument acts were classified (into starting points, developing points, convergence markers, prompters, delimiters, and a residual category), and sequences were analyzed. Some sequences were converging, as when the partners approach one another’s views, and some were diverging. Convergence sequences were associated with higher appropriateness ratings, and the reverse was true of divergence. The Holtgraves (1997) and Canary and Patterson (1989) studies modify one another. Both showed that agreement is polite. However, in the Holtgraves investigation, agreement was conceptualized merely as a tactic, whereas Canary and Patterson saw it as a genuine substantive convergence on some point. Holtgraves teaches that a simple, potentially empty expression of agreement accomplishes face repair. Canary and Patterson show that real agreement is a positive affective accomplishment. Politeness highlights several important points about interpersonal arguing. It is cooperative, and it involves people’s feelings. At the same time

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a substantive point is chased, arguers need to keep track of their relational messages. Maintenance of face is a continuing diplomatic accomplishment. Each person wants to be free and to be seen as competent and socially attractive. If you admit that I am, I will act as though you are. So long as both people abide by this fundamental social contract, arguing proceeds along respectful, polite lines. The most pressing personal experience of face-to-face arguments may have more to do with this contract than with the matters apparently at hand. Competence Begging To this point, I have examined tightly contained three-turn sequences, potentially smaller adjacency-pair sequences and self-repairs, and overall frames (e.g., listen–clarify–elicit) that contextualize arguing. In this section, I explore how an argument can stitch the smaller sequences together during a conversation. The core concept in this development is what I call competence begging. Competence begging refers to the repetition, revision, or reinstatement of some speech act until a competent reply is elicited. Competence refers most to the wishes of the arguer, although at some points it leaks over into Conversation’s preferences as well. The idea is that the speaker offers a particular speech act, one to which a particular sort of reply is wanted. When that response is not forthcoming, the speaker reinstates the original speech act, perhaps in an edited form, and continues with it until the hearer finally makes an appropriate (i.e., wanted) speech act in return. Thus, competence begging is defined as repeating the occasion for a competent reply after one has not occurred in the originally occasioned slot. A competent reply is a preferred second pair part, a propositionally adequate utterance, an acceptable repair for a dispreferred second pair part, or a psychologically satisfying action. Pomerantz (1980) wrote about a similar idea, fishing devices. She described how indirectness can be used to elicit a desired comment from another person. She showed, for instance, how a person can tell a little story that can be usefully completed if the other person supplies a bit of information—the material that is fished for. If the bait is not taken, an explicit request for the information may follow after a turn or two. Her idea is a little different than this one, and her examples are much more compact. Nonetheless, it is useful literature in this connection. In terms of arguing, the competent reply is most often agreement, concession, withdrawal of doubt, or something along those lines (cf. Sacks, 1987). When the arguer’s main frame is play, however, the desired reaction is disagreement, which may become the wanted reply in ongoing oppositional exchanges, too (Kotthoff, 1993). Arguers are not

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structurally required to beg competence. Many arguments are not settled to everyone’s satisfaction, and participants often withdraw before any mutual agreement takes place. When the argument is pursued, however, the pursuit is understood as competence begging. The idea has applicability to many more things than arguing. I first noticed the phenomenon some years ago when I was collecting data on replies to compliments. I had brought dyads to a room where their conversation (on any topic) would be videotaped, but I secretly instructed one of the speakers to make sure to give a compliment to the other sometime during the interaction so that I could observe how people reply to praise. While I was watching the videotapes and reading the transcripts, I saw one man compliment another, but the listener made no acknowledgment of any kind that a compliment had been given. This failure of response was disappointing, but I continued to watch. A few minutes later, the speaker repeated the compliment. Still no appreciable uptake. A few minutes after that, the speaker offered the compliment for a third time, and finally the listener made a grudging indication that he had been praised. I realized that the speaker was acting as though the compliment weren’t complete until some sort of uptake had occurred. In the absence of a competent reply, the speaker kept reinstating the compliment. Once an acknowledgment appeared, the speaker quit complimenting and stayed solely on their joint discussion topic. At that point, I became more interested in competence begging than in compliment replies and began collecting instances. Here, I present examples showing how competence begging works in general, then I discuss its manifestations during face-to-face arguing. The general data are organized into four classes: simple corrections are elicited, other types of normally competent performance are elicited, especially competent replies are elicited, and a speaker capable of begging competence declines to do so. The examples of simple corrections are more normally analyzed as repair sequences (Schegloff, Jefferson, & Sacks, 1977). Schegloff (1987), for instance, studied the recycling of turn beginnings, especially when the first attempt was overlapped by the other speaker. However, I have something more in mind here, although it may not be apparent in these first, simplest instances. In the first example, an apparently incorrect item is held out for competent revision: Jefferson (1987), p. 87. 1 2 3 4

Milly Jean Milly

. . . and then they said something about Krushchev has leukemia so I thought oh it’s all a big put on. Breshnev. Breshnev has leukemia. So I didn’t know what to think.

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Analysis of this instance needs no new apparatus, as it is reasonably well explained by standard repair concepts. I offer it as an example of how 3 can be interpreted as a request for competent performance. The exchange ends after 4 because the competent reply is immediately produced; nothing more needs to be begged. The next example is perhaps a little more challenging to the usual apparatus and also shows how competence begging can be entirely oriented to content and not to structure. The exchange is between one of my daughters and myself, when she was in first grade. I jotted it down from memory a little while after it happened. 1 2 3 4 5 6

J D J D J D

Daddy, I can spell “best.” Okay, let’s hear it. ((Spelling)) B-u-s-t. We:ll, no:. That’s not quite right. ((Spelling)) B-e-s-t. Right!

The invited request appears in 2, and 3 is a structurally competent reply. However, it isn’t substantively right, and so competence is begged in 4. Because 5 is both structurally and substantively competent, the sequence ends in 6. Incidentally, substantive competence is a psychological event, a mutual agreement. The next set of examples is somewhat more complex than just obtaining a correction. A competent reply is elicited, and these replies have more content than simple error correction. The first shows an ultimately failed effort to get a competent reply to a compliment about a Busch Beer T-shirt. 410 F90, lines 122ff, transcribed by J. M. Tews 1 L 2 3 4 P 5 6 L 7 P 8 L

mm::hm - mm::hmm that’s cool - - Busch Beer (1.0) that’s a cool shirt= =Dad’s ball team - he used to have it - he won it one year they used Busch as their shirts - so:: (1.0) [ ] I like that Now he’s got [ brother’s baseball team?

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The compliment initially appears in 1, 2, and 3. The first two of these instances leave a slot for a reply, but none is forthcoming. The compliments become increasingly explicit, as the fishing becomes more pointed. The most straightforward is 3, but P immediately offers a locally relevant comment that does not acknowledge the praise. L begs a competent reply again in 6, but P ignores the effort again in 7. Finally, in 8, L simply gives up. The next two examples on this point are more immediately relevant to arguing. The first concerns two young children playing with blocks. R picks up a block near B, who attempts to take it from him. Corsaro & Rizzo (1990), p. 32. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

B R B R B R B R B

No - no. No. I had it first. I want one. But I had it first. I want one Barbara. I had that first. I want it. I had it first.

Each of B’s turns is an effort to obtain what she regards as a competent response from R, an agreement to return the block. Each of R’s turns is, from B’s point of view, a failure to provide an acceptable utterance. These failures precipitate her repeated instantiations of her standpoint. The next example of trying to obtain a competent reply deals with adults in court. A divorcing couple is disputing the division of their property. Mr. S is representing himself and is cross-examining Mrs. S. I focus on the judge, who first tries to get Mr. S to ask a competent question and later guides Mrs. S to a competent answer. In re: The marriage of [Mrs. S] (petitioner) and [Mr. S] (respondent), in the Circuit Court for the Ninth Judicial Circuit of Illinois, McDonough County, Division #1, 14 May 1987, pp. 50–51, official transcript, lines 1ff. 1 Mr: . . . I would like to ask why if the lodge had offered 2 you to keep your job why you felt you needed to leave 3 out there and return back to Illinois if you still had a job? 4 Mrs.’ Attorney: Your Honor, I will object, I can’t see the relevancy. 5 Mr: The relevance is she had an opportunity for employment while 6 I was forced out she still had an opportunity for

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7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Court:

Mr: Court: Mrs: Court: Mr: Mrs: Court: Mrs: Court:

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employment and she wanted to move back because of her mother. She had tried— Why don’t you ask her the question that she really testified about. Ask her whether or not she was told if she divorced you she could still have a job. Do you want to ask her that question? Yes, Your Honor. Why don’t you ask her that question? What was said? I was told if I divorced Allen then I would have my job. But— Are you asking her why she didn’t divorce you at that time? Yes, I am. That is my question. Why didn’t you divorce me at that time instead of waiting until a year later? Well the reason why I came back to Illinois was because I— That is not the question—why didn’t you divorce him at that time? I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready. Mentally I wasn’t ready. Okay, next question.

After an apparently correct intervention by Mrs. S’s attorney (4), the judge prompts Mr. S (9–12) to ask a more pointed question. He agrees in 13 but doesn’t actually ask the question. In 14 the judge renews the suggestion, begging competence. Mrs. S begins to answer the unasked question in 15 and 16, but the judge overrides her talk and begs competence from Mr. S again in 17. Finally, in 18 and 19, Mr. S not only agrees but produces the desired act. Competence having been obtained, the judge’s attention then turns to Mrs. S, who has not quite properly answered in 20. The judge then begs competence from her in 21 and 22. Her reply to the competent question is itself competent (23), and in 24 the judge signals that the whole question–answer sequence has been successfully concluded. In structural terms, the couple is conversing properly throughout the episode. Mr. S’s turn in 1 through 3 is a perfectly comprehensible question. It is substantively incompetent, according to the rules of evidence, but this incompetence is external to Conversation’s preferences. Similarly, Mrs. S’s utterance in 20 occupies an answer slot, and it appears that she is building toward something that would reasonably be heard as an answer. However, it is not quite on (legal) point, and the judge nudges her toward a reply that is both structurally and substantively appropriate. The judge’s begging of competence from Mr. S is a considerable

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source of the coherence of the modestly long sequence from 9 to 19. His attention to Mrs. S similarly gives coherence to the shorter passage from 21 to 23. Additionally, the episode that begins in 9 and is explicitly capped at 24 shows how competence begging is used to align conversants so that they can produce jointly comprehensible meanings. The competence begging, in short, has a great deal to do with the emerging argument and less connection to conversational microstructure. Having shown how competence begging is manifest in simple corrections and in more general tasks, I turn to a third point. The same general sort of action sequences can also be used to elicit an even more competent reply, even if a somewhat competent response has already occurred. The following example also comes from court records. A criminal defendant is being examined by his own attorney. The defendant is cooperating, but the attorney wants even better answers than the defendant initially offers. Illinois v. [defendant], Proceedings of the Sentencing Hearing, 26 January 1989, Circuit Court for the Ninth Judicial Circuit of Illinois, McDonough County. Pp. 25–26, official transcript, lines 1ff. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Q : Would you tell us what your attitude was when you went to court in the past when you were facing rather serious charges? A: I just didn’t care, really. Q : Why not? A: Well, I didn’t have nothing to lose. I didn’t have no job. I didn’t have no wife. I didn’t have nothing. Q : Plus you were kind of a wild guy? A: It didn’t matter. I could be in jail or I could be on the street. Q : Is that still true? A: No, it’s not. Q : Why not? A: Well, I haven’t been in trouble in five years. I have had a job for four years, been married four years. I just don’t want that kind of life no more. Q : Okay. A: There’s nothing in there that I want, and I am just, I don’t do nothing to get in trouble no more. Q : Okay. Now, you have heard the testimony of your wife that you provide support for your family, right?

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The attorney begs competence in 5, 8, 13, and 17. Each prompt follows a reasonably responsive utterance—reasonable both structurally and substantively. The attorney’s questions really have been answered, but in his or her view, not competently enough. In 5, 13, and 17, the attorney wants the defendant to elaborate, so as to put more argumentative substance in public view. In 8 the attorney suggests a topic, a way of expanding on the answer given in 6 and 7. The defendant is smoothly cooperative, never resisting the prompts or objecting that he has already given an adequate answer. The attorney’s turn at 20 indicates that the material has finally been competently produced and a new topic can be entertained. In describing himself prior to his marriage and in the present, the defendant can be understood as producing a biographical narrative with the help of his attorney. This behavior seems to be common in court; Pomerantz (1987) offered some similar examples (e.g., pp. 232, 234), as did Atkinson (1992, e.g., pp. 200–201). Storytelling is often a joint activity, even when only one person knows the story (e.g., Nofsinger, 1991, pp. 155–162). This example, however, goes beyond cooperation regarding prefacing, extended turns at talk, or joint telling. The attorney’s competence begging is directing the story, which everyone officially pretends is known only by the defendant, although the attorney slips in this respect at 8. The dialogue proceeds as if the attorney has a story outline in mind and keeps begging responses until the outline is suitably filled in. The example shows how the ends of successful competence-begging episodes can be marked, by the divorce judge in 24 and by the criminal defendant’s attorney in 20. Previous examples, such as the nursery school children’s exchange about blocks and in the compliment conversation about the Busch Beer T-shirt, show apparently incomplete sequences that lack this sort of capping. These last examples are suggestive of Vuchinich’s (1990) finding that many arguments are not really concluded at all. I offer one last remark about competence begging in general before I focus on its role in arguing: The point of the sequence may be precisely to show that the respondent is incompetent. This sort of thing may happen, for example, in a hostile doctoral oral examination or in a crossexamination in court. My example here is from a psychiatric clinic, in which a patient is examined to see if he is ready for release. Mehan (1990), pp. 174–175, lines 3ff. This is Mehan’s transcription of part of Frederick Wiseman’s film, Titicut Follies. The exchange is between the head psychiatrist (HP) and a patient (Pt). 1 HP: What got you down here? 2 Pt: They sent me down here for observation.

278 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

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HP: Why? Pt: They, they thought, I, I, went to see a social worker, and I saw a psychiatrist, they said that, well why don’t you go down there. Because I had an old problem. HP: You felt the coffee was poison and you felt that people were mixing you up in your thinking, you were shaking. Pt: Not so! The only part that’s true is coffee. And what sort of treatment do I get now? There are a hundred patients going back and forth, who are, who are obviously doing me harm. HP: Are you working here, Vladimir? Pt: No, there is no suitable work for me. All I’ve got is, all I got is the kitchen and all they do is throw cup cups around. In fact, they got two television sets which are blaring, machines which are going, everything which is against the mind. There is one thing uh uh uh that a patient does need, and this is what I do know, absolutely, is is quiet, if I have a mental problem or even an emotional problem. I’m thrown in with over a hundred of them and all they do is yell, walk around, televisions are blaring, so that’s doing my mind harm! HP: Are you involved in any sports here? Pt: There are no sports here. All I’ve got is a baseball, and — and-a a glove, and that’s it! There’s nothing else. Hum. There’s nothing else. Back at the other place, I had I had all the facilities to improve myself. I had the gym, I had the school, I had all kinds of uh uh anything I want. HP: Are you in any group therapy here? Pt: No! There is no group, obviously, I do not need group therapy, I need peace and quiet. See me. This place is disturbing me! It’s harming me. I’m losing weight. I’m losing weight. Every, everything that’s been happening to me is bad. And all I get, all I get is “well why don’t you take medication?” Medication is disagreeable to me. There are people to whom you may not give medication. Obviously, and the medication that I got is hurting me, it’s harming me! HP: ? Well Vladimir, you should Pt: In fact to be specific it harmed my thorax, I do know that much, what it harmed. And if it harmed HP: The thorax?

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This example shows the same sort of competence-begging prompts as discussed previously, especially in the courtroom examples. The head psychiatrist asks for more competent answers at 3, 7 and 8, and 41. Beginning at 4 and again at 9, the patient produces speech acts that are recognizable as fulfilling Conversation’s structural requirements. More interesting at this point is where competence begging is structurally and psychologically occasioned yet does not occur. Several of the patient’s answers, although structurally competent, are not substantially so. In the courtroom transcripts, follow-up occurred at those points, and competence was begged. Here, it is not. The psychiatrist could have begged competence at 13, for instance. The patient explained that the coffee is poison and that many patients were determined to do him harm. A questioner might solicit evidence or elaboration at 13, but apparently the psychiatrist believes that the final point on these matters has been made, and so a new topic is introduced. A similar thing happens at 23. In 18 through 22, the patient says that his mental health is being jeopardized by the institution. Instead of pursuing what would superficially seem to be a matter of grave professional concern, the psychiatrist lets the comment stand and changes the topic again. Line 29 is a more marginal example because the patient’s comments at 24 through 28 may have been competent. At 38 the psychiatrist cannot prevent himself from counseling for a moment, indicating that the sequence (30–37) is not really a competent reply to 29. Noticeably, however, the psychiatrist does not go further to solicit a more appropriate comment, even though he appears to have some motivation to do so. The reason that competence begging is omitted at these points, I think, is that competence is precisely the issue. As in a doctoral exam or courtroom self-defense, the object of the exchange is to test some feature of a person—intellectual attainment, innocence, or mental stability. Tracy (1997) carefully explored this sort of interaction in academic colloquia. Competence begging can guide a person to a display of suitability, but it can also be omitted to expose failings. This observation shows that competence begging results from a cognitive impulse and is not required by Conversation. In this, it is more like shifting a topic than exchanging a greeting. It may be interesting to explore the social circumstances in which a person expects the other to beg competence cooperatively and those settings in which help is not anticipated. This exploration strays farther afield from the topic at hand, but it is apparent nevertheless that the first possibility sounds like coalescent arguing and the second like eristic. I close this discussion of competence begging by trying to make explicit what it has to do with conversational arguing. First, competence

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begging, by design, calls out meaning. It makes positions clearer, evidence explicit, reasoning public. It is obviously a useful structural resource for testing or filling out arguments. It is equally applicable to narrative and linear lines of reasoning. Second, competence begging is a cooperative enterprise, emphasizing that conversational arguing is itself a joint activity (e.g., Akatsuko, 1997; Resnick, Salmon, Zeitz, Wathen, & Holowchak, 1993). It is first a kind of reserved uptake of what the other has said and second an invitation for the other to contribute in a more appropriate way. Third, although competence begging can occur at many points of an argument, its initiation is voluntary rather than structurally required. Even when it is noticeably missing, inferences are based on understanding the content and intuitions about the conversants rather than formal considerations. Fourth, competence begging is a recognizable structure by means of which arguments can be pursued for as long as both parties wish. Should a disagreement not be mutually settled after, say, the third turn, both participants can orient to this alignment system. Last, competence begging is a structural resource that can, in principle, organize huge chains of discourse. It can also handle smaller ones, of course, but much of what I have been examining—brief three-turn sequences, adjacency pair expansions, in-turn repairs—is often quick conversational moments. Competence begging shows a structural means for arguers to supplement or supply topical and global coherence to extended sequences of exchanges.

A DESCRIPTION OF CONVERSATIONAL ARGUING: MACROANALYSIS In the previous section, I discussed how arguing happens, turn by turn. The conversational sequences I examined were fairly short: the three-turn sequence, adjacency pair expansion, simple face negotiations, and competence begging across a few turns. In this section, I turn attention to whole episodes. Brief episodes can be analyzed with the tools already presented, but longer conversations involve connecting the microstructures and perhaps something beyond that, something that is qualitatively distinct. Besides its relevance as a structural description of a well-disciplined sequence, competence begging is a tool for understanding how smaller argumentative segments can be stitched together. I have said that competence begging is a structural resource, but it is not necessarily a tight one. In the conversation in which I first noticed it (the one with the repeatedly unacknowledged compliments), several minutes passed between the reinstantiations of the compliment. During those intervening minutes, the

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transcript gave no evidence that the compliment was still on the floor or in the background in any way. Only when it reappeared could an observer or conversant have realized that the matter was unresolved. More than minutes can pass. Several scholars have studied serial arguments (K. Johnson & Roloff, 1998, 2000; Trapp & Hoff, 1985), matters that recur in relationships. They come up, they are argued, and then they appear again, perhaps a few days later. They return because they have not been mutually settled and at least one arguer wants to renew the discussion. This pattern is competence begging extended across part (or even all) of a relational trajectory. It is even possible to conceive that long-term social arguments, such as civil rights or suffrage, are competence begging writ large. For convenience, however, I stick to arguments that are contained within one episode. Each argumentative conversation has at its base a central issue, what the Amsterdam scholars call a standpoint (actually some arguments fly all over, but I restrict myself to this simple case). This position is disputed, and it absorbs and subordinates all sorts of utterances—those that express claims, that display reluctance, that offer evidence, that challenge assertions, that contradict, that give intentional offense, that smooth the interaction, and so forth. The standpoint, along with the mutual goal of exploring it, affords global coherence to the whole episode. The points that are pursued within the argument depend on several things. The arguers’ psychological orientations to the standpoint, to the other person’s arguments, to self, and to the other person are all fundamental motivational considerations. Cognitive foundations include what the interactants know or think they know about the issue. Their inventions and editing come from cognitive and emotional sources and may reflect the felicity conditions of the focal speech act. The structural requirements of Conversation make slots for certain things and make other things essentially unutterable at a given moment. Each person’s judgments and wants determine, from turn to turn, whether agreement has occurred or whether competence must continue to be begged (either immediately or later). Everything that is done while arguing is not relevant to the pragmadialecticians’ normative model; it is only attuned to the substantive requirements for critical discussion and intentionally omits the personal and interpersonal ones. I provide a reasonably full example, my summary of one of the conversations presented in chapter 5. Two students were brought in to discuss whether or not African-American fraternities should be thrown off campus. This is the conversation between the African-American woman (L) and the White man (K). Readers may recall that the conversation did

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not end in agreement. I think that brief summaries of the turns focus attention better on the points I want to make, so only a few remarks are quoted from the transcript. I have imposed some ordering on the summary, and readers should be aware of that. Through indenting, I display the subordinations of various arguments to one another to show the content structure of the exchange. The assigned topic, that Black fraternities should have their official recognition withdrawn, is not explicitly stated in the beginning of the exchange but is clearly understood, probably from the experimenter’s instructions to the conversants. My summary is in Fig. 7.1. The first thing I note is how clearly the various subordinations can be identified. Even though this discussion did not end in mutual agreement and even though many of the smaller sequences were also unresolved, the two people cooperatively maintained coherent lines of argument. For the most part, once agreement was reached, the subargument was regarded as concluded, and neither party pursued it. Brief and reasonable exceptions to this occur at Turn 26, where L clarifies her understanding of the agreement, and at Turns 45 and 46, where both parties clarify. Even in this ultimately unresolved argument, neither party returned to underscore past positions that have won assent. To do so may constitute lording it over the other arguer, but such a move may also serve to reinstantiate agreement. The arguers’ joint behavior differed when no agreement occurred. Then, the argument got deeper—that is, the arguers pursued some detail or development of what they hadn’t been able to agree on. The aim is to discover common ground and then back out to the original point of dispute and resolve it. This deepening happens in Turns 11 to 26, where they finally achieved agreement. It also happens at Turns 27 to 47, also ending in some agreement. Interestingly, this lemma development (see Levelt, 1989) also characterizes the huge sequence from Turn 51 to Turn 84, at the end of which K and L are still in disagreement. It is worth noticing how challenges are useful in pushing these developments deeper. Challenges occupy key slots in Turns 12 to 17, Turns 33 to 43, and Turns 58 to 71. Although challenges seem to have a natural capacity to generate lemmas, they are quite face threatening (Muntigl & Turnbull, 1998) and do not always generate desired replies, as the figure shows. Once the lemma sequences are fully explored, ending either in agreement or the obvious lack of it, the arguers always back out and return to the broad generative issue. This is apparent at Turns 11, 27, 47, and 85. A return seems to be a natural, rational move when agreement on subsidiary matters has been reached, but at 85, nothing of the sort has happened. K has given up on the possibility of agreement on the lemma sequence. He devalues the whole sequence by declaring that they are off

283

T

L: all frats drink

K: yes agree

L: non membrs drink

K: yes agree

6

7

8

9

L chall: black?

K yes, all same

12

13

K: frats for drinkg, so no service

K: no agree

5

11

L chall: 24 hours?

K: frats for drinkg

2

1

FIG. 7.1.

Content diagram for an argument ending without agreement. (Continued)

284

T

L: do hear, need to look K: then all would know

16

17

K: few are racist L: can be K: some can be agree L: many are

22

23

26

L: no media coverage

21

18

K chall: why not hear?

L chall: ev & K’s character

15

14

285

L: no, blacks better

32

L chall: don’t you? K: no L chall: don’t you?

37

38

K chall: ev?

36

34

L: stress relief, all do it

K: whites better

31

33

L: but other frats, too

L: maybe agree

30

30

K: noisy

K: Q Dogs typical

29

27

FIG. 7.1.

(Continued)

286

K: get rid of them

L: no, I’ll meet w Admin no reslutn

48

K: yes agree

47

47

L: so all do it

46

K: yes agree

43

K: almost agree?

L chall: know anyone?

42

45

K: no no reslutn

41

L: as annoying as black?

L chall: don’t you?

40

44

K: no

39

T

287

FIG. 7.1.

(Continued)

L: not daily

66

L: not enuf kegs at parties

62

K: private use

K: for kegs

61

65

L chall: how?

K: on parties

59

60

L chall: how?

K: yes

57

58

L: no

56

K: yes

53

K: $ for parties, not service

L: no

52

54

K: waste $

51

288 L: I know members

68

L: can, too L: I code switch

78

L: GPA reqd

72

74

K: “bullshit”

71

K: no Stand English

L: 2.5 or 3.0

70

73

K chall: info on GPA?

L: good grades, can’t be drunk

69

68

K chall: ev?

67

T

289

K: off topic

FIG. 7.1.

K: mine black

81

K: waste $

L: doing much good no reslutn

L: your argts no good no reslutn

87

88

90

85

84

L: due to hood

K: my friends don’t need to

80

79

L: only some Bl hoods no reslutn

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topic (Muntigl & Turnbull, 1998, showed that irrelevance claims are extremely face threatening). L has also apparently given up hope (or interest in continuing to interact with K); she cooperates with the irrelevance claim rather than trying to make a case for reintroduction of any part of the details in Turns 51 to 84. This return to root, if I may call it that, seems to be a natural way of tying off lemmas. If the subsidiary development has ended in agreement, it is a rational move to go back to the root issue to check whether it, too, has been resolved. When the return to root happens at 85, however, no such prospect is in store. At 87, K reinstantiates the argument about the fraternities wasting money—an argument that had already been raised at 11. Whether or not the fraternities use their funds properly on charitable activities has not quite been resolved, although the trail of subordinate argument from Turns 12 to 26 led to at least a partial agreement on whether or not people can be prejudiced. This agreement, however, is never substantively tracked back to root because the arguers are unable to use this material to form a further agreement on whether or not African-American fraternities should have their recognition withdrawn. When they get back to the basic issue at Turn 27, they find that they are still in disagreement. By reinstating the matter at 87, K may have been trying to build on their earlier partial success in following this idea, but when L disagrees at 88, K makes no response at all. Nor does he speak again after L closes the conversation with the declaration that none of K’s arguments are any good. The return to root is an orienting move. After agreement on some related matter, arguers may check on the possibility of complete substantive alignment. Even after the lemmas have not and obviously will not generate agreement, the return to root serves to remind the arguers of the basic issue on the floor. K’s comment at 85, that they are off topic, suggests that the return to root is naturally used as a way to discipline large argumentative sequences. The return to root is also a particular kind of competence begging. K is the protagonist in the argument. He is in first position (Hutchby, 1996) and is the one who is seeking a competent (i.e., wanted) reply to his standpoint. Each time he returns to express his position, he creates a slot for L to agree. Several of his efforts are edited in hopes of obtaining the desired reply. His initial case, in Turn 1, is that fraternities exist mainly for drinking. At Turn 11, he adds the implication that because their attention is given over to drinking, they do little charitable or community service. At 27, he tries out the idea that recognition of the fraternities should be withdrawn because they play their music so loudly. His return to root in Turn 47 is a naked statement that the campus should simply get rid of them, but in Turn 51 he offers the line of argument (similar to

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that involved in the standpoint at Turn 11) that they waste their money. It turns out that, in K’s view, they waste it by spending it on beer, so this is also a reprise of the original standpoint. Finally, in Turn 87, he asserts again that they waste their money, but this position is not explored again, and the episode ends. Whether the standpoint is simply repeated or is slightly revised, however, at each of these points he is occasioning and soliciting L’s agreement. Returning to root seems to be a useful way to beg competence so as to give substantive coherence to the whole interaction. Because I do not want to let these observations rest entirely on the analysis of a single face-to-face argument, I explore a second example, the other interaction studied in chapter 5. The topic is the same, but these arguers ended up in agreement. This time the two participants both appear to be African-Americans. My summary is in Fig. 7.2. Several differences between Fig. 7.1 and Fig. 7.2 are immediately apparent, and it is important to consider whether these are related to the fact that the first exchange did not end with mutual agreement and the second one did. First, the second argument does not have as much structural development, if development is indexed by the depth of lemmas. Only one sequence (i.e., Turns 4 to 30) goes five levels deeper than root, and only one other goes four levels deep (i.e., Turns 97 to 111, although Turn 111 seems to be an irrelevancy). In contrast, Fig. 7.1 shows one very large lemma that has 11 subordinate lines of thought and another that goes five deep. This difference is obviously due to the points at which agreement occurs. In Fig. 7.1, the 11-deep excursion ends not in agreement but in an irrelevancy claim. In Fig. 7.2, the five-deep sequence ends in apparent agreement at Turn 30, and a three-deep development ends in agreement at Turn 69. Once agreement has been reached, no further details must be explored. Development is done in search of agreement and stops once assent is gained. A second difference is that unresolved matters are marked as such in Fig. 7.1 but not in Fig. 7.2. This difference reflects the flow of the conversations, although it is sometimes hard to document the reasons for my interpretations. In the first episode, the absence of agreement at several points is quite noticeable, perhaps because the conversants have been trying so hard to find common ground and are so obviously in disagreement. In the second conversation, several remarks are simply left without comment, at Turns 83 and 111. At 83, A may have agreed with B’s assertion, but neither the videotape nor the transcript gives much evidence of an agreement. The most conservative judgment is that A regarded B’s claim as off point and ignored it rather than enacting disagreement. Similarly, B’s contribution at 111 does not lead or refer to any developed points. A’s turn at 112 is quite conciliatory even though it does

turn 3

A: elimination an interesting idea

4

B: problems, but don’t eliminate

5

A: chall: why?

7

B: chall: their original purpose?

10

B: give black outlet on white campus

13

A: chall: what shared purpose?

14

B: be socially useful

18

B: but: social clubs

20

B: selfish

26

B: social more imp to them than academic

27

B: start . . .

28

A: guidance

30

A: put strings on them

30

laughter agree

31

B: tough academic reqmnts

33

B: so take easy classes

36

A: so give guidance FIG. 7.2.

292

Content diagram for an argument ending with agreement. (Continued)

turn 36

A: univ not guide them, so consider eliminating

36

A: you said mainly social [18]

37

B: agree

39

A: no real restrictions in place

43

B: need more univ input, but shouldn’t run them

48

A: not run them agree

49

B: orgs should selforganize agree

50

A: orgs should selforganize agree

5559

B: when lose leaders, a problem

6163

B: should have experience before leading

68

A: should have a little regulation

69

B: agree

70

A: so probationary status

71

B: agree

75

B: rules not enforced

76

A: agree FIG. 7.2.

(Continued)

293

turn 77

B: “they” don’t care much

78

A: agree

79

B: attitude is, “black, so hands off”

80

A: agree

81

B: blacks need to take care of own donations

83

B: no one else helps

88

A: chall: if an orgn is negative, eliminate?

89

B: yes

90

A: chall: if whole mass not productive?

91

B: ban them

96

A: chall: if one org doing badly?

97

B: ban them

98

B: but have guidelines

99

A: soon none left

100

B: need guidelines

101

A: chall: like probationary status?

102

B: set reqmnts

107

A: chall: what if [not] meet guidelines? FIG. 7.2.

294

(Continued)

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turn 108

B: no choice, to be fair

111

B: orgs do service

114

A: mix our views together, do guidelines agree

115

B: agree

118

A: semiprobationary status

119

B: agree

120

A: coord w admin, be more productive

121

B: agree

122

A: agree FIG. 7.2.

not adapt to 111. (The figure makes Turn 36 also appear to have elicited no comment, but the continuation of 36 reframes this idea as the root issue, and there is development of that root.) This conversation contains fairly clear disagreement, as in the sequence in Turns 88 to 97 (notice A’s objection to B’s answers, in Turn 99). The arguers’ disinclination to declare or enact disagreement at various points is therefore probably not due to reticence or face management. Instead, it reflects a contrast in the way arguers handle points that have little prospect of generating agreement. In Fig. 7.1, such matters are pursued vigorously, but in Fig. 7.2 they are quietly set aside. Another obvious difference between the episodes has to do with agreement sequences. By this phrase, I mean a series of turns (i.e., more than a two-turn pair) in which the participants repeatedly declare agreement. Not only does this declaration cement common ground, but it also valorizes agreement itself, behaviorally showing that it is something to be dwelt upon. Figure 7.1 shows a nice sequence of agreements in Turns 2 to 9 and a very grudging and questionable series in Turns 44 to 47. Otherwise, no agreeing sequences appear. In contrast, Fig. 7.2 includes several such exchanges—at Turns 43 to 50, 68 to 80, and 114 to 122. Nota-

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bly, the last two sequences cross through the root issue, giving them a special power to generate or confirm fundamental consensus. One may speculate on the reason that Fig. 7.1 has an early agreement sequence, but Fig. 7.2 does not. It may have to do with racial sensitivity. The argument summarized in Fig. 7.1 involved a White man and an African-American woman, and perhaps the arguers were trying to be especially careful in the way they initiated the exchange. The second argument involved two African-Americans, and they may have felt more comfortable exploring their disagreements together. If there is any merit to this speculation, it would then suggest that agreement sequences can be tools for negotiating positive relational definitions (Fig. 7.1) or for displaying a shared commitment to agreement (Fig. 7.2). These differences between the macrostructures of the arguments, then, seem to have some connection to whether the episodes ended in agreement or not. Depth of development is determined by how early subordinate agreements are reached, and the more relevant agreements of that sort the arguers have, the more likely they are to come together in the end. The marking of disagreements is itself a sign that trouble is brewing and that arguers are not agreeing or cooperating in setting aside minor differences. It may be supposed that a fully coalescent attitude toward the issue may turn this marking into a valuable sort of signposting that would serve to orient dialecticians to the key matters. In contrast, it may be that the second pair of arguers was more attuned to agreement, and their exchange shows little or no marked disagreement. The third difference is the frequency and positioning of the agreement sequences. Here, too, the fact that only the second dyad was moving toward agreement seems to explain the data. The second argument also shares some similarities with the first, and it is time to explore these. In particular, the return to root, competence begging, and challenges seem to deserve comment. Figure 7.2 shows several instances of the return to root. As in the other argument, this is an orienting move. Each time it happens, the arguers are checking to see if they are in substantive alignment yet. The first return, at 36, accommodates the very end of the sequence from Turns 3 to 36. Much of that initial development (i.e., 5 to 26) simply explores the nature of African-American fraternities, but the close of that lemma brings up the idea of administrative guidance. Joint inspection (notice all the agreements) of university restrictions from Turns 39 to 69 leads to another return to root, at 70. This reformulation of A’s position gains agreement, and the episode may have ended there. However, the illusory nature of the agreement becomes apparent as the arguers pursue the matter, as the series of root exchanges at 88 to 97 shows (especially note Turn 99, where the undesirability of B’s responses is expressed). The

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very significant return at 114 (where A offers to “mix our views”) offers and develops into genuine alignment. As I noted earlier, the return to root is a species of competence begging. This latter phenomenon occurs at quite a few other points in the exchange as well. The series of turns from 18 to 26, where only B says anything of significance, offers A a number of opportunities to agree, but A doesn’t. At 27, B says something unclear and elliptical about “starting,” and A supplies a completion at 28, where the idea of starting a program of administrative guidance appears for the first time. Rather than support this thought, however, B reverts to the question of whether the fraternities value social over academic missions. A reapplies the suggestion of guidance at 36 but gets no substantive uptake from B. Finally, at the end of 36, A takes B’s analysis of social priority as a premise, and B delivers a competent reply at 37. The sequence from Turns 88 to 111 is another interesting competencebegging episode. Throughout this passage, A continues to frame questions to which B persistently gives unwanted replies. Finally A seems to give up on the chance of obtaining a competent response and offers an accommodating return to root in 114. This fragment may be interpreted as an example of how B’s stubbornness solicited a new (and more competent, more desired) standpoint from A and how B succeeded in 114. In this sense, both A and B were begging competence from one another. Finally, I note again how useful challenges are in stimulating argumentative development. The first developed sequence, Turns 5 to 30, is started by challenges at 5, 7, and 13. A contradiction appears in Turn 18, and this contradiction seems to serve a similar argumentative function. Interestingly, the development in Turns 36 to 69 is not challenge driven. Instead, the arguers make locally relevant extensions of the previous turn to introduce a further idea at 43 and 55, and later at 81. Two of these three moves take place immediately following an agreement, and the other one is only one turn displaced. Challenges do not take place after agreements in Fig. 7.2, and the same is true in Fig. 7.1. Analysis of these two arguments suggests that challenges are an aggressive way to pursue and clarify disagreement but topically relevant extensions are a more natural move for following up on agreement. This idea of extensions may profitably be added to Muntigl and Turnbull’s (1998) list of T2 and T3 moves; the extensions in Fig. 7.2 do not quite seem to be counterclaims and are certainly not contradictions, challenges, or irrelevancy claims. To close this section, I make a few observations about the macrostructure of interpersonal arguing. The standpoint is critical in giving coherence—both global and local—to the participants’ moves. Everything is in the context of the overarching topic. Participants are aware of this

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context and constantly check themselves against the root issue. The two arguments I have analyzed qualitatively are both substantive. That is, they are generally on point and are instances of instrumental arguing. There are tinges of facework here and there, but for the most part the conversations are straightforwardly about the apparent topic. Much of the development in these arguments can be understood as competence begging because the arguers do not initially agree and so do not immediately obtain competent (i.e., wanted) replies from the interlocutor. The arguers’ persistence gives rise to the competence-begging structure, which is often developed as lemmas. All four conversants participate readily in these competence-begging episodes, maintaining their local standpoints and trying to move in the direction of assent. Several particular moves seem to be important in stimulating argumentative complexity. Challenges are very prominent in these two conversations, and a challenge naturally leads to development of a subordinate issue. Also, challenges normally occur just after agreement was possible but not reached (although not at all such points). Contradictions and counterclaims seem to have a similar potential, but these dialogues contain few. Argumentative development after assent does not seem to be comfortably initiated by challenges. Instead, topically relevant argument extensions occur in those slots. These extensions are less aggressive than challenges and more conversational, in the nontechnical sense of the word.

CONCLUSIONS Arguing is an interpersonal accomplishment. Although it is normally characterized in part by opposition, such disagreement mainly spices up what is an otherwise blandly cooperative enterprise. For an argument to happen, or to happen productively, the arguers must jointly endorse all these things: 1. the conversational topic, including what and whose particular standpoint is under review; 2. the interactive procedural rules, including turn taking, preference organization, and allocation of burden of proof; 3. the key personal definitions of self, other, and relationship; should these become controversial, the dialogue immediately derails to focus only on them (see Folger, Poole, & Stuttman, 1997, ch. 5); 4. what will be counted as true and relevant;

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5. what forms of reasoning are acceptable, including what is allowable as fair arguing; and 6. the means of determining a joint conclusion. This list is not as detailed as van Eemeren and Grootendorst’s (2004, ch. 8) “ten commandments for reasonable discussants” or their 15 rules for critical discussion, but it has the virtue of drawing attention to matters important to the interpersonal character of arguing. It is interesting to reflect that nearly everything on all these normative lists is usually taken for granted by participants (cf. Hopper, 1981). The whole project of conversation analysis can be described as an effort to explicate things that nearly everyone can already do. Although it is obvious that many of these taken-for-granteds are essential to the social order, I also have little trouble imagining the outline of an argument to the effect that these things may also have evolutionary value (e.g., Pinker, 1994). Turn-taking rhythms seem to be biological in origin (Cappella, 1991), suggesting that humans (that is, the organisms) have developed in such a way as to favor interpersonal exchange. Supposing that humans have disagreed for as long as they have had opinions, the ability to come to correct decisions through argument would seem to be a reproductive advantage, one that may be enhanced if the arguing is congenial. That all people recognize, orient to, enact, and cooperate in simple structures for arguing suggests that these are fundamental tools of humanity, whether they are biological or social in origin. The various features of conversational argument that I have explored—the three-turn sequence, preference organization, adjacency pairs, lemma organizations, competence begging, the return to root, agreement sequences, and the like—all seem, on their faces, to be productive. Each does a nice job of coordinating people while they pursue disagreement. They afford a basic skeleton for interaction (e.g., adjacency pairs) and argument (e.g., the three-turn sequence), they orient conversants to what is relevant (e.g., the return to root), they permit arguers to express both differences (e.g., competence begging) and solidarity (e.g., agreement sequences), and they offer a route to substantive development and enlightenment (e.g., lemma organization). These are all interactive resources, not rigid behavioral constraints. People can argue irrelevantly, wildly, and incoherently. This isn’t the norm for competent adults, however. In the various transcripts and summaries in this chapter, reasonably skilled arguing appears. Even in the argument most open to critique, L and K’s failed exchange about African-American fraternities, both participants cooperated in expressing

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themselves clearly and relevantly, exchanging turns, keeping track of own and other’s positions, avoiding obvious personal attacks, and a host of other ventures. Even that argument had, in its early moments, some small potential to generate mutual agreement. For the most part, people create their personal lives through conversation. Arguing is part of that continuing project.

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Impossible Arguments

I am generally optimistic about the prospects and potentials of interpersonal arguing. I believe that it is a fundamental means of creating, shaping, and sharing meanings and that arguing can therefore achieve productive ends, including finding common ground, settling disagreements, and moving interpersonal relationships to more secure bases. I have tried to illustrate and explain these possibilities throughout the book. However, realism has required that I occasionally acknowledge that arguments can go wrong, sometimes badly wrong. This situation may happen when one or another arguer has a crude frame for the activity, when severe emotional reactions erect impenetrable barriers of ego defense, when arguers are misinformed or uninformed about their topics, or when someone simply cannot follow a line of inference. Ordinarily, people can point to some personal failings or to some prejudicial circumstances that account for arguments that have gone off the tracks. My commitments—reasoned ones, I hope—have led me to portray these difficulties as accidental (in Aristotle’s definitional sense), not as inherent to the essential activity of arguing. Arguments, after all, are supposed to contain recognizable evidence that leads to public inferences about the conclusions that can be drawn. In principle, arguing can be done competently in any case, precisely because the structural features of interpersonal arguing permit and even encourage mistakes to be corrected dialectically. In this chapter, however, I point out several structural difficulties that can arise, difficulties so substantial that good dialectical arguing becomes nearly impossible. In calling these arguments impossible, of course, I am 301

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somewhat hyperbolic. If I can explain the problems to readers, people ought to be able to identify these vulnerabilities in discourse and so divert the argument onto productive lines. However, the identification and correction of these particular structural problems is so difficult that people are commonly unable to make the needed corrections. The matters under discussion in this chapter are therefore not simple fallacies. People do not need to know the Latin expression for a bad argument scheme to be able to say that just because one thing happens and then another one does, they are not entitled to conclude that the first thing causes the second (i.e., post hoc ergo propter hoc). Nor does an arguer need to distinguish carefully between ad hominem and ad personem to be able to maintain that just because a senator says something about the Social Security Trust Fund, people are not required to believe what the legislator has asserted. Threats (ad baculum) are often immediately recognized as nonarguments, at least insofar as constructive reasoning about the apparent topic is concerned. Fallacies, as named and collated by philosophers and rhetoricians over the millennia, condensed out of common discourse. People noticed that certain sorts of arguments looked plausible but often did not hold up under close scrutiny. Those observers with a talent for abstraction were able to label and define those argument schemes, which is where the lists of fallacies must have originated. Formal education on these matters should certainly be helpful, but my point is that intelligence and a dialectical attitude are very often sufficient to prevent ordinary fallacies from derailing a critical discussion, for these factors were the only defenses in the first place. Noticing a fallacy, either through some formal analysis or through intelligent instinct, requires only that one clearly think through the details of the argument at hand. Impossible arguments require more than that. Dealing with these forms necessitates that an arguer be able to rise above the immediate argument and be able to contemplate and discuss its nature at a higher, more theoretical level. Many bright people aren’t able to reach this level, and they find themselves trapped in the argument sequences. They may know that something has gone badly wrong, but they can’t quite say what it is. If they cannot articulate the problem, it cannot become a dialectical matter, and so the argument founders. This situation is very much the same as that analyzed by Watzlawick et al. (1967; also see S. Tracy, 2004; Watzlawick, 1978; Watzlawick, Weakland, & Fisch, 1974; Wood & Pearce, 1980) in their discussion of paradoxes. They followed Bertrand Russell’s theory of logical types, which specifies that, even though people may use the same words, they in fact have different logical languages for different levels of meaning. If one considers a class of objects, the class and the objects within it are of different logical types. If people do not realize the difference in logical

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types, they can be confused by a paradox. As an example, the statement I am lying is apparently paradoxical because it is only true if it is false, but false if it is true. However, the example is actually two statements. One, at the object level, states that “I” am lying, that is, “I” is an object within the class of lying. The second, at the meta level, asserts that the whole statement (i.e., I am lying) is true. The meta statement is logically not part of the meaning domain for the object statement. Once this distinction is realized, one can see that the original assertion I am lying is meaningless, not self-contradictory (see Watzlawick et al., 1967, ch. 6, for a fuller treatment, including the liar’s paradox). This realization, which necessitates the ability to understand an alternative to and to rise above the object language, is the key to understanding. In the remainder of this chapter, I do not pursue quite this sort of analysis, but there is a sense in which the two argument structures I describe generate a feeling of paradox for the participants. Immersed within a fruitless exchange and confined to the level of the immediate argument, the arguers find themselves flying like the ball in some screen savers, bouncing perpetually off the borders of the monitor display: If he’s lying, he’s telling the truth; but if he’s telling me the truth, he’s lying; but if he’s lying. . . . One needs to be able to discuss screen savers to escape this sort of situation, and the ball cannot. I describe these structures, showing how a more abstract level of analysis reveals their pitfalls. However, as I move through the chapter, I show how many people—reasonably bright and well-motivated people— are not naturally able to work at the required meta-argumentative levels. Earlier in the book, I noted that many people do not have advanced frames for interpersonal arguing. Quite a few do not distinguish between evidence and reason. Anyone who has taught a course or unit on logic or fallacies knows that even college-level adults commonly make errors. However, all these mistakes are failings at the level of the immediate argument. The meta-argumentative plane is still more advanced, and it is difficult to navigate. The two impossible arguments I explore here are (a) pseudo- or nonevidence, and (b) reflexive arguments. The first matter originates with Kuhn’s (1991) study of how ordinary people try to argue about causal theories. The second is something that I have noticed and written about previously. PSEUDOEVIDENCE Kuhn’s (1991) important book, The Skills of Argument, consists of an elaborate report on the results of many one-on-one interviews with people asked to argue. Three topics were in use—Why do students fail in school?

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Why do criminals return to crime after prison? What causes unemployment?—and all participants talked about each subject. Their basic task was to generate a causal theory for each topic. The interviews followed a careful protocol (see Kuhn, 1991, Appendix 1), and investigators prompted repeatedly for arguments and evidence. Each respondent participated in two interviews, both typically an hour in length. The main sample involved 160 people from four different age ranges: ninth graders, and adults in their 20s, 40s, and 60s. In the three upper ranges, half the participants had at least some college. Half the ninth graders came from upper-middle-class schools that aim students toward college, and half came from lower-class schools whose graduates rarely attend college. Males and females were equally distributed in each age range. After identifying and classifying respondents’ causal theories, Kuhn’s first analytical step was to study the evidence that people gave to support their views. This set of findings is the central concern here, although the findings about evidence connect in important ways to some of Kuhn’s other foci. Kuhn (1991, ch. 3) classified respondents’ evidence into three broad categories: genuine evidence, pseudoevidence, and nonevidence, in the context of causal arguments. Genuine evidence meets two criteria: it must be distinct from the causal theory itself (i.e., not just a reexpression of the central claim), and it must have to do with the correctness of the theory. Included in this category is evidence about covariation of putative cause and effect, external causes of the focal cause, and indirect evidence (i.e., analogy, general but applicable statements about human nature, and evidence that alternative causal theories are incorrect). I am particularly interested in Kuhn’s second large category, pseudoevidence. Pseudoevidence does not actually tend to prove the correctness of the causal theory. Instead, it supplies a scenario that involves the cause and effect. These little narratives make the causal theory appear plausible, but they do not prove that the causal connection exists. Pseudoevidence is little more than a restatement of the causal theory, although often in a personal or individualized way. Main types of pseudoevidence are generalized scripts (e.g., a description of a hypothetical blended family whose child fails in school), narrative scripts (e.g., better developed stories about specific children who are held back), discussion of the consequences of the effect rather than its causes (e.g., what happens to children who do poorly in school), and scripts that relay specific examples or illustrations of the cause and effect. Kuhn’s final large category is nonevidence. Respondents indicate that they are so obviously right that evidence is unnecessary, they provide material that simply doesn’t bear on the correctness of the theory, or they offer the effect as incontrovertible evidence that the cause must have been responsible (e.g., in response to a probe for evidence that

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poor nutrition causes children to fail in school, one person replied, “The grades they get in school . . . [show that] they are lacking something in their body,” p. 87). The frequencies of these sorts of evidence are of some interest. Nonevidence is rarest. Most common in Kuhn’s sample is pseudoevidence. In spite of repeated probing, for the crime and unemployment topics, only about 40% of her respondents provided genuine evidence. The school topic, the most familiar one, stimulated genuine evidence 48% of the time. In another study, Kuhn, Shaw, and Felton (1997) assigned adolescent and adult students to write essays on capital punishment (not an inherently causal topic), and only 4% generated good evidence for their opinion (pretest data, p. 296). Limon and Mitchell (2001) asked undergraduates to participate in a face-to-face argument with a trained confederate, on the topic of doctor-assisted suicide. Only 16% of their sample generated what Kuhn would count as genuine evidence, and even fewer— 5%—offered pseudoevidence for their views. Apparently, people rarely offer good evidence spontaneously. Kuhn’s original figures seem to reflect a substantial probing effect. The results of this interactive probing are somewhat encouraging. From the many transcripts in Kuhn’s (1991) book, it is clear that the respondents often fail to generate good evidence at first, but once they are pressed, many can provide or describe probative data. This behavior is roughly the sort of thing that ought to be happening in a critical discussion. In chapter 7, I reviewed the Amsterdam theory of dialectical argument and noted that the initial stages (i.e., opening and confrontation) are not especially argumentative. The argument stage is actually the third one. Even in principle, then, rich expressions of reason and evidence should occur after the interlocutor presses the protagonist and the argument is fully joined. Several studies show that experience in face-to-face arguing improves people’s arguing skill (Kuhn et al., 1997; Kuhn & Udell, 2003). However, even when repeatedly challenged, not everyone can generate good evidence. Kuhn (1991, p. 92) showed that 29% of her respondents never gave genuine evidence for any of the three topics. To this point, I have shown that a sizeable number of people make structurally deficient arguments. This point does not go very far toward proving that pseudoevidence is implicated in impossible arguments. People make reasoning mistakes all the time, and even if an error is not corrected during a particular interaction, good arguing in those circumstances is not a hopeless prospect. To explain why I think that arguments centered on pseudoevidence or nonevidence are nearly impossible to resolve properly, I need to explain several more things. First, I need to display the nature of pseudoevidence more clearly to show just how impermeable this sort of case is, and second, I need to explain why

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that impermeability is a basic feature of the arguers’ understanding of argument. Govier (2001) analyzed one of Kuhn’s (1991, pp. 71–72) transcripts and showed the essential problem quite effectively. The respondent, a noncollege male in his 40s, explains why criminals return to crime after leaving prison. His causal theory is that they commit crimes because they truly want to be criminals. Govier edited Kuhn’s transcript and added parenthetical numbers to it. All the numbered statements refer to points where the respondent seems to believe that he is providing evidence, but at each place he is simply presupposing that his conclusion is correct. I pick up the interview partway through. Interviewer: How do you know that this is the cause? Subject: Because (1) I think if they want to become good citizens, they would . . . Interviewer: If you were trying to convince someone else that your view that wanting to stay in crime is the cause, what evidence would you give to try to show this? Subject: Well, I would get some evidence of people that did commit crimes and went to jail and now are good honest citizens . . . There are many . . . Some should still be in jail. They shouldn’t let them out at all. (2) The crimes they commit . . . there is no excuse for them. Interviewer: Just to be sure I understand, can you explain exactly how this shows that wanting to stay in crime is the cause? Subject: Well, they always blame it on environment and how they are brought up, and I can remember, I can state that crime and the burning of buildings that you have throughout the United States today . . . [years ago this did not happen; now things are different . . .] It’s the element, the people that come in. (3) They don’t want to better themselves . . . (3a) People don’t want to change . . . Interviewer: Is there anything someone could say or do to prove that what you’ve said is what causes prisoners to return to crime? Subject: Anybody that’s been in jail and have repeated convictions . . . they’ve always been in jail, so what did he get out of it? (4) They get room and board and they really don’t make an honest living. And you and I, the taxpayer, maintain these people. It comes out of our taxes. (Govier, 2001, p. 86)

Govier, an informal logician, promptly identified all this as the fallacy of begging the question, and she is surely right. Striking here is the respondent’s persistence. In spite of four fairly pointed prompts, he simply restates his conclusion each time, showing no awareness of inadequacy. Using different words and emphasizing different aspects of his conclu-

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sion, he appears intelligent and reasonable, if somewhat opinionated, but he doesn’t give any evidence at all for his causal theory of recidivism. Just for contrast, I invent some evidence (I have no reason to suppose that any of it is true) that the respondent could have used. He may have said that criminals have high testosterone levels that impel them to do highly aggressive things and that this chemical imbalance inevitably causes them to cross socially acceptable lines. He could have said that many people have made millions of dollars from crime, the occasional prison stay is simply a cost of doing business, and so people want to commit crimes from understandable financial motives. He could have said that criminals have a wrong moral sense, and they get personal enjoyment from taking risks and hurting contemptible law abiders. Even if these are all false, Kuhn would have coded them as genuine evidence. However, the respondent didn’t say anything like that. He said that criminals want to commit crimes because (1) “I think if they want to become good citizens, they would.” Criminals want to commit crimes because (2) “The crimes they commit . . . there is no excuse for them,” meaning that “they just want to.” Criminals want to commit crimes because (3) “They don’t want to better themselves.” Criminals want to commit crimes because (3a) “People don’t want to change,” and criminals want to commit crimes because (4) “They get room and board and they really don’t make an honest living,” suggesting that they don’t even mind prison. Over and over again, he says they want to commit crimes because they want to commit crimes. He believes that he has given suitable answers to prompts that ask him to provide evidence, to explain why he counts his point as evidence, to anticipate how another person could see a particular idea as evidence, and so forth. Perhaps he doesn’t understand the questions, perhaps he doesn’t understand what causal evidence is, or perhaps these misunderstandings are the same problem. Kuhn’s work explores how people understand arguing deficiently and build naïve epistemologies that support pseudoevidence and nonevidence. However, before discussing her findings, I offer, if not a defense, at least an explanation of why functional people can argue in this way. As discussed in chapter 7, various conversations are structured in such a way as to invite or permit arguing. Within those conversational structures, places for argument appear. In one study (Hample, 2000a) I examined requests and found that each request immediately creates a justificatory reason slot. Sometimes the request is followed by a reason (e.g., “please lend me your car because I have to take my dog to the vet”), but sometimes the reason slot is filled by a trade or incentive (e.g., “lend me your car and I’ll fill it with gas”). The incentives do not justify the favor; they merely create a basis for granting it even though it isn’t justified.

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In a classic study, Langer, Blank, and Chanowitz (1978) showed how anything in a reason slot can be treated as a genuine reason, even if it isn’t. They had a confederate try to get someone to step aside from a copying machine, to let the confederate use it out of turn. Requests were made in three different ways. First, a reason was given: “Excuse me, may I use the Xerox machine, because I’m late to class?” This request produced a 94% compliance rate. The importance of the reason is displayed by contrast to the results of the second request form: “Excuse me, may I use the Xerox machine?” Lacking a reason, this version generated only 60% compliance. The interesting thing is the third form: “Excuse me, may I use the Xerox machine, because I have to make some copies?” This request has something in the reason slot—“because I have to make some copies”— but this material is surely not a reason, even if it is prefaced by because. It is very much like pseudoevidence in that it merely revises and restates the conclusion (i.e., “grant my request,” in this case). Langer et al. called the material placebic, indicating that it looks like a reason but isn’t. Nonetheless, Langer et al. found a 93% compliance rate for this condition, essentially identical to the results obtained with a real reason. One can certainly fault a person for not attending to argumentative responsibilities closely enough in a given case but also understand how an arguer who is willing to go with the flow may passively accept a statement in a reason slot as a justification, even if it isn’t. No doubt all people do this from time to time. What about the people in Kuhn’s study who always (or, at any rate, on three out of three topics, even after prompting) provided pseudoevidence or nonevidence when they should have given genuine evidence? The problem seems to be that they were dramatically deficient in both arguing skills and understanding how interpersonal reasoning works. They don’t seem to have believed they were doing anything inappropriate. Kuhn (1991) afforded the main data on this point. She also explored a number of skills besides the provision of evidence. One is recognition of causal theories that are alternatives to one’s own. If someone cannot conceive of an alternative theory, that person is unlikely to see much need to justify his or her own theory. Within Kuhn’s topics—school failure, recidivism, and unemployment—many alternative causal accounts are available, so the inability to acknowledge more than one’s own is an intellectual problem. She found (Kuhn, 1991, p. 112) that between 30% and 40% of her respondents were unable to supply an alternative theory, even after prompting. Eight percent of her respondents failed on this task for all three topics (p. 114). Failure to generate an alternative theory is significantly associated with the failure to provide genuine evidence. Some respondents coded as having failed on this task attempted it but were either incoherent or assimilated the alternative into their own causal

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accounts. Others simply would not or could not engage the task. The prompt was, “A person like we’ve been talking about whose view is very different from yours—what might they say is the major cause?” Replies included: “I don’t know. I seem to have covered everything”; “I think they’ll say the same thing I would say”; “I think that the majority think the way I do” (p. 110). A particularly interesting failure is: “I have no idea. But I’m sure that they would have every argument in the book, every possible argument, and still would not persuade me” (p. 110). This example shows a complete insulation of one’s own views from any contrary theories. These respondents’ causal theories are impenetrable. Why bother with evidence? Closely related is the question of whether Kuhn’s participants could think of counterarguments to their own theories. One’s own position really only needs support if an attack on it is conceivable. Successful counterarguments are mainly those that are directed against the existence, necessity, or sufficiency of the respondent’s putative cause. Some respondents were simply not on point, but others said that they couldn’t think of anything plausible or that no reasonable objection could be made. About 50% to 60% of Kuhn’s informants were unable to generate a counterargument, depending on the topic (p. 140). Twenty-two percent failed for all three topics (p. 142). The inability to generate a counterargument was associated with the failure to provide genuine evidence for two of the three topics (pp. 142–143). Could Kuhn’s respondents rebut a counterargument? Those who thought of one were asked to answer it (Kuhn, 1991, ch. 6). Those who could not generate objections to their own theories were supplied with one by the interviewer. Successful rebuttals either criticized the counterargument on its face, showed that it is less explanatory than the respondent’s own theory, or integrated it into the respondent’s own theory (showing that it is not really a counterargument at all). Fifty to sixty percent of the participants were unsuccessful in rebutting, and between 16% and 33% did not even try, depending on the topic. Nine percent failed on all three topics. Respondents who generated their own counterarguments were more likely to be successful in inventing a rebuttal, compared to those people for whom the interviewer provided a counterargument. These skills—inventing genuine evidence, conceiving of alternative theories and counterarguments, and answering counterarguments—are, in an important sense, all of a piece. Aside from being statistically related to one another, they have a common conceptual theme: the understanding of what is involved in a causal argument. Many of Kuhn’s participants enclosed their theories in such a way that they could have no real dialectical contact with other arguers. Genuine evidence is unneeded, no alternatives are possible, no objections can reasonably be made, and re-

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buttals are superfluous, provided that the person takes for granted the simple, unassailable truth of his or her own causal theory. Kuhn (1991, 2001; Kuhn, Katz, & Dean, 2004; Kuhn, Weinstock, & Flaton, 1994) accordingly investigated people’s metacognitions about arguing. She categorized people’s basic epistemologies into three groups: absolutist, multiplist, and evaluative (Kuhn, 1991, ch. 7). Absolutists simply cannot conceive of any reasonable view except their own. Prompted with “Could someone prove that you were wrong?” absolutist replies are of this flavor: “No, because I think I’m right”; “Well, if I truly believe in what I’m saying, I don’t think that anyone could prove me wrong” (p. 175). Certainty is involved in this epistemology. Multiplists understand that there are other views and acknowledge that others are entitled to their opinions. Unhappily, however, they make a further leap: Because everyone is entitled to an opinion, all opinions are of equal merit. They think that their own views, for instance, have just as much justification as expert judgments. Prompted with “How sure are you of your view, compared to an expert?” some answer in these ways: “The same. My opinion can stand just as high as theirs”; “I’m more sure of my beliefs than a lot of experts” (p. 180). In the second instance the assumption is that the more certainty one has, the better the theory. However, the key to multiplism is captured in comments such as “. . . you can’t prove an opinion to be wrong, I don’t think. (Why not?) Because an opinion is something which somebody holds for themselves. You can’t change their opinion or alter it. They have their own opinion” (p. 182). Another multiplist said, “See, I’m entitled to my belief, if I feel like it’s right” (p. 183). The third epistemology, evaluativism, is the only one that an argumentation scholar would wish to defend. As with the multiplists, these informants understand that many views are possible. In contrast to them, however, the evaluativists understand that some theories are better than others, requiring that the arguments be evaluated. In particular, they are willing to say that experts probably have better formed understandings than they do. They recognize that subject matter authorities have access to more data and probably have more experience on the topics at issue. They also understand that, for these three topics at least, some uncertainty about one’s own views is appropriate. One respondent compared herself to an expert in this way: “I’m speaking from personal experience. An expert is speaking from years of objective experience. At the moment I think my opinion is justified, but if an expert were to prove me wrong in a way that I would find acceptable, then maybe my opinion could be swayed” (p. 190). In Kuhn’s (1991, ch. 7) sample, the percentage of absolutists varied from 49% to 65%, depending on the topic. Multiplists were next most

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common, accounting for between 26% and 38%. The frequency of evaluative epistemology ranged from 9% to 22%. Twenty-nine percent of her sample was absolutist on all three topics. Her statistical analyses show that absolutists are worst, and evaluativists best, on all four major arguing skills: inventing genuine evidence, conceiving of alternative theories, generating counterarguments, and rebutting objections. Kuhn also assessed her respondents’ certainty about the correctness of their causal theories. Absolutists were most certain they were right, with about 75% sure or very sure their theory was correct. Evaluativists expressed the least certainty, and multiplists were in between. In short, the results show a set of metacognitions about arguments and opinions that insulate people from engagement in dialectic. The cruder an epistemology is, the more likely it is to be buttressed with affective protection, the certainty and commitment (cf. Rhoads & Cialdini, 2002) that one’s views cannot be countered. Close-mindedness is perhaps most often understood as a personality trait, but it results from complementary sets of cognitions and feelings. In reviewing this work, I have emphasized the results pointing to the least argumentative ability because I have wanted to build a case that arguing with such people is essentially impossible. They may be contentious, but they are unable to be argumentative. Whether such people are common is really not an important consideration for the point I wish to make, but it is best to make a few remarks about the demographics and prospects of these poor arguers. Throughout Kuhn’s (1991) study, she consistently reported that neither sex nor age is an important factor in predicting argument skills. College or noncollege, however, has a consistent impact, with the college groups doing better. This effect does not seem to have much to do with the educational experience of higher education, though. Even in the ninth graders, the effect occurred. They were divided into college and noncollege groups based on the placement histories of their schools. For this reason, Kuhn believed that the essential arguing skills develop earlier in life than high school, and she implied that this development may have something to do with socioeconomic status or early education (cf. Kuhn et al., 2004). Incidentally, she conducted a successful educational intervention with high-risk 13- and 14-year-olds (Kuhn & Udell, 2003). Kuhn is committed to the idea of scaffolding (cf. Perkins, 1989), where a teacher or investigator carefully guides an arguer to a position from which she or he can make the next skill step. She and others have also produced evidence that dyadic or group interaction improves arguing skills, both during the interactions and in postinteraction essays (Johnson & Johnson, 1989; Kuhn et al., 1997; Kuhn & Udell, 2003; Limon & Mitchell, 2001), as does debate experience (Allen et al., 1999; Perkins, Bushey, & Farady, 1986, cited in Woll, 2002, p. 460). Im-

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portantly, as people’s skill levels advance, their levels of certainty moderate and they become less polarized (Kuhn, 1991; Kuhn et al., 1997). However, the scaffolding, the interventions, the careful prompting, the dyadic interactions, and the debate experience all leave some people behind. If a person cannot generate genuine evidence, she or he cannot argue with any useful level of skill. Such a person can disagree, can opine, can challenge, can object, and can be resolute but cannot give reasons that permit dialectical progress. Even if the interlocutor verbally identifies such a person’s supporting material as pseudoevidence or nonevidence, this claim will be dismissed. Well reasoned counterarguments are similarly devalued by the view that everyone is entitled to hold any opinion. I apply the somewhat hyperbolic label “impossible” to argument with or among such people. Rudimentary exchanges of assertions certainly occur, participants have no trouble with the three-turn sequence, and they appear to be moving through the stages of critical discussion, but without genuine evidence available for scrutiny, the potential of arguing to improve people’s thinking is unachieved. If a more advanced cointeractant happens to be present, his or her critical or meta comments are rejected out of hand. Absolutists have the crudest epistemology. Mainly, they understand that lots of other people are wrong. How they themselves got to be right and how others got to be wrong are mysteries that they simply have not engaged. Booth (1974), unfavorably impressed with the commonality of the phrase nonnegotiable demands in the student protests of the 1960s and 1970s, inveighed against the insulation of one’s position from counterargument. For absolutists, opinions are all nonnegotiable. People who try to rebut them are simply incorrect, and elaborate counterarguments are just trickery. Multiplists are equally insulated from argument but for different reasons. With superficial liberality, they permit everyone to have an opinion and do not license any way to mediate differences. They certainly counterbalance the worries that Willard (1990), in an excellent essay, expressed about the prominence of authority in our society, but they do so from the wrong impulse. They don’t automatically believe experts, but mainly because they do not respect the additional data or disciplined thinking that authorities are expected to possess. In other words, they really don’t understand the idea of expert. This exaggeration of egalitarian ideals (also see Philipsen, 1992) leads to all opinions, all evidence, and all arguments being seen as deserving equivalent attention. Both absolutists and multiplists buttress their views with high levels of certainty. From their epistemological points of view, this certainty is justified, and in this, at least, they are consistent. However, that certainty creates or reinforces the barriers that anyone else will confront in trying

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to argue dialectically with such people. When one needs to change the other’s whole epistemology to engage dialectically on a particular point, the prospects for productive arguing are limited and perhaps vanishing. Evaluatists never comprise as much as one fourth of Kuhn’s main sample. Subject matter experts (e.g., school teachers and parole officers) did not do better, even on their own topics, than the comparable college groups. However, when she replicated her study with a small sample of doctoral candidates in philosophy, every one of them performed perfectly, according to her criteria (Kuhn, 1991, ch. 9). The philosopher subsample is probably more representative of the argumentation community than the main sample. I wonder if, argumentation scholars naturally being evaluativists themselves, they do not consistently overestimate the real world potential of arguing. Many people seem to have extremely undeveloped understandings of argumentation. Arguing with them has a high inherent likelihood of being fruitless. They hear the music, and they recognize the dance, but they fake the steps, and no one can tell them any different. In spite of being able to trace these difficulties to personal epistemologies and feelings, I have also said that, at bottom, this problem is structural. These people generate arguments that lack—insistently lack— genuine evidence. Having no probative evidence, obviously their arguments also lack reasoning about the evidence. Unable to defend their own views with structurally adequate argumentation, they are equally unable to discuss others’ arguments in a properly critical way. The personal metacognitions and affect that reinforce this behavior mainly serve to make the structural problems overwhelming. I call such arguments impossible. This book is hardly the place to speculate about the cultural causes and effects of these sorts of poor arguing, but that is certainly an important topic for someone to pursue. All democracies rest on the assumptions that public discussion leads to the best policies and that everyone should have an equal voice. Society needs to do better to ensure that all those equal voices are also roughly equivalent in quality.

REFLEXIVE ARGUMENT The second sort of impossible argument is much more obviously a structural problem. It not only has an essential dialogic sequence but is also tethered to institutional or social strictures. On its face, it seems to have irresistible logical force, but this appearance is due to its quasiparadoxical nature. I refer to reflexive arguments, a topic I have previously explored (Hample, 1998b, 2001a, 2002). Certainly if the arguers understand the

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problem and wish to avoid it, they can, but avoidance is unlikely, not merely because of personal preferences. This sort of impossible argument therefore reverses the balance between structure and person that is observed as a cause of difficulty in pseudoevidence discourse. The form of a reflexive argument can be specified in this way. Two arguers (A and B) are required because this experience is inherently dialogic (and for that reason, reflexive argument does not fit anywhere on the normal lists of fallacies, which are all prototypically monological). A: I claim that C is so. B: No, C is wrong, for reason R. A: Aha! R proves that C is so.

In principle, this three-turn sequence can be a perfectly legitimate argument, and so this formal specification is not sufficient to define reflexive arguing. The sense in which the argument is reflexive is apparent. In Turn 3, R is said to turn on itself. If the exchange were to end after the third turn, arguer B would have proved A’s case—at least in A’s view. The further element that makes the sequence reflexive (i.e., both recursive and objectionable, which is the way I use the term), is that B disagrees that R proves C but cannot say so effectively. In other words, A is able to impose a reasoning system on B, a system that is not open to dialectical scrutiny. The imposition occurs because of external power that originates in institutional or social authority. The form is also identifiable when A tries to impose the reasoning system but is unable to draw on sufficient external authority, and B can escape. The first time I noticed this, I was reading the transcript of Joan of Arc’s (1412–1431) condemnation trial (Barrett, 1931). Joan claimed to see visions that instructed her to leave her family, go to the French Dauphin, lead his armies, and see him crowned King of France. Although rare today, reports of religious visions were more common in Joan’s period and often regarded as authentic by the public, intellectuals, and church officials. She was captured by the English, who put her on trial for heresy (the English were very concerned that her testimonies about the visions encouraged people to believe that God sided with the French). The inquisition, held in English territory, was presided over by Bishop Cauchon, who was English in his political allegiances. Joan was declared a heretic at her condemnation trial. In return for her public repentance, she was sentenced to prison. Soon thereafter (possibly due to abuse or threats of abuse by the guards), she ceased to abide by the terms of her confession and repentance, was handed over to the secular arm, and was burned at the stake. At her French-controlled rehabilitation trial in 1455, the con-

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demnation was set aside, partly on procedural grounds related to Cauchon’s participation. She was canonized in 1920. Here is what drew my attention to the arguments in the condemnation trial. The inquisitors maintained that she was sinful, both proclaiming and enacting things contrary to God’s will. Among other things, she had traveled to the Dauphin in defiance of her father’s will and wore men’s clothing, both straightforwardly in contradiction of Deuteronomy. Her explanation was that she had been instructed to do these things by the angels who visited her in visions. The inquisitors, believing that Satan can impersonate angels if need be, did not accept this defense at face value. Surely it is obvious, they thought, that no angel would ever instruct someone to sin. Therefore, it was Satan, not angels, who appeared to Joan and told her to leave her family and wear men’s clothing. By freely accepting the devil’s influence, Joan became a heretic. Here is my reading of Joan’s essential situation, cast into the form of reflexive argument: Inquisitor: You are a heretic, because you have gladly sinned in violation of Deuteronomy. Joan: I did these things in conformity to my visions. Inquisitor: This proves that you are an unrepentant heretic, in league with Satan.

Joan’s only plausible line of defense is thereby absorbed into the inquisition’s theory of the case. Any defense she could offer would only serve as further proof that she had entered into a pact with Satan (i.e., the essential definition of witchcraft during the witch persecutions). She did not deny any of the factual allegations, but if she had, such rebuttals would have proved that she was insubordinate to the inquisition and the Church Militant, displaying heresy anyway (see Hample, 2001a, 2002). Even assuming that Joan was innocent of heresy, no honest defense was available to her. The argument is reflexive because all of Joan’s possible resistances prove her heresy, at least in the eyes of the inquisitors. And only the inquisitors’ eyes mattered. Inquisitions never began until the inquisitors were already convinced of the accused’s guilt (for an excellent introduction to the inquisitorial system, see Peters, 1988). Guilt and innocence were virtually never at issue; the only matters before the inquisition were whether or not the sinner’s soul could be saved and whether the community of Christians could be protected from seductive heresy. The whole system was therefore designed to obtain confession and repentance. People who did not confess were often returned to prison for further contemplation, and some died there, still contemplating years later. Other recalcitrants were declared unrepentant and given to secular

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authorities for punishment (contrary to myths about the inquisition, it was generally far more lenient than government officials of the time). Although a few exceptions have been documented, for the most part no one was ever released by an inquisition until she or he had confessed and promised to repent. The inquisitorial system had a iron grip on anyone whose soul it sought to save, and the inquisitors—only the inquisitors—needed to be assured that confessions and penances were sincere. The consequence was that the reflexive arguments at the heart of inquisitorial procedures were buttressed by legal, institutional, religious, military, and social supports. Other than through escape and flight, it was impossible for an accused to leave the field and refuse the inquisition’s authority. This sort of power is essential to the operation of reflexive argument because it depends on one party’s theory of the case being imposable on the other arguer. Joan was enmeshed in what Goodnight (in press) called a predicament: “Predicaments arise in those complex exchanges where discourse and critique are entwined and the requirements of how best to regard the interests of reasoning and obligations of communication are contested . . .” (ms. p. 17). In other words, meta-arguing was required to promote the trial to a fairer dialectical footing. Perhaps Joan could have said something like, “I reject your argumentative scheme because it is reflexive and therefore does not permit defensible critical discussion.” However, this statement, too, would have been self-evidence of heresy because it expresses resistance to the authority of the Church over Christians. No more could an accused murderer today effectively refuse to acknowledge that criminal courts have any relevance to him or her (cf. Goodell, 1973). When the whole field of argument is controlled by one party, the other arguer has few resources available for questioning procedures or the conclusions caused by them. To put the role of external power into clearer relief, I examine another example of reflexive argument, this time an argument that fails to work. The problem in this instance is that the arguers can simply walk away from one another. I owe this example to Scott Jacobs, who has studied the campus evangelism of Jed Smock, “Preacher Jed” (van Eemeren et al., 1993, ch. 7; Jacobs, 1983; Jacobs & Laufersweiler, 1981). Smock, a fundamentalist Christian, came to the campuses of large public universities in the United States, took up a spot in some public area, and began haranguing passing students for their sinfulness. Often they heckled him in return, resulting in exchanges that Smock appears to have relished. I begin by offering four passages from the (slightly simplified) transcripts in Jacobs and Laufersweiler (1981). J is Preacher Jed, and A is a passing student, not necessarily the same one in each passage.

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(1) Lines 039–048, p. 116. J:

. . . the Bible exposes so much of what you’re learning in the classroom today as the lies of the Devil. So unless you know God’s written Word, you’re bound to be deceived. A: But I know the Word. It just doesn’t mean the same thing to me as it does to you. So how do I know you’re not deceiving me? (2) Lines 077–086, pp. 121–122. J: But I’m preaching the Word. Who’s casting stones? A: YOU ARE! You won’t even LISTEN to me. You keep interrupting me! J: NO::. I’m correcting you, girl. The Bible says preach the Word, reprove, rebuke, and exhort with all long-suffering and doctrine. A: Oh! You’re correcting me. Uh huh. ((mocking tone)) (3) Lines 048–060, pp. 141–142. How many have read the whole Bible from Genesis to to Revelation? ((J raises own hand, looks around; four or five audience members raise their hands)) A few. How many have read all the New Testament? A: Have you read James Joyce? J: ((After scanning audience)) Still only a few. Now, most of you are ignorant of what the Bible SAYS. How could you know, because you don’t know what it says. A: It’s pure fiction. J: How do you expect to, uh, to defend your point of view rationally if you’re opposed to the Bible without knowing what it says? J:

(4) Lines 004–033, pp. 140–141. J: The Bible says the Word of God is like a hammer. A: You’re really an asshole. I just thought I’d mention that. J: You know anyone can come up here and cuss and swear and mock and heckle. And to me that’s a sure indication that they have no (.) rational argument. Yesterday, a- a man cursed me and spit in my face. To me that’s an indication that it’s obvious he has no rational argument, against the Truth. How can you reason against the truth? So the only thing a person can resort to (.) is to heckling or mocking or talking foolishly or cursing and swearing. A: But you can’t speak rationally with any truth. J: Oh yes. I can speak rationally. We speak very rationally. A: ((laughter)) We can’t speak rationally to you though. J: We have two basic assumptions. Number one, that there is a God and this is His Word. A: Defend that assumption!

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J: We don’t have to defend our assumptions. A: Ohhhh. Okay. That’s rational. ((laughter)) How come we do?

The first exchange highlights the matter of authority. Preacher Jed insists on the authority of the Scriptures and his right to interpret them. The student objects, saying that Smock’s reading has no more grounding than the student’s. This sort of exchange occurs frequently, without necessarily being involved in reflexive arguments. However, it prefigures one of the key points I make here: Neither side has anything like inquisitorial authority to impose a reasoning frame. The second passage continues in this light. The student obviously thinks that Smock is not being very dialectical because he acts as though his words and views are privileged. Preacher Jed confirms this belief, saying that his role is to correct the student, not to listen to her sinfully wayward opinions. He claims Biblical authority for what he is doing. He is verbally trying to accomplish what the inquisition attained in practice, complete control over the procedures and roles of the discussion. The student’s contemptuous reply, however, rejects Smock’s effort. This sort of comment was effectively unavailable to Joan. Joan was trapped, but the student in this passage can simply go on to her class. The third extract shows something about Smock’s standards for rational argument and whether these standards are shared by his audience. His foundation is Scripture. When a student labels the Bible as fiction, Smock simply ignores the remark. Smock’s grounding is not open for discussion, any more than was that of the inquisition. However, he makes a point: One must have studied the Bible to have any rational standing to criticize it. This statement must simply have been a sophistic moment for Preacher Jed; any interpretations different than his own would immediately have necessitated correction. My real interest is in the fourth passage, which includes two reflexive arguments, each aimed at the other party. Both Smock and the student are trying to impose inquisition-like control over the terms of the exchange. Here is Smock’s position: Smock:

Your soul is imperiled because you don’t accept that there is a God and the Bible is His Word. Student: You have no reasons that prove those assumptions. Smock: See? Your doubts are irrational and put you in danger of eternal damnation.

If Smock had institutional control of the student, the argument no doubt would come to an inquisitorial conclusion. However, the student’s position is parallel:

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Student: You are irrational because you will not give grounds for your positions. Smock: My views are based on God’s Word, and need no further justification. Student: See? You are irrational, and cannot prove your case.

If the student were Smock’s judge, a result would be imposed on the basis of preconceptions about the proper conduct of an argument. To understand reflexive arguing, it is essential to appreciate that the reflexive arguer is completely sincere and that from his or her point of view the argument is airtight and its conclusion inescapable. Smock really believes that to question the Bible’s authority is a sure road to hell. The student really believes that any assumption, once questioned, needs external justification. Inquisitors really believed that a failure to confess was a sort of self-damnation. The institutional power that inquisitors possessed must have seemed a convenient asset that derived from their essential correctness. That neither the campus evangelist nor his listeners had compulsive power must have been obvious to them. Still, they each acted as though they could compel the other because that potential is always at the core of the force of reflexive argumentation. There is an authoritarian pretense of power in the enactment of reflexive arguing. As discussed in chapter 1, enactment—the way the arguer conducts him- or herself to typify the case—is a kind of argument (Lake, 1983, 1990). Before drawing any further conclusions about reflexive arguing, I offer several other illustrations. I have made no systematic search for reflexive arguments, and such a project would be a redoubtable ambition. However, in my professional and casual reading, I have noticed some other instances. The next example is actually about argumentation theory. A few feminists have made the claim that linear, propositional logic is a means of male hegemony. They say that this way of thinking is more typically masculine than feminine because it devalues the narrative style that at least some women prefer. It thereby disempowers women in places such as the courts or legislatures, where men have made the rules of evidence and procedure. Readers wishing to explore this controversy have several good resources available to them (Gilbert, 1994, 1995, 1997; Hynes, 1995; and the special issue of Argumentation and Advocacy edited and introduced by Palczewski, 1996). Although I don’t think that logic is especially masculine or unusually difficult for women, I certainly agree that narratives have argumentative force. However, that is not the issue at hand in this chapter, where the concern is with the potential for reflexive argument that naturally grows out of this view. An imaginary exchange

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between one such feminist (a woman, for starkness) and a male interlocutor follows: Feminist: Logical, linear arguments are oppressive tools. They are essentially ideological, and the ideology is one of exclusion. It is the way men hold to power: power in politics, in industry, in science, everywhere they want it and want to keep it. Making everything reducible to little p’s and q’s, little syllogisms with their little proofs, is something that would only occur to men, and it keeps women out, or makes them try to pretend to be masculine. Men keep doing it partly and exactly because it keeps women out. Man: No, that’s wrong. Arguments have a quality that is independent of the arguer, and certainly independent of the arguer’s sex. An argument is logical or fallacious, it has evidence or it doesn’t, it’s coherent or it’s not. There are matters of degree in there, of course, but they are things to be argued about, too. It’s not at all ideological, and the fact that you’re on the wrong side right now doesn’t mean that women aren’t just as good at arguing as men are, and just as welcome in science and business. Feminist: Good example.

The feminist first makes her claim, the accusation that begins a reflexive sequence. The man responds with a linear argument of the form to which the feminist objects. The feminist then concludes that the man’s arguing modality helps prove her case because it is yet another instance of masculine logic used to oppress a woman. She does not engage his content, just as the inquisitors, Preacher Jed, and the passing students saw no real need to rebut or counterargue. Ironically, the reflexive argument is itself oppressive or would be if the feminist could impose her intellectual frame on the man and could coerce consequences for him if he did not agree. However, the man, like Smock’s students, can just walk away. The result is an exchange that is not likely to result in any joint agreement. The feminist will not engage any linear arguments from the man because she views their simple existence as supporting the foundations of her position and their content therefore pointlessly anathematic. From her point of view, he is genuinely attempting oppression in miniature. The man will not accept the feminist’s position because she will not defend it in any terms that he respects. From his point of view, she is genuinely irrational because she will not directly counterargue. Although this sort of exchange may be strikingly useful as a means of mutual identity display, it has little chance of satisfying the pragmadialectical requirements for a proper critical discussion (see chap. 7). Because each arguer’s point of view implies that the argument has

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been won, neither has any impulse to critique the underlying structure of the discussion (cf. Goodnight, in press). Neither believes that he or she has any reason to suspect or expose the reflexive nature of the argument. Conspiracy arguments (e.g., Young, Launer, & Austin, 1990; Zarefsky, 1984) are famously hard to counter because people who believe in the conspiracy are likely to regard refutations as part of the problem. This site seems likely for reflexive arguments. A reasonably good science fiction novel illustrates this insight (McAuley, 2001). One of the characters is committed to a variety of conspiracy theories, and the novelist comments: How he loves his theory. It is a huge meme that has eaten up his higher thought processes, a junkyard construction into which he wedges and hammers and jams new facts wherever he can, full of disregarded loose ends, impossible to contradict because any objection is part of the conspiracy and therefore valueless. (p. 366)

It hardly matters what the refutation would look like. Perhaps the military-industrial complex has bought itself another Senator. Perhaps the police are really Men in Black, required to obscure the truth. Perhaps Satan has impersonated angels in a vision. Nothing penetrates, and the more prima facie the counterargument is, the more obviously it comes from the Enemy. If a person loosely anticipates a reflexive argument but does not feel capable of showing what is wrong with it, that person may choose not to argue at all. Edwards (1994) suggested that this choice is at least part of the reason that Catholic theologians delayed for several years in answering Luther’s pamphlets and sermons, especially those published in German. The problem, as the Catholics saw it, was that to answer Luther was to take him seriously, elevating his position in the popular mind. While disputing this or that point Luther made, they all charged that Luther was upsetting legitimate authority and tradition. These defenders of the papacy argued that the public debate was itself wrong and dangerous, subversive in principle to legitimate hierarchy and authority. While Luther was entreating his readers to make up their own minds on the basis of Scripture alone and not let the papacy and its clerical allies mislead them with fabricated claims to authority, his opponents were issuing treatises that said that the broader public—“the ignorant and rebellious commoners”—should in no way be involved in such disputes. Yet by entering into the vernacular debate, the Catholic publicists were implicitly inviting the commoners to debate the issues and take sides. By refuting Luther’s view[s] they actually propagated them. The medium subverted the Catholic mes-

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sage and gave the curious at least a glimpse of Luther’s tantalizing ideas. No wonder the Catholic publicists generated such a feeble response to the Evangelical barrage. (p. 165)

This extract shows two reflexive arguments, each used by one side from the ambition of silencing the other. The theologians loyal to Rome initiated an argument similar to this one, carried out through public Catholic–Protestant exchanges of pamphlets and other materials: Catholic:

Your objections to the papacy constitute a heretical theology that violates the traditions and Scriptural basis of the Church Militant. Protestant: But the papacy is illegitimate because it and its attendant hierarchy mediate between the faithful and the Scriptures. People should have a direct, personal relationship with God. Catholic: Your heretical remarks confirm what I have said.

The Catholics’ delay in engaging Luther’s vernacular materials, however, was due to their anticipation of this argument from the Protestants: Protestant: Your obvious need to confute our principles shows that they are reasonable on their face and would be persuasive to the public. Catholic: But your principles are heretical. They devalue Christian tradition, and violate the one and only true faith. Protestant: If that were so, you would have no need to argue with me, for nothing I could say would ever seem reasonable. The fact that you dispute with me proves that our principles deserve close consideration by anyone concerned for his or her salvation.

In spite of his excommunication and the finding of heresy at the Diet of Worms, Luther’s political status prevented the Roman Church from acting as it wished. Luther survived, able to walk away from the Catholic authority. The example shows precisely how an inquisition without typical inquisitorial power fails to impose its reflexive frame on the putative victim. Reflexive arguing proceeds from, or at least projects, an essential disrespect for the other arguer. Johnstone (1982) explained that good dialectic requires that each arguer understand and experience the other’s position. One must, at least temporarily and hypothetically, occupy the interlocutor’s worldview and reasoning system to engage it. This understanding cannot have happened authentically in any of the examples discussed here. The inquisitors would never have seriously entertained the idea that

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Joan’s visions were legitimate; Smock’s hecklers cannot have understood the depth and sincerity of his belief that the students were grasped by fundamental evil; the feminist is unable to accept that a linear refutation of her position is possible; the papists could not imagine a legitimate Church not directly descended from Peter. This arrogance is clear and probably justified in the example to follow (Mehan, 1990, pp. 174–175). A psychiatric patient is participating in a scheduled hearing whose purpose is to see if he is ready for release. Because I have already shared much of the transcript in chapter 7, I simply summarize here. The psychiatrist asks a number of questions about the patient’s thoughts and actions. Each time the patient replies with some claim—the coffee is poison, his medications are actively harmful—that is obviously unacceptable to the board. If the patient’s claims were true, he would have good arguments for release, but his claims are so obviously out of bounds that the board does not even bother to counterargue. They simply move on to the conclusion that he needs to remain institutionalized. Here is the patient’s argumentative problem, schematized as a reflexive argument: Psychiatrist: Patient: Psychiatrist:

You do not seem to be progressing very well. That’s because the doctors are poisoning me. Hmm. That means you really aren’t making much progress.

The patient’s claims are never engaged because the interlocutors do not believe that they deserve to be. The Catholics must have felt that way about Luther’s views, at least at first, but their silence lent impetus to the Reformation because they lacked the institutional authority that the patient’s psychiatrist possesses. In contrast to Luther, the patient has no real chance to be heard in a setting where people will treat him authentically. These few examples are merely a sampling of what I suppose to be an argument type that occurs with modest frequency. Goodnight (in press) said that predicaments “pervade all modern controversies” (ms. p. 17). Although predicament is a broader matter than reflexive argument (the latter being only one stimulus to the need to interrogate the means of communication), his observation encourages a consideration of where reflexive arguments may play important roles. As I have noted, reflexive arguments only have compulsory power when backed by some sort of inescapable authority. When such arguments appear without power, the arguer is trying to enact irresistible force, which in itself is interesting. In everyday discourse, one can ob-

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serve something like this force in accusations of “isms” (Wood & Pearce, 1980). Wood and Pearce pointed out that these accusations are double edged: One is charged with devaluing a group but at the same time is implicitly labeled as a person who makes excessive use of the categories. So: A: You are prejudiced against African-Americans, and so you are racist. B: No, I think they are just as capable as we are. A: Aha! So it really is “us” and “them” to you.

In this hypothetical exchange, A is commanding moral, not institutional, power in an effort to compel B. The accusation is inherently paradoxical, according to Wood and Pearce, because of its dual use and denial of the category system. The accusation tries to carry this duality invisibly, and it is only revealed in the third turn. In practical terms, it may be best simply to walk away from a reflexive argument, and potential victims do so in the examples here. However, walking away is unsatisfying theoretically and does not suffice in circumstances that call for joint agreement. Nor is it always possible, as Joan’s fate shows. What is needed is a move that Simons (1994) called “going meta.” The arguer needs to reframe the interaction and must reframe it in such a way as to dissipate the reflexivity. Sunlight and exposure seem to be called for. However, going meta requires a certain footing in the interaction. Joan of Arc, for instance, seems to have lacked the necessary position to critique her predicament. The standing required to go meta is more nuanced than my analysis to this point may suggest. One of Simons’ key examples is Clarence Thomas, who was able to reframe his confirmation hearing as, in his phrase, “a high-tech lynching.” As a witness subordinate to the procedural rules of the U.S. Senate, it is certainly not obvious that Thomas ought to have been able to do this, but he managed to call on a moral standing that, in a highly public setting, disciplined the senators to abandon their simple “I ask, you answer” construction of the hearing. Ways to counter institutional power—a resource that can generate reflexive constraints—seem to have a special importance today. There are many instances of what Lessl (1989) called the priestly voice, and this enacted argument is difficult to handle. Lessl contrasts the bardic voice, which expresses the quotidian world, with the priestly one, which mediates between the public and some elite, hidden world. Inquisitors did that, showing the potential for reflexivity in their status. However, there are also secular priests. When public officials summarize intelligence findings to which the public has no access, they use the priestly voice, for in-

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stance. Even as I write, the American public is having considerable difficulty in learning to hear such pronouncements skeptically—just as most medieval Christians immediately assented to Church pronouncements about the existence (and later, nonexistence) of witchcraft. Editorialists and columnists often write in the priestly voice as well, when they express the conclusions they draw from anonymous sources. Institutions naturally try to preserve themselves, and sometimes these efforts take the form of insulation from critique. When the inquisition released prisoners, for instance, it sometimes required people to sign statements to the effect that they would never reveal any of the inner workings of the inquisitorial process (e.g., Priolkar, 1961). Some similar insulation efforts occur today, in the U.S.A. Patriot Act and the use of America’s military judicial system for detainees. Attempts to expose some government practices under the Patriot Act are themselves argued to be violations of the Act. Detainees lack various rights precisely because they are detainees. To express the matter in the inquisition’s terms shows the opportunity for reflexivity: Inquisitor:

The inquisition has acted justly and kindly to help you clarify your faith and preserve your opportunity for salvation. Ex-prisoner: But the inquisition is, in fact, unfair, prejudiced, and unChristian. Inquisitor: Regrettably, I must take note of your resistance to the Roman Church, a resistance that is itself heretical.

Self-preservation is nearly as natural an impulse for an institution as for a person. Few things can so completely contain the possibility of critique as reflexive arguments. To summarize, reflexive argument is an interactive form designed to swallow up any plausible answers to the initiating accusation. For it to work, either the initiator must have genuine compulsive power over the other arguer or, at least, the victim must accept the other’s authority. A fundamental imbalance of force and resource is required or projected in a reflexive argument, and this imbalance violates what is needed for proper dialectic. Reflexive arguers, however, can be completely sincere in what they do. They can believe that their arguments are airtight and that their assertion of power is entirely legitimate. These views seem naturally to justify the frame for the interaction, a frame that can only be resisted by a successful meta move. Achievement of the commitments and procedures needed for proper critical discussion is made exceptionally difficult when one party projects a reflexive frame onto the interactional reasoning.

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CONCLUSIONS This chapter has been about impossible arguments. I think it worth repeating that the term impossible is an exaggeration. In principle, the ability to understand and recognize both pseudoevidence and reflexive arguments should put people in a position to expose them and to propose better argumentative practices. In practice, however, the problems are likely to persist. Pseudoevidence, and the set of related incompetencies that go with it, seem to have origins in people’s inability to argue well. Although Kuhn (e.g., Kuhn & Udell, 2003) has had success with her scaffolding interventions, in a particular interaction pessimism may be justified. One cannot say, “reason better” and have much hope of a constructive response. One may as well tell a basketball player, “get taller.” Every person has limitations, some inherent and some dispositional, that limit the ability to argue well. What is most troubling about Kuhn’s (1991) results is that she finds so many people, so often, to be unable to give good reasons, even when pressed and guided to do so. The theories of dialectic, critical discussion, and ideal speech situations often have an admirable optimism at their base—the commitment that if people reason together long enough, as well as they can, they will achieve a joint agreement that is substantively superior to wherever they began. Kuhn’s results suggest that for some people, these are very brief exchanges indeed, with new conclusions remarkably unlikely. Arguing productively with such interlocutors is not, I suppose, impossible, and some arguers do better when engaged in dialogue. However, it is extremely effortful and may require more patience than many people have. Reflexive arguments, in contrast, are problematic because of social or institutional factors. Simply making a reflexive argument projects a superior status for self and an inferior one for other. However, it is the particular argument form that accomplishes the reflexivity. Powerful institutions may be prone to the imposition of this frame, but it is certainly not an inherent corollary of authority. Going meta is the theoretical solution to this sort of predicament, and it is necessary to understand how extrainstitutional standing can be used to support such a move. Given the orientation of this book, I have treated pseudoevidence and reflexive argument in terms of interpersonal exchanges. However, both concepts certainly have applications for those scholars more interested in larger social units. These sorts of arguments are always made, at bottom, by individuals, but when people have public roles, they speak with a public voice, and their arguments thereby take on social, moral, legal, or political standing. To find either sort of impossible argument at the core of

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an institution’s position should immediately lead to very critical remarks about the commitment of that institution to substantive argument. As a nearly final note on these matters, I should say that I have no reason to suppose that these two are the only sorts of impossible arguments. They are merely the two that I have noticed. Argument theorists and critics should be alert to the possibility of other systematic barriers to good reasoning. Readers may have found this a depressing chapter. I merely regard it as a realistic one. I continue to believe that interpersonal arguing, with its built-in capacity for self and mutual correction, is an effective means for improving lives. Many arguments do not need to go very deeply to be productive, and when people intentionally engage complex and nuanced topics, they often set themselves to do so. Ordinarily intelligent, wellinformed people who take on a dialectical attitude while reasoning with one another should benefit consistently and repeatedly in every element of the human experience.

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A Closing Editorial About the Importance of Arguing

Some years ago, my wife and I were having an argument. I have forgotten what we were arguing about (there may well be a life lesson in that), but I think we were going back and forth about what some other person, perhaps a politician or dean, had said that day. We were exploring the person’s claims and discussing what he or she had said in support of them. Suddenly, in the middle of the exchange, she remarked, “Oh my! You really think that the argument matters!” This was a crystallizing moment for both of us. She realized that I think that people’s arguments should always be taken seriously and analyzed for their cogency, evidence, and so forth, as a first step in thinking about the issue. I realized that she doesn’t immediately take that stance. For her, the public argument is at best a problematic indication of what is going on. Before she is inclined to engage the details of someone’s arguing, she wants to see evidence that the person really means what he or she is saying, that the public reasons are also the real ones. She thinks that my analytical stance is a handicap, and she may be right. My reflexes are probably due to my interest in argumentation having been born and shaped in the firefight of American interscholastic debate, where every line of argument, every item of evidence, requires a response. No exceptions are allowed. If someone says something, it deserves to be answered. Her position, however, is quite a reasonable one. Whether thinking about politicians, deans, or nearly anyone else, we need to be aware that people’s arguments are often little more than post facto rationalizations of how they want things to settle out. She assumes that public arguments are virtual plans, not real ones, and I work from 328

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the opposite hypothesis. She looks first for interests, and I look first for reasonings. I have thought about that exchange more than a few times. Naturally, I still think I’m right, but I can see that she is, too. That second realization has caused me to try to refine my understanding of why arguments matter. Public arguments, whether they are sincere or not, are still public commitments. We live simultaneously in private and public worlds, and arguments constitute important elements of our public character. A crotchety person may express kindness to a child, and that kindness really counts, even if it is ephemeral. Some think, for instance, that the Gulf War of 1991 was really and only about oil. That idea may be the interest that people with my wife’s orientation would point to as a reason to disregard the various public pronouncements about our national motives. They may be right. As an ordinary citizen, I have few ways of securely finding out what motivated our leaders in their most private of hearts, but once we said that we were committed to the freedom of the Kuwaiti people, and opposed to the Iraqi aggression, we were. We had to act in a way consistent with what we said, even if the public argument was no more than a virtual plan, a cover for our petroleum ambitions. Words spoken publicly have to be taken publicly, although they may have other meanings. Unfortunately, many citizens feel so alienated from what public people say that the reflexive response to public argument is cynicism. Rod Hart came to our campus a few years ago to give a public lecture on how people do (and should) react to political discourse and made some memorable remarks about the difference between cynicism and skepticism. Cynicism is the immediate devaluing (or even reverse valuing) of what is said, while skepticism is a critical response that withholds judgment, tests reasoning, and awaits evidence. Skepticism is the citizen’s proper attitude, he said. Cynicism is a close-mindedness that keeps nonsense out but equally prevents enlightenment. As Hart (2000) closed his book on political discourse, The trackings and cross-trackings done here show, if nothing else, that political language is every bit as complex as politics itself. Because so few Americans pay attention to the words they hear during campaigns, it seemed useful for me to do so. Trapped in my very large data base were brave and intelligent words, often Olympian words, some expedient ones as well. For both good and ill, these texts stand as a record of the American people’s self-understandings during the last fifty years, of plans they have made and rued, of memories prized and ignored. (p. 244)

It is ironic that we can see these texts as a valuable part of our historical record yet hear them with contempt when they are said in our own day.

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John Kennedy’s Inaugural, Patrick Henry’s Liberty or Death speech, Frederick Douglass’ Fifth of July Oration, Lincoln’s great speeches, Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail—all these are venerated. Surely these great leaders were also prey to the same expediencies, the same compromises, the same political realities that we see as polluting public discourse today. With the exceptions of Kennedy and King, those great leaders took the rostrum before the explosion of advertising or the centralization of public propaganda. Whether the mass media created a mass public or simply found it waiting to be commodified, we can be confident that we are no longer the local, community-centered nation that we once were. We hardly expect to have substantial conversations on public topics now because that discourse has somehow become the domain of national talk— talk owned by a few corporations and dependent on a few loci of information for its available content. Rather than speak our own minds, we are content to complain that no one on Crossfire made our points quite sharply enough. We think that the most prescient remarks are made by Leno and Letterman, not by senators. We see ourselves as represented not so much by politicians, because we mistrust even those we vote for, but by favored columnists or pundits whose writings resonate for us, or entertain us, or both. The other columnists and pundits, of course, personify media bias. Nonetheless, the arguments matter. Part of the buildup toward the 2003 Iraq War was President Bush’s claim that the Iraqi regime was connected to the terrorist attacks of September 11. As the months went on and he was unable to specify clear connections between Iraq and al Qaida, the weakness of his evidence was itself taken as an indication of what his private arguments must have been. However, the public argument still required a public action consistent with the public claims. Furthermore, all arguments reveal the inner arguer, whether the public reasoning is privately authentic or not. I have noted at several points that arguing can be done to display one’s identity—one’s values, expectations, beliefs, and goals. Intentional or not, arguing always does this. For instance, just after a terrorist attack on a Western compound in Saudi Arabia, Secretary of State Powell issued a brief statement on May 13, 2003, at Riyadh Air Force Base. Perhaps he extemporized it, or possibly it was supplied to him by an aide. Either way, we form impressions about him and the nation he represents by examining it: As the Minister [Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al Faisal bin Abdel Aziz] has just said, terrorism strikes anywhere, everyone. It is a threat to the entire civilized world, and even in this moment of sadness, we will commit ourselves again to redouble our efforts, work closely with our Saudi friends,

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and friends all around the world to go after al Qaeda, to go after terrorists, to go after those who would kill innocent people, and to make sure that the scourge is lifted from the earth. The President has made it clear that terrorism is the number one priority for all of us. We will not rest until we have dealt with this threat to all of us. Thank you. (www.usembassy.it/file 2003_05/alia/A3051302.htm)

This speech is an argument. Powell concluded that “we will not rest” (implying that we should not rest) and justified this promise with several reasons: the attack threatens civilization, innocent people have been killed, and President Bush has established a priority. Although his statement is mainly expressive, it makes a claim and invites others to endorse it. He proposed definitions of himself and the nation he represents in this brief statement. Notice civilized world. Unless one supposes that terrorists are a threat to themselves, Powell’s phrase reads terrorists out of civilization. What does civilization mean in such a context? It cannot refer to modern technology because the terrorists clearly have that; nor can it refer to any other material participation in contemporary economics because terrorists function in that domain as well. One trusts it does not refer to preferred religions. Perhaps it has to do with form of government, but that seems unlikely, considering that Powell’s Saudi hosts do not greatly encourage democracy in their own nation. Civilized, in short, must refer to some value system, unspecified in this short statement. Because no elaboration of the term is given, Powell seems to regard the basic idea as obvious in this context. The context mainly emphasizes paramilitary aggression, to express it as neutrally as I can. One is reminded of the aphorism, “ ‘terrorist’ is what the big army calls the little army.” What the United States did in Iraq in the months preceding the Riyadh attack did not jeopardize our membership in civilization or our standing to declare who else belongs, else Powell would never have wanted to discuss “civilized” at all. We see clues to Powell’s commitments in “those who would kill innocent people,” “scourge,” “priority,” and “threat.” The terrorists contrast with “friends,” and “Saudi friends” in particular. Friends who function in a rational system that is careful to have priorities will counter the scourge of those who kill civilians. It is too contentious to explore the “collateral damage” resulting from U.S. actions in the Iraq War of 2003, but Powell, in spite of his official position, seems to emphasize the neighborly value of friendship as well as the global value of civilization. He also opposes killing innocents and envisions a world in which the scourge of terrorism has been “lifted away.” This rhetoric conveys a world view, one that listeners are invited to accept or

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even fill in according to their own understandings. To say that Powell’s speech lacks detail is simply to say that it was appropriate for the brief ceremonial moment in which it was given. Both Powell and his nation display commitments in this talk, even if some are commitments to avoid certain topics (examining U.S. officials’ statements about al Qaida, one generally gets the idea that terrorists are irrational, not that they are motivated by deeply felt values of their own, nor does one have any sense that the United States may ever consider paramilitary action itself). Powell’s argument—what it declares, what it assumes, what it omits—is telling. Even if he privately did not respect his undemocratic Saudi hosts, he revealed that “friend” is a highly positive thing to say about someone. Even if he genuinely regretted the unmentioned deaths of Iraqi civilians in the Iraq War, he displayed that “killing innocents” is an awful act. Regardless of his possible private differences with President Bush, his statements suggest that he takes for granted that the United States should carry out presidential priorities. Regardless of his understanding of U.S. Special Forces’ capabilities and recent history, he proclaimed that “terrorism” is not like that at all. He also enacted the idea that an Air Force base is an appropriate place for a Secretary of State to make a statement or to be welcomed by a Saudi friend. Arguments matter because they are public displays of identity, commitments, assumptions, and values. They should even matter to cynics, although they may be most perceptively understood by skeptics. Not everyone is as reserved as my wife about taking arguments seriously. The classic sources offer two distinct sets of reasons for the importance of arguing, and these two general orientations continue to distinguish various argumentation scholars from one another, to this day. The two classes of justification are personal and social. The personal justifications were described by Aristotle: Rhetoric is useful because things that are true and things that are just have a natural tendency to prevail over their opposites, so that if the decisions of judges are not what they ought to be, the defeat must be due to the speakers themselves, and they must be blamed accordingly. . . . Again, it is absurd to hold that a man ought to be ashamed of being unable to defend himself with his limbs, but not of being unable to defend himself with rational speech, when the use of rational speech is more distinctive of a human being than the use of his limbs. (Rhetoric, I.1, 1355a 22–1355b 8)

Arguing skill is required of those who would take hold of their own lives, seeking truth, offering legislation, defending or attacking in court. If every advocate is highly skilled, the result is a sort of Aristotelian Invisible Hand that hovers over the polity and its store of knowledge. Although

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this view of personal competence, tested in rhetorical combat, has good public ends, Aristotle’s first orientation is to the individual. Whereas Aristotle’s Rhetoric is probably more highly regarded than any other classical source today, it was Cicero who dominated medieval and renaissance rhetorical thought. As Abbott (1996, e.g., pp. 6–7) emphasized, Cicero’s justification for argument, not Aristotle’s, came first to mind during the Renaissance. The key passage is near the beginning of de Inventione: For there was a time when men wandered at large in the fields like animals and lived on wild fare; they did nothing by the guidance of reason, but relied chiefly on physical strength; there was as yet no ordered system of religious worship nor of social duties; no one had seen legitimate marriage nor had anyone looked upon children whom he knew to be his own; nor had they learned the advantages of an equitable code of law. And so through their ignorance and error blind and unreasoning passion satisfied itself by misuse of bodily strength, which is a very dangerous servant. At this juncture a man—great and wise I am sure—became aware of the power latent in man and the wide field offered by his mind for great achievements if one could develop this power and improve it by instruction. Men were scattered in the fields and hidden in sylvan retreats when he assembled and gathered them in accordance with a plan; he introduced them to every useful and honourable occupation, though they cried out against it at first because of its novelty, and then when through reason and eloquence they had listened with greater attention, he transformed them from wild savages into a kind and gentle folk. (I. ii. 2)

He went on to explain that even in more recent times, justice and good policy continue to depend on the power of speech and reason. Civilization, then, is born in argument. This Ciceronian inheritance was an important feature of Renaissance humanist thought. Cicero’s quasihistory features an individual, but clearly his point is the close connection between arguments and the state. Whereas Aristotle saw arguing as analogous to wrestling with an opponent, Cicero regarded it as lying at the heart of public nature. Both these viewpoints have their parallels today. In these matters, this book has been more Aristotelian than Ciceronian. My emphasis has been on persons, not publics. Other scholars have developed profound insights into and commitments about the role of argument in the public sphere (e.g., Goodnight, 1982; the Alta conferences are, I think it is fair to say, dominated by this sort of work). I admit that I am uncomfortable discussing something like “the argument for racial equality” as a depersonalized historical phenomenon because I want to study the people who made the argument, resisted it, or ignored it. I have

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always been happy to leave to others the more or less Hegelian impulse to see great arguments as having a sort of historical energy, independent of the people involved. Still, I often admire the results of working from this scholarly standpoint (e.g., Zarefsky, 1979, 1986; Zarefsky & Gallagher, 1990). Just as Aristotle built from the skilled individual toward the wise polity, that is my intention as well. Obvious but underappreciated facts about arguments are that only people can argue and that arguments only exist because people produce them. When scholars write that “the Constitution argues . . . ,” or that “the fact of inequality argues . . . ,” they are engaging in a rhetorical figure, not literalism. I believe, as both Aristotle and Cicero did, that good arguments should take a decisive place in political discourse, but I emphasize that the arguing is done by people, who themselves have to be sited in a public place where their utterances will be consequential. I think it is fair to say that Martin Luther King, Jr., had a more pervasive influence on public law than Frederick Douglass did, but not because King’s arguments were better. King was simply in a better position to argue and had more influential sponsors (e.g., Pauley, 1998). The arguers, not the argument, possess the energy for public transformation. An argument can be a vehicle for change, but the changers are always and only the arguers. The connections I see between personal argument and public life are two. The first is the more obvious one: Policies are based on arguments. Ideally, the pertinent arguments are about the public good, practicality, or ethics, but even considerations about campaign contributions and electoral positioning are arguments. Our nation is carried by arguments, good or bad. The second connection has more to do with the nature of arguing. Free and democratic governments are aimed at the same dialectical ideals that characterize the best interpersonal arguing. Open minds, reliance on tested evidence, public displays of inference patterns, sincere expressions of commitments, and equal access to speaking opportunities and information—these principles underlie the best critical discussions, whether they are private or public. I believe that this is no accident. Dialectical principles can today be justified with elaborate epistemologies, but they must once have slowly emerged from some sort of brute pre-Ciceronian society. These procedures are honored because we can see that the more closely we approach them, the more ultimately satisfactory the exchanges are, and the more they are violated, the more injustice and error eventually appear. We endured millennia of monarchy, militarism, and tyranny, but the modern age is finally beginning to apply our best personal standards to our governments.

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When people argue together dialectically, coalescently, they are enacting a democracy in miniature. They exchange reason, not threat. They rely on evidence, not force. They display their interests openly and do not pretend to positions they do not hold. This, I think, is what we want our governments to do as well. And we learned all this by arguing with one another, paying attention as we did.

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Author Index

A Abbott, D. P., 333 Abelson, R., 101 Ajzen, I., 156 Akatsuko, N., 280 Albertano of Brescia, 177 Allen, M., 30, 31, 53, 176, 178, 215, 203, 238, 311 Allen, T., 102 Andersen, P. A., 145 Anderson, C. M., 178 Anderson, K. V., 43 Andrews, K., 79, 81, 82, 83 Antaki, C., 262 Applegate, J. L., 40, 215, 235, 237 Arambel-Liu, S., 79 Aristotle, 1, 14, 19, 42, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 127, 203, 253, 332 Arnold, C. C., 4 Arpan-Ralstin, L., 111 Atkinson, J. M., 277 Austin, C. C., 321 Austin, J. L., 76, 245 Averroës, 2

B Badzinski, D. M., 37 Bailey, C. L., 178

Baird, A. C., 203 Baker, K., 200 Barclay, J. R., 202 Barrett, W. P., 314 Baukus, R. A., 28 Bavelas, J. B., 239 Beatty, M. J., 178, 179 Beavin, J. H., 37, 266, 302, 303 Bell, R. A., 123, 215, 234 Benoit, P. J., 24, 26, 27, 29, 261, 269 Benoit, W. L., 14, 261, 269 Berelson, B. R., 131 Berger, C. R., 37, 48, 78, 88, 90, 91, 92, 111, 117, 124, 183 Berkowitz, S., 53, 238, 311 Berlo, D. K., 132 Bettinghaus, E. P., 202 Bilmes, J., 261, 263 Bird, O., 64 Bitzer, L. F., 2, 184 Black, A., 239 Black, J. B., 101 Blank, A., 308 Blood, M., 79, 81, 82, 83 Booth-Butterfield, S., 197 Booth, W. C., 127, 312 Bosanquet, B., 7 Boster, F. J., 38, 129, 180, 181, 232, 233, 238 Bowden, E. M., 79 Bower, G. H., 101

359

360

N

AUTHOR INDEX

Bowers, J. W., 42 Boyle, R., 262, 263 Bradac, J. J., 48 Bransford, J. D., 202 Brigance, W. N., 129 Brockriede, W., 9, 19, 55, 74, 133, 238, 241 Broetzmann, S., 102 Brown, K., 36 Brown, P., 33, 42, 86, 99, 235, 265, 268, 270 Brown, T., 79, 81, 82, 83 Bruce, B., 47, 48 Bryant, D. C., 4, 203 Burgoon, M., 194 Burke, K., 8, 50, 73 Burke, P., 137 Burks, D. M., 41 Burleson, B. R., 40, 41, 56, 112, 123, 215, 225, 235, 237, 240, 241 Burrell, N., 30, 31, 203 Bushey, B., 311

C Cacioppo, J. T., 197, 237 Canary, D. J., 149, 270 Cantrill, J. G., 102 Caplan, H., 76 Caplan, S. E., 40, 123, 215, 235 Cappella, J. N., 299 Carlson, R. E., 41 Carpendale, J. I. M., 265 Carter, K. K., 177 Cegala, D. J., 172 Ceraso, J., 202 Chaiken, S., 197, 237 Chanowitz, B., 308 Chovil, N., 239 Christiaansen, R. E., 202 Cialdini, R. B., 311 Cicero, M. T., 70, 85, 333 Clark, H. H., 80, 123 Cloven, D. H., 37, 240 Cody, M. J., 89, 181, 185, 186, 187, 194, 198, 218, 220, 221, 239, 240 Cole, T., 195 Collins, B. E., 45, 126 Corsaro, W. A., 274

Coser, L. A., 35, 45, 126 Cotton, E., 137 Coulter, J., 255 Cox, J. R., 14, 133 Craig, R. T., 256 Cruz, M. G., 214 Cupach, W., 33

D Dallinger, J. M., 26, 34, 41, 78, 81, 92, 95, 96, 97, 119, 124, 135, 138, 140, 141, 172, 178, 180, 181, 182, 189, 194, 201, 209, 212, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227, 230 Daly, J. A., 123, 141, 215, 234 Darus, H. J., 139 Dascal, M., 62 Dause, C. A., 74 de Glopper, K., 201 Dean, C., 27, 78, 102, 104 Dean, D., 310, 311 Delia, J. G., 131, 215, 233, 235, 237 Della Casa, G., 137 Denning, V. P., 194 Deutsch, M., 42, 43, 44, 92 DeWine, S., 178 Dieter, O. A. L., 70 Dillard, J. P., 35, 36, 41, 46, 47, 78, 88, 95, 97, 114, 115, 124, 126, 135, 183, 185, 186, 187, 198, 218 DiSanza, N. L., 266 Donohue, W. A., 41 Dorsey, C., 200 Downey, G., 216 Drake, L. E., 41 Durkheim, E., 187

E Eadie, W. F., 41 Edgley, C., 238 Edwards, M. U., 321 Ehninger, D., 55, 74 Elliott, L., 83, 195 Elwood, W. N., 177 Evans, D. A., 89 Evans, J. St. B. T., 202

AUTHOR INDEX

F Fairhurst, G. T., 37 Farady, M., 311 Feldman, S. I., 216 Felton, M., 305, 311, 312 Feteris, E., 253 Fillenbaum, S., 202 Finucane, M., 178 Fisch, R., 302 Fishbein, M., 156 Fisher, W. R., 8, 50 Fitzpatrick, M. A., 37 Flaton, R., 310 Fofano, J., 140, 181 Folger, J. P., 37, 45, 298 Francik, E. P., 80, 123 Franks, J. J., 202 Freeley, A. J., 74 Frymiare, J. L., 79

G Galanter, E., 217 Gallagher, V. J., 334 Gerritsen, S., 201 Gilbert, M. A., 7, 15, 43, 128, 175, 266, 319 Glander, T., 130, 132 Glenn, P. J., 123, 215 Goffman, E., 37, 99, 265, 266 Golish, T. D., 34 Goodell, C., 316 Goodnight, G. T., 56, 184, 316, 323, 333 Goodwin, C., 266 Goodwin, M. H., 8, 266 Gottman, J. M., 37 Govier, T., 14, 15, 16, 52, 306 Greenblatt, R., 79 Greene, J. O., 46, 78, 88 Greene, K., 177 Greene, R. W., 102 Grice, H. P., 87, 208, 256 Grismer, A., 79, 81, 82, 83 Grootendorst, R., 16, 18, 57, 58, 201, 242, 243, 245, 246, 250, 252, 253, 254, 299, 316 Gross, A. G., 62 Gross, J. J., 145, 172 Guerrero, L. K., 146

N

361

Guetzkow, H., 45, 126 Gurley, K., 237

H Haberman, F. W., 4 Haberman, J., 79 Hackman, M., 178 Hall, A. E., 178 Hammond, H., 79, 81, 82 Hample, D., 5, 6, 10, 13, 23, 26, 27, 33, 34, 40, 41, 42, 46, 52, 54, 78, 79, 81, 82, 83, 84, 89, 90, 92, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 102, 104, 119, 123, 124, 135, 136, 138, 140, 141, 143, 171, 172, 177, 178, 180, 181, 182, 185, 189, 191, 194, 195, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 209, 210, 212, 215, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227, 230, 238, 241, 253, 307, 313, 315 Harden, J. M., 35, 46, 47, 102, 104, 198, 218 Harpine, W. D., 74 Hart, R. P., 41, 329 Hayashi, T., 266, 267, 268, 269 Haynie, B. F., 175 Heisel, A. D., 178, 179, 234 Henderson, M. D., 197 Henle, M., 202 Hobbs, J. R., 89 Hoff, N., 174, 281 Holowchak, M., 280 Holtgraves, T., 270 Honeycutt, J. M., 102, 190 Hopper, R., 123, 299 Hopphan, J., 79, 81, 82 Houston, J., 26 Houtlosser, P., 253 Hovland, C. I., 131 Hullett, C. R., 38 Hultzén, L. S., 71, 74 Hunt, S., 53, 238, 311 Hunter, J., 41 Hutchby, I., 38, 255, 260, 290 Hynes, T. J., 319

362

N

AUTHOR INDEX

I Ilie, C., 255 Infante, D. A., 28, 36, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 178, 183, 236 Irizarry, F. P., 178

Kotthoff, H., 263, 271 Kounious, J., 79 Kubeck, J. E., 175 Kuhn, D., 17, 303, 304, 305, 308, 309, 311, 312, 313, 326

L J Jackson, D. D., 37, 266, 302, 303 Jackson, S., 12, 16, 19, 30, 31, 241, 242, 252, 255, 256, 259, 263, 264, 316 Jacobs, S., 12, 16, 19, 30, 31, 242, 252, 255, 256, 259, 263, 264, 265, 316 Janiszewski, C. A., 80, 123 Jefferson, G., 272 John, O. P., 145, 172 Johnson-Laird, P. N., 202 Johnson, A. J., 29, 194 Johnson, A., 27, 78, 102, 104 Johnson, D. W., 311 Johnson, K. L., 281 Johnson, R. T., 311 Johnstone, H. W., 55, 322 Jordan, W. J., 181, 198, 220, 237 Jung-Beeman, M., 79

K Kamen, H., 54 Kang, K. H., 214 Katz, D., 38, 171 Katz, E., 130 Katz, J. B., 310, 311 Kay, B., 180, 232 Kazoleas, D., 180, 232 Kellermann, K., 42, 78, 102, 117, 195, 203 Kenady, B., 83, 195 Kennedy, G. A., 62, 127 Kinney, T. A., 198 Kitao, K., 102 Kline, S. L., 56, 76, 77, 78, 233, 245 Knapp, C., 171 Kneupper, C. W., 8 Kopp, L., 27, 78, 102, 104 Kopperschmidt, J., 255 Kosberg, R. L., 28

LaFrance, B. H., 178 Lake, R. A., 10, 11, 38, 319 Lambert, B. L., 78, 187, 191, 195, 216 Langer, E. J., 190, 308 Lapinski, M. K., 38 Laufersweiler, C. J., 316 Launer, M. K., 321 Lawrence, S., 123, 215 Laycock, C., 74 Lazarsfeld, P. F., 130, 131 Lea, H. C., 54 Lee, C. M., 42 Leeper, R. W., 100 Leff, M. C., 62 Lessl, T. M., 324 Levelt, W. J. M., 88, 282 Levine, T. R., 178 Levine, T., 180, 181, 232 Levinson, S. C., 33, 42, 76, 86, 99, 235, 255, 262, 263, 265, 268, 270 Lewin, K., 46, 89, 90, 92, 100, 114, 124, 128, 185, 189, 190 Lim, T.-S., 42, 102, 138, 141 Limon, M. S., 197, 238, 305, 311 Lindstrom, E., 237 Ling, D. A., 8 Littlejohn, S. W., 242 Loffredo, D., 178 Louden, A., 53, 238, 311 Luckie-Parks, A., 200 Lumsdaine, A. A., 131

M Mallin, I., 43 Martin, M. M., 178 Martin, R. W., 30, 33 Matthews, J., 39 Mayer, M., 238 McAuley, P., 321 McBath, J. H., 15, 19

AUTHOR INDEX McCarthy, T. A., 56 McCroskey, J. C., 179, 234 McGuire, W. J., 204 McKerrow, R. E., 241 McLaughlin, M. L., 89, 185, 186, 187, 194, 198, 208, 218, 220, 221, 240, 256 McNally, J. R., 237 McPhee, W. N., 131 Mehan, H., 277, 323 Meijinders, A., 135 Meuffels, B., 250 Meyer, J. R., 78, 89, 110, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 120, 124, 125, 194, 213, 217, 220 Mezger, R., 83, 195 Miller, G. A., 217 Miller, G. R., 129, 202 Miller, L. C., 89, 185, 186, 187, 194, 218, 220, 221, 240 Mitchell, M. M., 197, 238, 305, 311 Mongeau, P. A., 176, 236 Moore, R., 200 Moulin, N., 79, 81, 82, 83 Mullett, J., 239 Muntigl, P., 255, 256, 258, 259, 260, 261, 264, 265, 267, 269, 282, 290, 297 Murphy, J. J., 76 Murphy, R., 4 Myers, K. A., 178, 222, 224, 225, 227, 230

N Nabi, R. L., 135 Nadeau, R., 70 Neer, M. R., 178, 232 Nelson, G. K., 140, 181 Newman, D. R., 239 Newman, D., 47, 48 Newman, R. P., 239 Ngoitz, A., 27, 78, 102, 104 Nicotera, A. M., 178, 235 Nofsinger, R. E., 269, 277 Nussbaum, E. M., 233

363

O’Keefe, B. J., 39, 41, 45, 46, 47, 78, 114, 187, 191, 195, 210, 215, 216, 233, 235 O’Keefe, D. J., 10, 195, 198, 204, 233, 236, 238, 245 O’Neill, J. M., 74 Ochs, E., 89 Ohbuchi, K., 46 Olbrechts-Tyteca, L., 4, 15, 16, 19, 26, 52, 127 Olmstead, G., 239 Olson, L. N., 34, 184 Oostdam, R., 201 Opt, S., 178 Osgood, C., 186

P Palczewski, C. H., 319 Patterson, G. J., 270 Pauley, G. E., 334 Pearce, W. B., 302, 324 Perelman, C., 4, 15, 16, 19, 26, 52, 127 Perkins, D. N., 311 Peters, E., 315 Petronio, S., 240 Petty, R. E., 197, 237 Philipsen, G., 64, 312 Pinker, S., 299 Planalp, S., 126, 146 Plato, 268 Pomerantz, A., 258, 262, 263, 271, 277 Poole, M. S., 37, 45, 298 Powers, W. G., 237 Preiss, R. W., 176, 178 Pribram, K. H., 217 Prill, P. E., 72 Priolkar, A. K., 325 Provitera, A., 202 Pullan, B., 55 Purcell, W., 4, 73 Purifoy, G., 26 Putnam, L. L., 76

Q, R O O’Hair, H. D., 239

N

Quintilian, 69, 73 Quinton, J., 79, 81, 82, 83

364

N

AUTHOR INDEX

Rancer, A. S., 28, 36, 135, 136, 138, 140, 178, 236, 237 Reber, P. J., 79 Resnick, L. B., 280 Reygadas, P., 175 Reynolds, J. L., 200 Reynolds, R. A., 200 Rhoads, K. v. L., 311 Richmond, V. P., 179, 234 Rizzo, T. A., 274 Roach, K. D., 137 Roberto, A., 178 Roberts, L., 194 Rogers, E. M., 130 Roloff, M. E., 37, 80, 91, 123, 129, 240, 281 Rosenberg, M. J., 131 Roskos-Ewoldsen, D. R., 111, 198, 200 Rothenberg, K., 116 Rowland, R. C., 18, 19 Rubin, J. Z., 41

Smith, A., 52 Snoeck Henkemans, F., 16 Snyder, M., 41 Solomon, D. H., 115, 124, 183, 186, 187 Spitzberg, B., 33, 149 Sproule, J. M., 253 St. Pierre, J., 111 Stamp, G. H., 141 Steinberg, M., 129 Steinfatt, T. M., 202 Stevens, J. P., 173 Stewart, J., 43 Stewart, R. A., 137 Stiff, J. B., 176, 236 Stuttman, R. K., 37, 45, 298 Suci, G., 186 Summary, J., 79, 81, 82, 83 Swap, W. C., 41 Sypher, B. D., 233 Sypher, H. E., 233

T S Sacks, H., 255, 261, 271, 272 Salmon, M., 280 Samp, J. A., 124 Scales, R. L., 74 Schank, R. C., 101, 266 Scheerhorn, D. R., 30, 33 Schegloff, E. A., 272 Schrader, D. C., 36 Schriffin, D., 255, 265 Schutz, W. C., 36 Searle, J. R., 76, 245 Segrin, C., 35, 46, 47, 88, 95, 97, 114, 198, 218 Seibold, D., 129 Seiffert, M. A., 36 Semic, B. A., 149 Shaw, L., 83, 195 Shaw, V., 305, 311, 312 Shaw, W. C., 74 Sheffield, F. D., 131 Shepherd, G. J., 39, 45, 46, 47 Shimanoff, S. B., 110 Sillence, J. A. A., 266 Simons, H. W., 324 Slater, M. D., 197 Smalley, B., 73

Tannen, D., 265, 266 Tannenbaum, P. H., 186 Tedeschi, J. T., 46 Thompson-Hayes, M., 171 Thompson, W. N., 129 Thorne, C., 200 Todorov, A., 197 Toulmin, S., 5, 247 Tracy, K., 256, 279 Tracy, S., 302 Trapp, R., 30, 31, 33, 174, 281 Turnbull, W., 255, 256, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 264, 265, 267, 269, 282, 290, 297 Turner, D., 76 Turner, R. E., 238 Turner, T. J., 101 Tusing, K. J., 198

U, V Udell, W., 305, 311, 326 Valencic, K. M., 179 van Eemeren, F. H., 15, 16, 18, 57, 58, 201, 242, 243, 245, 246, 250, 252, 253, 254, 299, 316

AUTHOR INDEX Vangelisti, A. L., 141 VanHyfte, V., 26 Venvertloh, G., 79, 81, 82 Vuchinich, S., 277

W Waldron, V. R., 78, 172, 184 Wallace, K. R., 4, 55, 238 Wallenfelsz, K., 171 Wallenfelsz, P., 171 Waltman, M. S., 41, 76, 112, 225 Wang, C. H., 79, 81, 82 Wang, X., 83, 195 Wanner, J., 33 Wardwell, C., 26 Wason, P. C., 202 Wathen, S. H., 280 Watzlawick, P., 37, 266, 302, 303 Weakland, J. H., 302 Weaver, R. M., 55, 238 Weger, H., 244, 250 Weinstein, J. R., 175

N

365

Weinstock, M., 310 Welbourne, J., 197 Wenzel, J. W., 11, 12, 33, 51, 56, 59, 194, 199, 200, 250 Wigley, C. J., 36, 136, 140, 178 Willard, C. A., 14, 16, 128, 133, 241, 312 Wilson, S. R., 46, 76, 78, 89, 95, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 124, 198, 214, 215 Woefel, M. L., 181 Woll, S., 202, 311 Wood, J. T., 302, 324 Wyer, R. S., 204

Y, Z Yingling, J., 33 Young, M. J., 321 Zarefsky, D., 321, 334 Zediker, K., 43 Zeitz, C. M., 280 Ziegelmueller, G. W., 74

Subject Index

A Adjacency pairs, see Conversational arguing Appropriateness, 235–236 Argumentativeness, 28–29, 135–140, 178–180, 212, 222–225, 232–233, 236

B, C Barriers, 92, 124 Blurting, 40–41, 117, 188 Climate, 92–93, 124 Coalescent arguments, 43–44, 279 Cognitive rules, 110–111, 120–123 Meyer’s theory of editing, 114–120, 217 Wilson’s cognitive rules model, 111–114, 214–215 Communication apprehension, 178–179, 234 Competence begging, see Conversational arguing Competence in arguing, 33–34, 83, 235, 238 Competition, see Cooperation Conversational arguing, 241–300 see also Pragmadialectics

adjacency pairs, 17, 261–265 agreement sequences, 295–296 competence begging, 271–281, 290–291, 297–298 first and second position, 260, 290 lemmas, 282, 290–291, 298 macroanalysis, 280–298 preference organization, 261–265 return to root, 282, 290–291, 296–298 three-turn sequence, 255–261 Cooperation, 42–45 in conversation, 255–256, 280, 298–299

D Definition of argument, 1–21 final, 18–20 preliminary, 1 various, 13–19 Dialectic, 1–2, 12, 43, 56–59, 242 and democracy, 334–335

E Editing arguments, 40–42, 85–125, 216–231 Effectiveness, 236–238

367

368

N

SUBJECT INDEX

Emotions, 126–175, 266 displays, 143–171 felt emotions while arguing, 171–174 neglected in modern scholarship, 129–134 not opposite of reason, 126–128 Engagement in arguing, 177–184, 259 Enthymeme, 2, 201–202 Eristic arguments, 42–43, 279 Ethics, 55–56, 238–239 Evidence, 200–201 Example, 3 Extroversion, 233–234

F Fallacies, 58, 302 see also Pragmadialectics and pseudoevidence, 306–307 and reflexive argument, 314 Field theory, see Life spaces Frames for arguing, 22–60, 92–93, 209–214 see also Goals first frame, 34–40 second frame, 40–51 third frame, 51–60

J, K Justifications for arguing, 332–333 Kinds of argument, 9–11

L Life spaces, 89–94, 114, 185, 189–209 content, 190–191, 193–209 interpersonal, 190–193, 207–209 planes of reality and irreality, 100, 107–109 Loneliness, 234

M Message design logic, 210 Message production, 78–79 general model, 88–109 specific model for editing arguments, 110–123

N Naïve understanding of arguing, 23–33, 51 Narrative, 7–9, 50, 73

G Goals, 25–26, 89–91, 94–99, 111–125 dominance 36–37, 44 identity display 37–38, 45, 331–332 instrumental, 34–36 multiple, 35–36, 39–40, 46–47, 124–125 play 38–39, 45

I Interpersonal construct differentiation, 113–114, 123, 214–216, 223–227, 233–236 Invention, 61–84 Inventional capacity, 78–83, 195–196

O, P Obstacles, 91–92, 108–109, 123 Perspectives on argument, see Standards for argument evaluation Plans, 78–79, 99–105, 125, 266–268 connecting own and other’s, 47–51 distinguished path, 100–101 memory organization packets, 101–105 real and virtual, 47–48, 108, 328 Politeness, 265–271 see also Goals of repertoires, 81 Pragmadialectics, 242–254 discussion rules, 57–58, 250–254 episodic structure, 243–245 and fallacies, 253–254 required speech acts, 245–250 Pseudoevidence, 303–313

SUBJECT INDEX

Q, R Quantity of arguing, 138, 180, 232–234 Reception of arguments, 197–205 Reciprocity in arguing, 23, 37, 40, 138, 140–141, 180–181, 184, 270 Reflexive argument, 313–325 Relevance, 245 Rule of first-speak, 123

N

Standards for argument evaluation, 11–13, 51–59 appropriateness, 56–59 effectiveness, 54–56 soundness, 52–54 Stasis, 70–78 for speech acts, 76–77, 245, 249–250 Style, 3–5

T S Self-correcting potential of argument, 3, 53, 56, 253–254, 313 Situation, 89–94, 176–240 dimensions, 194 and editing, 218–221, 227–231 and emotions, 136–140 and engagement, 180–184 relationship to goals, 185–189, 194 Speechlessness, 90, 111, 183

369

Taking conflict personally, 135–136, 140–142, 178–181, 212–213, 222–225 Technical quality, 238 Topics, 137–138 personal or public, 29 Topoi, 62–70 Toulmin model, 5–7

V Violence, 26–28, 32, 236