Hinges, Deep Disagreement and Fixed Points in the Argumentation Logic

In his treatise ‘On Certainty’ (1969) L. Wittgenstein compared the propositions ex- pressing basic principles to the hinges enabling both doubting and justifying knowledge. In 1985 Robert Fogelin proposed the conception of deep disagreement in argumentation analysis and in his description of it he referred to the hinges. We continue Wittgenstein’s hinges metaphor and compare pulling and pushing the door of knowledge to adopting contrary standings about principal issues, which can result in the deep disagreements. We suggest looking at the hinges enabling those door moves as at the fixed points in the extension semantic of the argumen- tation logic. Interpreting the hinges as the fixed points allows viewing rejected arguments as isolated deadlocks of the deep disagreements, or anti-extensions, and opens a possibility for a compromise on the basis of certain extensions. В трактате «О достоверности» (1969) Л. Витгенштейн сравнил предложения, выражающие ключевые принципы знаний людей, с дверными петлями, без которых невозможно ни обосновывать знание, ни сомневаться в нём. В 1985 году Роберт Фогелин предложил понятие глубокого несогласия для анализа аргументации и, описывая его свойства, сослался на дверные петли Витгенштейна. Если продолжить метафору дверных петель Витгенштейна, то, если дверь познания толкают или тянут, это ведет к глубоким разногласиям по принципиальным вопросам. В русле этого мы предлагаем посмотреть на дверные петли как на неподвижные точки в семантике расширения логики аргументации. Это позволяет рассматривать отклоненные аргументы как изолированные тупики глубоких разногласий и открывает возможность для компромисса на основе определённых расширений.

Modersmålsämnets legitimitet i ett förändrat politiskt landskap - En analys av svensk riksdagsdebatt under 2010-talet

The legitimacy of the mother tongue subject in a changing political landscape: An analysis of Swedish parliamentary debate in the twenty-tens. This paper highlights and discusses the arguments in favor of, or against Mother Tongue Instruction (MTI) in Swedish parliamentary debate between 2010 and 2020. New to this decade is the entrance of yet another nationalist and populist party with the abolishment of MTI on its political agenda. Building on a critical discourse analytical frame and argumentation analysis, we discuss this party’s rhetoric on MTI – based in an Othering discourse and the construction of MTI as a path to alienation – and the parliamentary counter-voices. The latter mainly concern the role of MTI for development of Swedish and learning in other school subjects, implying that MTI in its own right is subordinated. We argue that this counter-discourse represents a shift in how MTI is legitimized – and in fact plays into assimilationists’ hands – compared to the pluralistic ideology that initially made way for MTI. The importance of scrutinizing political rhetoric is stressed to anticipate political action.

Argumentation in anonymous online discussions about decriminalising cannabis use

Aims: In October 2019, a citizens’ initiative to decriminalise cannabis use started a large debate about drug policy in Finland. This study examines online discussions about the initiative to supplement the current knowledge about citizens’ drug opinions. The focus is especially on argumentation techniques that are used to support or object to the decriminalisation. Design: Methodologically, the study is based on discourse studies, new rhetoric, and argumentation analysis. The data of 1,092 messages were collected from a popular Finnish anonymous discussion forum Ylilauta. Results: Online discussions about the legal status of cannabis are highly polarised. Decriminalisation is often both supported and resisted in a strong and affective manner, and even hate speech is not rare in the data. Statements made by both discussion parties often lack any argumentation or are based on fallacies, especially ad hominem arguments. Some discussants refer to scientific studies and expert statements, even though such references are usually inaccurate. Cannabis is compared to alcohol more often than to other illegal drugs. Conclusions: The emotional responses and inadequate argumentation might be partially explained by the general nature of online discussions and the culture of the investigated website, but also by the powerful stigma related to illegal drugs and insufficient knowledge on the subject. A future objective is to create a societal atmosphere where the complex question of the legal status of cannabis could be discussed more neutrally and rationally.

IN VARIETATE CONCORDIA? WIKIPEDIA EDITOR DEBATES ABOUT EU CULTURE

This paper addresses how the Wikipedia community has debated the existence of an EU culture on a Wikipedia discussion site between 2001 and 2019. That is, a corpus of discussions among Wikipedia editors (‘Wikipedians’) was examined to shed light on how the Wikipedians involved argue for/against the idea that an overarching EU culture exists at present. This, combined with an examination of debates about concrete cultural elements associated with the EU, permits an insight into Wikipedians’ conception(s) of the union. Drawing on argumentation analysis shows that the data examined indicates that cultural commonality across EU member states is not necessarily ascribed to the EU but to their being European countries. Additionally, even Wikipedians who argue that an overarching EU culture exists do not necessarily actually subscribe to this view but argue for reference to cultural elements in the Wikipedia article on the EU in order to signal to Wikipedia readers that the EU is “more than a set of treaties”.

Cross-issue correlation based opinion prediction in cyber argumentation

One of the challenging problems in large scale cyber-argumentation platforms is that users often engage and focus only on a few issues and leave other issues under-discussed and under-acknowledged. This kind of non-uniform participation obstructs the argumentation analysis models to retrieve collective intelligence from the underlying discussion. To resolve this problem, we developed an innovative opinion prediction model for a multi-issue cyber-argumentation environment. Our model predicts users’ opinions on the non-participated issues from similar users’ opinions on related issues using intelligent argumentation techniques and a collaborative filtering method. Based on our detailed experimental results on an empirical dataset collected using our cyber-argumentation platform, our model is 21.7% more accurate, handles data sparsity better than other popular opinion prediction methods. Our model can also predict opinions on multiple issues simultaneously with reasonable accuracy. Contrary to existing opinion prediction models, which only predict whether a user agrees on an issue, our model predicts how much a user agrees on the issue. To our knowledge, this is the first research to attempt multi-issue opinion prediction with the partial agreement in the cyber-argumentation platform. With additional data on non-participated issues, our opinion prediction model can help the collective intelligence analysis models to analyze social phenomena more effectively and accurately in the cyber argumentation platform.

Neuroethics for Fantasyland or for the Clinic? The Limitations of Speculative Ethics

What purpose can be served by empirically unsubstantiated speculation in ethics? In answering that question, we need to distinguish between the major branches of ethics. In foundational moral philosophy, the use of speculative examples is warranted to the extent that ethical principles and theories are assumed to be applicable even under the extreme circumstances referred to in these examples. Such an assumption is in need of justification, and it cannot just be taken for granted. In applied ethics, the use of unrealistic scenarios is more difficult to justify. It can be positively harmful if it diverts our attention from more urgent issues. Neuroethics is one of the areas of applied ethics where speculative scenarios have taken up much of the attention that could instead have been devoted to problems that are relevant for the treatment and care of patients. Speculative ethics has often been defended with mere possibility arguments that may at first hand seem difficult to refute. It is shown with examples how such claims can be defeated with a combination of science and argumentation analysis.

Software Support for Discourse-Based Textual Information Analysis: A Systematic Literature Review and Software Guidelines in Practice

The intrinsic characteristics of humanities research require technological support and software assistance that also necessarily goes through the analysis of textual narratives. When these narratives become increasingly complex, pragmatics analysis (i.e., at discourse or argumentation levels) assisted by software is a great ally in the digital humanities. In recent years, solutions have been developed from the information visualization domain to support discourse analysis or argumentation analysis of textual sources via software, with applications in political speeches, debates, online forums, but also in written narratives, literature or historical sources. This paper presents a wide and interdisciplinary systematic literature review (SLR), both in software-related areas and humanities areas, on the information visualization and the software solutions adopted to support pragmatics textual analysis. As a result of this review, this paper detects weaknesses in existing works on the field, especially related to solutions’ availability, pragmatic framework dependence and lack of information sharing and reuse software mechanisms. The paper also provides some software guidelines for improving the detected weaknesses, exemplifying some guidelines in practice through their implementation in a new web tool, Viscourse. Viscourse is conceived as a complementary tool to assist textual analysis and to facilitate the reuse of informational pieces from discourse and argumentation text analysis tasks.