Argumentation in Nigerian investigative public hearings

This paper examines defendants’ argumentative discourse in the 2008 Nigerian investigative public hearings on the Federal Capital Territory administration. The data, which consist of nine defendants’ presentations, are analyzed qualitatively, using a combination of the pragma-dialectical and extended pragma-dialectical theories of argumentation. The findings show that the hearing panel initially starts of as the institutional protagonist and defendants as the antagonists, and but later serve as the institutional antagonist and protagonists, respectively. The defendants tend to use analogy and causal argumentation schemes while employing subordinative and complementary coordinative argumentation structures. The defendants also employ different strategic maneuvers at different argumentative stages of the critical discussion. Due to the politico-forensic communicative domain and information-seeking genre of the investigative public hearing discourse, the concluding stage is suspended. Thus, the study shows the influence of communicative activity type on the argumentative activities in a critical discussion.

Causal Argument

This chapter outlines the range of argument forms involving causation that can be found in everyday discourse. It also surveys empirical work concerned with the generation and evaluation of such arguments. This survey makes clear that there is presently no unified body of research concerned with causal argument. It highlights the benefits of a unified treatment both for those interested in causal cognition and those interested in argumentation, and identifies the key challenges that must be met for a full understanding of causal argumentation.

“Our reading would lead to…”

Of the various subtypes of causal argumentation, one that has been sparking the interest of a large number of scholars across various contexts is pragmatic argumentation. This paper aims at undertaking an exploratory study of discursive indicators of pragmatic argumentation in a synchronic corpus of judgments by the Supreme Court of the United States of America. The study began with a qualitative overview to be followed by a more quantitative investigation, in which discursive indicators of pragmatic argumentation were lemmatized and searched for at a corpus level. Data show both the tendency of lemmas to occur within larger patterns, and the way these are correlated with an outline of both desirable and undesirable consequences the judge may draw the attention to. Findings thus appear to offer food for thought in the three largely interrelated areas of argumentation, discourse studies and legal theory.

Applied Epistemology and Argumentation in Epidemiology

The general goal is to encourage informal logicians and those interested in applied epistemology to look at epidemiology as a paradigmatic science crucially dependant on argumentation to justify its claims. Three specific goals are: 1. exemplify applied epistemology by looking critically at causal argumentation in epidemiology, 2. show that justification of causal claims in epidemiology is a form of “argument to the best explanation,” 3. show that there could be a symbiotic relationship between epidemiology and work in various applied reasoning disciplines such as argumentation and “applied epistemology.”