Four Critical Essays on Argumentation

This book is divided into two parts, "Argumentation in Critical Discourse Analysis" and "Questions and Doubts about Visual Argumantation", each part containing two chapters. In the first chapter, "Topoi in Critical Discourse Analysis", I am concerned with how topoi are used (and misused) in the Discourse-Historical Approach. The Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA), pioneered by Ruth Wodak (see Wodak, de Cillia, Reisigl, Liebhart 1999; Wodak, van Dijk 2000; Wodak, Chilton 2005; Wodak, Meyer 2006; Wodak 2009), is one of the major branches of critical discourse analysis (CDA). In its own (programmatic) view, it embraces at least three interconnected aspects (Wodak 2006: 65): 1. 'Text or discourse immanent critique' aims at discovering internal or discourse-internal structures. 2. The 'socio-diagnostic critique' is concerned with the demystifying exposure of the possibly persuasive or 'manipulative' character of discursive practices. 3. Prognostic critique contributes to the transformation and improvement of communication. CDA, in Wodak's view, is not concerned with evaluating what is 'right' or 'wrong'. CDA ... should try to make choices at each point in the research itself, and should make these choices transparent.1 It should also justify theoretically why certain interpretations of discursive events seem more valid than others. One of the methodical ways for critical discourse analysts to minimize the risk of being biased is to follow the principle of triangulation. Thus, one of the most salient distinguishing features of the DHA is its endeavour to work with different approaches, multi-methodically and on the basis of a variety of empirical data as well as background information. (Wodak ibid.) One of the approaches DHA is using in its principle of triangulation is argumentation theory, more specifically the theory of topoi. In the first chapter, I am concerned with the following questions: how and in what way are topoi and, consequentially, argumentation theory, used in DHA as one of the most influential schools of CDA? Other approaches (e.g., Fairclough (1995, 2000, 2003) or van Leeuwen (2004, 2008; van Leeuwen, Kress 2006)) do not use topoi at all. Does such a use actually minimize the risk of being biased, and, consequentially, does such a use of topoi in fact implement the principle of triangulation? Judging from the works we analysed in the first chapter, there are no rules or criteria how to use topoi or how to detect topoi in the discourse/text; the only methodological precept seems to be, »anything goes«! If so, why does CDA need triangulation? And what happened to the principle stipulating that CDA »should try to make choices at each point in the research itself, and should make these choices transparent? « We have seen identical and similar bundles of topoi for different purposes or occasions; we have seen different bundles of topoi for identical and similar purposes or occasions; we have seen different bundles of topoi for different occasion; and we have seen pretty exotic bundles of topoi for pretty particular and singular purposes. Which leads us to a key question: can anything be or become a topos within DHA? And, consequentially, what actually, i.e., historically, is a topos? If a topos is supposed to connect an argument with a conclusion, as all the relevant DHA publications claim, one would expect that at least a minimal reconstruction would follow, namely, what is the argument in the quoted fragment? What is the conclusion in the quoted fragment? How is the detected topos connecting the two, and what is the argumentative analysis of the quoted fragment? Unfortunately, all these elements are missing; the definition and the quoted fragment are all that there is of the supposed argumentative analysis. And this is the basic pattern of functioning for most of the DHA works. At the beginning, there would be a list of topoi and a short description foreach of them: first, a conditional paraphrase of a particular topos would be given, followed by a short discourse fragment (usually from the media) illustrating this conditional paraphrase (in Discourse and Discrimination, pp. 75-80), but without any explicit reconstruction of possible arguments, conclusions, or topoi connecting the two in the chosen fragment. After this short "theoretical" introduction, different topoi would just be referred to by names throughout the book, as if everything has already been explained in these few introductory pages. It is quite surprising that none of the quoted DHA works even mention the origins of topoi, their extensive treatment in many works and the main authors of these works, namely Aristotle and Cicero. Even the definition, borrowed from Kienpointner (mostly on a copy-paste basis), does not stem from their work either: it is a hybrid product, with strong input from Stephen Toulmin's work The Uses of Argument, published in 1958. All this is even more surprising because today it is almost a commonplace that for Aristotle a topos is a place to look for arguments (which is true), a heading or department where a number of rhetoric arguments can be easily found (which is true as well), and that those arguments are ready for use – which is a rather big misunderstanding. According to Aristotle, topoi are supposed to be of two kinds: general or common topoi, appropriate for use everywhere and anywhere, regardless of situation, and specific topoi, in their applicability limited mostly to the three genres of oratory (judicial, deliberative, and epideictic). With the Romans, topoi became loci, and Cicero literally defines them as “the home of all proofs” (De or. 2.166.2), “pigeonholes in which arguments are stored” (Part. Or. 5.7-10), or simply “storehouses of arguments” (Part. Or. 109.5-6). Also, their number was reduced from 300 in Topics or 29 in Rhetoric to up to 19 (depending on how we count them). Although Cicero's list correlates pretty much, though not completely, with Aristotle's list from the Rhetoric B 23, there is a difference in use: Cicero's list is considered to be a list of concepts that may trigger an associative process rather than a collection of implicit rules and precepts reducible to rules, as the topoi in Aristotle's Topics are. In other words, Cicero's loci mostly function as subject matter indicators and loci communes. Which brings us a bit closer to how topoi might be used in DHA. In the works analysed in the first chapter, the authors never construct or reconstruct arguments from the discourse fragments they analyse – despite the fact that they are repeatedly defining topoi as warrants connecting arguments with conclusions; they just hint at them with short glosses. And since there is no reconstruction of arguments from concrete discourse fragments under analysis, hinting at certain topoi, referring to them or simply just mentioning them, can only serve the purpose of »putting the audience in a favourable frame of mind. « »Favourable frame of mind« in our case – the use of topoi in DHA – would mean directing a reader's attention to a »commonly known or discussed« topic, without explicitly phrasing or reconstructing possible arguments and conclusions. Thus, the reader can never really know what exactly the author had in mind and what exactly he/she wanted to say (in terms of (possible) arguments and (possible) conclusions). In Traité de l'argumentation – La nouvelle rhétorique, published in 1958 by Ch. Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, topoi are characterised by their extreme generality, which makes them usable in every situation. It is the degeneration of rhetoric and the lack of interest for the study of places that has led to these unexpected consequences where »oratory developments«, as Perelman ironically calls them, against fortune, sensuality, laziness, etc., which school exercises were repeating ad nauseam, became qualified as commonplaces (loci, topoi), despite their extremely particular character. By commonplace- es, Perelman claims, we more and more understand what Giambattista Vico called »oratory places«, in order to distinguish them from the places treated in Aristotle's Topics. Nowadays, commonplaces are characterised by banality which does not exclude extreme specificity and particularity. These places are nothing more than Aristotelian commonplaces applied to particular subjects, concludes Perelman. And this is exactly what seems to be happening to the DHA approach to topoi as well. Even more, the works quoted in the first part of the articlegive the impression that DHA is not using the Aristotelian or Ciceronian topoi, but the so-called »literary topoi«, conceptualized by Ernst Robert Curtius in his Europaeische Literatur und Lateinisches Mittelalter (1990: 62- 105, English translation). What is a literary topos? In a nutshell, oral histories passed down from pre-historic societies contain literary aspects, characters, or settings which appear again and again in stories from ancient civilisations, religious texts, art, and even more modern stories. These recurrent and repetitive motifs or leitmotifs would be then labelled literary topoi. The same year that Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca published their New Rhetoric, Stephen Toulmin published his Uses of Argument, probably the most detailed study of how topoi work. Actually, he does not use the terms topos or topoi, but the somewhat judicial term “warrant”. The reason for that seems obvious: he is trying to cover different “fields of argument”, and not all fields of argument, according to him, use topoi as their argumentative principles or bases of their argumentation. According to Toulmin (1958/1995: 94-107), if we have an utterance of the form, “If D then C” – where D stands for data or evidence, and C for claim or conclusion – such a warrant would act as a bridge and authorize the step from D to C. But warrant may have a limited applicability, so Toulmin introduces qualifiers Q, indicating the strength conferred by the warrant,