Challenging Authority with Argumentation: The Pragmatics of Arguments from and to Authority

Abstract

Authority is both a pragmatic condition of much public discourse and a form of argumentative appeal routinely used in it. The goal of this contribution is to propose a new account of challenging authority in argumentative discourse that benefits from the interplay of the resources of recent speech act theory and argumentation theory. Going beyond standard approaches of the two disciplines, the paper analyzes nuanced forms of establishing and, especially, challenging discourse-related authority. Can Donald Trump advise his own scientific advisors on potential COVID-19 treatments? Addressing questions like this, the paper identifies various paradoxes of authority and the forms of authority discussed in the literature. It then distinguishes between argument from authority (or expert opinion) and argument to authority (or expert opinion) and argues that this rearranged structure mutually benefits the pragmatic account of speech act theory and the schematic account of argumentation theory in the task of better understanding and critiquing discourses such as Trump’s.

Norms of Public Argumentation and the Ideals of Correctness and Participation

“…Some of the basic norms of public argumentation nevertheless fruitfully overlap pragmatically. Regarding one of the key types of argument in public deliberation, the argument from expert opinion, for instance, recent studies (Lewiński 2022;Zenker & Yu 2023) show its argument scheme to be associated with critical questions that are largely co-extensive with the public norms epistemologists have proposed to evaluate expertise (e.g., Goldman 2001). Specifically, an expert should be competent in the relevant discipline, be unbiased and recognized by other experts, and have verifiable credentials and a good track record of correct judgements.…”

“…Substantive norms are developed in epistemic proceduralism, a branch of political theory that seeks to defuse the critiques of democracy and the deflationary account of truth, while saving a substantive epistemic role for procedures in democratic institutions. In critiquing expertruled political regimes, epistemic proceduralists submit that even reasonable citizens regularly disagree about who counts as an expert (Estlund 1997;Goldman 2001;Lewiński 2022;Zenker & Yu 2023). This points to a central problem in justifying normative accounts of political argumentation in democracies: explaining how rule by non-experts can still result in epistemically valuable outcomes.…”

“Doutor, volta e pesquise melhor, falou besteira”: autoridade e argumentação em comentários no YouTube

“…Gabriel Isola-Lanzoni; Lucas Pereira da Silva Todo conteúdo da Linha D'Água está sob Licença Creative Commons CC BY-NC 4.0. discursivos (Khosravinik;Unger, 2016) e argumentativos (Lewiński, 2022;Araszkiewicz;Koszowy, 2024), assim como em áreas adjacentes, como o ensino de ciência (Blancke;Boudry, 2022) e a filosofia da ciência (Allchin, 2022). Nossa contribuição às investigações orienta-se à reflexão sobre as formas de ratificação e de refutação da autoridade no ambiente digitalilustrada por enunciados como o que dá título a este artigo -, sobretudo no fórum instaurado na seção de comentários de vídeos do YouTube, a partir de um olhar centralmente argumentativo.…”

“…O vídeo é apresentado pelo Dr. Luiz Vicente Rizzo, que ocupa o cargo de Diretor Superintendente do Instituto Israelita de Ensino e Pesquisa Albert Einstein. Isso posto, o artigo se organiza da seguinte maneira: (i) inicialmente, apresentamos a fundamentação teórica assumida em nosso trabalho, na qual discutimos conceitos importantes da teoria da argumentação, como questão argumentativa (Grácio, 2010;Gonçalves-Segundo, 2020;2023a), esquema argumentativo (Walton;Reed;Macagno, 2008;Gonçalves-Segundo, 2023a) e pergunta crítica (Walton;Reed;Macagno, 2008;Lewiński, 2022;Gonçalves-Segundo, 2023a), articulando-os à conceituação de Crise da Desinformação Científica (Allchin, 2022) e à dependência epistêmica em especialistas (Hardwig, 1985) para tratar do papel de autoridade no campo científico. Em seguida, (ii) passamos à descrição dos procedimentos metodológicos adotados para a coleta, organização, filtragem, seleção e análise dos comentários.…”

Norms of Public Argument: A Speech Act Perspective

“…Think of devices such as "sneaky" presuppositions, including those aimed at unduly accommodating the authority of the speaker (Bach and Harnish 1979;Sbisà 1999;Langton 2015Langton , 2018Cepollaro 2020;Caponetto 2022); insinuations (Camp 2018(Camp , 2022Domínguez-Armas and Soria-Ruiz 2021;Oswald 2022); conversational exercitives (McGowan 2004); discursive distorsions (Kukla 2014); subordinating speech (Langton 1993;Maitra & McGowan 2012); dogwhistles and figleaves (Saul 2017(Saul , 2018(Saul , 2021; code words (Khoo 2017) and propagandistic discourse more in general (Stanley 2015) (for a recent collection of topics in this debate, see Khoo & Sterken 2021). The study of such linguistic tools also raises the question of how to resist them: the literature on counterspeech aims to develop ways to prevent or challenge such harmful conversational moves (Langton 2018;Lepoutre 2021;Lewiński 2022;Tirrell 2021;see Cepollaro et al 2023 for an overview).…”