Ethos and Pragmatics

Herman, Thierry

doi:10.3390/languages7030165

Cited by 9 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 36 publications

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“…Donald Trump's presidency has been a continuous source of inspiration for research interested in the tricky, and often outright harmful, pragmatics of public argument (Beaver and Stanley 2019;Herman 2022;Herman and Oswald 2021;Jacobs et al 2022;Khoo 2017Khoo , 2021Neville-Shepard 2019;Ryan Kelly 2020;Saul 2017Saul , 2021Tirrell 2017). One of the presidency's fascinating twists came on 23 April 2020, during one of the daily press conferences Trump's White House organized in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.…”

Section: Can a President Advise His Advisors?mentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Lewiński

2022

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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.

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Section: Can a President Advise His Advisors?mentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Lewiński

2022

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“…being the representation of the ethos of a speaker by commentators or members of the audience(Herman, 2022). In the television programme, the role of the commentator is assumed by Vittorio Sgarbi, who in offering a commentary on Stramezzi, simultaneously constructs his own ethos in his statements.…”

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confidence: 99%

Being an expert in pandemic times: negotiating epistemic authority in a media interaction

D'Angelo,

Orletti

2023

Front. Commun.

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Since the so-called phase one of the Coronavirus pandemic, media professionals have shown great attention to communication about the epidemic, so much so that a “glottology of COVID-19” has even been advocated to reflect on war metaphors referring to the disease. Despite media solicitations, however, reflection on communication at the time of COVID was not immediately the subject of linguistic analysis, at least in the Italian context. However, the issue of the relationship between language and culture, society, and thought has recently been explored in the face of the limitation of only formal analyses on language at the time of COVID. In the first stage, it quickly became apparent that the people in charge of institutional communication were used to talking mostly with experts on public health problems or research results, without the necessary training to modulate their language according to the degree of specialization of the audience. Instead, it is currently possible to detect an improvement in communication skills, and to observe the emergence of opposing factions with respect to the new resources of both preventive and therapeutic medicine, respectively the pro-vax and no-vax movements. These issues have been the focus of many Italian TV talk shows, such as the program “Non è l'Arena.” In the episode of 9/25/21, which is the subject of this article, the positions expressed in favor of one argument or the other would seem to adopt different mechanisms for managing the epistemic mode of certainty/uncertainty, such as semantic-syntactic and rhetorical-pragmatic devices, as well as conversational moves. This paper is aimed at describing the management of certainty/uncertainty in a media context through the qualitative fine-grained analysis of the interactional exchanges between host and representatives of opposite views in the dual theoretical framework of classical rhetoric and conversational analysis (CA), which, although starting from different scientific paths, share the vision of the centrality of speech in human action. The CA analysis indicated that, whilst the interviewer maintained a neutral stance in conducting the interview, he showed a position of affiliation toward the doctor who recommended therapies not in line with the Italian medical guidelines. This was evident through the space provided to him to explain his expertise, as well as through the repetition and emphasis of the evaluative elements expressed. The rhetorical analysis, focusing on the participants' ethos, reveals that the interviewer deliberately intervened in the construction of the epistemic authority of the representatives of the two positions. The rhetorical analysis, focusing on the ethos of the three participants in the interaction, shed light on selected strategies and argumentative chains used to gain credibility and to prevail in the discussion. The linguistic-rhetorical mechanisms used do not pertain to the field of dialectical discussion and aim at a direct attack on the opponent's thesis. Nevertheless, the clash remained balanced without any epistemic authority overpowering the other: both the rhetorical and conversation analyses demonstrate a polarized dialogue, wherein the two sides are portrayed as representatives of two distinct and incompatible perspectives.

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Argumentum Ad Alia: argument structure of arguing about what others have said

Budzyńska

Reed

2023

Synthese

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Expertise, authority, and testimony refer to aspects of one of the most important elements of communication and cognition. Argumentation theory recognises various forms of what we call the argumentum ad alia pattern, in which speakers appeal to what others have said, including Position to Know scheme, Witness Testimony scheme, Expert Opinion scheme and the classical ad verecundiam. In this paper we show that ad alia involves more than merely an inferential step from what others (a person in position to know, a witness, an expert) have said, and that studying this type of argumentation requires going beyond the argument structure of propositional contents to account for different speech activities. We also demonstrate that using the words of others, attacking what has been said, and reasoning from how others reason constitute a rich repertoire of communication strategies which we need to model in order to be able to analyse them manually and to process them computationally.

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Ethos and Pragmatics

Cited by 9 publications

References 36 publications

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

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

Being an expert in pandemic times: negotiating epistemic authority in a media interaction

Argumentum Ad Alia: argument structure of arguing about what others have said

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