Journal of Argumentation in Context - Volume 2, Issue 3, 2013

Understanding argumentation in marriage as a design enterprise focuses researchers’ efforts in understanding how such arguments can go wrong and helps to identify designs that might help reduce unproductive conflict. Given the importance many marriage experts place on successful conflict management, designing procedures that help couples resolve their differences can potentially reduce the negative personal and societal results of failed marriages. In this paper I analyze the Fair Fight for Change (FFFC) conflict management procedure as a strategic maneuvering activity type. The purpose of this analysis is to examine the adequacy of the procedure itself in helping couples produce rational decisions about marital disagreements balanced by strategic maneuvers aimed to maintain the identity and relationship needs of the participants. Specifically, I recommend a redesign of the FFFC that incorporates a simplified version of the critical discussion rules to help guide couples as they attempt to resolve their differences.

This project consists of the multidisciplinary analysis of the persuasive strategies used in a regional TV commercial to promote GADIS, a Galician (Spain) supermarket chain. The video, which provoked an overwhelmingly positive reaction within Galician society, strategically appeals nationalistic feelings in order to achieve specific commercial objectives. In this commercial GADIS presents itself as a company that defends local attributes (Galician, Galicians, and ‘Galicianness’) against foreign ones. The speaker, by playing off positive stereotypical features of Galicia and inverting negative ones, builds and conveys a positive image of Galicia which is intended to make Galicians proud of their Galicianness. In order to make the advertisements more acceptable, GADIS praises the Galicians through the use of humor and irony, which serves to mitigate the nationalism presented.

In this paper it is examined how doctors may strategically elicit concessions from their patients in order to create a favorable point of departure for the treatment decision-making discussion. Using the dialectical profile for establishing starting points in an argumentative discussion (van Eemeren, Houtlosser, and Snoeck Henkemans 2007) as an analytic tool, an overview is provided of the different — analytically relevant — dialectical moves that doctors may make at the opening stage of the discussion and the possible subsequent dialectical pathways. Based on examples taken from actual consultation practice, each of these pathways is illustrated. Moreover, some of the strategic maneuvers doctors may deploy to start the critical resolution process in the most favorable way are identified, linking these maneuvers to the aims that are inherently embedded in the broader institutional context in which the discussion takes place.