Journal of Argumentation in Context - Volume 3, Issue 3, 2014

Many scholars have argued that practicing medicine requires sophisticated rhetorical prowess (Loftus 2012; Pender 2005; Segal 2005, 2007). Although rhetorical theory can explain how novices learn to argue like experts, much work in the subfield of medical learning only implicitly draws on rhetorical notions (e.g., Barton & Eggly 2009; Heritage & Maynard 2006). This study examines conversations between faculty physician preceptors and resident physician trainees in an internal medicine clinic to consider the role of persuasion in teaching novices to argue like experts. Using Aristotelian topoi, I reveal how the common lines of argument underlying medical teaching and learning help novice and expert physicians explain concepts, elicit interpretations, and initiate deliberation. As they synthesize and rationalize medical information, they use antecedent-and-consequence, possible-and-impossible, authority, and testimonial topoi. This study of professional enculturation elucidates a rarely examined area of medical communication, potentially enabling preceptors to teach their tacit reasoning more explicitly to residents.

We survey the disciplinary status and the research trends of argumentation studies. Our investigation combines the methods of a literature review and environmental scan. The latter consists in analysis of the linguistic features of journal titles, which we approach as a type of metacommunication. The results of our environmental scan suggest that the authors contributing to argumentation research envision it as a well-integrated field with a complex system of relations among the communities, agendas, methods, and venues involved in it. Yet we also found that the field is often seen as divided along the lines of binary oppositions between theory and its applications, as well as between theoretical and empirical research. We found that the field is increasingly turning to empirical, applied, and professional research, while the status of scholarly research is declining. Our analysis suggests that argumentation studies is developing a more sophisticated and tractable theory and methodology

In order to comply with Anti-Money Laundering (AML) laws, financial intermediaries are being engaged with unprecedented communicative activities, mainly oriented at detecting suspicious activities which must be reported to the Financial Intelligence Unit. The polysemous notion of ‘suspicion’ is pivotal to these communicative activities and needs to be clarified in order to establish to what extent argumentation is involved in their fulfillment. To this purpose, we apply the method of semantic analysis developed within Congruity Theory bringing to light the different semantic values of the verb ‘to suspect’ and its lexical derivates in a corpus of ordinary English; then we compare these meanings with the actual uses of this verb in the international and national AML laws. Amongst the numerous factors contributing to the polysemy of this word, we focalize on the difference emerged between an argumentative value of ’to suspect’ and another meaning in which suspicion is reduced to a mere hunch. This suggests that there exist different types of suspicion acts which are more or less argumentative. Interestingly, anti-money laundering international standards and some national implementations seem to admit suspicions at different argumentative degrees, entailing different levels of critical assessment expected from the financial intermediary. We also identify important implications for bank’s anti-money laundering activities deriving from the different semantic traits emerged in the analysis. We conclude the paper by eliciting from the outcome of the semantic analysis a number of questions that will guide the next steps of an ongoing research project in which Swiss banks’ AML practices are investigated from an argumentative perspective.