Journal of Argumentation in Context - Volume 4, Issue 2, 2015

This paper aims to examine how parents use the argument from authority and its effectiveness to persuade their children to accept rules and prescriptions during mealtimes. Using the model of a critical discussion integrated with the Argumentum Model of Topics as analytical approach, a corpus of 31 arguments from authority advanced by parents were analyzed. The results of this study show that parents always refer to an adult as source of authority. This is mostly themselves (self-oriented argument), and, less frequently, a third party (other-oriented argument) such as a grandparent or a child’s teacher. In light of these results, it is reasonable to assume that for the parents the reference to themselves is a more effective argument than the reference to a third party. However, in the corpus the children are more prone to accept their parents’ argumentation when the authority is another adult and not one of their parents.

In this article we present an exploratory investigation of pictorial and multimodal metaphors appearing in print product advertisements; the aim is to ascertain their relevance for the arguments that the ads put forth. Departing from the working hypotheses that advertising is an argumentative activity type employing pictorial and multimodal metaphors, and that these are often examples of visual argumentation, we analyze a small corpus of print product ads by employing the theoretical frameworks offered by Blending Theory and the Argumentum Model of Topics. This allows us to reconstruct the enthymematic structure of advertising arguments highlighting the correspondence between rhetorical tropes and argumentative loci.

In these student dialogues, deliberative aspects of argumentation in SSI inquiry are documented as different from strictly scientific argumentation. I suggest that deliberative argumentation is a complex alternation between reasoning patterns that relate to different activity layers. This understanding of deliberative argumentation emerged when analyzing students’ dialogues, developing the categories theme (theoria), inquiry (praxis) and inscribing (poeisis). Analyses are presented to account for this emerging understanding. The analyses utilize social functional linguistics (SFL), pragmatic conversation analysis, and rhetorical approaches to argumentation. What characterizes the students’ oral deliberation is an alternation between certain foci. Roberts’s (2011) use the terms theoria, praxis, and techne to characterize similar reasoning patterns in his Vision 1 and 2 of scientific literacy. I suggest that in civic deliberation all patterns of reasoning are necessary to handle SSI, whereas in strictly scientific argumentation, theoria is dominant. Such distinctions should also be considered when analyzing and developing instructional strategies.