Warranting Assent

Warranting Assent
Author: Edward Schiappa
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 362
Release: 1995-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780791423639

This book is a book about how individuals decide that arguments (or excuses) are valid or invalid, sound or unsound, strong or weak, ethical or unethical, with many examples and applications.

Argumentation Theory and the Rhetoric of Assent

Argumentation Theory and the Rhetoric of Assent
Author: David Williams
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2006-02-05
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0817353356

The themes of the essays in Argumentation Theory and the Rhetoric of Assent all coalesce around the general question: "When, if ever, is assent justified?" The question immediate triggers complex and multifaceted considerations of argument and, ultimately, power. In parsing out the nature of assent, the essays take divers approaches: aesthetic and symbolist, rationalistic and formalistic, field theory, various conceptualizations of a public sphere, etc. Together, they offer an insightful exploration of an exciting new terrain argumentation studies.

Religion and Public Reasons

Religion and Public Reasons
Author: John Finnis
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 440
Release: 2011-04-07
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0191616214

The essays in Religion and Public Reasons seek to argue for, and illustrate, a central element of John Finnis's theory of natural law: that the main tenets of personal and political morality, and of a good legal order, are taught both by reason (arguments accessible to everyone) and by authentic divine revelation (teachings accessible to all who have a reasonable faith in its witnesses). The author's main books each include arguments for rejecting atheism and agnosticism; several papers here take up these arguments and indicate ways in which they open onto the reasonable grounds for accepting that more about God's nature, and about the meaning of Creation (including ongoing natural evolution), is disclosed by the revelation carried far forward among the Jewish people, and given definitive form by the Jews and Greeks who assembled in the universal Church, as witnesses of Christ, to carry forward that revelation into our present. Several papers argue that "public reason" properly includes such a religion, and that Humeian, Nietzschean, Deweyian, Rawlsian or other atheistical or deistic understandings of a reasonable secularism are badly mistaken. Many substantial papers record the author's position in controversies within Catholicism since the 1960s: on social justice, contraception and abortion; nuclear deterrence; Newman on conscience before pope; Maritain's hopes for a new Christendom and von Balthasar's for a hell empty of human persons; and on "proportionalism" and Lonerganian "historical consciousness" as moral-theological methods. Previously unpublished papers include several University and college sermons, and a substantial introduction.

Conducting Socially Responsible Research

Conducting Socially Responsible Research
Author: Omar Swartz
Publisher: SAGE
Total Pages: 219
Release: 1997
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0761904999

This book redefines our understanding of theory, criticism and pedagogy with the vocabulary of neo-pragmatism. When human knowledge becomes historicized and socialized, the distinctions between our public, academic and instructional personae fade. In place of such traditional personae, a new identity is encouraged for scholars in the field of communication. The book successfully argues that rhetorical scholars can assume a cultural importance in life.

Sight, Touch, and Imagination in Byzantium

Sight, Touch, and Imagination in Byzantium
Author: Roland Betancourt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 420
Release: 2018-04-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108667708

Considering the interrelations between sight, touch, and imagination, this book surveys classical, late antique, and medieval theories of vision to elaborate on how various spheres of the Byzantine world categorized and comprehended sensation and perception. Revisiting scholarly assumptions about the tactility of sight in the Byzantine world, it demonstrates how the haptic language associated with vision referred to the cognitive actions of the viewer as they grasped sensory data in the mind in order to comprehend and produce working imaginations of objects for thought and memory. At stake is how the affordances and limitations of the senses came to delineate and cultivate the manner in which art and rhetoric was understood as mediating the realities they wished to convey. This would similarly come to contour how Byzantine religious culture could also go about accessing the sacred, the image serving as a site of desire for the mediated representation of the Divine.

Rhetoric, Cultural Studies, and Literacy

Rhetoric, Cultural Studies, and Literacy
Author: J. Frederick Reynolds
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2013-11-05
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1136689648

This volume presents a representative cross-section of the more than 200 papers presented at the 1994 conference of the Rhetoric Society of America. The contributors reflect multi- and inter-disciplinary perspectives -- English, speech communication, philosophy, rhetoric, composition studies, comparative literature, and film and media studies. Exploring the historical relationships and changing relationships between rhetoric, cultural studies, and literacy in the United States, this text seeks answers to such questions as what constitutes "literacy" in a post-modern, high-tech, multi-cultural society?

Dialog Theory for Critical Argumentation

Dialog Theory for Critical Argumentation
Author: Douglas N. Walton
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2007-09-19
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027292000

Because of the need to devise systems for electronic communication on the internet, multi-agent computing is moving to a model of communication as a structured conversation between rational agents. For example, in multi-agent systems, an electronic agent searches around the internet, and collects certain kinds of information by asking questions to other agents. Such agents also reason with each other when they engage in negotiation and persuasion. It is shown in this book that critical argumentation is best represented in this framework by the model of reasoned argument called a dialog, in which two or more parties engage in a polite and orderly exchange with each other according to rules governed by conversation policies. In such dialog argumentation, the two parties reason together by taking turns asking questions, offering replies, and offering reasons to support a claim. They try to settle their disagreements by an orderly conversational exchange that is partly adversarial and partly collaborative.

Defining Reality

Defining Reality
Author: Edward Schiappa
Publisher: SIU Press
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2003
Genre: Definition (Philosophy)
ISBN: 9780809388929

Vernacular Voices

Vernacular Voices
Author: Gerard A. Hauser
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
Total Pages: 366
Release: 2022-01-18
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1643362860

An award-winning study of how formal and informal public discourse shapes opinions A foundational text of twenty-first-century rhetorical studies, Vernacular Voices addresses the role of citizen voices in steering a democracy through an examination of the rhetoric of publics. Gerard A. Hauser maintains that the interaction between everyday and official discourse discloses how active members of a complex society discover and clarify their shared interests and engage in exchanges that shape their opinions on issues of common interest. In the two decades since Vernacular Voices was first published, much has changed: in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, US presidents have increasingly taken unilateral power to act; the internet and new media have blossomed; and globalization has raised challenges to the autonomy of nation states. In a new preface, Hauser shows how, in an era of shared, global crises, we understand publics, how public spheres form and function, and the possibilities for vernacular expressions of public opinion lie at the core of lived democracy. A foreword is provided by Phaedra C. Pezzullo, associate professor of communication at the University of Colorado Boulder.

The Rhetorical Rise and Demise of “Democracy” in Russian Political Discourse, Vol I

The Rhetorical Rise and Demise of “Democracy” in Russian Political Discourse, Vol I
Author: David Cratis Williams
Publisher: Academic Studies PRess
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2021-12-14
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1644697343

The essays in this book examine the arguments and rhetoric used by the United States and the USSR following two catastrophes that impacted both countries, as blame is cast and consequences are debated. In this environment, it was perhaps inevitable that conspiracy theories would arise, especially about the downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 over the Sea of Japan. Those theories are examined, resulting in at least one method for addressing conspiracy arguments. In the case of Chernobyl, the disaster ruptured the “social compact” between the Soviet government and the people; efforts to overcome the resulting disillusionment quickly became the focus of state efforts.