| OCR Text |
Show 338 on labor rights, health care securities, and living wages for public educators? Argumentation and reason have failed time and time again because if we ever lived in a world where rationality compels social change, we surely no longer live in this imaginary world today. So where do we go from here? Should we just quit and let argumentation wither and rot in the same dark corner as its old ally, reason? Argumentation can move forward, but to do so, it must throw away all of the parts that fail to make it work. This includes 1) argumentation as an oral disagreement, 2) argumentation as a dialectical process of reasoning, and 3) argumentation as a solely human endeavor. All we are left with is the concept of force, and it is through force that argumentation critics can begin to build a body without its cancerous organs. Force is unique because it is irreducible, traceable, and mobile. It also accounts for affect. Force has indeed been an important component of argumentation research, but it requires new articulations to realize our objectives. To accomplish this, let us briefly engage with one of the most prominent argumentation scholars, Stephen Toulmin, and see if there is room for something new. In his much-acclaimed book, The Uses of Argument, Toulmin paid considerable attention to the uniqueness of force to the study of argumentation. To Toulmin, the force of an argument determines an argument's strength, which is contrasted with criteria that determine how an argument is to be evaluated with respect to another order. An argument's force is principally determined by its modal term, which is also known as the qualifier. Modal terms state the arguer's degree of confidence in the argumentative conclusion, and they hedge arguments in degrees of force. So, for instance, when I say "it is very likely that the Detroit Tigers will win the American League Pennant in 2015," the |
