Argumentation Through Languages and Cultures
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Argumentation Through Languages and Cultures Christian Plantin1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract The four contributions in this special issue on Argumentation Through Languages and Cultures deals with clear cases of such argumentative situations as they develop in different cultures and language groups. One of these papers comes from the Inuit oral culture; three papers from written cultures, Chinese, Muslim and Indian cultures. Among written cultures, the Indian and Muslim cultures have developed sophisticated theories of argument, while the Chinese culture, according to Graham (Disputers of the Tao—Philosophical argument in Ancient China, Open Court, Chicago, 1989, p. 169), combined “a sense of rigorous proof with the indifference to logical forms”. Keywords Argument · Languages · Culture · Argument in Muslim culture · Argument in ancient Chinese culture · Philosophical debates in India · Argument in oral cultures · Ammassalik oral culture Many years ago, the community of argumentation studies circulated a question from a student, asking if anybody knew of some alternative to Toulmin’s layout of argument. Somebody suggested, without giving more details, that the Chinese might have practiced and elaborated such a non-Toulminian concept of argument (I couldn’t retrieve the original correspondence). The question may suggest that the student was just fed up with the basics of their argumentation course. In a more challenging way, it can be considered as a significant interrogation about universals in argumentation theory, and universals can be boring to some audiences, as elementary logic teachers know very well. Anyway, Toulmin’s “layout of argument” is certainly not the arch-villain of the party; it does the job it is supposed to do. As Ehninger and Brockriede (1983) made clear, if Warrant and Backing are seen as the key components of an underlying topos, their combination can be taken as expressing the essence * Christian Plantin Christian.Plantin@univ‑lyon2.fr 1
Research Group ICAR Interactions, Corpora, Learning, Representations, CNRS - ENS de Lyon, Lyon, France
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of an argument scheme, the defining concept the Data-Claim argumentative relation. Moreover, it adequately represents a key domain of Western argumentative practices, default reasoning. It defines the conditions under which a claim can be taken as a working hypothesis to be submitted to the criticism of a challenging voice, obstinately looking for the refutability conditions of the argued claim. These are of course abstract considerations; the rise in abstraction is regularly paid for by a weakened capacity to account for the riches of lexical-semantic expression and inter-subjective relations at play in a specific argumentative encounter. The issue of the universal applicability of Western models can be approached as an empirical question. If argumentation is defined in relation with logic, one has to consider that, as an axiomatic mathematical discipline, logic is universal, meaning that its conclusions
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