Underlying Assumptions in Argumentation: Values, Ontology and Identity

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Underlying Assumptions in ArgumentationValues,
Ontology and Identity

• PSC 202 Fall 2006
• Northrup
• September 19 Plenary

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Announcements

• Op-ed topic due Thursday in discussion section
  topic and 1 to 2 sentence description of your
  position
• On Thursday this week, Thorson and Northrup
  sections will meet in Eggers 060

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Unit II Formal Reasoning
All As are Bs C is an A Therefore C is a B

• All Democrats are wimps
• Al Gore is a Democrat
• Therefore Al Gore is a wimp

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More Recent Example

• All candidates who change their minds
  (flip-floppers) are indecisive
• Indecisive people make poor leaders
• John Kerry is a flip-flopper
• Therefore John Kerry would make a poor leader

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Another Example

• All junkies started out using marijuana
• Marijuana use leads to heroin addiction
• Many college students smoke marijuana
• We must institute drug prevention programs in
  college or we will have a whole generation of
  junkies

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Unit II

• Formal argumentation
• Creating robust, logical arguments
• Will look at
• Types of claims
• Types of proofs
• Fallacies in argument
• Today how underlying assumptions and values
  (ontology and identity) can impact argumentation

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Todays Theme

• Values, beliefs, ontology, identity
• Use them or they can use you

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The Rhetorical Situation

• Text, reader/audience, author, constraints,
  exigence
• Constraints traditions beliefs, attitudes,
  prejudices, interests and habits that influence
  the audiences perceptions. (Wood)
• And that influence the person making an argument

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Constraints as Underlying Assumptions and
Motivations

• Values
• Beliefs
• Ontology
• Identity

• Strong affective component
• Often non-negotiable
• Often hidden
• Often a powerful force in argument and political
  conflict

Stem cell research
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Why Important

• Often has hidden impact on debate and conflict
• If hidden, may not see non-negotiable nature of
  conflict
• Or may not see the real conflict
• May confound rationality of the discourse,
  resulting in logical fallacies

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Values (Rybacki)

• Intangibles
• The vision people have of the good life
• An enduring belief that a specific mode of
  conduct or end-state of existence is personally
  or socially preferable
• Ideas about right and wrong, good and bad, true
  and false, just and unjust, virtuous and corrupt

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Values Hierarchies

• Individuals values can be arranged in a
  hierarchy
• Parties to a conflict may have similar values but
  different hierarchies
• If not made explicit, conflict often becomes
  hostile and unresolved

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Some Values

• Individual rights are important
• Family is important
• An individuals responsibility to his community
  is important

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Ontology - Deeper than Values

• Consider statement of value from last slide
  Family is important
• What meanings, ideas, beliefs, entities are
  structured around the notion of family?
• Another example life is precious
• (think about relationship of that statement to
  issues of abortion, stem cell research, or
  capital punishment)

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Environment v. Development Ontology Research

• Study done of conflict over development at Lake
  Tahoe
• An intractable conflict
• Developers vs. environmentalists

Susan Hunter, Conflict in the Tahoe Basin, in
Intractable Conflicts and Their Transformation,
1989.
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Defining Ontology

• Inner sense of what exists often hard to put
  into words
• Beliefs and values are tied to ontology
• Ontology includes
• What exists (and doesnt exist)
• What entities exist (God, evil people, nature)
• The nature of those entities (a fetus)
• What is right and good (or not)
• Some notion of risk

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Ontologies Impact Understandings of an Argument
Ontologies
Perceived context of problem and perceived risk
Beliefs
Ethics
Problem definition
Evaluation of Risk
Alternatives
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Parties to Tahoe Conflict

• DEVELOPERS
• Humans are separate from nature
• Humans have intrinsic value
• Nonhuman entities have only instrumental value
• Humans do require other entities as resources and
  should value them accordingly

• DEEP ECOLOGISTS
• Oneness of nature
• All nature has intrinsic value
• What is nonnatural has only instrumental value
• All of nature is interconnected

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Risk Aversion and Ethics

• DEVELOPERS
• Risk A threat to anything necessary for human
  survival is a threat to humans
• Ethics All entities with intrinsic value deserve
  moral consideration

• DEEP ECOLOGISTS
• Risk Threat to any natural entity is a threat to
  humans
• Ethics All entities with intrinsic value deserve
  moral consideration

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Ontology and Science

• Logical arguments and providing evidence
• Can we count on science?
• Eye puff study

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Gender Ontology Should Women Soldiers Be Allowed
in Combat

• Navy Lt. arguing against
• consider the young man under fire and neck deep
  in the mud of a jungle foxhole, sustained in that
  purgatory by the vision of home a warm,
  feminine place that represents all the good
  things that his battlefield is not.

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• Somewhere in that soldiers view .. is the notion
  that he is here so that all the higher ideals of
  home embodied in mother, sister, and girlfriend
  do not have to be here.

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• To ship that ideal out, dress her in a flack
  jacket, mash a helmet over her curls, and plop
  her in the next foxhole is to mortally disorient
  a man who is already near the end of his
  psychological tether.

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The American Dream and Welfare

• Elements of the American dream?
• What entities exist?
• Implications for whether welfare is a correct
  policy

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Identity and Argumentation

• While ontology refers to what entities exist and
  what their nature is
• Identity refers to the sense of self what
  constitutes who I am
• Can be individual can also be group
• Group identity can take precedence depending on
  its salience in a situation

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Identity and Constraint

• Can determine what is possible, what is
  impossible
• Can determine what one party can imagine about
  the experience of another (if anything)
• Can determine whether the other is considered
  worthy of argumentative engagement

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Identity Inculcation

• Northern Ireland
• Coles
• Identity formed in (often violent) contrast to
  another group

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Ten-year Old Catholic Boy

• they call us dirty Fenians, and they say
  were pigs, and we should go south. We wave our
  Irish flag at them!
• We have to use our heads theyre waiting for us
  to make mistakes. Theyd like an excise to be rid
  of us. Theyd as soon kill us.
• They want no part of us, nor we of them thats
  how it is, and its been like that since so long
  that you might as well say forever.

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11 Year Old Protestant Boy

• They dont have the mind, my dad says they drink
  and they have ten kids to a family and even more.
  Then they shout poor and unfair.
• If we left it to them, thered be us, doing all
  the work, trying to keep our streets clean, and
  inside, our houses clean and then thered be
  all of them, more and more and more of them. Wed
  have to leave, or settle for the Mystery Shop
  running things.

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• Theyre not like us, not in the church, and not
  in the way they live, and they will breed and
  breed, and one day, Ulster will have a bigger
  problem than now.
• We think the Fenians should go south. They should
  be with their own, and we should be with our own.

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Gender Identity Kohlbergs Stages of Moral
Development

• The Heinz Dilemma
• Was Heinz right in stealing the drug?

?
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Stages

• Level 1 (Pre-Conventional)
• 1. Obedience and punishment orientation
• 2. Self-interest orientation
• Level 2 (Conventional)
• 3. Interpersonal accord and conformity
• (a.k.a. The good boy/good girl attitude)
• 4. Authority and social-order maintaining
  orientation
• (a.k.a. Law and order morality)
• Level 3 (Post-Conventional)
• 5. Social contract orientation
• 6. Universal ethical principles

Source Wikipedia
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Kohlberg and Gender Diffs

• Found that boys regularly scored higher on the
  scale than girls
• Boys level 6 universal principles
• Girls level 4 social order maintaining, level
  5 social contract orientation

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Carol Gilligan Another View

• In a Different Voice
• Criticized Kohlberg all boy subjects
• Scoring method favored universal principles
  more common to boys
• Girls used principle based on preserving
  relationships
• Ethic of care

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Gender Identity and Politics

• From moral development difference perspective,
  how might men and women look differently at
• War
• Welfare
• Taxation
• 9/11

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Conclusion

• Values, ontology, identity
• Use them or they can use you

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• We have a big problem here in Ulster the
  Catholics. Theyre all Fenians they want to drag
  us down.
• If we didnt keep them in their streets, and
  watch them, theyd try to take over the city, and
  those six counties would be owned by Dublin and
  the Pope of Rome. Wed be living like pig
  farmers.