Houtlosser and van Rees (Eds.) - Considering pragmadialectics: A festschrift for Frans H. van Eemeren on the occasion of his 60th birthday
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This well-deserved Festschrift for Frans van Eemeren was presented to him, as a big surprise, at the ISSA Conference in Amsterdam in June 2006.Not much happens in argumentation scholarship that he does not see coming, certainly not in Amsterdam, but this did.Twenty-six contributions make it a varied and heterogeneous assemblage, in subject, approach, and merit.One group of papers has the commendable goal of making us wiser on topics related to pragma-dialectics, rather than engage in application, debate or critique.Erik Krabbe, whose From Axiom to Dialogue (with Else Barth, 1982) was an important inspiration for pragma-dialectics, instructively traces the notion of the "logical dialogue game" from Aristotle's Topics to the Erlangen school.This background helps understand a fascination that may have caused van Eemeren and Grootendorst to cast their seminal ideas in the form of an axiomatic system.Daniel O'Keefe commends pragma-dialectics for its contribution to an understanding of argument quality, grounded not in empirical effect but in reasoned theory.Such an understanding makes it possible to look for correlations between theoretical quality and persuasive effects.Looking at three features derivable from the pragma-dialectical rules, O'Keefe, using meta-statistical analysis, does find positive correlations.Hans V. Hansen identifies important similarities between pragma-dialectical theory and Stuart Mill's thinking on argumentation.They concern those aspects of the theory that many would probably agree are the most valuable theoretically as well as socially: freedom of discussion, critical testing as the essence of reasonableness, the utility of normative rules.The contribution from Eddo Rigotti et al. analyzes a large text sample of authentic texts drawn from the British National Corpus to investigate the semantics of the word reasonable, so crucial to modern argumentation theory; interesting submeanings emerge.Manfred Kienpointner stays in the descriptive mode in his analysis of a sample of the notorious "Nigerian spam letters."László Komlósi calls for more integration of linguistic pragmatics and argumentation theory, which would be good idea.His piece mentions almost every important concept in both fields, gives no examples of anything, specifies no relationship with pragma-dialectics and remains almost completely opaque.Several papers try to engage in actual application of pragma-dialectical theory, but much of this alleged application remains a token tipping of hats.Thomas Goodnight instructively exposes the complexities of "informed consent" in the doctor-patient relationship, seen as a deliberative process, but his attempt to relate
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".