Commentary on: Justin Ross Morris' "Narrative, intersectionality and argumentative discourse"
Bibliographic record
Abstract
J.R. Morris’s paper is intended as a philosophical reflection on how to possibly address in a most appropriate and favourable way the issue of acknowledging and assessing the argumentative characteristics of narrative discourse. It does not get to the point of providing a personal theoretical account of narrative argument as such or how it actually works nor is it its intention. It tackles instead certain preliminary problems and explicit caveats regarding the interest for argumentation theorists to involve in such a kind of research. As I am now deeply interested in this issue, as my own paper in this conference (unambiguously entitled “Narration as argument”) indicates, I have found Morris’s work especially appealing. It has also helped me to take a look at certain problems of the theoretical framework in which we may be able to think about narrative argumentation which I had myself somewhat overlooked. I must finally admit that I openly sympathize with his “use-based” approach and his empirical and contextual concerns regarding the study of the practices of arguing. I am, consequently, a rather already persuaded reader and commentator, especially as regards his overall conclusion about the intrinsic interest, value and virtues (as opposed to weaknesses and risks) of narrative argument. However, let me point out certain issues which I think could be better clarified in his paper. Morris starts commenting on the pitfalls of excessively narrow and too theoretical or abstract definitions of discursive categories such as “narrative”, suggesting instead that we embrace a more empirical, “use-based” approach, following Wittgenstein’s maxim regarding the study of language: “Don’t ask for the meaning, ask for the use”. As I’m not very fond myself neither of analytic definitions nor of philosophical theories based on them, I again concede the general point. I would suggest, nonetheless, that, instead of referring this topic to the old and allembracing discussions about “nominalism” (as Morris does in note 1), he could make use of the ideas of a very interesting Uruguayan philosopher from the beginning of the 20 th century, Carlos Vaz Ferreira, who is now precisely being vindicated by some people working in argumentation theory (Vega Renon 2008); Spanish speaking people, I admit, as he is not yet translated into English. My comment is, therefore, just a suggestion for further reading not the mention of any obvious omission. In his Logica viva (2008 [1910]), Vaz Ferreira develops a theory about “paralogisms” (as he calls them) as risky habits of reasoning, some of which are not precisely typical of uneducated people but just the opposite. In this respect,
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".