CFP: Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del linguaggio (RIFL): Agreement and disagreement: logical and rhetorical perspectives

RIFL – Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del linguaggio

Issue 7, December 2012: Agreement and disagreement: logical and rhetorical perspectives

Edited by: Francesca Piazza and Mauro Serra

The philosophy of the XX century was characterized by many so-called"turns". One of these happened in 1958. In this year C.Perelman’s and L.Olbrechts-Tyteca’s Traité de l’argumentation and S.Toulmin’s The Uses of Argumentationwere published: both books, although from different perspectives, revaluate thelogic of argumentation in a way that, in opposition to demonstrative Cartesian logic, attaches importance to efficacy, likelihoodand audience. Therefore, they develop  a doxastic logic that, using Aristotelian terminology, is concerned with what may be true or false, and can be otherwise. This is, indeed, a very large field, including most of practices that make sense of the human life in a linguistic community.

Consequentially, we have a research field, Argumentation Theory, that, in the following fifty years, has widened. Today it includes, in an interdisciplinary perspective, logic, philosophy, linguistics, communication theory, anthropology, cognitive sciences, and law. Many different theoretical approaches have accepted the challenge of Perelman and Toulmin. However, despite their recognition of debate and dialogue as "places" where argumentation is rooted, it seems that the conflicting nature of these practices has been largely neglected.

The pragma-dialectical approach, one of the ruling perspective today, is paradigmatic. Indeed, the studies that draw inspiration from this research program have an explicitly normative aim. From this perspective, disagreement is only the starting point of argumentative discourse, whose only aim should bethe agreement between speakers. In this way, however, the conflicting nature of the argumentative practice is removed (with all the consequences of a removal). On the contrary, if we fully assume this dimension of conflict we can extend the boundaries of the argumentative "scenario". Indeed, we can also include, as a limit point, situations that are usually excluded, such as quarrels or exchanges of insults.

This agonistic component, with all of its destructive potential, was largely acknowledged by ancient Greek thinking. For the Greeks, indeed, logos in opposition to violence (bia) was the distinctive feature of the human being that marks men as different from animals and, with an ethnocentric vein, also Greeks from barbarians; on the other side, however, they also acknowledged that conflict existed inside the logos. Therefore logos was not only a possible alternative to biabut also a place where violence can be aroused and intensified.

So, just to give a couple of examples, in Homer the fight of words between orators that takes place in the meson was conceptually analogous to the fight between warriors, while Gorgias, by saying that logos is a mighty lord, underscores its dark side. Indeed paradoxically, he claims that being under the influence of speech or rather being persuaded is the same as being seized by violence.

It is exactly this situation that, according to Aristotle, accounts for the technical transformation of a natural skill. Indeed, after stressing that rhetoric and dialectic are the only arts that prove opposite, Aristotle writes: «it would be strange if an inability to defend oneself by means of the body is shameful, while there is no shame in an inabilty to use speech; the latter is more characteristic of humans than is use of body» (Rhet, 1355a42-b2).

The proposal of this issue of Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio starts from the idea that the perspective of ancient rhetoric and dialectic is still fruitful. This means that we must consider argumentative practice as the place where agreement and disagreement coexist in an unstable and conflicting relationship. This is the only way to analyse one of the most specific features of the human being: the link between language and society.

In particular, this issue will focus on the following topics:

• The relationship between agreement/disagreement in the argumentative scenario
• Argumentation from a natural skill to a practical experience
• Argumentative practices from cross-cultural points of view
• Different forms of linguistic conflict
• The role of speakers and personal factors in argumentative practices
• Validity, truth and persuasiveness  in argumentative practices
• The definition and role of fallacies in argumentative practices

Manuscripts should have a theoretical focus. Papers from the following areas are accepted: philosophy of language, linguistics, rhetoric, semiotics, history of philosophy, philosophy of law, moral philosophy, anthropology, sociology, psychology and neuroscience.

Submissions may be in Italian, English, French, German, Spanish and Russian. All submissions must be prepared for blind review. The author's name, the institutional affiliation and the title’s paper must be placed in a separate file.  Papers must be sent as Microsoft Word file (.doc or .rtf) to: [email protected]

Instructions for authors:

Max length:
40000 characters (including spaces) for articles (including the references) and reviews;
20000 characters (including spaces) for interviews;
10000 characters (including spaces) for specific paper review.

Submission deadline: September 09, 2012
Notification of acceptance: October 10, 2012
Issue publication: December 2012

For further informations: [email protected]