Beth Innocenti
1. The problem:[1]
How can speakers construct effective arguments?
Social actors make arguments for a range of purposes, such as to reflect on their own reasoning (Hoffmann 2016), to induce audiences to perform cognitive activities that may be precursors to belief or action such as wondering, considering, and looking for evidence (Pinto 1991), to accept accountability for a position (Andone 2015), to display identity (Hample and Irions 2015), and more. In this chapter I focus on making arguments for a proposal in order to influence audiences to identify the merits of the proposal.
By “making arguments” I mean the strategy of communicating linguistically explicable premise-conclusion units (O’Keefe 1982), distinguishable from other strategies such as using vivid descriptions, marching in protest, or drawing a border around some text that includes arguments (Jacobs 2000). When constructing effective arguments, social actors need to consider the full range of rhetorical strategies, in addition to making arguments, that they can use to get audiences to reason well (Jacobs 2006). Rhetorical traditions show that social actors have been inventing ways of managing disagreement in reasonable manners for centuries (Jackson 2015).
Proposing is a widespread illocutionary act—an act performed just by saying something (Austin 1962). Social actors propose in a range of contexts: proposing a policy at a school board meeting, proposing a topic for a research paper, proposing to a committee that a project receive funding, proposing a destination for a family vacation, and more. To address the range of contexts in which social actors make proposals and the various design options that contexts present, such as school board meeting procedures or the parameters of a research paper assignment, I limit the discussion to communication design strategies, or how social actors design contexts just by saying something (Goodwin 2007; Jackson and Aakhus 2014). What strategies can social actors use to construct effective arguments for a proposal, where “effective” arguments are arguments that audiences are influenced to scrutinize?
Social scientific researchers have identified factors that may influence the likelihood that audiences will scrutinize arguments. For example, on one hand, if personal involvement in an issue is low, then even if a social actor designs a proposal that includes many strong arguments to show why the matter is relevant to the audience, audience members may simply assume that the high number of arguments means the proposal was well-researched, and warrant their attitude about the proposal by that assumption rather than think carefully about the merits of the arguments (Petty and Cacioppo 1984). On the other hand, undistracted audiences who are knowledgeable, have a high need for cognition and high personal involvement with an issue may scrutinize arguments by assessing the relevance and sufficiency of evidence, considering counter-proposal