PERIODIC TABLE OF ARGUMENTS

THE ATOMIC BUILDING BLOCKS OF PERSUASIVE DISCOURSE

Argument from evaluation (Ev)

Schermafdruk 2018-03-17 20.51.14

The author of this review states that Paragliding is a great experience and that You have to do it! To identify the type of argument, we follow the instructions in the Argument Type Identification Procedure (ATIP).

The procedure starts with an analysis of the statements functioning as the conclusion and the premise, followed by a number of transformations of the original text so as to represent the argument in the standard order [conclusion, because premise]. This yields the following result:

Paragliding has to be done by you, because paragliding is a great experience.

The next step of the procedure is to determine the ‘argument form’, which is defined as the specific configuration of the subjects and predicates. The present example fits the form “a is X, because a is Y“, which means it should be labelled as a first-order predicate argument (abbreviated as ‘1 pre’).

Paragliding (a) has to be done by you (X), because paragliding (a) is a great experience.

The analyst subsequently determines the ‘argument substance’, which is defined as the specific combination of the types of statements. In this case, the conclusion is a statement of policy (P), and the premise is a statement of value (V). The argument thus combines a statement of policy with a statement of value (abbreviated as ‘PV’).

Now that the analyst has determined the basic characteristics of the argument, they can be summarized by providing its systematic name, which combines the relevant labels for the argument form and the argument substance. In this case, we are dealing with a first-order predicate argument that combines a statement of policy with a statement of value. Its systematic name, in abbreviated form, is thus ‘1 pre PV’. In the visualization of the Periodic Table of Arguments, such arguments are situated in the PV column of the Alpha Quadrant.

The systematic name provides the analyst with important information about the so-called ‘lever’ of the argument, which is a formulation of its underlying mechanism (see Wagemans 2019). In this case, the systematic name tells us that the argument is based on the relationship between the predicates X and Y. Since a fitting keyword for describing this relationship is ‘evaluation’, the lever can be formulated as is a great experience (Y) is a motivating EVALUATION for has to be done by you (X).

The keyword connects the systematic framework of the Periodic Table of Arguments to the names of argument types as they can be found in the traditional dialectical and rhetorical categorizations of arguments. To reflect this tradition, every systematic argument type that is distinguished in the table hosts an arbitrary number of so-called ‘isotopes’, which are named after the keyword that describes the underlying mechanism of the argument. In this case, the isotope name is ‘argument from evaluation’ (represented in the table by the symbol ‘Ev’).

Schermafbeelding 2020-10-26 om 21.24.13

SOURCE

Review on TripAdvisor by Karanuppal24 on December 13, 2017.

%d bloggers like this: