This semester I will study argumentation theory under the tutelage of Charles Davis in the Missouri School of Journalism. My research will probably be the first steps toward a graduate thesis on argumentation and journalism.

This post is a small announcement that I will update this blog about my argument research as it progresses. (I’ll describe the research in a moment.)

I’m going to write these posts for two reasons.

1. Self-improvement. My writing is weak in part because I do not write very often. I hope that this “public” commitment to updates will pressure me into practicing writing regularly.

2. Discussion. If anyone else is interested in argumentation or its relationship to journalism, that’s great. I have much to learn and want to converse. If you want to comment about which parts of my writing are lousy, that’s OK, too.

The research

I am interested in argument in the sense of using reasons and evidence to reach conclusions about how the world is or should be. An example of these arguments is “the economy is bad because unemployment is at 10%.” Another is “We should decrease taxes on businesses because at current rates they are discouraged from hiring workers.”

I am dividing my research into a few broad topics.

One topic is analyzing and evaluating arguments. In this part of the research I will develop my ability to outline arguments and test the quality of their reasoning and evidence using critical thinking skills.

A big part of this topic is the study of fallacies, such as appeals to authority or ad hominem attacks. Through the work of writers such as Douglas Walton, I want to think about the structure of fallacies and when they might be more or less appropriate to use in an argument.

A second topic is understanding arguments in context. Some have argued — I think Stephen Toulmin is among them, but I haven’t read his books yet — that different standards for what makes a “good argument” apply in different contexts, such as in a business context or in an academic one. How strong is this position?

A third topic is asking, when we are arguing, what are we trying to do? In a most abstract sense, what is argument? This topic has been influenced by three papers I understand to be seminal by Brockriede, O’Keefe, and Hample. When we study argument, are we looking only at the words involved? Or must we also consider arguments “about” things (argument₂, O’Keefe called it)? To what extent do we consider the psychological parts of giving and receiving arguments as part of studying “argument” (Hample)?

Argument and journalism

As I said earlier, I hope to eventually bring what I learn into a larger argument about journalism. Specifically, I wonder what we can learn and prescribe about journalism under a lens of argumentation.

My rough working thesis is:

1. Journalists usually try to say something about the way the world is: the house burned down, the mayor lied, the economy tanked, etc. They offer descriptive arguments.

2. To decide whether to accept a descriptive argument, we can use critical thinking skills.

3. If we apply critical thinking skills to journalists’ descriptive arguments, we might find their arguments tend to be poor.

4. If journalists do not tend to present strong descriptive arguments (a conditional I hope to investigate empirically), we might question why, given our limited time in which to read, we read journalism. There is plenty of other, non-journalistic (non-newspaper or blog) work out there offering descriptive arguments that might present them more strongly.

What’s next

My next post will summarize my first readings in argument from over the last few weeks. It’ll probably cover the work of Walton, Brockriede, O’Keefe, and others. I will, I hope, finish it in the next few days.