Justice and Argument: Toward Development of a Dialogical Argumentation Theory

Everywhere, these days, one hears the call for dialogue. In the public domain, for instance, the Ford Foundation recently called for "difficult dialogue" initiatives from colleges and universities, and organizations like the Public Conversation Project and Public Dialogue Consortium work with civic organizations and groups to encourage dialogue among Americans on the polarizing issues of the day (see, for instance, Becker, et al., 1995; Chasin and Herzig, 1993; Pearce and Littlejohn, 1997; as well as www.publicconversations.org\ and www.publicdialogue.org\). In the academy, the foundational work of Martin Buber, Mikhail Bakhtin, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Jurgen Habermas has had an impact on scholarship in many fields, including literature, philosophy, psychology, theology, communication studies, and social criticism. There is, suggest Anderson, Baxter, and Cissna (2004, p. 2), a conceptual turn toward dialogue. For some this interest in dialogue may appear to be a fad. However, there is a tradition in argumentation and rhetorical studies which has repeatedly pointed to the importance of a dichotomy between monological, or functional/instrumental communication, and dialogical communication. In his essay, "The Limits of Rhetoric" (1965a), philosopher Maurice Natanson argued that even though Aristotle related rhetoric to dialectic and ethics, Aristotle's focus on the modes of persuasion led to "a misleading emphasis on rhetorical technique and to a lack of emphasis on the theoretical aspects of rhetoric" (p. 95). For Natanson, the ultimate consequence of this emphasis on technique has been a perception that rhetoric is functional or instrumental in character (see Czubaroff, 2000, on the rhetoric, dialectic, dialogic nexus). His own studies of argumentation led Natanson (1965b) to recognize an interpersonal and existential dimension in argument. Thus, he noted that the arguer is always situated in the presence of another (p. 10), and that genuine argument entails risk to the particularity of the self (pp. 15-16). However, Clark (1976) comments that Natanson remained interested in argumentation as a cognitive and logical enterprise, and so failed to explore the relational orientations identified by Martin Buber (1970) as I-It and I-You. In differing ways, Ehninger's (1970) and Brockriede's (1972) theoretical work acknowledged a relational tradition in communication, and both, citing Buber's classic distinction between I-It and I-You relations, made a fundamental distinction between unilateral/instrumental and bilateral/personal argumentation. More recently David Gilbert (2003), noting that Brockriede's essay is part of a larger conversation within our field about Plato's Phaedrus, suggests that the relational tradition in argumentation studies has an ethical impetus. That is, he argues that recognition of the relational character of arguing enables researchers to distinguish manipulative communication from communication that entails genuine self-risk and a respect for others (p. 15). (1) Finally, writing from outside the argumentation and rhetorical perspectives, communication scholar Carl Botan (1997) confirms the importance of the relational dimension to communication when he comments, "the ethicality of strategic communication can be analyzed not so much in terms of its content as its process-the relationship it assumes or enforces between the involved parties-and the attitudes and values this reflects" (p. 190). Botan not only confirms the connection between process, relationship, and ethics assumed by Ehninger and Brockriede, he also recognizes that the fundamental choice of orientation is between a monological and dialogical attitude (see pp. 190-192). The recent theoretical work of Josina M. Makau and Debian L. Marty (2001) in Cooperative Argumentation, and James Crosswhite (1996) in The Rhetoric of Reason contributes to this relational tradition in argumentation studies by elaborating elements of a dialogical argumentation model to be distinguished from competitive and adversarial models. …