How to deal with attitude strength in debating situations. A survey on forewarning, argument strength, repetition, and source credibility as mediators of uncertainty
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Manuele De Conti
Abstract
When exploring debate practices, much of the argumentation and debate literature suggests effective strategies for persuasion. However, debate appears to be a type of dialogue where participation promotes one-sidedness and persuasion normally fails to occur. This indicates that debating is useless unless it addresses uncertain people, as the literature often claims. Relegating debate to deal with only uncertain people implies that debate is ineffective when it is addressed to highly committed participants, denying its historical role as a method to combat absolute certainty. Therefore, in order to restore the role of debate, this paper presents a review of relevant surveys on attitude strength moderation performed by collecting information on how to lead people with strong attitudes toward a doubtful stance.
Abstract
When exploring debate practices, much of the argumentation and debate literature suggests effective strategies for persuasion. However, debate appears to be a type of dialogue where participation promotes one-sidedness and persuasion normally fails to occur. This indicates that debating is useless unless it addresses uncertain people, as the literature often claims. Relegating debate to deal with only uncertain people implies that debate is ineffective when it is addressed to highly committed participants, denying its historical role as a method to combat absolute certainty. Therefore, in order to restore the role of debate, this paper presents a review of relevant surveys on attitude strength moderation performed by collecting information on how to lead people with strong attitudes toward a doubtful stance.
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents vii
- Preface ix
- Introduction 1
-
Certainty
- Certainty 29
- Modes of modality in an Un-Cartesian framework 47
-
(Un)Certainty as attitudinality
- Counter-argumentation and modality 65
- Explanation as a certainty marker in persuasive dialogue 83
- How to deal with attitude strength in debating situations. A survey on forewarning, argument strength, repetition, and source credibility as mediators of uncertainty 97
- The role of subjective certainty in the epistemology of testimony 121
- Uncertainty in polar questions and certainty in answers? 135
- Lying as a scalar phenomenon 153
- Persuasion pragmatic strategies in L1/L2 Italian argument-ative speech 175
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Dialogical exchange and speech acts
- What do I know as yet? 185
- On polar questions, negation, and the syntactic encoding of epistemicity 199
- Epistemic uncertainty and the syntax of speech acts 217
- Discursive functions of evidentials and epistemic modals 239
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Onomasiology
- Vagueness, unspecificity, and approximation. Cognitive and lexical aspects in English, Swedish, and Italian 265
- Latin commitment-markers 285
- Italian come se “as if” 297
-
Applications in exegesis and religious discourse
- The communication of certainty/uncertainty within a Gospel passage (John 9:1-41) 327
- Rhetorics of (un)certainty in religious discourse 343
- Subject index 363
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents vii
- Preface ix
- Introduction 1
-
Certainty
- Certainty 29
- Modes of modality in an Un-Cartesian framework 47
-
(Un)Certainty as attitudinality
- Counter-argumentation and modality 65
- Explanation as a certainty marker in persuasive dialogue 83
- How to deal with attitude strength in debating situations. A survey on forewarning, argument strength, repetition, and source credibility as mediators of uncertainty 97
- The role of subjective certainty in the epistemology of testimony 121
- Uncertainty in polar questions and certainty in answers? 135
- Lying as a scalar phenomenon 153
- Persuasion pragmatic strategies in L1/L2 Italian argument-ative speech 175
-
Dialogical exchange and speech acts
- What do I know as yet? 185
- On polar questions, negation, and the syntactic encoding of epistemicity 199
- Epistemic uncertainty and the syntax of speech acts 217
- Discursive functions of evidentials and epistemic modals 239
-
Onomasiology
- Vagueness, unspecificity, and approximation. Cognitive and lexical aspects in English, Swedish, and Italian 265
- Latin commitment-markers 285
- Italian come se “as if” 297
-
Applications in exegesis and religious discourse
- The communication of certainty/uncertainty within a Gospel passage (John 9:1-41) 327
- Rhetorics of (un)certainty in religious discourse 343
- Subject index 363
