I consider some uses of citations in academic writing and analyze them as instances of the “appeal to expert opinion” argumentative scheme to show that the critical questions commonly linked to this scheme are difficult to apply. I argue that, by considering citations as special communicative and argumentative situated acts, their use in real practice can be explained more adequately. Adaptation to the audience and to the social constraints is common and necessary in order to collaborate with others and to (...) advance in a discipline, but also to attain rhetorical goals that differ from strictly cognitive ones. (shrink)

We sketch and defend a Commitment View of testimony. Unlike alternative approaches, we focus on the ordinary act of testifying, attempting to identify the commitments essential to this speech act and to explain why those commitments are practically necessary. In view of this account, we argue that given the commitments undertaken in testifying, a speaker’s testimony can qualify as evidence.

This paper attempts two things: to give the reader a very general idea of the main outlines of what Govier has to say both about social and political trust and about trust in personal relationships, and to present in slightly more detail what she says about the role of trust in acquiring belief and/or knowledge from testimony and about the reasons for trusting such testimony.

Contrary to current individualistic epistemology, Classical rhetoric provides us with a pragmatical and particularly dynamic conception of ‘testimony’ as a source made available for the orator by the particular community in which she acts. In order to count as usable testimony, a testimony to which one could appeal in further communications, any discourse must comply with specific rules of social sanction. A deliberate attention to the social practices in which testimony is given and assessed may offer us a more accurate (...) view of its epistemological role. (shrink)

In academic contexts the appeal to authority is a quite common but seldom tested argument, either because we accept the authority without questioning it, or because we look for alternative experts or reasons to support a different point of view. But, by putting ourselves side by side an already accepted authority, we often rhetorically manoeuvre to displace the burden of the proof to avoid the fear to present our opinions and to allow face saving.

Far from being of interest only to argumentation theorists, conceptions of speech acts play an important role in practitioners’ self-reflection on their own activities. After a brief review of work by Houtlosser, Jackson and Kauffeld on the ways that speech acts provide normative frameworks for argumentative interactions, this essay examines an ongoing debate among scientists in natural resource fields as to the appropriateness of the speech act of advocating in policy settings. Scientists’ reflections on advocacy align well with current scholarship, (...) and the scholarship in turn can provide a deeper understanding of how to manage the communication challenges scientists face. (shrink)

This paper argues that the problem of expertise calls for a rapprochement between social epistemology and argumentation theory. Social epistemology has tended to emphasise the role of expert testimony, neglecting the argumentative function of appeals to expert opinion by non-experts. The first half of the paper discusses parallels and contrasts between the two cases of direct expert testimony and appeals to expert opinion by our epistemic peers, respectively. Importantly, appeals to expert opinion need to be advertised as such, if they (...) are to sway an epistemic peer. The second half of the paper sketches a theoretical framework for thinking about assessments of expertise in a unified way, via a ‘default and challenge’ model that emphasises the need for a version of conversational scorekeeping. It is through such scorekeeping that interlocutors can track and coordinate their differences in epistemic outlook. The paper concludes with a genealogical perspective on the function of (attributions of) expertise: acceptance of another’s appeal to expert opinion may be construed as tacit agreement that inquiry, for now, has been taken far enough. (shrink)