Aims Of Argument Pdf

[Yoshi Heffernan]

Ifthe NRA and ACLU have their way, it would empower a virtually limitless set of claims against the government based on the specious argument that any regulatory action penalizes the speech of third parties. Put simply, the government would no longer be allowed to govern.

NRA v. Vullo represents the latest salvo in a decades-long effort to secure the industry super-privileged legal status. The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act immunizes weapons manufacturers from liability for crimes committed with their products. Guns are the only consumer products manufactured in the US not subject to regulation by the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

After all, industries as varied as car makers, banks, chemical manufacturers, or airlines could claim their business is simply protected speech, immune from government oversight. This bizarre, dystopian scheme would wipe out decades of common-sense rules that protect consumers, the environment, and our financial system.

Dru Stevenson is a law professor at South Texas College of Law in Houston, with focus on firearms regulation and administrative law. He signed on to an amicus brief in this case filed by scholars of banking, insurance, and administrative law, and banking governance.

I suspect that this is because we tend to have the wrong kinds of arguments in the wrong situations. As we developed the concept for our project, we began to realize there are essentially three kinds of arguments. Each kind of argument has its own rules, its own aims, and its own set of expectations. Problems arise when we enter into an argument expecting one thing, and ending up with another.

The educational argument does not aim to solve anything, though it might involve tools of conflict transformation. The educational argument does not intend to persuade the other to change their mind, though it may well involve the back-and-forth of debate. When arguing for the sake of argument our primary aim is to learn.

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You may already use Rogerian argument in your everyday life to negotiate with your friends, family, and/or romantic partners. For example, if you wanted to watch a comedy and your friend wanted to watch a romance, you might compromise by offering to watch a rom-com, as this offers each of you a bit of what you are looking for in that particular moment. Note, however, that this style of argument is decidedly less common in academic settings, where various empirical or theoretical notions of truth are often prized above the practical advantages of the Rogerian method.

The first aim shows the reader that you understand the complexities of the argument and that you have listened sympathetically to what it is they have to say. This is important, because the success of the Rogerian arguments relies on cooperation and collaboration. The second aim puts this understanding into practice by seeking a symbiotic solution. The third aim builds ethos and rapport between the parties. If audiences believe they share a value system with a speaker or writer, they are more likely to agree to the terms of whatever solution is presented.

While each of these aims is important, Young, Becker, and Pike stress that they are just that: aims, not steps. You should not necessarily view these aims as occurring in a linear, step-by-step process. The authors present a synthesized discussion of what a successful Rogerian argument should contain, but they eschew any formalized structure. The structure of the argument should instead be determined by the speaker, and it should be modified and adapted according to the rhetorical situation at hand.

Here, we would introduce the topic and briefly discuss why it is a matter of contention. We would lay out the differing perspectives, briefly mention the merits of each argument, and discuss the implications closely considering all perspectives to arrive at a solution that works for everyone.

Here we might provide specific details that lend merit to their argument. We want to show that we are fully considering their claims and not just giving lip service, in the hope that that they will give similar value to our opinions. We could include statistics, testimony from instructors and students, or even examples from media that support their theory that digital technology can indeed be a distraction during instruction.

Here, we would introduce our claim that digital technology should be allowed in the writing classroom. We would still want to speak as objectively as possible in order to establish our ethos as concerned but unbiased speaker. We might even qualify our position by acknowledging that there are, of course, situations in which technology should be put away, but reiterate that, generally speaking, the presence of digital technology is a positive.

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As for the humanities, the English majors have scattered to the four winds: 11 percent of them to elementary and secondary teaching, 10 percent to various business occupations, 9 percent to communications, 9 percent to lawyering, 5 percent to advertising; the rest scattered. Of the philosophers, 30 percent are lawyers and 18 percent are software people. I defy anybody to make sense out of that. Again, the connections include some obvious things and some non-obvious things. We have two English majors who are now artists and one who is an architect. We have a philosophy major who is a farmer and two who are doctors.

What about doctors, 9 percent of the sample? These are much more concentrated, because of the prerequisites of medical schools. Sixty percent of the doctors came from the biology concentration and 17 percent from chemistry. However, there was at least one doctor each from anthropology, classics, English (four of them, in fact), history and philosophy of science, ideas and methods, mathematics, music, philosophy, psychology, public policy, and Romance languages and literatures. While the main pathway to medicine is obvious, it is by no means the only way in.

The other large group among alumni is in banking and finance (also about 10 percent). Of these, 40 percent came from economics, 8 percent from psychology, 7 percent from political science, 7 percent from English, 6 percent from mathematics, 5 percent from public policy, and 4 percent from history. Again there is a dominant route in, but there are many routes beside the dominant one.

I am sorry to list all these things for you, but I want to eradicate in your minds the notion that there is much of a connection between your college curriculum and your eventual career. There is, to be sure, what social scientists are fond of calling an elective affinity; there are concentrations whose graduates are slightly more likely to end up in certain careers than others. But there are no concentration/career connections that are ruled out, and there are no obligatory tracks of any kind.

So the second basic reason for working hard in some particular form of study is wrong as well, at least in this college. With the exception of those planning to become professors in the natural sciences, there is absolutely no career that is ruled out for any undergraduate major at the University of Chicago. What you do here does not determine your occupation in any way. You are free to make whatever worldly or otherworldly occupational choice you want once you leave, and you do not sacrifice any possibilities because you majored in something that seems irrelevant to that choice.

As far as performance in college is concerned, there is not, as I said, any national evidence that level of performance in college has more than a minor effect on later things like income. And in my alumni data, there is absolutely no correlation whatever between GPA at the University of Chicago and current income. Get it straight. Whether you end up on Fire Island or in the Hamptons depends largely on things that are unrelated to what you do as an undergraduate at Chicago.

I hope then to have disposed of the notion that what you do here or how well you do it has any connection with your worldly success either in general or in detail. The general level of that worldly success is already guaranteed by your admission here and by the factors that made it happen. The detailed level of your worldly success depends largely on occupational choices that are unrelated to what or how you do here.

Now the third reason for getting a college education is that it will give you foundational cognitive skills for later life. Since this is the argument I have myself made most strongly in the past, I shall take special care to demolish it.

There is much evidence that our own alumni, alumni of equivalent schools, and national alumni samples all believe deeply that such general skills constitute the crucial learning in their college experience. Alumni always note the loss of detailed knowledge from college, while they always emphasize their retention of general skills that they use in all walks of life.

In business, it is more or less the same. Those of you who go into business will never have to write well in the sense that I or some other professor uses the term. You will have to reduce things to bullets well; you too will be in the business of simplification and clarification. And you will have to work well with others and indeed will need to shelve a large part of your independence. You will have to put your critical thinking under very strict control, as Bob Jackall has so brilliantly shown. General analytic skills will be very important to you, but, again as Jackall and other students of management have shown, the crucial analytic skills for business managers lie mainly in interpreting people and in decoding the kaleidoscopically biased types of information that flow through large organizations. These are not things we teach you a damn thing about in college. Our texts are not written by people who are trying to deceive you into doing what they want.

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