Marianne Doury

Argument Schemes Typologies in Practice: The Case of Comparative Arguments

Most studies dealing with analogy or comparison emphasize the pervasive character of the discursive processes they refer to, and regret the lack of any satisfactory theoretical account for them. The present paper tries to take a more positive stance: it starts from the many insightful essays on comparative arguments and proposes to make them enter into dialogue with actual argumentative practices. In order to avoid the pitfall mischievously mentioned by Christian Plantin, who claims that “any proposition of synthesis of existing typologies finally results in an additional typology” (2005, p. 50, my translation), I propose a non-exhaustive inventory of the main parameters classically identified in academic works, parameters which permit a sub-categorization of arguments based on a comparison. It results in four main oppositions within the general class of comparative arguments: figurative / literal analogies; qualitative / quantitative analogies; a priori / predictive analogies; confirmative / refutative analogies. I then turn to the observation of actual argumentative practices. My focus is on three ranges of phenomena: the way comparative argument schemes are labelled by ordinary arguers; the indicators which are associated with them; the refutation devices they elicit. The purpose of such an approach to comparative arguments is to assess to what extent the academic sub-classifications have counterparts in the folk pre-theorization of argumentation (and, specifically, in the spontaneous perception of argument schemes) as revealed by the three sorts of discursive clues mentioned above.

How to Make Figures Talk: Comparative Argument in TV Election Night Specials

Typically, election night specials focus on announcing the results and commenting them. These comments reveal two argumentative stages: the first consists of assessing the scores (“it’s a good/poor result”); the second is explanatory (“this poor score reflects the voters’ disappointment with the outgoing president”/“this high score shows the voters’ longing for change”). The present paper will focus on the assessment process. The observation of election night specials during the last decades in France suggests that an electoral result is not good or bad in itself, but is discursively constructed as such. For instance, the discursive evaluation of a result is often integrated within argumentative sequences that aim at justifying it. We will examine the function of comparison in such argumentative sequences. Based on the transcript of two TV specials after the first round of French presidential elections (April, 22nd, 2012) from two TV channels (TF1 and France 2), we will show how the assessment of the scores relies on various comparisons: between the results obtained by the different candidates within the same election; between the results obtained by one political party in successive presidential elections; between the results obtained by the leaders of different countries confronted with similar economic crisis; between the results predicted by polling organizations and the actual results. We aim at exploring the argumentative use of comparison as well as the associated conditions of acceptability in context.