Abstract
Inspired by studies about the history and anthropology of knowledge, this text addresses the question of how places are constitutive of the process of argumentation. The argument from place (argumentum a loco) that is presented in classical rhetoric handbooks, particularly in Quintilian, is used as a model of analysis in order to emphasise the situated character of argumentative processes. Both the attention to the place from which an argument is uttered and to the place to which the argument refers are useful guides that help us understand the phenomenon of relevance and keep expanding the contextual and situated approach to argumentation theory and rhetoric.
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Notes
For a comprehensive account of rhetoric and argumentation in scientific practices, see Richard W. Serjeantson, “Proof and Persuasion,” in The Cambridge History of Science, edited by Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2006), pp. 132–176.
I do not intend to create a dichotomy between the referred place and the place from which one speaks, but neither do I intend to provide an explanation about the continuity or friction between them. The relation is complex, and the discourses and arguments about a place are usually determined by the places of utterance themselves, and vice versa, the places of utterance have the power to orientate the experience and knowledge of places. On the dynamic relation in specific cases, see, for example: Michael Reidy, “From Oceans to Mountains: Constructing Space in the Imperial Mind,” in Knowing Global Environments: New Historical Perspectives on the Field Sciences, edited by Jeremy Vetter (Rutgers University Press, 2010), pp. 17–38; Lachlan Fleetwood, “‘No former travellers having attained such a height on the earth’s surface’: Instruments, inscriptions, and bodies in the Himalaya, 1800–1830,” History of Science 56, no. 1 (2018): 3–34. Likewise, on the role of the Phlegraean Fields and Pozzuoli in the medicine of Early Modernity, see Andrés Vélez-Posada, “The Forum Vulcani in the Work of Juan Huarte: Geographical Argument and Renaissance Medicine,” in Greek Science in the Long Run: Essays on the Greek Scientific Tradition, edited by Paula Olmos (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), pp. 301–321.
The Royal Society as a space of sociability in the city of London is an exemplary case in order to see how the expansion of the legitimacy of mechanical theories and modern naturalistic studies developed from a social context: Simon Schaffer and Shapin, Steven, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). For an ethnographical account of knowledge-production see Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987). The origin of this approach can be traced back to Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1962] 2012).
Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2010); Christian Jacob, Lieux de Savoir 2, Les mains de l'intellect (Paris: Albin Michel, 2011). For a recent account of this fruitful approach, see the special Issue on Making Visible: The Visual and Graphic Practices of the Early Royal Society, edited by Sachiko Kusukawa, Perspectives on Science 27:3 (2019).
The “artisan epistemology” has been studied in the case of Early Modernity by Pamela H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). See also Matteo Valleriani (ed.), The Structures of Practical Knowledge (Cham: Springer, 2017).
For a general account of this, see the section “Personae and Sites of Natural Knowledge”, in The Cambridge History of Science, pp. 177–362.
For a historical and anthropological understanding of places and space in the production of knowledge, see: David N. Livingstone, Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Christian Jacob, Qu’est-ce qu’un lieu de savoir? (Marseille: OpenEdition Press, 2014) [https://doi.org/10.4000/books.oep.423]; Peter Meusburger, David N. Livingstone, Heike Jöns (eds.), Geographies of Science (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010).
For a synthesis of this argument, see Steven Shapin, “Placing the View from Nowhere: Historical and Sociological Problems in the Location of Science.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 23, 1, (1998), pp. 5–12.
See for instance, Christian Jacob, “Cadres et environnement des activités savantes”, in Qu’est-ce qu’un lieu de savoir?. The relationship between cities and the knowledge that inhabits them allows urban settings to favour styles, intellectual practices and technical developments, see the special issue on “Sciences et villes-mondes, XVIe–XVIIIe siècles”, edited by Antonella Romano and Stéphane Van Damme, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 55–2, (2008).
In this paper I understand the argument in its loosest sense, which includes both its technical definition as reasoned inferences between some premises and a conclusion, and its definition as argumentation, in the sense of a series of expressed assumptions by means of which one intends to dissent or to resolve a disagreement in the context of a discussion. On this debate, including the logical difficulties for a definition of argument, see Jeffrey Goodman, “On Defining ‘Argument’,” Argumentation, 32–4 (2018): 589–602. A seminal paper about the difficulty of the definition of argument in the context of the emergence of informal logic is Douglas N. Walton, “What is Reasoning? What is an Argument?”, The Journal of Philosophy, 87–8 (1990): 399–419. See also, David Hitchcock, On Reasoning and Argument: Essays in informal logic and on critical thinking, (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2017). From a more classical account on the broad sense of argument since the tradition of rhetoric, Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria or The Orator’s Education, Books 3–5, edited and translated by Donald A. Russell (Cambridge MA; London: Harvard University Press, 2001) [5, 10] pp. 365–375.
Stephen Toulmin, “The World of Where and When”, in Return to Reason, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001) p. 192 and ff.
One cannot but recall the definition of rhetoric as the faculty or ability of finding the available means of persuasion in any given case. See Aristotle, On Rhetoric. A Theory of Civic Discourse, translated by George A. Kennedy, (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), [1355b–1356a] pp. 36–37.
Christopher Tindale, The Philosophy of Argument and Audience Reception, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
Quintilian, [5, 10, 20–21] pp. 374–377.
For this conception of the argument as a living entity, see Quintilian, [5, 10, 21–22] pp. 376–377.
Aristotle, [1355b–1356a] pp. 36–37.
Tindale, pp. 1–19.
The speech can be read at [http://obamaspeeches.com/]. I am drawing on Tindale, pp. 7–10.
Ann Vasaly, Representations: Images of the World in Ciceronian Oratory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) p. 15 and ff.
Quintilian, [5, 10, 23] pp. 376–377.
Quintilian, [5, 10, 32] pp. 382–383.
“Arguments are also derived from place. It is a consideration relevant to the credibility of a Proof whether the scene of the crime was in the mountains or in the plain, by the sea or inland, cultivated or uncultivated, frequented or isolated, near or far, good for the purpose or bad.” Quintilian, [5, 10, 37] pp. 382–383; see also Ann Vasaly, pp. 20–26.
Quintilian, [5, 10, 39–42] pp. 384–387.
Menander Rhetor, Treatises, edited with translation and commentary by Donald A. Russell and Nigel G. Wilson, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), [Book II] pp. 29 and ff. For studies about Menander’s rhetoric of place and its epistemological role, see Laurent Pernot. La rhétorique de l’éloge dans le monde gréco-romain. (Paris: Institut d’études augustiniennes, 1993) and Christian Jacob and Frank Lestringant, Arts et légendes d’espaces: Figures du voyage et rhétoriques du Monde (Paris: Presses de L'École Normale Supérieure, 1981).
See Ernst Robert Curtius, “The Ideal Landscape”, in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, translated by Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013) pp. 183–202.
References
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Valleriani, Matteo (ed.). 2017. The structures of practical knowledge. Cham: Springer.
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Vélez-Posada, Andrés. 2012. The Forum Vulcani in the work of Juan Huarte: Geographical argument and Renaissance medicine. In Greek science in the long run: Essays on the Greek scientific tradition, ed. Paula Olmos, 301–321. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Walton, Douglas N. 1990. What is reasoning? What is an argument? The Journal of Philosophy 87(8): 399–419.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to my colleague Júlder Gómez Posada who read an earlier version of this essay and helped me significantly with his comments. I thank also Christopher Tindale for his support and José Gascón for his attentive translation of my Spanish text. This work has been done during 2018–2019 at CRASSH, University of Cambridge, thanks to a research leave from my home institution Universidad EAFIT, Medellín.
Funding
Funding was provided by FP7 Ideas: European Research Council (Grant No. 617391), Genius before Romanticism Project led by Alexander Marr, at CRASSH, University of Cambridge and Universidad EAFIT.
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Vélez-Posada, A. Place as Argument. Argumentation 34, 13–23 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-019-09490-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-019-09490-2