War das Absicht? Indikatoren subjektiver Intentionalitätszustände bei der ethischen Bewertung von Argumentationsbeiträgen

Abstract

The concept of argumentational integrity describes criteria for evaluating contributions to argumentative discussions from an ethical perspective. These criteria have been elaborated in the form of conditions for, characteristics, and standards of (un-)fair argumentation; keeping to these conditions has been defined as fair, to consciously violate them as unfair argumentation. This definition presupposes that an >unfairness verdict< necessarily comprises two components: (a) There must be a violation of an argumentative rule; (b) this violation must have been committed with some degree of awareness. Thus in evaluating an argumentative rule violation as unfair, one has to take into account the speaker’s subjective state of intentionality. In this paper we first discuss the theoretical distinction between an objective rule violation and the subjective awareness in analogy to the German criminal law; on this basis we then report a study where the hypothesis that both the severity of the objective rule violation and the subjective degree of intentionality play a part in unfairness evaluations could be empirically confirmed (1.). Next, we ask how intentionality might be inferred in everyday communication; we put forward a category system of potential cues to (or indicators of) intentionality which was derived on the basis of pragmalinguistic analyses of everyday argumentative interactions (2.). In the last part of the paper we present two empirical studies where we tested for some of these potential indicators whether they are in fact used to infer intentionality in evaluating argumentative discussions. The results show that the indicators have a differential effect on the attribution of intentionality, depending on the type of the indicator as well as on the severity of the argumentative rule violation (3.).