ReCOUNT - Reasons of the others: concession and counterargument in polylogues

ReCOUNT is a collaborative corpus based investigation of discursive patterns of concession and counterargument (CO(u)N patterns) in the context of argumentative polylogue, relying on a qualitative and quantitative exploration of an extensive case study of discussions on issues related to Generative AI carried out via social media platforms.

The discursive practice of counterargument plays a crucial role in argumentation theory, as a bridge between the analysis of argumentative discussions and their evaluation, especially in the perspective of dialectical theories, which tie the quality of an argument to its ability to withstand criticism in a discussion setting. We hypothesize that, in a defeasible reasoning setting, counterargument inherently presupposes an act of concession (resuming, re-presenting and – to some extent – recognizing the reasons of the other), consequently adopting the concession and counterargument pattern (CO(u)N pattern) as the main unit of analysis and drawing on the rich linguistic and rhetorical literature on concession, with a special attention to the linguistic polyphony tradition.

Relying on multiple layers of analysis of the corpus, which include Inference Anchoring Theory (IAT), its enrichment and combination with the Argumentum Model of Topics (AMT), as well as an ad-hoc multidimensional annotation of CO(u)N we seek to bridge the gap between pragma-linguistic and rhetorical studies of concession and micro-inferential analyses of counterargument from the perspectives of defeasible reasoning, informal logic and dialectics.

By placing the investigation in a polylogical setting and adopting a polylogical perspective, we mobilize this multi-layer analytical framework to capture hitherto undescribed phenomena relating to the resumption, re-presentation and countering of others’ reasoning that emerge when the reconstruction of the discussions abandons the traditional dyadic setting.

The proper description of these emerging polylogical phenomena involves the microscopic analysis of CO(u)N patterns, accounting for anaphoric phenomena, reconstructing enthymematic inferences, and projecting the pattern’s polyphonic configuration of perspectives onto the polylogue’s participants, but also requires the macroscopic analysis of recurring large scale CO(u)N configurations, individual and communitarian CO(u)N styles characterizing discussion participants, as well as trends and tendencies emerging within discussions over time and across discussions. To this effect, the multi-layer analytical framework is applied at different levels of granularity to the annotation of sub-corpora within the broad case study of discussions on Generative AI on social media platforms to produce qualitative analyses of collections of highly detailed reconstructed examples and to develop quantitative analytics for mapping large discussions and capture trends, tendencies and styles across the whole corpus.

Expected results include, ranging from the micro- to the macro- level, a pragmatically grounded understanding of the functioning of different types of defeaters in enthymematic arguments, new understanding of the complex argumentative patterns incorporating conceded arguments (known as conductive arguments) as well as on the strategies for managing multi-dimensional configurations of (dis-)agreement in polylogue, with insights on the context-specific dynamics of the discussions on Generative AI and on the role of social-media platforms as desirable by-product of the research.

The USI-IALS team and the WUT-New Ethos team, on the one hand, will leverage on their respective strengths by focusing respectively on in-depth reconstructive qualitative analysis of enthymemes and on the quantitative corpus analytics. On the other hand, they will closely collaborate in theory building, corpus design and collection, corpus annotation.