International/Interdisciplinary Discourse Seminars
Second I/IDS Seminar
4-6 p.m.
G. Thomas Goodnight
Annenberg School of Communication
will speak on the topic
Everyone is invited.
Refreshments will be served.
Any public controversy is constituted in a vast array of arguments that draw upon resources from cultural, social, political vocabularies. Extended public debates create networks of opposing reasons such that new events, findings, statements of opinion and the like are quickly integrated into support or discounted as irrelevant or spurious evidence. This paper examines metaphors in controversy as "argument games" (Habermas' terms), gambits that fire episodes of dispute. It is argued that (1) critical examination of argument games in controversy yields knowledge of problems in sustaining communicative rationality, (2) that large data banks containing discourses of controversy can serve as useful sites of research for tracking the beginnings, spread, reformulation, and end of argument games, and (3) attention to the controversy over language use permits the study of fallacies endemic to modernist contexts of communication.
A paper that discusses the Vietnam metaphor and Iraq is available upon request as an attachment.
I/IDS (International/Interdisciplinary Discourse Seminars) is an informal organization of USC students and faculty with research interests in discourse. It started in May 2004 when students and faculty from USC’s departments of Linguistics, Spanish, International Relations, and the Marshall School of Business met to identify and nurture a campus-wide group interested in discourse. For its inaugural year, I/IDS has received support from the Center for International Studies. Meetings will be held once a month during the academic year, alternating between the Center for International Studies and the Linguistics Department. If you’d like to be added to our e-mail list for announcements, please send your details to Fleur van der Houwen: vanderho@usc.edu