Argumentation from expert opinion in science journalism

Greco, Sara; Morasso, C

Back

Greco_2014_PeterLang_Argumentation from expert opinion

Book chapter

Argumentation from expert opinion in science journalism : the case of Eureka's Fight Club

Greco, Sara ORCID Istituto di argomentazione, linguistica e semiotica (IALS), Facoltà di comunicazione, cultura e società, Università della Svizzera italiana, Svizzera
Morasso, C Fondazione don Gnocchi ONLUS, Milan, Italy

2014

Published in:

Rhétorique et cognition - Rhetoric and Cognition / Thierry Herman ; Steve Oswald. - Bern: Peter Lang. - 2014

English This paper sets out to analyse fallacious uses of the locus from authority in science journalism based in particular on vague appeals to expert opinion. To do so, we adopt a case-study approach (Flyvbjerg 2001), focusing our analysis on the column Fight Club published by the monthly scientific supplement Eureka to the British newspaper The Times (issues published from October 2009 to November 2010). We analyse scientific journalism as a context of argumentation (Rigotti and Rocci 2006, van Eemeren 2010), considering its goals and the roles fulfilled by scientists, journalists and the public (Lesnher 2003, Bubela et al. 2009). A sound approach to expert opinion is crucial in this context, as laypersons have normally no choice but trusting scientific journalists to understand data which would otherwise be inaccessible to them but which can bear important consequences for their present and future lives. From the theoretical point of view, we start from Douglas Walton’s well-documented approach to appeals to expert opinion (Walton 1997). Yet we extend and complement this approach in two important respects. First, we follow Goodwin’s (2010) suggestion to reinterpret the expert-layperson relationship as an agency relationship. The layperson is the principal in a relationship in which she needs to retain the agent, i.e. the expert, to do something she cannot do for herself. Goodwin’s hypothesis inserts appeals to expert opinion in the bigger picture of a human relationship in which both principal and agent have their own rhetorical goals, which sometimes may not be aligned, thus explaining possible origins of fallacious uses of the locus from expert opinion as derailments of the arguers’ strategic manoeuvring (van Eemeren and Houtlosser 2002). Second, we associate Walton’s critical questions to the premises of the argument scheme from expert opinion on the basis of the Argumentum Model of Topics (AMT, Rigotti and Greco Morasso 2011). This allows understanding the kind of premises which vague uses of expert opinion are associated to. What results from our analysis is the weakness of the material component of this argument scheme. From the cognitive point of view, the interest in the locus from expert opinion lays in the fact that, when it is used in a vague way, it may become a sort of cognitive immunisation against argumentation; in fact, appealing to the authority of experts in argumentative discussions may be used to invite to suspend one’s critical attitude towards his or her decision. In sum, our paper presents advances on the argument scheme from expert opinion at two levels. At the theoretical level, it contributes to discussion on this specific argument scheme and the cognitive implications of its possible fallacious uses. At the level of the study of argumentation in context, it sheds some light on the debate on science journalism, which is nowadays fiercely open among scientists and the wider public.

Collections