Croatia APPLY Winter School 2020: Methods of argument analysis and evaluation in public contexts

During the 4-day Training school participants will be introduced to a variety of perspectives to analyze and evaluate argumentation in public policy communication. One of the models for analyzing argument schemes which participants will learn to understand and use will be Argumentum Model of Topics – AMT which enables a fine-grained analysis of argumentative discourse in terms of principles of support of arguments. Participants will also get acquainted with the formal linguistic approach of the Periodic Table of Arguments (PTA). Both AMT and PTA approaches have been successfully used in corpus annotation projects and will provide a great opportunity for students to compare different conceptualizations of the notion of the ‘argument scheme’ and to learn how taxonomies of argument schemes can be employed in their own research. Further on, for efficient public policy analysis, one must consider the importance of practical reasoning, traditionally defined as reasoning about what to do (rather than what to believe). Participants will be familiarized with the basic concepts related to practical reasoning (beliefs, desires, intentions) and a specific scheme of (public) practical argumentation, resting on a comparative assessment of competing courses of action (measures, policies) to be taken. Finally, participants will be introduced to a methodology for analyzing argumentative context in policy communication based on the Polylogue Framework. It is well known that methods for argument analysis have increasingly focused on techniques for using context to analyze argument. During the Training school participants will go a step further to consider methods for analyzing how argumentative contexts are created and the consequences for policy communication in complex circumstances that follow from choices about communicative action and technical and institutional design.