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Эпистемология и философия науки 2023. Т. 60. № 1. С. 115-130 УДК 167.7
Epistemology & Philosophy of Science 2023, vol. 60, no. 1, pp. 115-130 DOI: https://doi.org/10.5840/eps202360111
Argumentation
from a cognitive perspective*
Natalia V. Zaitseva -
PhD in Philosophy, Leading Research Fellow. Lomonosov Moscow State University.
27, build. 4 Lomonosov Av., Moscow 119991, Russian Federation; e-mail: natvalen@list.ru
This paper was motivated by reflections on what makes our argument convincing and persuasive. The substantive answer in my view suggests the examination of the cognitive grounds of argumentation. In the introductory section, I consider various approaches to identifying the cognitive component in argumentation. That way, I briefly observe recent relevant publications, which I classify into two groups: those directly addressing cognitive grounds of argumentation; and papers on formal models of argumentation that take cognitive nature of persuasion as a premise. In the second section, I argue for phenomenologicaly inspired approach to cognitive activity as one which provides an adequate cognitive interpretation of the latter. In so doing, I touch upon key some phenomenological concepts and focuses on an analogizing apperception (appresentation). The third section accumulates all the above. I proceed from the interpretation of the argumentation as discursive activity aimed at a deliberate change in an opposite party's position, which may not be explicitly presented in the course of arguing. It makes us turn to cognitive procedure of appresentation as it was presented by Husserl for an adequate interpretation of transfer and grasping of argumentative message's meaning.
Keywords: argumentation theory, cognitive approach, phenomenology, appresentation
Аргументация
в когнитивной перспективе
Зайцева Наталья Валентиновна - кандидат философских наук, ведущий научный сотрудник. Московский государственный университет им. М.В. Ломоносова. Российская Федерация, 119991, г. Москва, ГСП-1, Ломоносовский пр., д. 27, корп. 4;
e-mail: natvalen@list.ru
Побудительным мотивом к написанию этой статьи послужило стремление, основываясь на данных нейрокогнитивных и феноменологических исследований, выявить универсальные когнитивные механизмы, лежащие в основании аргументации как убеждающего воздействия. Во вступительном разделе я рассматриваю различные подходы к выявлению когнитивного компонента в аргументации. Анализ обширной литературы по этой тематике за последние годы позволил выделить две группы публикаций. Во-первых, это работы, в которых прямо и непосредственно рассматриваются когнитивные аспекты аргументации; стоит заметить, что эта группа оказалась самой немногочисленной. Во-вторых, статьи о формальных моделях аргументации, которые принимают когнитивную природу убеждения в качестве предпосылки по умолчанию, но при этом не анализируют ее детально. Во втором разделе я предпринимаю попытку кратко охарактеризовать и обосновать плодотворность феноменологически ориентированного подхода
Исследование поддержано научно-образовательной школой МГУ им. М.В. Ломоносова «Мозг, когнитивные системы, искусственный интеллект».
© Зайцева Н.В., 2023
115
к познавательной деятельности в целом и аргументативно-коммуникативной в частности, что, на мой взгляд, обеспечивает адекватную когнитивную интерпретацию последней. При этом я делаю акцент на концепции аналогизирующей апперцепции (аппрезентации), демонстрируя имплицитно содержащийся в ней, на мой взгляд, широкий когнитивный потенциал идеи апперцептивного переноса. Основная задача этого раздела - подготовить почву для последующей когнитивно-феноменологически обоснованной реконструкции примера эффективной аргументации. В третьем разделе аккумулируется все вышесказанное. Я исхожу из интерпретации аргументации как дискурсивной деятельности, направленной на изменение позиции адресата аргументации, в основе которой лежит вербальная трансляция смысла и изменение структуры личностных смыслов адресата. Обращение к ап-презентации как универсальному когнитивному механизму, идея которого была представлена Гуссерлем, задает вектор исследования проблемы понимания другого и возможности трансляции смысла, обозначая новый ракурс исследования и реконструкции аргументации как когнитивно обусловленной деятельности. В статье выявлена фундаментальная роль когнитивного механизма аппрезентации в процессе аргумен-тативного убеждения, обоснована контекстуальная зависимость восприятия аргументативного сообщения, что делает возможным целенаправленное структурное изменение концептуальной системы адресата и «управляемое», предсказуемое принятие решения.
Ключевые слова: теория аргументации, когнитивный подход, феноменология, аппрезентация
1. Introduction
"Argumentation is a cognitive category" [van den Hoven, 2015]. It is more than a quotation; it is a motto theme of this paper. Furthermore, to strengthen the claim, I dare reckon argumentation is an essentially cognitive phenomenon. The characteristic is definitely applicable to the interpretation of argumentation as a process rather than to argumentation as a text. Due to its intimacy with logic such interpretation is very convenient from purely theoretic point of view. However, a formal logic as a model of natural, everyday argument has many opponents. Criticism largely focuses on the point that as a norm for ordinary arguing, logical correctness is too strict and unattainable in principle.
If people were completely rational they would be persuaded only by valid arguments with true premises (but) in fact, often enough they are persuaded by invalid arguments or arguments with false premises and not persuaded by sound arguments [Haak, 1978, p. 2].
Argumentation is not just a formal derivation - it also is social influence directed at other party, be that a private person, institution or a universal audience. Thus, argumentation as a process can be defined as
a verbal activity aiming at changing a party's position by means of reasoning (in the sense of discourse verbal activity).
However, as opposed to the normative (textual) interpretation of argumentation, this approach highlights the peculiarities of argumentation that were almost totally ignored under the former. A persuasive effect on a party (argumentation addressee) is a crucial, distinctive feature of this procedural conception. Going further, it is quite natural to pose a question on what makes one's argumentative influence persuasive. From my point of view, while searching for an answer to the question one is poised to deal with argumentation as a cognitive phenomenon.
One can find the above paragraph to be rather trivial; yet, to my surprise, whilst all the above is evident, few publications directly addressing the cognitive nature of argumentation are surprisingly scarce. Very roughly the papers can be classified into two groups: (1) those devoted to cognitive grounds and cognitive functions of argumentation per se; (2) investigations in formal modelling of argumentation that take into account the cognitive aspect of arguing as providing a persuasive effect on the audience. Below, I will briefly review the plethora of ideas.
(1) "Arguments are not in statements but in people" [Brockriede, 1975, p. 179].
To the best of my knowledge, one of the earliest cognitive conceptions of argumentation has been developed by D. Hample since the 1970s. Taking O'Keefe's [1977] distinction of two kinds of argument, namely, action of arguing (what people make) and argumentative interaction (what people have), he sets up the third alternative: "the cognitive dimension of argument - the mental processes by which arguments occur within people" [Hample, 1985a, p. 2], "an intrapersonal event which goes on in the mind of the arguer" [Hample, 1985b, p. 267]. While other kinds of argument are public, argument-as-cognition is private. "Its private mental character provides its inventional resources and its basic probative force", and in this sense it forms a basis for both forms of argument and "illuminates the nature of argument in general" [Hample, 1985a, p. 18]. This view of argumentation leads D. Hample in his later writings [2007] to distinguish between three phases of arguing: argument production, the argument's text, and argument reception, where two of them are mental and cognitive. Interestingly, Hample himself categorises his approach as a sort of psychological approach to argumentation [2016].
Extending Brockriede's quotation in Hample case one may reckon that "Arguments are not in statements but in peoples' heads". And again, as far as I know, his original idea of argumentation as primarily a mental activity was not been widely circulated and recognised. Evidenced by his recent writings [Hample, 2014; Hample, 2016], his focus on persuasive effects resulted in a very specific 'cognitive theory of argument', which proposes a way to predict people's adherence to a claim on the basis
of subjective probabilities. This tendency of cognitive model development links Hample's approach to the aforementioned group of research (2).
(2) "The adoption of a cognitive approach to argumentation can offer an adequate framework for dealing with both standard and non-standard argumentation models" [Garcez et al., 2014, p. 110].
Cognitive models of formal argumentation are better to consider in a broader context of argumentation paradigm in an artificial intelligence project. Over past thirty years argumentation study became a central theme in the Al-related research. The straightforward reason for it stems from important differences between treating natural reasoning in the 'hardcore' AI and in the argumentation theory. To name but a few, according to a logical approach dominant in the AI research for many years, conclusion is strictly entailed by premises, its truth is determined by the truth of the premises, and thus argument is objective, what means in turn, that, so to say, people are sanitized out of the arguments. Reasoning in argumentation theory is defeasible (a successful counterargument may destroy the previous argument by adding new premises which attack it) and subjective (its persuasive effect essentially depends on values, beliefs and presuppositions of the audiences to which it is addressed). These distinctive features offer argumentation theory significant advantages over a standard logical approach in modelling argument within AI.
Some argumentative models of natural reasoning are united under the label 'cognitive'. To avoid circumlocution and recurrence, I would rather invoke the authority and refer to a relatively up-to-date paper [Garcez et al., 2014], which starts with an exhaustive and detailed introduction and ends by an extensive list of references. Besides, this paper by itself dramatically exemplifies the research of the second kind. While describing the principal goal of their paper, the authors list different aspects of argumentation their model successfully deals with: "joint-attacks, argument support, ordered attacks, disjunctive attacks, metalevel attacks, self-defeating attacks, argument accrual and uncertainty" [Ibid., p. 109]. Evidently, all of the above mentioned is related to formal argumentation. In general the appearance of the term 'cognitive' (sometimes, 'neural') in the name of a formal argumentative model means that this model pretends to provide a formal account for specific 'cognitive' features and aspects of argumentation, assuming that these features and aspects are subject matter for a different research (and oftentimes - for a different science), and here they are borrowed off-the-shelf. This peculiarity is quite expectable for formal argumentation in pursuit of natural argument, and equally undoubtedly bears no relation to genuinely true cognitive consideration of argument.
In my view, the cognitive argumentation theory arises from attempts to consider argumentation through the prism of cognitive science that would be a progressive sustained implementation of a cognitive program as applied to a specific (argumentative) kind of verbal cognitive activity.
Such a theory must make explicit principles and mechanisms of persuasive (and convincing) argumentation based on the research of mind and cognitive faculties. Based on the data of neurocognitive and phenomeno-logical studies, its puprose is to identify the universal cognitive mechanisms underlying argumentation as a persuasive influence.
2. Adding Phenomenology to Argumentation: Crucial Concepts
To begin with, it should be noted that the close intimate connection between phenomenology and cognitive science has long been evident to stakeholders. To mention but a few, here is a list of some important publications with self-explanatory titles, relevant institutions and research areas. In 2000, a new International Association for Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences (IAPCS) was formed, and two years later an international journal 'Phenomenology and the Cognitive science' was started in print, providing a platform for intersections between continental philosophy (phenomenology), empirical science and cognitivizm. To the best of my knowledge, the Dreyfus and Hall's book [1982] was first in a row, and since then an endless string of books and papers has been published, including [Gallagher and Zahavi, 2007] and [Schmicking and Gallagher, 2010] as telling examples. Sometimes, new research areas constitute themselves from this unfailing spring. The most relevant in the context of the current paper appear varieties of neurophenomenology and cognitive phenomenology.
The early eighties were marked by the growing interest to, so to say, phenomenological reconstruction of core rhetorical concepts (cf. [Deetz, 1981; Long, 1983]). These attempts centered on building blocks of rhetoric paradigm as it was presented earlier in New Rhetoric. More specifically, the notions of universal and particular audience, presence and communion were considered through the lens of sense formation process interpreted phenomenologicaly. Over time, this interpretation has emerged as a separate topic, that is, in its own right - a phenomenology of meaning in rhetoric [Tucker, 2001]. Recent rapid growth of cognitive neuroscience research gave an increased impetus to this trend and seems to have engendered a new interdisciplinary research area known as 'neu-rorhetorics' [Fahnestock, 2005; Jack, 2013].
Below, I will introduce relevant phenomenological concepts which play the key role in my version of cognitive phenomenology as applied to argumentation. In a nutshell, I consider intentionality to be a universally embedded and embodied cognitive characteristic inherent to and in different animated bodies. This broad interpretation of intentionality makes it possible to develop an intentional theory of concept (for details refer to
[Zaitseva and Zaitsev, 2019]), and, in particular, model a categorization process via analogizing apperception-like function. The latter issue brings into play a less known than intentionality yet essential phenomenological concept of analogizing apperception (appresentation), to be considered below.
Husserl introduces this concept in the Fifth Cartesian Meditation [Husserl, 1960] to avoid charges in of solipsism. The rationale for such an objection is connected with the specific nature of phenomenological method providing "the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view" [Smith, 2016], which makes the other transcendental ego questionable. Thus, in the Fifth Meditation Husserl's aim is to "uncover the sphere of transcendental being as monadological in-tersubjectivity" in order to justify the existence of the intesubjective surrounding world shared by different transcendental subjects. And he does so with the help of analogizing apperception, or appresentation.
'Appresentation' literally means making something 'co-present', and the best way to clarify the very idea of this cognitive procedure is to follow Husserl, who introduces this concept through analogy with ordinary perception and recollection. When I see the front-side of a physical object (say, building), I directly experience just its visible part. At the same time, it always immediately appresents the other invisible part of this object making it co-present. Certainly, this is a rough example because in case of perception there is always at least potential for verification, when 'the back becomes the front', and I get an opportunity to directly perceive the previously hidden part of the object. When the appresentation of the Other Ego is concerned, such a verification is impossible a priori. The solution found by Husserl employs the machinery similar to recollection, which renders present not only the object of current experience, but the very experience as well. What is important in this connection, we never confuse the "living" object with its experience, nor do we ever take a recollection of a preceding pain with the real pain sensed at the moment. Says Husserl: "Just as, in my living present, in the domain of "internal perception", my past becomes constituted by virtue of the harmonious memories occuring in this present, so in my primordial sphere, by means of appresentations occuring in it and motivated by its contents, an ego other than mine can become constituted accordingly, in non-origi-nary presentations [in Vergegenwartigungen] of a new type, which have a modificatum of a new kind as their correlate" [Husserl, 1960, p. 115]. Thus, through analogizing apperception, Husserl shows that the Other is always a projection of my very self. Likewise not only the other self but any object of the world is typed "by analogy" with the model object pattern, a cognitive agent has experienced earlier.
A closer examination of the nature of apperceptive transfer allows identifying a more fundamental bottom procedure of pairing. Pairing appears to be, as Husserl notes in §51, a primal form of passive synthesis,
designated as "association". The idea behind the pairing association is that two objects are given in pure passivity in a phenomenological unity of similarity, which constitutes a pair (if there are more than two objects, they are constituted into "phenomenally unitary group", which again forms a pair with model object pattern). Pairing association leads to an overlaying of each component of the pair with the objective sense of the other, which results in a "mutual transfer of sense", that is, an apperception of one object according to the sense of the other. In the case of apperception of Alter ego, the Other body forms a pair with my "similar" living body, and this Other body appropriates the sense from mine by means of sense-transfer. Broadly speaking, the meaning of an analogizing apperception (appresentation) lies in the transfer of sense characteristics (type) from model object to a new object (stimulus in perceptive case) on the basis of identity parts, moments or sides of these objects. Here goes Husserl's famous example with scissors and child, who has finally grasped the idea of scissors (understood "the final sense of scissors"), and from then onward he/she "sees scissors at the first glance as scissors" [Husserl, 1960, p. 111].
It is critical to underscore that apperceptive transfer is neither an inference from analogy (and not an inference at all), nor a thinking act. It does not presuppose explicit reproducing, comparing, concluding or inferring - instead it "points back to a 'primal instituting', in which an object with a similar sense became constituted for the first time". It is an embedded and embodied fundamental cognitive mechanism that forms the basis of cognitive faculty as directed interaction between subject and object. In Husserl's words: "Even the physical things of this world that are unknown to us are, to speak generally, known in respect of their type. We have already seen like things before, though not precisely this thing here. Thus each everyday experience involves an analogizing transfer of an originally instituted objective sense to a new case, with its anticipative apprehension of the object as having a similar sense" [Ibid.].
Husserl was well aware of the key role of appresentation in substantiating the process of cognition and he devoted a lot of time and effort to studying it. He addresses the analogizing apperception (often without using this term yet) long before Cartesian Meditations, even in Logical Investigations [Husserl, 1970], and some years later in Thing and Space: Lectures of 1907 ([Husserl, 1997]) and Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic ([Husserl, 2001]) unpublished during his lifetime.
Exploring cognition from the intentionality perspective, Husserl discovers various fundamental cognitive a priori that provide the very possibility of cognition. Generative a priori come into play at different levels, and the intension to identification as a basis of appresentation is among them. That way, Husserl uses the expression "constitution of objectivity", which means for him a specific activity of consciousness, due to which objects are not perceived as independent of consciousness (like a reflec-
tion in a mirror), but are formed from components of consciousness. The objectness of cognition understood this way turns out to be closely related to intentionality as directedness. In the parlance of our time, all living entities, from unicellular organisms to humans, grasp and process only those perceptual data that they are ready to perceive and process on an a priori cognitive basis. These a priori appear as certain prerequisites in empirical research, "dispositions", and in the centuries-old practice of philosophical reflection they manifest themselves as irreducible, necessary conditions of our experience.
The phenomenological study of consciousness involves several stages, and the first and extremely important is how our consciousness constitutes a thing - an "object of direct experience." According to Husserl, this process is a transition from passivity to activity, the result of which is the formation of the object as it is "given" to consciousness. The very first, passive synthesis of an object gives rise to a novel answer to the Kantian question of how we take several different appearances for manifestations of the same object. Husserl remarks that "having a unified perceptual consciousness across multiple appearances requires that the appearances have certain sensible qualities in common." [Husserl, 2001, p. 10].
In the process of cognition, we constantly have to correlate partial and incomplete sensory perception data (the facade of a house, the crown of a tree, a fragment of an ornament on a carpet, etc.) with samples stored in memory to ensure a holistic perception of objects (house, tree, carpet) in a passive automatic mode. This effect is achieved through specific associations that provide unity and diversity and include pairing, similarity, etc. Associations based on pairing and similarity determine analogizing apperception, which turns out to be a deep a priori mechanism that characterizes passive synthesis and provides the foundation of well-known cognitive functions from the most primitive to complex. It is with good reason to say that pairing, similarity, and apperceptive transfer underlie categorization, sample-based reasoning, instance-based learning, amodal completion, and argumentative persuasion procedures.
3. Argumentation in Cognitive Phenomenological Perspective
Above, I took as a starting point in my analysis of argumentation that it pursues the objective of deliberate change in an opposite party's position, being it the other person, in the simplest case. Such an understanding of argumentation prompts influence on the Other's closed for direct perception mental area. That in turn brings us back to the problem of appresentation of the Other ego as it was posed by Husserl and discussed in a previous section. Thus, the concept of apperceptive transfer
is appearing in the focus of a so designed argumentation study. Broadly viewed it lies in the very basis of cognitive faculties in charge for comprehension of the argumentative message's meaning, and, eo ipso, in a more general sense apperceptive transfer can be viewed as a grounding understanding.
Before considering this mechanism in an argumentative context, it would be appropriate to make a short remark concerning apperceptive transfer and meaning comprehension. An important consequence of our above-mentioned conception of neurophenomenology lies in embodied, embedded and possibly unconscious (non-reflective) character of meaning comprehension. The latter makes our approach akin to so called 'Dual-Process Theory' to the extent that both assume the existence of implicit, automatic, unconscious cognitive procedures along with more traditional explicit, conscious and thus controlled ones. In case of understanding it means that besides conscious understanding based on verbal proceeding of a message there is an unconscious proto-level of apprehension which goes without reflection and the latter is complementary to the former. As a result, a complex sense of an argumentation message is being formed by an addressee combining intersubjective components with personal (subjective) values, attitudes, presuppositions and interpretations. The very idea of personal sense was described by famous Russian psychologist N.A. Leontiev (for more detail consult [Leontiev, 2005]). Applied to sense-formation of argumentative message, all that means that a successful 'argumentator' aiming on desired change of the other's position may both use a conscious channel of linguistic communication and fall back on subthreshold communication.
Language in communication plays the role of a trigger, a starting gear that not only encourages the addressee to understand the objective meaning of words and expressions, but, and most importantly, triggers the process of deep personal comprehension, translating objective linguistic semantic meanings into subjective personal meanings determined pragmatically. Notably, it is important to understand that the subject constitutes personal meanings every time anew, here and now, depending on the constantly changing context. This means that a necessary condition for successful purposeful argumentation is the translation of the neutral meaning of a linguistic expression, "meaning by itself" into the meaning "for me", or personal meaning. Thus, argumentation is not aimed at understanding of semantical meaning of an argumentative message, that can be interpreted as an answer to a question: "What object (or situation) is meant?", but it rather aimed at the formation of personal meaning, that can be identified with answering the question: "What does this object (or situation) mean for me?". This way we move beyond a simple understanding of language to understanding and acquisition of the world of things-for-me, of the world as existence.
To consider this point more closely, let me provide an illustrative example.
A defense of a schoolboy who stabbed his classmate with a knife, by Anatoly Koni, a famous Russian attorney.
The reason for this desperate act was daily harassment by a classmate. The accused was a humpback by nature, and the injured fellow greeted him every day for several years with his mocking phrase: "Hunchback!". As history shows, Koni managed to build the most effective speech in his lawyer career. He started his courtroom speech with a customary greeting: "Your Honor and ladies and gentlemen of the jury!". Koni stayed silent for a while and once again repeated - word by word -his greeting. After a short pause he said it again, and again, and again in the very same words... In a few moments the judges and assessors exploded in anger, demanding to withdraw "this madman" from the courtroom. The job was jobbed. Koni called for quiet and gave his famous short speech: "I just have repeated these inoffensive words for several times, and it caused such strong sentiments, while my client had been poisoned for several years!" The accused was acquitted by the jury.
At the first glance, this example can be typified as Argumentum ad Populum, that is, a fallacious argument that allows one to win the case by arousing the emotions rather than by appealing to relevant facts. However, in this particular case the trick is more complicated and thus essentially different and more efficient. Considered more fundamentally, this argumentative sample may be interpreted in a cognitive phenomenological way.
It is important to understand that argumentation is not value-neutral. This means that it is aimed at forming in the agent a subjectively significant image of an object, a value-laden type (meaning), determined pragmatically. We reside in a world of types. In argumentation, we also have to either change the addressee's personal meaning, and accordingly the image of the object or situation, or intentionally participate in its creation. In order to understand how to realize it in argumentation influence, one should give an answer to the question: what concepts and categories are involved in this world typification in a grounding way. The points at issue are transcendental proto-sense (proto-meaning) mechanisms and protoconcept of generative a priori in Husserl's sense. When our example is concerned, I will mean the mechanism of analogizing apperception presented above, while taking upon myself the responsibility to claim that emotions also belong to these generative a priori. Let's focus on the relationship of appresentation and emotions in more detail.
Husserl did not attribute emotions to semantic characteristics, which was quite understandable by his fierce struggle with psychologism in logic, considered by him as a guarantor of the objectivity of scientific knowledge. He did his best to purify semantic meaning from all psychological layers, but in his act-based conception of meanings as a species [Husserl, 1970], he considers the cognitive correlate of semantic meaning (Bedeutung),
characterizing it through the ideal content of the act of meaning-bestowal. That way, ideal act-content appears as an inseparable unity of matter (what of the act) and quality (how). This approach assumed the consideration of the subject as the bearer of a certain historical experience. Husserl associated the understanding and co-directedness of the acts of various subjects with the jointness of their experience (they just share the same background). Under this approach, meaning could not remain something neutral, objective and independent in relation to the subject and was psychologized. Trying to substantiate the objectivity of meaning in the context of the subjective cognitive acts, Husserl always had to balance on the fine line between psychologism and antipsychologism.
Taking into account recent findings in cognitive neuroscience, I will venture to argue that the emotional component is inherent in cognitive acts of various levels. We live in a typed, emotionally colored world. At the same time the cognitive status of emotions is still ambiguous. Typically, emotion is treated as an affective state, characterizing a relation of a subject towards an object (situation), and as such it is not included in characteristics of intentional object itself. Franz Brentano, whose ideas had an impact on Husserl's philosophy, ascertained an intimate connection between emotions and intentionality. According to Brentano, emotions are object-directed and thus intentional phenomena [Montague, 2017]. Interestingly, he never used the term "intentionality" himself and favored "object-direct-edness" instead; in so doing he distinguished three types of such directed-ness: presentation, judgments, and phenomena of love and hate. Obviously, emotional directedness falls under the last category of the three.
Sharing the positions of Husserl and Brentano, it can be argued that, being a component an intentional act, emotion participates in the construction of an object as a typical objectivity, and, accordingly, an object image stored in memory. Emotions are deep-laid, they belong to older brain structures that are not directly related to rational cognition. They belong to our "anonymous", passive Self. We cannot control emotions, but they continue to participate in the typifying of objects and influence our decisions.
When emotional coloring is concerned, I do not mean only sensually perceived temporal objects. The fundamental role of emotions is also manifested in cognitive acts aimed at ideal, abstract objects, which is confirmed experimentally (consult for example [Vigliocco, Kousta, Della Rosa et al., 2014]). The emotional valence in the-presentation of such objects is linguistically expressed in words like 'elegant proof', 'beautiful theorem', 'elegant solution' and so on. In my opinion, emotions should be treated as built-in prototypes, embodied dispositions involved in the constitution of the world. I consider them as generative a priori, embodied and biologically determined. Any interaction of an agent (not necessarily human) with a stimulus characterizes the latter as bringing pleasure or displeasure, positive or negative, as a "phenomenon of love or hate"
in Brentano's words. An adequate (typical) response to stimuli in the process of cognition-adaptation ensures the survival of the agent, the preservation of its life, and underlies the strategy of his behavior. Cognition in this case appears as a continuous meaning-bestowal process, based on spontaneous, including emotional, typifying. This process allows, in particular, to build an ontology of the human Umwelt, which includes such types as "fair", "pleasant", "terrible", "scary", "beautiful", etc. Analogizing apperception, the way I see it, is directly related to the objectivity of the intentional world and should be supplemented with an emotional component.
Through analogizing apperception, based upon pattern matching, we reconstruct the situation, including its emotional characteristic as well. It is important to note that emotional categorization is carried out automatically and anonymously in the process of passive synthesis; the agent is not the initiator of this process and even more so does not control it. Emotions cannot be controlled, rather they control us. But how can the emotional concepts needed by a skilled argumentator be actualized in the addressee's head? How to give them movement and force the addressee to use them to typify the situation?
Applied to our argumentative case study the above considerations allow the following train of assumptions. At the first stage, an addressee (a juror, in our case) is impelled to experience a new, unusual situation. This situation is experienced and typified as an emotionally displeasing image to be memorized (fixed in memory). Due to this new experience, he/ she becomes, so to say, a 'ready perceiver' (in [Bruner, 1957] sense) and so, prepared to identify the situation under consideration (knife attack) with this new experience (being bullied by verbal attack). After that, at the second stage, a lawyer shows the moment of identity of this newly experienced situation as a sample with a knife attack. It leads to an immediate ap-presentation and transfer of those sensual components and emotional colorings first of all, which are accessible and dominant at the moment. As a result, a juror identifies him/herself with the accused-as-a-victim, which leads to an unconscious desire to justify, to get acquitted, and subsequently to acquit the accused, as indeed happened. Thus a criminal turns into a suffering victim, and his offender gains negative coloring.
4. Conclusion
It goes without saying the above considerations only schematically illustrate the cognitive phenomenological method's rich potential for reconstruction of argumentation. A closer examination would reveal a possibility to expand this approach to tackle such key concepts of argumentation theory and rhetoric as audience (both particular and universal one),
argumentative reasoning and argumentation schemes, targeting and anonymity, and much more. Regardful to the spirit of time, the empirical support of neuroscience research unleashes bonus possibilities for interpretation of argumentation in the sense of neurophenomenology. There are a variety of relevant conceptions that left beyond the scope of this paper; however, I cannot help but mention some of them in this Conclusion.
First of all, the situation with turning a jury into a ready perceiver is very close to that described by J. Bruner [1957] in terms of 'perceptual readiness' and 'category accessibility', where the former depends on the latter and accessibility is interpreted as "function of the likehood of occurrence of previously learned events, and one's need states and habits of daily living" [Ibid., p. 123]. As for 'ready perceiver', it is also a Bruner's term to label a cognitive agent "in a position to use his cognitive readiness not only for perceiving what is before him but in foreseeing what is likely to be before him" [Ibid., p. 130]. Bruner puts the focus on the unconscious angle of identification, which is a "hidden categorization", being a sign of any perception. Thus, he universalizes the typifying process. He shows the dependence of typifying on context, which is quite consistent with the position of Husserl, who emphasized that the subject does not receive meanings from the outside in a ready-made form, but "creates" them every single time ex novo on the spot. In a case in point, what is meant is not the relativization of meaning, but rather a choice. The influence of context on the choice of category is well demonstrated by the research conducted by Bruner, Minturn [1955]. The trial subjects were presented with a broken letter B, the elbow pieces moved from the vertical line by one millimeter, so that it can easily be mistaken for the number 13. The subjects typified the stimulus in different ways, depending on what they were presented with earlier: letters or numbers. In fact, thereby they carried out an appresentative transfer of meaning from an experienced and actualized sample. Thus, the context determined the preliminary activation of a whole set of relevant categories and their neural correlates (cellular ensembles). In our paradigmatic example, the attorney himself set the necessary context, forcing the jury to experience the sample situation here and now, making the categories he needed available, thereby influencing the decision of the addressee audience.
Secondly, it is noteworthy that in his elaborations, Bruner focuses on the process of categorization based upon identification of a stimulus with a category member. For any stimulation process, there is a trace in memory that participates in the identification of the stimulus by detecting similarities between the process of stimulation and the memory trace. It brings to mind a recently discussed phenomenological procedure of analogizing appresentation. From this perspective, therefore, exemplified by legal argument, this manoeuvre can be regarded as a constrained categorization of a situation-stimulus in predetermined terms on the basis of ap-perceptive transfer of sense from activated sample to stimulus.
Thirdly, argumentative communication can be easily interpreted by means of simulation theory. In such a context, the addressee from our legal example is suggested he/she should simulate a real experience in a condensed, schematic form in order to activate relevant personal feelings. When a cognitive agent is focused on a concrete thing, he/she mentally simulates perception of and interaction with this thing as if he/she were constructing it from Lego details. At the same time, it is always an act of typification, act of building into conceptual schema. Applied to argumentation, it means that linguistically shaped arguments activate non-linguistic traces in our memory, which in turn activate other, perhaps, deeper layers, and so forth. In other words, understanding of an argument is not merely grasping of a 'finished' meaning - it is a process of comprehension based on re-activation of earlier experienced events.
The above suggests multiples and diverging topics worth exploring individually. However, even at this stage of the research the fundamental role of the cognitive mechanism of appresentation in the process of argumentative persuasion is revealed, and that way the contextual dependence of the perception of an argumentative message is substantiated, which determines the possibility of a purposeful structural change in the addressee's conceptual system and "controlled", predictable decision-making.
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