Presuppositional Fallacies

This study explores the utilization and impact of various types of presuppositions in Steve Jobs' Commencement Address at Stanford University on June 12, 2005. The data were analysed according to the models proposed by Karttunen, L. (n.d.). The analysis reveals that presuppositions are used extensively in this commencement address, which significantly contributes to the success of the speech. The data suggested that existential presuppositions predominate, comprising 63% of the analysed segments, thereby underscoring their integral role in the address. Structural triggers and lexical items were also significant, constituting 23% and 14% of the data, respectively. These findings reveal the nuanced and strategic deployment of presuppositions by Jobs to foster a deeper connection with his audience. The extensive use of presuppositions, especially existential ones, highlights a deliberate rhetorical strategy. By embedding assumed truths within his narrative, Jobs not only enhanced the speech’s relatability and engagement but also steered audience perception with minimal resistance. This tactic of embedding presuppositions allowed Jobs to convey his messages more effectively, ensuring they were received with open minds and minimal critical resistance.

In an earlier paper, entitled’ strategic maneuvering with the burden of proof,’ we have explained our dialectical perspective on the division of the burden of proof in a critical discussion (van Eemeren and Houtlosser, 2002). We did so by answering a series of interrelated questions from a procedural view of critical reasonableness: Why is there a burden of proof? A burden of proof for what? For whom? What exactly does the burden of proof involve? When is it activated? What means can be used to acquit oneself of the burden of proof? And when is one discharged? Because our responses were given in a critical rationalist vein, they are attuned to resolving a difference of opinion by critically testing the acceptability of a standpoint in the most systematic, thorough, perspicuous, and economic way. In the present paper we aim to complement this approach by offering a pragmatic solution for an important problem that may arise in ‘mixed’ disputes, where opposite standpoints are put forward regarding the same issue. The problem concerns the order in which the opposing standpoints are to be defended.

Radical constructivists advocate discovery-based pedagogical regimes that enable students to incrementally and continuously adapt their cognitive structures to the instrumented cultural environment. Some sociocultural theorists, however, maintain that learning implies discontinuity in conceptual development, because novices must appropriate expert analyses that are schematically incommensurate with their naive views. Adopting a conciliatory, dialectical perspective, we concur that naive and analytic schemes are operationally distinct and that cultural–historical artifacts are instrumental in schematic reconfiguration yet argue that students can be steered to bootstrap this reconfiguration in situ; moreover, students can do so without any direct modeling from persons fluent in the situated use of the artifacts. To support the plausibility of this mediated-discovery hypothesis, we present and analyze vignettes selected from empirical data gathered in a conjecture-driven design-based research study investigating the microgenesis of proportional reasoning through guided engagement in technology-based embodied interaction. 22 Grade 4–6 students participated in individual or paired semi-structured tutorial clinical interviews, in which they were tasked to remote-control the location of virtual objects on a computer display monitor so as to elicit a target feedback of making the screen green. The screen would be green only when the objects were manipulated on the screen in accord with a “mystery” rule. Once the participants had developed and articulated a successful manipulation strategy, we interpolated various symbolic artifacts onto the problem space, such as a Cartesian grid. Participants appropriated the artifacts as strategic or discursive means of accomplishing their goals. Yet, so doing, they found themselves attending to and engaging certain other embedded affordances in these artifacts that they had not initially noticed yet were supporting performance subgoals. Consequently, their operation schemas were surreptitiously modulated or reconfigured—they saw the situation anew and, moreover, acknowledged their emergent strategies as enabling advantageous interaction. We propose to characterize this two-step guided re-invention process as: (a) hooking—engaging an artifact as an enabling, enactive, enhancing, evaluative, or explanatory means of effecting and elaborating a current strategy; and (b) shifting—tacitly reconfiguring current strategy in response to the hooked artifact’s emergent affordances that are disclosed only through actively engaging the artifact. Looking closely at two cases and surveying others, we delineate mediated interaction factors enabling or impeding hook-and-shift learning. The apparent cognitive–pedagogical utility of these behaviors suggests that this ontological innovation could inform the development of a heuristic design principle for deliberately fostering similar learning experiences.

An evaluation of management aspects of a hypertrophic African impoundment