CFP: Reason & Rhetoric in the Time of Alternative Facts

Special Issue – Informal Logic: 

Reason & Rhetoric in the Time of Alternative Facts

Informal Logic invites submissions for a special issue on “Reason & Rhetoric in the Time of Alternative Facts”. This issue aims to analyze, explain, and critique instances of argumentation connected to the campaign, election, and presidency of Donald Trump, as well as associated issues such as the concept of “post-truth” emerging from the Brexit campaigns. We believe that argumentation theory can help in forming answers to some of the questions that events around the new U.S. president open-up.

Trump has adopted a distinctive approach to argumentation that is especially worth studying now that it is stemming from the highest political office in the United States. In terms of both form and content, the written and verbal argumentation coming from the current president, as well as official Whitehouse communications—including the whitehouse.gov website—constitute rich material to engage argumentation scholars. Equally interesting are, for example, issues surrounding the way the press deals/dealt with and reacts to the new president and the argumentative and rhetorical choices made by his adversaries during and after the presidential campaign.

This issue of Informal Logic welcomes contributions from both theorizers and practitioners in the expanding field of argumentation studies, including, but not limited to, scholars in Informal Logic, Rhetoric, Pragma-Dialectics, Communication Studies, and Critical Thinking.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Argument Schemes in White-House Communications
• The (In)Effectiveness of Trump Speeches
• Comparisons of Contemporary and Past Instances of Whitehouse Argumentation
• Governmental Multimodal Argumentation
• Fallacies, Blunders, and False News
• Post-truth Premises and Conclusions
• Trump, Clinton, and Ethos
• Audiences in the Presidential Campaign
• The Ethical Dimensions of Public Argument
• Trump and the News
• Quantitative Studies on Argumentation around Trump
• Trump and the Virtues of Argument
• Trump as a Diplomat
• Using Trump to Teach Critical Thinking

Submitted papers must present original research that has not been published and is not currently under review with any other journal. All submissions will be double-blind peer reviewed and selected based on the paper’s originality, significance, relevance, and clarity of presentation. The deadline for the submissions is the 1st of September, 2017.

Author Guidelines:

Submissions should be between 5000 and 7000 words (without notes) in length and follow the Informal Logic formatting template available at:

http://ojs.uwindsor.ca/ojs/leddy/index.php/informal_logic/about/submissions

Submissions should be prepared for blind review and sent as a PDF or Word document to: [email protected]

Deadlines (these are cut-off deadlines; extensions are not possible):

Paper submission deadline: September 1st, 2017

Accept or decline decisions announced:  December 1st , 2017

Revised papers due: February 1st , 2018

Publication: Informal Logic, 28.1, March, 2018

Guest Editors:

Katharina Stevens PhD, Dept. of Philosophy, University of Lethbridge

Michael D. Baumtrog PhD, Dept. of Philosophy, University of Windsor

The guest editors are happy to answer any questions that might arise.

Katharina Stevens & Michael Baumtrog: [email protected] / [email protected]