2026 Schedule and Abstracts

January 9th 1PM ET

Neil Levy 

When Should We Argue? 

It’s been said you can’t reason someone out of a position they haven’t reasoned themselves into. If that’s true, then it might be pointless to argue with them. I suggest the principle is not true, and arguments can move people no matter the basis for their belief. However, there are other constraints on the usefulness of argument. Argument is effective when the sides already share not only stating points, but guardrails on what counts as a good argument. Moreover, many people – on our side as much as ‘theirs’ – can’t be argued out of our views, because we don’t genuinely believe them. I suggest we need different strategies for changing minds, alongside argument. 



 February 6th 1PM ET

Gerard Dunne 

Critical Thinking as  Stress-Testing-Critique-Support-Explanationism (STCSE).  
 
Successful critical thinking requires both a critical mindset and expertise in evaluating reasons. Much has been written about the former in terms of open-mindedness, epistemic vigilance, and so forth, but comparatively little about the ‘black box’, that is the business of stress-testing competing reasons regarding what to accept, believe or do. I show balance metaphors and reasons-for-and-against (debit/credit ledger) determinations to be unfit to appropriately handle complex decisions requiring multivariate, context-specific judgements. Instead, I propose and defend a new framework for criticality: something I call, Stress-Testing-Critique-Support-Explanationism (STCSE). 



March 6th 1PM ET

Justin Eckstein

Sound Tactics in the March for our Lives 

In Sound Tactics, I position sound as a vital resource within the rhetorical arsenal of contemporary activism. I develop a theory of “sound tactics,” arguing that the qualities of immediacy, intensity, and immersion uniquely equip sound to compel institutional response. In this talk, I will focus on the March for Our Lives movement. I will illustrate how the sonic dimensions of protest, what I call a "cut out," generated an affective urgency that reframed public discourse on gun violence. This case underscores rhetoric and argumentation's broader contribution to sound studies, revealing how auditory practices shape conditions of resistance, accountability, and collective judgment. 



April 10th 1PM ET

Friderike Spang 
 
Tailoring to the Audience? Ethics of Argumentation in Vegan Advocacy 

In this paper*, I treat vegan activism as a form of deliberative activism: a practice centered on exchanging reasons and engaging interlocutors through argument. Within this deliberative setting, activists are often encouraged to tailor their message to the audience, advocating for veganism in terms of health or environmental benefits rather than animal suffering. This talk examines the ethical implications of that practice. I argue that audience-tailored framing can generate significant moral costs for non-human animals: When the core concern of animal suffering is set aside for strategic reasons, deliberative exchanges can inadvertently objectify animals, weaken their moral standing, reinforce property notions, make future harms easier to justify, and create a hierarchy of moral worth among different animal species. 

The talk also opens up broader questions for the ethics of argumentation: what responsibilities do advocates bear when choosing their argumentative strategy? And, especially in the case of advocacy for non-human beings, what distinct responsibilities arise when speaking on behalf of those who cannot participate in the exchange themselves? The aim is to show that the question of “what persuades” should not be treated in isolation but considered together with other ethical concerns. 



May 1st 1PM ET

Nicholas Shackel 
 
The Normativity of Rationality 
 
Must we be rational? Does rationality place requirements on us that we ought to obey? Do the requirements of rationality really matter or are they an unfeeling and arbitrary imposition. If they do matter, why do they matter and how do they matter? My talk will address this question and give part of my answer to it. 



June 5th 1 PM ET

Jakub Prus 
 
Debating With, Not Against: The Cracovian Debate as a Model of Cooperative Argumentation 
 
This talk introduces the Cracovian debate, a cooperative format designed to teach critical and charitable discussion. Unlike competitive debates that reward winning, the Cracovian model treats disagreement as a shared inquiry aimed at cognitive growth for all participants. Grounded in the dialectical principle of charity, it trains debaters to reconstruct opposing arguments fairly, engage critically without hostility, and collaborate across differences. Pilot studies (2021–2025) indicate that this approach enhances argument quality and supports depolarisation. The session outlines the format’s structure, pedagogical aims, and practical applications in classrooms and workshops. 



July 3rd 1PM ET

Haixin Dang 
 
TBA
 
TBA



August 7th 1PM ET

Oxana Pimenova 

Conceptualizing and Modelling Rhetorical Injustice 
 
 Unlike epistemic injustice, which arises from the relationship between a speaker and their hearer (Fricker, 2007), rhetorical injustice originates from the speaker’s relationship to the institutional reasoning context in which institutional discourse occurs as reasoning exchanges among positionally unequal arguers – state-affiliated experts and others. In such an institutional discourse, a context is a structure that defines requirements (scope, boundary, information, and aggregation) mandatory to be observed by participants to gain institutional credibility for their testimonies and have those testimonies accommodated in state decisions. The first part of the presentation focuses on the theory of rhetorical injustice, introducing its components such as institutional credibility and institutional rebuttals, along with a detailed examination of a matrix of authority rules – boundary rule, scope rule, aggregation rule, and information rule – that underpin institutional rebuttals as rhetorical strategies used by state-affiliated experts. The second part of the presentation models rhetorical injustice as a regulatory-rhetorical equilibrium in the case of Indigenous consultations over the Trans Mountain project. It demonstrates how state-affiliated experts produce high-stringency institutional requirements for Indigenous evidence collection and adjudication and then use those requirements to rebut Indigenous testimonies/arguments as lacking institutional compliance and, hence, institutional credibility. I argue that in institutional discourses where power and persuasion intersect on the part of the institutional representative (state-affiliated expert), rhetoric may become an advocacy strategy that serves those most positionally advantaged, thereby reinforcing existing position-knowledge disparities and causing epistemic injustices towards positionally subordinate participants. 



September 4th 1PM ET

Amy Floweree 
 
How and When to be a Good Faith Interlocutor
 
Trolling, most would agree, is toxic for discussion. Trolls are in bad faith. What we require from our interlocutors is good faith. But how is someone a good faith interlocutor? Many have advocated that the good faith interlocutor only argues for what they sincerely believe. However, this view rules out three important roles for a good faith interlocutor: the Devil’s Advocate, the Gadfly, and the Spokesperson. These roles are crucial to healthy discussion. And in spaces where not all stakeholders are present, the role of Spokesperson (speaking on behalf of those who cannot speak) is particularly vital. In this paper, I argue that the good faith interlocutor is one that aims at answering the question under discussion. Unlike trolls (who aim at disrupting the conversation, showing up their interlocutor, or changing the question), if a good faith interlocutors motivations and beliefs are added to the common ground their contribution still aims at answering the question. My account captures a variety of roles that good faith interlocutors can take. But it also highlights the possibility of virtuous trolling: when the question under discussion is a bad one, sometimes one ought to engage in bad faith. 



October 2nd 1PM ET

Casey Johnson 

 Care and Political Disagreement 
  
Political beliefs have a telos: to be or to become public.  Political beliefs call for action, and political actions are not the sort of thing we can usually take alone.  When we take political action, we often have to convince others to act with us.  And that usually requires public argument.  When we think about political disagreements and the arguments that attend them, we often think of emotionally fraught cases.  Public political disagreements are uncomfortable and risky, even shameful.  So, it is no surprise that many people avoid them where possible, to the detriment of democracy.  This means that if we value democracy, we ought to be concerned to make political disagreement less painful.   
Much of the relevant literature has conceived of political disagreement from an individualistic perspective.  Recent work in feminist epistemology, however, offers an alternative to this individualistic perspective. My own ameliorative approach understands political disagreement a kind of inquiry and understands inquiry as requiring caring communities.  The project of this talk is to understand what results from framing political disagreement in care-based terms.  I’ll first sketch the relevant machinery from care epistemology.  Then, I’ll classify political disagreements according to considerations about the relationship between the parties to the disagreement: how socially intertwined they are, and how well-placed they are to give and receive care.  When parties to disagreement are neither socially intertwined nor well-placed to give and receive care, they are not obviously good candidates for a care-based approach and so, I’ll close by briefly exploring what lies beyond the limits of care when it comes to political disagreement 



November 6th 1 PM ET

Marcin Lewinski 
 
Unethical Charity in Argumentation  
  
The talk discusses two “un-ethical” senses of the Principle of Charity (PC) as used in argumentation theory. In the discipline, it is a methodical guideline to adopt the strongest possible reconstruction of an argument, rather than some other plausible but weaker or flawed version of it. While it might sound as simple as that, the principle is far from being straightforward, as attested by the particularly lively debate around it, both in argumentation theory (Stevens, ed., 2025; Lewiński, 2026) and in the philosophy of language (Abreu et el., ed., 2025).  In this talk, I will, first, caution that ethically driven takes on charity developed in argumentation theory run the risk of generating or perpetuating ethically dubious consequences; notably, a patronizing relation between the charity giver and taker and a blanket immunity to criticism by the (possibly strategic) charity taker. In this sense, “un-ethical” means ethically wrong, immoral. To attenuate for such perils of “toxic charity” (Stevens, 2025), I will, second, re-examine the link between the philosophical and argumentation theoretic takes on charity to argue for an understanding of the PC that has nothing to do with ethical concerns. So conceived, the PC is, rather, a conceptual requirement to understand language and argumentation in the first place. (As Donald Davidson said in an interview about his prominent account of the principle of charity: “it’s not a matter of being kind to people; it’s the condition for understanding them at all.”) In this sense, “un-ethical” means irrelevant to ethics.  Finally, however, I will attempt to show that it’s precisely the unethical charity (in the second sense) that paves the way for otherwise ethical­—that is: free, fair, and egalitarian—practices of argumentation. 



December 4th 1 PM ET

Joshua Habgood-Coote 
 
Bad Questions 

This paper is about bad questions; questions which are bad in the sense that pursuing them is an impediment to progress in  inquiry. The starting point of the paper is that there is an under-appreciated kind of criticism of people, arguments, and discourses: that they are addressing the wrong questions. I call this style of criticism question critique. After arguing that attempts to ground question critique in epistemic, practical, and moral norms are unsuccessful, I develop an account inspired by Habermasian critical theory, on which question critique is grounded in the constitutive norms of the activity of inquiry. This account distinguishes between three kinds of bad questions:  blocking questions, frustrating questions, and malfeasant questions.