Rhetorical argumentation in popular science discourse: Features and prospects

Abstract

The nature of popular science discourse in recent decades has acquired a convincing function, while it is addressed to an audience that is not always loyal to science. There are new requirements for writing argumentative popular science texts and they must contain arguments that depend on the target audience. The need for a broad mastery of the skill of writing well-reasoned popular science texts is associated with the issues of understanding how successfully their function has been implemented to convince the audience and thе explication of technologies that help make these texts convincing, including the creation of a database of typical basic arguments. It is believed that the methods of computer analysis used in computational rhetoric can be used to study the argumentative specifics of popular science literature, and rhetorical argumentation should be the most productive approach to argumentation in a popular science text because only it provides ways of interacting with the audience. However, there are constraints for the development of this direction that make it difficult to find and annotate arguments in a popular science text, namely: an ambiguity in understanding the argument and argumentation, modeling various arguments depending on the understanding of their structure and function, and finally, the target audience modeling. Explication of arguments in the text is possible through linguistic markers, but there is a problem of establishing the boundaries of the argument. Identifying the internal structure of text segment relationships solves this problem, however, annotating the text is sensitive to certain methods of modeling argumentation. Based on the basic model of Toulmin’s argument, the special aspects of modeling rhetorical argumentation and its dependence on the target audience are illustrated. It is proposed that the concept of a universal audience can hardly be adapted to practical tasks, and criteria that are consistent with the format of truths and the format of audience values, the implementation of which could bring the target audience closer to an universal one. The author demonstrates the features in the pragma-dialectical approach, which, despite its popularity in computational rhetoric, do not allow it to be fully adapted to popular science discourse.