Stevens, Katharina

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Browsing Stevens, Katharina by Subject "Autonomy"

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    Asking before arguing? consent in argumentation
    (Springer, 2023) Stevens, Katharina; Casey, John
    Arguments involve, at minimum, attempts at presenting something that an audience will take to be a reason. Reasons, once understood, affect an addressee’s beliefs in ways that are in some significant sense outside of their direct voluntary control. Since such changes may impact the well-being, life projects, or sense of self of the addressee, they risk infringing upon their autonomy. We call this the “autonomy worry” of argumentation. In light of this worry, this paper asks whether one ought to seek an addressee’s consent before arguing with them. We first consider the view that arguing of any sort and on any topic requires consent. However, such a view is extreme, and we reject the general requirement of consent because argument contains its own internal permission structure. We find, however, that this permission structure is not always operative, and that consent may nonetheless be morally required in certain kinds of cases.
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    Sophisms and contempt for autonomy
    (Penn State University Press, 2024) Stevens, Katharina
    Argumentation theory tends to treat the distinction between intentional and unin- tentional fallacies—sophisms and paralogisms—as unimportant for the evaluation of argumentation. The article author believes this is so because argumentation the- ory tends to be focused on the epistemic functions of argumentation and fallacious arguments pose the same threat to the production of epistemic goods whether they are intentional or not, so the distinction is not needed for the epistemic evalua- tion of argumentation. This article argues that argumentation has a special connec- tion to respect for autonomy, one that enables it to also produce distinctly moral goods. Sophisms, but not paralogisms, spoil these goods. Worse—sophisms produce potentially continuing moral harms, while paralogisms do not. Therefore, the paralogism/sophism distinction should be reintegrated into argumentation theory's evaluative toolbox. duce potentially continuing moral harms, while paralogisms do not. Therefore, the paralogism/sophism distinction should be reintegrated into argumentation theory’s