Genetically modified organisms and the age of (Un) reason? A critical examination of the rhetoric in the GMO public policy debates in Ghana

Using narrative policy analysis we examined the adversarial rhetoric of claims-makers in their bid to undermine alternative and conflicting accounts of GMOs as environmental and human health risk and to forestall any challenges to the scientific authority of the technological deterministic account of the GMO policy debates in Ghana. The study shows that the GMO discourse was built with the rhetorical frames of smallholder farmer vulnerability and entitlement used in the account it contradicts, thereby legitimating its own appeal for responsive remedies. Civil society claims attacked GMOs as discriminatory and as an environmental and human health risk. Government and scientists engaged in unsympathetic counter rhetorical strategies in hopes of debunking or neutralizing the claim made by civil society. In other words, Government and scientists were denying the claim that GMO was discriminatory and posed significant human health risk, as well as the call to action to do something about GMOs. Civil society adapted the counter rhetoric of insincerity, claiming that scientists had some kind of “hidden agenda” behind their claim, such as eagerness to just earn money from their patents on GMOs. It is imperative that communication on GMOs includes the underlying assumptions, the uncertainties and the probabilities associated with both best and worst case scenarios. This is a necessary condition to minimise misinformation on GMOs but may be insufficient to completely erase conspiracy theories from the minds of the public especially when scientists and government are perceived to be biased towards multinational corporations that are ostensibly preoccupied with making profits.     

When luxury advertising adds the identitary values of luxury: A semiotic analysis

The majority of researches on luxury focus on the behaviour and opinions of consumers and let drop the important role that advertising produces on them, as is done in this work and shown with a relational model. In addition to their commercial message, some remarkable and artistic advertisings convey the identitary values of luxury (IVL) characterizing luxury parent Houses. We list and analyze these IVL: craft production, raw materials, respect of craftsmen, their knowledge, know-how, gestures and traits of artistic genius. A semiotic and rhetoric analysis of two selected advertisings (Louis Vuitton, Hermès) allow to identify the semic richness of discursive content of symbolic images and identitary narratives of each luxury brand (“griffe”), revealing the implicit IVL. We conclude that strength and power of major luxury Houses lie in the global coherence they apply everywhere (creation, products, narratives and advertisings), reinforcing their brand image and attracting more loyal consumers.     

McCloskey, economics as conversation, and Sprachethik

In writing about the 'rhetoric of economics' - particularlyabout the standards which prevent situations where 'anythinggoes' in argument - McCloskey takes an eclectic approach totwo philosophical positions, based on Rorty and Habermas respectively.But these positions, despite sharing some common aspects, alsodifferentiate themselves from each other sharply in importantways. In this paper, it is argued that this eclecticism of McCloskeyis not coherent, as a result of her not completely graspingthe fundamental differences between these two positions, andthat this incoherence has damaging implications for her projectof the rhetoric of economics.     

从西方修辞学角度解读《裘力斯·凯撒》

从西方修辞学的角度解读了莎士比亚的《裘力斯·凯撒》,剖析了作品中对三大人工说服手段、修辞格以及修辞韬晦性的运用,深入探讨了莎翁对剧情的精彩谋篇、对人物的鲜明刻画以及对主题的精心安排,揭开莎翁作为一代修辞大师的面纱,由此进一步论证了文艺复兴时期的修辞复兴,也丰富了莎学领域的研究。     

Commonplaces in Risk Talk: Face Threats and Forms of Interaction

Talk about risk is problematic for interaction; it can involve the speaker or hearer saying things that threaten participants' ‘face’, the ways they want themselves to be seen by others. One way of dealing with these threats to face, and to keep the conversation going, is the use of commonplaces. Commonplaces, generally applicable and generally known arguments, play an important role in interaction, invoking shared, taken‐for‐granted perspectives embedded in familiar roles and everyday practices. They are similar to some of the frames discussed in risk communication, but they focus our attention on rhetoric and interaction rather than cognition. In this paper, I show how commonplaces are used in focus group discussions of public choices involving dangers to life or health. They tend to be used in response to dilemmas, when a speaker is put on the spot, and they tend to lead to other commonplaces. Analysis of commonplaces supports those who argue that studies of public perception of risks and programmes of communication about risks need to be sensitive to the personal interactions, rhetorical strategies, and cultural embeddedness of any risk talk.     

Reason as a Nexus of Natural Law and Rhetoric

Although the pages of Journal of Business Ethics have hosted an ongoing dialogue on the ethics of rhetoric and persuasion, the debates have been unable to account for the underlying morality of the human propensity to engage in rhetorical discourse as a part of living in society. In this paper, I offer natural-law ethical theory as a moral paradigm in which to examine rhetoric. In this context, I assert that rhetoric services reason, which in turn services our dispositions or inclinations that are one ideological foundation of natural-law theory. As rhetoric affects the apprehension of these dispositions it subsumes a related morality in which rhetorical endeavors can be seen as “natural”. So endowed, I believe that this conception of rhetoric offers a number of philosophical and practical implications, one of which is a new way to assess the morality of commercial manifestations of rhetoric such as spin and the use of puffery in advertising.     

Rhetoric vs realism in economic methodology: a critical assessment of recent contributions

This paper reviews the relatively new debate on rhetoric andrealism in economic methodology, concentrating on its main exponents:Deirdre McCloskey on the side of rhetoric, Tony Lawson as theadvocate of critical realism, and Uskali Mäki, arguingfor a combination of rhetoric and realism. The review highlightsa blind spot in the debate, namely the opportunity to rethinkcritically the project of epistemology.     

Pauper Fiction in Economic Science: "Paupers in Almshouses" and the Odd Fit of Oliver Twist

The almshouse dominated the thinking about poverty and the poor during America's period of industrialization and its greatest economic downturns. Yet economists had surprisingly little to say about the facts of almshouse demography, and what they have written has been a rather bad fiction when seen in contrast with American novels. The main object of the paper is to delineate typical characters and characteristics of almshouses in America, and to examine the plausibility of various literary characterizations in light of the facts. The data certainly suggest new stories about paupers in American history: economists, and even the new social historians, have gotten it wrong. Between the Civil War and the Great Depression, the typical pauper living in an almshouse was not Oliver Twist (as many believe). He was not the Shiftless Man of the classical imagination (as Malthusians and Benthamites believe). The typical pauper of an American almshouse was plural. Instructive examples in American literature include Lennie, of Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men ; Denver, of Toni Morrison's Beloved ; Mrs. Thomson, of Edward Eggleston's The Hoosier School-Master ; and Forrest Gump, of Winston Groom's Forrest Gump .     

Getting the timing right: Kairos as the rhetorical framing of time

As organizational actors invoke and create the past, present and future of their organizational contexts in support of proposed decisions, the rhetorical framing of time is central to decision-making. To explain how such rhetorical framing occurs, this paper explores kairos as a conceptualization of the duality of encountering and enabling “the decisive moment.” Following a process of advocating a new IT strategy in a financial firm, we find that kairos appears when the rhetorical framing of time is consistent with dominant interpretations of the interrelations between the past, present and future of the organization. Thus, the paper conceptualizes kairos as constitutive for decision-making; only when the timing is right, will persuasive efforts prevail.