A new issue of the journal Informal Logic explores the work of York University Professor Emeritus Michael Gilbert. The issue Vol. 42 No. 3 (2022) is titled “Special Issue: Michael Gilbert’s Multi-Modal Argumentation” and was published Sept. 7.
Seven scholars have contributed essays describing, critiquing and exploring different aspects of Gilbert’s work in philosophy. Gilbert began studying philosophy in 1962 at what was then Hunter College in the Bronx, a part of the City University of New York, and has yet to stop. His first field of research is argumentation theory, an interdisciplinary area including scholars from philosophy, linguistics, social psychology, and communication theory. His approach is radical insofar as it places emphasis and demands credibility for non-logical modes of communication. Information in arguments is exchanged not through statements, but through messages which include familiar meaning, context, bodily communications, power relations, and intuitions to list but a few of the many resources ordinary people use.
The special issue includes the following articles:
- Multi-Modal 2020: Multi-Modal Argumentation 30 Years Later – Michael A. Gilbert (author, professor emertius in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies (LA&PS))
- Gilbert as Disrupter: Modes (of Many Sorts) in the Theory of Argument – Leo Groarke (author)
- Logics for “Non-Logical” Argumentation: A “Neo-Logicist” Defense of the Primacy of the “Logical” Mode of Argument in Gilbert’s Multi-modal Theory of Argumentation – David Godden (author)
- Amenable Argumentation Approach: Accommodating Emotional Arguments – Linda Carozza (author, faculty member in LA&PS)
- Reflections on the Physical or Visceral Mode of Argumentation in Michael Gilbert’s Theory of Multi-Modal: Argumentation and its Relation to Gesture Studies and The Embodied Mind –Claudio Duran (author, professor emeritus in LA&PS)
- On the Kisceral Mode of Argumentation – Christopher Tindale (author)
- Kisceral Argumentation in Law: Past and Present, Here and There – Marko Novak (author)
The journal’s editors state: “Michael Gilbert first considers the history and development of his theory before Leo Groarke helpfully clarifies the differences and affinities between multi-modal and multimodal argumentation. Then, each of Gilbert’s modes is explored in a separate critical study, with David Godden attending to the logical mode, Linda Carroza to the emotional, Claudio Duran the visceral, and Christopher Tindale the kisceral. A final paper by Marko Novak applies the theory (particularly the kisceral mode) to the field of law. Together, these papers offer readers an opportunity to review the range of ideas associated with Gilbert’s model, and set the grounds for continuing research on this important theory.”
The issue is available online.
Originally published in YFile.