earticle

영어

Argumentation is a social activity whereby an arguer increases the audience’s adherence to claims being advanced. Argumentation is performed at a site of discourse, where the arguer, the audience, and arguments affect each other through a process of argumentation. This study, from a perspective of argumentation studies, attempts a discourse analysis to identify what solicited Okakura Tenshin (1863-1912) to commit so-called complex question fallacies in The Awakening of the East, in which he urged Asian people to take action of resistance against Western imperialism. The paper first clarifies the coercive nature of the pertinent fallacy in the sense that a respondent can be trapped into conceding a presumption embedded in the question given to him/her. A consideration of the historical background suggests that the presumption at stake here does not hint the fact that the Imperial Japan as a newly emerging power intensified tendencies to behave similarly to imperialistic Western nations. Regarding this work of Okakura’s as practical argumentation, i.e. argumentation whereby agents involved make a decision on what to do, this study then shows that the pertinent presumption does not immediately correspond to any premise in the structure of practical argumentation, but contributes to the enhancement of Okakura’s ethos as an arguer. This enhancement of his ethos is expected to establish his communion with Asian people so that their adherence to his claim can increase. Thus this finding reinforces the significance of a reciprocal cooperation between discourse analyses and argumentation studies.