Logical Argument vs Acceptable Argument: Towards the Research Approach to the Analysis of Criticism in Scientific Text

The issues of the correlation of logical validity and acceptability of the argument for the addressee are discussed in the article. The aim of the work is to clarify the meaning of formal logic in the reconstruction of argumentative discourse. The novelty of the study is initiated by the applicable approach to the research of addressee semantics in the praxis of scientific reviewing. The hypothesis of the research is that criticism in the texts of scientific reviews contains a directive to an acceptable argument. In this case, syllogistics as a modality of reaching an inference provides the objectivity of the analysis. The commonality of the subject matter protects the analysis from the reviewer's subjective interpretation. L.G. Vasilyev's method is applied in the article; it is based on the modification of the argumentative function model. The method implies the procedure of syllogistic reconstruction according to the thesis and the average term. The pragma-dialectical model of critical discussion is used to analyze the argumentative situation on the level of interaction. The interactive level of analysis involves the notion of counter-argument, and textual fragments with criticism, reconstructed due to the rules of logic, indicate the quality of the initial text. In the scrutinized texts, one can think of two types of standard objectionable from the critical point of view: revealing violation of the logical validity of pro-argument and revealing violation of conventional standards of the representation of the scientific result. A violation of standards of logical validity is connected with the focus of counter-argument. The focus of data criticism points out the defectiveness of the argument with regard to relevance, quality and quantity. The focus of foundation criticism refers to arguments that do not reach a conclusion, as well as to the absence of logical link. The focus of thesis criticism is basically connected with the rebuttal of the thesis that can be explicit or implicit. The most frequently encountered logical fallacies are “circular reasoning” and “no consequence”, which are identified in criticism. The most frequent fallacy of this type is the fallacy of “begging the question”. Among informal fallacies in pro-argument there are fallacies known as “appeal to the authority”, “appeal to the majority”, “appeal to the tradition”. The authors have coined a new fallacy, the so-called “fallacy of repeated argument” which appears when a proponent fails to take into account the results of similar research and verifies the evidence that has already been proved. The text corpus shows that the subject of systematic criticism on behalf of the opponent is the identification of the violation of academic writing standards. The authors' analysis reveals criticism regarding the lexis and style of writing, the structure of the text, grammatical and spelling errors. The article provides insights on the communicative code, which includes argumentative maxims and principles as well as principles of interpretation that are supposed to prohibit any distorting of the author's position and finding additional meanings in the scientific review.

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