Suchergebnisse

The present article addresses the professional conclusions of an international platform of education in intercultural discourse in the European Union's EDUC Project. In flagging social issues and concerns, cross-cultural academic collaboration is a powerful tool to bring about social change. In our educational project participants encounter different cultures, so the discussed topics, and especially the metaphors for the Covid-19 pandemic, receive instant reflections from different cultural perspectives, multiplying the potential sphere of valid interpretations, yielding novel perspectives in intercultural pragmatics and communication. This gives birth to a novel methodology that builds on the open-minded integration of different points of view, understanding universal traits of human cognition and differences in culture in the linguistics of discourse.

The persuasive power of metaphor is often seen in opposition to rational procedures in argumentation, which should guarantee deliberative democracy in the public sphere. Against this view, referable to the classic theory of argumentation, we adopt the argumentative theory of reasoning (MERCIER, SPERBER 2011) and present the results of an experimental study on the role of metaphors in a specific argumentative fallacy, the quaternio terminorum (ERVAS, LEDDA 2014; ERVAS, GOLA, LEDDA, SERGIOLI 2015). In light of the experimental evidence, we argue that (1) it is no longer possible to evaluate the role of metaphors in argumentation without distinguishing different kinds of metaphors (in the experimental study the distinction between dead and live metaphors is analysed); (2) it is possible to identify different argumentative styles (i.e. argumentative persuasion and reflective argumentation). Connecting different kinds of metaphors with different argumentative styles, we propose an interpretative framework able to integrate persuasion and argumentation.