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© Michael D. Baumtrog. Informal Logic, Vol 38, No. 1 (2018), pp. 1-12. 

Special Issue 
 

Reason and Rhetoric in 
the Time of Alternative Facts 

 
GUEST EDITORS 

 
KATHARINA STEVENS 
 Philosophy Dept. 
University of Lethbridge  
Lethbridge, AB 
Canada  T1K 3M4 
Katharina.Stevens@uleth.ca 
 
 

MICHAEL D. BAUMTROG 
Law & Business Dept., Ted     
Rogers School of Management  
Ryerson University   
350 Victoria Street 
Toronto, ON  
Canada   M5B 2K3 
baumtrog@ryerson.ca  

 
 
Introduction to the Special Issue 
MICHAEL D. BAUMTROG 
 
1.  Introduction  
This special issue on Reason and Rhetoric in the Time of Alterna-
tive Facts is a response to the noticeable shift in the way reason 
and rhetoric are being employed in the public domain. For us as 
academics, it also constitutes our first step in fulfilling what we 
think is our obligation: to make sense of this new phenomenon and 
evaluate its contributions to or detractions from public reasonable-
ness. The uniqueness of this time is hinted at by the fact that 50 
years ago an expression like “alternative fact”, used anywhere but 
in the legal domain, might have been considered nonsensical given 
its oxymoronic nature. Today, however, the term enjoys wide-
spread usage by skeptics and supporters alike.  
 As history will have it, this time of alternative facts also hap-
pens to fall into what might be called the online era of the digital 



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age. In this online era, contemporary media that make use of the 
internet have undoubtedly contributed to the traction that a term 
like “alternative facts” and the arguments it is used in have found 
in popular usage. In all of the papers comprising this special issue, 
contemporary media, and notably social media, have played an 
important role. They enable the spreading of Fake News (Gelfert), 
serve in the broadcasting of powerful fables (Stevens), multiply 
the effects of Bullshit (Kristiansen and Kaussler), and make all of 
these easily accessible for the illustration of the value of critical 
thinking in the classroom (Sullivan).  

In light of the uniqueness of today’s use of reason and rheto-
ric, along with the contemporary media’s effect on public dis-
course, this introduction will focus on the role of the media in 
order to contextualize the discussion in the articles of this special 
issue.   

2.  Argumentation and the media  
It is hard to overstate the importance of the media on the develop-
ment of informal logic and argumentation as academic areas of 
study. When informal logic was born, radio, television, and news-
paper were the dominant media. The reasoning and arguments 
transmitted through these media quickly found their way into the 
classroom and were discussed around both the dinner table and 
water cooler. With an abundance of arguments to make sense of, 
students and researchers developed methods and theories for how 
to analyze and evaluate them. Indeed, as Ralph Johnson has noted 
on a number of occasions (e.g., 2006, pp. 247-248), the inspiration 
for developing informal logic as its own discipline came, at least 
in part, from his reading of Kahane’s anecdote about a student 
questioning the applicability of traditional logic courses to Presi-
dent Johnson’s decision to escalate the war in Vietnam. As a re-
sult, Johnson and Blair’s textbook Logical Self Defense includes 
two chapters explicitly focused on the media—one on advertising 
and the other on news media. 

In the intervening years much has changed for both argumen-
tation and the media, and much hasn’t. The previously dominant 



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media have not disappeared, but adapted (and continue to adapt) to 
the new dominance of the internet. While traditional radio listen-
ing has declined, it has been followed by dramatic increases in the 
consumption of streaming audio. Listeners now have music, news, 
comedy, and all kinds of other auditory content accessible, on-
demand, through services like Spotify, iTunes\podcasts, and indi-
vidual user live streams. Radio waves no longer limit the reach of 
audio transmission in terms of time or geographical scope: users 
no longer need to tune in, at a specific time, nor do they need to 
live within the boundaries of radio waves to have full access to 
these kinds of auditory transmission.  

Traditionally printed newspapers have also evolved. In their 
new online homes, many now provide mixed-media services and 
expanded free content. The Globe and Mail, The New York Times, 
and The Washington Post have all developed expansive websites, 
offering audio, video, and text-based news. In addition, news sites 
leaning toward both sides of the political spectrum have sprung up 
and gained notoriety entirely via the internet (cf. The Intercept and 
Breitbart). Without the physical costs of paper and the limits of 
distribution imposed by it, these sites have been able to gain read-
ership at unprecedented rates.  

Finally, while traditional television remains widely available 
and viewed, online audio-video sources continue to grow in num-
ber. They offer on-demand viewing of everything from the latest 
blockbuster films, to entire university courses, to live streams of 
protests on the other side of the planet, provided by platforms such 
as Netflix, YouTube, and Livestream, respectively.   

This evolution means that the way we receive arguments and 
the way arguments travel is now importantly different than it was 
when studies of informal logic and argumentation began. The 
internet is now the main source of news for people across the 
globe (cf. Newman et al. 2015; Newman et al. 2017) and people 
are using Facebook and Google as their top news sources. And, 
perhaps now more than ever, we are witnessing the impact of 
some of these changes even if we don’t yet fully understand them.  



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3.  Travelling arguments  
Why does it matter if arguments travel? Several scholars of argu-
mentation, informal logic, and critical thinking have exchanged 
the requirement that a good argument be true, with the requirement 
that a good argument be acceptable. The exchange is motivated in 
part by the insight that much of what we discuss is not a matter of 
truth or falsity. The question of whether President Johnson should 
escalate the war in Vietnam is better understood as one with a 
justifiably supported answer rather than a true answer. In addition, 
as a philosophical problem, capital T Truth is hard to come by. 
Making Truth a necessary component of a good argument would 
unnecessarily exclude a large number of good arguments from 
receiving a positive evaluation.  

If arguments cannot or should not be assessed on the merit of 
truth, the next best thing is to assess them via challenge. For 
pragma-dialecticians (van Eemeren and Grootendorst 2004), the 
critical testing of a standpoint is an essential feature of good argu-
ments. The best arguments withstand the most (ideally, all) chal-
lenges. For the informal logical and rhetorical approaches, argu-
ments, when not tested by real audiences, are imagined to face 
ideal (Blair and Johnson 1987) or hypothetical (Tindale 1999) 
audiences. The role of imagining these audiences is to put the 
argument to the strongest test possible. If we don’t know the truth, 
the best thing we can do is test our arguments against the best of 
what we do know. And in Wohlrapp’s theory of argument (2014), 
a thesis is valid if the argumentative structure supporting it can be 
used to answer all open objections. 

 If this is the way to evaluate arguments, then it is crucial that 
arguments travel, since one test does not say much about the quali-
ty of an argument. You and I may agree that we have a good ar-
gument, but as soon as it leaves our conversation and is evaluated 
by our friends in the United States, it could quickly turn out to be 
of a lesser quality than anticipated. The farther an argument can 
travel, the more it can be tested, the more it may also be improved. 
Ideally, at the end of the day, the travelling of arguments allows us 



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to recognize weak and strong arguments as what they are, and to 
place our trust in the strong ones.  

Aside from face-to-face communication, the mass and social 
media constitute two main modes of argument travel. A nation-
wide broadcast can literally move an argument from the steps of 
Parliament in Ottawa to the kitchen of a homeless shelter in Van-
couver in an instant, while our interpersonal international connec-
tions, webbed together via social media, can allow less mainstream 
arguments to travel worldwide in a matter of hours.  

Ideally, moving from context to context, and meeting the 
challenges of differing audiences, demonstrates an argument’s 
strength or lack thereof. In other words, a strong argument should 
have public merit. As William Rheg has argued,  

An argument A has public merits insofar as A travels through a 
well-structured network of relevant technical and policy contexts 
by its ability (a) to meet challenges and (b) find uptake in topically 
relevant contexts and (c) find confirmation in materially relevant 
contexts. (2009, p. 56)   

On his view, contexts are topically relevant insofar as mem-
bers of the different contexts share expertise in the same field and 
experimental methods and they are narrowly materially relevant 
insofar as members have the expertise to test/confirm the quality 
of the argument content (2009, p, 51). In other words, cogent 
arguments meet the demands of, and are taken up and confirmed 
by, people familiar with the methods of arriving at the conclusion 
and with the expertise to confirm it. 

Rheg also identifies contexts that are broadly materially rele-
vant. And although he leaves the idea admittedly under-developed 
(2009, p. 57) it may be most important for present purposes. Using 
the evolution vs. divine creation debate as an illustration, he ar-
gues that two contexts are broadly materially relevant for each 
other insofar as each appears to address the same question (in the 
evolutionary debate, regarding the origin of species), but the ele-
ments of expertise—the technical vocabulary, methods of inquiry, 
and standards of cogent argument—differ (ibid.). In broadly mate-
rially relevant contexts, cross-context communication can become 



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quite difficult, making it seem as though the questions at issue 
fundamentally diverge (ibid.). 

Rheg’s ideas as expressed in his 2009 paper focused on the 
travel of scientific arguments. For those arguments, talk of experts 
and procedures is quite fitting. When moving to the social domain, 
however, where political arguments, primarily addressed to the 
voting public start to travel, notions of topical and material rele-
vance become much harder to track. In the public domain of gen-
erally social and political argumentation, who counts as an expert 
becomes a difficult question. People seldom demonstrate humility 
regarding their expertise and indeed, as Rheg acknowledges, their 
standards of cogent argument can differ significantly. As the say-
ing goes (often accompanied by an eyeroll), on social issues “eve-
ryone’s a damn expert”. 

To be fair, although the general population (the editors of this 
issue included) could benefit from a greater recognition of the 
limits of their expertise pertaining to a number of arguments found 
in the political area, it is also understandable and even necessary 
that the lay person should form opinions on such topics. After all, 
they are being asked to do so, and insofar as they are members of 
the public, they need to form opinions on issues of public concern 
if they are to fulfill their civic duties. Whether people are qualified 
or not, in today’s version of the online era the conclusions they 
come to on these issues will have a dramatic effect on the rest of 
the arguments they are presented with. 

4.  Divided publics 
Despite the importance of argument travel, the abovementioned 
evolution in media means that the ability for arguments to travel 
has also evolved and, maybe counter-intuitively, been restricted in 
many cases. As Eli Pariser (2011) has argued, the evolution of the 
internet and social media has brought with it the creation of the 
“Filter Bubble”. A filter bubble is the name attributed to the expe-
rience that a user of the web, and especially of social media, en-
counters after an algorithm selects and prioritizes the content s/he 
is presented with. In short, when you are surfing the web, the 



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clicks you make are tracked and used to create a personal profile 
of your interests and opinions. Google has been open about their 
attempts to personalize advertising, but less well known is that 
personalization also effects general search results as well as the 
posts you are more or less likely to see on social media platforms 
like Facebook. Since users are more likely to click things they 
agree with, they are presented with more things they are likely to 
agree with. This creates what Pariser calls a “You Loop” (ibid., 
Ch. 4), which occurs when the platform shows you information. 
you agree with, causing you to click it, and thereby re-affirming 
for that platform that it is information you agree with. Since there 
is an indescribable volume of information available on the web, 
the prioritization of certain content means other content is restrict-
ed, filtered away from the information you receive on a daily 
basis.  

A wide-ranging study from 2017 has shown that “More than 
half of us (54%) prefer paths that use algorithms to select stories 
rather than editors or journalists (44%). This effect is even more 
apparent for those who mainly use smartphones (58%) and for 
younger users (64%)” (Newman et al. 2017). In addition to algo-
rithms, many of our favourite news sources now also provide the 
option to receive alerts for breaking news. Alerts like these keep 
us attached to sources we pre-approve and contribute to our physi-
cal attachment to technology. As The Economist (not so elegantly) 
explains, “Overall, Americans touch their smartphones on average 
more than 2,600 times a day (the heaviest users easily double that). 
The population of America farts about 3m times a minute. It likes 
things on Facebook about 4m times a minute” (The Economist, 
2017 p. 20). Our reliance on our internet-connected technologies, 
especially those that purposefully filter our access to information 
(like Facebook), keeps us in our own information bubbles, regular-
ly confirming—or at least not questioning—our basic assumptions 
about the social and political world and the way it ought to work.  

These loops can become especially dangerous when they re-
enforce harmful narratives. As Katharina Stevens has shown, 
fables used to mischaracterize American immigrants can be ex-
tremely powerful. If my search for “Trump speech” leads me to 



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the fable of the snake she discusses, and its persuasive force is 
effective, my next click may end me up on a link associated with 
the keywords “Trump”, “snake”, and “immigrant”. Having learned 
of my interest in the topic, a later search for “American immigra-
tion”, rather than presenting neutral statistics at the top of the list, 
may instead show me items related anti-immigration policy. Like-
wise, a search for “Trump speech” that lands me on a speech he 
made to business executives in the 1990s, may in the end prevent 
me from ever encountering his fable at all. 
 Of course, bubbles can be bigger and smaller. On the smallest 
scale, we each have our own bubble. But by virtue of living within 
a society, few of us are truly unique in a way that means we won’t 
share interests and opinions with others. On a big enough scale, we 
might posit two to three huge bubbles, each tinted a certain colour, 
corresponding to the right, center, and left of the political spec-
trum. One way to identify which colour your bubble is, is to find 
your position on any number of central issues. Once identified, 
these positions can be understood as what you take to be starting 
premises—unquestioned assumptions upon which the rest of your 
views are based. Simply stated, those basic and shared assump-
tions of the political left, centre, and right mean that web users are 
presented with content generally in agreement with those basic 
beliefs/assumptions and generally not provided with information 
that contradicts it.  

On this scale, however, the bubbles encompassing those with 
shared basic premises are so huge that within them we can still see 
how an argument could be said to have appropriately travelled and 
earned its public merit. Take, for example, the contemporary 
debate on gun control. Proponents of both sides of this debate (and 
those in between) can point to arguments that have traveled in the 
sense Rheg identifies as producing public merit—meeting chal-
lenges, while finding uptake in topically relevant contexts and 
getting confirmed in materially relevant contexts. This fact could 
be part of what keeps the left and right in eternal political opposi-
tion: both sides are able to produce demonstrations of how their 
arguments have cogently travelled, that is, have been tested, taken 
up, and confirmed across a multitude of relevant micro contexts. 



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Understood in this way, a term like ‘alternative fact’ starts to 
make some sense. One bubble has one set of facts, another bubble 
another set. Viewed from one bubble, the facts of another are 
‘alternative’. On this understanding, the tested premises and con-
clusions of the arguments in each bubble, become the truths—the 
facts—of that bubble. This could be why Kristiansen and Kaussler 
argue in their article in this special issue, “If something is thought 
to be true in the minds of audiences, then for them that belief 
might as well be true”. 

5.  Reminding ourselves of the importance of an old debate  
If our collective filter bubbles are so big that within them argu-
ments can be seen to have gained public merit, but between them 
opposition remains, we end up in a position where different con-
clusions, seemingly equally well supported and worthy of ac-
ceptance, exist simultaneously. If truth is not a criterion of good 
arguments, and oppositional arguments all gain legitimate accept-
ability, we find ourselves at a deep impasse, not just between 
political views, but in how we should conceptualize the normative 
dimensions of argument and its evaluation (see Boger 2005). 
Similar to Stevens’s contention that “We will reject an argument 
that makes use of inferences not allowed in the frame we have 
adopted” (see this issue), we can expect that we will reject an 
argument that makes use of inferences not grounded on the basic 
assumptions colouring our bubbles.  

The problem that occurs when arguments circle around the 
same bubbles is that important premises are left unquestioned and 
certain conclusions are left unchallenged. Replacing truth with 
acceptability as a standard for argumentation evaluation works 
best when you have diverse and equally powerful voices contrib-
uting reasons. However, given our bubbles produced by the algo-
rithmic tendency for things to be presented that we agree with, the 
acceptability criterion is met artificially easily. As Gelfert points 
out,  

Perspective matters. For the recipient of a piece of disinformation, 
or someone who is confronted with an instance of fake news, it 



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does little good to be told that they should only accept what they 
are told if, in fact, it meets the requisite criteria of veracity and 
truthfulness. To be sure, there may be an objective fact of the mat-
ter whether the purported information or news items represents 
reality, but from the perspective of the recipient, this relationship 
is epistemically inscrutable. (See this issue.) 

One way out is to look back toward truth for an answer. Could 
truth be the all-encompassing bubble? Or could it be a spear, able 
to pierce each bubble to get to the heart of each argument? A 
golden arrow travelling through the otherwise tinted argumentative 
worlds? It does not seem likely. As Kristenssen and Klauster 
remind us, “Historically derived, contextually informed, subjec-
tively determined, and ultimately distorted by innate inadequacies 
in the human sensory apparatus, the establishing of truth—or 
falsity for that matter—is a difficult proposition” (see this issue).  

Another option is to encourage each other to break out of our 
bubbles. This means hunting for arguments against our basic 
assumptions and understanding what tints other bubbles and why. 
It means employing our critical thinking. As Stephen Sullivan 
emphasises, “critical thinking itself demands a willingness to 
consider diverse perspectives and is inconsistent with indoctrina-
tion” (see this issue). It thus means acknowledging that we must 
do the opposite of what we have been trained to do. While much 
of our effort has been aimed at resolving disagreements, the lesson 
here is that today, it might be just as valuable to try to find them. 

6. Organization of the Issue 
The rest of the issue is organized as follows. The first article, “The 
Bullshit Doctrine: Fabrications, Lies, and Nonsense in the Age of 
Trump” by Lars J. Kristiansen and Bernd Kaussler, aims to put 
real instances of Bullshit on the table. Although the concept of 
linguistic bullshit has been debated and evolved over time, the 
conversation has largely been restrained to the theoretical realm. 
Presenting a multitude of examples, Kristiansen and Kaussler 
show how the American president produces Bullshit that meets the 
characterizations provided by a number of different authors, there-



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by providing a rare empirical analysis of Bullshit in political ac-
tion.  

In the second article “Trump, Snakes, and the Power of Fa-
bles” Katharina Stevens focuses on an oft (and still) used fable that 
Donald Trump tells to link snakes to the dangers of immigration. 
Using an argumentative lens, Stevens discusses the use of fables as 
argumentative source analogues and demonstrates their dangers 
when used for overly narrow comparisons. She then explores the 
further danger that can result from fables when they function as 
frame setting arguments—establishing premises that will remain 
unquestioned in later instances of reasoning and argumentation. 

The third research-focused article in this issue, “‘Fake News’: 
A Definition” by Axel Gelfert, illustrates both the importance and 
difficulty of accounting for the phenomenon referred to as “fake 
news”. Grounding his proposed definition in a survey of existing 
conceptions, Gelfert argues that the central feature of fake news is 
that it is produced by design. In so doing, he also explores how 
fake news capitalizes on our existing cognitive biases, causing 
them to become more prevalent even against our better judgement.  

The fourth paper in this volume is a Teaching Supplement that 
provides valuable examples and reflects upon author Stephen 
Sullivan’s experience of using “Donald Trump as a Critical-
Thinking Teaching Assistant”. Sullivan engagingly narrates his 
experience and groups his examples into useful categories for 
undergraduate instruction. He is also careful to provide wise warn-
ings concerning the dangers involved in using Trump too much. 

Taken together, this special issue of Informal Logic consti-
tutes one early step in trying to make sense of the unique employ-
ment of reason and rhetoric that we are living with today. Our 
hope is that the articles presented here can be used as reference 
points for further analysis, discussion, and debate involved in the 
argumentative practices that are taking place now and that will 
almost certainly surprise us again in the future.  
 Finally, as guest editors, we would like to express our sincere 
gratitude to all of the reviewers who took their time to provide 
detailed comments on and suggestions for the manuscsripts sub-
mitted to our call. We are equally thankful to all of the authors, 



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12 

who have worked over the past months to prepare and polish their 
thoughts on the complicated and sometimes downright odd issues 
emanating from the contemporary political environment. And we 
thank the Editors for giving us this opportunity and for their ongo-
ing support. 
 
 
References 
 
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