Crispy wrote
I am not sure why you would seperate quotes and replies in your post since they are both considered replies.
Your are right, they are both replies. Eventually, I'd like to provide argument appraisal. So, it is good to know what is being accepted or rejected.
A quote with new evidence acts as a reply and must be evaluated and checked for relevance. However a quote with no grounds, redundant or repetitive is rejected. There are many rules for rejecting. You can see many applied in courts of law: admisibility, irrelevance, conclusive, hearsay, etc. Most of those rules come from Formal Logic, many other from Argumentation Theory: fallacies.
Please have a look at Stephen Toulmin works on Argumentation Theory. He provided one of the most successful approaches to argument analysis and appraisal. I believe something along his work can be done here with this module.
Take a look at this:
(just in case we loose the image above.)
OR, this
| DATA |
--------------- |
inference |
-----------> |
QUALIFIER ---> |
CLAIM |
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| since |
WARRANT |
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unless |
REBUTTAL |
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| because |
BACKING |
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1. Claim: conclusions whose merit must be established. For example, if a person tries to convince a listener that he is a British citizen, the claim would be “I am a British citizen.”
2. Data: the facts we appeal to as a foundation for the claim. For example, the person introduced in 1 can support his claim with the supporting data “I was born in Bermuda.”
3. Warrant: the statement authorizing our movement from the data to the claim. In order to move from the data established in 2, “I was born in Bermuda,” to the claim in 1, “I am a British citizen,” the person must supply a warrant to bridge the gap between 1 & 2 with the statement “A man born in Bermuda will legally be a British Citizen.”
4. Backing: credentials designed to certify the statement expressed in the warrant; backing must be introduced when the warrant itself is not convincing enough to the readers or the listeners. For example, if the listener does not deem the warrant in 3 as credible, the speaker will supply the legal provisions as backing statement to show that it is true that “A man born in Bermuda will legally be a British Citizen.”
5. Rebuttal: statements recognizing the restrictions to which the claim may legitimately be applied. The rebuttal is exemplified as follows, “A man born in Bermuda will legally be a British citizen, unless he has betrayed Britain and has become a spy of another country.”
6. Qualifier: words or phrases expressing the speaker’s degree of force or certainty concerning the claim. Such words or phrases include “possible,” “probably,” “impossible,” “certainly,” “presumably,” “as far as the evidence goes,” or “necessarily.” The claim “I am definitely a British citizen” has a greater degree of force than the claim “I am a British citizen, presumably.”
BACK TO THE QUOTE QUESTION
A quote to an argument already advanced by a peer during the discussion could take any of those six forms, however, since there is a CONTEXT (not shown in diagrams above) we will handle quotes as a reminder of the frame of reference to the whole discussion. This is useful in long threads that span several pages. Arguers and Moderator need to be able to control context. Otherwise, they will start a discussion and end up in a different subject.