Forthcoming in Proceedings of the Eighth Conference of the International Society for the Study of Argumentation, ed. B. Garssen, D. Godden, F.S. Henkemans & G. Mitchell (Amsterdam: Rozenberg Publishers, 2015) Argument Operators and Hinge Terms in Climate Science GORDON R. MITCHELL & JOHN LYNE Department of Communication University of Pittsburgh USA gordonm@pitt.edu; lyne.john@gmail.com ABSTRACT: Climate scientist James Hansen’s use of we call ‘hinge terms’ — such as ‘dangerous’ and ‘tipping point’ — operate to reconfigure argumentation on global warming by pre-scripting headlines of media coverage on scientific findings. Study of this case stands to elucidate an understudied aspect of the global warming controversy, as well as contribute to understanding of how ‘argument operators’ function to relocate arguments into different contexts, with potential implications for argumentation theory. KEYWORDS: global warming, argument activity type, rhetorical figures, James Hansen, rhetoric of science 1. INTRODUCTION The intellectual roots of American argumentation scholarship intertwine with the tradition of public address criticism, a fact that helps account for the centrality of context in the work of prominent American scholars of argument (e.g., Newman 1961; Zarefsky 1990). The recent launch of the Dutch journal Argumentation in Context, along with a new book series by the same name, provides an occasion to explore how the American approach to criticism of public argument in situated contexts relates to new features of pragma-dialectics that emphasize contextual features of argumentation, such as the concept of “argumentative activity types” (van Eemeren & Houtlosser 2009). Considerable attention has been devoted in pragma-dialectics to understanding how context may “discipline” norms for judging the soundness of arguments that unfold within a particular argumentative activity type (van Eemeren & Houtlosser 2009, p. 15). Left understudied, however, is the question of what happens when an argument shifts from one activity type to another, and further, what moves by interlocutors might spur, or block, such shifts. We use the term “argument operators” to refer to detectable moves that change argument modalities. Our focus here is on operators that relocate arguments within different normative contexts. While context is featured in various ways within the literature of argumentation (e.g. fields, argumentation activity types), it is normally taken to be a form of pre-figured ground that constrains or regulates what is possible within the given context. Our focus differs in that it calls attention to argumentative strategies that relocate an existing argument within a different context, thereby changing the norms and constraints that pertain to the argument. 1 1 We note that the term “operators,” as defined by computer programming languages, may show some elemental similarities to the ones we are describing, in that they allow manipulations of “semantic” as well as