Argumentation theory
Encyclopedia
Argumentation theory, or argumentation, is the interdisciplinary study of how humans should, can, and do reach conclusions through logical reasoning, that is, claims based, soundly or not, on premise
s. It includes the arts and sciences of civil debate, dialogue
, conversation, and persuasion
. It studies rules of inference
, logic
, and procedural rules in both artificial
and real world settings.
Argumentation includes debate
and negotiation
which are concerned with reaching mutually acceptable conclusions. It also encompasses eristic
dialog, the branch of social debate in which victory over an opponent is the primary goal. This art and science is often the means by which people protect their beliefs or self-interests in rational dialogue, in common parlance, and during the process of arguing.
Argumentation is used in law
, for example in trials, in preparing an argument to be presented to a court, and in testing the validity
of certain kinds of evidence. Also, argumentation scholars study the post hoc rationalizations by which organizational actors try to justify decisions they have made irrationally.
An argument must have at least one premise and one conclusion.
Often classical logic is used as the method of reasoning so that the conclusion follows logically from the assumptions or support. One challenge is that if the set of assumptions is inconsistent then anything can follow logically from inconsistency. Therefore it is common to insist that the set of assumptions is consistent. It is also good practice to require the set of assumptions to be the minimal set, with respect to set inclusion, necessary to infer the consequent. Such arguments are called MINCON arguments, short for minimal consistent. Such argumentation has been applied to the fields of law and medicine. A second school of argumentation investigates abstract arguments, where 'argument' is considered a primitive term, so no internal structure of arguments is taken on account.
In its most common form, argumentation involves an individual and an interlocutor/or opponent engaged in dialogue, each contending differing positions and trying to persuade each other. Other types of dialogue in addition to persuasion are eristic
, information
seeking, inquiry
, negotiation
, deliberation
, and the dialectical method (Douglas Walton). The dialectical method was made famous by Plato
and his use of Socrates
critically questioning various characters and historical figures.
, a theory of knowledge (epistemology) in the field of philosophy
. It sought to find the grounds for claims in the forms (logic) and materials (factual laws) of a universal system of knowledge. But argument scholars gradually rejected Aristotle's systematic philosophy and the idealism
in Plato and Kant. They questioned and ultimately discarded the idea that argument premises take their soundness from formal philosophical systems. The field thus broadened.
Karl R. Wallace's seminal essay, "The Substance of Rhetoric: Good Reasons" in the Quarterly Journal of Speech (1963) 44, led many scholars to study "marketplace argumentation" - the ordinary arguments of ordinary people. The seminal essay on marketplace argumentation is Ray Lynn Anderson and C. David Mortensen,"Logic and Marketplace Argumentation" Quarterly Journal of Speech 53 (1967): 143-150. This line of thinking led to a natural alliance with late developments in the sociology of knowledge
. Some scholars drew connections with recent developments in philosophy, namely the pragmatism
of John Dewey
and Richard Rorty
. Rorty has called this shift in emphasis "the linguistic turn
".
In this new hybrid approach argumentation is used with or without empirical
evidence to establish convincing conclusions about issues which are moral, scientific, epistemic, or of a nature in which science alone cannot answer. Out of pragmatism and many intellectual developments in the humanities and social sciences, "non-philosophical" argumentation theories grew which located the formal and material grounds of arguments in particular intellectual fields. These theories include informal logic
, social epistemology
, ethnomethodology
, speech acts, the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of science, and social psychology
. These new theories are not non-logical or anti-logical. They find logical coherence in most communities of discourse. These theories are thus often labeled "sociological" in that they focus on the social grounds of knowledge.
, Richard Rieke, Gordon Mitchell, Carol Winkler, Eric Gander, Dennis S. Gouran, Daniel J. O'Keefe
, Mark Aakhus, Bruce Gronbeck, James Klumpp, G. Thomas Goodnight
, Robin Rowland
, Dale Hample
, C. Scott Jacobs
, Sally Jackson
, David Zarefsky
, and Charles Arthur Willard
) while the term "informal logic
" is preferred by philosophers, stemming from University of Windsor
philosophers Ralph H. Johnson
and J. Anthony Blair. Harald Wohlrapp
developed a criterion for validness (Geltung, Gültigkeit) as freedom of objections.
Trudy Govier, Douglas Walton, Michael Gilbert, Harvey Seigal, Michael Scriven
, and John Woods
(to name only a few) are other prominent authors in this tradition. Over the past thirty years, however, scholars from several disciplines have co-mingled at international conferences such as that hosted by the University of Amsterdam (the Netherlands) and the International Society for the Study of Argumentation (ISSA). Other international conferences are the biannual conference held at Alta, Utah sponsored by the (US) National Communication Association
and American Forensics Association and conferences sponsored by the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation (OSSA).
Some scholars (such as Ralph H. Johnson) construe the term "argument" narrowly, as exclusively written discourse or even discourse in which all premises are explicit. Others (such as Michael Gilbert) construe the term "argument" broadly, to include spoken and even nonverbal discourse, for instance the degree to which a war memorial or propaganda poster can be said to argue or "make arguments." The philosopher Stephen E. Toulmin
has said that an argument is a claim on our attention and belief, a view that would seem to authorize treating, say, propaganda posters as arguments. The dispute between broad and narrow theorists is of long standing and is unlikely to be settled. The views of the majority of argumentation theorists and analysts fall somewhere between these two extremes.
, discourse analysis and discursive psychology, as well as being a coherent discipline in its own right. Recently CA techniques of sequential analysis have been employed by phoneticians to explore the fine phonetic details of speech.
Empirical studies and theoretical formulations by Sally Jackson and Scott Jacobs, and several generations of their students, have described argumentation as a form of managing conversational disagreement within communication contexts and systems that naturally prefer agreement.
s. The project was developed by Russell and Whitehead in their Principia Mathematica. If an argument can be cast in the form of sentences in Symbolic Logic, then it can be tested by the application of accepted proof procedures. This has been carried out for Arithmetic using Peano axioms. Be that as it may, an argument in Mathematics, as in any other discipline, can be considered valid only if it can be shown that it cannot have true premises and a false conclusion.
coined the expression "low information voters" to describe most voters who know very little about politics or the world in general.
In practice, a "low information voter" may not be aware of legislation that their representative has sponsored in Congress. A low-information voter may base their ballot box
decision on a media sound-bite, or a flier received in the mail. It is possible for a media sound-bite or campaign flier to present a political position for the incumbent
candidate that completely contradicts the legislative action taken in Washington D.C. on behalf of the constituents. It may only take a small percentage of the overall voting group who base their decision on the inaccurate information, a voter block of 10 to 12%, to swing an overall election result. When this happens, the constituency at large may have been duped or fooled. Nevertheless, the election result is legal and confirmed. Savvy Political consultants
will take advantage of low-information voters and sway their votes with misinformation
because it can be easier and sufficiently effective. Institutions such as factcheck.org have come about in recent years to help counter the effects of such campaign tactics. Factcheck.org's stated goal is "We aim to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics, for voters".
has long studied the non-logical aspects of argumentation. For example, studies have shown that simple repetition of an idea is often a more effective method of argumentation than appeals to reason. Propaganda
often utilizes repetition. Nazi rhetoric has been studied extensively as, inter alia, a repetition campaign.
Empirical studies of communicator credibility and attractiveness, sometimes labeled charisma, have also been tied closely to empirically-occurring arguments. Such studies bring argumentation within the ambit of persuasion theory and practice.
Some psychologists such as William J. McGuire believe that the syllogism
is the basic unit of human reasoning. They have produced a large body of empirical work around McGuire's famous title "A Syllogistic Analysis of Cognitive Relationships." A central line of this way of thinking is that logic is contaminated by psychological variables such as "wishful thinking," in which subjects confound the likelihood of predictions with the desirability of the predictions. People hear what they want to hear and see what they expect to see. If planners want something to happen they see it as likely to happen. Thus planners ignore possible problems, as in the American experiment with prohibition. If they hope something will not happen, they see it as unlikely to happen. Thus smokers think that they personally will avoid cancer. Promiscuous people practice unsafe sex. Teenagers drive recklessly.
and Charles Arthur Willard
have championed the idea of argument fields, the former drawing upon Ludwig Wittgenstein's
notion of language games
, (Sprachspiel) the latter drawing from communication and argumentation theory, sociology, political science, and social epistemology. For Toulmin, the term "field" designates discourses within which arguments and factual claims are grounded. For Willard, the term "field" is interchangeable with "community," "audience," or "readership." Along similar lines, G. Thomas Goodnight has studied "spheres" of argument and sparked a large literature created by younger scholars responding to or using his ideas. The general tenor of these field theories is that the premises of arguments take their meaning from social communities.
Field studies might focus on social movements, issue-centered publics (for instance, pro-life versus pro-choice in the abortion dispute), small activist groups, corporate public relations campaigns and issue management, scientific communities and disputes, political campaigns, and intellectual traditions. In the manner of a sociologist, ethnographer, anthropologist, participant-observer, and journalist, the field theorist gathers and reports on real-world human discourses, gathering case studies that might eventually be combined to produce high-order explanations of argumentation processes. This is not a quest for some master language or master theory covering all specifics of human activity. Field theorists are agnostic about the possibility of a single grand theory and skeptical about the usefulness of such a theory. Theirs is a more modest quest for "mid-range" theories that might permit generalizations about families of discourses.
To describe his vision of daily life, Toulmin introduced the concept of argument fields; in The Uses of Argument (1958), Toulmin states that some aspects of arguments vary from field to field, and are hence called “field-dependent,” while other aspects of argument are the same throughout all fields, and are hence called “field-invariant.” The flaw of absolutism, Toulmin believes, lies in its unawareness of the field-dependent aspect of argument; absolutism assumes that all aspects of argument are field invariant.
Toulmin’s theories resolve to avoid the defects of absolutism without resorting to relativism: relativism, Toulmin asserted, provides no basis for distinguishing between a moral or immoral argument. In Human Understanding (1972), Toulmin suggests that anthropologists have been tempted to side with relativists because they have noticed the influence of cultural variations on rational arguments; in other words, the anthropologist or relativist overemphasizes the importance of the “field-dependent” aspect of arguments, and becomes unaware of the “field-invariant” elements. In an attempt to provide solutions to the problems of absolutism and relativism, Toulmin attempts throughout his work to develop standards that are neither absolutist nor relativist for assessing the worth of ideas.
Toulmin believes that a good argument can succeed in providing good justification to a claim, which will stand up to criticism and earn a favourable verdict.
The first three elements “claim,” “data,” and “warrant” are considered as the essential components of practical arguments, while the second triad “qualifier,” “backing,” and “rebuttal” may not be needed in some arguments.
When first proposed, this layout of argumentation is based on legal arguments and intended to be used to analyze the rationality of arguments typically found in the courtroom; in fact, Toulmin did not realize that this layout would be applicable to the field of rhetoric
and communication until his works were introduced to rhetoricians by Wayne Brockriede and Douglas Ehninger. Only after he published Introduction to Reasoning (1979) were the rhetorical applications of this layout mentioned in his works.
Toulmin proposes an evolutionary model of conceptual change comparable to Darwin’s model of biological evolution. On this reasoning, conceptual change involves innovation and selection. Innovation accounts for the appearance of conceptual variations, while selection accounts for the survival and perpetuation of the soundest conceptions. Innovation occurs when the professionals of a particular discipline come to view things differently from their predecessors; selection subjects the innovative concepts to a process of debate and inquiry in what Toulmin considers as a “forum of competitions.” The soundest concepts will survive the forum of competition as replacements or revisions of the traditional conceptions.
From the absolutists’ point of view, concepts are either valid or invalid regardless of contexts; from a relativists’ perspective, one concept is neither better nor worse than a rival concept from a different cultural context. From Toulmin’s perspective, the evaluation depends on a process of comparison, which determines whether or not one concept will provide improvement to our explanatory power more so than its rival concepts.
under the name pragma-dialectics. The intuitive idea is to formulate clearcut rules that, if followed, will yield rational discussion and sound conclusions. Frans H. van Eemeren, the late Rob Grootendorst
, and many of their students have produced a large body of work expounding this idea.
The dialectical conception of reasonableness is given by ten rules for critical discussion, all being instrumental for achieving a resolution of the difference of opinion (from Van Eemeren, Grootendorst, & Snoeck Henkemans, 2002, p. 182-183). The theory postulates this as an ideal model, and not something one expects to find as an empirical fact. The model can however serve as an important heuristic and critical tool for testing how reality approximates this ideal and point to where discourse goes wrong, that is, when the rules are violated. Any such violation will constitute a fallacy. Albeit not primarily focused on fallacies, pragma-dialectics provides a systematic approach to deal with them in a coherent way.
to perform and analyze the act of argumentation with computers. Argumentation has been used to provide a proof-theoretic semantics for non-monotonic logic
, starting with the influential work of Dung (1995). Computational argumentation systems have found particular application in domains where formal logic and classical decision theory are unable to capture the richness of reasoning, domains such as law and medicine. A comprehensive overview of this area can be found in a recent book edited by Iyad Rahwan and Guillermo R. Simari.
Within Computer Science, the ArgMAS workshop series (Argumentation in Multi-Agent Systems), the CMNA workshop series, and now the COMMA Conference, are regular annual events attracting participants from every continent. The journal Argument & Computation is dedicated to exploring the intersection between argumentation and computer science.
Premise
Premise can refer to:* Premise, a claim that is a reason for, or an objection against, some other claim as part of an argument...
s. It includes the arts and sciences of civil debate, dialogue
Dialogue
Dialogue is a literary and theatrical form consisting of a written or spoken conversational exchange between two or more people....
, conversation, and persuasion
Persuasion
Persuasion is a form of social influence. It is the process of guiding or bringing oneself or another toward the adoption of an idea, attitude, or action by rational and symbolic means.- Methods :...
. It studies rules of inference
Inference
Inference is the act or process of deriving logical conclusions from premises known or assumed to be true. The conclusion drawn is also called an idiomatic. The laws of valid inference are studied in the field of logic.Human inference Inference is the act or process of deriving logical conclusions...
, logic
Logic
In philosophy, Logic is the formal systematic study of the principles of valid inference and correct reasoning. Logic is used in most intellectual activities, but is studied primarily in the disciplines of philosophy, mathematics, semantics, and computer science...
, and procedural rules in both artificial
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
and real world settings.
Argumentation includes debate
Debate
Debate or debating is a method of interactive and representational argument. Debate is a broader form of argument than logical argument, which only examines consistency from axiom, and factual argument, which only examines what is or isn't the case or rhetoric which is a technique of persuasion...
and negotiation
Negotiation
Negotiation is a dialogue between two or more people or parties, intended to reach an understanding, resolve point of difference, or gain advantage in outcome of dialogue, to produce an agreement upon courses of action, to bargain for individual or collective advantage, to craft outcomes to satisfy...
which are concerned with reaching mutually acceptable conclusions. It also encompasses eristic
Eristic
Eristic, from the ancient Greek word Eris meaning wrangle or strife, often refers to a type of argument where the participants fight and quarrel without any reasonable goal....
dialog, the branch of social debate in which victory over an opponent is the primary goal. This art and science is often the means by which people protect their beliefs or self-interests in rational dialogue, in common parlance, and during the process of arguing.
Argumentation is used in law
Law
Law is a system of rules and guidelines which are enforced through social institutions to govern behavior, wherever possible. It shapes politics, economics and society in numerous ways and serves as a social mediator of relations between people. Contract law regulates everything from buying a bus...
, for example in trials, in preparing an argument to be presented to a court, and in testing the validity
Validity
In logic, argument is valid if and only if its conclusion is entailed by its premises, a formula is valid if and only if it is true under every interpretation, and an argument form is valid if and only if every argument of that logical form is valid....
of certain kinds of evidence. Also, argumentation scholars study the post hoc rationalizations by which organizational actors try to justify decisions they have made irrationally.
Key components of argumentation
- Understanding and identifying arguments, either explicit or implied, and the goals of the participants in the different types of dialogue.
- Identifying the premises from which conclusions are derived
- Establishing the "burden of proof" — determining who made the initial claim and is thus responsible for providing evidence why his/her position merits acceptance
- For the one carrying the "burden of proof", the advocate, to marshal evidenceEvidenceEvidence in its broadest sense includes everything that is used to determine or demonstrate the truth of an assertion. Giving or procuring evidence is the process of using those things that are either presumed to be true, or were themselves proven via evidence, to demonstrate an assertion's truth...
for his/her position in order to convince or force the opponent's acceptance. The method by which this is accomplished is producing valid, sound, and cogent arguments, devoid of weaknesses, and not easily attacked. - In a debate, fulfillment of the burden of proof creates a burden of rejoinder. One must try to identify faulty reasoning in the opponent’s argument, to attack the reasons/premises of the argument, to provide counterexamples if possible, to identify any logical fallacies, and to show why a valid conclusion cannot be derived from the reasons provided for his/her argument.
Internal structure of arguments
Typically an argument has an internal structure, comprising the following- a set of assumptions or premises
- a method of reasoning or deduction and
- a conclusion or point.
An argument must have at least one premise and one conclusion.
Often classical logic is used as the method of reasoning so that the conclusion follows logically from the assumptions or support. One challenge is that if the set of assumptions is inconsistent then anything can follow logically from inconsistency. Therefore it is common to insist that the set of assumptions is consistent. It is also good practice to require the set of assumptions to be the minimal set, with respect to set inclusion, necessary to infer the consequent. Such arguments are called MINCON arguments, short for minimal consistent. Such argumentation has been applied to the fields of law and medicine. A second school of argumentation investigates abstract arguments, where 'argument' is considered a primitive term, so no internal structure of arguments is taken on account.
In its most common form, argumentation involves an individual and an interlocutor/or opponent engaged in dialogue, each contending differing positions and trying to persuade each other. Other types of dialogue in addition to persuasion are eristic
Eristic
Eristic, from the ancient Greek word Eris meaning wrangle or strife, often refers to a type of argument where the participants fight and quarrel without any reasonable goal....
, information
Information
Information in its most restricted technical sense is a message or collection of messages that consists of an ordered sequence of symbols, or it is the meaning that can be interpreted from such a message or collection of messages. Information can be recorded or transmitted. It can be recorded as...
seeking, inquiry
Inquiry
An inquiry is any process that has the aim of augmenting knowledge, resolving doubt, or solving a problem. A theory of inquiry is an account of the various types of inquiry and a treatment of the ways that each type of inquiry achieves its aim.-Deduction:...
, negotiation
Negotiation
Negotiation is a dialogue between two or more people or parties, intended to reach an understanding, resolve point of difference, or gain advantage in outcome of dialogue, to produce an agreement upon courses of action, to bargain for individual or collective advantage, to craft outcomes to satisfy...
, deliberation
Deliberation
Deliberation is a process of thoughtfully weighing options, usually prior to voting. In legal settings a jury famously uses deliberation because it is given specific options, like guilty or not guilty, along with information and arguments to evaluate. Deliberation emphasizes the use of logic and...
, and the dialectical method (Douglas Walton). The dialectical method was made famous by Plato
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
and his use of Socrates
Socrates
Socrates was a classical Greek Athenian philosopher. Credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy, he is an enigmatic figure known chiefly through the accounts of later classical writers, especially the writings of his students Plato and Xenophon, and the plays of his contemporary ...
critically questioning various characters and historical figures.
Argumentation and the grounds of knowledge
Argumentation theory had its origins in foundationalismFoundationalism
Foundationalism is any theory in epistemology that holds that beliefs are justified based on what are called basic beliefs . This position is intended to resolve the infinite regress problem in epistemology...
, a theory of knowledge (epistemology) in the field of philosophy
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
. It sought to find the grounds for claims in the forms (logic) and materials (factual laws) of a universal system of knowledge. But argument scholars gradually rejected Aristotle's systematic philosophy and the idealism
Idealism
In philosophy, idealism is the family of views which assert that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. Epistemologically, idealism manifests as a skepticism about the possibility of knowing any mind-independent thing...
in Plato and Kant. They questioned and ultimately discarded the idea that argument premises take their soundness from formal philosophical systems. The field thus broadened.
Karl R. Wallace's seminal essay, "The Substance of Rhetoric: Good Reasons" in the Quarterly Journal of Speech (1963) 44, led many scholars to study "marketplace argumentation" - the ordinary arguments of ordinary people. The seminal essay on marketplace argumentation is Ray Lynn Anderson and C. David Mortensen,"Logic and Marketplace Argumentation" Quarterly Journal of Speech 53 (1967): 143-150. This line of thinking led to a natural alliance with late developments in the sociology of knowledge
Sociology of knowledge
The Sociology of knowledge is the study of the relationship between human thought and the social context within which it arises, and of the effects prevailing ideas have on societies...
. Some scholars drew connections with recent developments in philosophy, namely the pragmatism
Pragmatism
Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition centered on the linking of practice and theory. It describes a process where theory is extracted from practice, and applied back to practice to form what is called intelligent practice...
of John Dewey
John Dewey
John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. Dewey was an important early developer of the philosophy of pragmatism and one of the founders of functional psychology...
and Richard Rorty
Richard Rorty
Richard McKay Rorty was an American philosopher. He had a long and diverse academic career, including positions as Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Princeton, Kenan Professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia, and Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University...
. Rorty has called this shift in emphasis "the linguistic turn
Linguistic turn
The linguistic turn was a major development in Western philosophy during the 20th century, the most important characteristic of which is the focusing of philosophy and the other humanities primarily on the relationship between philosophy and language....
".
In this new hybrid approach argumentation is used with or without empirical
Empirical
The word empirical denotes information gained by means of observation or experimentation. Empirical data are data produced by an experiment or observation....
evidence to establish convincing conclusions about issues which are moral, scientific, epistemic, or of a nature in which science alone cannot answer. Out of pragmatism and many intellectual developments in the humanities and social sciences, "non-philosophical" argumentation theories grew which located the formal and material grounds of arguments in particular intellectual fields. These theories include informal logic
Informal logic
Informal logic, intuitively, refers to the principles of logic and logical thought outside of a formal setting. However, perhaps because of the informal in the title, the precise definition of informal logic is matters of some dispute. Ralph H. Johnson and J...
, social epistemology
Social epistemology
Social epistemology is a broad set of approaches to the study of knowledge, all of which construe human knowledge as a collective achievement. Another way of positioning social epistemology is as the study of the social dimensions of knowledge. One of the enduring difficulties with defining social...
, ethnomethodology
Ethnomethodology
Ethnomethodology is an ethnographic approach to sociological inquiry introduced by the American sociologist Harold Garfinkel . Ethnomethodology's research interest is the study of the everyday methods people use for the production of social order...
, speech acts, the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of science, and social psychology
Social psychology
Social psychology is the scientific study of how people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. By this definition, scientific refers to the empirical method of investigation. The terms thoughts, feelings, and behaviors include all...
. These new theories are not non-logical or anti-logical. They find logical coherence in most communities of discourse. These theories are thus often labeled "sociological" in that they focus on the social grounds of knowledge.
Approaches to argumentation in communication and informal logic
In general, the label "argumentation" is used by communication scholars such as (to name only a few) Wayne E. Brockriede, Douglas Ehninger, Joseph W. WenzelJoseph W. Wenzel
Joseph W. Wenzel is an American argumentation and rhetorical scholar. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana.He has lectured in Austria, France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands...
, Richard Rieke, Gordon Mitchell, Carol Winkler, Eric Gander, Dennis S. Gouran, Daniel J. O'Keefe
Daniel J. O'Keefe
Daniel J. O'Keefe is an American communication and argumentation theory scholar. He is the Owen L. Coon Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. His research concerns persuasion and argumentation, with a focus on meta-analytic synthesis of research...
, Mark Aakhus, Bruce Gronbeck, James Klumpp, G. Thomas Goodnight
G. Thomas Goodnight
G. Thomas Goodnight is an American argumentation and rhetorical scholar.He is a professor and director of doctoral studies in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California...
, Robin Rowland
Robin Rowland
Robin Rowland is an American argumentation and rhetorical scholar. He is a professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas. He has published in Communication Monographs, Journal of the American Forensic Association, Quarterly Journal of Speech, and...
, Dale Hample
Dale Hample
Dale Hample is an American argumentation and rhetorical scholar, associate Professor at the University of Maryland . He has published many peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, and written one book and edited another....
, C. Scott Jacobs
C. Scott Jacobs
Curtis Scott Jacobs, , is an American argumentation, communication, and rhetorical scholar.He graduated from the University of Illinois with a Ph.d. He taught for many years at the University of Arizona. He is now Professor of Communication at the University of Illinois...
, Sally Jackson
Sally Jackson
Sally Jackson is an American scholar of argumentation, communication, and rhetoric.Dr. Jackson served as the chief information officer for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign., but resigned from the position on April 8, 2011 due to disagreement with a change in administrative reporting...
, David Zarefsky
David Zarefsky
David Zarefsky is an American communication scholar with research specialties in rhetorical history and criticism. He is professor emeritus at Northwestern University. He is a past president of the National Communication Association and the Rhetoric Society of America...
, and Charles Arthur Willard
Charles Arthur Willard
Charles Arthur Willard is an American argumentation and rhetorical theorist.He received his doctorate at the University of Illinois, Urbana, USA, in 1972. From 1974 to 1982 he was the Director of Forensics at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire . He has lectured in Austria, Canada, France,...
) while the term "informal logic
Informal logic
Informal logic, intuitively, refers to the principles of logic and logical thought outside of a formal setting. However, perhaps because of the informal in the title, the precise definition of informal logic is matters of some dispute. Ralph H. Johnson and J...
" is preferred by philosophers, stemming from University of Windsor
University of Windsor
The University of Windsor is a public comprehensive and research university in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. It is Canada's southernmost university. It has a student population of approximately 15,000 full-time and part-time undergraduate students and over 1000 graduate students...
philosophers Ralph H. Johnson
Ralph Johnson (philosopher)
Ralph H. Johnson is a native of Detroit, Michigan. Johnson has been credited as one of the founding members of the informal logic movement in North America, along with J. Anthony Blair who co-published one of the movement’s most influential texts, “Logical Self-Defense,” with Johnson...
and J. Anthony Blair. Harald Wohlrapp
Harald Wohlrapp
Harald Wohlrapp is a German philosopher. His main focus is argumentation theory.- Argumentation theory :...
developed a criterion for validness (Geltung, Gültigkeit) as freedom of objections.
Trudy Govier, Douglas Walton, Michael Gilbert, Harvey Seigal, Michael Scriven
Michael Scriven
Michael Scriven is a British-born academic, with a first degree in mathematics and a doctorate in philosophy. He has made significant contributions in the fields of philosophy, psychology, critical thinking, and, most notably, evaluation .He has produced over 400 scholarly publications and has...
, and John Woods
John Woods (logician)
John Hayden Woods is a Canadian logician and philosopher, currently Director of the Abductive Systems Group at the University of British Columbia and The UBC Honorary Professor of Logic. He has also been affiliated with the Group on Logic, Information and Computation, of the Department of...
(to name only a few) are other prominent authors in this tradition. Over the past thirty years, however, scholars from several disciplines have co-mingled at international conferences such as that hosted by the University of Amsterdam (the Netherlands) and the International Society for the Study of Argumentation (ISSA). Other international conferences are the biannual conference held at Alta, Utah sponsored by the (US) National Communication Association
National Communication Association
The National Communication Association is the largest national organization to promote communication scholarship and education. A non-profit organization that has over 8,000 educators, practitioners, and students who work and reside in every state and more than 20 countries...
and American Forensics Association and conferences sponsored by the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation (OSSA).
Some scholars (such as Ralph H. Johnson) construe the term "argument" narrowly, as exclusively written discourse or even discourse in which all premises are explicit. Others (such as Michael Gilbert) construe the term "argument" broadly, to include spoken and even nonverbal discourse, for instance the degree to which a war memorial or propaganda poster can be said to argue or "make arguments." The philosopher Stephen E. Toulmin
Stephen Toulmin
Stephen Edelston Toulmin was a British philosopher, author, and educator. Influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Toulmin devoted his works to the analysis of moral reasoning. Throughout his writings, he sought to develop practical arguments which can be used effectively in evaluating the ethics behind...
has said that an argument is a claim on our attention and belief, a view that would seem to authorize treating, say, propaganda posters as arguments. The dispute between broad and narrow theorists is of long standing and is unlikely to be settled. The views of the majority of argumentation theorists and analysts fall somewhere between these two extremes.
Conversational argumentation
The study of naturally-occurring conversation arose from the field of sociolinguistics. It is usually called conversational analysis. Inspired by ethnomethodology, it was developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s principally by the sociologist Harvey Sacks and, among others, his close associates Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson. Sacks died early in his career, but his work was championed by others in his field, and CA has now become an established force in sociology, anthropology, linguistics, speech-communication and psychology. It is particularly influential in interactional sociolinguisticsInteractional sociolinguistics
Interactional sociolinguistics is a subdiscipline of linguistics that uses discourse analysis to study how language users create meaning via interaction. Interactional sociolinguistics was founded by linguistic anthropologist John J. Gumperz...
, discourse analysis and discursive psychology, as well as being a coherent discipline in its own right. Recently CA techniques of sequential analysis have been employed by phoneticians to explore the fine phonetic details of speech.
Empirical studies and theoretical formulations by Sally Jackson and Scott Jacobs, and several generations of their students, have described argumentation as a form of managing conversational disagreement within communication contexts and systems that naturally prefer agreement.
Mathematical argumentation
The basis of mathematical truth has been the subject of long debate. Frege in particular sought to demonstrate (see Gottlob Frege, The Foundations of Arithemetic, 1884, and Logicism in Philosophy of mathematics) that arithmetical truths can be derived from purely logical axioms and therefore are, in the end, logical truthLogical truth
Logical truth is one of the most fundamental concepts in logic, and there are different theories on its nature. A logical truth is a statement which is true and remains true under all reinterpretations of its components other than its logical constants. It is a type of analytic statement.Logical...
s. The project was developed by Russell and Whitehead in their Principia Mathematica. If an argument can be cast in the form of sentences in Symbolic Logic, then it can be tested by the application of accepted proof procedures. This has been carried out for Arithmetic using Peano axioms. Be that as it may, an argument in Mathematics, as in any other discipline, can be considered valid only if it can be shown that it cannot have true premises and a false conclusion.
Scientific argumentation
Perhaps the most radical statement of the social grounds of scientific knowledge appears in Alan G.Gross's The Rhetoric of Science (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990). Gross holds that science is rhetorical "without remainder," meaning that scientific knowledge itself cannot be seen as an idealized ground of knowledge. Scientific knowledge is produced rhetorically, meaning that it has special epistemic authority only insofar as its communal methods of verification are trustworthy. This thinking represents an almost complete rejection of the foundationalism on which argumentation was first based.Legal argumentation
Legal arguments are spoken presentations to a judge or appellate court by a lawyer, or parties when representing themselves of the legal reasons why they should prevail. Oral argument at the appellate level accompanies written briefs, which also advance the argument of each party in the legal dispute. A closing argument, or summation, is the concluding statement of each party's counsel reiterating the important arguments for the trier of fact, often the jury, in a court case. A closing argument occurs after the presentation of evidence.Political argumentation
Political arguments are used by academics, media pundits, candidates for political office and government officials. Political arguments are also used by citizens in ordinary interactions to comment about and understand political events. The rationality of the public is a major question in this line of research. A robust political science research tradition seems to prove that the American public is largely irrational and ignorant of even the most basic knowledge of national or world affairs. Political scientist Samuel L. PopkinSamuel L. Popkin
Samuel L. Popkin is a noted political scientist who teaches at the University of California, San Diego. He received his Ph.D. from M.I.T. in 1969. Popkin has played a role in the development of rational choice theory within political science. He is also noted for his work as a pollster.Popkin has...
coined the expression "low information voters" to describe most voters who know very little about politics or the world in general.
In practice, a "low information voter" may not be aware of legislation that their representative has sponsored in Congress. A low-information voter may base their ballot box
Ballot box
A ballot box is a temporarily sealed container, usually square box though sometimes a tamper resistant bag, with a narrow slot in the top sufficient to accept a ballot paper in an election but which prevents anyone from accessing the votes cast until the close of the voting period...
decision on a media sound-bite, or a flier received in the mail. It is possible for a media sound-bite or campaign flier to present a political position for the incumbent
Incumbent
The incumbent, in politics, is the existing holder of a political office. This term is usually used in reference to elections, in which races can often be defined as being between an incumbent and non-incumbent. For example, in the 2004 United States presidential election, George W...
candidate that completely contradicts the legislative action taken in Washington D.C. on behalf of the constituents. It may only take a small percentage of the overall voting group who base their decision on the inaccurate information, a voter block of 10 to 12%, to swing an overall election result. When this happens, the constituency at large may have been duped or fooled. Nevertheless, the election result is legal and confirmed. Savvy Political consultants
Political consulting
Political consulting, beyond the self-evident definition of consulting in political matters, refers to a specific management consulting industry which has grown up around advising and assisting political campaigns. This article deals primarily with the development and nature of political consulting...
will take advantage of low-information voters and sway their votes with misinformation
Misinformation
Misinformation is false or inaccurate information that is spread unintentionally. It is distinguished from disinformation by motive in that misinformation is simply erroneous, while disinformation, in contrast, is intended to mislead....
because it can be easier and sufficiently effective. Institutions such as factcheck.org have come about in recent years to help counter the effects of such campaign tactics. Factcheck.org's stated goal is "We aim to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics, for voters".
Psychological aspects
PsychologyPsychology
Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...
has long studied the non-logical aspects of argumentation. For example, studies have shown that simple repetition of an idea is often a more effective method of argumentation than appeals to reason. Propaganda
Propaganda
Propaganda is a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position so as to benefit oneself or one's group....
often utilizes repetition. Nazi rhetoric has been studied extensively as, inter alia, a repetition campaign.
Empirical studies of communicator credibility and attractiveness, sometimes labeled charisma, have also been tied closely to empirically-occurring arguments. Such studies bring argumentation within the ambit of persuasion theory and practice.
Some psychologists such as William J. McGuire believe that the syllogism
Syllogism
A syllogism is a kind of logical argument in which one proposition is inferred from two or more others of a certain form...
is the basic unit of human reasoning. They have produced a large body of empirical work around McGuire's famous title "A Syllogistic Analysis of Cognitive Relationships." A central line of this way of thinking is that logic is contaminated by psychological variables such as "wishful thinking," in which subjects confound the likelihood of predictions with the desirability of the predictions. People hear what they want to hear and see what they expect to see. If planners want something to happen they see it as likely to happen. Thus planners ignore possible problems, as in the American experiment with prohibition. If they hope something will not happen, they see it as unlikely to happen. Thus smokers think that they personally will avoid cancer. Promiscuous people practice unsafe sex. Teenagers drive recklessly.
Argument fields
Stephen E. ToulminStephen Toulmin
Stephen Edelston Toulmin was a British philosopher, author, and educator. Influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Toulmin devoted his works to the analysis of moral reasoning. Throughout his writings, he sought to develop practical arguments which can be used effectively in evaluating the ethics behind...
and Charles Arthur Willard
Charles Arthur Willard
Charles Arthur Willard is an American argumentation and rhetorical theorist.He received his doctorate at the University of Illinois, Urbana, USA, in 1972. From 1974 to 1982 he was the Director of Forensics at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire . He has lectured in Austria, Canada, France,...
have championed the idea of argument fields, the former drawing upon Ludwig Wittgenstein's
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He was professor in philosophy at the University of Cambridge from 1939 until 1947...
notion of language games
Language-game
A language-game is a philosophical concept developed by Ludwig Wittgenstein, referring to simple examples of language use and the actions into which the language is woven.- Description :...
, (Sprachspiel) the latter drawing from communication and argumentation theory, sociology, political science, and social epistemology. For Toulmin, the term "field" designates discourses within which arguments and factual claims are grounded. For Willard, the term "field" is interchangeable with "community," "audience," or "readership." Along similar lines, G. Thomas Goodnight has studied "spheres" of argument and sparked a large literature created by younger scholars responding to or using his ideas. The general tenor of these field theories is that the premises of arguments take their meaning from social communities.
Field studies might focus on social movements, issue-centered publics (for instance, pro-life versus pro-choice in the abortion dispute), small activist groups, corporate public relations campaigns and issue management, scientific communities and disputes, political campaigns, and intellectual traditions. In the manner of a sociologist, ethnographer, anthropologist, participant-observer, and journalist, the field theorist gathers and reports on real-world human discourses, gathering case studies that might eventually be combined to produce high-order explanations of argumentation processes. This is not a quest for some master language or master theory covering all specifics of human activity. Field theorists are agnostic about the possibility of a single grand theory and skeptical about the usefulness of such a theory. Theirs is a more modest quest for "mid-range" theories that might permit generalizations about families of discourses.
Stephen E. Toulmin's Contributions
By far, the most influential theorist has been the late Stephen E. Toulmin, the Cambridge educated philosopher and student of Wittgenstein. What follows below is a sketch of his ideas.An Alternative to Absolutism and Relativism
Toulmin has argued that absolutism (represented by theoretical or analytic arguments) has limited practical value. Absolutism is derived from Plato’s idealized formal logic, which advocates universal truth; thus absolutists believe that moral issues can be resolved by adhering to a standard set of moral principles, regardless of context. By contrast, Toulmin asserts that many of these so-called standard principles are irrelevant to real situations encountered by human beings in daily life.To describe his vision of daily life, Toulmin introduced the concept of argument fields; in The Uses of Argument (1958), Toulmin states that some aspects of arguments vary from field to field, and are hence called “field-dependent,” while other aspects of argument are the same throughout all fields, and are hence called “field-invariant.” The flaw of absolutism, Toulmin believes, lies in its unawareness of the field-dependent aspect of argument; absolutism assumes that all aspects of argument are field invariant.
Toulmin’s theories resolve to avoid the defects of absolutism without resorting to relativism: relativism, Toulmin asserted, provides no basis for distinguishing between a moral or immoral argument. In Human Understanding (1972), Toulmin suggests that anthropologists have been tempted to side with relativists because they have noticed the influence of cultural variations on rational arguments; in other words, the anthropologist or relativist overemphasizes the importance of the “field-dependent” aspect of arguments, and becomes unaware of the “field-invariant” elements. In an attempt to provide solutions to the problems of absolutism and relativism, Toulmin attempts throughout his work to develop standards that are neither absolutist nor relativist for assessing the worth of ideas.
Toulmin believes that a good argument can succeed in providing good justification to a claim, which will stand up to criticism and earn a favourable verdict.
Components of argument
In The Uses of Argument (1958), Toulmin proposed a layout containing six interrelated components for analyzing arguments:- 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.” (1)
- 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.” (2)
- 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.” (3)
- 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.”
- 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.”
- 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.”
The first three elements “claim,” “data,” and “warrant” are considered as the essential components of practical arguments, while the second triad “qualifier,” “backing,” and “rebuttal” may not be needed in some arguments.
When first proposed, this layout of argumentation is based on legal arguments and intended to be used to analyze the rationality of arguments typically found in the courtroom; in fact, Toulmin did not realize that this layout would be applicable to the field of rhetoric
Rhetoric
Rhetoric is the art of discourse, an art that aims to improve the facility of speakers or writers who attempt to inform, persuade, or motivate particular audiences in specific situations. As a subject of formal study and a productive civic practice, rhetoric has played a central role in the Western...
and communication until his works were introduced to rhetoricians by Wayne Brockriede and Douglas Ehninger. Only after he published Introduction to Reasoning (1979) were the rhetorical applications of this layout mentioned in his works.
The Evolution of Knowledge
Toulmin's Human Understanding (1972) asserts that conceptual change is evolutionary. This book attacks Thomas Kuhn’s explanation of conceptual change in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn held that conceptual change is a revolutionary (as opposed to an evolutionary) process in which mutually exclusive paradigms compete to replace one another. Toulmin criticizes the relativist elements in Kuhn’s thesis, as he points out that the mutually exclusive paradigms provide no ground for comparison; in other words, Kuhn’s thesis has made the relativists’ error of overemphasizing the “field variant” while ignoring the “field invariant,” or commonality shared by all argumentation or scientific paradigms.Toulmin proposes an evolutionary model of conceptual change comparable to Darwin’s model of biological evolution. On this reasoning, conceptual change involves innovation and selection. Innovation accounts for the appearance of conceptual variations, while selection accounts for the survival and perpetuation of the soundest conceptions. Innovation occurs when the professionals of a particular discipline come to view things differently from their predecessors; selection subjects the innovative concepts to a process of debate and inquiry in what Toulmin considers as a “forum of competitions.” The soundest concepts will survive the forum of competition as replacements or revisions of the traditional conceptions.
From the absolutists’ point of view, concepts are either valid or invalid regardless of contexts; from a relativists’ perspective, one concept is neither better nor worse than a rival concept from a different cultural context. From Toulmin’s perspective, the evaluation depends on a process of comparison, which determines whether or not one concept will provide improvement to our explanatory power more so than its rival concepts.
Rejection of Certainty
In Cosmopolis (1990), Toulmin traces the Quest for Certainty back to Descartes and Hobbes, and lauds Dewey, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Rorty for abandoning that tradition.Pragma-dialectics
Scholars at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands have pioneered a rigorous modern version of dialecticDialectic
Dialectic is a method of argument for resolving disagreement that has been central to Indic and European philosophy since antiquity. The word dialectic originated in Ancient Greece, and was made popular by Plato in the Socratic dialogues...
under the name pragma-dialectics. The intuitive idea is to formulate clearcut rules that, if followed, will yield rational discussion and sound conclusions. Frans H. van Eemeren, the late Rob Grootendorst
Rob Grootendorst
Rob Grootendorst was a Dutch communication and argumentation theory scholar. He was professor for Dutch speech communication at the University of Amsterdam...
, and many of their students have produced a large body of work expounding this idea.
The dialectical conception of reasonableness is given by ten rules for critical discussion, all being instrumental for achieving a resolution of the difference of opinion (from Van Eemeren, Grootendorst, & Snoeck Henkemans, 2002, p. 182-183). The theory postulates this as an ideal model, and not something one expects to find as an empirical fact. The model can however serve as an important heuristic and critical tool for testing how reality approximates this ideal and point to where discourse goes wrong, that is, when the rules are violated. Any such violation will constitute a fallacy. Albeit not primarily focused on fallacies, pragma-dialectics provides a systematic approach to deal with them in a coherent way.
Artificial intelligence
Efforts have been made within the field of artificial intelligenceArtificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
to perform and analyze the act of argumentation with computers. Argumentation has been used to provide a proof-theoretic semantics for non-monotonic logic
Non-monotonic logic
A non-monotonic logic is a formal logic whose consequence relation is not monotonic. Most studied formal logics have a monotonic consequence relation, meaning that adding a formula to a theory never produces a reduction of its set of consequences. Intuitively, monotonicity indicates that learning a...
, starting with the influential work of Dung (1995). Computational argumentation systems have found particular application in domains where formal logic and classical decision theory are unable to capture the richness of reasoning, domains such as law and medicine. A comprehensive overview of this area can be found in a recent book edited by Iyad Rahwan and Guillermo R. Simari.
Within Computer Science, the ArgMAS workshop series (Argumentation in Multi-Agent Systems), the CMNA workshop series, and now the COMMA Conference, are regular annual events attracting participants from every continent. The journal Argument & Computation is dedicated to exploring the intersection between argumentation and computer science.
Further reading
Flagship journals:- Argumentation
- Informal Logic
- Argumentation and Advocacy (formerly Journal of the American Forensic Association)
- Social Epistemology
- Episteme: a journal of social epistemology
Sources
- J. Robert Cox and Charles Arthur Willard, eds. Advances in Argumentation Theory and Research 1982.
- Dung, P. M. "On the acceptability of arguments and its fundamental role in nonmonotonic reasoning, logic programming and n-person games." Artificial Intelligence, 77: 321-357 (1995).
- Bondarenko, A., Dung, P. M., Kowalski, R., and Toni, F. , "An abstract, argumentation-theoretic approach to default reasoning", Artificial Intelligence 93(1-2) 63-101 (1997).
- Dung, P. M., Kowalski, R., and Toni, F. "Dialectic proof procedures for assumption-based, admissible argumentation." Artificial Intelligence. 170(2), 114-159 (2006).
- Frans van Eemeren, Rob Grootendorst, Sally Jackson, and Scott Jacobs, Reconstructing Argumentative Discourse 1993.
- Frans Van Eemeren & Rob Grootendorst. A systematic theory of argumentation. The pragma-dialected approach. 2004.
- Eemeren, F.H. van, Grootendorst, R. & Snoeck Henkemans, F. et al. (1996). Fundamentals of Argumentation Theory. A Handbook of Historical Backgrounds and Contemporary Developments. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
- Richard H. Gaskins Burdens of Proof in Modern Discourse. Yale University PressYale University PressYale University Press is a book publisher founded in 1908 by George Parmly Day. It became an official department of Yale University in 1961, but remains financially and operationally autonomous....
. 1993. - Michael A. Gilbert Coalescent Argumentation 1997.
- Trudy Govier, Problems in Argument Analysis and Evaluation. 1987.
- Dale Hample. (1979). "Predicting belief and belief change using a cognitive theory of argument and evidence." Communication Monographs. 46, 142-146.
- Dale Hample. (1978). "Are attitudes arguable?" Journal of Value Inquiry. 12, 311-312.
- Dale Hample. (1978). "Predicting immediate belief change and adherence to argument claims." Communication Monographs, 45, 219-228.
- Dale Hample & Judy Hample. (1978). "Evidence credibility." Debate Issues. 12, 4-5.
- Dale Hample. (1977). "Testing a model of value argument and evidence." Communication Monographs. 14, 106-120.
- Dale Hample. (1977). "The Toulmin model and the syllogism." Journal of the American Forensic Association. 14, 1-9.
- Trudy Govier, A Practical Study of Argument2nd ed. 1988.
- Sally Jackson and Scott Jacobs, "Structure of Conversational Argument: Pragmatic Bases for the Enthymeme." The Quarterly Journal of Speech. LXVI, 251-265.
- Ralph H. JohnsonRalph Johnson (philosopher)Ralph H. Johnson is a native of Detroit, Michigan. Johnson has been credited as one of the founding members of the informal logic movement in North America, along with J. Anthony Blair who co-published one of the movement’s most influential texts, “Logical Self-Defense,” with Johnson...
. Manifest Rationality: A Pragmatic Theory of Argument. Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000. - Ralph H. Johnson and J. Anthony Blair. "Logical Self-Defense", IDEA, 2006. First published, McGraw Hill Ryerson, Toronto, ON, 1997, 1983, 1993. Reprinted, McGraw Hill, New York, NY, 1994.
- Ralph Johnson. and Blair, J. Anthony (1987), "The Current State of Informal Logic", Informal Logic, 9(2–3), 147–151.
- Ralph H. Johnson. H. (1996). The rise of informal logic. Newport News, VA: Vale Press
- Ralph H. Johnson. (1999). The relation between formal and informal logic. Argumentation, 13(3) 265-74.
- Ralph H. Johnson. & Blair, J. A. (1977). Logical self-defense. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson. US Edition. (2006). New York: Idebate Press.
- Ralph H. Johnson. & Blair, J. Anthony. (1987). The current state of informal logic. Informal Logic 9, 147-51.
- Ralph H. Johnson. & Blair, J. Anthony. (1996). Informal logic and critical thinking. In F. van Eemeren, R. Grootendorst, & F. Snoeck Henkemans (Eds.), Fundamentals of Argumentation Theory. (pp. 383–86). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates
- Ralph H. Johnson, Ralph. H. & Blair, J. Anthony. (2000). "Informal logic: An overview." Informal Logic. 20(2): 93-99.
- Ralph H. Johnson, Ralph. H. & Blair, J. Anthony. (2002). Informal logic and the reconfiguration of logic. In D. Gabbay, R. H. Johnson, H.-J. Ohlbach and J. Woods (Eds.). Handbook of the logic of argument and inference: The turn towards the practical. (pp. 339–396). Elsivier: North Holland.
- Chaim PerelmanChaim PerelmanChaïm Perelman was a Polish-born philosopher of law, who studied, taught, and lived most of his life in Brussels. He was among the most important argumentation theorists of the twentieth century...
and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric, Notre Dame, 1970. - Stephen ToulminStephen ToulminStephen Edelston Toulmin was a British philosopher, author, and educator. Influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Toulmin devoted his works to the analysis of moral reasoning. Throughout his writings, he sought to develop practical arguments which can be used effectively in evaluating the ethics behind...
. The uses of argument. 1959. - Stephen Toulmin. The Place of Reason in Ethics. 1964.
- Stephen Toulmin. Human Understanding: The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts. 1972.
- Stephen Toulmin. Cosmopolis. 1993.
- Douglas N. Walton, The Place of Emotion in Argument. 1992.
- Joseph W. WenzelJoseph W. WenzelJoseph W. Wenzel is an American argumentation and rhetorical scholar. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana.He has lectured in Austria, France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands...
1990 Three perspectives on argumentation. In R Trapp and J Scheutz, (Eds.), Perspectives on argumentation: Essays in honour of Wayne Brockreide. 9-26 Waveland Press: Prospect Heights, IL - John Woods. (1980). What is informal logic? In J.A. Blair & R. H. Johnson (Eds.), Informal Logic: The First International Symposium .(pp. 57–68). Point Reyes, CA: Edgepress.
- John Woods. (2000). How Philosophical is Informal Logic? Informal Logic. 20(2): 139-167. 2000
- Charles Arthur WillardCharles Arthur WillardCharles Arthur Willard is an American argumentation and rhetorical theorist.He received his doctorate at the University of Illinois, Urbana, USA, in 1972. From 1974 to 1982 he was the Director of Forensics at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire . He has lectured in Austria, Canada, France,...
Liberalism and the Problem of Knowledge: A New Rhetoric for Modern Democracy. University of Chicago Press. 1996. - Charles Arthur Willard, A Theory of Argumentation. University of Alabama PressUniversity of Alabama PressThe University of Alabama Press was founded in 1945 and is the scholarly publishing arm of the University of Alabama.An Editorial Board composed of representatives from all doctoral degree granting public universities within Alabama oversees the publishing program. Projects are selected that...
. 1989. - Charles Arthur Willard, Argumentation and the Social Grounds of KnowledgeUniversity of Alabama Press. 1982.
- Harald WohlrappHarald WohlrappHarald Wohlrapp is a German philosopher. His main focus is argumentation theory.- Argumentation theory :...
. Der Begriff des Arguments. Über die Beziehungen zwischen Wissen, Forschen, Glaube, Subjektivität und Vernunft. Würzburg: Königshausen u. Neumann, 2008 ISBN 978-3-8260-3820-4
External links
- Universiteit Utrecht
- Universiteit Twente
- L'Argumentation: Introduction à l'étude du discours Free on-line book by Mariana Tutescu previously published in 1998 as ISBN 9735752484
- Argumentum.ch, E-course of Argumentation Theory for the Human and Social Sciences
- Interview with Stephen Toulmin in JAC