Rob Grootendorst was a Dutch

Netherlands

The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...

 communication

Communication

Communication is the activity of conveying meaningful information. Communication requires a sender, a message, and an intended recipient, although the receiver need not be present or aware of the sender's intent to communicate at the time of communication; thus communication can occur across vast...

 and argumentation theory

Argumentation theory

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 premises. It includes the arts and sciences of civil debate, dialogue, conversation, and persuasion...

 scholar. He was professor for Dutch speech communication at the University of Amsterdam. His contributions to the argumentation field include the co-foundation of the pragma-dialectic school

Pragma-dialectics

Pragma-dialectics, or pragma-dialectical theory, developed by and Rob Grootendorst at the University of Amsterdam, is an argumentation theory that is used to analyze and evaluate argumentation in actual practice...

 in argumentation theory.

He also wrote several books on the life and works of the Dutch writer and politician Theo Thijssen.

Biography

Grootendorst was a teacher at an elementary school in the 1960s. He studied Dutch studies

Dutch studies

Dutch studies may refer to:* the academic study of Dutch culture and language * Japanese Rangaku...

 at the University of Amsterdam since 1980, and became a Ph.D. in 1982 in Speech Communication. The dissertation was jointly written with Frans H. van Eemeren. They jointly founded the International Society for the Study of Argumentation in 1986.