Rhetorical criticism examines ideology as a form of strategic argumentation that functions to legitimize political authority. Ideology presents itself as political philosophy in a way that calls attention to its argumentation. Ideological arguments support claims (1) that those who wield political power represent the interests of all, and (2) that the existing social order is natural and inevitable in light of human nature. Functionally, ideology is indispensible, but perverse. Formally, ideology is argumentation that obscures its partiality under claims to universality.

The issue of the relationship between formal and informal logic depends strongly on how one understands these two designations. While there is very little disagreement about the nature of formal logic, the same is not true regarding informal logic, which is understood in various (often incompatible) ways by various thinkers. After reviewing some of the more prominent conceptions of informal logic, I will present my own, defend it and then show how informal logic, so understood, is complementary to formal logic.

This paper is an exercise in intellectual history, an attempt to understand how a specific term—”informal logic”— came to be interpreted in so many different ways. I trace the emergence and development of “informal logic” to help explain the many different meanings, how they emerged and how they are related. This paper is also, to some degree, an account of a movement that developed outside the mainstream of philosophy, whose origins lie in a desire to make logic useful (echoing Dewey).

In this paper, we will explore two initiatives that focus on the importance of employing logical theories in educating people how to think and reason properly, one in Poland: The Lvov-Warsaw School; the other in North America: The Informal Logic Initiative. These two movements differ in the logical means and skills that they focus on. However, we believe that they share a common purpose: to educate students in logic and reasoning (logical education conceived as a process) so that they may (...) be able to apply their skills to analyze the issues in their society (logical culture as a result of logical education). The aim of the paper is to justify this claim by exploring research objectives and products that are common to both movements. (shrink)

This paper offers a probabilistic treatment of the conditions for argument cogency as endorsed in informal logic: acceptability, relevance, and sufficiency. Treating a natural language argument as a reason-claim-complex, our analysis identifies content features of defeasible argument on which the RSA conditions depend, namely: change in the commitment to the reason, the reason’s sensitivity and selectivity to the claim, one’s prior commitment to the claim, and the contextually determined thresholds of acceptability for reasons and for claims. Results contrast with, and (...) may indeed serve to correct, the informal understanding and applications of the RSA criteria concerning their conceptual dependence, their function as update-thresholds, and their status as obligatory rather than permissive norms, but also show how these formal and informal normative approachs can in fact align. (shrink)

Logic holds an important position in education in China, from primary to higher. The development and spread of logic as a discipline in China has a history of more than a century, beginning during...

The last half of this century witnessed a proliferation of competing and complimentary theories of argumentation, initiated by the methodological shift from the "product" to the "process" of argument. This paper considers the effect of that shift by c omparing the different logical and epistemic status various theories assign to the standards of argument analysis and evaluation. In view of such differences, I argue that the systematic study of argumentation must clearly demarcate the normative and emp irical study of argumentation (...) with sensitivity to both the limit and significance of each. (shrink)

In this paper I develop and defend a form of argumentative normativity that is not based on fundamental principles. I first argue that research agendas that aim to discover fundamental principles of ‘good’ argumentative discourse share one crucial weak spot, viz. circularity. I then argue that this weak spot can be avoided in a pancritical view of normativity.

The issue I address in this paper is the age-old problem of the relationship between logic and rhetoric. More specifically, I ask the question, how do logic and rhetoric differ in their approaches to the study of argumentation? What makes this question timely are the changes that logic has undergone in the last 25 years. In this paper, I develop the idea that an argument is the central event in what I call argumentative space. I present a conception of argumentative (...) space as a subspace within rational space and seek to provide a rough characterization of the main features of argumentative space as understood, on the one hand, by informal logic and, on the other hand, by rhetoric. (shrink)

This paper examines, in studies utilizing Gilbert’s Multi-Modal Argumentation Model, processing of emotional arguments in ads which, due to Western Society’s bias, has tended toward logical analysis, even though they are emotional arguments. It explores reframing the analysis in the culture of Informal Logic, with particular reference to issues of the alethic status of premises, the ethics of claims, the context of assumptions, and the question of what constitutes truth in the context of emotions.