This paper attempts to define the concept of critique, explain its function␣and properties and distinguish it from the close concept of evaluation. It is argued that, beyond the argument, a critique is concerned with the position of the proponent relatively to the reality the argument is about. Moreover, a critique is itself an argument in which assumptions regarding the position of the proponent are justified for a given audience on the basis of the proponent’s argumentative background within a specific domain.

A macroscope is proposed and tested here for the discovery of the unique argumentative footprint that characterizes how a collective manages differences and pursues disagreement through argument in a polylogue. The macroscope addresses broader analytic problems posed by various conceptualizations of large-scale argument, such as fields, spheres, communities, and institutions. The design incorporates a two-tier methodology for detecting argument patterns of the arguments performed in arguing by an interactive collective that produces views, or topographies, of the ways that issues are (...) generated in the making and defending of standpoints. The design premises for the macroscope build on insights about argument patterns from pragma-dialectical theory by incorporating research and theory on disagreement management and the Argumentum Model of Topics. The design reconceptualizes prototypical and stereotypical argument patterns for characterizing large-scale argumentation. A prototype of the macroscope is tested on data drawn from six threads about oil-drilling and fracking from the subreddit Changemyview. The implementation suggests the efficacy of the macroscope’s design and potential for identifying what communities make controversial and how the disagreement space in a polylogue is managed through stereotypical argument patterns in terms of claims/premises, inferential relations, and presentational devices. (shrink)

In The Uses of Argument, Stephen Toulmin proposed a model for the layout of arguments: claim, data, warrant, qualifier, rebuttal, backing. Since then, Toulmin’s model has been appropriated, adapted and extended by researchers in speech communications, philosophy and artificial intelligence. This book assembles the best contemporary reflection in these fields, extending or challenging Toulmin’s ideas in ways that make fresh contributions to the theory of analysing and evaluating arguments.

Relevance of premises to conclusion can be explicated through Toulmin’s notion of warrant, understood as an inference rule, albeit not necessarily formal. A normative notion of relevance requires the warrant to be reliable. To determine reliability, we propose a fourfold classification of warrants into a priori, empirical, institutional, and evaluative, with further subdivisions possible. This classification has its ancestry in classical rhetoric and recent epistemology. Distinctive to each type of warrant is the mode by which such connections are intuitively discovered (...) and the grounds on which we ultimately justify them. The classification of warrants is thus epistemic. We illustrate the difference by contrasting empirical physical with institutional intuition, and argue for the advantages of this approach over Toulmin’s conception of field dependence. (shrink)

Argument schemes are abstractions substantiating the inferential connection between premise(s) and conclusion in argumentative communication. Identifying such conventional patterns of reasoning is essential to the interpretation and evaluation of argumentation. Whether studying argumentation from a theory-driven or data-driven perspective, insight into the actual use of argumentation in communicative practice is essential. Large and reliably annotated corpora of argumentative discourse to quantitatively provide such insight are few and far between. This is all the more true for argument scheme corpora, which tend (...) to suffer from a combination of limited size, poor validation, and the use of ad hoc restricted typologies. In the current paper, we describe the annotation of schemes on the basis of two distinct classifications: Walton’s taxonomy of argument schemes, and Wagemans’ Periodic Table of Arguments. We describe the annotation procedure for each, and the quantitative characteristics of the resulting annotated text corpora. In doing so, we extend the annotation of the preexisting US2016 corpus of televised election debates, resulting in, to the best of our knowledge, the two largest consistently annotated corpora of schemes in argumentative dialogue publicly available. Based on evaluation in terms of inter-annotator agreement, we propose further improvements to the guidelines for annotating schemes: the argument scheme key, and the Argument Type Identification Procedure. (shrink)

In everyday communicative arenas, we engage in critical discussions to persuade others to change their views about issues of personal as well as public interest. Discourse analysts have deemed concessions as privileged strategies to manage disagreement and reach consensus. However, a coherent and comprehensive account of the argumentative functions played by different concessive relations is lacking: do concessions always bear an argumentative role? By which semantic and pragmatic properties? What type of argumentative moves do they instantiate? To answer these questions, (...) we propose a corpus-based study of lexical markers of concessions in the subreddit Changemyview. Drawing from a multilevel semantic and pragmatic annotation, polysemous markers with contrast are disambiguated, and an empirically motivated typology of concessive relations is proposed. The results of the analysis highlight two types of concessions that are specialized in introducing and/or preventing counterarguments. (shrink)