If good argument is virtuous, then fallacies are vicious. Yet fallacies cannot just be identified with vices, since vices are dispositional properties of agents whereas fallacies are types of argument. Rather, if the normativity of good argumentation is explicable in terms of virtues, we should expect the wrongness of fallacies to be explicable in terms of vices. This approach is defended through case studies of several fallacies, with particular emphasis on the ad hominem.

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.

The present study examines how the build-up to the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003 was metaphorically constructed in pro- and anti-war newspaper opinion/editorial discourse. Drawing on methodological insights from critical discourse analysis and pragma-dialectical argumentation theory, the fallacious discussion used in the pro-war op/eds to build up a ‘moral/legal case’ for war on Iraq, based on adversarial argumentation, is problematised. An investigation of how the US official perspective about the ‘legitimacy’ of attacking Iraq has managed forcefully to creep (...) into the US–British mainstream newspaper op/ed argumentation through the manipulative use of metaphor is explored here. This fallacious derailment of the discussion is countered by the anti-war op/ed metaphorical argumentation. The op/ed articles analysed here thematise key controversial issues regarding the alleged Iraqi possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction, Saddam's links to Al-Qaeda and the legitimacy of the US ‘preemptive’ war without the authorisation of the UN Security Council. The political debate of the US run-up to Iraq War was a contest between metaphors and a battle over imagery. This article illustrates how the deployment of metaphors with high public resonance is a useful rhetorical tool to fallaciously advance contentious claims. (shrink)

Is bias an obstacle to a virtue theory of argumentation? Virtue theories seem vulnerable to a situationist challenge, analogous to similar challenges in virtue ethics and epistemology, that behavioural dispositions are too situation-specific for virtues to be psychologically plausible. This paper argues that virtue argumentation may respond to this challenge by combining a defence of the virtue of humility with a demonstration of the role of attitude strength, as exhibited by deep-seated virtues.