Éste es un artículo de lógica informal dedicado a la estructura de los argumentos. En él se mantiene que la estructura de los argumentos está formada por tres tipos de relaciones argumentativas: relaciones entre enunciados, relaciones entre argumentos y enunciados y relaciones enltre argumentos. Los dos últimos tipos de relaciones han recibido menos atención que el primero pero, según se explica en el artículo, son necesarios para dar cuenta de los argumentos hipotéticos o suposicionales y de formas complejas de argumentación (...) como la argumentación coordinada o la argumentación múltiple. (shrink)

Christian Kock’s essays show the essential interconnectedness of practical reasoning, rhetoric and deliberative democracy. They constitute a unique contribution to argumentation theory that draws on – and criticizes – the work of philosophers, rhetoricians, political scientists and other argumentation theorists. It puts rhetoric in the service of modern democracies by drawing attention to the obligations of politicians to articulate arguments and objections that citizens can weigh against each other in their deliberations about possible courses of action.

This paper aims to perform a multi-level analysis of the Irish public discourse on Covid-19. Despite widespread agreement that Ireland’s response was rapid and effective, the country’s journey through the pandemic has been no easy ride. In order to contain the virus, the Government’s emergency legislation imposed draconian measures including the detention and isolation of people deemed to be even “a potential source of infection” and a significant extension of An Garda Síochána’s power of arrest. In April 2020, journalists John (...) Waters and Gemma O’Doherty initiated judicial review proceedings before the High Court to challenge such legislation, which they defined as unconstitutional, “disproportionate” and based on “fraudulent science”. The proceedings attracted widespread media coverage in what soon became a debate on the legitimacy of emergency legislation and the notion of ‘fake news’ itself. After a brief survey of the legislative background to Ireland’s Covid response, the argumentative strategy is analysed through which the High Court eventually dismissed Mr Waters and Ms O’Doherty’s challenge. Focusing on the process of justification of the judicial decision, the paper provides a descriptive account of the argument structure of the Court’s decision. This sheds light on the pattern of multiple argumentation through which the Court interpreted relevant norms in the Constitution and at once re-established the primacy of “facts” informing political decision-making at a time of national emergency. (shrink)

Toward a Shared Metaphoric Meaning in Children's Discourse: The Role of Argumentation The text deals with the phenomenon of understanding and interpreting metaphoric expressions in children. Of the many metaphoric figures, one type was selected: the ‘so-called’ psychological-physical metaphors that illuminate a psychological experience by appealing to an event in the physical domain. The data consist of children's discussions in pairs, in which they make a joint interpretation of metaphors including a dual-function adjective, e.g., a hard person, a sweet person, (...) an empty person. A hundred and forty-four dialogues between peer dyads were recorded from three age groups : 6;6-7;6, 8;6-9;6, and 10;6-11;6. The children's task was to prepare an interpretation of metaphorical expressions for two television quiz shows, one for peers and one for young preschoolers. The research design was balanced for age, gender, and order of metaphoric interpretation in the two experimental variants. Following Quignard's model, we analyzed children's argumentation as a particular case of dialogical problem solving, whereby children had to understand the metaphoric meaning and convey it to the potential addressee. The results show an interesting dynamic in the argumentative orientation of the pro and the contra type, depending on the age of interlocutors. The frequency of metaphoric interpretations in opposition to those presented by the partner decreases with the children's age, but the frequency of compound proposals with the use of the partner's contribution increases. For the younger addressee, children most frequently interpret metaphors as descriptions of magical situations. (shrink)

This paper makes an independent start with formalizing the rules for the argumentation stage of critical discussions. It does not deal with the well-known code of conduct consisting of ten rules but with the system consisting of fifteen rules on which the code of conduct is based. The rules of this system are scrutinized and problems they raise are discussed. Then a formal dialectical system is defined that reflects most of the contents of these rules. The aim is to elucidate (...) the way the rules work and to show how a formal approach can be useful to achieve this. It is also shown how the present method can be used to study the nature of circular argumentation. While, generally, the formalization follows closely the original rules for the argumentation stage of critical discussions, there will also be proposed some modifications of the original protocol. (shrink)

Pragma-dialectics is dynamic, context-sensitive, and multi-agent; it promises theories of fallacy and argumentative structure. But pragma-dialectic theory and practice are not yet fully in harmony. Key definitions of the theory fall short of explicating the analyses that pragma-dialecticians actually do. Many discussions involve more than two participants with different and mutually incompatible standpoints. Success in such a discussion may be more than success against each opponent. Pragma-dialectics does well at analyzing arguments advanced by one party, directed at another party; it (...) does much less well at analyzing arguments directed at several opponents at once or at convincing an audience. I suggest a strategy of construing fallacies as defeasible arguments relying on reasonable default principles but applying them in circumstances in which they are undercut or overridden. (shrink)

This article begins with an introduction to defeasible (nonmonotonic) reasoning and a brief description of a computer program, EVID, which can perform such reasoning. I then explain, and illustrate with examples, how this program can be applied in computational representations of ordinary dialogic argumentation. The program represents the beliefs and doubts of the dialoguers, and uses these propositional attitudes, which can include commonsense defeasible inference rules, to infer various changing conclusions as a dialogue progresses. It is proposed that computational representations (...) of this kind are a useful tool in the analysis of dialogic argumentation, and, in particular, demonstrate the important role of defeasible reasoning in everyday arguments using commonsense reasoning. (shrink)

Although argumentation plays an essential role in our lives, there is no integrated area of research on the psychology of argumentation. Instead research on argumentation is conducted in a number of separate research communities that are spread across disciplines and have only limited interaction. With a view to bridging these different strands, we first distinguish between three meanings of the word ?argument?: argument as a reason, argument as a structured sequence of reasons and claims, and argument as a social exchange. (...) All three meanings are integral to a complete understanding of human reasoning and cognition. Cognitive psychological research on argumentation has focused mostly on the first and second of these meanings, so we present perspectives on argumentation from outside of cognitive psychology, which focus on the second and third. Specifically, we give anoverview of the methods, goals, and disciplinary backgrounds of research on the production, the analysis, and the evaluation of arguments. Finally, inintroducing the experimental studies included in this special issue, which were conducted by researchers from a range of theoretical backgrounds, weunderline the breadth of argumentation research as well as stress opportunities for mutual awareness and integration. (shrink)

Wellman identified three types of conductive arguments, the third of which contains both pro and counter-considerations in the same piece of reasoning. This paper provides a pragma-dialectical analysis of this type of argumentation, with special focus on argumentation reconstruction. It argues that the account of pro/con argumentation in the framework of argument-as-product has problems solvable by a pragma-dialectical approach. The paper asserts that pro/con argumentation should be analyzed as a dialectical strategy of a protagonist, where acknowledgement of counter-considerations shows that (...) the antagonist’s reasons have been taken into consideration, although the pro-considerations override them. Thus, the pro-considerations of pro/con argumentation should be interpreted as the protagonist’s overriding defeaters of the antagonist’s counter-arguments, the protagonist incorporating the latter as counter-considerations. The paper further argues that the pragma-dialectical framework needs an additional conceptual tool to properly reconstruct complex forms of pro/con argumentation. Finally, the pragma-dialectical approach to reconstruct pro/con argumentation has several advantages, especially to a more logical-structural approach to complex pro/con argumentation. (shrink)

Douglas Walton has done extensive and valuable work on the concepts of presumption and practical reasoning. However, Walton’s attempt to model practical reasoning as presumptive is misguided. The notions of “inference” and of the burden of proof shifting back and forth between proponent and respondent are misleading and lead to counterintuitive consequences. Because the issue in practical reasoning is a proposal, not a proposition, there are, in the standard case, several perfectly good reasons on both sides simultaneously, which implies that (...) argument appraisal necessarily contains a subjective element—a fact argumentation theory needs to conceptualize. (shrink)

This paper attempts to systematically characterize critical reactions in argumentative discourse, such as objections, critical questions, rebuttals, refutations, counterarguments, and fallacy charges, in order to contribute to the dialogical approach to argumentation. We shall make use of four parameters to characterize distinct types of critical reaction. First, a critical reaction has a focus, for example on the standpoint, or on another part of an argument. Second, critical reactions appeal to some kind of norm, argumentative or other. Third, they each have (...) a particular illocutionary force, which may include that of giving strategic advice to the other. Fourth, a critical reaction occurs at a particular level of dialogue (the ground level or some meta-level). The concepts here developed shall be applied to discussions of critical reactions by Aristotle and by some contemporary authors. (shrink)