The article develops and justifies, on the basis of the epistemological argumentation theory, two central pieces of the theory of evaluative argumentation interpretation: 1. criteria for recognizing argument types and 2. rules for adding reasons to create ideal arguments. Ad 1: The criteria for identifying argument types are a selection of essential elements from the definitions of the respective argument types. Ad 2: After presenting the general principles for adding reasons (benevolence, authenticity, immanence, optimization), heuristics are proposed for finding missing (...) reasons, for deductive arguments, e.g., semantic tableaux are suggested. (shrink)

Does a high degree of confirmation make an inductive argument valid? I will argue that it depends on the kind of question to which the argument is meant to be providing an answer. We should distinguish inductive generalization from inductive extrapolation even in cases where they might appear to have the same answer, and also from confirmation of a hypothesis.