This book provides a systematic analysis of many common argumentation schemes and a compendium of 96 schemes. The study of these schemes, or forms of argument that capture stereotypical patterns of human reasoning, is at the core of argumentation research. Surveying all aspects of argumentation schemes from the ground up, the book takes the reader from the elementary exposition in the first chapter to the latest state of the art in the research efforts to formalize and classify the schemes, outlined (...) in the last chapter. It provides a systematic and comprehensive account, with notation suitable for computational applications that increasingly make use of argumentation schemes. (shrink)

Focusing on a particular kind of so-called “conductive argument”, i.e. a “pro/con” argument intended to support a practical conclusion, I argue that “conductive argument” is a category mistake. There is no such thing as a “conductive argument”, if the term is meant to designate a single argument, with one conclusion. What (confusingly) appears to be a “conductive argument”, as structure, is one of two main possible outcomes of deliberative activity, understood as the critical testing of alternative proposals for action. More (...) precisely, it is a recapitulation or summary of a process of critical questioning that has unfolded in time, where a practical conclusion has withstood criticism, in the sense that no decisive objections have emerged against it, though there are counter-considerations to it, as well as reasons in favour. To say that there are no decisive objections is to say that the opposite (negative) conclusion is not supported: it does not follow conclusively that the course of action being proposed is not reasonable. The positive conclusion, together with all the reasons that have been cited in favour and all the reasons that have been cited against (the counter-considerations), will be virtually indistinguishable from a so-called “conductive argument”. Whenever the positive conclusion does not survive criticism, the potential “conductive argument” will disintegrate, collapsing into a deductive argument in favour of the negative conclusion. (shrink)

Fundamentals of Critical Argumentation presents the basic tools for the identification, analysis, and evaluation of common arguments for beginners. The book teaches by using examples of arguments in dialogues, both in the text itself and in the exercises. Examples of controversial legal, political, and ethical arguments are analyzed. Illustrating the most common kinds of arguments, the book also explains how to evaluate each kind by critical questioning. Douglas Walton shows how arguments can be reasonable under the right dialogue conditions by (...) using critical questions to evaluate them. The book teaches by example, both in the text itself and in exercises, but it is based on methods that have been developed through the author's thirty years of research in argumentation studies. (shrink)

Media argumentation is a powerful force in our lives. From political speeches to television commercials to war propaganda, it can effectively mobilize political action, influence the public, and market products. This book presents a new and systematic way of thinking about the influence of mass media in our lives, showing the intersection of media sources with argumentation theory, informal logic, computational theory, and theories of persuasion. Using a variety of case studies that represent arguments that typically occur in the mass (...) media, Douglas Walton demonstrates how tools recently developed in argumentation theory can be usefully applied to the identification, analysis, and evaluation of media arguments. He draws upon the most recent developments in artificial intelligence, including dialogical theories of argument, which he developed, as well as speech act theory. Each chapter presents solutions to problems central to understanding, analyzing, and criticizing media argumentation. (shrink)

This article reacts against the undesirable ideological separation between dialectical and rhetorical approaches to argumentative discourse. It argues that a sound evaluation of argumentation requires an analysis that reveals all aspects of the discourse pertinent to critical testing. To explain the rationale of the various moves made in the discourse and the strategic patterns behind them, not only the interlocutors' dialectical goals must be taken into account, but also their rhetorical goals. After explaining how rhetorical insight can be instrumental in (...) deepening and justifying a dialectical analysis, an integrated analysis is made of the rhetorical strategies that are brought to bear in an advertorial published by the oil company Shell. (shrink)

Focusing on a particular kind of so-called “conductive argument”, i.e. a “pro/con” argument intended to support a practical conclusion, I argue that “conductive argument” is a category mistake. There is no such thing as a “conductive argument”, if the term is meant to designate a single argument, with one conclusion. What (confusingly) appears to be a “conductive argument”, as structure, is one of two main possible outcomes of deliberative activity, understood as the critical testing of alternative proposals for action. More (...) precisely, it is a recapitulation or summary of a process of critical questioning that has unfolded in time, where a practical conclusion has withstood criticism, in the sense that no decisive objections have emerged against it, though there are counter-considerations to it, as well as reasons in favour. To say that there are no decisive objections is to say that the opposite (negative) conclusion is not supported: it does not follow conclusively that the course of action being proposed is not reasonable. The positive conclusion, together with all the reasons that have been cited in favour and all the reasons that have been cited against (the counter-considerations), will be virtually indistinguishable from a so-called “conductive argument”. Whenever the positive conclusion does not survive criticism, the potential “conductive argument” will disintegrate, collapsing into a deductive argument in favour of the negative conclusion. (shrink)

David Miller is the foremost exponent of the purist critical rationalist doctrine and here presents his mature views, discussing the role that logic and argument play in the growth of knowledge, criticizing the common understanding of argument as an instrument of justification, persuasion or discovery and instead advocating the critical rationalist view that only criticism matters. Miller patiently and thoroughly undoes the damage done by those writers who attack critical rationalism by invoking the sterile mythology of induction and justification that (...) it seeks to sweep away. In addition his new material on the debate on verisimilitude is essential reading for all working in this field. (shrink)

From a critical rationalist perspective, I look at a fragment of the debate on shale gas exploration in the UK in order to make a proposal on the nature and representation of “conductive” argumentation, arguing it should not be viewed as a single argument, but in relation to deliberation as genre. There is no “conductive argumentation”, only various possible outcomes of deliberation, seen as critical testing of (alternative) proposals.

The renowned philosopher John Searle reveals the fundamental nature of social reality. What kinds of things are money, property, governments, nations, marriages, cocktail parties, and football games? Searle explains the key role played by language in the creation, constitution, and maintenance of social reality. We make statements about social facts that are completely objective, for example: Barack Obama is President of the United States, the piece of paper in my hand is a twenty-dollar bill, I got married in London, etc. (...) And yet these facts only exist because we think they exist. How is it possible that we can have factual objective knowledge of a reality that is created by subjective opinions? This is part of a much larger question: How can we give an account of ourselves, with our peculiar human traits DS mind, reason, freedom, society - in a world that we know independently consists of mindless, meaningless particles? How can we account for our social and mental existence in a realm of brute physical facts? In answering this question, Searle avoids postulating different realms of being, a mental and a physical, or worse yet, a mental, a physical, and a social. There is just one reality: Searle shows how the human reality fits into that one reality. Mind, language, and civilization are natural products of the basic facts of the physical world described by physics, chemistry and biology. Searle explains how language creates and maintains the elaborate structures of human social institutions. These institutions serve to create and distribute power relations that are pervasive and often invisible. These power relations motivate human actions in a way that provides the glue that holds human civilization together. Searle shows how this account illuminates human rationality, free will, political power, and human rights. Our social world is a world created and maintained by language. (shrink)

This book provides a systematic analysis of many common argumentation schemes and a compendium of 96 schemes. The study of these schemes, or forms of argument that capture stereotypical patterns of human reasoning, is at the core of argumentation research. Surveying all aspects of argumentation schemes from the ground up, the book takes the reader from the elementary exposition in the first chapter to the latest state of the art in the research efforts to formalize and classify the schemes, outlined (...) in the last chapter. It provides a systematic and comprehensive account, with notation suitable for computational applications that increasingly make use of argumentation schemes. (shrink)

In this article I scrutinise a crucial tension in understanding the debate over shale gas production in Europe. On the one hand, analyses predominantly grasp the debate in terms of pro-and-con dialectics, as if the pro-shale gas camp faced the anti-shale gas camp in a dyadic clash of opposing voices. On the other hand, it is commonly recognised that this debate is driven by multi-party and multi-position argumentative dynamics. In this broader context, I focus on one pivotal contribution to the (...) debate – Gazprom’s press release from October 2013 outlining Russia’s energy giant’s strategy of dealing with unconventional gas production. I employ concepts and methods of argumentative discourse analysis to contend that an arguer to a multi-party debate – argumentative polylogue – faces a number of constraints and opportunities that cannot be adequately grasped in terms of dyadic pro-and-con dialectics. The analysis reveals how Gazprom needs to simultaneously design its discourse to address a number of other parties who might also disagree among themselves: from Greenpeace to European Union governments to shale gas companies. I show why and how a stakeholder analysis used in organisational communication might lead to a better understanding of this form of multi-party public argumentation. (shrink)

By presenting a case study based on the argumentative analysis of news in the press, this article introduces and discusses strategic manoeuvring with contextual frames. Drawing on the linguistic notion of frame, I introduce the concept of contextual frame to refer to the news context, that is, the background against which a certain event is presented as a piece of news. I argue that newspapers and journalists make use of contextual frames in the apparently neutral genre of news reporting to (...) propose specific interpretations of the facts at issue, which become the basis for explicit comments and editorials. To show how this works, I investigate in detail a case of newspaper coverage of a complex episode using the pragma-dialectical notion of strategic manoeuvring and the Argumentum Model of Topics to analyse argument schemes. I show that, in the use of contextual frames, there is a prominent relation between presentational devices and topical potential; contextual frames provide the implicit material premises which are at the basis of argumentations through which newspapers interpret and comment on the news. (shrink)

David Miller elegantly and provocatively reformulates critical rationalism—the revolutionary approach to epistemology advocated by Karl Popper—by answering its most important critics. He argues for an approach to rationality freed from the debilitating authoritarian dependence on reasons and justification. "Miller presents a particularly useful and stimulating account of critical rationalism. His work is both interesting and controversial... of interest to anyone with concerns in epistemology or the philosophy of science." —Canadian Philosophical Reviews.

ABSTRACTThis article aims to make a methodological contribution to the ‘argumentative turn’ in policy analysis and to the understanding of the public debate on the UK Government's austerity policies. It suggests that policy arguments are practical arguments from circumstances, goals and means–goal relations to practical conclusions that can ground decision and action. Practical proposals are evaluated in light of their potential consequences. This article proposes a deliberation scheme and a set of critical questions for the evaluation of deliberation and decision-making (...) in conditions of incomplete knowledge. It illustrates these questions by analysing a corpus of articles from five newspapers over the two months following the adoption of the first austerity budget in June 2010. It also suggests how analysis of ‘frames’ and ‘framing’ can be integrated with the evaluation of deliberation and decision-making. (shrink)

This paper offers a new way to make sense of disagreement expansion from a polylogical perspective by incorporating various places in addition to players and positions into the analysis. The concepts build on prior implicit ideas about disagreement space by suggesting how to more fully account for argumentative context, and its construction, in large-scale complex controversies. As a basis for our polylogical analysis, we use a New York Times news story reporting on an oil train explosion—a significant point in the (...) broader controversy over producing oil and gas via hydraulic fracturing. (shrink)

Media argumentation is a powerful force in our lives. From political speeches to television commercials to war propaganda, it can effectively mobilize political action, influence the public, and market products. This book presents a new and systematic way of thinking about the influence of mass media in our lives, showing the intersection of media sources with argumentation theory, informal logic, computational theory, and theories of persuasion. Using a variety of case studies that represent arguments that typically occur in the mass (...) media, Douglas Walton demonstrates how tools recently developed in argumentation theory can be usefully applied to the identification, analysis, and evaluation of media arguments. (shrink)

Focusing on a particular kind of so-called “conductive argument”, i.e. a “pro/con” argument intended to support a practical conclusion, I argue that “conductive argument” is a category mistake. There is no such thing as a “conductive argument”, if the term is meant to designate a single argument, with one conclusion. What appears to be a “conductive argument”, as structure, is one of two main possible outcomes of deliberative activity, understood as the critical testing of alternative proposals for action. More precisely, (...) it is a recapitulation or summary of a process of critical questioning that has unfolded in time, where a practical conclusion has withstood criticism, in the sense that no decisive objections have emerged against it, though there are counter-considerations to it, as well as reasons in favour. To say that there are no decisive objections is to say that the opposite conclusion is not supported: it does not follow conclusively that the course of action being proposed is not reasonable. The positive conclusion, taken together with all the reasons that have been cited in favour and all the reasons that have been cited against, will be virtually indistinguishable from a so-called “conductive argument”. Whenever the positive conclusion does not survive criticism, the potential conductive argument will disintegrate, collapsing into a deductive argument in favour of the negative conclusion. (shrink)