The evaluation of arguments and argumentation is best understood epistemologically. Epistemic circularity is not formally defective but it may be epistemologically objectionable. Sorenson's doubts about the syntactic approach to circularity are endorsed with qualifications. One explanation of an argument's goodness is its ability to produce justified belief in its conclusion by means of justified belief in its premises, but matters are not so simple for interpersonal argumentation. Even when an argument's premises and conclusion are justified for a speaker, this justifiedness (...) may not be transmissible to every hearer. Still, an epistemic approaeh is instructive. Arguing in enthymemes can be legitimate, e.g., because enthymemes can help produce justified persuasion in an audience that supplies the missing premises. (shrink)

Socializing Epistemology: An Introduction through Two Sample Issues Frederick F. Schmitt Social epistemology is the conceptual and normative study of the ...

"A list of the works of John Stuart Mill": p. xxx.

Knowledge in a Social World offers a philosophy for the information age. Alvin Goldman explores new frontiers by creating a thoroughgoing social epistemology, moving beyond the traditional focus on solitary knowers. Against the tides of postmodernism and social constructionism Goldman defends the integrity of truth and shows how to promote it by well-designed forms of social interaction. From science to education, from law to democracy, he shows why and how public institutions should seek knowledge-enhancing practices. The result is a bold, (...) timely, and systematic treatment of the philosophical foundations of an information society. (shrink)

Chapter The Need for a Theory of Argument Structure. THE STANDARD APPROACH The approach to argument diagramming which we call standard was originated, ...

The Aims of the Book -/- 1. To improve your skill in analyzing and evaluating arguments and presentations of the kind you find in everyday discourse (news media, discussions, advertisements), textbooks, and lectures. 2. To improve your skill in presenting arguments, reports and instructions clearly and persuasively. 3. To improve your critical instincts, that is, your immediate judgments of your attitudes toward the communications and behavior of others and yourself, so that you consistently approach them with the standards of reason (...) and the attitude of reasonableness. 4. To improve your knowledge about the facts and arguments relevant to a large number of important contemporary issues in politics, education, ethics, and several practical fields. -/- These are practical aims but not narrow practical aims: the third one, in particular, is very far-reaching and requires a whole shift of values for most of us. So this is intended to be a powerful, as well as practical, book using practical, everyday examples of the kind that a citizen, especially a citizen-student, runs into all the time. -/- The text starts with a short discussion of reasoning itself, then explores the details of this approach, and then gets down to practical procedures for improving one's reasoning skills. The discussions and examples always begin at a rather elementary level, but they get into harder material fairly quickly. If you are, or are hoping to be, a teacher or a lawyer, a scientist or an executive, what you learn here will be professional skills for you—vital professional skills. But for any citizen, they are also essential skills. (shrink)

When, if ever, is one justified in accepting the premises of an argument? What is the proper criterion of premise acceptability? Can the criterion be theoretically or philosophically justified? This is the first book to provide a comprehensive theory of premise acceptability and it answers the questions above from an epistemological approach that the author calls common sense foundationalism. It will be eagerly sought out not just by specialists in informal logic, critical thinking, and argumentation theory but also by a (...) broader range of philosophers and those teaching rhetoric. (shrink)

He further argues that it is necessary to rethink traditional conceptions of argument, and to find a position that avoids the limitations of both the highly abstract approach of formal logic and the highly contextualized approaches of rhetoric and communication theory.".

The paper's thesis is that dialogue is not an adequate model for all types of argument. The position of Walton is taken as the contrary view. The paper provides a set of descriptions of dialogues in which arguments feature in the order of the increasing complexity of the argument presentation at each turn of the dialogue, and argues that when arguments of great complexity are traded, the exchanges between arguers are turns of a dialogue only in an extended or metaphorical (...) sense. It argues that many of the properties of engaged back-and-forth exchanges of paradigmatic argument dialogues are not found in ‘solo’ arguments, and that at least some of the norms appropriate to the former type of argument, such as some of the pragma-dialectical rules of van Eemeren and Grootendorst's model, do not apply to the latter. (shrink)

To build an argument--and particularly an argument presented as a monologue--a writer must assemble and marshal a battery of supports for a claim. Some of those supports will be arranged in convergent structures, some as linked; some will be expressed, some will be left implicit; sometimes a support will need further support of its own--and sometimes, not. This paper explores the factors which lead a writer to make particular choices, the interactions between those factors, and the constraints on a w (...) riter's freedom in exercising her power, drawing on recent findings in computational modelling of the generation process. (shrink)