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.

J. Anthony Blair is a prominent international figure in argumentation studies. He is among the originators of informal logic, an author of textbooks on the informal logic approach to argument analysis and evaluation and on critical thinking, and a founder and editor of the journal Informal Logic. Blair is widely recognized among the leaders in the field for contributing formative ideas to the argumentation literature of the last few decades. This selection of key works provides insights into the history of (...) the field of argumentation theory and various related disciplines. It illuminates the central debates and presents core ideas in four main areas: Critical Thinking, Informal Logic, Argument Theory and Logic, Dialectic and Rhetoric. (shrink)

Topical Themes in Argumentation Theory brings together twenty exploratory studies on important subjects of research in contemporary argumentation theory. The essays are based on papers that were presented at the 7th Conference of the International Society for the Study of Argumentation in Amsterdam in June 2010. They give an impression of the nature and the variety of the kind of research that has recently been carried out in the study of argumentation. The volume starts with three essays that provide stimulating (...) theoretical perspectives on argumentation. Subsequently, some views are explained on the intriguing topics of ‘dissensus’ and ‘deep disagreement’. After a discussion of three different approaches to the treatment of types of argumentation some classical themes from antique argumentation theory are revisited. The new research area of visual argumentation is explored in the next part. The volume concludes with three reports of experimental studies concerning argumentative discourse. The volume starts with three essays that provide stimulating theoretical perspectives on argumentation. Subsequently, some views are explained on the intriguing topics of ‘dissensus’ and ‘deep disagreement’. After a discussion of three different approaches to the treatment of types of argumentation some classical themes from antique argumentation theory are revisited. The new research area of visual argumentation is explored in the next part. The volume concludes with three reports of experimental studies concerning argumentative discourse. The volume starts with three essays that provide stimulating theoretical perspectives on argumentation. Subsequently, some views are explained on the intriguing topics of ‘dissensus’ and ‘deep disagreement’. After a discussion of three different approaches to the treatment of types of argumentation some classical themes from antique argumentation theory are revisited. The new research area of visual argumentation is explored in the next part. The volume concludes with three reports of experimental studies concerning argumentative discourse. (shrink)

This volume reflects the development and theoretical foundation of a new paradigm for critical thinking based on inquiry. The field of critical thinking, as manifested in the Informal Logic movement, developed primarily as a response to the inadequacies of formalism to represent actual argumentative practice and to provide useful argumentative skills to students. Because of this, the primary focus of the field has been on informal arguments rather than formal reasoning. Yet the formalist history of the field is still evident (...) in its emphasis, with respect to both theory and pedagogy, on the structure and evaluation of individual, de-contextualized arguments. It is our view that such a view of critical thinking is excessively narrow and limited, failing to provide an understanding of argumentation as largely a matter of comparative evaluation of a variety of contending positions and arguments with the goal of reaching a reasoned judgment on an issue. As a consequence, traditional critical thinking instruction is problematic in failing to provide the reasoning skills that students need in order to accomplish this goal. Instead, the goal of critical thinking instruction has been seen largely as a defensive one: of learning to not fall prey to invalid, inadequate, or fallacious arguments. (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 tribute to the breadth and influence of Trudy Govier’s philosophical work begins with her early scholarship in argumentation theory, paying special attention to its pedagogical expression. Most people first encounter Trudy Govier’s work and many people only encounter it through her textbooks, especially A Practical Study of Argument, published in many editions. In addition to the work on argumentation that has continued throughout her career, much of Govier’s later work addresses social philosophy and the problems of trust and response (...) to moral wrongs. The introduction by Catherine Hundleby situates Govier’s research along the path of her unusual academic life. While following the timeline of Govier’s research publication, in this collection the authors build on her work and suggest certain new connections between her argumentation theory and social philosophy. A Practical Study of Argument, first published in 1985, situates Govier among a distinct segment of informal logicians whose concerns about teaching reasoning to post-secondary students orient their research, Takuzo Konishi argues. Moira Kloster evaluates Govier’s progress in the challenge of providing critical thinking education to diverse and changing social contexts. Shifting gears to social philosophy but still addressing education, Laura Elizabeth Pinto explores the significance of Govier’s work on trust for explaining the problem of “audit culture” for teaching. At the centre of this volume, social philosophy receives an abstract meta-ethical defense from Linda Radzik. Moving solidly into the domain of normative social philosophy, Alice MacLachlan reconsiders Govier’s condemnation of revenge by viewing it as a form of moral address, but she notes how revenge as an act of communication contrasts with argumentation in lacking the respect that Govier maintains is intrinsic to argumentation. MacLachlan ultimately agrees that revenge is morally indefensible. The practical challenges of addressing others in the aftermath of wrongdoing, especially in public contexts, can make it difficult to distinguish between victims and combatants or wrongdoers, Alistair Little and Wilhelm Verwoerd explain, and Kathryn Norlock argues that forgiveness is psychologically vexed too. People may recognize transformation to be in principle possible for all people, Norlock argues, and yet we may find the evidence regarding some particular evildoer sufficient to count that person as an exception. Finally Govier responds to the various papers. (shrink)

Arguing that our attachment to Aristotelian modes of discourse makes a revision of their conceptual foundations long overdue, the author proposes the consideration of unacknowledged factors that play a central role in argument itself. These are in particular the subjective imprint and the dynamics of argumentation. Their inclusion in a four-dimensional framework and the focus on thesis validity allow for a more realistic view of our discourse practice. Exhaustive analyses of fascinating historical and contemporary arguments are provided. These range from (...) Columbus’s advocacy of the Western Passage to India, over the trial of King Louis XVI during the French Revolution, to today’s highly charged controversies surrounding euthanasia and embryo research. Excavating foundational issues such as the purpose of argument itself and the contested role of argument as a generator of knowledge, the book culminates in a discussion of the relationship between rationality and reasonableness and criticizes the restrictions of ‘rational’ argument relying on fixed logical, economic or cultural criteria that in reality are mutable. Here, a true, open argument requires the infusion of Paul Lorenzen’s principle of ‘transsubjectivity’, which recognizes but transcends the partiality of the individual and which can be seen in the pragmatic and expanding consensus that humanity can control itself to safeguard the future of a fragile, damaged world. (shrink)

This volume focuses on dialogue and argumentation in contexts which are marked by truculence and discord. The contributors include well known argumentation scholars who discuss the issues this raises from the point of view of a variety of disciplines and points of view. The authors seek to address theoretically challenging issues in a way that is relevant to both the theory and the practice of argument. The collection brings together selected essays from the 2006 11th Wake Forest University Biennial Argumentation (...) Conference held at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida and the 2012 14th Wake Forest University Biennial Argumentation Conference held at Casa Artom in Venice, Italy. (shrink)

This paper analyzes and evaluates the 2007 majority opinion of the German National Ethics Council which seeks to establish new information (as to the inferior quality of legally procurable human embryonic stem cells) as a sufficient reason for a relaxation of the 2002 Stem Cell Law. A micro-level analysis of the opinion’s central section is conducted and evaluated vis à vis the strongest known opponent position in the national debate at that time. The argumentation is claimed to rely on an (...) unsupported semantic assumption regarding the parthood relation of the 2002 compromise and to misconstrue the strongest known opponent position. (shrink)

Current practice in logic increasingly accords recognition to abductive, presumptive or plausible arguments, in addition to deductive and inductive arguments. But there is uncertainty about what these terms exactly mean, what the differences between them are (if any), and how they relate. By examining some analyses ofthese terms and some of the history of the subject (including the views of Peirce and Cameades), this paper sets out considerations leading to a set of definitions, discusses the relationship of these three forms (...) of argument to argumentation schemes and sets out a new argumentation scheme for abductive argument. (shrink)

This paper examines arguments that take counter- considerations into account, and it does so from a dialogical point of view. According to my account, a counterconsideration is part of a critical reaction from a real or imagined opponent, and an arguer may take it into account in his argument in at least six fully responsive ways. Conductive arguments will be characterized as one of these types. In this manner, the paper aims to show how conducive, and related kinds of argument (...) can be understood dialogically. (shrink)

Many take the claim that you cannot ‘get’ an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ to imply that non- moral beliefs are by themselves incapable of justifying moral beliefs. I argue that this is a mistake and that the position that moral beliefs are justified exclusively by non-moral beliefs—a view that I call moral inferentialism—presents an attractive non-sceptical moral epistemology.

“Deductivism” is a broad label for various theories that emphasize the importance of deductive argument in contexts of rational discussion. This paper makes a case for a very specific form of deductivism. The paper highlights the dialectical importance of advancing deductively valid arguments in natural-language reasoning. Sections 2 and 3 explain the various forms that deductivism has taken. Section 4 makes a case for a particular form of deductivism. Section 5 discusses the value of deductive argument in law. Section 6 (...) concludes and acknowledges critical questions that need to be addressed more fully in future work. (shrink)

Bipolar argument graphs represent the structure of complex pro and contra arguments for one or more standpoints. In this article, ampliative and exclusionary principles of evaluating argument strength in bipolar acyclic argumentation graphs are laid out and compared to each other. Argument chains, linked arguments, link attackers and supporters, and convergent arguments are discussed. The strength of conductive arguments is also addressed but it is argued that more work on this type of argument is needed to properly distinguish argument strength (...) from more general value-based components of such arguments. The overall conclusion of the article is that there is no justifiably unique solution to the problem of argument strength outside of a particular epistemological framework. (shrink)

Edited by J. Anthony Blair and Ralph H. Johnson King’s College London, UK: College Publications, 2011. Pp. vii, 1-299. Softcover. ISBN: 978-1-84890-030-1. US$ ~20.

Existing solutions to the epistemic regress problem, and the theories of justification built upon them, are inadequate, for they fail to diagnose the root source of the problem. The problem is rooted in our attachment to a pernicious dogma of modern epistemology: the idea that a judgement must be supported by some kind of reason or evidence to be justified. The epistemic analogue of the doctrine of original sin, this idea renders every judgement in need of redemption – guilty until (...) shown to be innocent – distorting our understanding of reason at a very deep level, and preventing us from conceptualizing a satisfactory solution to the problem. If we opt for a more context–sensitive mechanism for assigning default epistemic status, however, we get a more plausible picture of justification, an epistemology more in tune with epistemic practice, and an elegant solution to the regress problem. (shrink)

I take 'informal logic' to be the (descriptive and normative) study of 'real arguments'-arguments which are or have been used with the aim of convincing others of a point of view. I argue that the informal logic tradition thus conceived (i) lends strong support to something like Quine's view that our beliefs really support one another like the filaments in a spider's web--and thus that the traditional view that implication is an asymmetric relation is false; (ii) suggests that the classic (...) division of arguments into deductive and inductive has distorted our thinking about the evaluation of real arguments; and (iii) implies that naturalised epistemology is on the right track. (shrink)

La concepción predominante de la argumentación sigue privilegiando la dimensión representacional del lenguaje y, en consecuencia, ignora o infravalora las funciones compromisorias, directivas o expresivas de la argumentación. En este artículo examino los usos de la argumentación en la esfera pública -con especial atención a la deliberación y a la negociación- para poner de manifiesto y reivindicar la importancia de las funciones no persuasivas de la argumentación, entre las que se destaca la construcción y moldeado de identidades sociales.

The paper calls for argumentation theory to learn from moral and political philosophy. Several thinkers in these fields help understand the occurrence of what we may call legitimate dissensus: enduring disagreement even between reasonable people arguing reasonably. It inevitably occurs over practical issues, e.g., issues of action rather than truth, because there will normally be legitimate arguments on both sides, and these will be incommensurable, i.e., they cannot be objectively weighed against each other. Accordingly, ‘inference,’ ‘validity,’ and ‘sufficiency’ are inapplicable (...) notions. Further distinctive features of pro and con arguments in practical argumentation are explored, and some corollaries are drawn regarding evaluative norms of legitimate dissensus. Examples from immigrationrelated public debates in Denmark are given. (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)

Political debate is a distinctive domain in argumentation, characterized by these features: it is about proposals for action, not about propositions that may have a truth value; there may be good arguments on both sides; neither the proposal nor its rejection follows by necessity or inference; the pros and the cons generally cannot, being multidimensional and hence incommen- surable, be aggregated in an objective way; each audience member must subjectively compare and balance arguments on the two sides; eventual consensus between (...) the debaters is not a reasonable requirement. From all this follows a view of the rhetor’s special obligation in democratic, deliberative rhetoric on which it becomes crucial, in the interest of the audience, that political debaters acknowledge good arguments on the opposite side and explain why, on balance, they deem the arguments favoring their own side to be stronger. (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)

Business ethics as an applied inquiry requires an expanded normative method which allows both philosophical and religious ethical considerations to be employed in resolving complex issues or cases. The proposed foundational normative method provides a comprehensive framework composed of major philosophical and religious ethical theories. An extensive rationale from the current trends in business ethics and metaethical considerations supports the development of this method which is illustrated in several case studies. By using this method, scholars and business persons gain greater (...) certitude about the ethical quality of their deliberations and decision making than what may be achieved with current nonsystematic or nascent normative methods. (shrink)

Defining qualified reasoning as reasoning containing such loose qualifying words as 'probably,' 'usually,' 'probable, 'likely,' 'ceteris paribus,' and 'primafacie, Ennis argues that typical cases of qualified reasoning, though they might be good arguments, are deductively invalid, implying that such arguments fail soundness standards. He considers and rejects several possible alternative ways of viewing such cases, ending with a proposal for applying qualified soundness standards, which requires employment of sufficient background knowledge, sensitivity, experience and understanding of the situation. All of this (...) takes place as part of the process, introduced elsewhere, of successively applying different legitimate sets of standards until one is found that is satisfied, or none is found, the latter calling for rejection of the argument, the former calling for its acceptance. (shrink)

The thesis of this paper is that an argument's possessing the form of affirming the consequent does not suffice to make its premises at all favorably relevant to its conclusion. In support of this thesis I assume two premises and argue for a third. My two assumptions are these: (1) that an argument's possessing the form of affirming the consequent does not suffice to make its conclusion certain relative to its premises (this is widely, if not universally, acknowledged by writers (...) on logic), and (2) premises are favorably relevant to a conclusion only if it is certain or probable relative to them (I argued for this in an earlier paper). The premise I argue for in this paper is that an argument's possessing the form of affirming the consequent does not suffice to make its conclusion probable relative to its premises. To establish this third premise, I first refute a defense of the contrary position (namely, that an argument's possessing the form of affirming the consequent suffices to make its conclusion probable relative to its premises), then offer counterexamples to that position, and finally demonstrate the failure of several attempts to save it. (shrink)

Why informal logic? Informal logic is a group of proposals meant to contrast with, replace, and reject formal logic, at least for the analysis and evaluation of everyday arguments. Why reject formal logic? Formal logic is criticized and claimed to be inadequate because of its commitment to the soundness doctrine. In this paper I will examine and try to respond to some of these criticisms. It is not my aim to examine every argument ever given against formal logic; I am (...) limiting myself to those that, as a matter of historical fact, were instrumental in the replacement of formal logic by informal logic and initially established informal logic as a separate discipline. If the criticism of the soundness doctrine is defective, then the move from formal logic to informal logic was not theoretically well-motivated. It is this motivation that I wish to bring into question, rather than the adequacy or inadequacy of formal or informal logic as such. While I will tend to the view that formal logic is as adequate as it is reasonable to expect, the real issue is whether it is inadequate for the reasons that, as a matter of historical fact, were used to motivate its rejection. (shrink)

We often say things like “Even though X, Y” or “In spite of Y, X”. What do we mean when we say things like this? What does it imply about the reasons involved? I will argue that there are at least some cases, namely when they are used in the conclusions of conductive arguments, where it should be seen as modifying our expression of X and indicating a certain kind of affect towards X, and this is characteristic of (the most (...) interesting class of) conductive arguments. Showing that there are such uses thus shows that there are conductive arguments, or at least arguments with this characteristic feature, and, conversely, it will be shown that it is by taking the reasoning to be conductive that we can best make sense of these uses. I do not intend a comprehensive survey of all possible uses of “even though” or of all accounts of conductive arguments that have been given. (shrink)

Argumentation logicians have recognized a specter of relativism to haunt their philosophy of argument. However, their attempts to dispel pernicious relativism by invoking notions of a universal audience or a community of model interlocutors have not been entirely successful. In fact, their various discussions of a universal audience invoke the context-eschewing formalism of Kant’s categorical imperative. Moreover, they embrace the Kantian method for resolving the antinomies that continually vacillates between opposing extremes – here between a transcendent universal audience and a (...) context-embedded particular audience. This tack ironically restores the very external mediation they thought to obviate in their aim to ‘dethrone’ the absolutism and totalitarianism of formal logic with a democratic turn to audience adherence, the acceptability of premises and inferential links, and a contextual, or participant-relative, notion of cogency. (shrink)

By Maurice A. Finocchiaro Studies in Logic, Logic and Argumentation, Vol. 42. London: College Publications, 2013. Pp. vii, 1-279. ISBN 978-1-84890-097-4. UK£12 US$17.10 CDN$21.12.

Informal logic began in the 1970s as a critique of then-current theoretical assumptions in the teaching of argument analysis and evaluation in philosophy departments in the U.S. and Canada. The last 35 years have seen significant developments in informal logic and critical thinking theory. The paper is a pilot study of the influence of these advances in theory on what is taught in courses on argument analysis and critical thinking in U.S. and Canadian philosophy departments. Its finding, provisional and much-qualified, (...) is that the theoretical developments and refinements have had limited impact on instruction in leading philosophy departments. (shrink)

In this paper I review a number of Govier’s criticisms of the standard view of logic at the time she was developing her views about the nature of logic as it applies to the critique of arguments in natural language and the development of ways to teach skills in such critique. I argue that the concept of informal logic has emerged at least in part from those criticisms and Govier’s positive alternatives.

In Jonathan Adler argued that conductive arguments, as they are commonly characterized, are impossible—that no such argument can exist. This striking contention threatens to undermine a topic of argumentation theory originated by Trudy Govier based on Carl Wellman and revisited by the papers in “Conductive argument, An overlooked type of defeasible reasoning”. I here argue that Adler’s dismissal of conductive arguments relies on a misreading of the term ‘non-conclusive’ used in the characterization of this type of reasoning and argument, and (...) that as a result, his refutation fails. However, Adler’s critique raises other questions about conductive arguments that have to be answered. (shrink)

In this paper, we look at reasoning with evidence and facts in criminal cases. We show how this reasoning may be analysed in a dialectical way by means of critical questions that point to typical sources of doubt. We discuss critical questions about the evidential arguments adduced, about the narrative accounts of the facts considered, and about the way in which the arguments and narratives are connected in an analysis. Our treatment shows how two different types of knowledge, represented as (...) schemes, play a role in reasoning with evidence: argumentation schemes and story schemes. (shrink)

I argue that conductions are a special type of inference indeed, but that this does not mean that we need to develop novel standards of inference goodness or specific argument schemes for properly assessing them. Following LNMA’s theoretical framework, I provide a semantic account of conductions and explain the interesting pragmatic properties of a certain type of conductions in terms of the rhetorical dimension of the speech-act of arguing.

Conductive Arguments are held to be defeasible, non-conclusive, and neither inductive nor deductive (Blair and Johnson in Conductive argument: An overlooked type of defeasible reasoning. College, London, 2011). Of the different kinds of Conductive Arguments, I am concerned only with those for which it is claimed that countervailing considerations detract from the support for the conclusion, complimentary to the positive reasons increasing that support. Here’s an example from Wellman (Challenge and response: justification in ethics. Southern Illinois University Press, Chicago, 1971): (...) Although your lawn needs cutting, you ought to take your son to the movies because the picture is ideal for children and will be gone by tomorrow. (1971: 57) I argue that Conductive Arguments are not possible—the “ought” conclusion only holds if countervailing considerations are nullified. (shrink)

This volume presents a selection of papers reflecting key theoretical issues in argumentation theory. Its six sections are devoted to specific themes, including the analysis and evaluation of argumentation, argument schemes and the contextual embedding of argumentation. The section on general perspectives on argumentation discusses the trends of empiricalization, contextualization and formalization, offers descriptions of the analytical and evaluative tools of informal logic, and highlights selected principles that argumentation theorists do and do not agree upon. In turn, the section on (...) linguistic approaches to argumentation focuses on the problem of distinguishing between explanation and argument, while also elaborating on the role of verbal indicators of argument schemes. All essays included in this volume point out notable recent developments in the study of argumentation. (shrink)

We are pleased to release this edition of Ralph Johnson’s The Rise of Informal Logic as Volume 2 in the series Windsor Studies in Argumentation. This edition is a reprint of the previous Vale Press edition with some typographical errors and other minor mistakes corrected. The prime motive for gathering Ralph H. Johnson’s essays under one cover is their clear articulation of the goals, concerns and problems of the discipline of informal logic. To my knowledge all of the published articles, (...) even of the 1980s, are still in print. But some are obtainable only by special request of a journal back issue. Their availability, even their existence, is not nearly widely enough known, and this volume is dedicated to remedying that disservice to those currently working in the field of informal logic, critical thinking, argumentation, and practical reasoning. Three of these sixteen pieces appear here in print for the first time. The previously published pieces have appeared from 1980 to 1992 as chapters in collective works or as articles in journals, and these in turn published in Canada, USA, The Netherlands and Belgium. It is hoped that gathering this hitherto scattered material under one cover will contribute to a greater understanding of what informal logic is, and to an enhanced sense of the impact of Johnson’s ideas. A discipline of informal logic might exist today without the writings of Johnson and his frequent co-author, J. Anthony Blair. But it would almost certainly be quite different from what it actually is. (shrink)