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Agendas, Relevance and Dialogic Ascent

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Abstract

E. C. W. Krabbe characterizes a metadialogue as a dialogue about a dialogue, which in turn, is characterized as a ground level dialogue. Krabbe raises a number of interesting questions about this distinction, of which the most pressing is whether the difference between ground level and metadialogues can be drawn in a principled and suitably general way. In this note, I develop the idea that something counts as a metadialogue to the extent that it stands to its ground level counterpart in a relation of irrelevance. The irrelevance in question subsumes a triple of subconcepts: strategic relevance, agenda-relevance and irredundancy-relevance.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, University of British Columbia, 1866 Main Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada , V6T1Z1

    John Woods

  2. Department of Computer Science, King’s College, Strand, London, WC2R 2LS, UK

    John Woods

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  1. John Woods
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Correspondence to John Woods.

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Woods, J. Agendas, Relevance and Dialogic Ascent. Argumentation 21, 209–221 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-007-9054-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-007-9054-y

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