Argumentation theory
Argumentation theory is the interdisciplinary study of how conclusions can be supported or undermined by premises through logical reasoning. With historical origins in logic, dialectic, and rhetoric, argumentation theory includes the arts and sciences of civil debate, dialogue, conversation, and persuasion. It studies rules of inference, logic, and procedural rules in both artificial and real-world settings.
Argumentation includes various forms of dialogue such as deliberation and negotiation which are concerned with collaborative decision-making procedures. It also encompasses eristic dialogue, the branch of social debate in which victory over an opponent is the primary goal, and didactic dialogue used for teaching. This discipline also studies the means by which people can express and rationally resolve or at least manage their disagreements.
Argumentation is a daily occurrence, such as in public debate, science, and law. For example in law, in courts by the judge, the parties and the prosecutor, in presenting and testing the validity of evidences. Also, argumentation scholars study the post hoc rationalizations by which organizational actors try to justify decisions they have made irrationally.
Argumentation is one of four rhetorical modes, along with exposition, description, and narration.
Key components of argumentation
Some key components of argumentation are:- Understanding and identifying arguments, either explicit or implied, and the goals of the participants in the different [|types of dialogue].
- Identifying the premises from which conclusions are derived.
- Establishing the "burden of proof" – determining who made the initial claim and is thus responsible for providing evidence why their position merits acceptance.
- For the one carrying the "burden of proof", the advocate, to marshal evidence for their position in order to convince or force the opponent's acceptance. The method by which this is accomplished is producing valid, sound, and cogent arguments, devoid of weaknesses, and not easily attacked.
- In a debate, fulfillment of the burden of proof creates a burden of rejoinder. One must try to identify faulty reasoning in the opponent's argument, to attack the reasons/premises of the argument, to provide counterexamples if possible, to identify any fallacies, and to show why a valid conclusion cannot be derived from the reasons provided for their argument.
In this dialogue, the proposer first offers a premise, the premise is challenged by the interlocutor, and so the proposer offers a modification of the premise, which is designed only to evade the challenge provided.
Internal structure of arguments
Typically an argument has an internal structure, comprising the following:- a set of assumptions or premises,
- a method of reasoning or deduction, and
- a conclusion or point.
Often classical logic is used as the method of reasoning so that the conclusion follows logically from the assumptions or support. One challenge is that if the set of assumptions is inconsistent then anything can follow logically from inconsistency. Therefore, it is common to insist that the set of assumptions be consistent. It is also good practice to require the set of assumptions to be the minimal set, with respect to set inclusion, necessary to infer the consequent. Such arguments are called MINCON arguments, short for minimal consistent. Such argumentation has been applied to the fields of law and medicine.
A non-classical approach to argumentation investigates abstract arguments, where 'argument' is considered a primitive term, so no internal structure of arguments is taken into account.
Types of dialogue
In its most common form, argumentation involves an individual and an interlocutor or opponent engaged in dialogue, each contending differing positions and trying to persuade each other, but there are various types of dialogue:- Persuasion dialogue aims to resolve conflicting points of view of different positions.
- Negotiation aims to resolve conflicts of interests by cooperation and dealmaking.
- Inquiry aims to resolve general ignorance by the growth of knowledge.
- Deliberation aims to resolve a need to take action by reaching a decision.
- Information seeking aims to reduce one party's ignorance by requesting information from another party that is in a position to know something.
- Eristic aims to resolve a situation of antagonism through verbal fighting.
Argumentation and the grounds of knowledge
One of the original contributors to this trend was the philosopher Chaïm Perelman, who together with Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca introduced the French term la nouvelle rhetorique in 1958 to describe an approach to argument which is not reduced to application of formal rules of inference. Perelman's view of argumentation is much closer to a juridical one, in which rules for presenting evidence and rebuttals play an important role.
Karl R. Wallace's seminal essay, "The Substance of Rhetoric: Good Reasons" in the Quarterly Journal of Speech 44, led many scholars to study "marketplace argumentation" – the ordinary arguments of ordinary people. The seminal essay on marketplace argumentation is Ray Lynn Anderson's and C. David Mortensen's "Logic and Marketplace Argumentation" Quarterly Journal of Speech 53 : 143–150. This line of thinking led to a natural alliance with late developments in the sociology of knowledge. Some scholars drew connections with recent developments in philosophy, namely the pragmatism of John Dewey and Richard Rorty. Rorty has called this shift in emphasis "the linguistic turn".
In this new hybrid approach argumentation is used with or without empirical evidence to establish convincing conclusions about issues which are moral, scientific, epistemic, or of a nature in which science alone cannot answer. Out of pragmatism and many intellectual developments in the humanities and social sciences, "non-philosophical" argumentation theories grew which located the formal and material grounds of arguments in particular intellectual fields. These theories include informal logic, social epistemology, ethnomethodology, speech acts, the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of science, and social psychology. These new theories are not non-logical or anti-logical. They find logical coherence in most communities of discourse. These theories are thus often labeled "sociological" in that they focus on the social grounds of knowledge.
Kinds of argumentation
Conversational argumentation
The study of naturally occurring conversation arose from the field of sociolinguistics. It is usually called conversation analysis. Inspired by ethnomethodology, it was developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s principally by the sociologist Harvey Sacks and, among others, his close associates Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson. Sacks died early in his career, but his work was championed by others in his field, and CA has now become an established force in sociology, anthropology, linguistics, speech-communication and psychology. It is particularly influential in interactional sociolinguistics, discourse analysis and discursive psychology, as well as being a coherent discipline in its own right. Recently CA techniques of sequential analysis have been employed by phoneticians to explore the fine phonetic details of speech.Empirical studies and theoretical formulations by Sally Jackson and Scott Jacobs, and several generations of their students, have described argumentation as a form of managing conversational disagreement within communication contexts and systems that naturally prefer agreement.