Recent concerns with the evaluation of argumentation in informal logic and speech communication center around nondemonstrative arguments that lead to tentative or defeasible conclusions based on a balance of considerations. Such arguments do not appear to have structures of the kind traditionally identified with deductive and inductive reasoning, but are extremely common and are often called "plausible" or "presumptive," meaning that they are only provisionally acceptable even when they are correct. How is one to judge, by some clearly defined standard, whether such arguments are correct or not in a given instance? The answer lies in what are called argumentation schemes -- forms of argument (structures of inference) that enable one to identify and evaluate common types of argumentation in everyday discourse. This book identifies 25 argumentation schemes for presumptive reasoning and matches a set of critical questions to each. These two elements -- the scheme and the questions -- are then used to evaluate a given argument in a particular case in relation to a context of dialogue in which the argument occurred. In recent writings on argumentation, there is a good deal of stress placed on how important argumentation schemes are in any attempt to evaluate common arguments in everyday reasoning as correct or fallacious, acceptable or questionable. However, the problem is that the literature thus far has not produced a precise and user-friendly enough analysis of the structures of the argumentation schemes themselves, nor have any of the documented accounts been as helpful, accessible, or systematic as they could be, especially in relation to presumptive reasoning. This book solves the problem by presenting the most common presumptive schemes in an orderly and clear way that makes them explicit and useful as precisely defined structures. As such, it will be an indispensable tool for researchers, students, and teachers in the areas of critical thinking, argumentation, speech communication, informal logic, and discourse analysis.
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.
This volume comprises a selection of contributions to the theorizing about argumentation that have been presented at the 9th conference of the International Society for the Study of Argumentation (ISSA), held in Amsterdam in July 2018. The chapters included provide a general theoretical perspective on central topics in argumentation theory, such as argument schemes and the fallacies. Some contributions concentrate on the treatment of the concept of conductive argument. Other contributions are dedicated to specific issues such as the justification of questions, the occurrence of mining relations, the role of exclamatives, argumentative abduction, eudaimonistic argumentation and a typology of logical ways to counter an argument. In a number of cases the theoretical problems addressed are related to a specific type of context, such as the burden of proof in philosophical argumentation, the charge of committing a genetic fallacy in strategic manoeuvring in philosophy, the necessity of community argument, and connection adequacy for arguments with institutional warrants. The volume offers a great deal of diversity in its breadth of coverage of argumentation theory and wide geographic representation from North and South America to Europe and China.
Crucial Concepts in Argumentation Theory is a collection of essays that discuss a series of important issues in the study of argumentation. The essays describe the concepts that are crucial to argumentational research and the various ways these concepts have been approached. The essays explore such issues as points of view, unexpressed premises, argument schemes, argumentation structures, fallacies, argument interpretation and reconstruction, and argumentation in law. Each of the essays provides interested readers with an overview of the literature that can serve as a point of departure for further study.
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.
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.
Use of argumentation methods applied to legal reasoning is a relatively new field of study. The book provides a survey of the leading problems, and outlines how future research using argumentation-based methods show great promise of leading to useful solutions. The problems studied include not only these of argument evaluation and argument invention, but also analysis of specific kinds of evidence commonly used in law, like witness testimony, circumstantial evidence, forensic evidence and character evidence. New tools for analyzing these kinds of evidence are introduced.
This book is an introduction to the linguistic concepts of argumentation relevant for argument mining, an important research and development activity which can be viewed as a highly complex form of information retrieval, requiring high-level natural language processing technology. While the first four chapters develop the linguistic and conceptual aspects of argument expression, the last four are devoted to their application to argument mining. These chapters investigate the facets of argument annotation, as well as argument mining system architectures and evaluation. How annotations may be used to develop linguistic data and how to train learning algorithms is outlined. A simple implementation is then proposed. The book ends with an analysis of non-verbal argumentative discourse. Argument Mining is an introductory book for engineers or students of linguistics, artificial intelligence and natural language processing. Most, if not all, the concepts of argumentation crucial for argument mining are carefully introduced and illustrated in a simple manner.
This book examines argumentative situations as they develop in different cultures and language groups. It considers the development of argumentation studies, making greater allowance for the specificities of argument as developed by “non-mainstream cultures”; the contribution of Jainism to the framework of philosophical disputation in India; duel songs as an institutionalized argumentative genre practiced by Ammassalik culture within the Inuit community; the application of the Muslim theological-legal reasoning system to evaluate two traditional, pre-Muslim traditional practices in Borneo; the annotation of schemes on the basis of Walton’s taxonomy of argument schemes and Wagemans’ Periodic Table of Arguments; methodology proposed for the reconstruction and analysis of “double-mode” arguments in advertisements, combining the instruments developed in social semiotics, pragmatics, and argumentation theory; and a review of the argumentation-theoretical literature on metaphor in argumentative discourse. This book is of interest to students and researchers in argumentation studies, rhetoric, philosophy, cultural studies and language studies. Previously published in Argumentation Volume 35, issue 1, March 2021 Chapters "Annotating Argument Schemes" and "The Study of Metaphor in Argumentation Theory" are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.
The theory of argumentation is a rich, interdisciplinary area of research involving philosophy, communications studies, linguistics, psychology, and logics. Its techniques have found a wide range of applications in both theoretical and practical branches of artificial intelligence and computer science. Multi-agent systems theory has picked up argumentation-inspired approaches and specifically argumentation-theoretic results from many different areas. Researchers in argumentation and multi-agent systems are currently enjoying a unique opportunity to integrate the various understandings of argument into a coherent and core part of the functioning of autonomous computational systems. This book originates from the First International Workshop on Argumentation in Multi-Agent Systems, ArgMAS 2004, held in New York, NY, USA in July 2004. Besides 12 selected revised full papers taken from the workshop, 4 additional papers by key people in the area round off overall coverage of the relevant topics. The papers address the following main topics: foundations of dialogues, belief revision, persuasion and deliberation, negotiation, and strategic issues.
Argumentation is all around us. Letters to the Editor often make points of cons- tency, and “Why” is one of the most frequent questions in language, asking for r- sons behind behaviour. And argumentation is more than ‘reasoning’ in the recesses of single minds, since it crucially involves interaction. It cements the coordinated social behaviour that has allowed us, in small bands of not particularly physically impressive primates, to dominate the planet, from the mammoth hunt all the way up to organized science. This volume puts argumentation on the map in the eld of Arti cial Intelligence. This theme has been coming for a while, and some famous pioneers are chapter authors, but we can now see a broader systematic area emerging in the sum of topics and results. As a logician, I nd this intriguing, since I see AI as ‘logic continued by other means’, reminding us of broader views of what my discipline is about. Logic arose originally out of re ection on many-agent practices of disputation, in Greek Ant- uity, but also in India and China. And logicians like me would like to return to this broader agenda of rational agency and intelligent interaction. Of course, Aristotle also gave us a formal systems methodology that deeply in uenced the eld, and eventually connected up happily with mathematical proof and foundations.
