Argumentation theory is a distinctly multidisciplinary field of inquiry. It draws its data, assumptions, and methods from disciplines as disparate as formal logic and discourse analysis, linguistics and forensic science, philosophy and psychology, political science and education, sociology and law, and rhetoric and artificial intelligence. This presents the growing group of interested scholars and students with a problem of access, since it is even for those active in the field not common to have acquired a familiarity with relevant aspects of each discipline that enters into this multidisciplinary matrix. This book offers its readers a unique comprehensive survey of the various theoretical contributions which have been made to the study of argumentation. It discusses the historical works that provide the background to the field and all major approaches and trends in contemporary research. Argument has been the subject of systematic inquiry for twenty-five hundred years. It has been graced with theories, such as formal logic or the legal theory of evidence, that have acquired a more or less settled provenance with regard to specific issues. But there has been nothing to date that qualifies as a unified general theory of argumentation, in all its richness and complexity. This being so, the argumentation theorist must have access to materials and methods that lie beyond his or her "home" subject. It is precisely on this account that this volume is offered to all the constituent research communities and their students. Apart from the historical sections, each chapter provides an economical introduction to the problems and methods that characterize a given part of the contemporary research program. Because the chapters are self-contained, they can be consulted in the order of a reader's interests or research requirements. But there is value in reading the work in its entirety. Jointly authored by the very people whose research has done much to define the current state of argumentation theory and to point the way toward more general and unified future treatments, this book is an impressively authoritative contribution to the field.

Fundamentals of Critical Argumentation presents the basic tools for the identification, analysis, and evaluation of common arguments for beginners. The book teaches by using examples of arguments in dialogues, both in the text itself and in the exercises. Examples of controversial legal, political, and ethical arguments are analyzed. Illustrating the most common kinds of arguments, the book also explains how to analyze and evaluate each kind by critical questioning. Douglas Walton shows how arguments can be reasonable under the right dialogue conditions by using critical questions to evaluate them.

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Argumentation theory is a distinctly multidisciplinary field of inquiry. It draws its data, assumptions, and methods from disciplines as disparate as formal logic and discourse analysis, linguistics and forensic science, philosophy and psychology, political science and education, sociology and law, and rhetoric and artificial intelligence. This presents the growing group of interested scholars and students with a problem of access, since it is even for those active in the field not common to have acquired a familiarity with relevant aspects of each discipline that enters into this multidisciplinary matrix. This book offers its readers a unique comprehensive survey of the various theoretical contributions which have been made to the study of argumentation. It discusses the historical works that provide the background to the field and all major approaches and trends in contemporary research. Argument has been the subject of systematic inquiry for twenty-five hundred years. It has been graced with theories, such as formal logic or the legal theory of evidence, that have acquired a more or less settled provenance with regard to specific issues. But there has been nothing to date that qualifies as a unified general theory of argumentation, in all its richness and complexity. This being so, the argumentation theorist must have access to materials and methods that lie beyond his or her "home" subject. It is precisely on this account that this volume is offered to all the constituent research communities and their students. Apart from the historical sections, each chapter provides an economical introduction to the problems and methods that characterize a given part of the contemporary research program. Because the chapters are self-contained, they can be consulted in the order of a reader's interests or research requirements. But there is value in reading the work in its entirety. Jointly authored by the very people whose research has done much to define the current state of argumentation theory and to point the way toward more general and unified future treatments, this book is an impressively authoritative contribution to the field.

In this book two of the leading figures in argumentation theory present a view of argumentation as a means of resolving differences of opinion by testing the acceptability of the disputed positions. Their model of a 'critical discussion' serves as a theoretical tool for analyzing, evaluating and producing argumentative discourse. This is a major contribution to the study of argumentation and will be of particular value to professionals and graduate students in speech communication, informal logic, rhetoric, critical thinking, linguistics, and philosophy.

This series of books presents the fundamentals of logic in a style accessible to both students and scholars. The text of each essay presents a story, the main line of development of the ideas, while the notes and appendices place the research within a larger scholarly context. The essays overlap, forming a unified analysis of logic as the art of reasoning well, yet each essay is designed so that it may be read independently. The question addressed in this volume is how we can justify our beliefs through reasoning. The first essay, "Arguments," investigates what it is that we call true or false and how we reason toward truths through arguments. A general theory of argument analysis is set out on the basis of what we can assume about those with whom we reason. The next essay, "Fallacies," explains how the classification of an argument as a fallacy can be used within that general approach. In contrast, there is no agreement on what the terms "induction" and "deduction" mean, and they are not useful in evaluating arguments, as shown in "Induction and Deduction." In reasoning to truths, in the end we must take some claims as basic, not requiring any justification for accepting them. How we choose those claims and how they affect our reasoning is examined in "Base Claims." The essay "Analogies" considers how comparisons can be used as the basis of arguments, arguing from similar situations to similar conclusions. An important use of analogies is in reasoning about the mental life of other people and things, which is examined in "Subjective Claims," written with Fred Kroon and William S. Robinson. "Generalizing" examines how to argue from part of a collection or mass to the whole or a larger part. The question there is whether we are ever justified in accepting such an argument as good. "Probabilities" sets out the three main ways probability statements have been interpreted: the logical relation view, the frequency view, and the subjective degree of belief view. Each of those is shown to be inadequate to make precise the scale of plausibility of claims and the scale of the likelihood of a possibility. Many discussions of how to reason well and what counts as good reason are given in terms of who or what is rational. In the final essay, "Rationality," it's shown that what we mean by the idea of someone being rational is of very little use in evaluating reasoning or actions. This volume is meant to give a clearer idea of how to reason well, setting out methods of evaluation that are motivated in terms of our abilities and interests. At the ground of our reasoning, though, are metaphysical assumptions, too basic and too much needed in our reasoning for us to justify them through reasoning. But we can try to uncover those assumptions to see how they are important and what depends on them.

This book offers its readers an overview of recent developments in the theory of legal argumentation written by representatives from various disciplines, including argumentation theory, philosophy of law, logic and artificial intelligence. It presents an overview of contributions representative of different academic and legal cultures, and different continents and countries. The book contains contributions on strategic maneuvering, argumentum ad absurdum, argumentum ad hominem, consequentialist argumentation, weighing and balancing, the relation between legal argumentation and truth, the distinction between the context of discovery and context of justification, and the role of constitutive and regulative rules in legal argumentation. It is based on a selection of papers that were presented in the special workshop on Legal Argumentation organized at the 25th IVR World Congress for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy held 15-20 August 2011 in Frankfurt, Germany.