Argumentation
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Argumentation theory, or argumentation, is the study of how humans can, do, and should reach conclusions through logical reasoning, that is, claims based on premises. It 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 debate and negotiation which are concerned with reaching mutually acceptable conclusions. It also encompasses eristic dialog, the branch of social debate in which victory over an opponent is the primary goal. This art and science is often the means by which people protect their beliefs or self-interests in rational dialogue, in common parlance, and during the process of arguing.
Argumentation is used in law, for example in trials, in preparing an argument to be presented to a court, and in testing the validity of certain kinds of evidence. Also, argumentation scholars study the post hoc rationalizations by which organizational actors try to justify decisions they have made irrationally.
Key components of argumentation
- 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 his/her position merits acceptance
- For the one carrying the "burden of proof", the advocate, to marshal evidence for his/her 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 logical fallacies, and to show why a valid conclusion cannot be derived from the reasons provided for his/her argument.
See also
- Analysis of subjective logics
- Argument
- Argument map
- Burden of proof
- Critical thinking
- Criticism
- Debate
- Defeasible reasoning
- Discourse ethics
- Eristic
- Essentially contested concepts
- Fallacy
- Forensics
- Informal logic
- Legal theory
- Logical argument
- Logical fallacy
- Pars destruens/pars construens
- Persuasion
- Pragma-dialectics
- Pragmatism
- Propaganda
- Public Sphere
- Rationality
- Rhetoric
- Social Engineering (Political Science)
- Social epistemology
- Social Psychology (psychology)
- Sophistry
- Source criticism
- Straight and Crooked Thinking (book)
