My impulse when I decided to collect into a single volume the essays on topics in logical theory and related subjects that I have written in the last fifteen years was to borrow from the title of a work by Sextus Empiricus, and call my collection "Against the Logicians." Although the essays address a variety of problems that interest me, the thread that runs through them is a scepticism about how logicians see things. So, the title appealed to me. However, I had second thoughts and chose instead a title of one of my own essays, "In Defense of Informal Logic," which emphasizes my support for...

Scare Tactics, the first book on the subject, provides a theory of the structure of reasoning used in fear and threat appeal argumentation. Such arguments come under the heading of the argumentum ad baculum, the argument to the stick/club', traditionally treated as a fallacy in the logic textbooks. The new dialectical theory is based on case studies of many interesting examples of the use of these arguments in advertising, public relations, politics, international negotiations, and everyday argumentation on all kinds of subjects. Many of these arguments are amusing, once you...

Chapters 1-12 of this volume contain the papers on infonnal logic and argumentation that I've published and/or read at conferences over the last 17 years. These papers are reproduced here pretty much unchanged from their first appearance; it is my intention that their appearance here constitute a record of my positions and arguments at the time of their original publication or delivery. I've made minor changes in fonnat, in the style of references, etc., for the sake of consistency; I've also corrected typographical errors and the like. The only extensive changes in wording occur in the last...

Many Sides is the first full-length study of Protagorean antilogic, an argumentative practice with deep roots in rhetorical history and renewed relevance for contemporary culture.

Founded on the philosophical relativism of Protagoras, antilogic is a dynamic rather than a formal approach to argument, focused principally on the dialogical interaction of opposing positions (anti-logoi) in controversy. In ancient Athens, antilogic was the cardinal feature of Sophistic rhetoric. In Rome, Cicero redefined Sophistic argument in a concrete set of dialogical procedures. In...

In 1999 we invited a small number of colleagues to take part in a colloquium - voted to the analysis of argumentative discourse from two kinds of perspective: a dialectical and a rhetorical perspective. Our intention was to start a thorough disc- sion on the commonalities and differences between the two approaches. In this way we hoped to promote the development of analytic tools for dealing with argum- tation in which, in some way or other, the merits of both approaches are combined. The colloquium took place at the University of Amsterdam. In 2000 it was followed by a second colloquium at...

This volume of the Argumentation Library contains a collection of twenty-six theor- etical contributions to the study of argumentation. Together they provide an over- view of recent developments in the theory of argumentation which does justice to the theoretical variety in the field. InAnyone Who Has a View, the subject of argu- mentation is approached from different angles. Both the formal and informal logical approaches and the rhetorical and communicative approaches arc represented in various ways. We arc convinced that the collection of essays as a whole will be of interest not only to...

In the late 1990s, AI witnessed an increasing use of the term 'argumentation' within its bounds: in natural language processing, in user interface design, in logic programming and nonmonotonic reasoning, in Al's interface with the legal community, and in the newly emerging field of multi-agent systems. It seemed to me that many of these uses of argumentation were inspired by (of- ten inspired) guesswork, and that a great majority of the AI community were unaware that there was a maturing, rich field of research in Argumentation Theory (and Critical Thinking and Informal Logic) that had been...

The theory in the book is based on the latest research in argumentation theory, and especially on new applications of artificial intelligence (AI) to legal argumentation. The methodology of the book derives from recent work in argumentation theory and AI in which forms of reasoning other than deductive and inductive have been the focus of much investigation. The aim is not just to show how character judgments are made, but to show how they should properly be made based on sound reasoning, in order to avoid certain fallacies, errors and superficial judgments of a kind that are common. The book...

Argumentative Indicators: A Pragma-Dialectical Study identifies and analyses English words and expressions that are crucial for an adequate reconstruction of argumentative discourse. It provides the analyst of argumentative discussions and texts with a systematic set of instruments for giving a well founded analysis which results in an analytic overview of the elements that are relevant for the evaluation of the argumentation. In the book a systematic connection is made between linguistic insights into the characteristics of argumentative discourse and insights from argumentation theory into...

This volume of the Argumentation Library contains a collection of twenty-six theor- etical contributions to the study of argumentation. Together they provide an over- view of recent developments in the theory of argumentation which does justice to the theoretical variety in the field. InAnyone Who Has a View, the subject of argu- mentation is approached from different angles. Both the formal and informal logical approaches and the rhetorical and communicative approaches arc represented in various ways. We arc convinced that the collection of essays as a whole will be of interest not only to...