Dialogues In Argumentation

This book presents the historical, theoretical and empirical foundations of educational practices involving dialogue and argumentation.

In the spirit of models of argument starting with inquiry, this book starts with a question: What might it mean to teach argument in ways that open up spaces for change—changes of mind, changes of practice and policy, changes in ways of talking and relating? The author explores teaching argument in ways that take into account the complexities and pluralities young people face as they attempt to enact local and global citizenship with others who may reasonably disagree. The focus is foremost on social action—the hard, hopeful work of finding productive ways forward in contexts where people need to work together across difference to get something worthwhile done.

Dialogues represents argument not as a battle to be won, but as a process of dialogue and deliberation-the exchange of opinions and ideas-among people with different values and perspectives. Part One contains succinct instruction on analyzing and developing arguments, including critical reading, source documentation, and analyzing visual arguments. Part Two, updated with many new readings addressing current issues, offers a diverse collection of provocative essays from both the popular and scholarly medium. The lucid, lively, and engaging writing addresses students as writers and thinkers, without overwhelming them with unnecessary jargon or theory.

This book develops a logical analysis of dialogue in which two or more parties attempt to advance their own interests. It includes a classification of the major types of dialogues and a discussion of several important informal fallacies. The authors define the concept of commitment in a way that makes it useful in evaluating arguments. In traditional logic, a proposition is either true or false, and that is the end of it. In this new framework, an arguer can be held to his or her commitments in some cases, but in other cases, he or she can retract them without violating any rule of the dialogue. Commitment in Dialogue studies the conditions under which commitments should be held or may be retracted within an argument.

Because of the need to devise systems for electronic communication on the internet, multi-agent computing is moving to a model of communication as a structured conversation between rational agents. For example, in multi-agent systems, an electronic agent searches around the internet, and collects certain kinds of information by asking questions to other agents. Such agents also reason with each other when they engage in negotiation and persuasion. It is shown in this book that critical argumentation is best represented in this framework by the model of reasoned argument called a dialog, in which two or more parties engage in a polite and orderly exchange with each other according to rules governed by conversation policies. In such dialog argumentation, the two parties reason together by taking turns asking questions, offering replies, and offering reasons to support a claim. They try to settle their disagreements by an orderly conversational exchange that is partly adversarial and partly collaborative.

This festschrift is in honour of a leading philosopher of argumentation. His theories of argument structure, whilst rooted in Aristotelian philosophy, have been influential in computer science and artificial intelligence. His theories have a strong empirical side and cover much of how argument and debate is conducted. They examine how the process of exploring disagreement and reaching consensus can be structured, and how the 'nuts and bolts' of reasoning in communication are put together. His theories are increasingly finding application in computer science, where his approach to commitment based modelling of dialogue has influenced the design of protocols for software agents, and his work on argument structure is being used to guide the development of a new, world-wide argument web.