FALLACY

A fallacy is an argument which may convince some people but is not logically sound. Note that the truth of the conclusions of an argument does not determine whether the argument is a fallacy - it is the argument which is incorrect.

Fallacies can be categorized in a number of ways including:
Formal (or Logical) fallacies versus Informal fallacies
A formal fallacy relies on a logical step in a proof or argument which is incorrect allowing a conclusion to be reached. An informal fallacy will not occur in this manner.
Verbal fallacies
Which use some property of language, such as its ambiguity or length to mislead.
Though some of these classifications are not that sharp.
Fallacies are also often concerned with causality, which is not strictly addressed by logic, or involve implicit (or unstated) assumptions.
Fallacies often exploit emotional triggers in the listener or interlocutor, for example relating arguments to patriotism or family, or intellectual weaknesses targeting subjects which the listener knows little about. They may also take advantage of social relationships between people, for example citing support of important individuals to encourage listeners to agree with a conclusion..
When considered by themselves, fallacies can often seem very difficult to be misled by. However, actual arguments are often structured using rhetorical patterns that obscure the logical argument, deliberately or not - making observing fallacies difficult. Also, the component parts of the fallacy may be spread over a large period of time.
Material fallacies
The taxonomy of material fallacies widely adopted by modern logicians and based on that of Aristotle, Organon (Sophistici elenchi), is as follows:

• Fallacy of Accident (also called destroying the exception or a dicto simpliciter ad dictum secundum quid)--makes a generalization that disregards exceptions
  Example Argument: Cutting people is a crime. Surgeons cut people. Therefore, surgeons are criminals.
  Problem: Cutting people is only sometimes a crime.
• Converse Fallacy of Accident (also called reverse accident, destroying the exception, or a dicto secundum quid ad dictum simpliciter)--argues from a special case to a general rule
  Example Argument: Every swan I have seen is white, so it must be true that all swans are white.
  Problem: What one has seen is a special case. One can not have seen all swans.
• Irrelevant Conclusion (also called Ignoratio Elenchi)--diverts attention away from a fact in dispute rather than address it directly. This is sometimes referred to as a "red herring". Subsets include:
  purely personal considerations (argumentum ad hominem),
  popular sentiment (argumentum ad populum--appeal to the majority; appeal to loyalty.),
  fear (argumentum ad baculum),
  conventional propriety (argumentum ad verecundiam--appeal to authority)
  Example Argument: Kim Jong Il believes that war is justifiable therefore it must be justifiable.
  Problem: Kim Jong Il can be wrong.
  to arouse pity for getting one's conclusion accepted (argumentum ad misericordiam)
  proving the proposition under dispute without any certain proof (argumentum ad ignoratiam)
• Affirming the Consequent--draws a conclusion from premises that do not support that conclusion by assuming Q implies P on the basis that P implies Q
  Example Argument: If a person runs barefoot, then his feet hurt. Socrates' feet hurt. Therefore, Socrates ran barefoot.
  Problem: Other things, such as tight sandals, can result in sore feet.
• Denying the antecedent--draws a conclusion from premises that do not support that conclusion by assuming Not P implies Not Q on the basis that P implies Q
  Example Argument: If I have the flu, then I have a sore throat. I do not have the flu. Therefore, I do not have a sore throat.
  Problem: Other illnesses may cause sore throat.
• Fallacy of False Cause or Non Sequitur (Latin for "it does not follow")--incorrectly assumes one thing is the cause of another
  A special case of this fallacy also goes by the Latin term post hoc ergo propter hoc--the fallacy of believing that temporal succession implies a causal relation.
  Another special case is given by the Latin term cum hoc ergo propter hoc -- the fallacy of believing that happenstance implies causal relation (aka as fallacy of causation versus correlation: assumes that correlation implies causation).
  Example Argument: Our nation will prevail because God is great.
  Problem: One has no reason to believe that simply because God is great he will cause a nation to prevail.
• Fallacy of Many Questions (Plurium Interrogationum)--groups more than one question in the form of a single question
  Example Argument: Is it true that you no longer consider yourself an anarchist?
  Problem: A yes or no answer will still be an admission of guilt to being an anarchist at some point in time.
  Example
  The following argument is posited:
  Cake is food.
  Food is delicious.
  Therefore, cake is delicious.
  This argument claims to prove that cake is delicious. This particular argument has the form of a categorical syllogism. Any argument must have premises as well as a conclusion. In this case we need to ask what the premises are—that is, the set of assumptions the proposer of the argument can expect the interlocutor to grant. The first assumption is almost true by definition: cake is a foodstuff edible by humans. The second assumption is less clear as to its meaning. Since the assertion has no quantifiers of any kind, it could mean any one of the following:
  All food is delicious.
  One particular type of food is delicious.
  Most food is delicious.
  To me, all food is delicious.
  Some food is delicious.
  In all but the first interpretation, the above syllogism would then fail to have validated its second premise. The person may try to assume that his interlocutor believes that all food is delicious; if the interlocutor grants this then the argument is valid. In this case, the interlocutor is essentially conceding the point to that person. However, the interlocutor is more likely to believe that some food is disgusting, and in this case the person is not much better off than he was before he formulated the argument, since he now has to prove the assertion that cake is a unique type of universally delicious food, which is a disguised form of the original thesis. From the point of view of the interlocutor, the person commits the logical fallacy of begging the question.
  
  Verbal fallacies

Verbal fallacies are those in which a conclusion is obtained by improper or ambiguous use of words.

They are generally classified as follows.

• Equivocation consists in employing the same word in two or more senses, e.g. in a syllogism, the middle term being used in one sense in the major and another in the minor premise, so that in fact there are four not three terms
  Example Argument: All heavy things have a great mass; this is heavy fog; therefore this fog has a great mass.
  Problem: Heavy describes more than just weight. In the case of fog it means that the fog is dense not that it has a great mass"
  Connotation fallacies occur when a dysphemistic word is substituted for the speaker's actual quote and used to discredit the argument. It is a form of attribution fallacy.
  Amphibology is the result of ambiguity of grammatical structure
  Example: The position of the adverb "only" in the a sentence starting with "He only said that" results in a sentence in which it is uncertain as to which of the other three words the speaker is intending to modify with the adverb.
  Fallacy of Composition "From Each to All". Arguing from some property of constituent parts, to the conclusion that the composite item has that property. This can be acceptable (i.e., not a fallacy) with certain arguments such as spatial arguments (e.g. "all the parts of the car are in the garage, therefore the car is in the garage")
  Example Argument: All the band members (constituent parts) are highly skilled, therefore the band (composite item) is highly skilled.
  Problem: The band members may be skilled musicians but not in the same styles of music.
• Division, the converse of the preceding, arguing from a property of the whole, to each constituent part
  Example Argument: "the university (the whole) is 700 years old, therefore, all the staff (each part) are 700 years old".
• Proof by verbosity, sometimes colloquially referred to as argumentum verbosium - a rhetorical technique that tries to persuade by overwhelming those considering an argument with such a volume of material that the argument sounds plausible, superficially appears to be well-researched, and it is so laborious to untangle and check supporting facts that the argument might be allowed to slide by unchallenged.
  Accent, which occurs only in speaking and consists of emphasizing the wrong word in a sentence. e.g., "He is a fairly good pianist," according to the emphasis on the words, may imply praise of a beginner's progress, or an expert's deprecation of a popular hero, or it may imply that the person in question is a deplorable pianist.[citation needed]
  Figure of Speech, the confusion between the metaphorical and ordinary uses of a word or phrase.
  Example: The sailor was at home on the sea.
  Problem: The expression 'to be at home' does not literally mean that ones home is in that location.
  Fallacy of Misplaced Concretion, identified by Whitehead in his discussion of metaphysics, this refers to the reification of concepts which exist only in discourse.
  Example 1
  Tom argues:
  Joe is a good tennis player.
  Therefore, Joe is 'good', that is to say a 'morally' good person.
  Here the problem is that the word good has different meanings, which is to say that it is an ambiguous word. In the premise, Tom says that Joe is good at some particular activity, in this case tennis. In the conclusion, Tom states that Joe is a morally good person. These are clearly two different senses of the word "good". The premise might be true but the conclusion can still be false: Joe might be the best tennis player in the world but a rotten person morally. However, it is not legitimate to infer he is a bad person on the ground there has been a fallacious argument on the part of Tom. Nothing concerning Joe's moral qualities is to be inferred from the premise. Appropriately, since it plays on an ambiguity, this sort of fallacy is called the fallacy of equivocation, that is, equating two incompatible terms or claims.
• Example 2
  One posits the argument:
  Nothing is better than eternal happiness.
  Eating a hamburger is better than nothing.
  Therefore, eating a hamburger is better than eternal happiness.
  This argument has the appearance of an inference that applies transitivity of the two-placed relation is better than, which in this critique we grant is a valid property. The argument is an example of syntactic ambiguity. In fact, the first premise semantically does not predicate an attribute of the subject, as would for instance the assertion
  A potato is better than eternal happiness.
  In fact it is semantically equivalent to the following universal quantification:
  Everything fails to be better than eternal happiness.
  So instantiating this fact with eating a hamburger, it logically follows that
  Eating a hamburger fails to be better than eternal happiness.
  Note that the premise A hamburger is better than nothing does not provide anything to this argument. This fact really means something such as
  Eating a hamburger is better than eating nothing at all.
  Thus this is a fallacy of equivocation.
  
  Deductive fallacy
  In philosophy, the term logical fallacy properly refers to a formal fallacy : a flaw in the structure of a deductive argument which renders the argument invalid.
  However, it is often used more generally in informal discourse to mean an argument which is problematic for any reason, and thus encompasses informal fallacies as well as formal fallacies. – valid but unsound claims or bad nondeductive argumentation – .
  The presence of a formal fallacy in a deductive argument does not imply anything about the argument's premises or its conclusion (see fallacy fallacy). Both may actually be true, or even more probable as a result of the argument (e.g. appeal to authority), but the deductive argument is still invalid because the conclusion does not follow from the premises in the manner described. By extension, an argument can contain a formal fallacy even if the argument is not a deductive one; for instance an inductive argument that incorrectly applies principles of probability or causality can be said to commit a formal fallacy.
  
  Formalisms and frameworks used to understand fallacies
  A different approach to understanding and classifying fallacies is provided by argumentation theory; see for instance the van Eemeren, Grootendorst reference below. In this approach, an argument is regarded as an interactive protocol between individuals which attempts to resolve a disagreement. The protocol is regulated by certain rules of interaction, and violations of these rules are fallacies. Many of the fallacies in the list below are best understood as being fallacies in this sense.
  
  

third presidential debate

The debate does not meet academic standards for arguments – no concrete conclusion was arrived at. Both speakers-candidates were essentially discussing only their economic plans on how to recover from the economic slump- however, the Moderator failed to let the speakers come up to concrete conclusion, in black and white, so to speak, as whose economic plans was better. In other words, judgment on whose economic plans was better (reasonable) was left for the audience to decide.

charter change

I am for charter change. Nothing stays the same and only change is constant. There are provisions in our Constitution which does not anymore address the present conditions. For instance, the provisions restricting ownership of land to Filipino citizens only should be reviewed for it is restricting business and growth of our economy. Present conditions, globalization of businesses makes it undeniable fact that we must address the present constitutional restrictions so we will not be left behind by our neighbouring countries. Vietnam and Thailand economies’ are doing better than ours as they have passed laws relaxing ownership of land by non-citizens.

argumentation

Argumentation theory, or argumentation, embraces the arts and sciences of civil debate, dialogue, conversation, and persuasion; studying rules of inference, logic, and procedural rules in both artificial and real world settings. Argumentation is concerned primarily with reaching conclusions through logical reasoning, that is, claims based on premises. Although including debate and negotiation which are concerned with reaching mutually acceptable conclusions, argumentation theory 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.

[edit] Argumentation and the grounds of knowledge
Argumentation theory was once based upon foundationalism, a theory of knowledge (epistemology) in the field of philosophy. It sought to find the grounds for claims in the forms (logic) and materials (factual laws) of a universal system of knowledge. As argument scholars gradually rejected the idealism in Plato and Kant, and jettisoned with it the idea that argument premises take their soundness from formal philosophical systems, the field broadened. [1]. Karl R. Wallace's seminal essay, "The Substance of Rhetoric: Good Reasons," Quarterly Journal of Speech (1963) 44, led many scholars to study "marketplace argumentation," that is the ordinary arguments of ordinary people. The seminal essay on marketplace argumentation is Anderson, Ray Lynn, and C. David Mortensen, "Logic and Marketplace Argumentation." Quarterly Journal of Speech 53 (1967): 143-150.[2]. [3]. This line of thinking led to a natural alliance with late developments in the sociology of knowledge.[4]. Some scholars drew connections with recent developments in philosophy, namely the pragmatism of John Dewey and Richard Rorty. Rorty has called this shift in emphasis "the linguistic turn."
In this new hybrid approach argumentation is used with or without empirical evidence to establish convincing conclusions about issues which are moral, scientific, epistemic, or of a nature in which science alone cannot answer. Out of pragmatism and many intellectual developments in the humanities and social sciences, "non-philosophical" argumentation theories grew which located the formal and material grounds of arguments in particular intellectual fields. These theories include informal logic, social epistemology, ethnomethodology, speech acts, the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of science, and social psychology. These new theories are not non-logical or anti-logical. They find logical coherence in most communities of discourse. These theories are thus often labeled "sociological" in that they focus on the social grounds of knowledge.

[edit] Approaches to argumentation in communication and informal logic
In general, the label "argumentation" is used by communication scholars such as (to name only a few) Wayne E. Brockriede, Douglas Ehninger, Joseph W. Wenzel, Richard Rieke, Gordon Mitchell, Carol Winkler, Eric Gander, Dennis S. Gouran, Daniel J. O'Keefe, Mark Aakhus, Bruce Gronbeck, James Klumpp,G. Thomas Goodnight, Robin Rowland, Dale Hample, C. Scott Jacobs, Sally Jackson, and Charles Arthur Willard) while the term "informal logic" is preferred by philosophers, stemming from University of Windsor philosophers Ralph Johnson and J. Anthony Blair.
Trudy Govier, Douglas Walton, Michael Gilbert, Harvey Seigal, Michael Scriven, and John Woods (to name only a few) are other prominent authors in this tradition. Over the past thirty years, however, scholars from several disciplines have co-mingled at international conferences such as that hosted by the University of Amsterdam (the Netherlands) and the International Society for the Study of Argumentation (ISSA). Other international conferences are the biannual conference held at Alta, Utah sponsored by the (US) National Communication Association and American Forensics Association and conferences sponsored by the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation (OSSA).
Some scholars (such as Ralph Johnson) construe the term "argument", narrowly, for instance as exclusively written discourse or even discourse in which all premises are explicit. Others (such as Michael Gilbert) construe the term "argument" broadly, to include spoken and even nonverbal discourse, for instance the degree to which a war memorial or propaganda poster can be said to argue or "make arguments." The philosopher Stephen E. Toulmin has said that an argument is a claim on our attention and belief, a view that would seem to authorize treating, say, propaganda posters as arguments. The dispute between broad and narrow theorists is of long standing and is unlikely to be settled. The views of the majority of argumentation theorists and analysts fall somewhere between these two extremes.

[edit] Pragma-dialectics
One rigorous modern version of dialectic has been pioneered by scholars at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, under the name of pragma-dialectics. The intuitive idea is to formulate clearcut rules that, if followed, will yield rational discussion and sound conclusions. Frans van Eemeren, the late Rob Grootendorst, and many of their students have produced a large body of work expounding this idea.
The dialectical conception of reasonableness is given by ten rules for critical discussion, all being instrumental for achieving a resolution of the difference of opinion (from Van Eemeren, Grootendorst, & Snoeck Henkemans, 2002, p. 182-183):
Freedom rule. Parties must not prevent each other from advancing standpoints or from casting doubt on standpoints.
Burden of proof rule. A party that advances a standpoint is obliged to defend it if asked by the other party to do so.
Standpoint rule. A party’s attack on a standpoint must relate to the standpoint that has indeed been advanced by the other party.
Relevance rule. A party may defend a standpoint only by advancing argumentation relating to that standpoint.
Unexpressed premise rule. A party may not disown a premise that has been left implicit by that party, or falsely present something as a premise that has been left unexpressed by the other party.
Starting point rule. A party may not falsely present a premise as an accepted starting point nor deny a premise representing an accepted starting point.
Argument scheme rule. A party may not regard a standpoint as conclusively defended if the defense does not take place by means of an appropriate argumentation scheme that is correctly applied.
Validity rule. A party may only use arguments in its argumentation that are logically valid or capable of being validated by making explicit one or more unexpressed premises
Closure rule. A failed defense of a standpoint must result in the party that put forward the standpoint retracting it and a conclusive defense of the standpoint must result in the other party retracting its doubt about the standpoint.
Usage rule. A party must not use formulations that are insufficiently clear or confusingly ambiguous and a party must interpret the other party’s formulations as carefully and accurately as possible.
The theory postulates this as an ideal model, and not something one expects to find as an empirical fact. It can however serve as an important heuristic and critical tool for testing how reality approximates this ideal and point to where discourse goes wrong, that is, when the rules are violated. Any such violation will constitute a fallacy. Albeit not primarily focused on fallacies, pragma-dialectics provides a systematic approach to deal with them in a coherent way.

[edit] Argument fields
Stephen E. Toulmin and Charles Arthur Willard have championed the idea of argument fields, the former drawing upon Ludwig Wittgenstein's notion of language games, the latter drawing from communication and argumentation theory, sociology, political science, and social epistemology. For Toulmin, the term "field" designates discourses within which arguments and factual claims are grounded. [5] For Willard, the term "field" is interchangeable with "community," "audience," or "readership." [6]. Along similar lines, G. Thomas Goodnight has studied "spheres" of argument and sparked a large literature created by younger scholars responding to or using his ideas. [7] The general tenor of these field theories is that the premises of arguments take their meaning from social communities [8]
Field studies might focus on social movements, issue-centered publics (for instance, pro-life versus pro-choice in the abortion dispute), small activist groups, corporate public relations campaigns and issue management, scientific communities and disputes, political campaigns, and intellectual traditions. [9] In the manner of a sociologist, ethnographer, anthropologist, participant-observer, and journalist, the field theorist gathers and reports on real-world human discourses, gathering case studies that might eventually be combined to produce high-order explanations of argumentation processes. This is not a quest for some master language or master theory covering all specifics of human activity. Field theorists are agnostic about the possibility of a single grand theory and skeptical about the usefulness of such a theory. Theirs' is a more modest quest for "mid-range" theories that might permit generalizations about families of discourses.

[edit] Stephen E. Toulmin's Contributions

[edit] An Alternative to Absolutism and Relativism
Toulmin has argued that absolutism (represented by theoretical or analytic arguments) has limited practical value. Absolutism is derived from Plato’s idealized formal logic, which advocates universal truth; thus absolutists believe that moral issues can be resolved by adhering to a standard set of moral principles, regardless of context. By contrast, Toulmin asserts that many of these so-called standard principles are irrelevant to real situations encountered by human beings in daily life.
To describe his vision of daily life, Toulmin introduced the concept of argument fields; in The Uses of Argument (1958), Toulmin states that some aspects of arguments vary from field to field, and are hence called “field-dependent,” while other aspects of argument are the same throughout all fields, and are hence called “field-invariant.” The flaw of absolutism, Toulmin believes, lies in its unawareness of the field-dependent aspect of argument; absolutism assumes that all aspects of argument are field invariant.
Toulmin’s theories resolve to avoid the defects of absolutism without resorting to relativism: relativism, Toulmin asserted, provides no basis for distinguishing between a moral or immoral argument. In Human Understanding (1972), Toulmin suggests that anthropologists have been tempted to side with relativists because they have noticed the influence of cultural variations on rational arguments; in other words, the anthropologist or relativist overemphasizes the importance of the “field-dependent” aspect of arguments, and becomes unaware of the “field-invariant” elements. In an attempt to provide solutions to the problems of absolutism and relativism, Toulmin attempts throughout his work to develop standards that are neither absolutist nor relativist for assessing the worth of ideas.
Toulmin believes that a good argument can succeed in providing good justification to a claim, which will stand up to criticism and earn a favourable verdict.

[edit] Components of Argument
In The Uses of Argument (1958), Toulmin proposed a layout containing six interrelated components for analyzing arguments:
1. Claim
Conclusions whose merit must be established. For example, if a person tries to convince a listener that he is a British citizen, the claim would be “I am a British citizen.” (1)
2. Data
The facts we appeal to as a foundation for the claim. For example, the person introduced in 1 can support his claim with the supporting data “I was born in Bermuda.” (2)
3. Warrant
The statement authorizing our movement from the data to the claim. In order to move from the data established in 2, “I was born in Bermuda,” to the claim in 1, “I am a British citizen,” the person must supply a warrant to bridge the gap between 1 & 2 with the statement “A man born in Bermuda will legally be a British Citizen.” (3)
4. Backing
Credentials designed to certify the statement expressed in the warrant; backing must be introduced when the warrant itself is not convincing enough to the readers or the listeners. For example, if the listener does not deem the warrant in 3 as credible, the speaker will supply the legal provisions as backing statement to show that it is true that “A man born in Bermuda will legally be a British Citizen.”
5. Rebuttal
Statements recognizing the restrictions to which the claim may legitimately be applied. The rebuttal is exemplified as follows, “A man born in Bermuda will legally be a British citizen, unless he has betrayed Britain and has become a spy of another country.”
6. Qualifier
Words or phrases expressing the speaker’s degree of force or certainty concerning the claim. Such words or phrases include “possible,” “probably,” “impossible,” “certainly,” “presumably,” “as far as the evidence goes,” or “necessarily.” The claim “I am definitely a British citizen” has a greater degree of force than the claim “I am a British citizen, presumably.”
The first three elements “claim,” “data,” and “warrant” are considered as the essential components of practical arguments, while the second triad “qualifier,” “backing,” and “rebuttal” may not be needed in some arguments.

[edit] Application to Rhetoric
When first proposed, this layout of argumentation is based on legal arguments and intended to be used to analyze the rationality of arguments typically found in the courtroom; in fact, Toulmin did not realize that this layout would be applicable to the field of rhetoric and communication until his works were introduced to rhetoricians by Wayne Brockriede and Douglas Ehninger. Only after he published Introduction to Reasoning (1979) were the rhetorical applications of this layout mentioned in his works.

[edit] The Evolution of Knowledge
Toulmin's Human Understanding (1972) asserts that conceptual change is evolutionary. This book attacks Thomas Kuhn’s explanation of conceptual change in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn held that conceptual change is a revolutionary (as opposed to an evolutionary) process in which mutually exclusive paradigms compete to replace one another. Toulmin criticizes the relativist elements in Kuhn’s thesis, as he points out that the mutually exclusive paradigms provide no ground for comparison; in other words, Kuhn’s thesis has made the relativists’ error of overemphasizing the “field variant” while ignoring the “field invariant,” or commonality shared by all argumentation or scientific paradigms.
Toulmin proposes an evolutionary model of conceptual change comparable to Darwin’s model of biological evolution. On this reasoning, conceptual change involves innovation and selection. Innovation accounts for the appearance of conceptual variations, while selection accounts for the survival and perpetuation of the soundest conceptions. Innovation occurs when the professionals of a particular discipline come to view things differently from their predecessors; selection subjects the innovative concepts to a process of debate and inquiry in what Toulmin considers as a “forum of competitions.” The soundest concepts will survive the forum of competition as replacements or revisions of the traditional conceptions.
From the absolutists’ point of view, concepts are either valid or invalid regardless of contexts; from a relativists’ perspective, one concept is neither better nor worse than a rival concept from a different cultural context. From Toulmin’s perspective, the evaluation depends on a process of comparison, which determines whether or not one concept will provide improvement to our explanatory power more so than its rival concepts.

[edit] Rejection of Certainty
In Cosmopolis (1990), Toulmin traces the Quest for Certainty back to Descartes and Hobbes, and lauds Dewey, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Rorty for abandoning that tradition. Descartes lived in troubled, chaotic times (1596-1650).

[edit] Artificial intelligence
Argumentation is also a formal discipline within artificial intelligence where the aim is to make a computer assist in or perform the act of argumentation. In addition, argumentation has been used to provide a proof-theoretic semantics for non-monotonic logic, starting with the influential work of Dung (1995). Computational argumentation systems have found particular application in domains where formal logic and classical decision theory are unable to capture the richness of reasoning, domains such as law and medicine.
Within Computer Science, the ArgMAS workshop series (Argumentation in Multi-Agent Systems), the CMNA workshop series.[10] and now the COMMA Conference,[11] are regular annual events attracting participants from every continent.

[edit] Internal structure of arguments
Typically an argument has an internal structure, comprising of the following
a set of assumptions or premises
a method of reasoning or deduction and
a conclusion or point.
An argument must have at least one premise and one conclusion.
Often classical logic is used as the method of reasoning so that the conclusion follows logically from the assumptions or support. One challenge is that if the set of assumptions is inconsistent then anything can follow logically from inconsistency. Therefore it is common to insist that the set of assumptions is consistent. It is also good practice to require the set of assumptions to be the minimal set, with respect to set inclusion, necessary to infer the consequent. Such arguments are called MINCON arguments, short for minimal consistent. Such argumentation has been applied to the fields of law and medicine. A second school of argumentation investigates abstract arguments, where 'argument' is considered a primitive term, so no internal structure of arguments is taken on account.
In its most common form, argumentation involves an individual and an interlocutor/or opponent engaged in dialogue, each contending differing positions and trying to persuade each other. Other types of dialogue in addition to persuasion are eristic, information seeking, inquiry, negotiation, deliberation, and the dialectical method (Douglas Walton). The dialectical method was made famous by Plato and his use of Socrates critically questioning various characters and historical figures.

[edit] Psychological aspects
Psychology has long studied the non-logical aspects of argumentation. For example, studies have shown that simple repetition of an idea is often a more effective method of argumentation than appeals to reason. Propaganda often utilizes repetition. [12] Nazi rhetoric has been studied extensively as, inter alia, a repetition campaign.
Empirical studies of communicator credibility and attractiveness, sometimes labeled charisma, have also been tied closely to empirically-occurring arguments. Such studies bring argumentation within the ambit of persuasion theory and practice.
Some psychologists such as William J. McGuire believe that the syllogism is the basic unit of human reasoning. They have produced a large body of empirical work around McGuire's famous title "A Syllogistic Analysis of Cognitive Relationships." A central thrust of this thinking is that logic is contaminated by psychological variables such as "wishful thinking," in which subjects confound the likelihood of predictions with the desirability of the predictions. People hear what they want to hear and see what they expect to see. If planners want something to happen they see it as likely to happen. Thus planners ignore possible problems, as in the American experiment with prohibition. If they hope something will not happen, they see it as unlikely to happen. Thus smokers think that they personally will avoid cancer. Promiscuous people practice unsafe sex. Teenagers drive recklessly.

[edit] Kinds of argumentation

[edit] Conversational argumentation
Main articles: Conversation Analysis and Discourse Analysis
The study of naturally-occurring conversation arose from the field of sociolinguistics. It is usually called conversational analysis. Inspired by ethnomethodology, it was developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s principally by the sociologist Harvey Sacks and, among others, his close associates Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson. Sacks died early in his career, but his work was championed by others in his field, and CA has now become an established force in sociology, anthropology, linguistics, speech-communication and psychology.[13] It is particularly influential in interactional sociolinguistics, discourse analysis and discursive psychology, as well as being a coherent discipline in its own right. Recently CA techniques of sequential analysis have been employed by phoneticians to explore the fine phonetic details of speech.
Empirical studies and theoretical formulations by Sally Jackson and Scott Jacobs, and several generations of their students, have described argumentation as a form of managing conversational disagreement within communication contexts and systems that naturally prefer agreement.

[edit] Mathematical argumentation
Main article: Philosophy of mathematics
The basis of mathematical truth has been the subject of long debate. Frege in particular sought to demonstrate (see Gottlob Frege, The Foundations of Arithemetic, 1884, and Logicism in Philosophy of mathematics) that arithmetical truths can be derived from purely logical axioms and therefore are, in the end, logical truths. The project was developed by Russell and Whitehead in their Principia Mathematica. If an argument can be cast in the form of sentences in Symbolic Logic, then it can be tested by the application of accepted proof procedures. This has been carried out for Arithmetic using Peano axioms. Be that as it may, an argument in Mathematics, as in any other discipline, can be considered valid just in case it can be shown to be of a form such that it cannot have true premises and a false conclusion.

[edit] Scientific argumentation
Main article: Philosophy of Science
Perhaps the most radical statement of the social grounds of scientific knowledge appears in Alan G.Gross "The Rhetoric of Science." Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990. Gross holds that science is rhetorical "without remainder," meaning that scientific knowledge itself cannot be seen as an idealized ground of knowledge. Scientific knowledge is produced rhetorically, meaning that it has special epistemic authority only insofar as its communal methods of verification are trustworthy. This thinking represents an almost complete rejection of the foundationalism on which argumentation was first based.

[edit] Legal argumentation
Main articles: Oral argument and Closing argument
Legal arguments (or oral arguments) are spoken presentations to a judge or appellate court by a lawyer (or parties when representing themselves) of the legal reasons why they should prevail. Oral argument at the appellate level accompanies written briefs, which also advance the argument of each party in the legal dispute. A closing argument (or summation) is the concluding statement of each party's counsel (often called an attorney in the United States) reiterating the important arguments for the trier of fact, often the jury, in a court case. A closing argument occurs after the presentation of evidence.

[edit] Political argumentation
Main article: Political argument
Political arguments are used by academics, media pundits, candidates for political office and government officials. Political arguments are also used by citizens in ordinary interactions to comment about and understand political events. [14]. The rationality of the public is a major question in this line of research. A robust political science research tradition seems to prove that the American public is largely irrational and ignorant of even the most basic knowledge of national or world affairs. Political scientist S. Popkin coined the expression "low information voters" to describe most voters who know very little about politics or the world in general.
Some theorists have inferred from this that only comprehensively trained elites can debate public issues. They point as additional proof to the practice of academic debate in the United States, an activity almost exclusively involving children of the upper middle classes, future lawyers and graduate students, and not ordinary citizens.