A Pragma-dialectical Procedure for a Critical Discussion

According to the pragma-dialectical ideal of reasonableness, in case of a difference of opinion the protagonist and the antagonist of a standpoint should attempt to find out by means of a critical discussion whether the protagonist's standpoint is capable of withstanding the antagonist's criticism. In this paper, the authors formulate the latest version of their basic rules for the performance of speech acts in the various stages that can beanalytically distinguished in a critical discussion that can lead to the resolution of a single and non-mixed difference opinion.     

THE NEED FOR TRUE CONTROVERSIES IN PSYCHOANALYSIS: THE DEBATES ON MELANIE KLEIN AND JACQUES LACAN IN THE RÍO DE LA PLATA

Controversies are part of the process of scientific knowing. In psychoanalysis, the diversity of theoretical, technical and epistemological positions makes the debate particularly necessary and by the same token difficult. In this paper, the author examines the function of controversies and the obstacles to their development, taking as examples the debates held in the Rao de la Plata (Buenos Aires and Montevideo) during the nineteen seventies, when the dominant Kleinian ideas came into contact with Lacanian thought. The author examines different examples of argumentative discourses, using concepts taken from the theory of argumentation. The major difficulties encountered did not hinge on characteristics pertaining to psychoanalytic theories (i.e. the lack of commensurability between them), but on the defensive strategies aimed at keeping each theory's premises safe from the opposing party's arguments. A true debate implies the construction of a shared argumentative field that makes it possible to lay out the different positions and see some interaction between them and is guided by the search for the best argument. When this occurs, controversies promote the discipline's development, even when they fail to reach any consensus.     

Reasoning Is for Arguing: Understanding the Successes and Failures of Deliberation

Theoreticians of deliberative democracy have sometimes found it hard to relate to the seemingly contradictory experimental results produced by psychologists and political scientists. We suggest that this problem may be alleviated by inserting a layer of psychological theory between the empirical results and the normative political theory. In particular, we expose the argumentative theory of reasoning that makes the observed pattern of findings more coherent. According to this theory, individual reasoning mechanisms work best when used to produce and evaluate arguments during a public deliberation. It predicts that when diverse opinions are discussed, group reasoning will outperform individual reasoning. It also predicts that individuals have a strong confirmation bias. When people reason either alone or with like‐minded peers, this confirmation bias leads them to reinforce their initial attitudes, explaining individual and group polarization. We suggest that the failures of reasoning are most likely to be remedied at the collective than at the individual level.     

Two Forms of the Straw Man

The authors identify and offer an analysis of a new form of the Straw Man fallacy, and then explore the implications of the prevalence of this fallacy for contemporary political discourse.     

Argumentation and Interpersonal Justification

There are distinct but legitimate notions of both personal justification and interpersonal justification. Interpersonal justification is definable in terms of personal justification. A connection is established between good argumentation and interpersonal justification.     

On Argumentation Schemes and the Natural Classification of Arguments

We develop conceptions of arguments and of argument types that will, by serving as the basis for developing a natural classification of arguments, benefit work in artificial intelligence. Focusing only on arguments construed as the semantic entities that are the outcome of processes of reasoning, we outline and clarify our view that an argument is a proposition that represents a fact as both conveying some other fact and as doing so wholly. Further, we outline our view that, with respect to arguments that are propositions, (roughly) two arguments are of the same type if and only if they represent the same relation of conveyance and do so in the same way. We then argue for our conceptions of arguments and argument types, and compare them to alternative positions. We also illustrate the need for, and some of the strengths of, our approach to classifying arguments through an examination of aspects of two prominent and recent attempts to classify arguments using argumentation schemes, namely those of M. Kienpointner and D. Walton. Finally, we clarify how our conception of arguments and of argument types can assist in developing an exhaustive classification of arguments.