The aim of this meeting is to discuss the pragmatic and dialectical aspects of the argumentation process such as: the criteria of reasonableness and effectiveness in argumentative discourse; speech acts of argumentation and speech acts in dialogues; the dialectical accounts of fallacies; and the formal and computational representation of dialogue procedures. Special attention will be paid to the properties of argumentation, dialogue and persuasion important in the real-life practice. We will not be interested in the formal models of an “abstract” inference structures, but in the models focused on and close to rhetorical arguments used in the wild.

The special guest of the meeting is Prof. Frans van Eemeren who is a world leading expert in the philosophy of argument. He is co-author of pragma-dialectics which is one of the two most important contemporary theories of argumentation. Van Eemeren is a professor in the Department of Speech Communication, Argumentation Theory and Rhetoric at the University of Amsterdam. He is a Distinguished Scholar of the National Communication Association of the United States, Fulbright Professor, recipient of various research awards, chairman of the International Society for the Study of Argumentation (ISSA), and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Argumentation, Springer’s Argumentation Library, and John Benjamins’ book series Argumentation in Context. Van Eemeren is an author of fifty books and many papers and book chapters. His publications have been translated into Albanian, Armenian, Bulgarian, Chinese, Dutch, French, Italian, Russian and Spanish.

Programme:

10.30 – 10.45 Coffee and Introductions.

14.30 – 15.00  Katarzyna Budzyńska & Chris Reed: The dialectical account for ad hominem technique
15.00 – 15.30 Kamila Dębowska: Collaborative and egoistic conflict resolution dialogues

15.30 – 15.45 coffee

15.45 – 16.15 John Lawrence, Floris Bex & Chris Reed: Dialogues on the Argument Web. Mixed Initiative Argumentation with Arvina
16.15 – 16.45 Marcin Koszowy: Polish logical studies in a pragma-dialectical perspective

Abstracts:

Frans van Eemeren Reasonableness and effectiveness in argumentative discourse

In dialectical theories of argumentation the standards of reasonableness are formulated that are to be maintained in resolving differences of opinion on the merits. In ordinary argumentative discourse, however, the arguers are not only out to be seen as acting reasonably, but they also want their argumentation to be effective. They argue their cases in order to convince the addressees of the acceptability of their standpoints. According to Frans van Eemeren, the simultaneous pursuit of reasonableness and effectiveness in argumentative discourse gives rise to continual strategic manoeuvring between dialectical and rhetorical considerations. In his presentation, he makes clear that all argumentative moves that are made in argumentative discourse involve strategic manoeuvring, irrespective of the stage of the discourse in which they occur. By means of a reconstruction of the strategic manoeuvring taking place in an advertorial published by R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, van Eemeren makes clear that taking account of strategic manoeuvring leads to a more refined and thorough analysis.

Katarzyna Budzyńska & Chris Reed The dialectical account for ad hominem technique

In the talk we propose a new perspective on modelling ad hominem (AH) techniques in a dialogue. The approach is built upon the following assumptions: (i) that ad hominem is not an inferential, but undercutting structure; (ii) that it can be a non-fallacious dialectical technique in some communicative contexts; and (iii) that critical questions in AH scheme can be used to determine strategies of defending against AH attack. We aim to achieve two goals: first, to represent the deep ontological structure of dialogues with the speaker’s character attacks and defense; and second, to design a game AdHD in which a personal attack, and defense against it, are legitimate dialogue moves.

Kamila Dębowska Collaborative and egoistic conflict resolution dialogues

The aim of the paper is to propose a model of dialogues with conflict resolution. The focus is on the specification for goals and effects of this type of dialogue. The proposal is based upon the model by Walton. It will be shown that this model, even though referring directly to conflict resolution, does not allow to express its important properties. The paper proposes the model’s modification and extension, which enables describing various characteristics related to the goals of conflict resolution. Several formal and linguistic concepts are combined to define different kinds of effects achieved in this type of dialogues.

Barbara Dunin-Keplicz, Alina Strachocka, Andrzej Szałas & Rineke Verbrugge A Paraconsistent Approach to Speech Acts

This paper discusses an implementation of speech acts in a paraconsistent framework. We analyze four speech acts: assert, concede, request and challenge as building blocks of agents’ interactions. A natural four-valued model of interaction yields multiple new cognitive situations. They are analyzed in the context of communicative relations, which partially replace the concept of trust. These assumptions naturally lead to six types of situations: perceiving inconsistent information, perceiving previously inconsistent information, perceiving previously unknown information, perceiving unknown information, perceiving compatible information and perceiving contradictory information. These new situations often require performing conflict resolution and belief revision. The particular choice of a rule-based, DATALOG-like query language 4QL as a four-valued implementation framework ensures that, in contrast to the standard two-valued approaches, tractability of the model is maintained. The work concludes with a discussion of an example.

Marcin Koszowy Polish logical studies in a pragma-dialectical perspective

The aim of the talk is to give a rationale for employing language and methods of argumentation theory to discuss main research areas of the Polish studies in logic. A crucial subject-matter of inquiry undertaken within this movement are knowledge-gaining procedures such as: (1) verbalizing, defining, and interpreting, (2) observation, (3) inference, (4) formulating problems, (5) partition, classification, and ordering. I argue that some results of those procedures may be analyzed by means of a pragma-dialectical model of a critical discussion. I illustrate this claim with three ideas which are relevant for the logical studies in Poland: (i) the concept of logical culture – as it corresponds to the ideal model of a critical discussion, (ii) the program of language analysis – as it is in accord with the pragma-dialectical account of argument analysis, and (iii) the taxonomy of the fallacies – as it is in line with the pragma-dialectical approach to the fallacies as violations of one or more rules for critical discussion.

John Lawrence, Floris Bex & Chris Reed Dialogues on the Argument Web. Mixed Initiative Argumentation with Arvina

In this paper, we present Arvina, an online discussion tool supporting mixed initiative argumentation. Arvina allows stored argu- ments in the Argument Web to be introduced by software agents which human participants can then interact with. The presentation will include a live demonstration of the software.

Olena Yaskorska, Katarzyna Budzyńska & Magdalena Kacprzak Attacking the justificatory force of the argumentation

The talk aims to bring together and unify two traditions in studying dialogue as a game: dialogical logic introduced by Lorenzen; and persuasion dialogue games as specified by Prakken. The first approach allows the representation of formal dialogues in which the validity of argument is the topic discussed. The second tradition has focused on natural dialogues examining, e.g., informal fallacies typical in real-life communication. Our goal is to unite these two approaches in order to allow communicating agents to benefit from the advantages of both models, i.e. to equip them with the ability to persuade each other not only about facts, but also about the classical propositional validity of argument used in a dialogue. To this end, Lorenzen’s system needs to be expressed according to the generic specification for natural dialogues proposed by Prakken. As a result, the system allows the elimination of formal fallacies committed during a dialogue as well as the formal representation of the intersubjective inference procedure described by the 6th and 7th rule of pragma-dialectics (van Eemeren and Grootendorst 2004, pp.144-148).

• Katarzyna Budzyńska (CSWU)
• Magdalena Kacprzak (TUoB, PJIIT)
• Marcin Koszowy (UoB)
• Chris Reed (UoD)
• Joanna Skulska (CSWU, MAT)
• Olena Yaskorska (CSWU)

Admission is free, however, for organizational purposes please register your intention to attend by sending an email to Dr. Katarzyna Budzyńska: k.budzynska (at) uksw.edu.pl