Tijdschrift voor Taalbeheersing - Volume 36, Issue 1, 2014

The concept of argumentation schemes plays an important role in identifying real-life argumentation, and in assessing the quality of this argumentation by virtue of critical questions. Argumentation schemes have played a central role within argumentation theory since the second half of the last century. This special issue addresses two general topics related to argumentation schemes. In the first place, some papers tackle the question how argumentation schemes should be classified into a framework, and how they work together in argumentative discourse. In the second place, other papers address the question how language users employ criteria to evaluate argumentation.

In this article I develop a systematic catalogue of arguments that is based on a formal ordering principle and can be used as a point of departure for research in artificial intelligence and various kinds of empirical research such as research into argument quality. The catalogue is constructed by combining a formal-linguistic typology of arguments, developed and presented in earlier articles, with a formalized account of the pragma-dialectical classification of standpoints. First, I provide an account of the nature of arguments that avoids infinite regress problems in argument reconstruction. Then, I summarize the formal-linguistic typology of arguments, which consists of two main types – 'predicate arguments' and 'subject arguments' – and combine the typology with a formalized account of the pragma-dialectical classification of standpoints, which consists of three types – 'prescriptive standpoints', 'evaluative standpoints', and 'descriptive standpoints'. Finally, for each of the types of standpoints, I discuss what types of arguments are suitable to support them, describe the relations between the predicates and subjects of the argument and the standpoint involved, and give some examples of argument types distinguished in the literature that match the description.

As a consequence of the institutional preconditions applying to the strategic manoeuvring taking place in specific communicative activity types, certain context-dependent argumentative patterns of standpoints, argument schemes and argumentation structures can be observed in argumentative discourse. Pragma-dialecticians are interested in discovering these patterns and in determining to what extent they are stereotypical of the communicative activity types associated with a specific communicative domain. This paper concentrates on the way in which argumentation by analogy manifests itself in argumentative practice and the stereotypical argumentative patterns it is part of in various communicative domains. In the process, the pragma-dialectical view of argumentation by analogy is explained.

Do argumentation schemes play a part in the critical processing of argumentation by laymen? In a qualitative study participants had to formulate strong and weak arguments for a given claim and to rank a list of given arguments in quality. In interviews they were asked to motivate their opinions on the quality of the arguments. The study dealt with five argumentation schemes: argumentation from authority, from example, from analogy, from cause to effect and from consequences. Laymen criteria for argument quality were inferred from interview protocols. Results show a combination of general criteria from informal logic (such as relevance, acceptability, comprehensibility) and scheme-specific criteria (such as expertise for argumentation from authority, comparability for argumentation from analogy, effectiveness for argumentation from consequences). The results support the conventional validity of such criteria and clarify the continuum from peripheral to central processing in the Elaboration Likelihood Model: more and cognitively more demanding heuristics are used in central processing than in peripheral processing.

People without a background in argumentation theory possess several criteria to distinguish strong from weak arguments. The fact that people have these criteria does not imply that they will use them to objectively assess an argument's quality. Research on motivated reasoning suggests that people take a more critical stance toward arguments that go against their own opinions compared to arguments that are in accordance with these opinions. In this study, the question was addressed whether people employ criteria to evaluate arguments in a biased way. Forty participants were told that they would take part in a debate and either had to defend the claim that mixed schools were desirable (that is, schools attended by children with different ethnic backgrounds) or that they had to attack this claim. All participants received sixteen (strong and weak) arguments and were asked to prepare themselves for the debate while thinking aloud. Analysis of the think aloud protocols showed that people used criteria to boost the quality of arguments supporting their claim while disqualifying arguments that went against it. These results provide important insights into the nature of motivated reasoning because it studied the extent to which people actually use evaluation criteria while manipulating both the quality of the arguments provided and the claim that needed to be defended.

Claims supported by high-quality evidence have been found to be more persuasive than claims supported by low-quality evidence. However, Hoeken and Hustinx (2007) showed that this effect was only observed in short texts (a claim with evidence), but not in longer texts (where information unrelated to the evidence was added at the end of the text). The current experiment was conducted to examine whether this effect of text length could be explained by distraction (the additional text at the end distracts the reader) or by dilution (the additional text makes the fragment less diagnostic for claim evaluation). Participants (N = 629) read two texts with high/low-quality evidence. The text was presented in three versions: short, long with additional information at the end, or – new in comparison to Hoeken and Hustinx (2007) – long with additional information at the start. The data found support for the distraction explanation: an effect of evidence quality on persuasiveness was observed in the short text, and in the longer text with additional information at the start, but not in the longer text with additional information at the end.