A significant proportion of human reasoning is systematically biased, a fact that sits uneasily with argumentation theory’s methodological commitment to the principle of charity. Traditionally, the principle requires arguments to be reconstructed as plausibly and rationally as possible, which conflicts with the definition of cognitive biases as irrational. The aim of this paper is to show that we can and should integrate cognitive biases into argument reconstruction. Firstly, we demonstrate both the ubiquity and societal consequences of biased reasoning. We then articulate a trilemma for argument analysis: (i) exclude biased reasoning from reconstruction, (ii) redefine it as rational, or (iii) abandon the principle of charity. We argue that this trilemma can be resolved by adopting a nuanced understanding of charity that puts sufficient emphasis on the descriptive standard of accuracy alongside the normative standard of plausibility. By properly pursuing these dual aims, we can account for instances of biased reasoning in argument analysis in terms of the underlying mental states and processes. By taking the effect of the in-group bias in climate skepticism as an instructive example, we present one way of integrating cognitive biases into argument analysis by reconstructing instances of biased reasoning as arguments. The aim of such reconstructions is not to vindicate biased reasoning as epistemically sound, after all, but rather to make its justificatory structure transparent and discussable.
In argumentation theory, loci - also referred to as topoi - are commonly viewed as abstract sources of inference that guide the invention of arguments. Within the Argument Model of Topics (AMT), loci are analysed as sources of inference underlying individual arguments. This paper extends said view by arguing that loci perform a discourse-directive function beyond the level of individual arguments. This function is understood in an analytical sense and refers to how loci orient argumentative interaction by indicating the inferential relations along which issues become arguable in particular ways, such as procedural conditions, goals, constrained choices, conceptual boundaries, or source evaluation. Situated at the meso-level of analysis, this function exceeds the micro-level reconstruction of individual arguments while preceding the identification of recurring argumentative patterns at the macro-level. This paper shows how the reappearance of premises in extended debates, when repeatedly connected to conclusions through the same loci, recurrently instantiates the same inferential relations that orient argumentative interaction. These recurrent inferential relations do not themselves constitute argumentative patterns, but repetition makes these relations empirically traceable across argumentative contributions before the stabilization of argumentative patterns. The analytical framework is illustrated by examples from the controversy of nuclear energy production.
Research misconduct and questionable research practices are increasingly documented across academic disciplines, including the biomedical and social sciences, in parallel with transformations in university governance, evaluation systems, and research funding. In response to this major ethical concern that undermines the credibility and integrity of academic research, institutions and national authorities have developed ethical, legal, and procedural frameworks intended to promote good research practices and prevent misconduct; however, the extent to which these mechanisms effectively ensure rigorous and impartial investigations remains unclear. This article examines how a Finnish university and the national authority on research integrity handled a research misconduct allegation through a case study based on written documentation produced during the notification process and subsequent inquiries. The analysis mobilizes the pragma-dialectical framework to examine how the university assessed competing standpoints from two researchers, the Initiator of the allegations and the Respondent to those allegations, constructed and justified its own standpoint, all of this within a procedure formally grounded in fairness and impartiality. In parallel, we analyze how the national oversight authority subsequently evaluated both the integrity assessment and the soundness of the procedure itself. Through argumentation analysis, the study identifies instances in which institutional conclusions appear insufficiently supported by the available evidence, revealing patterns of fallacious reasoning, defective argumentation, and tensions between procedural obligations, institutional interests, and standards of objective inquiry. The findings raise broader questions regarding the thoroughness and impartiality of misconduct investigations, as well as the adequacy of current Finnish research integrity guidelines and procedures to effectively incentivize rigorous and unbiased handling of alleged misconduct cases.
This article examines a gap between argument-as-object evaluation and uptake-in-context evaluation. An argument may be cogent while an addressee accepts its conclusion without preserving the conditions under which it is warranted. To diagnose this gap, the article develops a threshold model of epistemically adequate uptake comprising four analytically distinguishable checks: reconstructability, inferential grasp, scope sensitivity, and updatability. Reconstructability and inferential grasp concern the argument’s structure and support relation; scope sensitivity concerns the conclusion’s present warranted range; and updatability concerns which part of the accepted argumentative basis should be revised when new evidence or defeaters arise. In relation to Toulmin-style qualification, argument schemes, relevance-acceptability-sufficiency criteria, pragma-dialectical critical discussion, and Pinto’s invitation-to-inference account, the model adds an addressee-side test of whether established restrictions survive acceptance and later use. Cases involving expert opinion, analogy, and clinical risk scores show how the four checks can come apart and how conclusions can become scope-insensitive when transferred, reused as premises, or inflated beyond their warranted range. The proposal offers a normative account of uptake for theoretical argument evaluation rather than a measure of persuasion, belief change, or debate outcomes.
This paper advances a unified account of how argumentative influence can align with epistemic agency by reframing the distinction between invitational and persuasion rhetoric. Drawing on Foss and Griffin’s (1995) influential articulation of invitational rhetoric as grounded in equality, immanent value, and self-determination, I argue that invitational communication inherently positions addressees as reason receivers—agents capable of understanding, evaluating, and endorsing reasons through their own rational capacities. In such settings, perspective change, when it occurs, constitutes rational self-persuasion, an internal process grounded in the addressee’s judgment of the speaker’s reasons. Foss and Griffin contrast this with persuasion rhetoric, holding that persuasion aims to modify others’ attitudes and thereby risks producing compliance under influence through pressure amplified by unbracketed power differentials. I contend, however, that this criticism targets only a subset of persuasion: persuasion that is purely uptake-driven. Building on insights from Gearhart (1979), Tindale (1999), and contemporary persuasion theory (e.g., O’Keefe 2016), I defend the rational persuasion thesis, according to which a speaker’s intention to rationally persuade is the intention to have addressees persuade themselves by judging the speaker’s premises to be reasons they themselves have. When persuasion is so understood, the speaker’s intention is inherently aligned with epistemic agency and motivates the creation of rhetorical environments marked by safety, value, and freedom—conditions Foss and Griffin take to be distinctive of invitational rhetoric. I conclude that argumentation respects epistemic agency not by forgoing influence, but by aiming at rational self-persuasion, thereby distinguishing rational from merely causal forms of rhetorical efficacy.
This article investigates how a still image can constrain argument reconstruction without being reduced to verbal paraphrase or opened to unconstrained interpretation. It examines Théodore Géricault’s Le Radeau de la Méduse (The Raft of the Medusa) as a demanding case for visual argumentation: a historically situated public image with weak explicit argumentative markers. I propose a burden-sensitive procedure linking optical description, depicted configuration, contextual uptake, reconstructable premises, warrants, and critical questions. A reproducible analysis of a digital reproduction makes selected descriptive commitments inspectable. The analysis shows Findings reveal that rescue cues are visually salient, yet remain inherently bound to physical suffering, exposure, and delayed recognition. The painting is therefore reconstructed as supporting a qualified visual argument: rescue is perceptible as a possibility but not secured as narrative or moral closure. The study’s methodological contribution demonstrateshow visual argument analysis can localise criticisable points in the passage from visual description to argumentative reconstruction.
In this paper, we propose a conceptual framework to understand and examine the argumentative content in multimodal protest. Protests arise in public controversies when people are dissatisfied with the way institutions deal with problems in society, and when conventional routes for addressing these issues are deemed problematic, especially for the powerless. Protest typically involves not only verbal expressions, but also the use of images, and bodily performances. While protest and other forms of activism are extensively explored from various perspectives, its argumentative role is understudied. In this paper, we show that protest not only contributes to public controversies through intervention (e.g. social or cognitive pressure), but also through communication. The argumentative value lies in the (multimodal) communicative dimension of protest: we can understand protest as a communicative act that uses multimodal means to express disapproval about something and to advocate a remedy. We argue that protest contributes arguments to a public controversy by (1) expressing a core argument that addresses potential critical reactions to the claims intrinsic to any protest, and by (2) providing, what we call, proto-arguments, i.e. pieces of information that the audience can use to argue in support of the protest at future occasions. Using the case study of Extinction Rebellion’s highway blockades in the Hague in the Netherlands, we illustrate the pattern of the core argument of protest and three types of proto-arguments. By broadening the scope of argumentation, we invite argumentation scholars to take multimodal protest seriously.
We argue that poorly reasoned, scientifically unsound, and materially harmful anti-trans arguments should be rejected when they are submitted to scholarly spaces. Taking as a case study Isabela Fairclough’s 2023 International Society for the Study of Argumentation (ISSA) keynote speech and subsequent publication in the conference’s proceedings, we demonstrate that the arguments being made in the paper contradict its own stated standards of critical rationalism, misrepresent scientific findings on trans and intersex communities, and lend illegitimate authority to actions that are likely to have harmful consequences. We treat this specific keynote as part of a larger pattern of contemporary discourse where trans lives are thrust into the center of public debate through disingenuous appeals to open dialogue. In response, we call for scholars to embrace academic values such as reason, trustworthy evidence, and professional ethics when testing arguments in academic spaces, especially arguments that claim to take a critical rationalist approach to deep disagreements. Arguments that fail to meet those tests should be rejected.
Experimental argumentation research allows researchers to test normative predictions from argumentation theory. In the domain of argument quality, for instance, numerous studies have supported the prediction that high-quality arguments should lead to better claim acceptance than low-quality arguments. These studies also examined factors moderating this effect, such as text length, and cultural background of the receiver. The current experiment adds another factor: incongruity between arguments. By presenting participants with arguments and counterarguments, they were put in a circumstance of incongruity, leading to higher elaboration of arguments and, therefore, to sensitivity to argument quality. Such sensitivity was found to be absent for French participants in an earlier study, but present for Dutch participants. The current study examined whether such sensitivity occurred for both national samples under the circumstance of argument incongruity. Dutch and French students (N = 544) indicated their acceptance of claims followed by statistical evidence and normatively strong or weak expert evidence, each of which served as argument in some cases and as counterargument in others. Analyses showed that normatively strong expert evidence was more persuasive than normatively weak expert evidence for Dutch participants, but that evidence quality did not affect claim acceptance for French participants. Implications for a cultural explanation for the French result are discussed.
This experimental study investigates how visual evidence reshapes the evaluation of arguments by examining its dual impact on perceived persuasiveness and critical scrutiny. Integrating multimodal argumentation theory with dual-process cognitive frameworks, this study tested whether statistical charts and emotional photographs differentially affect argument assessment. Participants (N = 341) evaluated arguments containing logical fallacies presented in three formats: verbal-only, verbal with a statistical chart, or verbal with an emotional photograph. Results revealed a persuasion-scrutiny trade-off: both types of visual evidence significantly increased perceived persuasiveness and credibility compared to the verbal-only baseline. However, they also significantly reduced participants’ ability to detect the embedded logical fallacies. This impairment was more pronounced for arguments paired with emotional photographs than with statistical charts. Furthermore, an individual’s Need for Cognition moderated these effects; individuals with a higher tendency for effortful thinking were less swayed by emotional visuals and showed attenuated impairment in logical scrutiny, though significant deficits in fallacy detection persisted even among high-NFC participants. The findings demonstrate that visual evidence acts as a potent heuristic cue that can enhance persuasive appeal while concurrently masking argumentative weaknesses by diverting cognitive resources from analytic processing. This research provides an empirical cognitive foundation for multimodal argumentation theory and underscores the necessity of cultivating critical multimodal literacy to navigate visually saturated persuasive discourse.
While Presidential debates present policy positions, they also construct group identities. This article asks how argumentative structures and linguistic choices work together to produce the “We” identity and “Them” identity that is characteristic of polarised political discourse. We analyse the 2024 Trump–Harris debate by integrating only argumentation schemes into the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) for its approach to argumentation. Three questions guide our analysis: how argumentation schemes construct in-group and out-group identities; how do lexical choices, analysed through DHA’s nomination strategy, construct in-group/out-group identities; and whether patterned relationships exist between scheme types and discursive strategies. Drawing on 24 reconstructed arguments and six in-depth analyses, we observe that ad hominem attacks and poisoning-the-well arguments tend to co-occur with predication and perspectivisation strategies, while arguments from consequences tend to co-occur with justification. We term these patterned relationships schematic affinities and offer the concept as a hypothesis warranting systematic investigation rather than a confirmed finding. Lexical devices, including terms that categorise actors as criminals, victims, or workers, reinforce the opposition that arguments establish. The framework demonstrates how argumentation theory and Critical Discourse Studies can inform one another, and it opens pathways for research on national identity formation, racism, and discriminatory discourse.
This study characterizes Czech State Police communication on Facebook as a distinct argumentative activity type within the public sector domain. Adopting a pragma-dialectical framework, we examine how social media affordances and the institutional goal of reinforcing public trust shape communicative practices. Our analysis identifies the initial situation as a single, non-mixed difference of opinion, where the police act as the protagonist addressing its online audience. We reconstruct two prototypical argumentative patterns: (1) “publicizing” posts, which utilize symptomatic argumentation to frame operational competence as a sign of trustworthiness, and (2) “advisory” posts, which employ pragmatic argumentation to justify safety prescriptions by highlighting negative consequences. The findings reveal that the police operate within an “advertorial” genre, strategically blending informative reporting with persuasive image work to construct the ethos of an “experienced patron.”
I propose a distinction between evidentiary and argumentative modes of the straw man fallacy. Traditional studies of this fallacy have focused on the changes that occur when a discussant represents another’s speech acts. This places undue normative significance on the question of “How much change is too much change?”, a question that has constantly eluded theorizing. I argue that in a dualist framework, when the evidentiary mode of the fallacy is taken as a starting point, the evaluation can begin with the phenomenon of deceit (as a marker of fallaciousness) and construct critical responses without the need to demonstrate that the change induced was in some sense disproportionate. To make this point, I give both imaginary and real-life examples of such evaluations.
Fallacy identification has long been theorized as context-sensitive, stance-dependent judgment, yet computational approaches often treat it as neutral or theory-independent. This paper proposes a multi-method framework that operationalizes stance-dependence in fallacy judgments through a computationally assisted case study of Leo Tolstoy’s What Is Art?. Grounded in Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), we annotate and extract elaborative argumentative sequences anchored on a single Nucleus, highlighting regions of discourse where rhetorical amplification may obscure inferential progression. These sequences are evaluated using stance-conditioned large language model (LLM) prompting, simulating eight analytically distinct reader perspectives varying in value alignment, author-related attitude, argumentation expertise, and fallacy-detection instruction. The analyses reveal systematic divergence in fallacy judgments across stances, suggesting that perceived fallacies depend not only on the text itself but also on the interaction between discourse structure and interpretive stance. To trace the basis of these judgments, we apply Toulmin’s model to identify implicit warrants, missing qualifiers, and culturally contingent backings that underlie contested evaluations. This study advances argumentation research in two ways. First, it demonstrates how computational tools can illuminate, rather than obscure, the stance-dependence of fallacy judgments. Second, it proposes a pluralistic framework that integrates rhetorical, logical, and interpretive perspectives for analyzing complex philosophical argumentation.
What is an argument? This foundational question in argumentation research cannot be answered univocally, because ‘argument’ is ambiguous. This paper has two goals. The first is to draw attention to a neglected distinction between two ordinary ‘logical’ senses of the term: an ‘objective’ and a ‘subjective’ one. The second is to define these senses. In the objective sense, an argument for (or against) a certain proposition is a reason for (or against) believing that proposition. In the subjective sense, it is a consideration intended to provide such a reason. After defining these two senses, the paper defends these definitions against several objections. In this connection, I argue, among other things, that conclusions are not internal parts of arguments; that premises and conclusions are not ‘speech acts’; that the subjective sense of ‘argument’ is robust against the charge of relativism; and that considerations can deserve the name ‘argument’ even if they do not provide actual support.
Twentieth century innovations in reasoning about health and medicine (randomized clinical trials, systematic reviews, and a growing list of other inventions) have dramatically changed what counts as good argumentation within this domain. Though these new forms are often highly specialized and highly technical, they are gradually becoming “norms of public argumentation” (Zenker, et al., 2024), spreading from esoteric discussion among medical scientists into other discourses (including interpersonal exchanges between doctors and patients). This pattern is not limited to health and medicine but affects so many domains that it has become ubiquitous in contemporary argumentative discourse. But innovations aimed at improving reasonableness, when successful, can disrupt preexisting normative frameworks. They can undermine and supplant prior bases for inference, abruptly change standards for argument criticism, and require adoption of different rules for argumentative engagement. The study reported here concerns the volatility that surrounds these innovations in a case study of debate over a controversial treatment for a controversial disease. Close examination of the debate from a normative pragmatic perspective shows much greater normative complexity than has been acknowledged within contemporary argumentation theory, including unexpected volatility in norms that arguers themselves must somehow manage.
This paper addresses the degree to which straw man arguments are perceived as persuasive by their targets. A review of the literature shows that there is a consensus on the topic, stipulating that using a straw man argument is unlikely to change a person’s views. However, the experimental evidence we have so far on the straw man fallacy only covers third-person scenarios, i.e., when participants act as an audience observing an argumentative exchange between others. This study fills this gap by discussing the second-person straw man, i.e., when the audience for the argument is the target of the straw man representation. It shows that (1) the straw man is indeed not a persuasive tactic, and (2) the political orientation of the statements and the participants also plays a role.
This study assesses whether the linguistic choices that Van Haaften and Van Leeuwen identified in the so-called ‘Van Gelder’ court case (as reported in a.o. Journal of Argumentation in Context 10(1), 97-120, 2021) have empirically demonstrable argumentative effects. This case revolves around proceedings that Yuri van Gelder brought against the Dutch Olympic committee, given his removal from the Olympic gymnastics final due to misbehaviour. Van Haaften and Van Leeuwen’s analysis demonstrates that the lawyers used a variety of linguistic choices in their pleas that are argumentatively instrumental for defending their position: Van Gelder’s lawyer uses a series of linguistic choices that serve to minimise the reprehensibility of Van Gelder’s behaviour and paint him as a victim, while the Dutch Olympic committee lawyer’s linguistic choices maximise the reprehensibility of the behaviour and frame Van Gelder as solely responsible for his situation. 209 participants read either an original or a manipulated fragment of one of the pleas and evaluated the reprehensibility of Van Gelder’s behaviour, his responsibility for the situation and their agreement with the judge’s decision (which favoured the Dutch Olympic committee). Results suggest that whether participants had read the original or the manipulated plea did not affect their evaluations. The content of the pleas did matter, however, as participants who read the plea by the Dutch Olympic committee lawyer were more negative about Van Gelder than those who had read Van Gelder’s lawyer’s plea. While the topical selection choices thus do seem to affect readers’ evaluations, our linguistic manipulations of the argumentative moves may have been too subtle to make a difference.
