Abstract This study integrates the polylogue framework of argumentation ( Lewiński and Aakhus 2023 ) with discourse analysis to show how a polylogical argumentative activity is discursively co-constructed in a multiparty discussion on the issues Argentine tango dancers face, with the specific focus on the matter of inclusivity/exclusivity. It contributes to developing the polylogue framework by investigating the complexity of argumentation at a micro level by exploring the interdependence of its three aspects (i.e., players, positions, and places) in one interaction. In terms of place, the way the host frames the activity orients towards the intricacies of the discussed issue as a goal rather than the resolution of difference of opinion, which is taken up by the participants. The study also demonstrates the interrelation of the participants’ identities and their positions and the position dynamics within single participants. Furthermore, it shows how the difference among the participants’ views, even though they share a position, and the construction of alliances during the interaction adds to the multifacetedness of argumentative activity.
This study integrates the polylogue framework of argumentation (Lewi & nacute;ski and Aakhus 2023) with discourse analysis to show how a polylogical argumentative activity is discursively co-constructed in a multiparty discussion on the issues Argentine tango dancers face, with the specific focus on the matter of inclusivity/exclusivity. It contributes to developing the polylogue framework by investigating the complexity of argumentation at a micro level by exploring the interdependence of its three aspects (i.e., players, positions, and places) in one interaction. In terms of place, the way the host frames the activity orients towards the intricacies of the discussed issue as a goal rather than the resolution of difference of opinion, which is taken up by the participants. The study also demonstrates the interrelation of the participants' identities and their positions and the position dynamics within single participants. Furthermore, it shows how the difference among the participants' views, even though they share a position, and the construction of alliances during the interaction adds to the multifacetedness of argumentative activity.
Accusations are common social actions found in couples conflict episodes. Drawing from video-recorded couples therapy sessions, we examine a corpus of couples accusation-response sequences in order to answer the following questions: How are offences (e.g., accusations/blame/reproach) formulated in couples therapy talk, how does the accused spouse resist or deny the offensive action and how does the therapist intervene in the offence-response sequences? Two methods are used to investigate these interactional practices. Conversation analysis (CA) is used to identify the sequential organization of these offence-response sequences and, in particular, the defensive moves used by the male spouse to resist the offensive action. Argumentation analysis (AA) from the perspective of the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) is used to reconstruct and evaluate argumentative sequences of accusation and responses (e.g., counter-reproach, justification, and acceptance of responsibility) particularly focusing on argumentation schemes. By integrating these approaches, we were able to reveal a couple's argumentative practices from both an interactional and content dimension.
In election debates, it is essential for politicians to try to steer the discussion to their own advantage and to the disadvantage of their opponent. One strategy to do so is exploiting the polyphony inherent in discourse, employing quotes, paraphrases and references to prior speech. In this study, we analyze an interaction from a Dutch election debate from 2021 to answer the question: 'how is the voice of the opponent included in the debate discourse by politicians to steer the interaction to their own advantage?' By recontextualizing an opponent's words, the discussion can be managed by representing the other's argumentation. Therefore, we speak about 'constructed argumentation' in debates, as the words of the other party are recontextualized to appear within a particular discussion to put pressure on the opponent to argue, force particular discussion points, and frame the other's position. This practice is part of the interactional fabric of election debates.
This study investigates the factors influencing perceived argument strength by examining the role of personal involvement, mood, and emotional appeals (pathos). Drawing on Douglas Walton's exploration of emotional appeals in argumentation (1992), we use the methodology from the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) by Petty and Cacioppo (1981) to conduct psycholinguistic experiments with 395 student participants. Participants were exposed to arguments appealing to positive, neutral, or negative emotions, while their levels of personal involvement and mood were controlled. Our findings reveal that high personal involvement significantly enhances perceived argument strength (PAS; Zhao et al. 2011), while mood influences PAS in a more indirect manner. Arguments appealing to positive emotions were rated higher in PAS compared to negative and neutral ones. These results contribute to the empirical study of argument strength, integrating insights from work on emotional appeals, the ELM framework, and recent analysis of argument strength dimensions (Zenker et al. 2020; Heyninck, Skiba, and Thimm 2023).
Both conversation analysis (CA) and extended pragma-dialectics (PD) share an interest in empirical, data-driven analysis of argumentative exchanges, a focus on sequential organization, and context-sensitivity. While cross-fertilization between CA and argumentation analysis in general took place, no full parallel analysis with CA and PD, let alone with extended PD was carried out. In this paper by CA and PD researchers, we compare how each approach interprets the same Dutch medical consultation and assess systematically how both approaches differ and complement each other. We will focus on disagreement management and doctor-patient decision-making. Our findings suggest that, despite the tensions, the combination of these approaches offers a more comprehensive understanding of the interactional dynamics of argumentation, shedding light on, e.g., the enactment of institutional roles, the normative consequences of turn-management, and varied facets of strategic maneuvering.
This study investigates gender inequalities in continued participation in competitive debate within Spanish-speaking university contexts. Quantitative data from major international Spanish-language debate tournaments held between 2020 and 2024 were analyzed. The findings indicate that men tend to remain involved in competitive debate for longer periods than women. This pattern is consistent with the perceptions reported by members of equity committees from different tournaments between 2020 and 2025, who were interviewed to provide complementary qualitative perspectives. In addition, greater experience is associated with higher competitive performance for both women and men. However, when debaters are grouped into novice and more experienced categories, the analyses do not reveal systematic or persistent gender-based differences in competitive performance.
In pragma-dialectics fallacies are viewed as violations of rules for critical discussion. The results of the 'Conceptions of reasonableness' project indicate that people confronted with clear cases of violations of these rules in experimental research consistently judge them as unreasonable. How can it then be explained that fallacies remain so often unrecognized in actual argumentative practices? In tackling this question, this article focuses on the argumentum ad baculum fallacy, which involves a violation of the pragma-dialectical Freedom Rule by preventing others from advancing a standpoint or doubt through making a threat. Earlier experimental testing in the Netherlands confirmed the hypothesis that arguers will be more inclined to consider an argumentum ad baculum as reasonable that can also be seen as a piece of advice than an "undisguised" argumentation ad baculum. The results of the replication in China reported in the current article confirm the results of the original study.
The article examines Roger Sherman's tactic of argumentation in a Congressional debate in June 1789 against considering a bill of rights in a timely fashion. It is argued that Sherman had a covert intention with his objections, and that they were only pretexts, put forward to create a deceptive implicature to block any consideration of amendments and of a bill of rights. The article then focuses on the evidence for claiming that Sherman had a covert intention in the debate and attention is also drawn to the political circumstances of the debate that may have been relevant to his choice of tactics. A distinction between overt and covert intentions is shown to be needed in the investigation of deceptive implicatures. The article also provides an example of how historical databases can be used as a source of data in the pragmatic study of language.
In the face of growing medical scepticism and institutional distrust, this article sketches an integrated framework to examine the interplay between public health controversies and clinical interactions. Situated within Community-Centred Approaches (CCA) and participatory public health, the framework employs tools from medical argumentation to show how doubt in healthcare interactions marks a crucial site where communicative and interpretive expertise are essential and trust is actively negotiated - a site that requires participatory practices capable of responding to and repairing it through dialogical engagement and reason-giving. Building on the concept of argumentative potential, it analyses clinical dialogue as the core community in which institutional legitimacy and interpersonal trust are negotiated. A case study on vaccine hesitancy illustrates how expressions of doubt can activate different argumentative potentials - ambivalent, sceptical, or denialist - each opening or closing discursive trajectories that either foster or erode trust. The paper advances the notion of argumentative participation as a key condition for discursive trust, illustrating how clinical dialogue can serve as a site of participatory repair, understood as the active rebuilding of trust through dialogue and shared reasoning, within broader public health controversies.
There are various ways in which Large Language Models (LLMs), the latest breakthrough in Artificial Intelligence, are relevant for medicine: this paper focuses on their potential for supporting and improving argumentation in healthcare, both for patients and for practitioners. The message is mostly positive, suggesting adoption of such systems, but with specific cautions: most notably, the need to leverage them for enhancing human communicative and epistemic performance, rather than replacing it, and the importance of training users on few key principles to guide their deployment of LLMs in healthcare. The paper is accompanied by four concrete use cases, included in the supplementary materials, that constitute an integral and crucial part of this contribution.
Health controversies are large, complex bodies of argumentative discourse. They involve committed oppositionality among people with heterogeneous interests and positions related to health, configurations of which may change over time, leaving traces in the form of argumentative texts that reflect not only pragmatic disagreements but also disagreements over epistemological questions. Understanding the complexity of health controversies requires significant investment of time and effort but also has significant disciplinary payoffs for argumentation. Because they are often sites for innovation in the practice of argumentation, health controversies hold promise for extending argumentation theory through discovery of novel phenomena. And because they are significant disagreement management challenges for society, health controversies invite the development within argumentation theory of an approach to intervention centered on valuing thorough exploration of disagreement.
Shared decision-making has become the ideal for medical decision-making. Given the pivotal role of argumentation within this process, shared decision-making has increasingly been examined through the lens of argumentation theory, particularly pragma-dialectics. This perspective paper outlines the pragma-dialectical contributions to the analysis of shared decision-making and explores the potential of this theory for addressing current and future challenges in medical decision-making. It aims to show that normative argumentation approaches, particularly the pragma-dialectical approach, are crucial for understanding and possibly improving shared decision-making. First, the paper discusses the alignment between shared decision-making and the ideal of a critical discussion, barriers to shared decision-making as violations of discussion rules and higher-order conditions, and the application of the pragma-dialectical approach to complex decision-making scenarios involving patient companions. Second, it considers how the pragma-dialectical approach may be used to confront the emerging issues of medical misinformation and artificial intelligence in medical decision-making.
The present contribution systematically explores the argumentative dimension of activist investor campaigns, which constitute a very important and underexplored argumentative activity type in the domain of financial communication. Using the controversy between an activist investor (AltaFox) and Hasbro company as a case in point, we adapt the stock issue model to identity strategically relevant argumentative patterns. To do so, each issue is connected to key contextual features and characterised for the type of standpoint and argumentation advanced by the two contending institutional arguers. The findings reveal, in particular, the strategic role of some loci in relation to specific sub-issues of an investor activist's proposal (e.g., analogy to discuss the alleged underperformance; efficient cause to attribute managerial responsibility, authority to legitimise the intervention of proxy advisory firms). Furthermore, we found trust to be one of the main points at issue, marking an important difference between these corporate controversies and the context of political policy debates out of which the stock issue model originated. We suggest that the proposed analytic approach to the analysis argumentative patterns represents a crucial starting point for the formulation of possible explanations for the outcome of a campaign. We conclude the paper by drawing implications from these findings for the study of argumentation in context and for strategic communication research.
Despite pledging to engage in two-sided dialogues during resource consultations with Indigenous Peoples (Haida Nation 2004, para 44), the administrative Canadian state often defaults to one-sided reasoning, emphasizing the project's necessity and managing evidential gaps in the project's assessments by giving the benefits of doubt to the industry while promising Indigenous communities adaptive management programs to mitigate all potential adversaries. Such reasoning strategies raise doubts about Canada's genuine commitment to administering the promised meaningful dialogue in Indigenous consultations. The lack of normative criteria for assessing the meaningfulness of dialogue within the Canadian administrative system further complicates the evaluation of government officials' commitment.This article applies Walton's dialogue system to evaluate how government agencies engage in consultative exchanges with Indigenous Peoples, focusing on their reasoning as commitments. It differentiates between dialogical and procedural elements in controlled exchanges across three contentious projects - the Mackenzie Valley, Trans Mountain, and Site C projects - theorizing the differences between one-sided, two-sided, and collapsed dialogues in Indigenous consultations. The article reveals that officials' actions in these dialogues often leveraged their institutional authority and statutory discretion to impose compliance costs on epistemically diverse communities (Pimenova 2025). This strategy sometimes weakens these communities' capacity to challenge project developments by subordinating their diverse testimonial credibility to the dominant argumentative discourse centered on consumption, mitigation, and epistemic ignorance.
Evidence-based policy often involves a kind of reasoning by analogy, which starts from the established success of an intervention on a given occasion (= source domain S). Policy makers infer that the same intervention is likely to be successful on another occasion (= target domain T). The practical goal of this paper is to develop, defend and illustrate a model detailing the reasoning steps that policy makers should go through in order to perform this type of analogical reasoning properly. Our model also offers tools for diagnosing flaws in the reasoning process for past cases where this kind of analogical reasoning went wrong. We illustrate the practical utility and diagnostic power of the model by means of two well-known failed evidence transfers. The theoretical goal of this paper is to investigate the ramifications of our model for general theorising on analogical reasoning.
