Speaker: Jean Wagemans (FGW, University of Amsterdam)
Date and Time: Thursday, November 16th 2017, 16:00-17:30
Venue: KdVI Seminar Room F3.20, Science Park 107.
Title: Informal sisters of Dame Logica: On the dialectical and rhetorical accounts of argument.
Abstract. Inspired by the classical disciplines of dialectic and rhetoric, present-day argumentation theorists have proposed a great variety of classifications of arguments, fallacies, and other means of persuasion. Although these accounts of argument are used for the purpose of producing, analysing, and evaluating argumentative discourse, they are not very satisfactory from a theoretical point of view. Dialectical and rhetorical approaches conceptualize the notion ‘argument’ in a very different way, the descriptions of the types of arguments employ informal language and the classifications are not always based on a clear theoretical rationale. In this talk, Wagemans will present a recently developed framework for integrating the dialectical and rhetorical accounts into a systematic and comprehensive Periodic Table of Arguments. After having given an overview of the main differences between logical, dialectical and rhetorical approaches to argument, he will explain the theoretical framework of the table and illustrate its contents by means of examples. The talk will be concluded with a discussion of the applications of the Periodic Table of Arguments.