ABSTRACT
In everyday life individuals consider arguments in order to reach many decisions. In organizational contexts groups of individuals present and consider arguments in order to agree a course of action or to understand a situation. The importance and relevance of argumentation to an understanding of both individual cognition and group cognition would seem self-evident. But a number of researchers have proposed that the role of arguments is overblown. For instance, Zajonc (1980) proposed that affect is primary and that the explicit reasons and arguments individuals provide for their actions are a side-show, mere rationalizations for the unconscious machinery of mind. Others have supposed that the decisions individuals reach are strongly influenced by implicit factors such as the ease of generating arguments that have nothing to do with the merits of the case. Clearly if these two objections are true, any theory of argument and decision will be circumscribed and the conditions under which any theory of argument and decision applies will need to be carefully charted.
