ABSTRACT
The point of departure for our analysis is the understanding of argumentation as reasoning-ininteraction . This understanding has been extensively and convincingly theorized at least since Aristotle’s Topics and Sophistical Refutations (e.g., Spranzi, 2011). Today, it is a building block of many approaches to argumentation: from “normative pragmatists” ( Jackson & Jacobs, 1980), pragma-dialecticians (van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 2004), formal dialecticians (Hamblin, 1970), communication scholars (Hample, Jones, & Averbeck, 2009), informal logicians ( Johnson & Blair, 1977), to formal logicians, such as van Benthem (2009), who claim that logic originated as a study of “intelligent interactions” (p. vii). Although the bulk of work in argumentation theory has focused on the task of defi ning what it means for interactions to be “intelligent” (or rational, reasonable, reasoned, valid, critical), relatively little attention has been paid to how to understand interactions. While for many reasoning-ininteraction is basically reasoning against conversational background, we work from a perspective where interaction is in the foreground, and reasoning is one of the things that happens there (and a crucial thing if argumentation is to be analyzed).
