ABSTRACT
Although contemporary argumentation theory embraces diverse theoretical perspectives, that diversity emerged from a broad, if partial, consensus that argument was a pragmatic means of problem solving in a democratic society. The faith in pragmatic reason was evident in Brockriede’s (1975) defi nition of argument as “ a process whereby people reason their way from one set of problematic ideas to the choice of another ” (p. 180). A similar perspective was implicit in Gronbeck’s (1980) keynote at the fi rst Alta conference, where he called for an effort to “disambiguate our vocabulary, restore a sense of ‘publicness’ into our speculations concerning argumentation, and reunite theorists with critics” in order to avoid continuing “to dwell in the booby hatch” (pp. 9, 11-14). Most explicitly, Wenzel (1980) “embraced . . . a conception of argumentation as the rationale of critical decision making” (pp. 125-126).
