ABSTRACT
Across global communities, agents reason not in a vacuum but from a ground of assumptions and beliefs about the world and their place in it. We may take these as the basic premises by which argumentation is possible and understand the set of such premises to be the repertoire agents use both to argue and to understand the arguments of others. That is, we not only need a base of ideas from which to reason ourselves, but we also use these to make sense of the reasoning of others. The centrality of argumentation to global governance becomes clear when we appreciate that not only is this repertoire the condition by which argumentation becomes possible, but the understanding of other perspectives that arises from argumentation then feeds back and changes ideas within the repertoire. Argumentation then becomes the fundamental way in which we change our views of the world and our understanding of others within that world. The complex processes by which this happens are part of what I intend to explore in this chapter.
