ABSTRACT
Dominic Infante jump-started the study of interpersonal arguing in the 1980s with his development of two self-report scales that measured basic argument motivations: argumentativeness and verbal aggressiveness. These two scales have been in constant use since their publication. Both argumentativeness and verbal aggressiveness are measured concepts, each composed of two subscales. Two opposite impulses theorize each pair, so scholars must subtract one from the other to get a resultant vector. The most general implication of the findings appears in title, “Argumentativeness and Verbal Aggressiveness Are Two Things Apiece.” Neither functions as a single construct. Given the reality that argumentation studies are something of an educational luxury, mostly undertaken in the universities of developed economies, this poses practical problems for the development of global argumentation theory. Somehow the field must develop local theories and must find a way to make them commensurate with one another.
