The Pragma-Dialectical Approach

In the past decade, the study of argumentation has developed into a field of study in its own right. ¹ This evolution is achieved by an interdisciplinary venture of philosophers, formal and informal logicians, discourse and conversation analysts, communication scholars, and representatives of still other disciplines. Depending on the perspective on argumentative discourse that is taken as a starting point, different outlines of paradigms have been articulated. Basically, Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s new rhetoric, Stephen Toulmin’s analytic framework, Michel Meyer’s problematology, Charles Willard’s social epistemics, Anthony Blair and Ralph Johnson’s informal logic, John Woods and Douglas Walton’s post-standard approach to fallacies, Jean-Blaise Grize’s natural logic, Else Barth and Erik Krabbe’s formal dialectics, and several other theoretical contributions already constitute more or less worked-out frameworks for the study of argumentation. ²