The Pragma-Dialectical Approach to the Fallacies Revisited

This article explains the design and development of the pragma-dialectical approach to fallacies. In this approach fallacies are viewed as violations of the standards for critical discussion that are expressed in a code of conduct for reasonable argumentative discourse. After the problem-solving validity in resolving differences of opinion of the rules of this code has been discussed, their conventional validity for real-life arguers is demonstrated. Starting from the extended version of the theory in which the strategic maneuvering taking place in argumentative discourse is included, the article explains that the violations of the rules that are committed in the fallacies involve derailments of strategic maneuvering. This culminates in a discussion of the exploitation of hidden fallaciousness as an unreasonable way of increasing the effectiveness of argumentative discourse – a vital topic of research in present-day pragma-dialectics

Normative Argumentation Theory Without Fundamental Principles

In this paper I develop and defend a form of argumentative normativity that is not based on fundamental principles. I first argue that research agendas that aim to discover (or claimed to have discovered) fundamental principles of ‘good’ argumentative discourse share one crucial weak spot, viz. circularity. I then argue that this weak spot can be avoided in a pancritical (Bartley, 1984) view of normativity