Argument Dialectics: The Place of Reasons in Logic (Argumentation Library, 45)

This book is a systematic exposition of Argument Dialectics (AD). Despite its name, argument dialectics is a logical approach to argumentation theory. AD stands out among theories of argument because of three unusual features: it is reasons-based, holistic and particularistic. This implies that AD conceives of logic as a theory of the dialectical construction of reasons, not as a theory of inferences. Consequently, contrary to other logical approaches, AD focuses on the study of inter-argumentative relations, especially those of opposition and weighing. The book makes an extensive use of the theory of reasons, a branch of metaethics that has been a very valuable quarry of intuitions and concepts for the elaboration of a reason-based theory of argument. The oppositions generalism-particularism and atomism-holism, proposed  by Jonathan Dancy, which play a central role in the book and in the development of AD, have been adapted from the theory of reasons, and the same can be said of the distinction between different statuses of reasons that AD associates with different kinds of counterarguments. Conceiving of the theory of argument in terms of reasons has the effect of situating the paradigm of argumentation in practical argumentation/reasoning “about what to do” rather than in theoretical argumentation “about what to believe”, as inference-based theories do. Hence, this book is of interest to argumentation theorists, communication theorists, epistemologists, linguists, moral philosophers, and philosophers of law.

I teach argumentation theory at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. My conception of argumentation theory and its development is presented in books such as Methodus argumentandi (2007), Es lógic (2013), En buena lógica (2020), and How Philosophers Argue (Argumentation Library, 14, 2022), Part II, and in half a hundred articles published in journals such as Argumentation, Informal Logic, Theoria, Revista Iberoamericana de Argumentación, etc.

My theoretical proposal is known as "argument dialectics". Argument dialectics is a theory of argument (or logic) based on reasons and not on inferences, holistic and not atomistic, and particularistic and not generalistic. It is a logic based on reasons, because it understands argument as the presentation of something to someone for consideration as a reason for something else. Reasons, unlike conclusions, are weightable, and consequently the dialectic of arguments places weighting and counter-weighting at the center of argumentative practices. The dialectic of arguments is holistic because it maintains that the logical properties of arguments depend on contextual factors, and therefore the conclusion is primarily the conclusion of a multilinear network or composition of arguments, not the conclusion of an isolated argument. The logical tradition is atomistic and maintains that, on the contrary, the logical properties of arguments depend solely on the relation between their premises and their conclusion, and thus do not depend on context. Finally, argument dialectics is particularistic, because it defends that one can distinguish between good and bad arguments logico sensu without resorting to general principles or rules, in contrast to the generalist tradition, which defends the opposite.