Walton Douglas

The notion of burden of proof and its companion notion of presumption are central to argumentation studies. This book argues that we can learn a lot from how the courts have developed procedures over the years for allocating and reasoning with presumptions and burdens of proof, and from how artificial intelligence has built precise formal and computational systems to represent this kind of reasoning. The book provides a model of reasoning with burden of proof and presumption, based on analyses of many clearly explained legal and non-legal examples. The model is shown to fit cases of everyday conversational argumentation as well as argumentation in legal cases. Burden of proof determines (1) under what conditions an arguer is obliged to support a claim with an argument that backs it up and (2) how strong that argument needs to be to prove the claim in question.

This book analyzes the uses of emotive language and redefinitions from pragmatic, dialectical, epistemic and rhetorical perspectives, investigating the relationship between emotions, persuasion and meaning, and focusing on the implicit dimension of the use of a word and its dialectical effects. It offers a method for evaluating the persuasive and manipulative uses of emotive language in ordinary and political discourse. Through the analysis of political speeches (including President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize address) and legal arguments, the book offers a systematic study of emotive language in argumentation, rhetoric, communication, political science and public speaking.

Argumentation, which can be abstractly defined as the interaction of different arguments for and against some conclusion, is an important skill to learn for everyday life, law, science, politics and business. The best way to learn it is to try it out on real instances of arguments found in everyday conversational exchanges and legal argumentation. The introductory chapter of this book gives a clear general idea of what the methods of argumentation are and how they work as tools that can be used to analyze arguments. Each subsequent chapter then applies these methods to a leading problem of argumentation. Today the field of computing has embraced argumentation as a paradigm for research in artificial intelligence and multi-agent systems. Another purpose of this book is to present and refine tools and techniques from computing as components of the methods that can be handily used by scholars in other fields.

Argumentation, which can be abstractly defined as the interaction of different arguments for and against some conclusion, is an important skill to learn for everyday life, law, science, politics and business. The best way to learn it is to try it out on real instances of arguments found in everyday conversational exchanges and legal argumentation. The introductory chapter of this book gives a clear general idea of what the methods of argumentation are and how they work as tools that can be used to analyze arguments. Each subsequent chapter then applies these methods to a leading problem of argumentation. Today the field of computing has embraced argumentation as a paradigm for research in artificial intelligence and multi-agent systems. Another purpose of this book is to present and refine tools and techniques from computing as components of the methods that can be handily used by scholars in other fields.

This book provides a systematic analysis of many common argumentation schemes and a compendium of 96 schemes. The study of these schemes, or forms of argument that capture stereotypical patterns of human reasoning, is at the core of argumentation research. Surveying all aspects of argumentation schemes from the ground up, the book takes the reader from the elementary exposition in the first chapter to the latest state of the art in the research efforts to formalize and classify the schemes, outlined in the last chapter. It provides a systematic and comprehensive account, with notation suitable for computational applications that increasingly make use of argumentation schemes.

Fundamentals of Critical Argumentation presents the basic tools for the identification, analysis, and evaluation of common arguments for beginners. The book teaches by using examples of arguments in dialogues, both in the text itself and in the exercises. Examples of controversial legal, political, and ethical arguments are analyzed. Illustrating the most common kinds of arguments, the book also explains how to evaluate each kind by critical questioning. Douglas Walton shows how arguments can be reasonable under the right dialogue conditions by using critical questions to evaluate them. The book teaches by example, both in the text itself and in exercises, but it is based on methods that have been developed through the author's thirty years of research in argumentation studies.