The book offers a compact but comprehensive introductory overview of the crucial components of argumentation theory. In presenting this overview, argumentation is consistently approached from a pragma-dialectical perspective by viewing it pragmatically as a goal-directed communicative activity and dialectically as part of a regulated critical exchange aimed at resolving a difference of opinion. As a result, the book also systematically explains how the constitutive parts of the pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation, which are discussed in a number of separate publications, hang together.

The following crucial topics are discussed:
(1) argumentation theory as a discipline;
(2) the meta-theoretical principles of pragma-dialectics;
(3) the model of a critical discussion aimed at resolving a difference of opinion;
(4) fallacies as violations of a code of conduct for reasonable argumentative discourse;
(5) descriptive research of argumentative reality;
(6) analysis as theoretically-motivated reconstruction;
(7) strategic manoeuvring aimed at combining achieving effectiveness with maintaining reasonableness;
(8) the conventionalization of argumentative practices;
(9) prototypical argumentative patterns;
(10) pragma-dialectics amidst other approaches.

Argumentation Theory: A Pragma-Dialectical Perspective is clearly written and makes argumentation theory understandable to all scholars and advanced students interested in argumentation research.

This open book is licensed under a Creative Commons License (CC BY). You can download Argumentation Theory: A Pragma-Dialectical Perspective ebook for free in PDF format (2.2 MB).