A Critical Discussion Game for Prohibiting Fallacies

Abstract

Abstract. The study of fallacies is at the heart of argumentation studies. In response to Hamblin's devastating critique of the state of the theory of fallacies in 1970, both formal dialectical and informal approaches to fallacies developed. In the current paper, we focus on an influential informal approach to fallacies, part of the pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation. Central to the pragma-dialectical method for analysing and evaluating argumentative discourse is the ideal model of a critical discussion. In this discussion model, a dialectical perspective on argumentation is combined with a pragmatic take on communicative interaction. By formalising and computationally implementing the model of a critical discussion, we take a first step in the development of software to computationally model argumentative dialogue in which fallacies are prohibited along the pragmadialectical norms. We do this by defining the Critical Discussion Game, a formal dialogue game based on the pragma-dialectical discussion model, executable on an online user-interface which is part of a larger infrastructure of argumentation software.

Argumentation models and their use in corpus annotation: Practice, prospects, and challenges

“…Argument mining has been presented as a natural extension to sentiment analysis and opinion mining (Grosse et al 2015;Dragoni et al 2018;Lytos et al 2019;Chen et al 2021). Understanding people's arguments concerning, a given topic is important from several perspectives, such as determining stance (Allaway and McKeown 2020;Küçük and Can 2020;Schiller, Daxenberger, and Gurevych 2021b), argument strength (Habernal and Gurevych 2016a;Wachsmuth et al 2017), and the presence of fallacies (Visser et al 2017) or semantic incongruity.…”

“…When the dialogue between the writer and prospective readers is implicit, the former must elaborate by foreseeing any doubts or criticisms that the latter may have or bring about. The kind of analysis proposed by pragma-dialectics is based on a dialog model, on which a qualitative review is employed, for instance, to detect fallacious arguments (van Eemeren and Grootendorst 1987; Visser, Budzynska, and Reed 2017). In terms of argument structure, pragma-dialectics distinguishes between multiple , subordinatively compound , and coordinatively compound argumentation.…”