Language and Argument: a Review of the Field

Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This paper has a dual purpose: it both seeks to introduce the other works in this issue by illustrating how they are related to the field of argumentation as a whole, and to make clear the tremendous range of research currently being carried out by argumentation theorists which is concerned with the interaction and inter-reliance of language and argument. After a brief introduction to the development of the field of argumentation, as many as eight language-based approaches to the study of argument are identified, taking as their perspective: rhetoric, argument structure, argument as act, discourse analysis, corpus methods, emotive argument, and narrative argument. The conclusion makes it clear that these branches of study are all themselves interconnected and that it is the fusion of methodologies and theory from linguistics and the philosophical study of argument which lends this area of research its dynamism.</jats:p>

Argumentation: A calculus for Human-Centric AI

“…Human argumentation is typically carried out in a social setting, as an argumentative discourse in Natural Language. It is, therefore, important to be able to recognize and extract the argumentation structure from the natural language discourse (Hinton, 2019(Hinton, , 2021. This includes the ability to recognize which parts of text are indeed argumentative, to identify the quality of the arguments that are extracted from the text, and, more generally, to extract the argumentative structure of support and attack between arguments extracted from various parts of some piece of text under consideration.…”

“…How is the process of human inference grounded in Natural Language, as it is studied, for example, in Textual Entailment (Dagan et al, 2009)? Several argumentationbased approaches study this question by considering how argumentative knowledge (arguments and strength) are extracted or mined from natural language repositories (Lippi and Torroni, 2016;Lawrence and Reed, 2019), i.e., how argument schemes are formed out of text (Walton, 1996), or how we can recognize good quality arguments (Hinton, 2019(Hinton, , 2021 from their natural language expression. The foundational challenge for argumentation is to understand how, in practice, the process of dialectic argumentation relates to and can be realized in terms of a human-like argumentative discourse in Natural Language.…”

The Linguistic Formulation of Fallacies Matters: The Case of Causal Connectives

“…In so doing, it contributes to the development of a recent trend in argumentation studies which tackles the relationships between argumentation and language (e.g. Herman et al 2018;Hinton 2019;Oswald et al 2018Oswald et al , 2020Pollaroli et al 2019).…”

The Double Framing Effect of Emotive Metaphors in Argumentation

“…Reasoning errors have a psychological dimension (Macagno and Walton, 2010;Walton, 2010;Godden, 2015), as they are arguments that seem to be sound without being so in terms of norms and standards (Van Eemeren and Grootendorst, 2004;Tindale, 2006;Walton, 2006). Their psychological dimension is tightly connected to their linguistic dimension, as also the linguistic formulation of arguments may lead to fallacies of reasoning (Oswald et al, 2018(Oswald et al, , 2020Hinton, 2019;Schumann et al, 2020). Fallacies of reasoning might reveal how we make sense of arguments, especially when they are formulated in natural languages, where ambiguous, polysemous, and non-literal use of words is widespread (Ervas et al, 2018).…”