Argument Evaluation and Dialogue Goals
From “Argument as Reasoned Dialogue¨ in Informal Logic
Every dialogue has a goal, and requires co-operation between the participants to fulfill the goal. This means that each participant has an obligation to work towards fulfilling his own goal in the dialogue, and also an obligation to co-operate with the other participant’s fulfillment of his goal. The basic reason why any argument can be criticized as a bad argument always comes down to a failure to meet one of these basic obligations.
Dialogues and Goals
Does every dialogue have a goal? Do their exists any dialogues which lack a goal? Does a goal need to be intention or tied to intent to exist for or in a dialogue?
Obligations and Goals of Dialogue
Provided a dialogue has a goal, does it really follow that there is an obligation to that goal? Provided one of the participants in a dialogue has an (intentional) goal in a dialogue, does that really produce obligations for other participants? What about when intentions are in conflict?
According to this every dialogue (Walton 2008, 3):
- Has a goal (i.e., not just that each participant in a dialogue has a goal)
- Requires co-operation (it’s not clear if “require¨ is being used here only descriptively, or is also being used here prescriptively)
If every dialogue has a goal independent of its participants’ own goals and intentions while requiring co-operation between them, then for every participant in a dialogue there is a voluntary goal that spurred the dialogue that then, via the required co-operation, creates an obligation toward another goal of the dialogue itself. A failure to meet this obligation allows us to evaluate any given argument in a dialogue as bad, which is to say this goal of the dialogue regulates what is or is not permitted, condoned or accepted via this obligation.
A dialogue (Ibid):
From “Argument as Reasoned Dialogue¨ in Informal Logic
message speech_acts cooperation description prescription teleonomy communication_theory argumentation_theory discourse informal_logic logic reasoning reason evaluation
bibliography
- “Argument as Reasoned Dialogue.” In Informal Logic: A Pragmatic Approach, 2nd ed., 2–37. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.