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Argumentation has been a topic of interest for philosophy since its very inception—not surprisingly, given that philosophical inquiry is first and foremost about the articulation of cogent arguments. Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations offered the first in a long list of taxonomies of fallacious arguments throughout the history of philosophy, either with a focus on rhetorical aspects (Cicero’s On invention and Rhetoric to Herennius, Quintilian’s Ars Oratoria, Schopenauer’s sarcastic pamphlet The Art of Being Right: Thirty-Eight Ways to Win an Argument, just to name a few specimens) or looking at their logical and dialectical underpinnings (besides Aristotle’s own work, Locke’s treatment of ad fallacies in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, book III of Whately’s Elements of Logic and book V of Mill’s A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive are all key references). Nor has this interest abated in recent times—quite the opposite, in fact. Since Hamblin’s seminal monograph Fallacies (1970), there has been a resurgence of studies on fallacious reasoning over the last few decades, with important contributions from all the main scholars in argumentation theory (e.g., Johnson and Blair 1977; Hintikka 1987; Woods and Walton 1989; Walton 1995; Tindale 2007; van Eemeren 2010): for a critical overview of these recent developments, Woods’s Errors of Reasoning (2013) is the best current source (see also Boudry et al. 2015 for a more focused critique of some of its outcomes, and van Eemeren et al. 2014 for a bird-eye view of various strands of argumentation research). Clearly, philosophical interest has not been limited to the dark side of (bad) arguments: the quest for a definition of argument quality sound enough to be satisfactory, yet flexible enough to be applicable to real-life arguments has preoccupied scholars for millennia, and it is still far from being solved—indeed, much of the friction between mainstream logic and so called informal logic hinges on what standard of argument quality one is willing to endorse, and on what grounds. Even more fundamentally, Aristotle’s distinction between logic, dialectic, and rhetoric has shaped (and is still shaping) the whole debate on argumentation. As for practical applications, some of Plato’s thesis in the Republic can be seen with modern eyes as a (grim) outlook on the prospects of deliberative democracy, given the argumentative skills and mindsets of its participants. In a similar vein, the value and pitfalls of political argumentation has been a matter of philosophical concern at least since Bentham’s Handbook of Political Fallacies, and arguably even well before that.

DOI: 10.1007/s13347-017-0264-4

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