Abstract
This chapter is a slightly revised version of a keynote address at the 2014 International Society for the Study of Argumentation conference. I describe the emergence of two themes that I think are key to the constitution of informal logic. One is the development of analytic tools for the recognition, identification and display of so-called “non-interactive” arguments. The other is the development of evaluative tools for assessing deductive, inductive, and other kinds of arguments (or other evaluative criteria than deductive validity and inductive strength). At the end I mention several current interests of informal logic.
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Notes
- 1.
HAT is the successor to FAT, Fundamentals of Argumentation Theory (van Eemeren et al. 1996).
- 2.
“Natural language deductivism” is the thesis that all arguments [in natural languages] should be interpreted as attempts to create deductively valid arguments.
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
Some seem to conceptualize better visually, others, numerically. I don’t know whether this difference has occurred to others and been investigated. The current fashion of developing computer-generated tree diagrams might be disadvantaging part of the student population.
- 6.
- 7.
Logicians gave their use of ‘validity’ a special, technical sense. In that sense, expressed in one of several possible ways, an inference from a set of premises to a conclusion is “valid” just in case the conclusion could not possibly be false if the premises were true.
- 8.
The terms ‘acceptability,’ ‘relevance’ and ‘sufficiency’ were originally introduced as names for the three criteria for logically good arguments by Johnson and Blair (1977).
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Acknowledgments
My thanks to Fellows at the Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation and Rhetoric at the University of Windsor for critical comments on, and suggestions for improvements of, earlier drafts of the keynote address, including Hans Hansen, Catherine Hundleby, Leo Groarke, Marcello Guarini, Bruno Leclercq, Christopher Tindale, and especially Ralph Johnson and Robert Pinto.
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Anthony Blair, J. (2015). What Is Informal Logic?. In: van Eemeren, F., Garssen, B. (eds) Reflections on Theoretical Issues in Argumentation Theory. Argumentation Library, vol 28. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21103-9_2
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