Winner of the 2019 Gerald R. Miller Outstanding Book Award presented by the Interpersonal Communication Division of the National Communication Association (NCA). Interpersonal Arguing is an accessible review of scholarship on key elements of face-to-face arguing, which is the interpersonal exchange of reasons. Topics include frames for understanding the nature of arguing, argument situations, serial arguments, argument dialogues, and international differences in how people understand interpersonal arguing. This is a thorough survey of the leading issues involved in understanding how people argue with one another.

Argumentation is often understood as a coherent set of Western theories, birthed in Athens and developing throughout the Roman period, the Middle Ages, the Enlightenment and Renaissance, and into the present century. Ideas have been nuanced, developed, and revised, but still the outline of argumentation theory has been recognizable for centuries, or so it has seemed to Western scholars. The 2019 Alta Conference on Argumentation (co-sponsored by the National Communication Association and the American Forensic Association) aimed to question the generality of these intellectual traditions. This resulting collection of essays deals with the possibility of having local theories of argument – local to a particular time, a particular kind of issue, a particular place, or a particular culture. Many of the papers argue for reconsidering basic ideas about arguing to represent the uniqueness of some moment or location of discourse. Other scholars are more comfortable with the Western traditions, and find them congenial to the analysis of arguments that originate in discernibly distinct circumstances. The papers represent different methodologies, cover the experiences of different nations at different times, examine varying sorts of argumentative events (speeches, court decisions, food choices, and sound), explore particular personal identities and the issues highlighted by them, and have different overall orientations to doing argumentation scholarship. Considered together, the essays do not generate one simple conclusion, but they stimulate reflection about the particularity or generality of the experience of arguing, and therefore the scope of our theories.

Winner of the 2019 Gerald R. Miller Outstanding Book Award presented by the Interpersonal Communication Division of the National Communication Association (NCA). Interpersonal Arguing is an accessible review of scholarship on key elements of face-to-face arguing, which is the interpersonal exchange of reasons. Topics include frames for understanding the nature of arguing, argument situations, serial arguments, argument dialogues, and international differences in how people understand interpersonal arguing. This is a thorough survey of the leading issues involved in understanding how people argue with one another.