J. Anthony Blair is a prominent international figure in argumentation studies. He is among the originators of informal logic, an author of textbooks on the informal logic approach to argument analysis and evaluation and on critical thinking, and a founder and editor of the journal Informal Logic. Blair is widely recognized among the leaders in the field for contributing formative ideas to the argumentation literature of the last few decades. This selection of key works provides insights into the history of the field of argumentation theory and various related disciplines. It illuminates the central debates and presents core ideas in four main areas: Critical Thinking, Informal Logic, Argument Theory and Logic, Dialectic and Rhetoric.

This volume contains a selection of papers (keynote addresses and other important papers) from the International Conference on Argumentation at Amsterdam of 2002 by prominent international scholars of argumentation theory. The contributions are representative of the main approaches to the study of argumentation: the informal logical approach, the logical approach, the dialectical approach, the rhetorical and the communicative approach. Taken together the papers in this volume provide an insightful cross-section of the current state of affairs in argumentation research.
The collection of essays as a whole will be of interest to all those working in the field of argumentation theory and to all scholars who are interested in recent developments in this field.

J. Anthony Blair is a prominent international figure in argumentation studies. He is among the originators of informal logic, an author of textbooks on the informal logic approach to argument analysis and evaluation and on critical thinking, and a founder and editor of the journal Informal Logic. Blair is widely recognized among the leaders in the field for contributing formative ideas to the argumentation literature of the last few decades. This selection of key works provides insights into the history of the field of argumentation theory and various related disciplines. It illuminates the central debates and presents core ideas in four main areas: Critical Thinking, Informal Logic, Argument Theory and Logic, Dialectic and Rhetoric.

This volume contains a selection of papers from the International Conference on Argumentation (Amsterdam, 2002) by prominent international scholars of argumentation theory. It provides an insightful cross-section of the current state of affairs in argumentation research. It will be of interest to all those working in the field of argumentation theory and to all scholars who are interested in recent developments in this field.

In Challenge and Response: Justification in Ethics, Carl Wellman coined 'conduction' and 'conductive' to name a distinctive kind of defeasible reasoning and argument-neither deductive nor inductive-often used in forming and justifying ethical judgments, classifications and judgments employing criteria. Some informal logicians have used the concept in their textbooks, but conductive reasoning and argument have hitherto received little scholarly attention. Conductive Argument is a comprehensive introduction to the theoretical issues related to conductive argument and reasoning. With papers by leading argumentation scholars, it is the product of a symposium, sponsored by the Centre for the Study of Reasoning, Argumentation and Rhetoric at the University of Windsor, organized to examine the concept of conductive argument. Topics covered include: historical antecedents of the concept of conduction, problems with Wellman's account of conduction, various conceptualizations of conductive argument and attendant problems, whether conductive arguments constitute a distinct class, the structure of conductive arguments, their domain(s), how they might be diagrammed, how they might be evaluated, and case studies of conductive arguments. Conductive argument deserves the close attention of theorists of reasoning and argumentation, communication and debate, informal logic and logic in general.