This volume contains 12 papers addressed to researchers and advanced students in informal logic and related fields, such as argumentation, formal logic, and communications. Among the issues discussed are attempts to rethink the nature of argument and of inference, the role of dialectical context, and the standards for evaluating inferences, and to shed light on the interfaces between informal logic and argumentation theory, rhetoric, formal logic and cognitive psychology.

Chapters 1-12 of this volume contain the papers on infonnal logic and argumentation that I've published and/or read at conferences over the last 17 years. These papers are reproduced here pretty much unchanged from their first appearance; it is my intention that their appearance here constitute a record of my positions and arguments at the time of their original publication or delivery. I've made minor changes in fonnat, in the style of references, etc., for the sake of consistency; I've also corrected typographical errors and the like. The only extensive changes in wording occur in the last few pages of Chapter 7, and were made only to enable the reader to see more clearly what I was getting at in my first attempt to write about the notion of coherence. Chapter 13 was written expressly for this volume. It looks retrospectively at the contents of the first 12 chapters and attempts to highlight the unifying themes that run through them. It also revisits the ideas about dialectic that occupied my first in light of later developments in my thinking but also re paper, reworking them emphasizing themes about which I've tended to remain silent in the last few years."