Argumentation theory is a distinctly multidisciplinary field of inquiry. It draws its data, assumptions, and methods from disciplines as disparate as formal logic and discourse analysis, linguistics and forensic science, philosophy and psychology, political science and education, sociology and law, and rhetoric and artificial intelligence. This presents the growing group of interested scholars and students with a problem of access, since it is even for those active in the field not common to have acquired a familiarity with relevant aspects of each discipline that enters into this multidisciplinary matrix. This book offers its readers a unique comprehensive survey of the various theoretical contributions which have been made to the study of argumentation. It discusses the historical works that provide the background to the field and all major approaches and trends in contemporary research.
Argument has been the subject of systematic inquiry for twenty-five hundred years. It has been graced with theories, such as formal logic or the legal theory of evidence, that have acquired a more or less settled provenance with regard to specific issues. But there has been nothing to date that qualifies as a unified general theory of argumentation, in all its richness and complexity. This being so, the argumentation theorist must have access to materials and methods that lie beyond his or her "home" subject. It is precisely on this account that this volume is offered to all the constituent research communities and their students. Apart from the historical sections, each chapter provides an economical introduction to the problems and methods that characterize a given part of the contemporary research program. Because the chapters are self-contained, they can be consulted in the order of a reader's interests or research requirements. But there is value in reading the work in its entirety. Jointly authored by the very people whose research has done much to define the current state of argumentation theory and to point the way toward more general and unified future treatments, this book is an impressively authoritative contribution to the field.

This book works through some of the theoretical issues that have been accumulating in informal logic over the past 20 years. At the same time, it defines a core position in the theory of argument in which those issues can be further explored. The underlying concern that motivates this work is the health of practice of argumentation as an important cultural artifact. A further concern is for logic as a discipline. Argumentative and dialectical in nature, this book presupposes some awareness of the theory of argument in recent history, and some familiarity with the positions that have been advanced. It will be of interest to academics, researchers, and advanced undergraduate and graduate students in the disciplines of logic, rhetoric, linguistics, speech communication, English composition, and psychology.

Argumentation theory is a distinctly multidisciplinary field of inquiry. It draws its data, assumptions, and methods from disciplines as disparate as formal logic and discourse analysis, linguistics and forensic science, philosophy and psychology, political science and education, sociology and law, and rhetoric and artificial intelligence. This presents the growing group of interested scholars and students with a problem of access, since it is even for those active in the field not common to have acquired a familiarity with relevant aspects of each discipline that enters into this multidisciplinary matrix. This book offers its readers a unique comprehensive survey of the various theoretical contributions which have been made to the study of argumentation. It discusses the historical works that provide the background to the field and all major approaches and trends in contemporary research.
Argument has been the subject of systematic inquiry for twenty-five hundred years. It has been graced with theories, such as formal logic or the legal theory of evidence, that have acquired a more or less settled provenance with regard to specific issues. But there has been nothing to date that qualifies as a unified general theory of argumentation, in all its richness and complexity. This being so, the argumentation theorist must have access to materials and methods that lie beyond his or her "home" subject. It is precisely on this account that this volume is offered to all the constituent research communities and their students. Apart from the historical sections, each chapter provides an economical introduction to the problems and methods that characterize a given part of the contemporary research program. Because the chapters are self-contained, they can be consulted in the order of a reader's interests or research requirements. But there is value in reading the work in its entirety. Jointly authored by the very people whose research has done much to define the current state of argumentation theory and to point the way toward more general and unified future treatments, this book is an impressively authoritative contribution to the 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.

Curricular peer mentoring is a programmatic approach to enrich student learning and engagement in postsecondary courses in which instructors welcome a more experienced undergraduate student into a credit course they are teaching. The student then serves as peer mentor to the students enrolled. Peer mentors can provide a variety of peer-appropriate, course-specific mentoring, tutoring, facilitation and leadership roles and activities that complement the roles of the course s instructor and teaching assistants both in classroom settings and beyond. A program provides training and ongoing support for a larger number of peer mentors and instructional teams and manages recruitment and program research and quality. This volume provides research findings, definitions, theories, and practical program descriptions as a foundation for program development and research of undergraduate curricular peer mentoring programs in higher education. This work builds on a long history of higher education program development and collects a significant amount of literature that has previously been scattered."

Religion evokes strong emotions and raises hard questions. This volume addresses many of the contentious elements that religion provokes and challenges some of the easy answers contemporary society has produced. The frequent and often facile dictum about the separation of church and state, when examined closely, may prove to contribute to the erosion of some of our most cherished human values, rather than to their preservation. The science-versus-religion dichotomy is dogma for many, yet the empiricism that is the hallmark of scientific method and knowledge can be singularly absent from positions that claim to be science. The current spate of attacks against God and religion that are now commonplace, when critically scrutinized, often fail to provide compelling arguments or even to be as objective as their authors claim. These and other explorations are the focus of this book. From the Forward in which Charles Kimball challenges the West to re-evaluate its perspective and understanding of the East, particularly Islam, to the Afterword in which theologian Gregory Baum chronicles the extraordinary reversal of sociology's estimation of religion, the invitation from this volume to all of us is to review our pieties and presuppositions as we reflect on the future of religion.