On Wednesday, September 28, 2022, Martin Hinton and Jean Wagemans organized a panel on contemporary approaches to fallacy theory at the 4th European Conference on Argumentation (ECA 2022) in Rome.
The panel offered five presentations demonstrating a range of the most up-to-date conceptions of fallacies and fallaciousness and seeked to reinvigorate the discussion of this phenomenon. The topics covered include new ideas on both the nature of fallacies and the methodology of studying them:
- Henrike Jansen – When plausible deniability becomes implausible
- Steve Oswald – On the rhetorical effectiveness of fallacies
- Katharina Stevens – Sophisms and the vice of contemptuousness
- Eugen Octav Popa and Alexandru Cârlan – Evidentiary convincing and evidentiary fallacies
- Martin Hinton and Jean Wagemans – A procedural approach to fallacies.
Abstract
Fallacies remain one of the most discussed aspects of argumentation theory and stubbornly resist any simple or universally agreed definition, characterisation, or explanation. No matter how argumentation is approached, errors, irrelevancies and misbehaviours need to be noted and accounted for. This is equally true for cognitive approaches. Questions such as why are we disposed to fall for certain traps and tricks of reasoning; how do fallacies relate to heuristics; and how can cognitive biases and prejudice be controlled, minimised, and ultimately reversed, are of the utmost importance. Their urgency has been increased by the fear that online arguing and the surfeit of information, much of it low quality or outright fake, on which it is based, has led to lower levels of argumentation, or, in other words, higher levels of fallacy. The answers to such empirical questions, however, are difficult to find without a firm theoretical basis for understanding what fallacies are.
This panel offers five presentations demonstrating a range of the most up-to-date conceptions of fallacies and fallaciousness and seeks to reinvigorate the discussion of this phenomenon. The topics covered include new ideas on both the nature of fallacies and the methodology of studying them.
The first paper: ‘When plausible deniability becomes implausible’, argues that the binary, paradigmatic idea of fallaciousness has been discarded and the criteria for fallacy evaluation are presumed to be completely contextually bound. A framework is then suggested wherein norms and criteria can be related to the preconditions of a particular argumentative activity type. This is followed by ‘On the rhetorical effectiveness of fallacies’, which takes a cognitive-based pragmatic approach in considering why fallacies are effective, and supports theoretical claims with empirical studies. ‘Sophisms and the Vice of Contemptuousness’ proposes a criterion for telling sophisms from paralogisms by linking the intentional use of fallacy to the argumentative vice of contemptuousness towards the addressee. ‘Evidentiary Convincing and Evidentiary Fallacies’ looks to extend the field in applying fallacy theory to situations of convincing through the use of evidence. It provides examples of the mishandling of evidence in real life cases, while discussing the identification and evaluation of such evidentiary fallacies. Finally, ‘A Procedural Approach to Fallacies’ criticises the traditional idea that fallacies are can be identified by resemblance to paradigmatic forms and argues for a new approach to the categorisation and identification of fallacies via an evaluation procedure which uncovers fallacious arguing through the systematic employment of so-called ‘procedural questions’.
LANCAR 