In their paper entitled “Two-Tier Fallacy Theory: A New Approach to Assessing Argument Quality”, Martin Hinton and Jean Wagemans propose a two-tier fallacy theory designed to resolve long-standing ambiguities in how scholars identify and evaluate faulty reasoning.
They argue that traditional approaches often conflate descriptive analysis with normative judgment, resulting in inconsistent and poorly justified labels for arguments. To address this, they introduce a systematic procedure that first uses the Argument Type Identification Procedure (ATIP) to categorize an argument’s structure via the Periodic Table of Arguments. Once the argument is objectively described, it undergoes the Comprehensive Assessment Procedure for Natural Argumentation (CAPNA) to test its acceptability across dimensions of process, reasoning, and expression.
By separating these steps, the authors aim to transform fallacy theory into an explainable, reproducible science suitable for both human analysis and automated AI detection. This dual framework ensures that characterizing an argument as fallacious is a justifiable conclusion grounded in specific failures rather than an arbitrary label.
Hinton, M., & Wagemans, J.H.M. (2025). Two-tier fallacy theory: A new approach to assessing argument quality. Informal Logic, 45(4), 472-503.
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