Start talking with almost anyone and you will discover some differences for which they will have their reasons. Carry on the conversation and it is likely that what at first seems to be ordinary communication between two people managing their differences is actually quite complex. It is this complexity that we examine in this book.

Consider two neighbors who happen to see each other at a local café, when one discovers that the other has some property available. A half-joking offer is made and met only with a nod. Two days later, a realtor contacts the property owner about acquiring the property on behalf of a potential buyer whose friend had overheard the conversation at the café. The property owner consults with her three siblings about selling the property that they co-own from a recent inheritance, and then each individually investigates values for comparable property online, as well as the inquiring realtor’s credibility. They cannot agree among each other about a sale price for the property, so they contract with their own realtor to help determine a price and to engage the buyer’s realtor. After a few exchanges of counteroffers, the seller and buyer agree on a purchase price. Before the sale can be completed, the buyer and the bank financing the purchase require an inspection of the property for defects and compliance with safety and environmental regulations set by government agencies. In addition, before the property exchange is finalized, the government requires certification of the property boundaries and clearing of any debts against it. The inspectors and certifiers involved each produce a document to be signed and attached to the sales contract as proof validating key facts necessary for the buyer’s offer and the seller’s acceptance.

From the café encounter to the completion of the property transaction, the opening scenario is an instance of something quite recognizable about everyday life: humans are immersed in complex communication. The café encounter between two neighbors is overheard by another, the realtor speaks to the property owner on behalf of an interested party, the owner is actually a group of family members, and the owner and eventual buyer interact through a variety of other parties with their particular, possibly divergent or incomplete, perspectives about the property and the circumstances. The complexity does not simply reside in the important but obvious fact that many different people are engaging each other in the many different events that develop from the café encounter. Complexity resides in the fact that taking any action relative to others, including saying something, can have consequences, even unknown ones, for any of the parties directly or indirectly involved. Moreover, the parties expect that each other, as individuals or collectives, may have reasons for their actions and can be held accountable for having reasons. The acceptability of any action depends, at least partly, on reasons justifying it. Herein lie the risks and opportunities of communication in human activity: when reasons are made explicit and open to criticism, the conduct and outcomes of interaction, as well as the individual and shared perspectives about the circumstances, are given shape, and often in unexpected ways. In our scenario, these events range in formality from casual conversations and online search to consultations and negotiations to transactions requiring signed, official documents. The events are linked together (or unlinked) by how communication’s risks and opportunities are managed by those who become involved and by the degree to which one event is consequential for the conduct and outcomes of other events. After all, the property transaction did not have to follow from the café encounter. Differences and disagreements are not per se bugs or failures of communication, but rather natural, even essential, features of communication. How the differences and disagreements are handled within and across these events through argumentation – the making and criticizing of reasons in the context of doubt and disagreement – matters for what develops or not and for the intelligence of the interaction.Footnote ¹

The scenario lets us formulate the basic problem we address in this book: how to understand the complexity of argumentation, that is, how argument and communication are entangled in human activity. This problem opens up new possibilities for theory and practice in describing, evaluating, and prescribing argumentation. The complexity to be examined, however, is occluded by a received view of argumentation that depends on a particular characterization of argumentation as a form of communication that happens just between two parties trading reasons and criticisms on “both sides” of an issue in one place at one time for the purpose of two parties to resolve their disagreement, in particular by means of one party convincing another. While the received view has merits that we hope to preserve, its base characterization is a limiting factor for seeing the complexity of argumentation, let alone engaging that complexity.

For instance, the opening scenario could be understood as two parties (i.e., a buyer and a seller) in a one-to-one exchange of a pro and a con position (i.e., accepting or rejecting a purchase price) that happens in one place (i.e., realtor’s office) – but obviously that scenario suggests that there is much more going on argumentatively within and across communicative events. A realtor might, for example, insinuate that the neighborhood is not appropriate for potential buyers from a particular ethnic or religious minority by stating they would feel “more comfortable” someplace else; and when criticized for a bigoted insinuation, she can sneakily respond she merely meant an age group.Footnote ² Or, instead, the realtor might respond by apologetically pointing out the sad reality of what kind of offers get accepted around here, thus unveiling deeper institutional conditions privileging what is arguable, such as when specific stipulations are written into deeds disallowing property transfers to buyers from a particular race.Footnote ³ Any such intervention opens new lines of (counter-)argumentation and affects the kind of practical conclusion that can be reached in the event. All the same, an all too common simplification of argumentation – what we call a dyadic reduction – dismisses such complexities and the often subtle dynamics that open up and close off argumentative opportunities: what could be said, what would count as a relevant argument, who could become involved, what differences could lead to, and where interaction could take place. The dyadic reduction of the received view is pervasive in technical, professional, media, and lay understandings of argumentation such as when: purchasing is seen as only a buyer and seller exchanging some good, finding a companion is seen as if it was only the two people who fell in love made it happen, health decision-making is seen as only the doctor and the patient selecting one treatment over another, electing leaders is treated as a choice between only left or right, handling a novel viral pandemic is treated as a choice only between saving the economy or saving public health, and policy controversy is treated as siding with either climate change acceptors or deniers. This list just names a few.

The dyadic reduction in technical, professional, and everyday efforts to describe, evaluate, and prescribe practices of argumentation is not only pervasive but also fundamentally problematic. The received view’s limiting factors are particularly poignant with respect to understanding contemporary controversies and decision-making but also consequential for what knowledge from other fields is taken to be relevant for understanding argumentation and for the recovery of important insights from the history of argumentation theory and practice. In contrast to the received view, we seek to articulate an alternative path of inquiry that is more deeply engaged with the entanglement of argumentation and complex communication in human activity.

Our opening scenario begins the turn from the dyadic reduction by building on our basic observation that communicative situations have always been replete with “third parties”: some ready to ameliorate or exploit differences and the making and criticizing of reasons, and others affected by the way differences are handled. More official, classical argumentative situations include judges, lawyers, juries, mediators, arbitrators, or audiences in all their well-known forms and capacities (assembly members, crowds, viewers). Less official, everyday situations, involve unaddressed bystanders, overhearers, and eavesdroppers in addition to directly addressed participants. And now, in the increasingly digitalized environments, this basic fact is exacerbated as highly complex networks of participants take up a variety of roles relative to the making and criticizing of reasons. These include addressees, readers, lurkers, trolls, moderators, service providers, conveners, AI-bots, advertisers, etc., all of whom tap into the affordances of devices, apps, platforms, and algorithms that underpin both formal and informal everyday interactions of people as they participate in social, civic, and economic life. Giving attention to third parties, especially in the evolving digital environment, disrupts some of the most basic ways argumentation is delineated such as interpersonal (micro) in contrast to mass public (macro) or as institutional (procedural, fact-based) in contrast to noninstitutional (free-wheeling, value-based). Yet surprisingly, third parties, and the many-to-many communication their roles reveal, are typically neglected in argumentation analysis, evaluation, and prescription.

This basic observation, moreover, brings new focus to the fact that the conduct of argumentation matters. Yet, while philosophers from Socrates to Habermas have argued that the quality of argumentative exchanges is the best check on human rationality, the correspondence between the individual human capacity and willingness to make and criticize reasons and the intelligence of the way this capacity is collectively organized remains an elusive theoretical problem and a persistent practical issue. In complex communication, the quality of interaction is an achievement that goes beyond the individual rationality of each supposed participant. For instance, the fact that self-interested parties to legal proceedings (e.g., plaintiff and defendant) are characteristically incapable or unwilling to yield to the force of the better argument of the other party does not render these proceedings flawed or useless. Over and above these two parties, it is a collective achievement of judges, attorneys, witnesses, expert assessors, jury members, and other courts of appeal to safeguard the reasonableness of the procedure and its final outcome. On the other hand, two dozen intelligent and critically minded people do not necessarily generate critical and intelligent exchanges on their Facebook pages. Moreover, the way in which complex communication, as in the opening scenario, becomes organized involves many choices, reflective or not, about the who, what, and where that is included in or excluded from the system of transactions and the consequences of those choices. One of our chief arguments throughout this book is that simplifications that ignore, downplay, hide, or dismiss such important realities of complex communication are detrimental to understanding and improving argumentation and thus to seeking intelligent interaction.

Our main task in this book is to highlight and reimagine the concern with the rationality of many-to-many communication that is blocked by the received view’s dyadic preoccupations about argumentation and its valorization of one-to-one and one-to-many communication. We give the concern about many-to-many communication a particular twist with the term polylogue to recognize that in complex communication many parties (players) pursue many distinct standpoints and rationales (positions) across multiple situations (places). The crucial point in recognizing polylogue is the obligation it creates to understand how argumentation and complex communication are entangled in human activity – that is, to explain how positions, players, and places are organized through argumentation and the consequences of their systemic interdependencies. The received dyadic view hinders this important task. So in making the case that it is imperative to see polylogue, we also make a case for embracing the descriptive, normative, and prescriptive implications of polylogue for argumentation theory and practice.

We chose polylogue as a simple yet perspicuous term for renewing and advancing inquiry of argumentation in complex communication. For the basic understanding of the concept, it suffices to unpack its Greek etymology – poly-logos signifies discourse (λόγος: logos) between many (πολύ: poly).Footnote ⁴ In this sense, it can easily be added to the common vocabulary of other words of Greek origin frequently used in the same semantic field, such as monologue or dialogue. Especially mono-logos, discourse of a single person, is a direct equivalent here. Dialogue, by contrast, might be a confusing term. Etymologically, dia-logos means “through” discourse; but this is all too easily mistaken for a di-logos, discourse between “two.” This slight difference in the original Greek prefixes arguably contributes to the dyadic reduction mentioned above. Indeed, both ordinary and academic vocabulary fall prey to the deeply entrenched practice of limiting a dia-logue to a di-logue: dialogue becomes basically an interaction between two speakers, and argumentative dialogue is characteristically theorized as an exchange of reasons and criticisms between only two arguers (proponent–opponent, protagonist–antagonist, arguer–critic, questioner–answerer). We aim to critically analyze this practice and its consequences.Footnote ⁵

To further set the stage for our investigation of polylogues, we introduce three chief motivations for addressing polylogue in the first place. The first of them is the undeniable empirical reality of polylogue. As in our opening scenario, much of people’s daily argumentation happens in complex communicative situations. That this fact cannot be simply dismissed has been reflected in an ongoing practical concern with the conduct and rationality of many-to-many communication and its mediation (Section 1.1). In this context, second, it is necessary and quite thrilling to trace and understand the origins of the theoretical dismissal of this reality via its reduction to dyadic interaction (Section 1.2). Finally, it’s equally necessary to acknowledge various developments in contemporary argumentation theory – most importantly, scrutiny of the context dependence of reasoning – that show there is more to see, to evaluate, and to manage in argumentation than the schematic simplifications of the dyadic reduction project (Section 1.3). Yet, these developments also reveal some unfinished business in reversing the dyadic reduction and embracing the complexity of argumentation. Our study of polylogue – this book – explores precisely the curious theory-reality gap, occasionally noticed but overall inadequately or incompletely treated. While we hope scholarly business of any sort can never be quite finished, we at least argue the steps we take here advance the study of argumentation in complex communication.

1.1 Managing Disagreement under Polylogical Conditions

The polylogical challenge to the received imaginary of argumentation is ever more obvious in light of the radical transformations in communication media and the increasing digitalization of social and institutional life. Consider the circumstances of the prominent platform-based companies coming to terms with the consequences of creating a place for large-scale, many-to-many, and, ostensibly, reasonable communication. One of Twitter’s founders, Evan Williams, highlighted an empirical and normative naïveté all too prominent in the social media era when he said in a May 2017 New York Times interview, “I thought once everybody could speak freely and exchange information and ideas, the world is automatically going to be a better place.” And, significantly, he added: “I was wrong about that.” It was as though the platform was simply enabling a series of unfettered encounters, like face-to-face, one-on-one conversations, where people freely and reasonably engage. This widely held presumption crashed into another communicative reality when many social platforms were exposed for participating in systematic, often hidden, distortions and manipulations of participation and content that in some cases were conducted by “rogue” commercial or state agents exploiting affordances of the platform.

Disagreement, it turned out, was a many-splendored opportunity for interested third parties, including the platform companies, whose actions were facilitated by the design of social media platforms to cultivate data by curating interactions. Indeed, the European Union’s 2018 General Data Protection Regulation requirements exposed just how many hidden commercial organizations act as third parties to the personalized interactions people have with each other and with various online services. In light of this, it was a telling moment when, in an interview during Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s spring 2018 tour defending Facebook’s societal role, he claimed that Facebook, with its more than two billion members, is more like a government than a business (Zuckerberg on Kleinberg show, March 2018). Indeed, it remains empirically and normatively naïve to expect that free, critical, and reasonable communicative exchanges can naturally happen at scale. And when exploiting disagreement at scale becomes part of the business model, it is necessary to admit that there are serious governance issues in generating trustworthy content and legitimate many-to-many communication. And now, all the platform companies have come in for at least some critical reassessment of their pervasive impact on the most basic interactions where people work out social and civic relations, economic exchange, political choice, and knowledge development. The contemporary struggle with platform companies reveals an age-old problem with a new media wrinkle – that is, admitting the puzzles of polylogue is not the same as understanding it.

What was (is) apparently lost on social media and other platform entrepreneurs about many-to-many communication was a front-and-center consideration for the authors of the United States Constitution when in 1788 they had to decide on “the number [of members in the House of Representatives] most convenient for a representative legislature” (Madison, 1788/Reference Hamilton, Madison, Jay and Ball2003, p. 269). Should the citizens of the new republic be represented by a few dozen or a few hundred delegates? According to James Madison, the number needed to be substantial in order to “secure the benefits of free consultation and discussion” and yet significantly limited so as not to let passion “wrest the sceptre from reason” (Madison, 1788/Reference Hamilton, Madison, Jay and Ball2003, p. 270). Sixty-five representatives, as stipulated by Art. 1, sect. 2, of the Constitution (pending the first national census), was a reasonable choice, given the historical circumstances of the nascent country, argued Madison. And he added a defensive punchline to those who would only be satisfied with a much larger assembly: “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob” (Madison, 1788/Reference Hamilton, Madison, Jay and Ball2003, p. 270). Madison and other framers of the Constitution thus clearly recognized the practical issue that the capacity and willingness of individuals to argue does not guarantee intelligent interaction. They feared that the human capacities to make and criticize reasons would yield to the passions, unfounded arguments, and other behaviors characteristic of a mob. They also had ideas about the potential for disagreement to be managed in a normatively justifiable and yet workable manner that can realize what is actually possible for knowing and acting in less-than-ideal circumstances.

As Madison’s words show, the framers turned to the dialectically inspired Socratic ideal for guidance to define an assembly that could tame complex communication’s risks while exploiting its opportunities in devising prudent courses of action. Was he really wrong in drawing upon the Socratic ideal for this design? Here, it is important to stress again that a reasoned dialogue between two speakers who exchange arguments and counterarguments – traditionally called “dialectic” and epitomized in the ideal Socratic dialogue – has long shaped understanding of what intelligent interaction is and what it should be. Perhaps Madison understood the problem of reasonable communication being swamped in the intricate passions and dynamics of an uncontrollable mob so well, that – by limiting numbers to better match their idealization of reasoned dialogue – he had already found a solution that would prevent surprise and harm, unlike the Facebook and other platform CEOs.

The framers and the platform CEOs share a concern with the uses of argument in complex communication for translating pluralistic perspectives, opinions, tastes, and preferences of the many into courses of action. While they may differ about the role of deliberation, administration, and markets in shaping courses of action, their choices highlight a practical awareness of communication as an architectonic art about configuring the interaction of positions, players, and places to realize a particular conduct and quality of argumentation. The framers devised a novel approach for a governance platform built around managing differences of opinion to construct policies. The platform found its legitimacy in its capacity for collective self-determination and adaptive development grounded in human rights rather than a monarchy, theocracy, or despotism. However, there was more and less to the framers’ practical theorizing about scaling up from dyadic Socratic interaction, with its emphasis on individual skills and virtues, to “polylogical” interactions where various collective dynamics enter the stage. The more involved their choices about who had the individual skills and virtues to participate in representative deliberations. Most notably, these choices included privileging propertied, white men as legitimate participants in public deliberation while other people were not considered legitimate public participants – women, those defined as property without any human rights whatsoever (the enslaved Africans, African-Americans, and conquered indigenous peoples), and others as objects of conquest (indigenous peoples still free at the time). The less involved the fact that the procedures for multiparty deliberation of the assembly were left to be developed. Interestingly, the initial rules for parliamentary procedure for determining the voice of the majority from public opinion were compiled by Thomas Jefferson from the British Parliament’s precedents for governing deliberation. The framers’ choices about the House of Representatives, and its relation to the other chamber of the legislature and branches of government in the broader conduct of governance, have developed through criticism, contestation, and reformulation of the platform. So too have the platform companies’ design choices been challenged for the uses of argumentation and what (and whose) ends participation in their platforms serve. However, there are some key differences with how choices about the uses of argumentation in platform design can be (and are) held accountable for redesign. What is important to see is that central to these choices are differences over the very ideas about the uses of argumentation. Admittedly, these choices could be seen and judged in terms of dyadic encounters as Madison was clearly tempted to do, rather than the practical and conceptual issues of many-to-many communication in a representative assembly.

Arguably, not everyone has the privilege of creating the US Constitution or the largest global communication platforms, but our short account of Madison’s, Zuckerberg’s, Williams’s, and the other platform CEOs’ more dramatic circumstances highlight the pervasive and obdurate reality of the entanglement of argument and complex communication in human activity. Indeed, in everyday life, human beings are immersed in many-to-many communication while making choices about, and inventions for, how to participate and how to shape that participation with uses of language, procedures, and technologies. Herein lie the practical issues and theoretical problems in understanding the relationship between the individual human capacity and willingness to make and criticize reasons and the formulation of intelligent interaction under pluralistic conditions. Seeing polylogue – the interaction among positions, players, and places – opens new questions and provokes new answers about the convergence of human rationality and complex forms of communication. How can the argumentative realities of polylogue, even mundane disagreement management, be adequately described and explained, such as when five friends pursue four positions in deciding where to have dinner? How can the argumentative realities of polylogue be effectively evaluated, such as when a third-party consultant facilitates multiple parties’ formulation of a public-private partnership for social innovation? How can legitimate forms of polylogue be prescribed for the mediation of knowledge and action, such as when a health organization creates a digital platform for shared decision-making about complex treatment plans among clinicians and patients that integrates expertise, omics, health data, and patient experience? Indeed, the conduct of argumentation and our ideas for its conduct are fully entangled in complex communication across human activity, permeating the way we understand, discuss, and act on the key challenges of climate change, global pandemic, social inequalities, etc.

Here we contend that the classical account of collective deliberation as given by Aristotle (Rhetoric, Book 1) can be reconsidered and possibly reimagined (Nieuwenberg, Reference Nieuwenburg2004; Yack, Reference Yack2006). Aristotle characterizes collective deliberation as a communicative practice belonging to the domain of politics in which members of a deliberative assembly decide together on the most expedient course of collective action. Deliberation necessarily takes place by means of public reasoning (which for Aristotle is “deliberative rhetoric”) where contrasting courses of future action are critically compared with one another and assessed by the deliberating public. As in the nascent United States, via the systemic exclusion of the political system, only a small portion of the community of the ancient polis had a chance to actively participate in the process of deliberation. However, in principle, every “free man” admitted to the assembly had a chance to shift his role from a mere listener to a public speaker. This classical account of public deliberation is an important acknowledgment of polylogical argumentation. Deliberation presupposes many-to-many communication: it is neither mere public speaking of an orator against the crowd of silent listeners (as the one-to-many “epideictic rhetoric” is) nor a neat exchange in which two opposing parties take turns to argue their case – whether in order to resolve their legal conflict against a formal third-party adjudicator (as in “forensic rhetoric”) or in order to critically test their philosophical arguments against an informal jury of their mentors, disciples, friends, and other interested onlookers (as in dialectic). This presupposition has largely lain fallow, even when the communicative perspective of argumentation has emerged in twentieth-century argumentation theory to address the reasoning that happens in communities, publics, fields, and institutions. And it still lays fallow today even as various ideas about intelligent polylogical interaction become embedded in technologies and media for interacting at scale characteristic of the contemporary communication landscape (Aakhus & Lewiński, Reference Aakhus, Lewiński, Feteris, Garssen and Snoeck Henkemans2011). But to get there, we must start by pulling the paradigmatic dyadic, dialectical encounter off its pedestal to see that the polylogue is always already there in human communication.

1.2 Origins of the Dyadic Reduction in the Study of Argumentation and Communication

The dyadic reduction is a powerful analytic move with a long history in the search for intelligent interaction. To appreciate the significance of the dyadic reduction, it is important to first see how early theorists recognized and exploited an isomorphism between conversation and reason. But then, to appreciate how polylogical reality became obscured in the search for intelligent interaction, it is important to see that the exploited isomorphism, while a powerful analytic move, was merely a serendipitous convergence of reason and conversation.

The intrinsic link between reason and communication is as old as the study of argumentation itself. And so is the dyadic reduction that theorizes argumentative communication as a movement between two basic poles, the speaker and the audience, the speaker and hearer, the proponent and opponent, or the questioner and answerer.

As is well known, argumentation studies in the Western world developed first in Ancient Greece across three disciplines: rhetoric, dialectic, and logic.Footnote ⁶ Over the centuries, often conflicting views on the origins, nature, and mutual relations between the three disciplines have proliferated, leading to an incredibly rich literature on the topic. As a result, any brief summary, such as ours, needs to walk the fine line between being naïve and being unnecessarily controversial. Assuming some simplifications are inevitable, we adduce two basic arguments for the link between reason and communication: (1) a diachronic argument resulting from a brief historical account of how the study of argumentation developed in Ancient Greece and (2) a synchronic argument based on structural similarities between the forms of communication and forms of reasoning. As we do so, we identify a certain pattern in argumentation disciplines. The empirical fact of the existence of argumentative practices, including malpractices (typically associated with rhetoric), has led to a normative drive to discipline them through some kind of rules (typically associated with logic). This has generated a number of prescriptive guidelines and interventions on how to conduct reasonable argumentation spread across the three disciplines but most directly associated with regimented dialectical discussions.

We do not enter into the fascinating details of the debate over the most adequate definition of the three argumentation disciplines and the complex relation between them (see for instance Allen, Reference Allen2007; Blair, Reference Blair, van Eemeren, Blair, Willard and Snoeck Henkemans2003; Reference Blair2012; van Eemeren & Houtlosser, Reference Eemeren, Houtlosser, van Eemeren and Houtlosser2002; Hamblin, Reference Hamblin1970; Johnson, Reference Johnson and Ritola2009; Krabbe, Reference Krabbe2000; Reference Krabbe, Houtlosser and van Rees2006; Reference Krabbe2013; Leff, Reference Leff2000; Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, Reference Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca1969; Rehg, Reference Rehg2005; Rescher, Reference Rescher1998; Wenzel, Reference Wenzel1979; Reference Wenzel, Schuetz and Trapp1990). In the context of Ancient Greece, we understand rhetoric as the art (a theorized practice) of using arguments in persuasive, typically public, speeches; dialectic as the art of using arguments in agonistic, typically well-regulated, conversations; and logic as the theory of valid forms of inference, notably deductive inference. The communicative nature of rhetoric and dialectic is thus obvious to the extent that they constitute the first Western theories of communication (Littlejohn, Reference Littlejohn and Enos1996; Littlejohn et al., Reference Littlejohn, Foss and Oetzel2016).Footnote ⁷ Logic – today conceived of as an independent study of formal structures of inferences – has, however, a strong, even if complex, relationship with the two former disciplines.

Historically, the challenge for Greek philosophers such as Zeno of Elea, Socrates, and Plato was to guard against what they perceived as abuses of argument by skilled rhetoricians, or sophists, such as Gorgias or Protagoras.Footnote ⁸ The initial philosophical response against the spurious, fallacious, and, as such, manipulative uses of rhetorical argumentation was to submit any argumentation to dialectical testing. Tightly disciplined dialectical discussion, progressing in a step-by-step fashion through sequences of well-defined questions and answers, was meant to expose weaknesses and inconsistencies of the other’s argumentation, and the overall position held. In this way, an indirect, apagogic proof for a contradictory position could be furnished, mostly in the form of the argumentum ad absurdum: since your position leads to absurd consequences and so is plainly wrong, its contradiction must be correct.

Dialectic – especially the way it is known from Aristotle’s Topics and Sophistical Refutations, two prime ancient sources – was a rule-governed practice of argumentative discussion. Allowing for an examination of any uncertain topic “on both sides of an issue,” it was clearly important in and of itself – as a form of intellectual training in disputation, as a useful guide in casual argumentative encounters, and as a tool for debating philosophical issues, including the first principles of other, particular sciences (Aristotle, Topics, 101a26–30; see Hamlyn, Reference Hamlyn1990; Merry, Reference Merry2016; Ryle, Reference Ryle1966; Slomkowski, Reference Slomkowski1997; Smith, Reference Smith1993; Spranzi, Reference Spranzi2011; Vlastos, Reference Vlastos and Burnyeat1994). However, it was also a crucial step toward formal logical systems: “logic seems to have risen out of dialectics … a dialogue in which the opponent tries to refute some assertion” (Bocheński, Reference Bocheński1951, p. 16).Footnote ⁹ That is because the establishment of basic logical principles, such as the principle of noncontradiction, “is still dialectical in pattern. … As we might put it, there are trans-departmental formal or logical principles presupposed by the departmental truths of the special sciences; and these logical principles need to be extracted, and can be extracted only by dialectic” (Ryle, Reference Ryle1966, p. 134). How so? Gilbert Ryle, in his account of the Ancient Greek dialectic focused on Plato’s contribution, aptly challenges the anachronistic assumption that logic has always been there. In Plato’s dialogues:

Having benefited from the intellectual context of Plato’s Academy as a student and teacher, Aristotle subsequently turned his explicit attention to the “rules and controls” of the dialectical debate practiced there. However, as twentieth-century commentators repeatedly observed, these “rules” examined in Aristotle’s treatises are of a highly heterogeneous nature: to today’s mind, some of them can indeed be seen as “formal logical rules,” while others as “methodological recommendations” or “even psychological remarks” on how to proceed in argumentative encounters (Bocheński, Reference Bocheński1951, p. 32). Throughout his intellectual development, Aristotle eventually succeeded in identifying the strictly logical aspect of argumentation through the concept of syllogism – and thus produced the first complete theory of formal logic in the Western world. This has been hailed as a remarkable achievement – and one that initiated the formal study of logical rules “for their own sake,” thus liberating them from the exigencies and contingencies of argumentative communication (Bocheński, Reference Bocheński1951, p. 19; see also Kneale & Kneale, Reference Kneale and Kneale1962). In short, “Logic arose originally out of reflection on many-agent practices of disputation,” and thus was founded on a “broader agenda of rational agency and intelligent interaction” (van Benthem, Reference Benthem, Rahwan and Simari2009, p. vii).Footnote ¹⁰

So much for the necessarily brief historical account of the communicative origins of logic and, therefore, of any study of argumentation. There is, however, also the structural argument, one that claims logic derives from dialectic not only historically but also conceptually. That is to say, logical rules are in fact derivations from the primary rules of dialectical discussions. A simple formulation of this idea can be found in Hamblin’s treatise Fallacies:

But what exactly does it mean that logical rules can be seen as “dialectical conventions,” as rules applicable to certain argumentative exchanges? In what sense can the rules of deductive logic aimed at truth preservation through formally valid inference be understood as mere derivatives of the rules of an agonistic dialectical dialogue, aimed at winning an argumentative duel with an opponent? One possible argument runs as follows:

In such an account, the deductive rules of classic formal logic are a systemic consequence of the strategic considerations established in the context of more general rules of dialectical discussions. In other words, it is our strategic argumentative goals in communicative encounters that drive the normativity of deductive forms of reasoning (Dutilh Novaes, Reference Dutlih Novaes2015; Reference Dutlih Novaes2020; Mercier & Sperber, Reference Mercier and Sperber2011; Reference Mercier and Sperber2017).

Admittedly, as a normative position on the nature of logic, such an account is laden with heavy philosophical assumptions. Most significantly, it requires one to take a nonrealist position on the nature of logical objects (laws, arguments) (Dummett, Reference Dummett1982). Both classical and contemporary systems of formal logic are characteristically underlain by the assumption that logic represents eternal “laws of thought” akin to Platonic ideas. With clear and distinct rational investigation, we can gain access to them and then put them to good use in our solo reasoning and argumentative discussions alike. Nonrealists, by contrast, see various systems of logic as human constructions, whereby the basic justification for a statement being true is not its correspondence to real external objects, but rather an internally constructed proof of that statement (Dummett, Reference Dummett1982). Further, one needs to assume that the most philosophically justifiable way of constructing a logical system is a dialogical system. Indeed, one of the most prominent champions of “constructive logic,” Paul Lorenzen, has argued forcefully for a dialogical justification of logical calculi (Lorenzen, Reference Lorenzen1987; see also Barth & Krabbe, Reference Barth and Krabbe1982; Hamblin, Reference Hamblin1970; Reference Hamblin1971; Krabbe, Reference Krabbe, Houtlosser and van Rees2006; Reference Krabbe2013; Walton & Krabbe, Reference Walton and Krabbe1995).

However, our argument for the important link between logic and dialectic – and more broadly, between reason and communication – does not rest on such a specific position on the status of logic and its relation to dialectic. A more moderate view would do as well. One such view is that of Finocchiaro, who argues the following when analyzing Barth and Krabbe’s (Reference Barth and Krabbe1982) From Axiom to Dialogue:

In any case, treating argumentation as a form of intelligent interaction where parties trade their reasons and criticisms is at least “equivalent” to the more abstract logical systems.

Our historical and structural arguments thus highlight an understanding of human reasoning as an interactive, rule-governed, and inventive process. One’s intellectual progress rests on intelligent interactions, where inventive argumentative techniques and rules inspire improvements:

While communication is thus taken to be central to argumentation, it is a particular form of communication as a regimented “two-party debate” comparable in its goals and strategies to chess, draughts, or even fencing duels, all of which are dyadic games (Ryle, Reference Ryle1966). These are games far more playable than the modern logic pictured by Lorenzen as a “dull game of solitaire,”Footnote ¹³ yet they still do not capture the rich field of human games (see Wittgenstein, Reference Wittgenstein2001/1953). Indeed, from Plato onward, argumentation scholars have characteristically simplified their notion of what communication is or could be in their theorizing, thus arriving at the neatly dyadic model where two speakers take well-defined turns and produce an orderly dialogue. The benefits of this dyadic reduction are well known at least since Aristotle’s description of dialectic: conversational moves can mirror inferential moves and, if all goes well, a set of conversational moves can produce a complex argument, even a conclusive proof such as reductio ad absurdum. In this way, argumentative practice reveals a deeper, powerful theory of deductive inference; and the theory finds its immediate practical application in the two-party debate. But to achieve this alluring parallelism between logic and conversation, one needs to limit the conversation to two participants, who neatly mirror the two basic logical values (true vs. false, pro vs. con) between which argumentation emerges. The advantages of elucidating inferential steps in actual uses of argument are thus clear. But so should be the perils of an inadequate modeling of complex communicative reality: while avowedly linked to communication in an intrinsic manner, argumentation also becomes detached from it due to the reductions and regimentations of a particular dyadic game.

The idea – mistaken, in our view – that the abstract order of reasoning and the actual communicative encounters are parallel and as such can be treated as dyadic, results from what we characterize in Chapter 2 as the serendipity thesis. The fact that some regimented one-on-one conversations might reflect the order of bivalued logic is serendipitous, rather than intrinsic to how argumentative communication works. Indeed, argumentative communication involves much more than a well-governed step-by-step dialogue between the pro-side and con-side in one venue. This fact is particularly conspicuous in today?s communicative activities brought about by the radical transformations in communication media and the increasing role of information in social and institutional life.

1.3 Argumentation and Communication: A Polylogical Turn?

Our brief history highlights that it is one thing to acknowledge the link between communication and reasoning, and yet another to follow the implications of this acknowledgment. One of our key arguments in this book is that to follow these implications is to embrace a polylogical approach to argumentation. More in particular, while the revival of argumentation theory in the twentieth century has significantly deepened our understanding of argumentation as a communicative and situated practice, it has left some important business unfinished – and in some respects even unstarted. This is where our polylogue framework steps in.

The Ancient disciplines of argumentation have gone through major developments over the centuries (see Toulmin, Reference Toulmin1990; Reference Toulmin2001). Dialectic flourished at the medieval universities via the highly regimented dyadic disputations, obligationes (Dutilh Novaes & Uckelman, Reference Dutlih Novaes, Uckelman, Dutlih Novaes and Read2016; Dutilh Novaes, Reference Dutlih Novaes2020), while rhetoric regained prominence in the Renaissance, but this time as a literary art of bene dicendi, rather than a civic art of reasonable argument in deliberative and judicial contexts (Perelman, Reference Perelman1982). The emergence of modern exact sciences as of the seventeenth century – with the towering figures of Galileo, Descartes, and Newton – led to a fundamental shift in construing human rationality: clear and distinct solo reasoning guided by the inference of mathematical formulas applied to quantifiable empirical observations became the model to follow. Formal logic of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein) epitomized this ideal – and developments of logical positivism for philosophy of science further consolidated it. Vis-à-vis older disciplines of argumentation, the new mathematical logic looked by all means like scientific astronomy to older astrology. Moreover, this concern for the rational foundations of knowledge was notably preoccupied with remedies for the imperfections of natural language and the reasoning errors of individual philosophers and scientists, more so than with reasoned discussion about the conduct of human affairs.

During this time, there were profound transformations of the economy, politics, and communications. Self-regulating social coordination among individuals outside of the state was elevated in market exchange and by an emerging public as a defined arena of opinion. This movement toward a civil society with participation focused on individual interests in private and public spheres of activity stood in contrast with the Ancient social and political life organized around civic virtue with participation in the agora and the ekklesia of a community (Habermas, Reference Habermas1989). There were the matters of identifying problems with official argument associated with the deliberative processes of newly emerging representative assemblies (e.g., Bentham, Reference Bentham1824; Madison, 1788/Reference Hamilton, Madison, Jay and Ball2003). There were also the matters of vernacular argument that occurred in a multiplicity of fora for settling differences between individuals and their interests that also played a complicated role in the formation of common opinions giving expression to the public will. Here the new media of the time had a significant role in mediating private and public argumentation outside of the state that set expectations for official policy. In this context, the functions and methods of private and public argumentation in everyday life were increasingly recognized and often contrasted with the ideal of infallible inference (Habermas, Reference Habermas1989).

This contrast was made particularly sharp by the American pragmatists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: Ch. S. Peirce, W. James, and J. Dewey. Among the “four incapacities” of the Cartesian method, Peirce lists the undue reliance of reasoning on “individual consciousness” and the fact that “[t]he multiform argumentation of the middle ages is replaced by a single thread of inference” (Peirce, Reference Peirce1868, p. 140). Instead, argues Peirce, in science, philosophy, and daily matters, argumentation is always “for the community” and its sought-for practical conclusion is a situation where “men come to agreement” (p. 141). Further, in this endeavor each discipline should “trust rather to the multitude and variety of its arguments than to the conclusiveness of any one” (p. 141).Footnote ¹⁴ Dewey (Reference Dewey1903, Reference Dewey1938, Reference Dewey1941), further developing Peirce’s and James’s ideas, described the standard for rational argument in terms of “warranted assertability” which happens through an ongoing, self-correcting process of collective inquiry that produces a correspondence in how “a solution answers the requirements of a problem” (Dewey, Reference Dewey1941, p. 178). The truth of a solution’s consequences thus does not lie in the correspondence between what is observed and necessarily true antecedent propositions nor in any simplistic sense of usefulness or personal desire-fulfillment.Footnote ¹⁵

While these ideas stood in contrast to logicians such as B. Russell, by the mid-twentieth century philosophers working within the formal logical approach started realizing the limits of what had stood for the ideal of rationality. One key argument rested on the assumption that human language, agency, and rationality are inherently communicative achievements. As such, they cannot be fully grasped via abstract systems of solitary reasoning. In a most famous and dramatic volta, L. Wittgenstein abandoned his own logical system and turned to investigating language games, “the whole, consisting of language and the activities into which it is woven” (Wittgenstein, 1953, §7). J. L. Austin, alongside other “ordinary language philosophers” at Oxford (G. Ryle, P. Strawson, H. P. Grice), similarly exposed various limits of the ideal language of formal logicians and claimed instead that “[t]he total speech act in the total speech situation is the only actual phenomenon which, in the last resort, we are engaged in elucidating” (Austin, Reference Austin1962, p. 147). Grice further specified that the mistake of trying to construct logical systems, whether in ideal or natural language, “arises from an inadequate attention to the nature and importance of the conditions governing conversation” (Grice, Reference Grice, Cole and Morgan1975, p. 43).

It is important to stress that these criticisms did not hinder further profound developments in formal logic.Footnote ¹⁶ And yet they instigated a number of very significant developments across various disciplines, most notably in philosophy, linguistics, and communication. It is no coincidence that contemporary study of argumentation – an undertaking that neatly cuts across these disciplines – has too benefited from the turn away from the formal logical to the communicative.Footnote ¹⁷

Indeed, the revival of argumentation theory starting in the mid-twentieth century advanced a turn toward understanding human reasoning as a context-dependent and communicative phenomenon (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, Reference Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca1969; Toulmin, 1958; see also Cox & Willard, Reference Cox and Willard1982; van Eemeren et al., Reference Eemeren, Garssen, Krabbe, Snoeck Henkemans, Verheij and Wagemans2014; Foss et al., Reference Foss, Foss and Trapp1985; Lewiński & Mohammed, Reference Lewiński, Mohammed, Jensen, Craig, Pooley and Rothenbuhler2016; Zarefsky, Reference Zarefsky2019). Joining the push back against the tide of pure logical formalism as an explanation and a normative model for reasoning in human conduct, including science, an intellectual movement about argumentation emerged around the acknowledgment that human reason extends beyond the application of topic-neutral formal inferences to empirically verifiable statements. Value judgements, conceptual discussions, practical estimations, and deliberations of daily life have their own “informal logic” guided by recognized “inference-tickets” (Ryle, Reference Ryle1949; Reference Ryle and Ryle1954). Importantly, the recognizability of inference-tickets varies from field to field (Toulmin, Reference Toulmin1958): what counts as a legitimate legal formula in some jurisdictions (“sales of property can be limited to a given ethnic or religious community”) can be challenged on moral grounds, etc. Further, argumentation scholars like the ordinary language philosophers called for investigation of daily conversations – the “debates” that happen in all walks of life – as the locus of our language and reasoning.Footnote ¹⁸ In this way, they reanimated some of the classic motivations and methods for studying argumentation, especially across the rich dialectical and rhetorical traditions but with an appreciation for the critique of reason in enlightenment rationalism (Black, Reference Black1965; Brockreide & Ehninger, Reference Brockriede and Ehninger1960; Hamblin, Reference Hamblin1970; Johnstone, Reference Johnstone1963; Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, Reference Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca1969; Rescher, Reference Rescher1977; see also Yost, Reference Yost1917).

Taken together, the context dependency and communicative character of reason inspired renewed attention to the prospects for reasonable communication in contemporary pluralistic society and its emerging media for communication. Yet, we contend that important implications of this revival remain incomplete. Critical unfinished intellectual business remains for understanding human reasoning as an interactive and situated process due to the lingering received view of argumentation as a thoroughly two-sided affair and the shadow it casts over a more dynamic view of context for understanding argument augured by the revival of argumentation theory. Hence, despite key developments and novel tools for understanding argument, contemporary argumentation theory also revived in various ways the old problem of the dyadic reduction (we explain this further in Chapter 2).

A significant thread in the history of this intellectual movement, that is still playing out to this day, is that it awakened an obligation to rethink the nature of communication and context as it relates to argumentation. This has sparked ferment, innovation, and intellectual realignments. What is particularly important for the perspective on argumentation we develop in this book are three such realignments.

First, the concept of argument, as premise-conclusion relations, that provided a common object of normative-evaluative interest for logic, rhetoric, and dialectic was insufficient for descriptive aims concerned with explaining how argument happens. These aims called attention to arguments in all walks of everyday life not just in political assemblies and courts of law, and with alertness to fuzzy, even nonobvious, cases of what might be arguments that do not conform to preconceived conventional notions. Conceptualizations incorporating social dimensions recognized that argument was something that was interactively made and not simply the textual representation of underlying abstract logical forms.

A different kind of relationship between argumentation and communication was articulated that acknowledged the importance of context but that shed more light on the role of interaction – the having of an argument – in understanding context. Argument had a social genesis in human activity that could be seen as sequences of participation organized by mutual involvement of people in some recognizable degree of opposition that also generated obligations to respond to an argument made by another or developed among others in interaction. An argument might only become apparent when someone subsequently calls out someone’s prior action to make it accountable. Argument, thus, might not simply be a product of individual reasoning but something jointly constructed in interaction such that an argument may never appear in a single utterance, as a particular type of sentence or speech act, or in so many words as a wholly expressed set of premise(s) related to a conclusion; and yet, the fact that an argument had been made could be recognized by those participating in the interaction (and by an analyst or some observer). Argumentation, moreover, could be seen as organized practices for having and making arguments that participants recognized as preferred (or dispreferred) methods for managing their disagreements in the conduct of joint activities or when opening a latent issue for collective action. These insights, developed in part by addressing the multiple meanings of argument in ordinary English where one can make but also have arguments, succeeded in drawing out deeper theoretical and empirical interdependencies between argument as inferences and argument as communicative phenomena (D. O’Keefe, Reference O’Keefe1977; Reference O’Keefe, Cox and Willard1982; Jackson & Jacobs, Reference Jackson and Jacobs1980; Jacobs & Jackson, Reference Jacobs and Jackson1981; Hample, Reference Hample1985; Jacobs, Reference Jacobs1989). Following Jackson and Jacobs, argumentation can be seen as a disagreement-relevant expansion of speech acts triggered whenever some speech act in an ordinary, institutional, or scientific context is (expected to be) challenged, thus opening, or encouraging, the risk for communication to break down. And so, making arguments comes to the rescue as a “repair mechanism” of sorts for what is problematic in the situation. For instance, while it is fine to reject an invitation, a job offer, a rule, or a scientific theory, it is not fine to do so without a “no, because” reason adequate enough to the gravity of the communicative trouble the rejection might get one into.

The key insight here is that argumentation studies require thick analysis of the ways argument is entangled in communication rather than thin analysis that separates argument from communication in various, sometimes subtle, ways.Footnote ¹⁹ Often limited to premise(s)-conclusion relations, the analytic world of an argumentation scholar is now populated by communicative phenomena such as making and having arguments, and managing disagreements while doing so. A key puzzle is how these different senses of argument – argument as premise(s)-conclusion, as argument-making, and as disagreement – relate to each other in human conduct and with what consequence.

Second, the richer conceptualizations of argument problematized what was to be critiqued and how. Wenzel (Reference Wenzel1979, Reference Wenzel, Schuetz and Trapp1990), for instance, articulated from the ordinary uses of the term “argument” differing perspectives of argument as products (argument), processes (arguing), and procedures (argumentation) to point a way forward. Drawing out these articulations relative to Habermas’s (Reference Habermas1970) universal pragmatics of communication and broader critical theory, Wenzel proposed the centrality of dialectic as a concern with the “striving for an ideal communication system in which rhetorical and logical capacities are united for critical purposes” (Reference Wenzel1979, p. 94). Wenzel’s answer to how the different senses of argument relate in human conduct was an affirmation that argument as formal premise-conclusion relations had been dislodged from its central position as the prime determiner of rationality that organized the field’s evaluative regimes of logic, dialectic, and rhetoric. With such a rebalancing that featured communication as a system that unites the differing senses of argument, what was the point of the dialectical critique of good argument?

In Habermas’s (Reference Habermas1984) landmark theory of communicative action, the dialectical view of argument furnished the scaffolding for a critique of society. In his theory, Habermas specified the conditions for an ideal speech situation where only the force of the better argument grounded understanding and coordinated action. He did this by repurposing Toulmin’s conceptualization of argumentation with reformulated insights from symbolic interaction and speech act theory. He sought to establish that people achieved valid understanding and legitimate coordination of action by working out the validity claims inherent in any communicative act through argumentation (Habermas, Reference Habermas1984, pp. 1–42). From this, Habermas built a critique of the distorting effects of modern economic and administrative systems on human communication, and the technical and bureaucratic colonization of the ordinary capacity of people for argumentation.

By contrast, in van Eemeren and Grootendorst’s (Reference Eemeren and Grootendorst1984, Reference Eemeren and Grootendorst1992, Reference Eemeren and Grootendorst2004) pragma-dialectics, a dialectical view was a new way to return to the critique of the rational relationship between premises and conclusion in light of dialogue contexts. Van Eemeren and Grotendoorst developed a systematic dialectical theory of argumentation that reformulated insights from ordinary language philosophy, speech act theory, and Popper’s critical rationalism. Their ideal model of critical discussion specified the conditions and rules which the two argumentative parties, the protagonist and the antagonist, need to follow to critically test their conflicting standpoints through chains of arguments and critiques. Walton’s (Reference Walton1989, Reference Walton1998) “new dialectics” focused on how different kinds of arguments, such as cause, analogy, or authority, presuppose critical questions to be addressed by a proponent to make a valid presumptive argument in discussion with an opponent. Dialogue types (e.g., persuasion, deliberation, negotiation) differ in terms of the demands for reasoned discussion associated with the dialogue type. While different in many important details, both these theories aimed to incorporate a dyadic, normative model for seeing and criticizing inferences people make, and the contextual limits on rational proof.

What is notable about these two directions for dialectical critique – Habermas’s large-scale theory and van Eemeren and Grootendorst’s and Walton’s small-scale theory – is how each shifts from ideal geometrical forms of premises-conclusion relations as a normative anchor point for judging good argument to an ideal form of argumentative interaction. Where one uses the ideal argumentative dialogue as a point of departure for evaluating how macrocontextual conditions distort the possibility for the force of the better argument to prevail in communication, the other uses the ideal to define procedural rules for evaluating the fallaciousness of particular moves that stymie the rational resolution of differences. Neither approach denies the complexity or messiness of context but a normative dyadic interaction – an idealized twentieth-century rendering of the Socratic dialogue – becomes the transcendental point of departure for critique that then either goes toward a macro-orientation or a micro-orientation. Either way, each is concerned with the distorting effects of context on argument and the prospect of a normative dialogue ideal for redeeming human conduct with rational argument. However, while Habermasian process idealizations do not readily scale down to the level of various types of interpersonal argumentative interactions, idealized procedures for critical discussion do not scale up to publics (Goodwin, Reference Goodwin2005; Rehg, Reference Rehg2005). In this way, they dichotomize the inquiry into argumentative interactions by focusing on either systemic dynamics or on individual encounters, thus neglecting complex forms of argumentative communication that permeate the private, the technical, and the public sphere alike.

We see a key insight in these normative approaches that embrace to some degree richer conceptualizations of what argument is by featuring new dialectical orientations that shift the vantage point for the argumentative critique of human conduct toward interaction. These theoretical moves, however, open puzzles about the relationship between what argument is and what it ought to be in the critique of argument in complex communication. By stabilizing and containing interaction with dyadic reductions, these normative idealizations of communicative interaction draw a boundary that defines micro and macro worlds of argument. How these dyadic reductions limit the prospects for argumentative critique, such as projected by Wenzel’s critique of communication systems that unite logic, rhetoric, and dialectic in particular ways, may only be discovered by taking the dyadic ideal off its transcendental pedestal.

Third, the revival’s descriptive and normative attention to practices of making and having argument shows there is something new to see, to critique, and to invent. Argument is not limited to a priori concepts or conventions as choices are made about how to argue and what will count as a good argument. These choices, reflective or not, open up and close off argumentative possibilities and the trajectories for communication and practical activity. The very fact of informal and formal rules of inference, procedures for justifying claims, and codes of conduct across situations and collectives suggests invention and discovery about argument for human action. Less sanguine about ideal speech situations or ideal discussion procedures, Goodnight (Reference Goodnight1982, Reference Goodnight2012) and Willard (1983, Reference Willard1989, Reference Willard1996), for instance, offered alternative critical approaches oriented toward the way human constructions define reasonableness. From another vantage point, communicators vary in the way they interpret contexts and reason about the design of messages to achieve goals. When in conflict situations, message design can exacerbate or ameliorate conflict above and beyond any premise-conclusion logic of what is said (B. O’Keefe, Reference O’Keefe1988). And from yet another vantage point, the communicative practices of collectives for managing differences are cultivated “situated ideals” for communicative action relative to the communicative demands and dilemmas of particular recurring circumstances (Craig & Tracy, Reference Craig and Tracy1995). Such orientations highlighted the complex situatedness of argument in modern life but with less insistence on a macro-micro divide and with less a priori definition of argument than approaches grounded in a static normative dialogue ideal. What argument is and what it ought to be are inherently practical matters of communication for human activities. The conditions for inventing and reinventing argument lie in its interactive, social genesis around commitments and obligations in human relationships and the self-governing character of making and having arguments. In practice, context is dynamic, not contained.

Static views of context often confound interaction with situation, place, or location and, when emphasizing the importance of size and scale, typically treat interaction principally as a microphenomenon of interpersonal, one-to-one interaction but not a macrophenomenon of public, one-to-many transmission. When interaction is defined by a situation, place, or location, it is stabilized or contained within a given social structure of aggregate beliefs, opinions, attitudes, values, or routinized genres of behavior that order by imposing external constraints on argument. Recent inquiries push back on the static view. Some recognize that arguments produced in one context may travel through other contexts with different norms for good argument (Rehg, Reference Rehg2005) and others that arguments may be about the argumentative conditions and conduct of particular fora (Asen, Reference Asen2005). Moreover, the control structures of society as found in the rules of systems, including coding, protocols, and interfaces, are not only consequential for the circulation of arguments but could also become targets of argumentation about the consequence of their design for reasonable communication (Abbott, Reference Abbott2018; Goodnight, Reference Goodnight2014; Harsin, Reference Harsin2014). At stake in this complexity are differing senses of good argument and its achievement not as seen from lofty transcendental heights but rather as experienced in the nitty-gritty of practical activity where arguers are “responsible for crafting some norms for regulating their activity” (Goodwin, Reference Goodwin2005, p. 163).

What is notable in these developments is acknowledgment, perhaps tacit, that interaction is not simply contained by given contexts. Static views chafe against what is plainly experienced and observable in everyday life: argumentative context is not just given but interactionally emergent (as highlighted by the property transaction scenario) and constructed (as in the platform and constitutional dramas). This dynamism blurs the theoretically drawn boundaries between micro and macro and around publics, fields, spheres, and communities often used to define context. Consider how the property transaction scenario, where we started the chapter, involves public and private argument that is located in many events at different levels with varying kinds of routinized situations, and yet it hangs together as a system of communication that unites practices of making and having argument in the realization of the purchase. What can be opened for concern about argument invention is how emergent and curated structures and practices of participation are responsive to and constitutive of argument.

A key insight emerging from attention to how argument is woven into activities, uses of language, and structures of participation is how differences and disagreements are a resource for the invention of argumentative practices. Argument happens in communication but communication itself is contestable and designable – designable with respect to the practices of making and having argument. A key challenge lies in better understanding how vigilance about argumentative conduct in society depends on following the textures of communicative practices and critique through (re)invention of argumentative practice. In other words, how by (re)imagining and developing alternative practices and structures of argumentation in complex communication one can ensure the flourishing of opposition and its contribution to knowledge and action.

1.4 Turning Argumentation toward Polylogue

As we stated at the beginning of this chapter, the crucial point in recognizing polylogue is the obligation it creates to understand how argumentation and complex communication are entangled in human activity – that is, to explain how positions, players, and places are organized through argumentation and the consequences of their systemic interdependencies for argumentation. To address polylogue, there is a need to do for interaction something like what Toulmin did for logic. Toulmin (Reference Toulmin1958) observed that the syllogistic argument was just a special case of reasoning that occurred under atypical conditions. As a standard, it excluded from the realm of reason many cases of justified inference. Toulmin’s remedy was to recognize the differing functions premises serve in justifying an argument as data for a claim, as warrants that license inferences from data to claim, or as backing to a warrant. From this insight, Toulmin was able to schematize a much larger range of argument and to speculate how the categories of the model relate to each other. Understanding the complexity of argumentation calls for a parallel move. We see that there is a traditionally accepted paradigmatic norm for interaction, the critical dialogue. While different authors use different terms, most have the concept of a special kind of dialogue in mind: argument is an interaction between two parties trading reasons and criticisms on “both sides” of an issue in one place at one time for the purpose of two parties resolving their disagreement by means of one party convincing another. (It is even embedded in Toulmin’s account.) For some it is an empirical condition, for others an aspirational norm or even a transcendental ideal, but the shared conviction is that such a dialogue conducted under specified conditions is the ideal or paradigmatic argumentative situation. This received dyadic view of argumentation is practically inefficient and distorts argumentation that is taking place.

A polylogical alternative is needed. One that can recognize a much broader range of argumentation in the practices of analyzing, evaluating, and designing argumentation. The concerns of logic, rhetoric, and dialectic with good argument remain but only in light of richer conceptualizations of argumentation and how, where, and when it is (or could be) practiced. By doing so, it will be possible to fully acknowledge that the traditionally accepted paradigmatic norm for interaction is just a special case of argument that occurs only under rather atypical conditions (Lewiński & Aakhus, Reference Lewiński and Aakhus2014). This requires pushing further the idea that argumentation analysts “must be concerned with a wide range of discourse, messages, and interactions whose properties can be explicated with an interest in their argumentative functions and structures despite their overt appearances” (Jacobs, Reference Jacobs, van Eemeren, Blair, Willard and Snoeck Henkemans1999). This concern with what Austin called “the total speech act in the total speech situation” needs attention to how argumentative functions become implicated in broader chains of social action and cognition (Jacobs, Reference Jacobs1989; Reference Jacobs, van Eemeren, Blair, Willard and Snoeck Henkemans1999; Reference Jacobs2000; Reference Jacobs2006). There is no specific claim on what an argument must look like. Instead, the emphasis is on how argument happens and how contexts are created that make some ways of arguing reasonable and other ways not.