Establishing validity among pre-school children

This paper lays out theoretical considerations and first analyses on the giving of and asking for reasons among preschool children age 3–7 in natural child-child play interaction. We attempt to give an integrated, multimodal analysis of the verbal, paraverbal and extraverbal means of these reasoning activities. In our data we find many instances of younger children who are giving reasons during play interaction. Often these reasoning activities do not occur in an open conflict and are not primarily directed at working out a local dissensus. Rather, these interactions seem to foreground the epistemic function of argumentation. We will argue that these practices should be understood and researched as early forms of argumentation.

The dialogic construction of justifications and arguments of a seven-year-old child within a ‘democratic’ family

The paper focuses on arguing and reasoning processes occurring at dinnertime family conversations. Our goal is to highlight the interplay between two sides of argumentative practices: the justification as social need to provide evidences for an assertion; the dialogic function of argumentation that refers to the goals arguers want to achieve during discussions. Through the analysis of a case study we discuss a sequence in which a child resists his father’s directive by an elaborated argumentative strategy in order to achieve his goal. Results show how participants engage in opposing the other’s standpoint and are socialized to argumentative dialogues.

The Epistemic Inferiority of Pragma-Dialectics – Reply to Botting

In a recent paper in this journal, David Botting defended pragma-dialectics against epistemological criticisms by exponents of the epistemological approach to argumentation, i.e. Harvey Siegel, John Biro and me. In particular, Botting tries to justify with new arguments a Functional Claim, that the function of argumentation is to resolve disputes, and a Normative Claim, that standpoints that have the unqualified consensus of all participants in a dispute will generally be epistemically sound. In this reply it is shown that Botting’s arguments are fallacious, that the two Claims are false and that the epistemological approach to argumentation, of course, outclasses pragma-dialectics epistemically and is at least as good as it in other respects.

Reasoning as a lie detection device

The biological function of human reasoning abilities cannot be to improve shared knowledge. This is at best a side effect. A more plausible function of argumentation, and thus of reasoning, is to advertise one's ability to detect lies and errors. Such selfish behavior is closer to what we should expect from a naturally selected competence.