Frans H. van Eemeren and Bart Garssen (Eds.): From Argument Schemes to Argumentative Relations in the Wild: A Variety of
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Frans H. van Eemeren and Bart Garssen (Eds.): From Argument Schemes to Argumentative Relations in the Wild: A Variety of Contributions to Argumentation Theory Cham (CH), Springer (= Argumentation Library, 35), 2020, 289 pp Fernando Leal1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
The book under review is a by-product of the Ninth International Conference on Argumentation, that took place in July 2018 in Amsterdam; but it is emphatically not a volume of proceedings. It would be far too short for that. The event in question was huge, and in fact the proceedings as such were published by Sic Sat in 2019 in an over twelve-hundred-page volume, and even that volume did not contain all contributions to the event. Out of the mass of presentations at ISSA 2018, the organizers, and now editors, selected two groups, of sixteen items each, for a more formal publication, according to whether the authors had an orientation towards general theoretical issues or were more interested in particular argumentative practices within particular communicative situations. The authors in both groups were asked by the editors to work their conference contributions out into longer, substantial essays. The book reviewed here contains the sixteen ‘theoretical’ essays, whereas the sixteen ‘practical’ essays have been published as volume 17 of the series Argumentation in Context by John Benjamins (van Eemeren and Garssen 2019). Reviewing a book of this kind has a certain difficulty in that each chapter has a different orientation. Thus, the usual duty of a reviewer, first to describe the contents of a book, then to evaluate it, can hardly be done in the space of a book review, for it would imply fulfilling both tasks for each book chapter. But there is another way. The subtitle of the book says ‘a variety of contributions to argumentation theory’—and there is indeed a huge variety here, a bouquet if not a banquet. But this is precisely its peculiar strength, for we can see it as a microcosm of the current situation in argumentation theory, where different approaches abound, and perspectives run, as it were, in all directions. I am therefore going to propose a classificatory scheme organized by four distinct aspects of the theoretical activity observable in * Fernando Leal [email protected] 1
Department of Education, University of Guadalajara, University Center for the Social Sciences and the Humanities (Belenes), 150 José Parres Arias Avenue, 45132 Zapopan, Jal., Mexico
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argumentation studies, which may help understand the current variety both in this book and in the whole field of argumentation studies. To avoid repeating the titles of the chapters and their authors and to facilitate referencing for the following discussion, I enlist this information in Table 1 (with exclusion of Chapter 1, which is the introduction by the editors). Table 2 shows three aspects of the classificatory scheme proposed here as applied to the chapters of the book under review. The fourth aspect will later on appear as Table 3. Let’s then proce
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