Review of Argumentation in Actual Practice: Topical Studies About Argumentative Discourse in Context , eds. Frans H. van
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Review of Argumentation in Actual Practice: Topical Studies About Argumentative Discourse in Context, eds. Frans H. van Eemeren and Bart Garssen Ann Burnette1 Accepted: 4 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Since Aristotle first identified the enthymeme as a rhetorical syllogism in Ars Rhetorica, scholars and practitioners have sought to identify, catalogue, and understand the dynamics of argumentation. What are the most effective ways to make claims and offer evidence? The historical study of argumentation has drawn from disciplines including rhetoric, philosophy, and logic, and has produced models that range from classical argumentation theory to the study of pragma-dialectics. This breadth of approaches is represented in Argumentation in actual practice: Topical studies in argumentative discourse in context. This collection presents argumentation case studies from media, political, medical, educational, legal, and military contexts. The authors of these chapters use a variety of approaches to explain the function of argumentation in these situations. Taken individually, these essays each illustrate, interrogate, and extend current theoretical work on argumentation. What this volume does as a whole, however, is highlight the many complex questions and tensions inherent in studying argumentation. One such question is what, exactly, researchers mean when they say “argumentation.” Baker and Schwarz point out that when scholars study argumentation in a learning environment, they usually focus on argumentation as the subject of learning. But argumentation is also a component of the educational process, and Baker and Schwarz provide the frame of argumentexturing to broaden learning theory and to extend argumentation theory “beyond adversarial public debate towards the possibility of taking into account knowledge-rich collaborative activities” (209). PerretClermont et al. study the reasoning of children and argue that viewing argumentation as a “contribution to a critical discussion” rather than a “skill” provides insight into children’s developmental psychology (232). Kloosterhuis and Smith trace different conceptions of the Rule of Law to divergent understandings of how argumentation functions in the legal context. The classical view of the Rule of Law frames legal reasoning as the use of strict deductive arguments, while the application of * Ann Burnette [email protected] 1
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more interpretative argumentative reasoning produces a “richer conception of the Rule of Law” (279). This volume also highlights the complexity of argumentation research, in terms of both the phenomena researchers study and the methods they use to enrich argumentation theory. Brambilla studies the use of multiple messages and different platforms in the Greenpeace Detox Campaign. He notes that multimodality works to “render the prototypical argumentative pattern more ‘colourful,’ rich and persuasive” (192) while also reducing th
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