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Schemes, Critical Questions, and Complete Argument Evaluation Shiyang Yu1   · Frank Zenker2 

© The Author(s) 2020

Abstract According to the argument scheme approach, to evaluate a given scheme-saturating instance completely does entail asking all critical questions (CQs) relevant to it. Although this is a central task for argumentation theorists, the field currently lacks a method for providing a complete argument evaluation. Approaching this task at the meta-level, we combine a logical with a substantive approach to the argument schemes by starting from Toulmin’s schema: ‘data, warrant, so claim’. For the yet more general schema: ‘premise(s); if premise(s), then conclusion; so conclusion’, we forward a meta-level CQ-list that is arguably both complete and applicable. This list should inform ongoing theoretical efforts at generating appropriate object-level CQs for specific argument schemes. Keywords  Argument · Complete evaluation · Critical question · Scheme · Standardization

1 Introduction For the purpose of evaluating natural language arguments, argument(ation) schemes and their associated critical questions (CQs) have remained central to contemporary argumentation theory (e.g., Walton et al. 2014, 89). Probably the first scholar to use ‘critical question’ (CQ) in today’s technical sense was Hastings (1962). Yet earlier,

* Frank Zenker [email protected] 1

College of Philosophy, Nankai University, Tianjin, People’s Republic of China

2

Center for Formal Ontology, Warsaw University of Technology, Pl. Politechniki 1, 00‑661 Warsaw, Poland



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S. Yu, F. Zenker

Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1958) had introduced ‘argumentative scheme’ (French: schème argumentatif) with reference to the schemes’ historical ancestors: the topoi (Greek: places; Latin: loci).1 While the topoi serve primarily in argument construction, whereas the schemes and CQs serve primarily in argument evaluation, both concepts, of course, are closely related. Even when restricted to argument evaluation, however, a unified theoretical understanding of argument schemes and CQs has so far remained absent. Indeed, already a unified taxonomy of argument schemes can hardly arise as long as “existing classifications of arguments are unsatisfying in a number of ways” (Wagemans 2016, 1).2 For instance, pragma-dialecticians treat an argument scheme as a kind of “characteriz[ation] [of] the way in which the reason given in support of a standpoint is supposed to bring about a transfer of acceptance to the standpoint in a particular type of argumentation” (van Eemeren 2018, 7). Further, informal logicians and scholars in AI & law tend to view schemes as “forms of argument (structures of inference) that represent structures of common types of arguments used in everyday discourse, as well as in special contexts like those of legal argumentation and scientific argumentation” (Walton et al. 2008, 1). Virtually all scholars, moreover, let ‘argument scheme’ denote a linguistic structure, while some few also view such structures as