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A pervasive aspect of human communication and sociality is argumentation: the practice of making and criticizing reasons in the context of doubt and disagreement. Argumentation underpins and shapes the decision-making, problem-solving, and conflict management which are fundamental to human relationships. However, argumentation is predominantly conceptualized as two parties arguing pro and con positions with each other in one place. This dyadic bias undermines the capacity to engage argumentation in complex communication in contemporary, digital society. This book offers an ambitious alternative course of inquiry for the analysis, evaluation, and design of argumentation as polylogue: various players arguing over many positions across multiple places. Taking up key aspects of the twentieth-century revival of argumentation as a communicative, situated practice, the polylogue framework engages a wider range of discourses, messages, interactions, technologies, and institutions necessary for adequately engaging the contemporary entanglement of argumentation and complex communication in human activities.
This chapter adopts one simple yet crucial principle of rationality – the contextually adequate contrast of reasons – as an important path for the normative evaluation of polylogue. This principle is consistent with the basic polylogical idea that arguing for a position is always arguing against other incompatible positions. The key normative obligation of any arguer is thus that of defending the contrastive bestness of the position advanced. The basic principle of contrastive reason can be contextually determined relative to the constraints and affordances of place for argumentation. As such, the principle is translatable into a normative condition from which to evaluate argumentation in complex communication: make a relevant expansion of a disagreement space. It is then demonstrated how this approach explains the false dilemma as a polylogical fallacy that neither logical nor dialectical approaches can adequately handle. The usefulness of this approach for evaluating the role of place in the management of disagreement in polylogue is also illustrated. Finally, the chapter discusses the intriguing and often paradoxical relations between individual and collective rationality that polylogue framework foregrounds, in contrast to most extant normative approaches in argumentation theory.
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