This chapter formulates the basic problem addressed in this book: how to understand the complexity of argumentation, that is, how argument and communication are entangled in human activity. Polylogue is introduced as a simple yet perspicuous term for renewing and advancing inquiry of argumentation in complex communication. The fact that polylogue cannot be dismissed is evident in examples of managing disagreement under polylogical conditions both contemporary (e.g., social media platforms) and historical (e.g., establishing congressional representation for the newly formed US republic). While recognized in practice, however, polylogue is theoretically dismissed by an analytic strategy of dyadic reduction prominent across time in the study of argumentation and communication. Even the remarkable theoretical and methodological contributions of the twentieth-century revival of the study of argumentation as a communicative, situated practice, do not yet make a polylogical turn for understanding argumentation due to lingering commitments to a paradigmatic norm of dyadic interaction. However, much broader considerations of how argument happens stimulated by this revival provide starting points for a polylogical alternative.

This chapter develops the crucial starting points for an inquiry into argumentation as polylogue. A framework is advanced that foregrounds polylogue as the natural state of affairs for argumentation. The framework elaborates how argument is embedded in communication and communication in activity, how argumentation is for communication, and how argumentation is a source of communicative innovation for polylogue. This profoundly social view of argumentation grounds the idea that polylogues are disagreement management practices in which various players pursue their contrasting positions across multiple places. A polylogue framework offers a new social ontology of argument in complex communication that fundamentally shifts descriptive, normative, and prescriptive attention to how contexts for argumentation are made via interaction and how argument is implicated in broader chains of social action and cognition. The polylogue framework thus scaffolds the discovery, analysis, and design of argumentative structures and functions for a much wider range of discourses, messages, interactions, technologies, and institutions.