Exploring Dialogue

Exploring Dialogue is a collection of essays on argumentation, authored or coauthored by Erik C.W. Krabbe, which take a philosopher's or even a logician's point of view. For this collection, Krabbe selected twenty of what, in his opinion, were his best philosophical essays about argumentation. Four of them were written with Jan Albert van Laar. All of these essays are, in one way or another, concerned with argumentative dialogue. Their focus is sometimes on particular kinds of fallacious reasoning, such as non-argumentation, non sequitur, quasi logical argument, or the fallacies described by Aristotle, sometimes on theoretical problems encountered when one tries to construct a model for reasonable dialogue, such as the problem of retraction, the retreat to dialogues about dialogues, the tension between cooperation and competition in dialogue, or the responsibilities of the party that is taking a critical stance. Though these essays were written from a logical point of view, only a few of them contain logical technicalities. They were also, to a great extent, influenced by the work of the pragma-dialecticians (the Amsterdam School), and one will find many references to their rules for Critical Discussion. Standing in between the formal and the informal there is the semiformal method of profiles of dialogue, which method is often used to illustrate possible courses of dialogues. Some essays use a more rigorous formalization in order to make their point: for instance, to compare ancient and contemporary dialectic or to explore the possibility of formalizing the pragma-dialectic model of Critical Discussion. Finally, there are some essays about argumentation in special contexts: mathematical proof and public controversy.