Messages, Functional Contexts, and Categories of Fallacy

Abstract

One clear trend in argumentation theory over the last few decades has been a revival in the study of fallacies, particularly within the dialectically informed traditions of informal logic and pragma-dialectics. Central to this revival (initiated by Hamblin, 1970) has been a broadened understanding of what makes various argumentative tactics fallacious in the first place. Two general and not altogether exclusive lines of re-analysis have been offered. First, informal logicians — especially Walton (1992a; 1992b; 1995; 1997a; 1997b; 1998a; 1998b; 1999) — have insisted that many of the so-called fallacies are actually sometimes reasonable. Depending upon the circumtances and the particulars of the argument, such tactics as slippery slope argument, emotional appeals, authority appeals, ad hominem attacks, appeals to popular opinion — any of these and many other tactics may be perfectly reasonable moves. Other types of supposedly fallacious moves such as argument ad ignorantiam and the various sorts of hasty conclusions associated with reasoning by sign, example, analogy and the like have been argued to be weak but only fallacious when taken to prove more than they can support. While informal logicians might not want to take it this far, one can easily conclude that this first line of re-analysis amounts to a comprehensive discrediting of the idea that categories of tactics can be assumed to be fallacious in principle, independent of the particulars of the situation and of the actual message that embodies that category of tactic.