On the divorce between philosophy and argumentation theory

Abstract

The author compares the views of analytic philosophy regarding argumentation and its philosophical relevance, with those of contemporary argumentation theories, in general, regarding the philosophical idea of meaning. He shows that, in the first case, the theory of meaning (Russell, Wittgenstein, Quine, and others) excludes argumentation and an approach on it, and, in the second, argumentation theories exclude, in practice, a theory of meaning, at least insofar the concept of meaning must be philosophically understood. The author concludes studying the role of each of these theories (meaning/argumentation) in Stephen Toulmin’s philosophy, where, by contrast and according to his interpretation, rhetoric and argumentation are at the core of the foundations of philosophy and of human knowledge and action as a whole.