Argument Dialectics: The Place of Reasons in Logic

I teach argumentation theory at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. My conception of argumentation theory and its development is presented in books such as Methodus argumentandi (2007), Es lógic (2013), En buena lógica (2020), and How Philosophers Argue (Argumentation Library, 14, 2022), Part II, and in half a hundred articles published in journals such as Argumentation, Informal Logic, Theoria, Revista Iberoamericana de Argumentación, etc.

My theoretical proposal is known as "argument dialectics". Argument dialectics is a theory of argument (or logic) based on reasons and not on inferences, holistic and not atomistic, and particularistic and not generalistic. It is a logic based on reasons, because it understands argument as the presentation of something to someone for consideration as a reason for something else. Reasons, unlike conclusions, are weightable, and consequently the dialectic of arguments places weighting and counter-weighting at the center of argumentative practices. The dialectic of arguments is holistic because it maintains that the logical properties of arguments depend on contextual factors, and therefore the conclusion is primarily the conclusion of a multilinear network or composition of arguments, not the conclusion of an isolated argument. The logical tradition is atomistic and maintains that, on the contrary, the logical properties of arguments depend solely on the relation between their premises and their conclusion, and thus do not depend on context. Finally, argument dialectics is particularistic, because it defends that one can distinguish between good and bad arguments logico sensu without resorting to general principles or rules, in contrast to the generalist tradition, which defends the opposite.