Argumentation Theory: A Very Short Introduction

Since the time of the ancient Greek philosophers and rhetoricians, argumentation theorists have searched for the requirements that make an argument correct, by some appropriate standard of proof, by examining the errors of reasoning we make when we try to use arguments. These errors have long been called fallacies, and the logic textbooks have for over 2000 years tried to help students to identify these fallacies, and to deal with them when they are encountered. The problem was that deductive logic did not seem to be much use for this purpose, and there seemed to be no other obvious formal structure that could usefully be applied to them.