Hubert Marraud – författare

This volume presents a double argumentative analysis of the debate between Bertrand Russell and Frederick Copleston on the existence of God. It includes an introduction justifying the choice of text and describing the historical and philosophical background of the debate. It also provides a transcript of the debate, based in part on the original recording.

The argumentative analyses occupy Parts I and II of the book. In Part I the argumentative process is analysed by means of the ideal model of critical discussion, the workhorse of pragma-dialectics. Part I shows how the two parties go through the four stages of a critical discussion. It highlights the questions raised over and beyond the presiding question of whether God exists and examines almost a hundred questions that are raised. Many are left in the air, whereas a few others give rise to sundry sub-discussions or meta-dialogues. In Part II the theoretical framework of argument dialectic is put to work: argument structures are identified by means of punctuation marks, argumentative connectors and operators, allowing to see the argumentative exchange as the collaborative construction of a macro-argument. Such a macro-argument is both a joint product of the arguers and a complex structure representing the dialectical relationships between the individual arguments combined in it. Finally, the complementarity of the two approaches is addressed. Thus the book can be described as an exercise in adversarial collaboration.

This book is a systematic exposition of Argument Dialectics (AD). Despite its name, argument dialectics is a logical approach to argumentation theory. AD stands out among theories of argument because of three unusual features: it is reasons-based, holistic and particularistic. This implies that AD conceives of logic as a theory of the dialectical construction of reasons, not as a theory of inferences. Consequently, contrary to other logical approaches, AD focuses on the study of inter-argumentative relations, especially those of opposition and weighing. The book makes an extensive use of the theory of reasons, a branch of metaethics that has been a very valuable quarry of intuitions and concepts for the elaboration of a reason-based theory of argument. The oppositions generalism-particularism and atomism-holism, proposed  by Jonathan Dancy, which play a central role in the book and in the development of AD, have been adapted from the theory of reasons, and the same can be said of the distinction between different statuses of reasons that AD associates with different kinds of counterarguments. Conceiving of the theory of argument in terms of reasons has the effect of situating the paradigm of argumentation in practical argumentation/reasoning “about what to do” rather than in theoretical argumentation “about what to believe”, as inference-based theories do. Hence, this book is of interest to argumentation theorists, communication theorists, epistemologists, linguists, moral philosophers, and philosophers of law.