ARGUMENTATION THEORY IN FORMAL AND COMPUTATIONAL PERSPECTIVE

Argumentation has been studied since Antiquity. Modern argumentation theory took inspiration from these classical roots, with Toulmin's 'The Uses of Argument' (1958) and Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's 'The New Rhetoric' (1969) as representants of a neo-classical development. In the 1970s, a significant rise of the study of argumentation started, often in opposition to the logical formalisms of those days that lacked the tools to be of much relevance for the study of argumentation as it appears in the wild. In this period, argumentation theory, rhetoric, dialectics, informal logic, and critical thinking became the subject of productive academic study. Since the 1990s, innovations in artificial intelligence supported a formal and computational turn in argumentation theory, with ever stronger interaction with non-formal and non-computational scholars. The present article sketches argumentation and argumentation theory as it goes back to classical times, following the developments before and during the currently ongoing formal and computational turn.