A pragmatic theory of fallacy

by Douglas N. Walton

Although many individual fallacies have now been studied and analyzed in the growing literature on argumentation, the concept of fallacy itself has lacked a sufficiently clear meaning to make it as useful as it could be for evaluating arguments. Walton looks at how an argument is used in the context of conversation. He defines a fallacy as a conversational move, or sequence of moves, that is supposed to be an argument that contributes to the purpose of the conversation but in reality interferes with it. The view is a pragmatic one, based on the assumption that when people argue, they do so in a context of dialogue, a conventionalized normative framework that is goal-directed. Such a contextual framework is shown to be crucial in determining whether an argument has been used correctly. Three problems are those of fallacy identification, fallacy analysis, and fallacy evaluation. Walton presents solutions for all three problems by developing new pragmatic structures to display the form of