Laypeople’s Evaluation of Arguments: Are Criteria for Argument Quality Scheme-Specific?

Peter Jan Schellens*, Ester Šorm, Rian Timmers, Hans Hoeken

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

Can argumentation schemes play a part in the critical processing of argumentation by lay people? In a qualitative study, participants were invited to come up with strong and weak arguments for a given claim and were subsequently interviewed for why they thought the strong argument was stronger than the weak one. Next, they were presented with a list of arguments and asked to rank these arguments from strongest to weakest, upon which they were asked to motivate their judgments in an interview. In order to assess whether lay people apply argument scheme specific criteria when performing these tasks, five different argumentation schemes were included in this study: argumentation from authority, from example, from analogy, from cause to effect, and from consequences. Laypeople’s use of criteria for argument quality was inferred from interview protocols. The results revealed that participants combined general criteria from informal logic (such as relevance and acceptability) and scheme-specific criteria (such as expertise for argumentation from authority, similarity for argumentation from analogy, effectiveness for argumentation from consequences). The results supported the conventional validity of the pragma-dialectical argument scheme rule in a strong sense and provided a more fine-grained view of central processing in the Elaboration Likelihood Model.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)681-703
Number of pages23
JournalArgumentation
Volume31
Issue number4
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2017

Keywords

  • Argumentation from analogy
  • Argumentation from authority
  • Argumentation from cause to effect
  • Argumentation from consequences
  • Argumentation from example
  • Argumentation schemes
  • Central processing
  • Conventional validity
  • Evaluation criteria

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