Argumentation in Complex Communication
Managing Disagreement in a Polylogue

A prevailing view of argumentation is overturned to advance practices for analyzing, evaluating, and designing disagreement management in complex communication.

Marcin Lewi?ski (Author), Mark Aakhus (Author)

9781009274371, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 22 December 2022

256 pages
23.5 x 15.7 x 2 cm, 0.56 kg

'Argumentation in Complex Communication develops a compelling framework for how we ought to be studying argument in our increasingly mediated and digitized world. It is a book worth reading, and it is one likely to change conversations, offering a way to bring nuance and better judgment to public and personal debates about what are appropriate courses of action.' Argumentation

A pervasive aspect of human communication and sociality is argumentation: the practice of making and criticizing reasons in the context of doubt and disagreement. Argumentation underpins and shapes the decision-making, problem-solving, and conflict management which are fundamental to human relationships. However, argumentation is predominantly conceptualized as two parties arguing pro and con positions with each other in one place. This dyadic bias undermines the capacity to engage argumentation in complex communication in contemporary, digital society. This book offers an ambitious alternative course of inquiry for the analysis, evaluation, and design of argumentation as polylogue: various players arguing over many positions across multiple places. Taking up key aspects of the twentieth-century revival of argumentation as a communicative, situated practice, the polylogue framework engages a wider range of discourses, messages, interactions, technologies, and institutions necessary for adequately engaging the contemporary entanglement of argumentation and complex communication in human activities.

Part I. Seeking, Seeing, and Embracing Polylogue: 1. Seeking polylogue
2. The Dyadic reduction
3. Seeing polylogue
4. Embracing polylogue. Part II. Analyzing, Evaluating, and Designing Polylogue. 5. Descriptive analysis of polylogues
6. Normative evaluation of polylogues
7. Prescriptive design of polylogues. 8. Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Anthropology [JHM], Sociolinguistics [CFB], Philosophy of language [CFA], Linguistics [CF]