Argumentation in Complex Communication

Managing Disagreement in a Polylogue

Marcin Lewinski author Mark Aakhus author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Cambridge University Press

Published:22nd Dec '22

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Argumentation in Complex Communication cover

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

A pervasive aspect of human communication and sociality is argumentation: making and criticizing reasons in the context of doubt and disagreement. This book offers an innovative theoretical framework for analyzing, evaluating, and designing polylogues, understood as practices of managing disagreements among multiple positions, players, and places.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.

'Lewiński and Aakhus provide a detailed and in many ways compelling argument for viewing polylogues involving multiple parties (not monologues or dialogues) as the more fundamental type of communication. Their thesis has important consequences for how we understand argumentative discourses and should command serious attention from scholars and students in a number of related fields.' Christopher Tindale, University of Windsor

ISBN: 9781009274371

Dimensions: 235mm x 157mm x 20mm

Weight: 560g

256 pages