Argumentation and The Grounds of Knowledge
Argumentation theory had its origins in foundationalism, a theory of knowledge (epistemology) in the field of philosophy. It sought to find the grounds for claims in the forms (logic) and materials (factual laws) of a universal system of knowledge. But argument scholars gradually rejected Aristotle's systematic philosophy and the idealism in Plato and Kant. They questioned and ultimately discarded the idea that argument premises take their soundness from formal philosophical systems. The field thus broadened.
Karl R. Wallace's seminal essay, "The Substance of Rhetoric: Good Reasons" in the Quarterly Journal of Speech (1963) 44, led many scholars to study "marketplace argumentation" - the ordinary arguments of ordinary people. The seminal essay on marketplace argumentation is Ray Lynn Anderson and C. David Mortensen,"Logic and Marketplace Argumentation" Quarterly Journal of Speech 53 (1967): 143-150. This line of thinking led to a natural alliance with late developments in the sociology of knowledge. Some scholars drew connections with recent developments in philosophy, namely the pragmatism of John Dewey and Richard Rorty. Rorty has called this shift in emphasis "the linguistic turn".
In this new hybrid approach argumentation is used with or without empirical evidence to establish convincing conclusions about issues which are moral, scientific, epistemic, or of a nature in which science alone cannot answer. Out of pragmatism and many intellectual developments in the humanities and social sciences, "non-philosophical" argumentation theories grew which located the formal and material grounds of arguments in particular intellectual fields. These theories include informal logic, social epistemology, ethnomethodology, speech acts, the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of science, and social psychology. These new theories are not non-logical or anti-logical. They find logical coherence in most communities of discourse. These theories are thus often labeled "sociological" in that they focus on the social grounds of knowledge.
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