On the [ARGTHRY] mailing list the plan was posted (by David Hitchcock) to aim for the translation of Harald Wohlrapp‘s Der Begriff des Arguments. I read the interesting review by Christian Kock. Here is a segment of the review that struck me, in particular the last couple of sentences:
Wohlrapp is an independent and original thinker who wants to belong to no school, but has a broader intellectual scope than existing schools. In true Aristotelian manner, he presents a sane and balanced theory based on observation and reflection rather than on axioms. But I question his desire to present a unified theory that downplays the distinction between facts and norms; while an individual cannot have his own individual facts that differ from other people’s facts, he can have his own individual norms which in turn dispose him for his individual choices. In his attempt to counter what he sees as ‘rampant relativism’ of our time Wohlrapp sometimes seems to me to throw out the baby, choice, with the relativistic bath water. What alarms him about the relativism he sees around him is “the belief that, at the end of the day, arguing is useless” (6). But there is no need to believe that arguing is useless even if we abandon the idea that argumentation theory can dictate our moral and political choices. There has always been and always will be argument about issues where choice is possible. That kind of argument is what I understand by ‘rhetoric’. We need thinkers like Wohlrapp to theorize such argument.
(In passing Kock mentions that only Trudy Govier studied the weighing of pros and cons. In AI & law there is more. See Jaap Hage‘s work on this and my own, often coauthored with Jaap.)
Tags: AI, argumentation, law, research
