A pragmatic theory of fallacy

Douglas N. Walton

Although many individual fallacies have now been studied and analyzed in the growing literature on argumentation, the concept of fallacy itself has lacked a sufficiently clear meaning to make it as useful as it could be for evaluating arguments. Walton looks at how an argument is used in the context of conversation. He defines a fallacy as a conversational move, or sequence of moves, that is supposed to be an argument that contributes to the purpose of the conversation but in reality interferes with it. The view is a pragmatic one, based on the assumption that when people argue, they do so in a context of dialogue, a conventionalized normative framework that is goal-directed. Such a contextual framework is shown to be crucial in determining whether an argument has been used correctly. Three problems are those of fallacy identification, fallacy analysis, and fallacy evaluation....

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