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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
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    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Hitchcock and Govier's pragma-dialectical analyses show that argument evaluation is context-sensitive, making relevance assessable only relative to a dialectical situation.

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    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.If relevance were purely context-relative, we could not identify obviously bad arguments across different situations as genuinely fallacious.
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    • 2.Some logical relationships (contradiction, validity) hold independent of dialectical situation, suggesting relevance has non-contextual foundations.
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    • 3.Excessive context-sensitivity risks making argument evaluation circular: judging relevance by dialectical rules that are themselves context-dependent.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
    ?
    • 1.Arguments function differently in negotiation versus academic debate, so relevance cannot be evaluated by universal criteria alone.
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    • 2.Pragma-dialectical theory correctly identifies that what counts as 'on-topic' depends on the parties' shared discussion goals and rules.
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    • 3.Context-sensitivity explains why ad hominem attacks are sometimes relevant (character witness disputes) and sometimes fallacious (policy debates).
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