ECA Fribourg 2017

2nd European Conference on Argumentation: Argumentation and Inference
20-23 June 2017, Fribourg, Switzerland

Special Theme: Argumentation and inference

In addition to welcoming submissions linked to argumentation studies in general, each ECA edition has a special theme. While the 1st edition of ECA was devoted to exploring the relationship between argumentation and the decisions that follow from it, the 2017 Fribourg edition will focus on the cognitive processes involved in argumentation, with a clear focus on what happens ‘upstream’ in the argumentative chain, both in production and reception. The 2nd edition of ECA will thus focus on inference as one of the key features of the argumentative process.

The field of argumentation has been expanding over the last decade with a clear opening towards cognitive psychology (and cognitive science more generally) and the processes it accounts for. With the development of cognitive science as an encompassing framework within which both psychological and social aspects of human behaviour can be accounted for, we believe that the time is ripe to ground a discussion in the community of argumentation studies around the notion of inference, along its formal, social and cognitive dimensions. The overarching questions the conference theme will be concerned with are therefore the following: How does the study of argumentation connect with the notion of inference and how, as a discipline, does it connect with the disciplines involved in the study of the cognitive features of inference? Granting, of course, that we take argumentation to be the verbal and social manifestation of inferential processes, we are seeking contributions focusing on the ins and outs of (i) how reasoning, but more generally inference, influences and constrains argument production and (ii) which (and how) inferential processes are involved in argument reception, thus covering cognitive tasks such as understanding and accepting.

To foster this discussion, the conference accordingly seeks to attract scholars in argumentation coming from a range of different traditions, including (but not limited to) philosophy, psychology, linguistics, informal logic, speech communication, pragma-dialectics, epistemic approaches, rhetoric, dialectics, logic, and computational approaches.

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

ULRIKE HAHN
Birkbeck, University of London, UK
SALLY JACKSON
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
JOHAN VAN BENTHEM
University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
DEIRDRE WILSON
University College London, UK & University of Oslo, Norway