33 Finding the Good Argument OR Why Bother With Logic?

Public argument has been compromised by either/or argumentation strategies and can often be characterized with the metaphor “argument is war,” as originally proposed by Lakoff and Johnson. In this essay from Writing Spaces, Rebecca Jones discusses the usual blocks to ethical argumentation and offers three preferred models that provide theoretical and practical methods for recognizing and inventing good arguments: classical rhetoric, Toulmin, and pragma-dialectics.

Read Rebecca Jones’s “Finding the Good Argument OR Why Bother With Logic?”

Keywords from this chapter in Writing Spaces

argument, logic, collaboration, deductive, inductive, reasoning

Author Bio

Rebecca Jones is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Writing, as well as the Writing Program Administrator, at Montana State University. She has published articles on rhetoric, writing, and argumentation studies found in Writing on the Edge, Writing Spaces, Enculturation, Composition Studies, and the collection Activism and Rhetoric: Theory and Contexts for Political Engagement (Routledge, 2019). Jones edited a collection along with Kathleen J. Ryan and Nancy Myers titled Rethinking Ethos: A Feminist Ecological Approach to Rhetoric (SIUP, 2016). And she teaches courses in professional writing, design, public argument, and rhetorical theory.