ISSA Proceedings 1998 – Preface

ISSAlogo1998At the Fourth Conference of the International Society for the Study of Argumentation (ISSA) in June 1998 a great many scholars interested in argumentation assembled in Amsterdam to present papers and exchange views. The ISSA conferences have become an important meetingplace for argumentation theorists stemming from a great variety of academic backgrounds and traditions and representing a wide range of academic disciplines and approaches: philosophy, speech communication, psychology, law, linguistics, rhetoric (classical and modern), logic (formal and informal), critical thinking, discourse analysis, pragmatics, and artificial intelligence. The Proceedings of the conference reflect that diversity.

Almost all the papers presented at the conference are published in this Proceedings of the Fourth ISSA Conference on Argumentation. Apart from the hard copy publication, a cd rom version of the proceedings is also made available.
This time the papers are arranged in alphabetical order. In principle, all papers are published exactly as they are handed in by the authors; no further editing has taken place.

The four editors would like to express their gratitude to the Board of the University of Amsterdam, the Faculty of Humanities, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), the Dutch Speech Communication Association (VIOT), the Institute for Functional Research of Language and Language Use (IFOTT), the Amsterdam University Association (AUV), the City of Amsterdam, Kluwer Academic Publishing House, and the International Centre for the Study of Argumentation (Sic Sat) for their financial support of the conference and the publication of these Proceedings.
They also want to thank Erik Poolman, Bart Garssen and Willy van der Pol for their assistance.

Frans H. van Eemeren – University of Amsterdam
J. Anthony Blair – University of Windsor
Rob Grootendorst – University of Amsterdam
Charles A. Willard – University of Louisville