ISSA Proceedings 2002 – Preface

It is with great pleasure that the planning committee of the Fifth Conference of the International Society for the Study of Argumentation (ISSA), which was held in Amsterdam in 2002 (June 25-28), presents all interested students of argumentation now with the Proceedings of this Conference.

We are sad that, due to his untimely death in 2002, this time Rob Grootendorst, who was a member of our team at all four previous ISSA Conferences, is no longer among the editors of the Proceedings. However, we are happy that Francisca Snoeck Henkemans was willing to take his place and join the editorial company. In honor of all the important work the late Rob Grootendorst did to stimulate and promote the study of argumentation, these Proceedings are dedicated to his memory.

It is our emphatic opinion that the Proceedings of the Fifth Conference include a great number of very interesting papers. They are written from a variety of perspectives and theoretical backgrounds. Besides philosophical, theoretical and empirical papers, there are, for instance, papers that deal specifically with public argumentation or with legal argumentation and there are also a number of case studies. Among the general topics that are treated are, as always, the fallacies, the teaching of argumentation, and argumentation in the media, but studies of linguistic aspects of argumentation and artificial intelligence are also represented. The Proceedings of the Fifth ISSA Conference reflect the richness of the contributions that were made to the Conference.

Since the First Conference in 1986, the ISSA Conferences in Amsterdam have become an important meeting-place for argumentation scholars from different disciplinary fields and with a great variety of interests. The number of participants has increased over the years, and so has the number of countries that are represented. We are convinced that the Fifth ISSA Conference has been as fruitful and stimulating as we hoped it would be. In our opinion, the average quality of the papers and the intellectual exchanges has reached a very high level. We hope that these Proceedings will prove our point to the readers. All the papers submitted for publication were reviewed by the editors. In some cases, this has led to further improvements. Despite the fact that we intended to publish Proceedings that provide a comprehensive and representative overview of the conference as a whole, only those papers were accepted that met our quality standards.

It goes without saying that the editors could only accomplish their task in such a short time because they received a lot of help from others. In the process of preparing these Proceedings, just as during the Conference itself, they were able to rely on the assistance of the faculty members of the Department of Speech Communication, Argumentation Theory and Rhetoric of the University of Amsterdam and other members of the research group ‘Argumentation in Discourse’ of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA).
It seems only fair, however, to mention one name in particular: Bart Garssen. We are grateful to Bart for his technical assistance in getting the manuscripts ready for publication. Thanks to his help. We are also able to include a CD-rom containing the electronic versions of the papers.

For financial and other kinds of assistance we are grateful to the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), the Dutch-Belgian Speech Communication Association (VIOT), the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), and, last but not least, the International Center for the Study of Argumentation and Speech Communication (Sic Sat).

Amsterdam, December 10, 2002
Frans H. van Eemeren, University of Amsterdam
J. Anthony Blair, University of Windsor
Charles A. Willard, University of Louisville
A. Francisca Snoeck Henkemans, University of Amsterdam

You May Also Like

ISSA Proceedings 2006 ~ The Criminal Abduction Paradox

ISSA Proceedings 2006 ~ A Discussion Of Habermas’ Reading And Use Of Toulmin’s Model Of Argumentation

ISSA Proceedings 2006 ~ The Rules Of The Critical Discussion And The Development Of Critical Thinking

ISSA Proceedings 2006 ~ An Analysis Of Preschool Hebrew Speaking Children’s Arguments From The Perspective Of The Pragma-Dialectical Model

ISSA Proceedings 2006 ~ Putin’s Terrorism Discourse As Part of Democracy And Governance Debate In Russia

ISSA Proceedings 2006 ~ Cultural Differences In The Persuasiveness Of Normatively Strong And Normatively Weak Expert Evidence

Comments