ISSA Proceedings 2010 – Preface

The Seventh Conference of the International Society for the Study of Argumentation (ISSA), held in Amsterdam from 29 June to 2 July 2010, drew again more submissions for presentations than any ISSA Conference before. After a strict selection procedure, exactly 300 scholars were invited to present their papers at the Conference. In addition, the Conference attracted some 200 interested colleagues and students who just wanted to attend the presentations and take part in the discussions. All in all, 500 people interested in argumentation assembled in Amsterdam to present papers and exchange views.

The 2010 ISSA Conference was, like previous ones, an international meeting place for argumentation scholars from a great variety of academic backgrounds and traditions, representing a wide range of academic disciplines and approaches: (speech) communication, logic (formal and informal), rhetoric (classical and modern), philosophy, linguistics, discourse analysis, pragmatics, law, political science, psychology, education, religious studies, and artificial intelligence. Besides papers on argument schemes, classical argumentation theory, critical responses to argumentation, deep disagreement, ethos and pathos, fallacies, the history of argumentation theory, interpersonal argumentation, logic and reason, practical argumentation, premise acceptability, rationality and reasonableness, topoi, the Toulmin model, visual argumentation, and argumentation in a cross-cultural perspective, papers were presented on argumentation in controversy, debate, education, science and the media, on argumentation in a financial, historical, legal, literary, medical, political and religious context, and on argumentation and computation, definition, epistemology, ethics, linguistics, persuasion, political philosophy, pragmatics, social psychology, stylistics, and the Internet. In the opinion of the editors, the Proceedings of the Seventh ISSA Conference reflect the current richness of the discipline.

Two thirds of the papers presented at the Conference are included in these Proceedings. Some of the papers presented at the Conference were not offered for publication in the Proceedings, some of the papers were not accepted after a meticulous review procedure while others were withdrawn. The editors decided to publish only those papers that met their standards of quality. Some papers have been considerably revised on the basis of the reviewers’ comments.

The Proceedings of the Conference are again published by Sic Sat, this time only in a CD ROM version. For the reader’s convenience, in the Proceedings the papers are arranged in the alphabetical order of the authors’ surnames.

The four ISSA board members, Frans H. van Eemeren, Bart Garssen, David Godden and Gordon Mitchell served as editors of the Proceedings. The editors were greatly helped by the systematic peer reviewing of all papers by other participants in the ISSA conference (at least two reviewers for each paper). Their evaluations and constructive suggestions have enhanced the quality of the Proceedings, and the editors are grateful to all of them. In addition, we received invaluable assistance in preparing the Proceedings from our research assistants and research master’s students Lester van der Pluijm and Jacky Visser. We thank both of them very much for their help in getting the manuscripts ready for publication. Last but not least, we would like to thank our publisher Auke van der Berg for the production of these Proceedings.

For their financial support of the conference, the editors would like to express their gratitude to the Dutch-Belgian Speech Communication Association (VIOT), the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), the City of Amsterdam, Springer Academic Publishers, John Benjamins Publishers, the International Learned Institute for Argumentation Studies (ILIAS), and the Sciential International Centre for Scholarship in Argumentation Theory (Sic Sat).

19 January 2011

Frans H. van Eemeren, ILIAS & University of Amsterdam
Bart Garssen, ILIAS & University of Amsterdam
David Godden, Old Dominion University
Gordon Mitchell, University of Pittsburgh