Types of Dialogue, Dialectical Shifts and Fallacies*

The critical discussion is clearly a major context of dialogue to use as a normative model in evaluating arguments as fallacious or not.1 However, this paper will study other types of dialogue that cluster around the edges of the critical discussion. It is a thesis of this paper that these peripheral models of dialogue are needed to support evaluations of arguments as fallacious or nonfallacious. A second thesis is that dialectical shifts, changes from one context of dialogue to another, are vitally important in the job of evaluating whether a given argument is fallacious or not. Previously the present author has, both jointly with John Woods in a series of papers on the fallacies,2 and more recently in his own works,3 advocated this pluralistic view that argumentation needs to be judged as correct or incorrect in relation to a multiplicity of different models of reasoned dialogue.4 It will be shown in Walton and Krabbe (1992) how some important types of dialogue that are major contexts for argumentation can be reduced to a typology of six basic types of dialogue.