Abstract

How to provide, in only 10 minutes, a kind of insight into the conception of argument that I have displayed in my book? This book has 500 pages and is the result of more than 25 years of work with my research group in Hamburg. Therefore it is a delicate task to give a substantive information about it in just some minutes. Despite this, I will start with something outside that task: I will deeply thank my commentators to have studied my book and have made up their minds about it. In particular I thank David Hitchcock who has initiated this panel and even takes the pain to chair it now. To all of you I gladly confess that I very much enjoy the opportunity to make our Hamburgian view a bit more understandable to the argumentation scholars of North America. I understand my task here like this: I am confronted with comments that have three differ­ent backgrounds, namely Informal Logic, Rhetorical argumentation theory and epistemic argumentation theory. In my answer after the fourth comment I will try to make the differ­ences between those and my view visible and show why I keep being convinced of my own theories. As an entrance I will now very shortly deploy some of the specific concepts and distinctions which are essential for our approach and I will do that in a way which should be informative in particular for these three schools.