DEADLINE EXTENDED TO 11 JANUARY 2015
The Practice/s of Giving Reasons: a special issue of Topoi
Guest Edited by Chris Campolo and David Godden
The re-discovery, in the late 1970’s, of the perspectives on argument as process and practice (added to that of product) occasioned a dramatic re-visioning of the object of study in argumentation. Viewed as a practice of transacting reasons, argumentation became a situated activity, or doing, requiring know-how, rather than a collection of reasons – a thing containing a collection of knowledge-that.
This volume focuses on the normative and epistemic dimensions and consequences of viewing argumentation as the practice/s of transacting (giving and asking for) reasons. We mean to create momentum behind the perspectives focused primarily on the actions and doings which, alongside many related human practices, constitute argumentation. Here we open a space to explore and interrogate the idea that neither argumentation as a whole, nor the many elements into which it may be analyzed, can be adequately understood apart from an account of what it is to give reasons, with all the complexity and fluidity that attends our engagement in any kind of know-how. Rather, the practice/s of transacting reasons is central to the projects of explaining what a reason is, how reasons work, the normativity of reasons, as well as their prescriptivity (or our accountability to them).
RAIL 