Argumentation Dec 2017 Open Access

Laypeople’s Evaluation of Arguments: Are Criteria for Argument Quality Scheme-Specific?

Peter Jan Schellens Radboud University Nijmegen ; Ester Šorm Delft University of Technology ; Rian Timmers HAS green academy ; Hans Hoeken Utrecht University

Abstract

Can argumentation schemes play a part in the critical processing of argumentation by lay people? In a qualitative study, participants were invited to come up with strong and weak arguments for a given claim and were subsequently interviewed for why they thought the strong argument was stronger than the weak one. Next, they were presented with a list of arguments and asked to rank these arguments from strongest to weakest, upon which they were asked to motivate their judgments in an interview. In order to assess whether lay people apply argument scheme specific criteria when performing these tasks, five different argumentation schemes were included in this study: argumentation from authority, from example, from analogy, from cause to effect, and from consequences. Laypeople’s use of criteria for argument quality was inferred from interview protocols. The results revealed that participants combined general criteria from informal logic (such as relevance and acceptability) and scheme-specific criteria (such as expertise for argumentation from authority, similarity for argumentation from analogy, effectiveness for argumentation from consequences). The results supported the conventional validity of the pragma-dialectical argument scheme rule in a strong sense and provided a more fine-grained view of central processing in the Elaboration Likelihood Model.

Journal
Argumentation
Published
2017-12-01
DOI
10.1007/s10503-016-9418-2
CompPile
Open Access
OA PDF Hybrid
Topics
argument assessment qualitative research
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Citation Context

Cited by in this index (3)

  1. Herne et al. (2026)
    The Influence of Justification Content and Argument Source on Perceived Argumen…
    Argumentation
  2. Friberg-Fernros et al. (2025)
    Can People be Made More Rational? Testing Whether People’s Ability to Assess Ar…
    Argumentation
  3. Svedholm-Häkkinen et al. (2024)
    Individual Differences in Argument Strength Discrimination
    Argumentation

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