[paulfurley]

Agreed:

“argumentation”, “pro & contra lists”, “dialectical relations” “premise-conclusion structures

..all appear within the first 100 words and I don’t know what any of them mean. I’m a a native English speaker with a technical education and I am lost!

Is the site aimed at some profession where these words are commonly used?!

[confused-k]

Before I gave up on finding out what this was and closed the website, I saw that the copyright author on the bottom of the page was German or affiliated with a German university. I'm fine with giving the person a pass on some of this language, and drawing on the German I know (and having lived there, somewhat familiar with how Germans would say things in English), I think:

- argumentation should be arguments or in more words: "these are the arguments I'm presenting to support my claims."

- pro/contra is pros/cons

- I have never heard the word 'dialectical'

- premise-conclusion structure I think is something like hypothesis-conclusion, maybe?

[weavie]

Dialectical comes from greek philosophy where the proponents of two opposing views would have a conversational debate with reasoned arguments to try to find the truth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic

[majkinetor]

> Before I gave up on finding out what this was and closed the website

Really ? Instant gratification type ?

[aasasd]

Hoo boy, how did you live your life without dialectical materialism?

[Veen]

Is the site aimed at some profession where these words are commonly used?!

It's created by a philosophy professor and aimed at students of philosophy and other interested in argumentation, so yes. But the terms aren't all that hard to figure out.

- Argumentation, giving reasons in support of an idea or claim.

- pro and contra lists, lists of reasons for (pro) and against (contra) a claim.

- dialectical relations, the relations between the claims made in an argument. For example, how one claim supports or undermines another claim.

- premise conclusion structures, a conclusion is a statement of what is claimed to be true, and the premises are statements that support the conclusion. In arguments, these are structured (hopefully) by logical relations so that the premises have some bearing on the truth of the conclusion. The conclusion can be inferred from the premises. If the premises are true, the conclusion is true (or more likely to be true).

Here's an explanation of premise-conclusion structure by the developer [0]:

Logically an argument consists of nothing else but sentences. But these sentences play different roles in an argument. Every argument has one inferred sentence (the conclusion) and at least one sentence from which the conclusion is inferred (a premiss). This premiss-conclusion structure is visualised as a sentence list: First all premisses of the argument are listed. Each horizontal line symbolizes an inference. Under the line the conclusion is listed (sometimes there are preliminary conclusions). Under the last line stands the main conclusion of the argument.

[0]: http://www.argunet.org/2013/04/03/so-what-exactly-is-an-argu...

Argdown is a syntax for writing arguments made up of premises and conclusions in the form of pro and contra lists. It then creates a diagram of the relationships between the premises and conclusions.

There's a better explanation here: http://www.argunet.org/2018/10/26/new-beginning-introducing-...

[avip]

It’s all Latin for we know something you don’t