Argumentation and Evidence

Abstract

This chapter underscores the centrality of argumentation to legal and evidential reasoning: The prosecution argues that the suspect committed the crime; attorneys present their arguments; the plaintiff argues his case by citing a relevant precedent; the court presents concurring and dissenting arguments; and so on. The author reviews the different accounts of argumentation developed in the academic literature and then relates those accounts to the context of evidence and proof. Specifically, he focuses on the construction of arguments and counterarguments as involving consecutive reasoning steps, starting with identifying an item of evidence and then reasoning towards some conclusion with the help of general rules of inference and generalizations.