Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2006

Publication Title

Journal of Pragmatics

Volume

38

Issue

5

First Page

745

Keywords

Examination dialogue, Dialogue theory, Expert opinion testimony, Computational dialectics, Witness testimony, Discovering inconsistency, Fallacies

Last Page

777

Abstract

Recent work in argumentation theory (Walton and Krabbe, 1995; Walton, 2005) and artificial intelligence (Bench-Capon, 1992, 2003; Cawsey, 1992; McBurney and Parsons, 2002; Bench-Capon and Prakken, 2005) uses types of dialogue as contexts of argument use. This paper provides an analysis of a special type called examination dialogue, in which one party questions another party, sometimes critically or even antagonistically, to try to find out what that party knows about something. This type of dialogue is most prominent in law and in both legal and non-legal arguments based on expert opinion. It is also central to dialogue systems for questioning and answering in expert systems in artificial intelligence. Examples studied are: (1) exegetical analyses and criticisms of religious and philosophical texts, and (2) legal examinations and cross-examinations conducted in a trial setting.

DOI

10.1016/j.pragma.2005.01.016

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