Menno Reijven in his paper entitled “Institutional and Institutionalized Fallacies: Diversifying Pragma-Dialectical Fallacy Judgments” positions himself in the debate about fallacy judgments, esp. in the situation where contextual issues play a role. His proposal is a very interesting one, because it seems to solve the problem that is at the core of this debate. By adding an extra dimension to fallacy judgments, Reijven is differentiating the answer to the question “Is this a good argument?” into four possibilities. Instead of the traditional “yes” and “no”, the evaluator of argumentative discourse can choose between the following responses (my rephrasing): (1) yes, this move is reasonable from a purely argumentative point of view, and it also makes sense within the particular institutional context in which it is performed (2) yes, this move is reasonable from a purely argumentative point of view, but it does not make sense within the particular institutional context in which it is performed (3) no, this move is fallacious if you judge it from a purely argumentative point of view, but things always go this way within this particular institutional context (4) no, this move is fallacious if you judge it from a purely argumentative point of view, and it does not make much sense within the particular institutional context in which it is performed either In diversifying pragma-dialectical fallacy judgments in this way, Reijven explicitly follows up on an elucidation of the consequences of the pragma-dialectical stance on the matter that Francisca Snoeck Henkemans and myself presented in our paper Reasonableness in context: Taking into account institutional conventions in the pragma-dialectical evaluation of argumentative discourse (Snoeck Henkemans & Wagemans, 2015). As we observed, certain argumentative moves performed in institutionalized contexts are fallacious when assessed from a pragma-dialectical perspective but seem perfectly reasonable or even institutionally required when assessed from the perspective of the conventions or rules applicable in the communicative domain at hand. Reijven’s proposal of diversifying fallacy judgments can be seen as an attempt to avoid the undesirable consequences of that observation: if we don’t want institutions to be promoting fallacious moves, we should differentiate our fallacy judgment. In my view, Reijven has been very inventive and precise in working out this diversification. His solution of adding an extra dimension to fallacy judgments opens up new pathways of dealing with the tension between general and context-specific standards for assessing argumentative discourse (i.e., between van Eemeren and Grootendorst’s approach and Walton’s approach). But it also invites a reconsideration of an even more fundamental issue, namely the question of what makes an argumentative move fallacious in the first place. Where do our standards for the reasonableness of argumentative discourse come from? Do they come from some kind of theoretical ideal that is generally applicable, or do we derive them from institutionalized practices? In his diversification proposal, Reijven does not make a choice between these two sources of normativity. Instead, he combines them, thus providing the analyst with four instead of two different fallacy judgments to choose from. It’s an elegant solution for a difficult problem, for sure. But could it also be an example of throwing out the normative baby with the combinational bathwater? In my comments, I shall first explain my views on the consequences of choosing a pragma-dialectical framework for evaluating institutionalized discourse, mainly on the basis of Snoeck Henkemans and Wagemans (2015). Then, I will reflect upon the more fundamental issue of where the standards for making fallacy judgments (should) come from, leading to the tentative conclusion that van Eemeren and Grootendorst’s generalistic approach generates the same results as Walton’s contextual approach. The comments give rise to two questions for Reijven, which can be found at the end of the respective sections.
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