Arguments, Conflicts, and Decisions - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 113

as a consequence of argumentative engagement, rather than in spite of it (Cohen
2005 ; Paglieri 2009 ). This more conflictual view of argumentation is supported
by some empirical findings on how arguers perceive their dialogical interaction:
Hample and Benoit ( 1999 ) found that people do not consider a dialogue as being
argumentative in nature, unless it is adversarial and somehow unresolved (see also
Hample et al. 1999 ).
This leaves us with a puzzle on the relationship between argument and conflict.
Does argumentation promote conflict resolution, or does it tend to exacerbate
conflicts? Crucially, this is not just a matter of theoretical curiosity, but it has
also important practical implications. Consider, for instance, its ramifications in
critical thinking education: if we see argumentation as a rational salve to heal social
conflicts, then of course its fostering should be regarded as a key priority for any
educational system worth its salt; but if, on the contrary, training people to argue
risks turning them into bickering, obdurate, insufferable know-it-alls, then great
caution should be exerted.
In light of such potential repercussions, it is important to establish whether the
dichotomy between a rational and a polemical view of argumentation is real or
apparent, before we even begin considering how to solve it. Section 7.2 of this
paper is devoted to articulate a decision-theoretic approach to argumentation, which
is suggested to put this tension in better focus and allows to make sense of it.
Section 7.3 reviews extant evidence in favor of that approach, highlighting several
roles that conflicts play in our argumentative decisions. Finally, Sect. 7.4 outlines
future developments and open issues in this line of research.

7.2 The Role of Conflict in Argumentative Decisions

When we argue, we make several decisions, sometimes without even realizing it:
we choose whether to enter the argument or not, what arguments to use and how to
present them, how to respond to the arguments of the counterpart, how to address
challenges and objections, how to solve potential ambiguities, when and how to
end the argument, and so forth. In fact, argumentation can be seen as the result of a
complicated decision-making process or, more exactly, as the interaction of multiple
decision-making processes performed by autonomous agents.
In spite of its obvious relevance in everyday argumentation, decision making
has been taken for granted rather than explored in argumentation theories, with few
exceptions (see Hample 2005 for a review of some of them, as well as my own
efforts in the same direction, summarized in Paglieri 2013a ). This partial neglect
originates from an insistence on what is the right move in a given argumentative
situation and not on how the subject may decide to opt (or not) for that move. It is
not that argumentation theorists are unaware of argumentative decisions, of course —
as arguers, if nothing else, they are bound to be familiar with those. They just do not
see it as their business to produce a theory of such decisions (for a diagnosis of why
this is the case, see Paglieri 2013a ).