Stages of argumentative dialogue

These stages can be regarded as an argument protocol. In a somewhat loose interpretation, the stages are as follows:

* Confrontation: Presentation of the problem, such as a debate question or a political disagreement
* Opening: Agreement on rules, such as for example, how evidence is to be presented, which sources of facts are to be used, how to handle divergent interpretations, determination of closing conditions.
* Argumentation: Application of logical principles according to the agreed-upon rules
* Closing: This occurs when the termination conditions are met. Among these could be for example, a time limitation or the determination of an arbiter.

Van Eemeren and Grootendorst provide a detailed list of rules that must be applied at each stage of the protocol. Moreover, in the account of argumentation given by these authors, there are specified roles of protagonist and antagonist in the protocol which are determined by the conditions which set up the need for argument.

Many cases of argument are highly unsymmetrical, although in some sense they are dialogues. A particularly important case of this is political argument.

Much of the recent work on argument theory has considered argumentation as an integral part of language and perhaps the most important function of language (Grice, Searle, Austin, Popper). This tendency has removed argumentation theory away from the realm of pure formal logic.

One of the original contributors to this trend is the philosopher Chaim Perelman, who together with Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, introduced the French term La nouvelle rhetorique in 1958 to describe an approach to argument which is not reduced to application of formal rules of inference. Perelman's view of argumentation is much closer to a juridical one, in which rules for presenting evidence and rebuttals play an important role.

Though this would apparently invalidate semantic concepts of truth, this approach seems useful in situations in which the possibility of reasoning within some commonly accepted model does not exist or this possibility has broken down because of ideological conflict. Retaining the notion enunciated in the introduction to this article that logic usually refers to the structure of argument, we can regard the logic of rhetoric as a set of protocols for argumentation.