Abstract:

The Comprehensive Assessment Procedure for Natural Argumentation (CAPNA) is a tool designed to help analysts produce evaluations of arguments which are systematic, repeatable, and explainable. The structure of the tool also emphasises the need for an all-round evaluation which takes into account the three traditional aspects of argument: the dialectical, the logical, and the rhetorical. The CAPNA procedure reflects these three perspectives by adopting a threefold structure: the Process stage is concerned with the dialectical context in which the argument is put forward; the Reasoning stage looks at the acceptability of its inference, based on norms of informal logic; and the Expression stage is linked to the rhetorical study of argument by its close examination of the use of language. The CAPNA system is combined with the descriptive procedures of the Periodic Table of Arguments (Wagemans), in what we call the Two-Tier approach to fallacy detection. This talk will briefly introduce the CAPNA procedure and concentrate on the illustration of the process in action, using examples of both purely textual and multimodal argumentation.