Out of the Space of Reasons: Argumentation, agents, and persons

The paper investigates the ‘logical space of reasons’ as a social space in which rational agents operate and persons in an important sense come to be. Building from an investigation of argumentative agents in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, I discuss both interior and exterior criteria for personhood and propose that the latter shows how argumentation, as a principal activity of the space of reasons, results in the particular kinds of persons we recognize there as rational agents. The overall analysis is indebted to Robert Brandom’s centralizing of the practice of giving and receiving reasons and the suggestive ways this can be applied to the realm of argumentation.