Journal of Argumentation in Context - Volume 15, Issue 1, 2026

In pragma-dialectics fallacies are viewed as violations of rules for critical discussion. The results of the ‘Conceptions of reasonableness’ project indicate that people confronted with clear cases of violations of these rules in experimental research consistently judge them as unreasonable. How can it then be explained that fallacies remain so often unrecognized in actual argumentative practices? In tackling this question, this article focuses on the argumentum ad baculum fallacy, which involves a violation of the pragma-dialectical Freedom Rule by preventing others from advancing a standpoint or doubt through making a threat. Earlier experimental testing in the Netherlands confirmed the hypothesis that arguers will be more inclined to consider an argumentum ad baculum as reasonable that can also be seen as a piece of advice than an “undisguised” argumentation ad baculum. The results of the replication in China reported in the current article confirm the results of the original study.

The article examines Roger Sherman’s tactic of argumentation in a Congressional debate in June 1789 against considering a bill of rights in a timely fashion. It is argued that Sherman had a covert intention with his objections, and that they were only pretexts, put forward to create a deceptive implicature to block any consideration of amendments and of a bill of rights. The article then focuses on the evidence for claiming that Sherman had a covert intention in the debate and attention is also drawn to the political circumstances of the debate that may have been relevant to his choice of tactics. A distinction between overt and covert intentions is shown to be needed in the investigation of deceptive implicatures. The article also provides an example of how historical databases can be used as a source of data in the pragmatic study of language.

This study investigates the factors influencing perceived argument strength by examining the role of personal involvement, mood, and emotional appeals (pathos). Drawing on Douglas Walton’s exploration of emotional appeals in argumentation (1992), we use the methodology from the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) by Petty and Cacioppo (1981) to conduct psycholinguistic experiments with 395 student participants. Participants were exposed to arguments appealing to positive, neutral, or negative emotions, while their levels of personal involvement and mood were controlled. Our findings reveal that high personal involvement significantly enhances perceived argument strength (PAS; Zhao et al. 2011), while mood influences PAS in a more indirect manner. Arguments appealing to positive emotions were rated higher in PAS compared to negative and neutral ones. These results contribute to the empirical study of argument strength, integrating insights from work on emotional appeals, the ELM framework, and recent analysis of argument strength dimensions (Zenker et al. 2020; Heyninck, Skiba, and Thimm 2023).

This study investigates gender inequalities in continued participation in competitive debate within Spanish-speaking university contexts. Quantitative data from major international Spanish-language debate tournaments held between 2020 and 2024 were analyzed. The findings indicate that men tend to remain involved in competitive debate for longer periods than women. This pattern is consistent with the perceptions reported by members of equity committees from different tournaments between 2020 and 2025, who were interviewed to provide complementary qualitative perspectives. In addition, greater experience is associated with higher competitive performance for both women and men. However, when debaters are grouped into novice and more experienced categories, the analyses do not reveal systematic or persistent gender-based differences in competitive performance.