Informal Logic: A Pragmatic Approach

For another logic text, I really enjoyed Walton’s Informal Logic: A Pragmatic Approach. It describes arguments as existing within different types of dialectic contexts (e.g. debate, deliberation, negotiation). Arguments that are fallacious in one context (e.g. threatening your opponent in a debate) are not in other contexts (e.g. threatening your opponent in a negotiation). From this, informal fallacies are defined not as inherently bad arguments that must always be avoided, but rather they emerge when one inappropriately shifts the dialectic from one type of argument to another.