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One of the main trends of argumentation studies in the last decades of the 20th century was the dismissal of the idea according to which formal logic is the core interpretation framework for argumentation and its problems. (Early in the 1960s, Toulmin and Perelman agreed in this respect, despite the differences between their conceptions of argumentation.) Without denying the importance of the formal logic approach, it was argued that this approach is limited and must be subsidiary to that of the currently so-called ‘argumentation theory’, i.e. a new area of research, autonomous and independent of logic, but interdisciplinary, which is believed to cross rationality as a whole. Formal logic would be limited because it would remain at the level of the form of arguments, and it would thus be unable to understand them in their respective contexts and from the inside.
That the formal logic approach to argumentation is far from dead is a fact proven by dozens of books published every year worldwide, as well as by its teaching at university level (mainly in Europe). From the perspective of formal logic, it is still believed not only that we cannot ignore the study of the form of arguments, but also that through this study we will be able to understand them from the inside, insofar as the content or substance of arguments is always given to a certain point by their form. Furthermore, only logic would be capable of meeting argumentation studies' needs for rigor and accuracy which characterize properly scientific matters. Argumentation, in this perspective, would be essentially a branch or an extension of logic.
The reaction against formal logic, mentioned above, did not entail the complete rejection of logic as paradigm for argumentation studies. In the 1970s new approaches to argumentation arose (as ‘informal logic’), which claimed (and claim) to still belong to the field of logic, albeit in a revisionary and revolutionary direction. On the other hand, from the 1960s onwards argumentation studies have been revitalized by new approaches to logic that have emerged from research on the foundations of mathematics and soon were applied to argumentation (as ‘dialogue logic’), thus reinforcing the claim that, after all, the logical paradigm was still alive and in good health. But, at the same time, the connections between logic and argumentation became complex and somehow questionable, specially for those who consider argumentation theory as a domain and not simply as an activity: in what sense are we doing logic, properly speaking, and not another thing, perhaps different from it, as ‘argumentation theory’ would be ?
The aims of the International Colloquium: INSIDE ARGUMENTS – LOGIC VS ARGUMENTATION THEORY (Faculty of Letters of the University of Coimbra, Portugal, 24-26 March 2011), which could only be argumentative, are to debate the connections between logic, in general or in any special sense of the concept, and the study of argumentation, and to take stock of the results achieved in this regard from the second half of the XXth century to our days. Systematic approaches to such connections, as well as other approaches, are welcomed.