A Collaborative Model of Argumentation in Dyadic Problem-Solving Interactions

Within a cognitive approach to argumentation, our research deals with the argumentative processes of knowledge co-construction in dialogue (Baker, 1999). From this point of view we have been designing experimental situations favouring argumentation in dyadic problem-solving (Quignard & Baker, 1998; Baker, Quignard, Lund & van Amelsvoort, this volume) over several years, in order to understand the roles of argumentation in the resolution of conceptual problems (Baker, 1998; Baker, Brixhe & Quignard, 2002). Whereas our previous research focussed on socio-cognitive conditions promoting emergence of argumentation between learners (Quignard, 1999 from a previous work of Golder, 1996), in this paper we address the problem of analysing the argumentation processes carried out in problemsolving dialogues and the interactional phenomena by which knowledge is collaboratively elaborated. On one hand, our cognitive approach to argumentation is naturally very closely related to pragmatics studies of dialogue, which aim to describe or analyse the relationships between the use of language and its social or contextual implications in concrete situations. On the other hand, the phenomenon we want to explain — argumentation — has been very well described in normative models of dialectics, which give quite solid bases for defining the limits of argumentation phases, their genuine moves and schemes (attacks and defences) and their rules. The proof of the consistency of such dialectical systems (see fore example Barth & Krabbe, 1982) is another argument in favour of their universal domain of application. These two very different approaches to argumentation are not necessarily to be opposed when the pragmatic foundations of the logic of these systems can be defined with some degree of formality (see for example Quignard & Baker, 1997). Recent developments in pragma-dialectics (van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 1992) have shown the efficiency of this combination, being both a normative and descriptive method for understanding argumentative discourse (van Eemeren et al., 1993) or designing argumentation situations, even for the purposes of learning (see Jackson, 1998). In fact, — and without playing on words — the previous models of argumentation meet their limits when dialogue is not yet or no longer argumentative. In other terms, when argumentation is too much considered as a verbal activity per se (with its own rules and own moves) there are some difficulties in taking into account cognitive continuum underlying the dialogue, for example rational commitments or problem-solving goals. Krabbe (1988) in an answer to Lorenz (Ibid.) stated that argumentative commitments can obtain in non-argumentative phases (e.g. theses), and thus some argumentative rules could prevail outside argumentative phases. In a later paper with Walton (1995), he tried to provide a logical framework for keeping trace of commitments across different dialogue phases, but that approach cannot be considered as a cognitive model. Another difficulty concerns the definition of a set of argumentative moves for the sake of describing argumentation processes. These moves cannot relate to the general