Slippery slope arguments are arguments that have historically been seen as informal fallacies and are prevalent in discussions of ethics, public policy, and legal reasoning. And while there have been provided a lot of accounts of what a slippery slope argument actually is, there has been no account that has been able to encompass all central features of slippery slope arguments. As such evaluating this type of arguments has been a toilsome endeavor for researchers working in argumentation theory…
Read moreSlippery slope arguments are arguments that have historically been seen as informal fallacies and are prevalent in discussions of ethics, public policy, and legal reasoning. And while there have been provided a lot of accounts of what a slippery slope argument actually is, there has been no account that has been able to encompass all central features of slippery slope arguments. As such evaluating this type of arguments has been a toilsome endeavor for researchers working in argumentation theory, since there is so little agreement of what exactly one is supposed to evaluate. In this article I aim to offer a way to deal with the issues that have made it so difficult to evaluate slippery slope arguments. I propose that some progress can be made when it comes to evaluating slippery slope arguments by combining pragma-dialectical theory with soft Bayesian argumentation, in order to account for both normative and descriptive dimensions among which arguments are defined in contemporary argumentation theory.
