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The term comes from the late Middle English word meaning 'beautiful', itself coming from the Latin word 'speciosus' meaning 'fair'. [4] This highlights the common quality of specious assertions being attractive in concept and pleasant to place belief in, thereby making them more readily adopted by the layperson despite a lack of factual basis or sound logical reasoning.
In the most general terms, a reason is a consideration in an argument which justifies or explains an action, a belief, an attitude, or a fact. [1] Normative reasons are what people appeal to when making arguments about what people should do or believe. For example, that a doctor's patient is grimacing is a reason to believe the patient is in pain.
This includes argument extraction, conclusion generation, [40] [additional citation(s) needed] argument form quality assessment, [49] machine argumentative debate generation or participation, [44] [46] [47] surfacing most relevant previously overlooked viewpoints or arguments, [44] [46] argumentative writing support [42] (including sentence ...
In his treatise Topics, Aristotle does not explicitly define topic, though it is "at least primarily a strategy for argument not infrequently justified or explained by a principle". [2] He characterises it in the Rhetoric [3] thus: "I call the same thing element and topic; for an element or a topic is a heading under which many enthymemes fall."
Arguments address problems of belief, explanations address problems of understanding. In the argument above, the statement, "Fred's cat has fleas" is up for debate (i.e. is a claim), but in the explanation, the statement, "Fred's cat has fleas" is assumed to be true (unquestioned at this time) and just needs explaining. [19]
Red herring – introducing a second argument in response to the first argument that is irrelevant and draws attention away from the original topic (e.g.: saying "If you want to complain about the dishes I leave in the sink, what about the dirty clothes you leave in the bathroom?"). [72] In jury trial, it is known as a Chewbacca defense.
Topics (or topoi) can be used to invent arguments and also to conceptualize and formulate the single-sentence declarative thesis. Edward P.J. Corbett, Robert Connors, Richard P. Hughes, and P. Albert Duhamel define topics as "ways of probing one's subject in order to find the means to develop that subject".
Argument – discourse characterized by reasons advanced to support conclusions. Argumentum ad baculum – settling a question by appealing to force. Ars dictaminis – the art of writing letters, introduced and taught during the Medieval rhetorical era. Assonance – words that repeat the same vowel sound.