The findings of philosophers, linguists, and psychologists are conjoined here in an effort to develop a descriptive/analytic account of reasoning as it actually occurs in social settings. The primary focus of this paper is the reasoning that occurs in discussions of controversial social issues by groups of peers. Preliminary analysis indicates that rather sophisticated argument structures emerge from these informal settings, and that conversational interaction stimulates the development of arguments. Although participants did not always fully state their arguments, the investigators felt justified in attributing implicit premises because these were referred to later in the conversation as if they had been stated. In this respect at least, instead of merely assuming that subjects are good at reasoning, this study provides evidence for the claim. In this paper, a system for coding elements of reasoning and a method for displaying the interactive structure of reasoning in conversations are developed. A long-term goal is to use the information gained from this study to help understand and correct two problems that arise in the teaching of reasoning: the difficulty many students have with acquiring the principles of reasoning in standard logic courses and the difficulty of transferring whatever reasoning skills are acquired in the classroom to new situations.
