Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The argumentative discourse of computer programmers engaged in a collaborative programming task were analyzed as instances of ecologically valid reasoning behavior. Teams of expert programmers were brought into a laboratory setting to work cooperatively on a software maintenance task. Arguments which occurred spontaneously in the course of the task were examined with respect to: (a) their effect on task performance; and (b) to reveal the sorts of inferential machinery programmers use when they reason with one another. Arguments were found to be important in the formulation of plans as well as the negotiation of strategic priorities with respect to the task. Pragmatic features of the programmers' discourse revealed extensive use of framing devices whose efficacy depended upon interpretation in the context of linked pragmatic scales.