Procedural Reasonableness and Normativity of Argumentation: Pragma-Dialectical Responses to Epistemologist Objections

Pragma-dialectical argumentation theory has received criticism from epistemological argumentation theorists. While the former emphasizes argumentation as aimed at resolving differences of opinion through adequate procedures, the latter emphasizes that argumentation is aimed at reaching a justified conclusion of the argumentation. In this paper pragma-dialectics is analyzed and two objections considered. The first objection pertains to the pragma-dialectical definition of reasonable argumentation, the other to the lack of an account of normativity of argumentation in pragma-dialectics. It is argued that the objections are not convincing.