Where do slippery slopes live: in conversation, in reasoning or in between?
Where do slippery slopes live: in conversation, in reasoning or in between?

Summary/Abstract: 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. While many accounts of what a slippery slope argument is have been proposed, none encompasses all central features of slippery slope arguments, as there is little agreement on 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 difficult to evaluate slippery slope arguments. I propose that progress can be made by combining pragma-dialectical theory with soft Bayesian argumentation, in order to account for both normative and descriptive dimensions along which such arguments are characterized in contemporary argumentation theory.

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