Abstract There are various ways in which Large Language Models (LLMs), the latest breakthrough in Artificial Intelligence, are relevant for medicine: this paper focuses on their potential for supporting and improving argumentation in healthcare, both for patients and for practitioners. The message is mostly positive, suggesting adoption of such systems, but with specific cautions: most notably, the need to leverage them for enhancing human communicative and epistemic performance, rather than replacing it, and the importance of training users on few key principles to guide their deployment of LLMs in healthcare. The paper is accompanied by four concrete use cases, included in the supplementary materials, that constitute an integral and crucial part of this contribution.

Abstract Health controversies are large, complex bodies of argumentative discourse. They involve committed oppositionality among people with heterogeneous interests and positions related to health, configurations of which may change over time, leaving traces in the form of argumentative texts that reflect not only pragmatic disagreements but also disagreements over epistemological questions. Understanding the complexity of health controversies requires significant investment of time and effort but also has significant disciplinary payoffs for argumentation. Because they are often sites for innovation in the practice of argumentation, health controversies hold promise for extending argumentation theory through discovery of novel phenomena. And because they are significant disagreement management challenges for society, health controversies invite the development within argumentation theory of an approach to intervention centered on valuing thorough exploration of disagreement.

Abstract Despite pledging to engage in two-sided dialogues during resource consultations with Indigenous Peoples ( Haida Nation 2004 , para 44), the administrative Canadian state often defaults to one-sided reasoning, emphasizing the project’s necessity and managing evidential gaps in the project’s assessments by giving the benefits of doubt to the industry while promising Indigenous communities adaptive management programs to mitigate all potential adversaries. Such reasoning strategies raise doubts about Canada’s genuine commitment to administering the promised meaningful dialogue in Indigenous consultations. The lack of normative criteria for assessing the meaningfulness of dialogue within the Canadian administrative system further complicates the evaluation of government officials’ commitment. This article applies Walton’s dialogue system to evaluate how government agencies engage in consultative exchanges with Indigenous Peoples, focusing on their reasoning as commitments. It differentiates between dialogical and procedural elements in controlled exchanges across three contentious projects — the Mackenzie Valley, Trans Mountain, and Site C projects — theorizing the differences between one-sided, two-sided, and collapsed dialogues in Indigenous consultations. The article reveals that officials’ actions in these dialogues often leveraged their institutional authority and statutory discretion to impose compliance costs on epistemically diverse communities ( Pimenova 2025 ). This strategy sometimes weakens these communities’ capacity to challenge project developments by subordinating their diverse testimonial credibility to the dominant argumentative discourse centered on consumption, mitigation, and epistemic ignorance.

Abstract In this paper, we describe and analyze how immigrants in Chile (N = 388, from Colombia, Perú and Venezuela), conceive having a disagreement and how they value the practice of giving reasons. For this purpose, we applied a survey that measures different argumentative tendencies. For the most part, we found all three immigrant groups to be comparable in how they thought and felt about arguing, but that age and gender were structural variables that made important differences in the way people conceived the practice of giving reasons.

Abstract Controversial “gain-of-function” research (GoFR) aims to improve understanding of human health by studying behavior of genetically altered viruses in laboratory experiments. GoFR proponents tout its potential to support public health disease surveillance, drug development and vaccine innovation, while skeptics warn that unplanned laboratory release of genetically altered pathogens could harm millions in pandemics caused by science. Public interest in GoFR grew during the Covid-19 pandemic, as theories circulated that SARS-CoV-2 was the result of GoFR conducted at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology. Analysis of a 2015 public debate on GoFR research, reconstructed according to pragma-dialectical argumentation theory, sheds light on the increasingly salient scientific controversy and contributes to the growing literature on argumentation and health.

Abstract This study examines the relations between oral and written argumentation in two contexts: written assignments and structured interviews among Ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) Jewish students in Israeli higher education. The segregated education system for Haredi students focuses on dyadic oral discussions about religious texts. When Haredi men start their way in academia, they move from an oral to a written culture. To understand this complex process, I compared forty argumentative essays and structured interviews of Ultra-Orthodox students. I identified which argumentative patterns recurred or differed across the two contexts. The comparison elicited complex findings: whereas dialectic patterns of weighing supporting and opposing arguments and counterarguments were prominent in both contexts, sweeping generalizations and firm arguments were found mainly in the essays. The similarity of the argumentative patterns in writing and in the interviews may be explained by the stability of argument schemata across different contexts. The findings expand on previous theoretical and empirical findings and demonstrate how the dialectic process of examining different perspectives leads to complex positions. Finally, I present educational implications for teaching argumentation, such as careful activity design and choosing discussion topics that elicit weighing and sophisticated arguments.

Abstract Short videos depicting rural China have gained popularity on social media domestically and internationally. Among the genre’s creators, Li Ziqi stands out for her unique style of culinary craft, starting from the most basic materials. I interpret Li Ziqi’s mushroom videos as multimodal “argumentative meshworks” casting a counterstatement to the “involuted” urban life and nature/culture division. To unfold the analyses, I first place videos in the context of urban ills. Built on previous studies of multimodal argumentation and entanglement anthropology, I define “argumentative meshworks” in three aspects: a human-nonhuman entanglement, a simplicity-complexity harmony, and a production-audience interaction. Then I select three mushroom videos as artefacts to unpack the multimodal meshworks. Following the empirical call argumentation studies, I use viewers’ comments to support my points throughout the whole piece. This inquiry explores multimodal argumentation’s new possibility to not only stress things out but create space for harmony and peace of mind.

Abstract This article reviews An Argumentative Analysis of the Emergence of Issues in Adult–Children Discussions