FROM THE EDITORS 

In this issue we are pleased to publish two papers originally presented at the conference 
of the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation, held at the University of Windsor, 
May 200 I. The first is Richard H. Gaskins's keynote address to the conference, "Shaping 
the adversary culture." In this essay Professor Gaskins distinguishes evidence-based 
reasoning and reflexive reasoning. He observes that judicial reasoning is becoming more 
and more concerned with the latter, which depends on the logic of presumption, and he 
suggests that argumentation theory has a significant role to play in determining the future 
shape of legal discourse, provided it frees itself from static models. 

The second is Jan Albert van Laar's study ofthe use of ambiguity in dialectics. His formal 
model of critical discussions distinguishes constitutive and regulative rules of argumenta-
tion and, accordingly. two kinds offallacies. Although violations of the constitutive rules 
is prohibited, the formal model allows a way for the discussion of norm-fallacies rather 
than their total elimination. Van Laar's paper was awarded the J. Anthony Blair Prize at the 
200 I conference, having been voted the best student essay at the conference by a panel 
of reviewers. 

Bruce Waller's paper on analogies distinguishes several functions of analogies of which 
only one is their employment as arguments. Analogical arguments may be divided into 
inductive and deductive ones. Waller argues that-contrary to the claims of Govier and 
Sunstein-all a priori analogies are best understood as deductive arguments. 

In "Dialogue games as dialogue models for interacting with, and via, computers," Nicolas 
Maudet and David Moore, after making an extensive survey of the existing literature, 
consider the adequacy of debate dialogue games as models for interactions between 
persons and computers. They go on to explore the issue for dialogue games which are not 
debate-oriented, and the possibilities of using dialogue games in multi-media environ-
ments. 

We have two reviews, one of Douglas Walton's Scare Tactics, by Francisca Snoeck 
Henkemans, and another of Robert Abelson's Statistics as Principled Argument, by Peter 
McBurney. We welcome these contributors to our pages. 

In the Teaching Supplement we continue our series of analyses of the Shell Advertorial, 
"Clear thinking in troubled times." In the last issue we printed contributions by Agnes 
van Rees and by Frans van Eemeren and Peter Houtlosser; in this issue Scott Jacobs and 
Ralph Johnson continue the discussion. 

In the next issue (Vol. 22. No. I) readers will see some changes to our Editorial Board, 
changes that we hope will encourage and support the evolution not only of this journal, 
but also of research in informal logic and argumentation theory.