FROM THE EDITORS 
To begin, we want to apologize for and 

explain the very late publication of 18.2&3. 
Due to the resignation of our fonner assist-
ant, a delay in securing his replacement, and 
considerable disorder in the operation, we 
have only recently begun to get on top of 
the journal's business. We deeply regret 
that the process of disseminating the work 
sent to the journal has been slowed. We 
plan to publish 19.1 in the summer, and an-
other double issue, 19.2&3, in the fall, dat-
ing that volume 1999. (Subscriptions,by 
Volume, not year, will not be affected.) 

Thanks to Mr. Pierre Boulos for his serv-
ices from June 1997 through July 1998, and 
welcome to Dr. Marcello Guarini, our new 
assistant. Marcello has been a great help in 
restoring orderly operations, ably assisted 
by three students: Janice Perera, Daniel 
Gunaratnam and Bill Snowden. Thanks also 
to our colleague Kate Parr for help in pre-
paring this issue. 

The contents of this double issue range 
widely over the principal areas of interest to 
readers of this joumal-infonnallogic, ar-
gumentation theory and critical thinking. 

In "Logic, Art and Argument," Leo 
Groarke argues that pictures, paintings and 
cartoons all may carry persuasive force and 
hence can be construed as argument, to be 
appraised with the procedures and criteria 
used on verbal arguments. 

In "Philosophical Dialogue Theories," 
David Moore and Dave Hobbes, from a 
background in computer studies, review 
various dialogical models for argumentation, 
argue that Mackenzie's DC model has great 
potential, discuss empirical tests for its suit-
ability, and inquire into the tractability of 
the system for computer-based applications. 

Most theorists agree that critical think-
ing requires dispositions as well as skills, 
but no account of the dispositional compo-
nent is generally accepted. In "Critical Think-
ing Dispositions," Robert Ennis presents a 
new approach, specifying a set of criteria 

for judging dispositional accounts. His cri-
tique of Perkins, Jay and Tischman leads to 
his own proposal. He concludes with some 
reflections on the task of assessing dispo-
sitions. 

In "Attributed Favourable Relevance 
and Argument Evaluation" Derek Allen ar-
gues there are problems with George 
Bowles's account (see INroRMALLooIC, 18.1) 
of the role of attributions of favourable rel-
evance in deciding what constitutes a good 
argument, but argues that such attributions 
are relevant for the evaluation of an argu-
ment 

In "What is an Infmite Regress Argu-
ment?" Claude Gratton examines a mode of 
argument much used but little studied, in-
troducing a basic vocabulary for discuss-
ing such arguments and developing an hy-
pothesis to explain why the claimed regress 
sometimes fails. He illustrates a common 
mistake in deriving the infmite regress and 
examines how the infmite regress functions 
as a premise. 

In "Does Scientific Realism Beg the 
Question," after reviewing four different 
ways of understanding the fallacy of beg-
ging the question, Geoffrey Gorham con-
cludes that, contrary to Fine, in none of them 
can it be claimed that scientific realism is 
guilty of begging the question. 

"The Argument of the Beard" is part of 
Douglas Walton's ongoing research into the 
individual fallacies. He proposes that the 
so-called argument of the beard, depending 
on the allegation of vagueness, is related to 
both the heap argument, and also to slip-
pery slope. He classifies these three types 
or argument and discusses issues they raise 
for infonnallogic research. 

Besides these articles, there is a note 
from John Follman et a/. on resources for 
research in critical thinking assessment, 
critical reviews of Johnson's The Rise of 
Informal Logic (by David Hitchcock) and 
Walton's Plausible Reasoning (by James 
Freeman), and five book reviews. 

Contributors please note the new specifications for manuscripts in Editorial Information.