FROM THE EDITORS 

Readers will notice a new look in this edition of the journal. We've gone 
desktop! That should help us to save costs and keep the journal in a solid financial 
position. We are most grateful to our Managing Editor, Mark Letteri, for countless 
hours spent helping us to convert to DTP; and we also wish to express our gratitude 
to Associate Editor Bob Pinto for the many, many hours he gave to help this 
conversion come about. We hope you like the new look but more important still the 
content. 

"Analyzing Conversational Reasoning" by Merrilee H. Salmon and Colleen M. 
Zeitz discusses an empirical study of reasoning as it occurs in conversations, with 
particular reference to co-constructed arguments. The eventual goal of this research 
program is to compare co-constr-klcted arguments with those developed by a single 
source, with the aim of seeing whether the quality of one differs from that of the 
other. 

"Aristotelian Dialectic" by H. Hamner Hill and Michael Kagan is a dialogue 
between two persons focusing on Aristotle's views on the nature of dialectic and 
rhetoric, and also on the role of dialectic and rhetoric in modem edutation. The party 
who advocates for the Aristotelian ideals argues that they are as important today as 
they were in the past and in the process uses in the dialogue many·of the techniques 
which he ascribes to Aristotle. 

"Slippery Slopes, Moral Slides and Human Nature" by Gary Colwell targets 
recent discussions of the slippery slope fallacy. Specifically, Colwell is investigating 
one particular form of the slippery slope-the moral causal slope argument which he 
argues is not always fallacious. Colwell claims that those who assess it as fallacious 
are missing its potential strengths. This happens either because they overlook factors 
in human nature that support this form of argument, or because they underestimate 
their influence. 

"The Case of the Missing Premise" by Don S. Levi argues that the flaw in the 
enthymematic approach to missing premises is the notion that argument can be 
restated as a premise-conclusion sequence. Levi starts by arguing that there are 
problems with the enthymematic approach and suggests that these are due to the 
failure of logicians to appreciate the importance of the rhetorical context of argument. 

"The Domain Constraint on Analogy and Analogical Argument" by William R. 
Brown investigates the commonplace that analogues in an argument from analogy be 
from the same domain. Brown argues that domain constraints cannot be exported to 
informal logic, where the relevance of properties, not their number, is the appropriate 
and prior criterion for evaluating analogical arguments. 

We also feature in this issue a Review Article by Paul K. Moser and J.D. Trout: 
"What is Feminist Epistemology?", in which they discuss Lorraine Code's What Can 
She Know? (1991), Sandra Harding's Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? (1991) 
and Louise Antony and Charlotte Witt's A Mind of One's Own (1993). We also 
present a Critical Study of Douglas Walton's The Place of Emotion in Argument 
(1992) by John Deigh.