9-12 June 2015, 1st European Conference on Argumentation (ECA 2015), Lisbon, Portugal

The European Conference on Argumentation (ECA) is a new pan-European initiative aiming to consolidate and advance various streaks of research into argumentation and reasoning: from philosophical, linguistic, discourse analytic, cognitive, to computational approaches. The chief goal of the initiative is to organize on a regular basis a major conference on argumentation. The first of these conferences will be hosted in Lisbon by the ArgLab, Institute of Philosophy (IFILNOVA), Universidade Nova de Lisboa.

The primary idea behind this first edition of the conference is that argumentation and reasoning are the main vehicles for our decisions and actions. They accompany, indeed constitute, a variety of significant social practices: from individual practical reasoning, small group decisions, deliberations of official bodies in various institutional contexts, to large-scale political and social deliberations. Argumentation is understood here as a mode of action - and not just any action, but a reasoned action, comprised of consideration of reasons (whether they are good or bad). Traditionally, argumentation has been assigned many distinct functions: epistemic, moral, conversational, etc. The aim of the conference is to explore how these functions are interrelated with the practical need for deciding on a course of action. Simply put, our chief concern is with the role argumentation and reasoning play when the question of 'what to do?' is addressed.

For more information, see http://www.ecargument.org/