ON THE LOGICAL INTEGRITY OF CHILDRENS ARGUMENTS

The purpose of this study was to investigate properties of children's naturally occurring arguments. The arguments were sampled from transcr ipts of 20 discussions held in 4 fourth-grade classrooms. The principa l findings were that (a) children's arguments are filled with seemingl y vague referring expressions, (b) the arguments sometimes do not cont ain explicit conclusions, and (c) most arguments are missing-or seem t o be missing-explicit warrants to authorize conclusions. The missing o r obliquely identified information, however, usually is given in the t ext or preceding discussion or is a commonplace from everyday life and readily inferable by actively cooperative participants in the discuss ion. Children seldom hack their arguments by appealing to general prin ciples, except when the foundation for the argument is disputed or see ms confusing. At a more general level, we conclude that it is possible to give a coherent account of children's arguments within the framewo rk of informal deductivism augmented with speech act theory.