Conflict diagrams for cross-examination dialogues

ABSTRACT

This paper builds a practical method of analyzing cross-examination dialogues by using tools adapted from formal dialectic and artificial intelligence to show how an argumentation model can shed new light on our understanding of actual cases of cross-examination in the common law courts. This is done by illustrating how the model brings out certain precise formal features of argumentative cross-examinations, which would otherwise be hidden from view. Cross-examination dialogue is further discussed in relation to ancient and contemporary approaches to formal dialectics.

KEYWORDS:

• Argumentation
• formal dialogue models
• examination
• legal argumentation
• questioning

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for support of the research in this book by Insight Grant 435-2012-0104.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Some convention is needed to enable the reader to distinguish between the moves of the one party from those of the other in complex examples. The convention is here with adopted of consistently designating the Questioner (the more powerful party) as she (her) and the Answerer as he (him).

2. The reader needs to be warned that the term “conflict map” from dispute resolution (Wehr, 1979) refers to something different from a conflict diagram in the sense of the term defined in this paper.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Douglas Walton

Douglas Walton (Ph.D. University of Toronto) is Distinguished Research Fellow of CRRAR (Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation and Rhetoric) at the University of Windsor. He has been Visiting Professor at Northwestern University, University of Arizona, and University of Lugano (Switzerland). He is co-editor of the Critical Argumentation textbook series for Cambridge University Press. In 2011, he was Fernand Braudel Research Fellow of the European University Institute in Florence, where he collaborated on research in legal argumentation with Prof. Giovanni Sartor of the EUI and the Faculty of Law at the University of Bologna. In 2010, he was appointed to the Editorial Board of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Law. In 2009, he was given the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Dean's Special Recognition Award of the University of Windsor, in recognition of excellence in research, scholarship and creative activity.