What Hamblin’s Formal Dialectic Tells About the Medieval Logical Disputation

In this paper we reconstruct a famous Severin Boethius’s reasoning according to the idea of the medieval obligationes disputation mainly focusing on the formalizations proposed by Ch. Hamblin. We use two different formalizations of the disputation: first with the help of Ch. Hamblin’s approach specially designed to formalize such logical debates; second, on the basis of his formal dialectics. The two formalizations are used to analyze the logical properties of the rules of the medieval logical disputation and that of their formal dialectic’s counterparts. Our aim is to to show that Hamblin’s formal dialectic is a communicative protocol for rational agents whose structural rules may differ, thus, varying its normative character. By means of comparing Hamblin’s reconstructions with the one proposed by C. Dutilh-Novaes we are able to justify the following conclusions: (1) the formalization suggested by Hamblin fails to reconstruct the full picture of the disputation because it lacks in some the details of it; (2) Hamblin’s formal dialectic and the medieval logical disputation are based on different logical theories; (3) medieval logical disputation, represented by the formalization of C. Dutilh-Novaes, and the two ones of Hamblin encode different types of cognitive agents. DOI: 10.21146/2074-1472-2017-23-1-151-176