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This chapter presents Habermas’s theory of argumentation as “a comprehensive framework” which has been developed in a way that can solve the problems created by Kuhn’s Gap. It posits that Habermas’s pragmatism, in contrast to Achinstein’s realism, commits him to develop a multiperspectival and social model in which arguments count as cogent in virtue of both process and product merits. Habermas’s argumentation theory brings in dialectic and rhetoric as constitutive dimensions of cogency itself and attempts to show that it is important for good scientific arguments to satisfy evaluative standards which are logical, dialectical, and rhetorical. The chapter concludes that it is not clear whether “the gap Kuhn opened up between logic and sociology” is closed fully by Habermas’s model.

This chapter discusses and characterizes the gap between logical and social-institutional perspectives in terms of argumentation theory after the publication of Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962. The gap opened up by Kuhn in his analysis of normal science is a situation “in which two perspectives on the cogency of scientific argumentation opposed one another” across an area of science studies “in which scientific arguments are persuasive but not logically compelling.” The chapter emphasizes that Kuhn’s attempt at the integration of different approaches appeals to revolutionary science as an argumentative process and leads to psychological receptivity while making decisions. It also discusses Carl Hempel’s purely syntactical model of confirmation for the evaluation of cogent evidential arguments, in which he differentiates between the pragmatic and the logical aspects of cogency.

This chapter analyzes a case of argument construction in high-energy physics—the writing of a scientific paper announcing the evidence for the existence of the top quark by the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF). In writing the 1994 papers at Fermilab, the CDF scientists “sought consensus on both the conclusions and supporting evidence.” This CDF case explains the different aims of critical assessment as it further clarifies and examines the potential of Habermas’s model for highlighting actual processes of scientific argumentation. It further shows how the use of Habermas’s argumentation theory can be helpful in creating interdisciplinary cooperation in the service of critical assessment of actual cases. The chapter concludes that Habermas’s model generated certain reform proposals in science as well as in science journalism .

In a first analysis, the ‘Cartesian’ argument denying the possibility of perceptual knowledge is compared with acceptable and unacceptable arguments that occur in non-philosophical contexts. Its illusory force is attributed to similarities to the former, its invalidity to differences partly shared with the latter. A variety of possible moves in defence of scepticism are then critically considered. Discussion of a confusion between infallibility and certainty leads into the topic of probability and a critique of two related responses to scepticism, ‘fallibilism’ and ‘contextualism’, that discard the intuitive link between knowledge and objective certainty. The argument calls on the notion of ‘defeasibility’, a term imported from jurisprudence into epistemology (where it is seriously ambiguous—see Chapter 6). Its relation to the notion of burden of proof and to argumentation theory is explained, and a particular sense is accordingly proposed in which ascriptions of knowledge may be both certain and ‘defeasible’.