Rules for epistemically oriented argumentative dialogues

In the current argumentation-theoretical discussion as well as in Walton and Krabbe's (1995) list of argumentative dialogue types, no attention is paid to truly epistemically oriented dialogues that serve the cooperative and argumentative search for truth―called "discourses". The paper attempts to fill this gap. (1) After a more precise determination of the desired conditions for such discourses (among others, epistemic goal, effectiveness, cooperativeness, argumentativeness, efficiency) (2) the game 'Disputation' (Lumer 1988) is presented and shown to fulfil these conditions, (3) while other discourse systems from the literature fall (mostly far) short of the conditions.