NB: PRE-PRINT VERSION of Baker, M.J. (2009). Argumentative interactions and the social construction of knowledge. In N.M. Mirza & A.-N. Perret-Clermont (Eds.) Argumentation and Education: Theoretical Foundations and Practices, pp. 127-144. Berlin: Springer Verlag. 1 ARGUMENTATIVE INTERACTIONS AND THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE MICHAEL BAKER ♦ Introduction Life is full of problems that we cannot solve alone, either because we do not have the necessary abilities or because the problems necessarily concern others. An example of the first case would be my sending an SMS message on a portable telephone (I do not know how to do that without help, although I could possibly find out), and of the second, deciding on the acceptability of human cloning (this is a debate that should concern everyone, not just oneself). In both cases, one way of trying to solve a problem is to engage in dialogue with other people in order to coordinate ideas and efforts. But whilst proverbial wisdom says that “many hands make light work”, it also proposes the opposite, that “too many cooks spoil the broth”. In other words, solving practical problems with others can create another kind of problem — that I shall term interlocutionary, since it is concerned with relations between locutions, or utterances — due to the fact that there can be a diversity of proposals for solving the practical problem, not all of which can usually be accepted at the same time. Thus, an interlocutionary problem requires deciding, together, which solution, or combination of solutions, to accept to a practical problem. In fact, I shall now call such “practical” problems praxeological problems (Meyer, 1982; Quignard, 2000), they concern not only physical actions (such as those involved in mending a car) but more generally, problems that are embedded in social practices (such as deciding what energy policy to adopt, or even solving mathematics problems at school), that may be both formulated and solved in language exchanged in interaction. So, how are interlocutionary problems solved? The following are three possibilities amongst many (excluding physical violence or appeal to absolute authority). Firstly, people could try to ignore the problem: perhaps one person does not want to offend the other by appearing ‘difficult’; perhaps there is a general feeling that the question is not sufficiently important to merit deeper discussion; perhaps they are short of time and want to move on, and so on. Secondly, people could restrict themselves to a simple exchange of divergent opinions: “yes that’s right / no it isn’t/yes it is/…”. But such an approach does not generally produce the required result. Finally, each could express additional information and reasoning relating to the problem, of the kind that would ♦ CNRS – Telecom ParisTech — michael.baker@telecom-paristech.fr