Argumentation has been an object of study for thousands of years, producing a rich legacy of thought starting with Aristotle's writings and other ancient texts. But only recently has it been possible to speak of argumentation as a field distinct from the many other fields that have had something to say about the subject matter across more than two millennia. Logic had been studied continuously since Aristotle's invention of the syllogism, but over time became detached from arguments occurring in natural interaction. At mid-twentieth century, two important books appeared, each rejecting formal deductive logic as an idealization of human reasoning and each proposing a new approach to theorizing argumentation by investigating its actual practice (Toulmin, 1958; Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1958). Taking these and several subsequent works as a new canon, the field of argumentation began self-organizing in the latter half of the twentieth century around this new kind of theory. One important direction has been a new strand in the study in logic, known as informal logic (Groarke, 2021) and aimed at understanding the mostly nondeductive forms of reasoning that can be reconstructed from what people offer as reasons in natural language. Another direction, emerging from language-related fields, has aimed at understanding argumentative discourse as communicative. Among these the best known and most influential is pragma-dialectics (van Eemeren et al., 2014). Its central theoretical construct is an ideal model of critical discussion involving two parties advancing arguments for and against their incompatible standpoints. This is roughly the context in which Marcin Lewi?nski and Mark Aakhus are working: a relatively new interdisciplinary field, recently emancipated from formal logic, but still infused with ideas inherited from Aristotelian concepts of logic, and also dialectic and rhetoric. In Argumentation in Complex Communication, the authors applaud the progress made since the break from formal logic, but point to a "curious theory-reality gap, occasionally noticed but overall inadequately or incompletely treated" (p. 9). The gap is between the complexity of actual argumentative practice and the simplicity of models that assume a two-sided exchange over a two-sided question as paradigmatic, an idealization more associated with dialectic than with logic. According to Lewi?nski and Aakhus, attempting to analyze intrinsically complex communication by searching for dyadic disagreement misdescribes argumentation and interferes with the search for ways to improve argumentation in its natural contexts of occurrence. They call this analytic strategy "dyadic reduction" and argue that it becomes unnecessary if theorists embrace complexity and develop theory that treats it as the natural condition of argumentative discourse. One way to do that is to treat argumentative discourse as polylogical, as many-to-many rather than one-to-one or one-to-many. The book is divided into two parts. Part I ("Seeking, Seeing, and Embracing Polylogue") has four chapters. The first two are aimed at tracing the path from classical Greek thought to contemporary dyadic models of argumentation and to undermining both the model itself and an analytic strategy of dyadic reduction. Chapter 1 identifies varied sources of complexity in argumentation and explains how the simplest possible conditions for argumentation came to be treated as its ideal form. Chapter 2 attacks dyadic reduction, both in the abstract and in its expressions within prominent strands of theorizing in the field. It concludes that "Polylogue exists as a fact of communication" (p. 57) and that dyadic reduction conceals this fact and ignores its implications. These two chapters will undoubtedly be controversial, but they do not appear to be essential steps in the book's argument.
