Nature of argumentative errors and retroactive function of exemplification in the logical program of Lógica Viva

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to systematize some fundamental points of the original logic program that Carlos Vaz Ferreira suggested more than a century ago in Lógica Viva, as opposed to the so-called "classical" or "traditional" logic and, therefore, faced with the conception of fallacies as a class of clear and distinct entities necessarily locatable in verbal schemes. Specifically, I intend to reconstruct three ideas inspired by the interpretation of Seoane (2022), known and deliberately complementary to each other, namely: that (i) exemplification constitutes the main analysis tool in Vaz Ferreira's program; that (ii) the specific function of the examples in Lógica Viva refers to the opportunity to enrich the scope of the “mobile skeleton” to detect sophisms or paralogisms; and, finally, that (iii) the introduction of the examples serves, above all, to the epistemic task of expanding and reconfiguring the very field of the study of argumentation, and even for the very survival of this lucid project.