Burdens of Proof and Persuasion in Everyday Argumentation

Abstract

In law, there is a distinction between two main types of burden of proof, called the burden of persuasion and the burden of production of evidence (or evidential burden). In everyday conversational argumentation, although the burden of proof tends to be harder to pin down, we argue that a useful distinction can be drawn between a global burden of proof and an evidential (local) burden of proof, relating to a specific claim made during the course of a discussion. In this paper we identify some dialectical principles on which the allocations of both burdens are grounded.

Keywords: Burden of proof, legal reasoning, argumentation, presumption