Érvekbl

Érvekbl is a conceptual framework and digital platform designed to organize, categorize, and analyze arguments. It is used in rhetoric, debate pedagogy, and critical thinking research as a structured approach to understanding argumentative components and their relationships.

The name Érvekbl combines the Hungarian word érvelés, meaning argumentation, with a suffix that suggests a catalog or collection. The term is primarily used in Hungarian-language discussions of argumentation theory, but it has been adopted by some international colleagues as a placeholder name for similar systems in cross-cultural studies of reasoning.

Core features of Érvekbl include a taxonomy of argument types such as claims, premises, warrants, backing, rebuttals, and qualifiers; a visualization tool for building argument maps; and a metadata schema for sources, credibility, and context. It promotes reproducibility by encouraging standardized tags and export formats, such as an illustrative Érvekbl-JSON, for interchange between tools and researchers.

Applications span classrooms, debate clubs, and research projects, where users can construct, compare, and critique arguments. The framework emphasizes clarity, relevance, and sufficiency of evidence, and supports automated analysis for logical structure, fallacies, and argument strength.

Limitations and criticisms focus on the potential for over-reliance on formal structures, which may obscure nuanced or rhetorical aspects of persuasion. Proponents argue that Érvekbl provides useful scaffolding for learning, evaluating, and communicating reasoning in a transparent and systematic way.