The most basic problem that led to the other problems studied in the book was posed in Chapter 1. If you try to model the given instance of practical reasoning as a sequence of argumentation only by an argument map, you are led to a state space explosion. Throughout the subsequent chapters we have moved toward a solution to this problem by embedding practical reasoning in an overarching procedural framework in which any given sequence of practical reasoning should be viewed as a part of a deliberation dialogue having an opening stage and a closing stage. This problem led to Chapter 6, where criteria for the proper closure of a deliberation dialogue were proposed. As shown in Chapter 6, practical reasoning is most characteristically used in deliberation dialogue – goal-directed dialogue in which a choice for action needs to be made or problem needs to be solved. It was also shown in Chapter 6 that that deliberation dialogue is often mixed in with information-seeking dialogue as new evidence of the circumstances comes in. Also, as early as Chapter 2, it was shown that practical reasoning is used in persuasion dialogue – for example, in ads for medical products.

Atkinson et al. (2013) showed that there are also many shifts in a deliberation dialogue to persuasion dialogue intervals. Typically, for example, a proposal that has been put forward as part of a deliberation dialogue is attacked by a critic who shifts to a persuasion dialogue in order to attack the arguments that were used to support the proposal that was made in the deliberation dialogue. It is important to see that there is nothing inherently illegitimate about such shifts.

However, a general problem arises from the variability of different communicative multi-agent settings in which practical reasoning is used. As seen in the examples from Chapter 6, deliberation dialogue is the most important and central setting in which practical reasoning is used, and the true colors of practical reasoning as a form of argumentation really begin to emerge once we embed it into this setting. Nevertheless, we also need to confront the underlying problem that in the argumentation in natural language examples where practical reasoning is used, there so often appear to be dialectical shifts from deliberation dialogue to persuasion dialogue.