As I have said on this blog, I struggle with keeping straight the differences between some of the conventional names for objections: a rebutting defeater, a rebuttal, an undercutting defeater, a premise objection, a plain ‘vanilla’ objection, an inference objection, a premise rebuttal, an inference rebuttal, an undercutting exception, an undercutting warrant, a counterargument, etc.

These names are typically reduced to three basic types of objections: 1) the main contention is less acceptable than another contention; 2) an inference is problematic; or, 3) a premise is bad. http://io.uwinnipeg.ca/~walton/papers%20in%20pdf/04%20Godden%20Walton%20Denying%20the%20Antecedent%20ILv24.pdf. Many people struggle with applying these distinctions.

At a finer level of atomicity, using a Transitive Inference Path, there is really only an objection to a predication. And it can be divided into, in my opinion, three more useful distinctions for litigation:

  1. The objection is based on an alternate predication.
  2. The objection is based on an exception to the predication.
  3. The objection is based on the nature of the predication.

The following Transitive Inference Path illustrates these sub-categories. It is drawn from Pollock, How to Reason Defeasibly. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE&id=136684