This chapter introduces empirical methodologies and their application in argumentation. To grasp how empirical approaches can contribute to a better understanding of argumentative phenomena in general, a brief introduction to the topic will be given. The chapter focuses on the description of corpus/computational approaches and more importantly for this book, experimental approaches. This chapter will lay the foundation for the experimental work in the following chapters. It will emerge that experimental perspectives can provide a complementary view to theoretical considerations, especially when it comes to the persuasiveness of arguments. This chapter will also show that experimental pragmatic accounts of fallacies in general, and the straw man, are still lacking and justify why the straw man can and should consequently be investigated from an experimental pragmatic angle.