Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-8bhkd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T05:35:29.775Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

13 - The Semantics and Pragmatics of Argumentation

from Part VII - Arguing and Rejecting

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 October 2022

By
Carlotta Pavese
Edited by
Daniel Altshuler
Daniel Altshuler
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
Get access

Summary

Arguments have always played a central role within logic and philosophy. This chapter overviews recent work on the semantics and pragmatics of argumentative discourse, with particular attention to work on the semantics of argument connectives such as ‘therefore’ in discourse coherence theory and in dynamic semantics, as well as on modal analyses of ‘therefore’. A dynamic analysis of the semantics of ‘therefore’ is described, that captures both uses of ‘therefore’ in categorical arguments as well as its uses in suppositional and complex arguments. In the final section, I overview some issues that arise on the pragmatics of arguments, such as how we are to characterize the distinctive utterance force of arguments versus explanations.

Keywords

arguments’therefore’discourse coherence theorydynamic semanticsexplanation
Type
Chapter
Information
Linguistics Meets Philosophy , pp. 383 - 413
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abrusán, M. (2016). Presupposition cancellation: Explaining the ‘soft–hard’ trigger distinction. Natural Language Semantics, 24(2), 165–202.Google Scholar
Abrusán, M. (2022). Presuppositions. In Altshuler, D. (Ed.), Linguistics Meets Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Aloni, M. (2007). Free choice, modals, and imperatives. Natural Language Semantics, 15(1), 65–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aloni, M., Beaver, D., Clark, B., & Van Rooij, R. (2007). The dynamics of topic and focus. In Aloni, M., Butler, A., & Dekker, P. (Eds.), Questions in Dynamic Semantics (pp. 123–145). Leiden: Brill.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Altshuler, D. (2016). Events, States and Times: An Essay on Narrative Discourse in English. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Anderson, A. R., Belnap, N. D. Jr., & Dunn, J. M. (2017). Entailment, Vol. II: The Logic of Relevance and Necessity. Princeton: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Asher, N. (1993). Reference to Abstract Entities. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic.Google Scholar
Asher, N., & Gillies, A. (2003). Common ground, corrections, and coordination. Argumentation, 17(4), 481–512.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Asher, N., & Lascarides, A. (2003). Logics of Conversation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Asher, N., & Morreau, M. (1990). Commonsense entailment: A modal theory of nonmonotonic reasoning. In van Eijck, J. (Ed.), European Workshop on Logics in Artificial Intelligence (pp. 1–30). Berlin: Springer.Google Scholar
Austin, J. L. (1975). How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beaver, D. (1985). Presupposition and Assertion in Dynamic Semantics. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh.Google Scholar
Beaver, D. (2001). Presupposition and Assertion in Dynamic Semantics. Stanford: CSLI.Google Scholar
Beaver, D., & Krahmer, E. (2001). A partial account of presupposition projection. Journal of Logic, Language and Information, 10(2), 147.Google Scholar
Belnap, N. D. (1960). Entailment and relevance. Journal of Symbolic Logic, 25(2), 144–146.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bochvar, D. (1939). Ob odnom trehznachom iscislenii i ego primeneii k analizu paradoksov klassicskogo rassirennogo funkcional ‘nogo iscislenija’. Matematiciskij sbornik, 4(1981), 87–112.Google Scholar
Boghossian, P. (2014). What is inference? Philosophical Studies, 169(1), 1–18.Google Scholar
Bras, M., Le Draoulec, A., & Asher, N. (2009). A formal analysis of the French temporal connective ‘alors’. Oslo Studies in Language, 1(1), 149–170.Google Scholar
Bras, M., Le Draoulec, A., & Vieu, L. (2001a). French adverbial ‘puis’ between temporal structure and discourse structure. Semantic and Pragmatic Issues in Discourse and Dialogue: Experimenting with Current Theories, CRiSPI Series, 9, 109–146.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bras, M., Le Draoulec, A., & Vieu, L. (2001b). Temporal information and discourse relations in narratives: the role of French connectives ‘puis’ and ‘un peu plus tard’. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Temporal and Spatial Information Processing, Vol. 13 (pp. 7–15). Association for Computational Linguistics.Google Scholar
Brasoveanu, A. (2007). Structured Nominal and Modal Reference. PhD thesis, Rutgers University.Google Scholar
Broome, J. (2013). Rationality through Reasoning. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons.Google Scholar
Charlow, N. (2014). Logic and semantics for imperatives. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 43(4), 617–664.Google Scholar
Chierchia, G., & McConnell-Ginet, S. (2000). Meaning and Grammar: An Introduction to Semantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Del Pinal, G. (2021). Probabilistic semantics for epistemic modals: normality assumptions, conditional epistemic spaces, and the strength of ‘must’ and ‘might’. Linguistics and Philosophy, 2021, 1–42.Google Scholar
Dorr, C., & Hawthorne, J. (2013). Embedding epistemic modals. Mind, 122(488), 867–913.Google Scholar
Dung, P. M. (1995). On the acceptability of arguments and its fundamental role in nonmonotonic reasoning, logic programming and n-person games. Artificial Intelligence, 77(2), 321–357.Google Scholar
Dutilh Novaes, C. (2021). Argument and argumentation. In Zalta, E. N. (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Fall 2021 edition.Google Scholar
Elswyk, P. van (2019). Propositional anaphora. Philosophical Studies, 176(4), 1055–1075.Google Scholar
Fogal, D., Harris, D. W., & Moss, M. (2018). New Work on Speech Acts. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gillies, A. (2009). On truth-conditions for if (but not quite only if). Philosophical Review, 118(3), 325–349.Google Scholar
Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In Cole, P. & Morgan, J. (Eds.), Syntax and Semantics, Vol. 3 (pp. 43–58). New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Groenendijk, J., et al. (2003). Questions and answers: Semantics and logic. In Proceedings of the 2nd CologNET-ElsET Symposium. Questions and Answers: Theoretical and Applied Perspectives (pp. 16–23). Utrecht: Universiteit Utrecht.Google Scholar
Groenendijk, J. A. G., & Stokhof, M. J. (1982). Semantic analysis of wh-complements. Linguistics and Philosophy, 5, 175–233.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hacquard, V., & Wellwood, A. (2012). Embedding epistemic modals in English: A corpus-based study. Semantics and Pragmatics, 5: 4–1.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hamblin, C. (1970). Fallacies. London: Methuen.Google Scholar
Heim, I. (1983). On the projection problem for presuppositions. In Portner, P. & Partee, B. H. (Eds.), Formal Semantics: The Essential Readings (pp. 249–260). Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Heim, J., Keupdjio, H., Lam, Z. W.-M., Osa-Gómez, A., Thoma, S., & Wiltschko, M. (2016). Intonation and particles as speech act modifiers: A syntactic analysis. Studies in Chinese Linguistics, 37(2), 109–129.Google Scholar
Hempel, C. G. (1962). Deductive-nomological vs. statistical explanation. Critica, 1(3), 120–127.Google Scholar
Hobbs, J. R. (1985). On the Coherence and Structure of Discourse. Stanford: CSLI.Google Scholar
Horn, L. (1972). The Semantics of Logical Operators in English. Dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles.Google Scholar
Horn, L. (1985). Metalinguistic negation and pragmatic ambiguity. Language, 61(1), 121–174.Google Scholar
Incurvati, L., & Schlöder, J. J. (2019). Weak assertion. The Philosophical Quarterly, 69(277), 741–770.Google Scholar
Jasinskaja, K., & Karagjosova, E. (2020). Rhetorical relations. In Matthewson, L., Meier, C., Rullmann, H., Zimmermann, T. E., & Gutzmann, D. (Eds.), The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Semantics (pp. 1–29). Chichester: Wiley.Google Scholar
Karttunen, L. (1973). Presuppositions of compound sentences. Linguistic Inquiry, 4(2), 169–193.Google Scholar
Karttunen, L. (1974). Presupposition and linguistic context. Theoretical Linguistics, 1, 181–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kaufmann, S. (2000). Dynamic context management. In Faller, M., Kaufmann, S., & Pauly, M. (Eds.), Formalizing the Dynamics of Information, pages 171–188. Stanford: CSLI.Google Scholar
Kehler, A. (2002). Coherence, Reference, and the Theory of Grammar. Stanford: CSLI.Google Scholar
Kocurek, W. A., & Pavese, C. (2021). The dynamics of argumentative discourse. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 51(2), 413–456.Google Scholar
Koralus, P., & Mascarenhas, S. (2013). The erotetic theory of reasoning: Bridges between formal semantics and the psychology of deductive inference. Philosophical Perspectives, 27, 312–365.Google Scholar
Kratzer, A. (1977). What ‘must’ and ‘can’ must and can mean. Linguistics and Philosophy, 1(3), 337–355.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kratzer, A. (2002). The notional category of modality. In Portner, P. & Partee, B. H. (Eds.), Formal Semantics: The Essential Readings (pp. 289–323). Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Krifka, M. (2013). Response particles as propositional anaphors. Semantics and Linguistic Theory, 23, 1–18.Google Scholar
Le Draoulec, A., & Bras, M. (2007). ‘Alors’ as a possible temporal connective in discourse. In de Saussure, L., Moeschler, J., & Puskas, G. (Eds.), Tense, Mood and Aspect (pp. 81–94). Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Lewis, D. (1972). General semantics. In Davidson, D. & Harman, G. (Eds.), Semantics of natural language (pp. 169–218). Dordrecht: Springer.Google Scholar
Longino, H. (1978). Inferring. Philosophy Research Archives, 4, 17–26.Google Scholar
MacColl, H. (1908). ‘If’ and ‘Imply’. Mind, 17(67), 453–455.Google Scholar
Mandelkern, M. (2016). Dissatisfaction theory. Semantics and Linguistic Theory, 26, 391–416.Google Scholar
Mercier, H., & Sperber, D. (2011). Why do humans reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory. Behaviorial and Brain Sciences, 34(2), 57–74.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Meyer, J.-J. C., & van der Hoek, W. (1993). A default logic based on epistemic states. In European Conference on Symbolic and Quantitative Approaches to Reasoning and Uncertainty (pp. 265–273). Cham: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morreau, M. (1992). Epistemic semantics for counterfactuals. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 21(1), 33–62.Google Scholar
Murray, S. (2014). Varieties of update. Semantics and Pragmatics, 7, 2–1.Google Scholar
Murray, S., & Starr, W. (2018). Force and conversational states. In Fogal, D., Harris, D., & Moss, M. (Eds.), New Work on Speech Acts (pp. 202–236). New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Murray, S., & Starr, W. (2020). The structure of communicative acts. Linguistics and Philosophy, 44(2), 425–474.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Needham, S. M. (2012). Propositional Anaphora in English: The Relationship between ‘So’ and Discourse. PhD thesis, Carleton University.Google Scholar
Neta, R. (2013). What is an inference? Philosophical Issues, 23(1), 388–407.Google Scholar
Papafragou, A. (2006). Epistemic modality and truth conditions. Lingua, 116(10), 1688–1702.Google Scholar
Parsons, J. (2011). Cognitivism about imperatives. Analysis, 72(1), 49–54.Google Scholar
Parsons, J. (2013). Command and consequence. Philosophical Studies, 164(1), 61–92.Google Scholar
Parsons, T. (1996). What is an argument? The Journal of Philosophy, 93(4), 164–185.Google Scholar
Pavese, C. (2017). On the meaning of “therefore”. Analysis, 77(1), 88–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pavese, C. (2021). Lewis Carroll’s regress and the presuppositional structure of arguments. Linguistics and Philosophy, 45(1), 1–38.Google Scholar
Pearson, H. (2010). A modification of the ‘hey, wait a minute’ test. Snippets, 22, 7–8.Google Scholar
Pollock, J. (1987). Defeasible reasoning. Cognitive Science, 11(4), 481–518.Google Scholar
Pollock, J. (1991a). Self-defeating arguments. Minds and Machines, 1(4), 367–392.Google Scholar
Pollock, J. (1991b). A theory of defeasible reasoning. International Journal of Intelligent Systems, 6(1), 33–54.Google Scholar
Pollock, J. (2010). Defeasible reasoning and degrees of justification. Argument and Computation, 1(1), 7–22.Google Scholar
Portner, P. (2004). The semantics of imperatives within a theory of clause types. Semantics and Linguistic Theory, 14, 235–252.Google Scholar
Portner, P. (2007). Imperatives and modals. Natural Language Semantics, 15(4), 351–383.Google Scholar
Potts, C. (2007). Into the conventional-implicature dimension. Philosophy Compass, 2(4), 665–679.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Potts, C. (2015). Presupposition and implicature. The Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory, 2, 168–202.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Prakken, H. (2010). An abstract framework for argumentation with structured arguments. Argument and Computation, 1(2), 93–124.Google Scholar
Railton, P. (1978). A deductive-nomological model of probabilistic explanation. Philosophy of Science, 45(2), 206–226.Google Scholar
Roberts, C. (1996). Information structure in discourse: Towards an integrated formal theory of pragmatics. In Yoon, J.-H. & Kathol, A. (Eds.), OSU Working Papers in Linguistics, Vol 49: Papers in Semantics. Columbus: The Ohio State University.Google Scholar
Rumfitt, I. (2015). The Boundary Stones of Thought: An Essay in the Philosophy of Logic. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Schwager, M. (2006). Conditionalized imperatives. Semantics and Linguistic Theory, 16, 241–258.Google Scholar
Searle, J., & Vanderveken, D. (1985). Foundations of Illocutionary Logic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Stalnaker, R. (1978). Assertion. In Portner, P. & Partee, B. H. (Eds.), Formal Semantics: The Essential Readings (pp. 147–161). Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Starr, W. (2014a). A uniform theory of conditionals. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 43(6), 1019–1064.Google Scholar
Starr, W. (2014b). What ‘if’? Philosophers’ Imprint, 14(10), 1–27.Google Scholar
Starr, W. (2020). A preference semantics for imperatives. Semantics and Pragmatics, 13(6), http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/sp.13.6Google Scholar
Stojnić, U. (2022). Anatomy of arguments in natural language discourse. In Lepore, E. & Sosa, D. (Eds.), Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Language (pp. 184–233). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Stokke, A. (2017). Conventional implicature, presupposition, and lying. Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, 91(1), 127–147.Google Scholar
Vaassen, B., & Sandgren, A. (2021). And therefore. Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2021.2010430Google Scholar
van Eemeren, F., & Grootendorst, R. (1982). The speech acts of arguing and convincing in externalized discussions. Journal of Pragmatics, 6(1), 1–24.Google Scholar
van Eemeren, F., & Grootendorst, R. (2004). A Systematic Theory of Argumentation: The Pragma-Dialectical Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Veltman, F. (1985). Logics for Conditionals. PhD thesis, University of Amsterdam.Google Scholar
Veltman, F. (1996). Defaults in update semantics. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 25(3), 221–261.Google Scholar
von Fintel, K., & Gillies, A. (2007). An opinionated guide to epistemic modality. In Gendler, T. S. & Hawthorne, J. (Eds.), Oxford Studies in Epistemology, 2 (pp. 32–62). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
von Fintel, K., & Gillies, A. (2010). Must… stay… strong! Natural Language Semantics, 18(4), 351–383.Google Scholar
Walton, D. (1990). What is reasoning? What is an argument? The Journal of Philosophy, 87(8), 399–419.Google Scholar
Wan, H., Grosof, B., Kifer, M., Fodor, P., & Liang, S. (2009). Logic programming with defaults and argumentation theories. In International Conference on Logic Programming (pp. 432–448). Berlin: Springer.Google Scholar
Wayne, D. (2014). Implicature. In Zalta, E. N. (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2019/entries/implicature/Google Scholar
Westmoreland, R. (1998). Information and Intonation in Natural Language Modality. PhD thesis, Indiana University.Google Scholar
Weydert, E. (1995). Default entailment. In Annual Conference on Artificial Intelligence (pp. 173–184). Berlin: Springer.Google Scholar
Willer, M. (2013). Dynamics of epistemic modality. Philosophical Review, 122(1), 45–92.Google Scholar
Yalcin, S. (2005). A puzzle about epistemic modals. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics, 51, 231–272.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×