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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
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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
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Chapter
Information
Linguistics Meets Philosophy , pp. 383 - 413
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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