In:Practical Theories and Empirical Practice: A linguistic perspective
Edited by Andrea C. Schalley
[Human Cognitive Processing 40] 2012
► pp. 257–272
The pragmatics of argumentation
Commitment to implicit premises
Published online: 19 December 2012
https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.40.10bec
https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.40.10bec
Argumentation in everyday life is a matter of pragmatics. A speaker who utters an assertion that is meant to be an argument is not only committed to the truth of the assertion itself and its presuppositions but also to the implicit premises that make the assertion a reasonable argument. For example, if a speaker utters an argumentum ad verecundiam “Dr XY said so”, he is committed to the truth of “Dr XY is an expert in the relevant field” among other premises. This follows from the properties of assertions alone if the commitment attributed to assertions is extended from ‘commitment to truth’ to ‘commitment to relevance’. Keywords: argumentation; assertion; commitment; implicit premises; relevance; truth
Cited by (1)
Cited by one other publication
Schumann, Andrew
2023. Argumentation tradition of traders in late antiquity. Journal of Argumentation in Context 12:2 ► pp. 159 ff.
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