The Pragmatics and Argumentation Interface

1. Pragmatic Insights into Argumentation: Some Pointers

It can be argued that linguistic aspects of argumentation have attracted scholarly attention ever since the foundation of rhetoric, which originally developed as the study of means of persuasion, and thus, to a fair extent, that linguistics plays an important role in the study of argumentation at large. Given that argumentation is a communicative activity which is predominantly verbal—even if multimodal aspects of argumentation are increasingly being recognised as playing a fundamental role in argumentative practices (see, e.g., Kjeldsen 2015; Tseronis and Forceville 2017; Tseronis and Pollaroli 2018)—it is only natural for the study of verbal resources to be included in rhetoric and argumentation studies. This also means that, presumably, all areas of inquiry in linguistics are potentially relevant to the study of argumentation as well. This Special Issue focuses on one domain of linguistic inquiry, namely pragmatics, and on the various ways in which it has been interfaced with argumentation theory. As such, it showcases current work at this interface and fully contributes to what could be dubbed a linguistic turn in argumentation theory, which can be said to have found its first scholarly expression in the work of Oswald Ducrot, Jean-Claude Anscombre, and their colleagues (Anscombre and Ducrot 1983; Ducrot 1980; Ducrot et al. 1980). More contemporarily, an important number of monographs, collective volumes, and Special Issues published over the last decade testify to the growing importance of linguistic aspects of argumentation (amongst which, prominently, Bermejo Luque and Moldovan 2021; Boogaart et al. 2021; Herman et al. 2018; Herman and Oswald 2014; Hinton 2021, 2023; Lewiński et al. 2023; Oswald et al. 2018, 2020; Pollaroli et al. 2019).

As a consolidated field of study, pragmatics, in its inferential tradition, owes a great deal to two foundational approaches: speech act theory (Austin 1962; Searle 1969) and Grice’s analysis of speaker meaning and conversation (Grice 1975, 1989). Austin was the first to try to develop a coherent theory to describe the praxeological nature of our talk exchanges (saying is doing) in his coining of the performative nature of communication, while Grice gave prominence to the idea that communication is a matter of intention recognition, with successful communication being described as the situation in which the speaker’s communicative intentions are recognised by their addressees. Both approaches offer crucial insights into the nature of our communicative practices and supply theoretical and conceptual apparatuses that allow for descriptively and explanatorily complex accounts. Speech act theory has been developed not only to tackle what language users do as they communicate, but also to provide a principled account of the norms and conditions under which these undertakings are said to conventionally express meaning and to allow for successful communicative exchanges. Grice’s account, to some extent, can be taken to adopt a similar perspective, as it also incorporates the idea that talk exchanges function according to some identifiable principles. However, Grice explores the way meaning is intentionally managed by conversationalists in terms of a form of cooperation and, more fundamentally, in a way that captures (and clearly articulates an account of) linguistic underdeterminacy, namely the fact that there is a gap between what speakers say and what they mean. Being rooted in ‘ordinary language philosophy’, both approaches are concerned with the reality of talk exchanges more than with abstract and formal systems of meaning, and this is also one of the reasons why both approaches have been so appealing to argumentation scholars.

It is thus no coincidence that both of these foundational pragmatic approaches have played a fundamental role in the development of argumentation theory for the past half century (see Oswald 2023 for a detailed overview); not only do these approaches offer theoretical frameworks to construe human communication, they also supply an inventory of concepts to account for a variety of communicative phenomena. This makes available a set of descriptive, normative, and explanatory tools that can be readily exploited to account for any phenomenon qualifying as communicative, argumentation included. Speech act theory has therefore been used, amongst other things, to define what argumentation consists of and has been interpreted as a speech act in itself (Bermejo Luque 2011; van Eemeren and Grootendorst 1984); Grice’s model has been used to assess the cooperativeness of argumentation (Goodwin 2001; Govier 2018; Walton 1998), to describe arguers’ reliance on and management of commitments and presumptions (Kauffeld 2001, 2003, 2009; Lewiński 2017; Macagno 2012; Moldovan 2016), but also to contribute insights to rhetorical research questions related to the study of persuasion (Dascal and Gross 1999; Tindale 1992, 2015). Yet other frameworks of the inferential pragmatic blend have been solicited to contribute insights to the study of argumentation, notably in relation to the argumentative reconstruction of communicated material that arguers have left implicit (Becker 2012; Gerritsen 2001; Oswald 2016).

In the past five years, speech act theory has seen many new developments, as philosophers of language have started to use it as a framework to assess socially significant discursive phenomena such as deception, hate speech, and various discriminatory discursive practices. The framework’s construal of communication as a practical unfolding in which principles and norms and are at play, with actual consequences in the real world in terms of social relationships, has turned it into an unavoidable theoretical resource to account for the abovementioned phenomena (see Fogal et al. 2018 for several examples of how speech act theory may be used in contemporary philosophy). It turns out that these developments are also extremely relevant when it comes to considering argumentative practices. A recent Special Issue of Topoi (Lewiński et al. 2023) showcases precisely the kind of fruitful insights that a pragmatic framework such as speech act theory may contribute to argumentation theory, through the analysis of various normative aspects of disputes and reasoning. In short, speech act theory is nowadays perhaps the most sought-after pragmatic companion to deal with specific argumentation theory concerns.

Other pragmatic frameworks have been recruited to address research questions in the field of argumentation theory, especially when it comes to analysing argumentation as a structured communicative activity. Two of the main assumptions of the normative pragmatic approach to argumentation (see, e.g., Goodwin and Innocenti 2019; Innocenti 2022; Jacobs 2000; Jacobs and Jackson 1982; Kauffeld 1998; van Eemeren et al. 1993; Weger and Aakhus 2005) are (i) that argumentative reality is emergent, that is, it is constituted through interaction, and that (ii) argumentative moves, even if they may be seen as individual, are the fruit of collaborative productions. Classical conversation analytic considerations (Sacks et al. 1974) are quite valuable in this endeavour to account for the reality of argumentative exchanges and offer useful methodological starting points to explore the way argumentative exchanges are sequenced and structured across talk exchanges and through various conversational moves.

The overlap between argumentation theory and pragmatics is, to say the least, significant: not only do they share similar objects of study (the set of argumentative practices is a subset of the set of communicative practices) and theoretical notions (inference, commitment, meaning, etc.), they also have been combined in argumentation scholarship, as seen in what precedes, to further our knowledge of argumentative practices (see also Oswald 2023). All this testifies to the overwhelming relevance of pragmatic theory for argumentation studies.

2. This Special Issue

It might be useful for readers to be aware of a number of considerations and challenges that emerged during the preparation of this Special Issue, in terms of both finding organisational principles to structure it content-wise and in terms of its significance for both scholarly communities, i.e., pragmaticians and argumentation scholars.

Let me first address issues of structure. The seventeen contributions that appear in what follows all address the pragmatics and argumentation interface, sometimes from one single perspective, sometimes from various perspectives simultaneously, which makes it difficult to generate a satisfactory order of appearance justified beyond discussion. An obvious organising principle, given the theme of this Special Issue, would have been to split contributions according to the direction of the interface they chose to explore, as, indeed, some contributions tackle the way pragmatic research has contributed (or can contribute further) to argumentation studies, while others also make room for the reverse direction, which considers not only what pragmatics can do for argumentation theory but also what argumentation theory can do for pragmatics. However, such a division would have created structural imbalance, as thirteen papers could be considered to explore the first option (de Oliveira Fernandes & Oswald, Jacobs et al., Luginbühl & Müller-Feldmeth, Smolka, Schumann, Moldovan, Kauffeld & Goodwin, Godden, Casey, Tindale, Ilie, Popa, and Hautli-Janisz et al.), and only four (Macagno, Lewiński, Herman, Gobbo et al.) to explore to some extent the bi-directionality of the relationship between pragmatics and argumentation. Another option would have been to structure this Special Issue based on the specific aspect of the interface that is discussed, from methodological integrations to practical, conceptual, and theoretical ones. But there, too, the task proved to be overly challenging as many papers contribute to more than one of these levels. Rather than producing an artificial and ill-justified structure, I therefore opted for an alphabetical order of appearance. Incidentally, I believe that the difficulty I experienced in trying to identify a coherent and justified structure for this Special Issue is a direct reflection of the richness of the pragmatics and argumentation interface: the range of overlapping dimensions between the two disciplines, from methodological considerations to purely theoretical ones, demonstrates how much the two disciplines have in common, and it therefore comes as no surprise that virtually all contributors have addressed different aspects of the interface in their work.

Second, it may be useful for readers to get a sense of the kind of readership that might be interested in the contents of this Special Issue. Argumentation scholars are amongst the most obvious intended readers of the Special Issue, given that most contributions discuss chiefly argumentative phenomena (e.g., ethos, fallacies), contexts of argumentation (e.g., disagreement and conflict), and research questions (e.g., the persuasive nature of arguments). Yet, pragmaticians are also catered for, as many contributions assess the argumentative implications, properties, and features of inherently pragmatic phenomena (such as commitment, authority, presumptions, various kinds of implicit meaning, reported speech, question–answer pairs, etc.). Thus, while the majority of contributions explore the interface by taking pragmatics as a starting point to deal with argumentation theory research questions, at the same time, the nature and scope of the discussions conducted in the papers forming this Special Issue will make pragmaticians feel at home, specifically because all authors have been asked to provide some thoughts on the significance of their own contribution in the study of the pragmatics and argumentation interface.

3. Acknowledgements

Before I succinctly present each contribution, I would briefly like to express my gratitude to many colleagues whose work was essential in the completion of this Special Issue and to highlight one specific feature of the latter. After I issued the call for papers, I was fortunate to be contacted by Jean Goodwin, who is the literary executor of the late Fred Kauffeld, and who took on the task of submitting an unpublished manuscript of Fred’s for consideration in this Special Issue. I am honoured to have had the opportunity to see this posthumous work appear here, and to have had the chance to pay tribute to Fred Kauffeld’s work by publishing another submitted contribution, by David Godden, who kindly took the opportunity to discuss Fred’s work and scholarly engage with it, which, in a way, perpetuates Fred’s thought. I would therefore like to express my heartfelt gratitude to Jean Goodwin for trusting me with this editorial project and for entrusting me with the responsibility of further disseminating Fred Kauffeld’s valuable work at the pragmatics and argumentation interface. I would furthermore like to express my sincere gratitude to the authors of all contributions, who allowed me to showcase their work in this Special Issue and trusted me in the editorial process. I am also very indebted to the thirty-eight reviewers who kindly agreed to engage with all the submissions I received, whose thorough and objective input allowed us to guarantee the scholarly quality and academic rigour which characterises all contributions.1 I am both utterly grateful for and incredibly humbled by the support that so many colleagues in my scholarly community have lent me, both as authors and as reviewers, in the preparation of this Special Issue.

4. Presentation of the Contributions to this Special Issue

In “Beliefs, Commitments, and Ad Baculum Arguments”, John Casey offers an enlightening account of the ad baculum argument which considers that its effectiveness in argumentative settings only indirectly has to do with the threat it expresses; rather, its appeal is to be found in the downstream consequences of the ad baculum having been performed, and, crucially, on an audience that is different from the target of the threat. Casey’s novel analysis of this particular fallacy is highly original in its consideration of a more global communicative picture in which “arguments are fundamentally meant to outlive our encounters”. Under this view, while the target’s commitments are affected by the ad baculum (they are adopting a (verbal) behaviour that is consistent with avoiding the negative consequence expressed in the threat), their beliefs are not, as no one can be compelled to believe something by force. Yet, crucially, the beliefs of the target’s subsequent audience down the line may very well be affected by the target’s constrained behaviour. This way, at this additional—and independent—conversational stage, a third party might take the target’s commitments as evidence for something and end up forming beliefs based on the latter. On these grounds, the author of an ad baculum fallacy may be said to ultimately aim for a non-present audience that is different from the direct recipient of the threat. In his account, Casey offers a fundamental insight for the study of fallacies that are relevant to the pragmatics and argumentation interface: the complete communicative situation, including down-the-line repercussions on different audiences (and beyond merely propositional concerns), needs to be carefully considered in the way we account for argumentative phenomena.

Daniel de Oliveira Fernandes and Steve Oswald’s paper explores the interface between pragmatics and argumentation by considering the impact of different types of implicit meaning on different types of rhetorical effects. On the rhetorical front and drawing on classical rhetoric but going beyond the Aristotelian rhetorical triangle (ethos, logos, pathos), their paper discusses an open list of rhetorical effects affecting speakers, audiences, messages, and the conversational flow of interaction. On the pragmatic front, the paper accounts for how specific features of different types of implicit meaning (presupposition, implicature, and back-door speech acts) are likely to trigger specific rhetorical effects. Drawing on different strands of research in rhetoric, cognitive science, linguistics, and pragmatics, the authors justify the rhetorical appeal of implicit meaning and highlight that an experimental study of rhetorical effects, as mediated by pragmatic meaning, has much to offer, as it has the potential to substantiate existing theoretical claims about the effects of various verbal resources (irony, metaphor, and more generally different types of pragmatic phenomena) with empirical evidence while simultaneously providing researchers with the tools to document the impact of linguistic manipulations on argumentative practices. All in all, this contribution seeks to consolidate already existing bridges between pragmatics and argumentation by exploring how experimental methodologies coupled with pragmatic accounts may assist the investigation of research questions in argumentation theory and rhetoric.

Federico Gobbo, Marco Benini, and Jean Wagemans’s contribution is devoted to the way reported speech, a typically pragmatic object of study, can be used but also represented in argumentative discourse. The specificity of the model put forward, known as the framework of adpositional argumentation, lies in its ability to capture not only purely argumentative structures but also informative structures which are not part, strictly speaking, of the justificatory relationship between premises and standpoints, but which may end up playing a role in argumentative discourse in which participants voice other participants’ views. The graphical representation of argumentative contributions in terms of adpositional trees developed therein furthermore allows the analyst to represent evidential information on sources of information to facilitate processes of commitment attribution at the analytical level. The model presented by the authors brings one clear methodological improvement to the table: it allows to trace, in a very precise way, where exactly differences in the interpretation of argumentative discourse are located, and thus to settle interpretative disputes based on a rigorous framework for argument representation. Accordingly, while the paper tackles the pragmatics and argumentation interface in terms of how reported speech (or relata refero) may be argumentatively exploited, it also explores the methodological implications of working at this particular interface through a systematic assessment of various types of reported speech and ways to graphically represent it.

David Godden’s paper offers a carefully crafted discussion of the normativity of presumptions as they are managed by arguers in argumentative exchanges. For presumptions to play a fruitful role in argumentation, Godden notes, they need to be both well founded (i.e., they should be valid and methodologically adapted to argumentation) and effective (i.e., they should be accessible to arguers and have binding force over their conversational behaviour). However, two different perspectives are nowadays available regarding the relationship between the well foundedness and the effectiveness of these norms. While Whatelian accounts hold that norms governing the use of presumptions in argumentation derive their effectiveness from their well foundedness, the view articulated by Kauffeld reverses the order of explanation by holding that it is the binding force of extra-argumentative commitments (i.e., their effectiveness) that is used to generate normatively well-founded presumptive inferences. Under Godden’s analysis, Kauffeld’s account postulates the primacy of non-argumentative domains of normativity, while Whatelian accounts hold that there are argumentation-specific norms, and this is highly consequential on how presumptions are used, handled, and responded to in argumentative exchanges. Ultimately, Godden argues, Kauffeld’s account stands out as the winner in the comparison because it is based on pre-existing normative structures of obligation, motivation, and accountability which are harnessed in particular ways when communicators engage in argumentative practices. This contribution constitutes yet another example in which pragmatic frameworks are likely to supply decisive insights meant to elucidate research questions with much currency in argumentation–theoretic domains.

The paper by Annette Hautli-Janisz, Katarzyna Budzynska, and Chris Reed starts from the assumption that many argumentative relations are implicitly conveyed and from the recognition that, despite their absence from the linguistic surface, implicit contents serve numerous purposes in argumentative exchanges, from structuring inferences to persuading audiences. Yet, as they are implicit, these contents are difficult to study via corpus and computational methods, which are bound to take the linguistic surface of text as input. To start exploring the realm of implicitness in argumentation, the authors thus chose to focus on the relatively understudied category of conventional implicatures (CIs), as the latter are indeed anchored on the linguistic surface and appear to be relatively stable meaning-wise. Specifically, the paper considers the way CIs can contribute to trigger, compose, and demolish arguments, both at the level of the text and at the (ethotic) level of arguers. What is at stake in this study is, accordingly, the particular role of CIs as a key resource for argumentative moves. While this paper stands out from the set of papers composing this Special Issue because of its computational focus, it meets the others and offers an original take on the theme of the Special Issue as it relies, like others, on linguistic, pragmatic, and semantic resources to further investigate argumentative practices.

The intricate link between pragmatics and rhetoric is at the core of Thierry Herman’s important piece on ethos, which, in a way, can be taken as prolonging some fundamental assumptions alluded to by Moldovan (see below), notably in what regards the idea that ethos, the image one has of a speaker, is the result of inferential work, and as such, it is amenable to a pragmatic treatment. Herman’s starting point is that, while they are typologically very rich and detailed, existing accounts of ethos seldom offer explanations as to how speaker image is generated and conveyed through discourse. The originality of this contribution resides in its adoption of a cognitive pragmatic framework such as relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1995; Wilson and Sperber 2012) to account not only for the inferential nature of ethotic representations, but also for their various types and subtypes, which vary along their pragmatic embedding. Notably, and in relation to the question of whether ethotic assumptions are intentionally or unintentionally conveyed in talk exchanges, Herman highlights that while it would be problematic to classify inferences on ethos as straightforward conversational implicatures, their implicit nature together with their propensity to being triggered by discursive moves makes them ideal elements belonging to the “grey area” of pragmatics which contain various types of weak communication (such as weak implicatures). For Herman, ethos is the fruit of an inference which accordingly needs to be assessed in cognitive terms. Because it transposes the rhetorical study of ethos into pragmatic research, this novel approach to ethos is a perfect example of one way in which the pragmatics and argumentation interface can constitute a mutually fruitful integration.

In her contribution, titled “How to argue with questions and answers: argumentation strategies in parliamentary deliberations”, Cornelia Ilie tackles a typically pragmatic phenomenon, namely question–answer pairs, and demonstrates the complex ways in which these may be used beyond their information-eliciting function at the pragmatic, argumentative, and rhetorical levels. From a pragmatic perspective, questions and answers are shown to be constrained by the speakers’ commitments, beliefs, and by various contextual factors which explain their fundamental structuring role in the interaction they are part of. From an argumentative perspective, Ilie describes the argumentative potential of questions and answers, which are used to challenge, shift the direction of deliberation, refute claims, divert attention, etc., and which allow arguers to navigate different levels of argumentativeness as well as different points on the normative scale of argumentative fallaciousness. One interesting finding emerging from the analysis of her corpus is that while questions typically perform face-threatening functions, answers tend to remain either evasive or opportunities for counter-speech. Yet, beyond these tendencies, the analysis also reveals that, in terms of the relationship between form and function, the questions and answers used in UK parliamentary debate do not exhibit one-to-one correspondences: indeed, questions and answers are likely to fulfil different functions, what is more to varying degrees. All in all, this paper illustrates the richness of the pragmatics and argumentation interface through an analysis of the argumentative affordances of pragmatic phenomena.

The paper by Scott Jacobs, Sally Jackson, and Xiaoqi Zhang adopts a conversation analytic stance in its normative pragmatic analysis of a press conference given by Donald Trump, in which they show how the former PotUS is pressed by reporters to gradually construct a standpoint on the Charlottesville protests by neo-Nazis and White nationalists. Instead of assuming, like mainstream argumentation theory predominantly does, that standpoints and positions are well-defined and speaker-bound, they highlight how argumentative material can be negotiated in discourse throughout exchanges and emphasise the emergent character of argumentative structures and contents. Their analysis clearly showcases how even the formulation of a standpoint, which we could presume to be unproblematically identified, can end up being the result of an interactive dialogical and, what is more, argumentative process. With this detailed case study, the authors demonstrate that pragmatic research has much to say about the use of argumentative resources by arguers, provided the analysis makes room for temporal, dynamic, and interactional processes deployed by arguers when they engage with these argumentative resources. This contribution thus clearly showcases the importance of pragmatic research in the study of research questions related to the field of argumentation.

In this posthumous article based on an unfinished paper and associated notes of the late Fred Kauffeld, Jean Goodwin offers an edited rendering of Kauffeld’s thoughts on the way speech act theory may be harnessed to account for argumentative issues related to arguers’ responsibilities, commitments, and obligations. This contribution is thus methodological in nature as it compares the merit of two distinct pragmatic takes on the speech acts involved in argumentation. Specifically, Kauffeld contrasts the rule-constituted view (inspired by classical Austinian work on illocutionary acts and their associated felicity conditions) and the pragmatic view of illocutionary acts (which includes a larger proportion of Gricean insights). With a full account of the advantages of the latter view, amongst which its ability to help designing better norms and assignment of responsibilities for improved real-life argumentative practices (which the rule-constituted view arguably cannot do), Kauffeld brings to the fore the important idea that any account of argumentation couched in a pragmatic framework (here heavily infused with the Gricean blend of pragmatics) must explain how important argumentative responsibilities and commitments are generated and why it is important to discharge them for successful argumentative interactions. In this piece, pragmatic frameworks are shown to provide fundamental insights for two properly argumentation–theoretic research purposes: (i) better understanding what is at stake in argumentative exchanges, and (ii) contributing to design better argumentative practices that actually—and normatively—work in our institutions.

Marcin Lewiński’s pragmatic study of authority is a fine example of the recent revival speech act theory has started to undergo over the last five years (see Fogal et al. 2018), through which classical speech act–theoretic tools are harnessed to deal with public discursive phenomena beyond assertion, such as argumentation, hate speech, discrimination, deception, etc. With a pragmatic starting point rooted in speech act theory, Lewiński thus considers how the notion of authority is managed (i.e., established and challenged) in argumentative settings as a case in point. He draws a crucial distinction to better characterise the kind of argumentative options at the arguers’ disposal in the negotiation of authority: arguments to authority (through which authority is established) should indeed be distinguished from arguments from authority (which draw the truth of some proposition from being uttered by an authoritative speaker). To show the connection between these two schemes, Lewiński links the argument from authority to the argument to authority through a presuppositional relation between the conclusion of the latter (‘E is an expert’) to one of the premises of the former (‘Expert E says so’). One of the crucial advantages of this complex scheme is that it fully exploits the resourcefulness of pragmatic theory to explain the different ways in which authority may be challenged: that way, beyond locutionary and perlocutionary challenges, one can now identify illocutionary challenges that can be relevant to probe the authority of a speaker. In terms of the pragmatics and argumentation interface, this contribution clearly illustrates how a typically argumentation–theoretic research question (how can authority be challenged through arguments?) stands to gain from a pragmatic treatment (here drawing on speech act theory). The upshot of this kind of interfacing endeavour is quite appealing as well as it shows how argumentation theory, which is rigorously equipped to deal with inference, may be of assistance in the investigation of pragmatic inferential phenomena.

In their paper, Martin Luginbühl and Daniel Müller-Feldmeth conduct a corpus analysis of unsupervised peer discussions between schoolchildren to shed light on different pragmatically significant levels, aspects, and features of oral argumentation skills. Their conversation–analytic study highlights the eminently interactional and procedural nature of oral argumentation, whose study in turn requires a focus on the interactional skills displayed in argumentative encounters. These encompass phenomena like the negotiability of justificatory moves as well as, amongst others, processes of epistemic positioning and disagreement management. From the analysis emerges the idea that the personal and social dimension of interaction is prominently at play in oral argumentation; this finding is drawn from the identification of various textualisation and marking strategies young arguers are shown to display. The authors also document the ability of children to display some awareness, and most importantly some practical knowledge, of the role of argumentation in the task that they are carrying out, as they are observed to make use of argumentative resources in their discussions. While the pragmatic import of the contribution is evident in the conversational–analytic treatment of argumentation as a process (which is structured, sequenced, interactional), its argumentative import lies in an enhanced description of the features of the argumentative product itself (i.e., the children’s conversations), a description which, as the authors note, can only be improved by incorporating concepts and tools from argumentation theory, thereby hinting at the complementary direction of fit embedded in the pragmatics and argumentation interface (i.e., from argumentation to pragmatics).

In “Ignoring Qualifications as a Pragmatic Fallacy: Enrichments and Their Use for Manipulating Commitments”, Fabrizio Macagno articulates a novel analysis of the secundum quid et simpliciter fallacy, which consists of ignoring qualifications that make a general statement inapplicable to a particular case. While the traditional logical and dialectical accounts have analysed the fallacy as an inductive error presenting qualified generalisations as universal ones, Macagno notes that these accounts do not cover relatively standard cases of the fallacy that are hardly interpretable in terms of hasty generalisation. Macagno articulates instead a novel pragmatic account of secundum quid which describes it as a fallacy of misrepresentation of speaker meaning, tampering with the inferential dimension of comprehension as well as with presumptive meanings of the utterance it misrepresents. In a nutshell, the secundum quid fallacy is characterised as a fallacy of commitment misattribution. Regarding the pragmatics and argumentation theory interface, Macagno’s contribution is two-directional. On the one hand, it draws on classical inferential pragmatic research on both explicature (saturation, modulation, narrowing, loosening, ad hoc concepts amongst others) and presumptive meanings to illustrate how pragmatics can be beneficial to exploring fully argumentative research questions such as the description of fallacies. On the other hand, it showcases how research in argumentation theory around the notion of presumptive reasoning can be exploited in accounting for interpretation, which is typically a pragmatic task.

Andrei Moldovan, in his article titled “Technical Language as Evidence of Expertise”, discusses a very specific type of argumentative move with ethotic significance, which consists of using technical jargon as evidence of one’s own expertise. Dubbed by Moldovan nonaccommodative use of technical language, this argumentative strategy has not received much attention in argumentation theory or in epistemology. In this contribution, the author discusses (i) its pragmatic nature, (ii) the quality of the evidence it supplies, and (iii) its persuasive power. The truly pragmatic import of the contribution lies in the first of these aspects, namely its ontological dimension, which essentially involves getting the addressee to infer that the speaker is competent. Now, Moldovan shows that, unlike most known types of implication (from semantic entailments to various types of implicature), this particular use of language cannot be equated with a speech act of arguing; instead, he argues that in some cases, namely those in which there is a manifest intention to have the audience recognise that the use of technical language is deliberate, the utterance can count as an argumentative move (though not as an argument per se). In cases in which this intention is not manifest, then the nonaccommodative use of technical language becomes merely a persuasive move. In so doing, Moldovan showcases how a Gricean analysis of speaker meaning, which layers meaning across different types of intentions, including a reflective intention, can play out in an account of conversational contributions with clear argumentative import. At the same time, this contribution brings to the surface evident links between pragmatic analyses of meaning and rhetorical phenomena, such as ethos.

Eugen Popa tackles one of the most fundamental assumptions of argumentation theory in his “Revisiting the relationship between arguing and convincing: towards a new pragmatic account”, by discussing whether arguing may indeed lead to convincing. Popa identifies a paradox that would likely negatively answer this question, and which originates from the following two scenarios: (i) if arguers share too much common ground (i.e., their knowledge set is practically the same), then it is unlikely that they will ever disagree, and thus no change of mind is even possible through argumentation; (ii) if arguers share too little common ground, then it is unlikely that one party will convince the other, as this would represent too large a shift in the recipient’s knowledge set (as in cases of deep disagreement). In order to move away from this paradoxical situation, Popa proposes that argumentation, instead of resolving a difference of opinion, serves to reveal the presence of a disagreement. Any change of mind, however, results not from any argumentative force, but from the awareness that arguers have joint experiences of mutually recognised facts being raised as the outcome of an argumentative exchange. In other words, awareness of joint commitments is what generates changes in opinion. This contribution showcases, albeit in a more philosophical vein, how pragmatic concepts such as the notion of commitment can be at the centre of our construal of what argumentation is.

Jennifer Schumann’s paper, which reports on an experimental study on disagreement perception in the straw man fallacy, contributes to the theme of this Special Issue on two fronts: (i) it investigates one aspect of the straw man fallacy that has not been experimentally tested, namely its refutational dimension, and (ii) it contributes to methodological discussions on whether the way questions are worded in empirical research is likely to affect the participants’ performance in the experimental task. Regarding the first aspect, Schumann convincingly demonstrates that people are sensitive to the fact that arguers who engage in straw manning disagree with their target, and that the misrepresentation they make manifest in their attack supports their disagreement. This also goes to show, quite reassuringly, that people are more likely to spot fallacies than not. From a methodological perspective, furthermore, Schumann shows that question wording (i.e., asking participants to what extent arguers agree vs. to what extent arguers disagree) does not seem to make any difference, given the similarity of the results obtained in both conditions. Overall, then, this paper is a prime example of the way methods in experimental pragmatics can be used to gain insights into the way argumentative phenomena (in this case the straw man fallacy) operate and are managed by arguers.

In her contribution, Jennifer Smolka tackles the interpretation of legal texts (together with its justification), which is a domain that is at the core of the interface between pragmatics and argumentation, given that the interpretations lawyers arrive at need to be justified, and, thus, argumentatively sound. More specifically, Smolka compares the different methods of interpretation used in statutory law and in international law and discusses how well suited neo- and post-Gricean approaches are when it comes to grounding these interpretations from an argumentative perspective. Through her analysis of the judges’ ruling in an international law case, Smolka convincingly shows that a hierarchy of rules of interpretation, which may be seen as an instantiation of the neo-Gricean system of conversational maxims, does not appear to adequately account for what happened in the legal proceedings. Instead, she suggests that legal practices can best be accounted for by a post-Gricean account which advocates context-sensitive and relevance-bound mechanisms of interpretation (Sperber and Wilson 1995), which seem to better reflect what happens in the justification of interpretations under international law. Overall, thus, this contribution rigorously articulates a clear claim about the type of pragmatic framework that should be used to support reasonable interpretations in international law. In a way, Smolka’s contribution illustrates how, in the domain of law and legal argumentation, pragmatic research may also fulfil practical purposes that are conducive to sound legal practices.

In the final contribution of this Special Issue, Chris Tindale takes us back to core aspects of pragmatic theory which are relevant to the study of argumentation by drawing some implications of Grice’s foundational pragmatic work, particularly in what regards its cross-cultural aspects. The starting question Tindale explores is the following: if Grice is right in assuming that communication succeeds under the condition that an audience recognises the speaker’s intention to mean something, how can we explain that communication can also succeed when speaker and audience do not share enough common ground to even recognise that there is an intention to mean something (regardless of the actual content of the message intended by the speaker)? While this is obviously likely to happen in cross-cultural communicative settings, where contextual conditions for uptake are not necessarily met, the puzzle can be extended to standard cases of communication, where the possibility of misunderstanding nevertheless remains. Through a review of different strands of research at the interface of argumentation and pragmatics, Tindale then substantiates the claim that it is the common experience of being a communicator (i.e., having repeatedly both addressed and been addressed by others) that allows for the possibility of intention recognition in the long run, recognition being understood in Gricean terms. This theoretical discussion thus puts a particular kind of pragmatic account of speaker meaning at the centre of an account of successful argumentation, once again showing how pragmatic considerations may be fruitfully brought to bear in an account of argumentation.