Interpretative Disputes, Explicatures, and Argumentative Reasoning

Abstract

The problem of establishing the best interpretation of a speech act is of fundamental importance in argumentation and communication in general. A party in a dialogue can interpret another's or his own speech acts in the most convenient ways to achieve his dialogical goals. In defamation law this phenomenon becomes particularly important, as the dialogical effects of a communicative move may result in legal consequences. The purpose of this paper is to combine the instruments provided by argumentation theory with the advances in pragmatics in order to propose an argumentative approach to meaning reconstruction. This theoretical proposal will be applied to and tested against defamation cases at common law. Interpretation is represented as based on a hierarchy of interpretative presumptions. On this view, the development of the logical form of an utterance is regarded as the result of an abductive pattern of reasoning in which various types of presumptions are confronted and the weakest ones are excluded. Conflicts of interpretations and equivocation become essentially interwoven with the dialectical problem of fulfilling the burden of defeating a presumption. The interpreter has a burden of explaining why a given presumption is subject to default, assuming that the speaker is reasonable and acting based on a set of shared expectations.

Adding limits to argumentative reconstruction: the case of taste in argumentation

“…Así, esta misma "forma desordenada" implica que una reconstrucción sobre la estructura es insuficiente para comprender el significado real del argumento. Por esto, distintos autores (como Macagno & Capone, 2016;Macagno & Bigi, 2018) han justificado la necesidad de incluir una reconstrucción pragmática del significado en el análisis argumentativo.…”

Determining the commitments of image-makers in arguments with multimodal allusions in the front covers of The Economist

“…So far, a number of argumentation scholars have used the categories and distinctions proposed by Relevance Theory for the purposes of analysis or evaluation of argumentative discourse (e.g. Tindale, 1992;Santibañez, 2009;Lewiński and Oswald, 2013;Macagno and Capone, 2016).4 Oswald (2007) rightly observes that a certain discrepancy exists between the analytical approach that (especially normative) theories of argumentation assume, focusing on the externalized product of arguing and reasoning processes, on the one hand, and the interpretive and internalist approach that Relevance Theory assumes, on the other hand, by focusing on the cognitive mechanisms underlying the processes of reasoning and arguing. His proposal is to integrate relevance-theoretic insights into a model of argumentation (in this case the pragma-dialectical one, see van Eemeren and Grootendorst, 2004) in order to account for the interpretation, evaluation and effectiveness of arguments.…”

Uncommon ground

“…The idea of representing default interpretations as an instance of presumptive reasoning is that it can be considered as a heuristic pattern of a more complex (critical) one of reasoning from the best explanation (see the notion of reasoning from best interpretation in Atlas and Levinson [1981] and the idea of different types of presumptions and presumptive reasoning underlying the inferential process of communication in Bach and Harnish [1979]), which in argumentation theory is formalized as follows (Macagno and Capone 2015;Walton et al 2008):…”

“…The idea of explicature can be enlarged to include not only the outcomes of nonreflective, automatic processes, but also the outcomes of the explanatory nonmonotonic microargumentation resulting from a conflict between presumptions (this idea has been developed in Macagno and Capone 2015;Macagno 2012a). For example, we consider the following example to show how presupposition is connected with the pragmatic process of construction of an explicature: 3…”

“…1 The goal of this paper is to show 1) how the mechanism of reasoning from best interpretation (a notion introduced in Atlas and Levinson 1981;Atlas 2008) can be analyzed from an argumentative point of view as a kind of presumptive reasoning, and 2) how this reasoning pattern can account for the relationship between presupposition triggers and pragmatic presuppositions. The discrepancy between the meaning of the sentence type (or meaning), the sentence token (or what is said) (Recanati 1989), and utterance meaning (Atlas 2007) (or what is meant) (Carston 1988: 155 andCarston 2002: 15) can be mediated by processes of defeasible (nonmonotonic) reasoning that can be represented as presumptive microarguments (Macagno and Capone 2015). Such microarguments are mostly processed heuristically; that is, they are not subjected to critical assessment.…”