Reporting and Interpreting Intentions in Defamation Law

Abstract

The relationship between quoting and indirect reporting another's words is an issue that connects the field of pragmatics to the studies in the areas of rhetoric, argumentation, and law. There is nothing more effective for establishing someone's commitments than referring to his own words (Boller 1967). However, for dialectical or rhetorical purposes, a quote can be distorted, or reported incorrectly (Walton and Macagno 2011). Commitments to positions that are scandalous or hard to defend can be attributed to an individual in order to arouse attention, discredit him, or attack him. Clearly, when words become directly connected with reputation or courtroom battles, the problem of establishing what a quote means exceeds the boundaries of pragmatics and rhetoric and becomes a legal issue. Quotes or misquotes become relevant in law when they are used for specific argumentative purposes, as instruments of defamation or powerful tools for attacking the opponent's case or defending against accusations. However, such argumentative uses presuppose a fundamental interpretative step. In these cases, a quote is not a mere repetition of a portion of another's text or speech; it is the use of another's utterance to support the speaker's viewpoint. For this reason, every quote used argumentatively is the outcome of an interpretative process. A reporter can report directly or indirectly a public figure's words to accuse, criticize, or negatively evaluate him or his behavior explicitly or implicitly, or to trigger a specific reaction in the audience. When a defamatory quote is brought before the court, its meaning is interpreted and explicated or reported to support the accusation. Similarly, the same quote needs to go through the same interpretative process to rebut the charges. The fundamental problem is to describe and provide rules and mechanisms governing the F. Macagno ( )

Interpreting Straw Man Argumentation

“…the so-called "illocutionary" and "perlocutionary" effects. For example an utterance can be interpreted as a request or as an order, depending on the context; an assertion of a negative behavior can be taken as an accusation or as a complaint, depending on the type of dialogue the interlocutors are engaged in (Macagno 2016b;Macagno and Capone 2016). Moreover, an utterance can be intended to result in accessory effects, such as reassuring, persuading, threatening, which do not constitute the effect performed by uttering the specific sentence (Searle 1976;Searle and Vanderveken 2005).…”

“…In this sense, pragmatic inferences can prevent ambiguities from arising (Jaszczolt 1999, p. 4); however, ambiguities can arise because not all the contextual factors on which the speaker relies in communicating his communicative or dialogical intentions (Grosz and Sidner 1986, p. 178) are shared by the hearer. Moreover, in cases of manipulation, ambiguities are introduced by preventing the interlocutor from accessing all the contextual factors needed for a correct or univocal understanding of the utterance (Macagno 2016b). Typical cases of such types of manipulative uses of ambiguity are the fallacies of straw man (Macagno and Damele 2013;Walton 1996) and wrenching from context (Macagno and Capone 2016;Walton and Macagno 2010).…”

Diagnosing Misattribution of Commitments: A Normative and Pragmatic Model of for Assessing Straw Man

“…In this sense, even though quotations mostly represent only an illocutionary act and the proposition expressed, selecting, marking, and emphasizing the dimension thereof more convenient to the quoter's interests (Clark and Gerrig 1990, p. 779), they need to take into account the conversational dimension and the context. In this sense, a test for the reasonableness of a quotation would be the fulfillment of a burden of quotation (Macagno 2016;Macagno and Capone 2016). The quoter, responsible for the selection of the aspects reported (Clark and Gerrig 1990, p. 792), should be able to prove that the direct or indirect quote (which is often the result of a pragmatic processing of the utterance) is supported by the context.…”

“…The possibility of straw manning a speaker or simply misrepresenting his commitments resulting from his utterances is based on the coexistence of two possibly satisfactory interpretations of his utterance(s) F. An interpretation, however, is not sufficient to explain F, but to explain F based on reasons, and more specifically on reasons stronger than the ones supporting alternative interpretations (premise 3). In this fashion, even harder cases, such as the ones consisting in reporting metaphorical utterances (Macagno 2016), can be explained and reconstructed using patterns of argumentative reasoning.…”

“…At best, the utterance could be analyzed as ambiguous, but in this case the quoted had to fulfill a burden of selecting and depicting an ambiguous utterance. He had to have and provide evident reasons for reconstructing a communicative intention that is not obvious (Macagno 2016), resulting in weaker commitments.…”