We investigate the impact of informal arguments on judgments about thought experiment cases in light of Deutsch and Cappelen’s mischaracterization view, which claims that philosophers’ case judgments are primarily based on arguments and not intuitions. If arguments had no influence on case judgments, this would seriously challenge whether they are, or should be, based on arguments at all—and not on other cognitive sources instead, such as intuition. In Experiment 1, we replicated Wysocki’s (Rev Philos Psychol 8(2):477–499, 2017) pioneering study on (...) a Gettier-style case, and we confirmed that the informal arguments used by him had no significant effect. However, we also included an improved argument for ascribing knowledge, which did have a significant effect even in Wysocki’s original design. We therefore followed up with Experiment 2 on three Gettier-style cases, where we used a more natural dialogical format for presenting both case descriptions and informal arguments. Overall, we found a clear impact of prima facie good pro and con arguments on case judgments. The issue of argument impact is thus no obstacle to arguing about thought experiments. (shrink)

The detection of hate speech and fake news in political discourse is at the same time a crucial necessity for democratic societies and a challenge for several areas of study. However, most of the studies have focused on what is explicitly stated: false article information, language that expresses hatred, derogatory expressions. This paper argues that the explicit dimension of manipulation is only one – and the least problematic – of the risks of political discourse. The language of the unsaid is (...) much more dangerous and incomparably more difficult to detect, hidden in different types of fallacies and inappropriate uses of emotive language. Through a threefold coding scheme based on the instruments of argumentation theory and pragmatics, a corpus of argumentative tweets published by 4 politicians (Matteo Salvini, Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, and Joseph Biden) within 6 months from their taking office (corresponding to the official end of their election campaign) is analyzed, detecting the types of argument, the fallacies, and the uses and misuses of “emotive words.” This coding results in the argumentation profiles of the speakers, which are compared statistically to show their different implicit strategies and deceptive tactics. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to show whether the two crucial dimensions used for assessing the quality of argumentation, argument-as-a-product (argument structure) and argument-as-a-process (relevance), are interrelated, and how they can be used to assess the effect of argumentative mode on students’ arguments. To this purpose, a twofold coding scheme will be developed, aimed at capturing: a) the argumentative function of evidence use and b) the dialogical relevance of evidence use. A study will be described in which students’ use (...) of evidence is elicited in two distinct argumentative modes (dialogical vs. non-dialogical). According to the results, in the dialogical mode students tended to use evidence in a more sophisticated way from both argument evaluation perspectives. (shrink)

Twitter is an instrument used not only for sharing public or personal information, but also for persuading the audience. While specific platforms and software have been developed for analyzing macro-analytical data, and specific studies have focused on the linguistic dimension of the tweets, the argumentative dimension of the latter is unexplored to this date. This paper intends to propose a method grounded on the tools advanced in argumentation theory for capturing, coding, and assessing the different argumentative dimensions of the messages (...) posted on Twitter, focusing on the types of argument communicated, the quality of their premises, and the fallacies committed – including the use of unshared presuppositions and emotive words. This method is applied to a corpus of 843 tweets published by the Italian Minister of the Interior, Mr. Matteo Salvini, from the date of his appointment to the beginning of his campaign for the European elections. The quantitative data provide general indications for detecting the strategies that characterize the argumentative profile of Salvini, which are then analyzed qualitatively. (shrink)

Twenty-five years ago, my colleagues Miyuki Kamachi and Jiro Gyoba and I designed and photographed JAFFE, a set of facial expression images intended for use in a study of face perception. In 2019, without seeking permission or informing us, Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen exhibited JAFFE in two widely publicized art shows. In addition, they published a nonfactual account of the images in the essay “Excavating AI: The Politics of Images in Machine Learning Training Sets.” The present article recounts the (...) creation of the JAFFE dataset and unravels each of Crawford and Paglen’s fallacious statements. I also discuss JAFFE more broadly in connection with research on facial expression, affective computing, and human-computer interaction. (shrink)

Douglas Walton’s multitudinous contributions to the study of argumentation seldom, if ever, directly engage with argumentation in mathematics. Nonetheless, several of the innovations with which he is most closely associated lend themselves to improving our understanding of mathematical arguments. I concentrate on two such innovations: dialogue types (§1) and argumentation schemes (§2). I argue that both devices are much more applicable to mathematical reasoning than may be commonly supposed.

Dieser Beitrag greift das Phänomen Fake News auf und plädiert für einen analytischen Zugang zur Thematik. Zunächst grenzt er den Begriff der Fake News von anderen Phänomenen ab. Er zeigt auf, dass der Begriff nicht nur keinen analytischen Mehrwert bietet, sondern dass er die eigentlichen Probleme verschleiert und als Propagandabegriff u.a. Verwendung findet, um Zensur zu rechtfertigen und die Gegenseite zu delegitimieren. Trotzdem sollte die Politische Bildung nicht vollkommen auf den Begriff verzichten. Versteht man Fake News als einen fließenden Signifikant (...) in hegemonischen Projekten, erlaubt dies den Zugriff auf die politische Dimension von Desinformation. Fake News als politischer Kampfbegriff lässt sich darüber hinaus als einen Angriff auf die Autorität der Leitmedien interpretieren. Der Autor geht im Anschluss sowohl auf die inhaltliche als auch auf die formelle Dimension dieses Angriffs ein. Darauf basierend erarbeitet er einen Vorschlag, wie Fake News auf analytischer Basis in der Politischen Bildung behandelt werden könnten. (shrink)

This article addresses the relationship between understanding and believing from the cognitive perspective of information-processing. I promote, within the scope of the Critical Discourse Analysis agenda, the relevance of an account of belief-fixation sustained by a combination of argumentative and cognitive insights. To this end, I first argue that discursive strategies fulfilling legitimization purposes, such as evidentials, tap into the same cognitive mechanisms as arguments. I then proceed to examine the idea that the most effective arguments are the ones that (...) manage to obscure or make irrelevant counter-evidence and propose, from a cognitive pragmatic perspective, a formulation of rhetorical effectiveness as a constraint on information-selection taking place at the interpretation stage and decisively influencing the evaluation stage responsible for belief-fixation. (shrink)

This chapter introduces and discusses the concepts of necessary and sufficient conditions.

The article develops and justifies, on the basis of the epistemological argumentation theory, two central pieces of the theory of evaluative argumentation interpretation: 1. criteria for recognizing argument types and 2. rules for adding reasons to create ideal arguments. Ad 1: The criteria for identifying argument types are a selection of essential elements from the definitions of the respective argument types. Ad 2: After presenting the general principles for adding reasons (benevolence, authenticity, immanence, optimization), heuristics are proposed for finding missing (...) reasons, for deductive arguments, e.g., semantic tableaux are suggested. (shrink)

The present essay discusses a notorious rhetoric means familiar to all scholars in the social sciences and humanities including philosophy: name-dropping. Defined as the excessive over-use of authoritative names, I argue that it is a pernicious practice leading to collective disorientation in spoken discourse. First, I discuss name-dropping in terms of informal logic as an ad verecundiam-type fallacy. Insofar this perspective proves to lack contextual sensitivity, name-dropping is portrayed in Goffman’s terms as a more general social practice. By narrowing down (...) the focus to social science and the humanities, the essay emphasizes its function of discursive legitimation. This view, I argue, is incomplete because it overlooks the basic mechanism beneath. Names not only provide legitimation of but also orientation in discourse. Consequently, two tipping points—detour and disorientation—are proposed as benchmarks for it to become problematic. The conclusion re-widens the argument’s scope by suggesting questions for future inquiries. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to explore the interrelation between persuasion tactics and properties of speech acts. We investigate two types of arguments ad: ad hominem and ad baculum. We show that with both of these tactics, the structures that play a key role are not inferential, but rather ethotic, i.e., related to the speaker’s character and trust. We use the concepts of illocutionary force and constitutive conditions related to the character or status of the speaker in order to (...) explain the dynamics of these two techniques. In keeping with the research focus of the Polish School of Argumentation, we examine how the pragmatic and rhetorical aspects of the force of ad hominem and ad baculum arguments exploit trust in the speaker’s status to influence the audience’s cognition. (shrink)

In his influential work on critical argumentation, Douglas Walton explains how to judge whether an argumentum ad verecundiam is fallacious or legitimate. He provides six critical questions and a number of ancillary sub-questions to guide the identification of reasonable appeals to authority. While it is common for informal logicians to acknowledge the role of bias in sampling procedures and hypothesis confirmation , there is a conspicuous lack of discourse on the effect of identity prejudice on judgments of authority, even though (...) this is a well-documented factor in attributing credibility, expertise, trustworthiness, and professional competence to oppressed groups. This could result in faulty judgments of ad verecundiam fallacy. Focusing on gender bias, I review recent works in feminist epistemology—particularly those of Miranda Fricker and Helen Longino —to develop three gender-based critical questions to supplement Walton’s original list of six. This addition will help us to identify erroneous dismissals of appeals to authority based on epistemic injustice and epistemic irresponsibility on the part of the speaker or knowledge community. This project promotes the overlapping aims of feminist epistemology and informal logic. (shrink)

The lack of a theory of relevance in the current state of the art of informal logic has often been considered regrettable, a gap that must be filled before the Relevance-Sufficiency-Acceptability model can be considered complete. I wish to challenge this view. A theory of relevance is neither desirable nor possible. Informal logic can get by perfectly well, and has been doing so far, with relevance judgments that are by nature unanalysable and intuitive. Criticism of theories of relevance, for example (...) in Woods , is deflated. (shrink)

Michael Huemer () argues that following the epistemic strategy of Critical Thinking—that is, thinking things through for oneself—leaves the agent epistemically either worse off or no better off than an alternative strategy of Credulity—that is, trusting the authorities. Therefore, Critical Thinking is not epistemically responsible. This article argues that Reasonable Credulity entails Critical Thinking, and since Reasonable Credulity is epistemically responsible, the Critical Thinking that it entails is epistemically responsible too.

According to informal logic, the possibilities of deductive logic as a tool for analysing and evaluating ordinary arguments are very limited. While I agree with this claim in general, I question it in the case of the argument from cause to effect. In this paper I first show, on the basis of carefully chosen examples, that we usually react differently to falsification of the conclusion of the argument from cause to effect than we do to the falsification of the conclusion (...) of other defeasible arguments. I then identify general conditions and assumptions under which the causal argument from cause to effect can be reconstructed as deductive. Finally, I compare the causal argument with the expert argument, which is a typical example of a defeasible argument in the narrower sense. (shrink)

The aims of this paper are to illustrate where previous attempts at the characterisation of slippery slope arguments have gone wrong, to provide an analysis which better captures their true nature, and to show the importance of achieving a clear definition which distinguishes this argument structure from other forms with which it may be confused. The first part describes the arguments of Douglas Walton and others, which are found wanting due to their failure to capture the essence of the slippery (...) slope and their inability to distinguish SSAs from other consequentialist forms of argument. The second part of the paper puts forward a clear analysis of what is special about SSAs: it is argued that all SSAs, properly so-named, claim that reaching a certain conclusion, A, involves the negation of a thitherto accepted principle, P, and that that principle is necessary to argue against further conclusions which are considered unacceptable. (shrink)

In diesem Open-Access-Sammelband setzen sich Autor*innen aus unterschiedlichsten Disziplinen mit der Auswirkung einer digitalisierten Öffentlichkeit für die Politische Bildung auseinander. Sie erörtern, wie sich die Formen digitaler politischer Kommunikation auswirken, wie der Politikunterricht mit der veränderten Ausgangslage umgehen könnte und welche Kompetenzen Schüler*innen benötigen, um in der digitalen Öffentlichkeit selbstbestimmt und -ermächtigt politisch teilzuhaben. Die Komplexität und die Interdependenzen digitaler Kommunikation verlangen nach einer multiperspektivischen und transdisziplinären Perspektive, der dieser Band verpflichtet ist.

Why informal logic? Informal logic is a group of proposals meant to contrast with, replace, and reject formal logic, at least for the analysis and evaluation of everyday arguments. Why reject formal logic? Formal logic is criticized and claimed to be inadequate because of its commitment to the soundness doctrine. In this paper I will examine and try to respond to some of these criticisms. It is not my aim to examine every argument ever given against formal logic; I am (...) limiting myself to those that, as a matter of historical fact, were instrumental in the replacement of formal logic by informal logic and initially established informal logic as a separate discipline. If the criticism of the soundness doctrine is defective, then the move from formal logic to informal logic was not theoretically well-motivated. It is this motivation that I wish to bring into question, rather than the adequacy or inadequacy of formal or informal logic as such. While I will tend to the view that formal logic is as adequate as it is reasonable to expect, the real issue is whether it is inadequate for the reasons that, as a matter of historical fact, were used to motivate its rejection. (shrink)

In her 2007 paper, “Argument Has No Function” Jean Goodwin takes exception with what she calls the “explicit function claims”, arguing that not only are function-based accounts of argumentation insufficiently motivated, but they fail to ground claims to normativity. In this paper I stake out the beginnings of a functionalist answer to Goodwin.

This paper presents a way in which formal logic can be understood and reformulated in terms of argumentation that can help us unify formal and informal reasoning. Classical deductive reasoning will be expressed entirely in terms of notions and concepts from argumentation so that formal logical entailment is equivalently captured via the arguments that win between those supporting concluding formulae and arguments supporting contradictory formulae. This allows us to go beyond Classical Logic and smoothly connect it with human reasoning, thus (...) providing a uniform argumentation-based view of both informal and formal logic. (shrink)

The thesis of the paper holds that some future developments of argumentation theory may be inspired by the rich logico-methodological legacy of the Lvov–Warsaw School (LWS), the Polish research movement that was most active from 1895 to 1939. As a selection of ideas of the LWS which exploit both formal and pragmatic aspects of the force of argument, we present: Ajdukiewicz’s account of reasoning and inference, Bocheński’s analyses of superstitions or dogmas, and Frydman’s constructive approach to legal interpretation. This paper (...) does not aim at exhaustive elaboration of any of these topics or their usefulness in current discussions within argumentation theory. Rather, we intend to indicate chosen directions of a potentially fruitful research program for the emerging Polish School of Argumentation which would consist in application of methods and conceptions elaborated by the LWS to selected open problems of contemporary research on argumentation. (shrink)

The Argumentative Adversariality debate is over the question of whether argument must be adversarial. A particular locus of this debate is on skeptical challenges in critical dialogue. The Default Skeptical Stance in argument is a practical manifestation of argumentative adversariality. Views about the on-the-ground value of the DSS vary. On one hand, in “The Social & Political Limitations of Philosophy”, Phyllis Rooney argues that the DSS leads to epistemic injustice. On the other, Allan Hazlett in his recent piece “Critical Injustice” (...) argues for the virtues of the skeptical stance in terms of epistemic justice. Both Rooney and Hazlett are concerned with the role skeptical engagement plays in argument, but they assign opposite values to it. In this essay, I review Rooney and Hazlett’s examples and show that the epistemic dysfunction in the two scholar’s going cases is one and the same, and argue that the cause of both is a lack of proper skeptical engagement. Skeptical engagement is a requirement for epistemic justice. Together and constitute an initial defense of the Adversarialist position against objections regarding the social epistemic risk of the skeptical stance. (shrink)

In this paper, we will explore two initiatives that focus on the importance of employing logical theories in educating people how to think and reason properly, one in Poland: The Lvov-Warsaw School; the other in North America: The Informal Logic Initiative. These two movements differ in the logical means and skills that they focus on. However, we believe that they share a common purpose: to educate students in logic and reasoning (logical education conceived as a process) so that they may (...) be able to apply their skills to analyze the issues in their society (logical culture as a result of logical education). The aim of the paper is to justify this claim by exploring research objectives and products that are common to both movements. (shrink)

Objectivity, Autonomy, and the use of Arguments from Authority Starting in the early modern era, the use of arguments from authority to support important factual claims began to be heavily criticized. Recent investigations into the nature of testimony, however, suggest that such criticisms are factually and normatively problematic. In this paper, the author argues for a model of testimonial authority that corrects this earlier, unrealistically individualistic picture of how person bear their burdens in the search for a common reality.

The appeal to expert opinion is an argument form that uses the verdict of an expert to support a position or hypothesis. A previous scheme-based treatment of the argument form is formalized within a Bayesian network that is able to capture the critical aspects of the argument form, including the central considerations of the expert's expertise and trustworthiness. We propose this as an appropriate normative framework for the argument form, enabling the development and testing of quantitative predictions as to how (...) people evaluate this argument, suggesting that such an approach might be beneficial to argumentation research generally. We subsequently present two experiments as an example of the potential for future research in this vein, demonstrating that participants' quantitative ratings of the convincingness of a proposition that has been supported with an appeal to expert opinion were broadly consistent with the predictions of the Bayesian model. (shrink)

I characterize the deductivist ideal of justification and, following to a great extent Toulmin’s work The Uses of Argument, I try to explain why this ideal is erroneous. Then I offer an alternative model of justification capable of making our claims to knowledge about substantial matters sound and reasonable. This model of justification will be based on a conception of justification as the result of good argumentation, and on a model of argumentation which is a pragmatic linguistic reconstruction of Toulmin’s (...) model of argument. (shrink)

Mencius, the second sage of Confucianism after Confucius, is well known for his subtle argumentative skills. Mencius did not develop his own argumentation theory, but argumentation practices, including his political argumentation, have enormously inspired later scholars in China to develop argumentation theories. In this paper, we try to reconstruct Mencius’s political argumentation from perspectives of both strategic maneuvering developed by van Eemeren et al. in argumentation theory and truth-functional logic in formal logic. The aim is to manifest the Dao, a (...) rational balance among logical, dialectical and rhetorical dimensions in Mencius’s political argumentation. The results indicate that Mencius’s political argumentation is not only logically justified but also shown to have maneuvered strategically between reasonableness and effectiveness, and that human beings have a common ground of formal and substantial logos, which makes it possible for people from different cultural groups to communicate rationally. (shrink)

Measurement is said to be the basis of exact sciences as the process of assigning numbers to matter (things or their attributes), thus making it possible to apply the mathematically formulated laws of nature to the empirical world. Mathematics and empiria are best accorded to each other in laboratory experiments which function as what Nancy Cartwright calls nomological machine: an arrangement generating (mathematical) regularities. On the basis of accounts of measurement errors and uncertainties, I will argue for two claims: 1) (...) Both fundamental laws of physics, corresponding to ideal nomological machine, and phenomenological laws, corresponding to material nomological machine, lie, being highly idealised relative to the empirical reality; and also laboratory measurement data do not describe properties inherent to the world independently of human understanding of it. 2) Therefore the naive, representational view of measurement and experimentation should be replaced with a more pragmatic or practice-based view. (shrink)

Populism is on the rise, especially in Western Europe. While it is often assumed that populist actors have a tendency for fallacious reasoning, this has not been systematically investigated. We analyze the use of informal fallacies by right-wing populist politicians and their representation in the media during election campaigns. We conduct a quantitative content analysis of press releases of right-wing populist parties and news articles in print media during the most recent elections in the United Kingdom and Switzerland in 2015. (...) The results show that fallacies are used in more than a third of all analyzed texts and overwhelmingly co-occur with populist key messages. Moreover, fallacies occur more often in populist parties’ press releases than in news articles and are more common in Switzerland compared to the United Kingdom. This study confirms the argument that populist actors use fallacies in combination with populist claims. (shrink)

This essay presents a dialogical framework for treating philosophical disagreements as persuasion dialogues with analogical argumentation, with the aim of recasting philosophical disputes as disagreements over analogies. This has two benefits: it allows us to temporarily bypass conflicting metaphysical intuitions by focusing on paradigmatic examples, similarities, and the plausibility of conclusions for or against a given point of view; and it can reveal new avenues of argumentation regarding a given issue. This approach to philosophical disagreements is illustrated by studying the (...) role of argumentation by analogy in disputes over Lockean justifications of intellectual property rights, and disagreements over whether artificial agents should be treated as moral agents. Finally, a nonexhaustive list of possible global and local points of contention over analogical arguments is identified in order to highlight potential avenues of argumentation in disagreements over analogies. (shrink)

Classical logic is based on an underlying view of the world, according to which there are elementary facts and compound facts, which are logical combinations of these elementary facts. Sentences are true if they correspond to, in last instance, the elementary facts in the world. This world view has no place for rules, which exist as individuals in the world, and which create relations between the most elementary facts. As a result, classical logic is not suitable to deal with rules, (...) and is therefore unsuitable to deal with legal reasoning. A logic that is more suitable should take into account that law is a part of social reality, in particular a part that consists of constructivist facts, and that rules play a central role in law. This article gives a superficial description of how social reality exists and of the place of law and legal rules in it. It uses this description to argue that traditional techniques to reason with and about legal rules provide a better logic for law than classical logic. These techniques can be accommodated in a logic that treats rules as logical individuals. (shrink)

What is informal logic, is it ``logic" at all? Main contemporary approaches are briefly presented and critically commented. If the notion of consequence is at the heart of logic, does it make sense to speak about ``informal" consequence? A valid inference is truth preserving, if the premises are true, so is the conclusion. According to Prawitz two further conditions must also be satisfied in the case of classical logical consequence: (i) it is because of the logical form of the sentences (...) involved and not because of their specific content that the inference is truth preserving; (ii) it is necessary that if the premises are true, then so is the conclusion. According to the prevalent criteria of informal logic an argument is cogent if and only if (i) its premises are rationally Acceptable, (ii) its premises are Relevant to its conclusion and (iii) its premises constitute Grounds adequate for accepting the conclusion (the ``ARG" conditions according to Govier). The ARG criteria characterize a certain broad kind of consequence relation. We do not (in general) have truth preservence in cogent arguments but if the premises are acceptable and other criteria are met, then so is the conclusion. We can speak about form in a loose sense and finally, there is rational necessity of the grounding or support relation. So a certain broad notion of logical consequence emerges from this comparison. The norms of ARG are norms of elementary scientific methodology in which argument is seen as embodying reasoning within a process of inquiry or of belief formation in subject areas accessible to every informed intellectual. (shrink)

It is generally claimed that there exist exceptional circumstances when taking human life may be approved and when such actions may be justified on moral grounds. Precise guidelines in the medical field for making such decisions concerning patients who are terminally ill or have irreparable injuries incompatible with a bearable life, are difficult to establish. Recommendations that take the particular logical form of a rule, such as "in dubio pro vita", "when in doubt favour life") have been suggested and in (...) some countries incorporated into legal texts (Germany). We claim here that such a rule is of no value since it is open-ended and always allows for doubt, and a decision to employ measures that would support human life could always be argued to be a valid choice. Preservation of this rule could be encouraged, but giving it the force of law may put physicians at risk, as they may be challenged for choosing to terminate life in otherwise ethically and medically uncontroversial circumstances. (shrink)

In this paper, the role played in learning to argue by an essential and yet under-researched epistemic and argumentative norm is discussed, namely, the consistency requirement. An argumentative intervention is presented, that is designed to enhance the understanding of this norm among high school students, to enable them to recognize contradictions in the process of argumentation and to familiarize them with the argumentative strategies related to the reductio ad absurdum. There follows a description of how the designed intervention was implemented (...) in two Italian high schools, which served as an exploratory case study, and the results obtained are discussed. (shrink)

The paper emphasizes significant resemblances between the Informal Logic Initiative and the Lvov-Warsaw School – the Polish philosophical movement, the rise of which is associated with “the Golden Age of Science and Letters”. The correspondence between informal logic and the logical studies of the LWS will be explored by discussing their subject-matter, goals, and methods. The project focused on applying logical studies of the LWS in analyzing and assessing arguments will be proposed.

Arguments from analogy are pervasive in everyday reasoning, mathematics, philosophy, and science. Informal logic studies everyday argumentation in ordinary language. A branch of fuzzy logic, approximate reasoning, seeks to model facets of everyday reasoning with vague concepts in ill-defined situations. Ways of combining the results from these fields will be suggested by introducing a new argumentation scheme—a fuzzy analogical argument from classification—with the associated critical questions. This will be motivated by a case study of analogical reasoning in the virtual friendship (...) debate within information ethics. The virtual friendship debate is a disagreement over whether virtual friendships are genuine friendships. It will be argued that the debate could move away from its current impasse, caused by unproductive metaphysical and logical assumptions, if extant arguments are reinterpreted as fuzzy analogical arguments from classification, and subjected to a new set of critical questions which would replace the quest for facts of essence about friendship with an emphasis on empirical data, persuasion, and definitional power. (shrink)

When discussing dialogue, argumentation researchers rarely draw the distinction between the story world and interactional world. While mediators often help to shape the interactions among agonists in the emerging flow of spoken discourse, writers of postulated dialogues narrate them, constructing a story world that depicts the agonists, depicts their utterances and their circumstances. In this paper, I ask where the agonists of the dialogue model of argument interact, and I show that they often interact in the story world of postulated (...) dialogues. Postulated dialogues are story problem conversations. Common in textbooks, exams, and standardized tests, story problems create hypothetical situations to illustrate formal relationships among variables, and are designed to be read in a theoretical attitude that treats the characters, objects, and circumstances that they depict as given. When argumentation researchers examine postulated dialogues, they tend to adopt a theoretical attitude, limiting their analysis to the conversation between the agonists depicted in the story world. Reading this way makes it easier to overlook the interactional world where the writing and reading of the texts takes place, obscuring the fact that they are narrated dialogues, often written by researchers. Reading this way also makes it easier to confirm the traditional participation framework of the dialogue model of argument. (shrink)

This paper is divided in five sections. Section 11.1 sketches the history of the distinction between speech act with negative content and negated speech act, and gives a general dynamic interpretation for negated speech act. “Downdate semantics” for AGM contraction is introduced in Section 11.2. Relying on semantically interpreted contraction, Section 11.3 develops the dynamic semantics for constative and directive speech acts, and their external negations. The expressive completeness for the formal variants of natural language utterances, none of which is (...) a retraction, has been proved in Section 11.4. The last section gives a laconic answer to the question posed in the title of the paper. (shrink)