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On the Argumentative Strength of Indirect Inferential Conditionals

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Abstract

Inferential or epistemic conditional sentences represent a blueprint of someone’s reasoning process from premise to conclusion. Declerck and Reed (2001) make a distinction between a direct and an indirect type. In the latter type the direction of reasoning goes backwards, from the blatant falsehood of the consequent to the falsehood of the antecedent. We first present a modal reinterpretation in terms of Argumentation Schemes of indirect inferential conditionals (IIC’s) in Declerck and Reed (2001). We furthermore argue for a distinction between epistemic-modal strong and deontic-modal weak IIC’s. In addition, we extend the category of the indirect inferential conditionals in order to include several other deontic-modal subtypes. On the basis of the undesirability of the consequent the hearer in these cases infers that the antecedent is also undesirable. In this way the rhetoric-argumentative strategy of Reductio ad Absurdum is extended from the realm of deductive reasoning to that of practical reasoning.

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Notes

  1. In this respect direct inferentials can be considered concise, i.e. enthymemic forms of Symptomatic Argumentation (Garssen 2001: 91) or the Abductive Argumentation Scheme for Argument from Effect to Cause (Walton et al. 2008: 172).

  2. More in particular, the reasoning process goes from the double negation of the consequent to the double negation of the antecedent. What makes this pattern even more complex is that the antecedent itself comprises a negation (God had NOT wanted us to eat in church).

  3. This extra complexity motivates our decision to present the first two types of indirect inferentials in the opposite order from that in the Declerck and Reed (2001: 296–301) typology.

  4. Notice that the expression I'm a Dutchman is as ridiculous as I'm Napoleon or I'm the Empress of China only in the ethnocentric non-Dutch setting of 17th c. British Dutch-bashing.

  5. The difference in Table 1 between the simple propositional pattern on the left and the modal pattern on the right runs parallel to the distinction drawn by Rescher (2006) between Reductio ad falsum and Reductio ad impossibile.

  6. Notice that, in addition to their straightforward, direct interpretation, examples like “If this is sauerkraut, I’ve never eaten sauerkraut” (Nieuwint 1992: 97), exhibit properties of two types of indirect inferentials, namely the improper naming IIC’s and the Dutchman IIC’s. On the one hand they involve a discrepancy between naming and characteristic properties (appearance, taste …), although in this case the discrepancy does not count as the starting point of the argumentation, as in (11), but as its conclusion. On the other hand, they resemble the ‘counterfactual indicative conditionals (Noh 1996) in that antecedent and consequent are counterfactual in interpretation but not in form.

  7. One crucial property which is lacking with the weak IIC’s is that they do not express a negative piece of advice based on a value judgment of a hypothetical state of affairs in the future, but instead they pass a (negative) judgment on an actual state of affairs in the present.

  8. Declerck and Reed (2001) draw an important distinction between inferential conditionals with a rhetorical question in the consequent and conditionals with an open question asking for information in the consequent, e.g. If he hasn’t arrived yet, could his plane have been delayed?. “It is important to see that we should not conflate the terms 'inferential' and ‘epistemic'. All inferential conditionals are epistemic, but not vice versa” (2001: 43). Interrogative clauses can contain an epistemic auxiliary as could in the example above without being inferential. “A conditional is a direct inferential only if the P-clause expresses a premise and the Q-clause is the conclusion drawn from it. Conditionals with a nonassertoric Q-clause are never inferential” (Declerck and Reed 2001: 43).

  9. This is why we have replaced the Declerck and Reed (2001: 45) label of assertoric interrogative, which basically coincides with the notion of “rhetorical question” by that of Expressive Negative Consequence.

  10. The difference between the two types of weak IIC then resides in the illocutionary force of the consequent. The formal encoding as an expressive negative consequence in type 4 gives the consequent the power of an exclamative, i.e. a stronger form of expressive.

  11. We should keep in mind that the IIC’s in Table 2 have an enthymemic form expressing the major premise but leaving the minor premise and the conclusion unstated. The Practical Reasoning underlying the weak IIC types 3 and 4 often combines with such an enthymemic format (Walton et al. 2008: 201).

  12. The fact that this sentence and the next start with ‘wanneer’ instead of ‘als’ poses no problem. The same mechanisms are at work. The only difference might be that the antecedent is interpreted as factual with ‘wannneer’.

  13. By virtue of the anaphoric connection—he refers to a president in (20a), and the rule itself points back to a rule in (20b)—the conditional clauses in (20) can be merged into a single main clause by incorporating the antecedent (as a relative clause) into the constituent referring to the central participant:

    (i) a. [A president who is worried if the submanager of the FBI is prowling around

    all sorts of dark corridors in the depths of the night to blab information], is in real trouble.

    b. There is something seriously wrong [with a government ruling that can only be instantiated by social detectives rummaging around people’s bedrooms].

  14. The examples in (22–23) display characteristics of meta-inferential conditionals by referring to epistemic verbs in the antecedent such as watch, hear, think, read (Smessaert and Verbrugge 2006). In (22a) the questioning of the antecedent does not concern the hearing as such, but the content of the message heard, i.e. there is something wrong with the reform proposal.

  15. Whether this onlooker will agree with the speaker that it should be called into question will obviously depend on whether his sympathies lie with the speaker or with the person offended.

  16. We can discern a continuum of deictic reference among the three additional types of weak IIC’s introduced in this section in the sense that there is a clear hierarchy in the way in which the participants of the speech act are in the picture: from problem to insult to deadlock. The ‘problem’ type 5 usually concerns the subject of conversation, while the ‘epistemic deadlock’ type 7 refers to the speaker and his incapability to process the inference. The ‘insult’ type 6 then lies in between, by sometimes referring to the addressee and sometimes to the subject of conversation.

  17. From the point of view of speech acts, type 6 constitutes a ‘proper’ insult, whereas with the epistemic deadlock type 7 the insult is only there in form but not in function.

  18. Notice that this formulaic pattern is slightly differently in Dutch and in English: the consequent of the Dutch examples simply states “then I don’t know (anymore)”, while their English translations require the addition of “what is”.

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Acknowledgments

We want to thank the two anonymous referees for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. Their remarks have significantly improved the readability of the text. Needless to say, all remaining errors are our own responsibility. The Research Foundation - Flanders made this research possible with a grant for the first author (Postdoctoral Fellow of the Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO)).

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Verbrugge, S., Smessaert, H. On the Argumentative Strength of Indirect Inferential Conditionals. Argumentation 24, 337–362 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-010-9179-2

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