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Enthymemes: From Reconstruction to Understanding

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Abstract

Traditionally, an enthymeme is an incomplete argument, made so by the absence of one or more of its constituent statements. An enthymeme resolution strategy is a set of procedures for finding those missing elements, thus reconstructing the enthymemes and restoring its meaning. It is widely held that a condition on the adequacy of such procedures is that statements restored to an enthymeme produce an argument that is good in some given respect in relation to which the enthymeme itself is bad. In previous work, we emphasized the role of parsimony in enthymeme resolution strategies and concomitantly downplayed the role of “charity”. In the present paper, we take the analysis of enthymemes a step further. We will propose that if the pragmatic features that attend the phenomenon of enthymematic communication are duly heeded, the very idea of reconstructing enthymemes loses much of its rationale, and their interpretation comes to be conceived in a new light.

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Notes

  1. We don’t mean to overlook Aus whose Ams are bad in a respect in which the Aus are also bad. But these are not our focus here.

  2. This excludes cases in which Am is literally coded in Au—Morse, Omega, and so on.

  3. One has a lexical understanding of a sentence just in case one’s understanding is constituted by an understanding of its words and word order.

  4. We are using “statement” and “proposition” interchangeably.

  5. “The Enthymeme must consist of few premisses, fewer often than those which make up the normal syllogism. For if any of those premisses is a familiar fact, there is no need even to mention it; the hearer adds it himself” (Rhetoric, I, 2, 1357a, 16–19).

  6. Clearly inferential familiarity concerns competent application of a given inferential scheme, not the capacity to describe its structure or to assign it the proper logical label.

  7. Notice that “All short-lived animals are butterflies” is false but not notoriously so, i.e. it is not a belief that we would normally consider as a sign of insanity, but rather just an indication of the arguer being misinformed. Compare, for instance, with “I am happy, so Mars is not a planet” or “If every Catholic priest is male, then John is a Catholic priest”.

  8. This is purely the result of an automatic procedure to determine, easily and effortlessly, the Am of an enthymeme. So there is no need to postulate (as we do not, in fact) that arguers have the explicit intention of privileging mental sanity over inferential correctness over factual truth in their interpretation of the utterance: this is just an unintended effect of how our cognitive processes work, under the pressure of scant resources.

  9. For helpful advice the authors warmly thank David Hitchcock and the editors’ anonymous referee.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Goal-Oriented Agents Laboratory (GOAL), Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della Cognizione, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Via S. Martino della Battaglia 44, 00185, Rome, Italy

    Fabio Paglieri

  2. University of British Columbia and King’s College London, Vancouver, BC, Canada

    John Woods

  3. University of British Columbia and King’s College London, London, UK

    John Woods

Authors
  1. Fabio Paglieri
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  2. John Woods
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Correspondence to Fabio Paglieri.

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Paglieri, F., Woods, J. Enthymemes: From Reconstruction to Understanding. Argumentation 25, 127–139 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-011-9203-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-011-9203-1

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