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Interpretative Disputes, Explicatures, and Argumentative Reasoning

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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.

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Notes

  1. In the letter of recommendation used by Grice, the writer is implicating that the candidate is not suitable for the job in question. The letter does not provide the relevant pieces of information concerning the candidate’s lecturing, research, supervising, and administrative abilities. This information is absent in the letter, which dwells on a quality that is not indispensable. Capone (2006) believes that the absence of the relevant elements that are conventionally associated with the frame of writing recommendation letters creates an implicature that is not cancellable. Clearly, the non-cancellability depends on the context. In a different context (for example, in case the letter is for a job as a secretary), the aforementioned letter could actually work as an act of recommendation (Seymour 2013). In this sense, we cannot evaluate cancellability independently from the context (Capone 2006, 2013). Whereas the pragmatic meaning might be different in different contexts, in a particular context an inference (such as the one triggered by the recommendation letter) cannot be withdrawn or cancelled.

  2. A recent Italian judgment has decreed that even non-explicit (or non-fully explicit) defamatory utterances published through Facebook are actionable (see Tribunale di Livorno, Judgment no. 38912 of 31 December 2012).

  3. http://www.cspinet.org/new/200508112.html (retrieved on May 16th, 2014).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ArgLab, IFL, Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Av. de Berna 26C, 1069-061, Lisbon, Portugal

    Fabrizio Macagno

  2. Università di Palermo, Palermo, Italy

    Alessandro Capone

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  1. Fabrizio Macagno
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  2. Alessandro Capone
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Correspondence to Fabrizio Macagno.

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Macagno, F., Capone, A. Interpretative Disputes, Explicatures, and Argumentative Reasoning. Argumentation 30, 399–422 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-015-9347-5

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