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The Pragmatic Force of Making an Argument

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Abstract

Making arguments makes reasons apparent. Sometimes those reasons may affect audiences’ relationships to claims (e.g., accept, adhere). But an over-emphasis on audience effects encouraged by functionalist theories of argumentation distracts attention from other things that making arguments can accomplish. We advance the normative pragmatic program on argumentation through two case studies of how early advocates for women’s suffrage in the U.S. made reasons apparent in order to show that what they were doing wasn’t ridiculous. While it might be possible to identify this as a new function of argumentation, we encourage instead attention to a more important question: explaining how all the diverse uses of argument have pragmatic force.

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Notes

  1. For example, assume that the function of argumentation is to resolve a disagreement. That can only happen if one side or the other eventually gives in. A functionalist theory would therefore posit a norm like “a failed defense of a standpoint must result in the protagonist retracting the standpoint, and a successful defense of a standpoint must result in the antagonist retracting his or her doubts” (van Eemeren et al. 2002, p. 183).

  2. “Making p ∴ c apparent” can be read as “making a reason apparent,” or even more exactly, as “making apparent that p is a reason for c” (and similarly for the other expressions).

  3. The technique is thus the inverse of the performative contradiction, where the speaker’s making of a claim serves to undermine it; it is the “I am alive” in contrast to the “I am dead.”

  4. It should be noticed that Damon, stepping in to speak for his companion, threatens to render her performance farcical or outrageous. His attempt to extend the argument1 seems pointless bickering that is just holding up the queue. Or in short: the gentleman with his “laborious research” doth argue too much.

  5. We use “pragmatic inference” in the technical sense established in pragmatics to refer to the “‘ampliative’ inferences” (Korta and Perry 2015) that are drawn from the fact that someone said something, to someone, in some circumstances. It is a commonplace that what a speaker means goes beyond the meaning of what she says. That extra (or sometimes even unrelated) meaning an auditor must figure out through some inferential process. These inferences are “pragmatic inferences” because they start from what the speaker has done. For example, from the fact that the President takes the Attorney General aside and says, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this [investigation] go,” a pragmatic inference can be drawn that President is ordering the AG to stop the investigation.

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Acknowledgements

We thank David Godden, Chris Campolo, and anonymous reviewers for comments, criticisms, and suggestions. An earlier version of the paper, entitled “The Pragmatic Force of Making Reasons Apparent,” was presented at the first European Conference on Argumentation and published in Mohammed and Lewiński (2016).

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  1. Department of Communication, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, 27695-8104, USA

    Jean Goodwin

  2. Department of Communication Studies, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, 66045-7574, USA

    Beth Innocenti

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Goodwin, J., Innocenti, B. The Pragmatic Force of Making an Argument. Topoi 38, 669–680 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-019-09643-8

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