The pursuit of good argument: the deep relation between Pragmatics and Argumentation
Having a successful conversation is one of the main goals that we, as speakers, are constantly chasing. Whether the dialogue is conflictual or cooperative, we often try to find a good justification for our standpoint, shaping, thus, argumentative interactions. But what is the secret of having a good conversation? More specifically, what are the types of arguments that lead to the resolution of the conversational goal?
Speaking of conversation and use of arguments, this article will offer an account of how different linguistic-pragmatic models (speech act theory, Gricean pragmatics, conversational analysis, and relevance theory) have been used to better understand the nature of argumentative practices, also describing the pursuit of a good argument.
Argumentation is a communicative activity taking place between at least two parties and, therefore, in it, we can find all the features characterizing human communication. An example is the production and identification of speaker’s meaning since in argumentative discussions speakers constantly exchange their meanings (Oswald, 2023).
Starting from this point, scholars have begun to consider the study of argumentation strictly correlated to the linguistic ones, specifically to the pragmatic study of language, i.e., the study of meaning in use.
Argumentation, indeed, has been deeply influenced by pragmatic principles. Let’s take into consideration the most famous pragmatic theory presented in a study called “How to Do Things with Words” by John Austin (. The scholar points out that in saying something we are actually doing something that is going to affect the feelings, thoughts, or actions of our interlocutor(s). He called these “performative utterances” since we performe them through communication. This theory has been then revisited by the language philosopher John R. Searle (1969) who described the performative utterance as the so-called “Speech Acts” (you can find further details here).
In other words, when we speak we are performing actions through which we express our intentions — sometimes explicitly, sometimes in a more opaque way — with the aim of influencing the other party, obtaining, thus, different conversational outcomes.
Interestingly, persuasion and conviction are the outcomes arguers want to achieve through their argumentative discussions, this is because much of our argumentative encounters are driven by an intention to get others to accept what we tell them, reaching, then, our conversational goal.
Not by chance, the first theorists who made transparent the correlation between the two disciplines are Van Eemeren and Grootendorst (1984) who defined in their Pragma-dialectical theory that argumentation is a constellation of complex speech acts.
Furthermore, the pragma-dialectical framework has largely drawn also on the Gricean conversational model, another pillar of pragmatic study of language. Grice’s contribution relies on his Cooperation Principle in conversations, where he states for different maxims a speaker should observe to maximize the effect of exchanging information and, thus, have a successful dialogical exchange. The cooperative principle has for instance been integrated into a communicative principle that arguers should observe, and which reframes Grice’s conversational maxims as felicity conditions for the successful performance of speech acts of argumentation. In a nutshell, this principle adapts the maxims to enjoin arguers not to perform incomprehensible, insincere, redundant, meaningless or irrelevant speech acts.
Last contemporary research, indeed, have focused on the relationship between (verbal) understanding and acceptance, which at the centre of the suite of cognitive mechanisms humans have presumably evolved to protect themselves against misinformation. In this framework, which incorporates the main assumptions of relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1995), initially inspired by the work of Paul Grice, verbal understanding is construed as a cognitive mechanism by which an individual’s cognitive environment, such as their own beliefs, gets updated, either through the addition of new information or evidence or through the strengthening, deletion or modification of old information.
All these approaches inevitably lead to a form of cooperation in the construction of argumentation as a joint activity in which participants share a goal, hence the development of a cooperative view on argumentation.
Taking into consideration this strong and inevitable relationship between pragmatics and argumentation, scholars have started to wonder “What is a ‘good’ argument?” or, in other word, under which criteria the quality of argumentation can be objectively assessed.
Well, an idea may lie in the theoretical model provided by Paglieri e Castelfranchi (2004) who presented an alternative model of belief revision (Data-oriented belief revision, DBR) where a selection over the available data is performed, to determine the subset of reliable information (i.e. beliefs) and their degree of strength in order to apply a reasoning process on coherent data.
In their model, thus, data are selected as beliefs based on their properties, i.e., the possible cognitive reasons to believe such data. More specifically, their theoretical framework accounts for four distinct properties of data, as follows:
• Credibility: a measure of the number and values of all supporting data, contrasted with all conflicting data, down to external and internal sources;
• Importance: a measure of the epistemic connectivity of the datum, i.e., the number and values of the data that the agent will have to revise, should he revise that single one;
• Relevance: a measure of the pragmatic utility of the datum, i.e., the number and values of the (pursued) goals that depend on that datum;
• (Un-)Likeability: a measure of the motivational appeal of the datum, i.e., the number and values of the (pursued) goals that are directly fulfilled by that datum.
The important aspect of the theoretical model of argument selection is the measurability of the described features. Indeed, this linguistic and cognitive model can be easily associated with mathematical measures which a dialogue system can rely on in order to explore its knowledge base coherently, select the most plausible argument to propose, and thus reach the desirable goal of the arguers.
References
Austin, John Langshaw (1975). How to do things with words, volume 88. Oxford university press.
Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In Speech acts (pp. 41–58). Brill.
Oswald, S. (2023). Pragmatics for argumentation. Journal of Pragmatics, 203, 144–156.
Paglieri, F., & Castelfranchi, C. (2004). Argumentation and data-oriented belief revision: On the two-sided nature of epistemic change. In CMNA IV: 4th workshop on computational models of natural argument, pages 5–12. sn.
Searle, John (1969). Speech acts: An essay in the philosophy of language, volume 626. Cambridge university press.
Van Eemeren, F. H. V., & Grootendorst, R. (1984). Speech acts in argumentative discussions. De Gruyter Mouton.
Wilson, D., & Sperber, D. (2006). Relevance theory. The handbook of pragmatics, 606–632.
