The Semantics and Pragmatics of Argumentation

Abstract

Arguments have always played a central role within logic and philosophy. This chapter overviews recent work on the semantics and pragmatics of argumentative discourse, with particular attention to work on the semantics of argument connectives such as ‘therefore’ in discourse coherence theory and in dynamic semantics, as well as on modal analyses of ‘therefore’. A dynamic analysis of the semantics of ‘therefore’ is described, that captures both uses of ‘therefore’ in categorical arguments as well as its uses in suppositional and complex arguments. In the final section, I overview some issues that arise on the pragmatics of arguments, such as how we are to characterize the distinctive utterance force of arguments versus explanations.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 23 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.