Amalia Haro Marchal

L'argumentation, en tant qu'acte de langage spécifique, implique un échange de sens entre ses participants, produisant des effets illocutoires qui se traduisent par des modifications de leurs droits et obligations dialectiques. La production de ces effets repose sur la construction conjointe, par le locuteur et l'interlocuteur, du sens de l'énoncé du locuteur. Or, le sens voulu par le locuteur ne coïncide pas toujours avec l'interprétation de l'interlocuteur. Cet article soutient que cet écart a des implications cruciales pour l'évaluation de l'argumentation. Plus précisément, il explore les conséquences de cet écart dans les cas d'attribution d'engagement, en prenant pour exemple le sophisme de l'homme de paille.

Parfois, nous discutons à propos de chats ou de l'existence d'un plus grand nombre premier. D'autres fois, nous discutons d'arguments. Dans ce cas, nous nous engageons dans une méta-argumentation. La plupart des descriptions de méta-argumentation dans la littérature l'abordent rétrospectivement : nous méta-argumentons sur des arguments déjà avancés. Ce faisant, nous pouvons trouver des méta-raisons de rejeter un argument par ailleurs valable, entre autres. Cet article aborde la méta-argumentation dans l'autre sens, c'est-à-dire de manière prospective. Pour illustrer ce concept, nous explorons des cas où l'on a des méta-raisons de formuler intentionnellement de mauvais arguments, ou, dans d'autres cas, où l'on argumente sans argumenter du tout, mais en communiquant de manière non argumentative pour étayer d'autres arguments. Nous appelons ces derniers cas des para-arguments.

Argumentation, as a specific type of speech act, involves an exchange of meaning among its participants, yielding illocutionary effects consisting in the production of changes in participants’ dialectical entitlements and obligations. The production of these illocutionary effects hinges on the joint construction by the speaker and the interlocutor of the meaning of the speaker’s utterance. However, the speaker’s meaning does not always coincide with the interlocutor’s interpretation. This paper argues that this gap has crucial implications for the evaluation of argumentation. Specifically, it explores the consequences of this gap in cases involving commitment attributions, taking the straw man fallacy as a case of study.

As a communicative activity, argumentation has been characterized as a specific type of speech act. In the analysis of the speech act of arguing, I have distinguished two illocutionary levels: one related to the speaker’s utterance and the other related to the communicative exchange involving the speaker and the interlocutor. In this article, I argue that these two levels are associated with the speaker’s meaning and the joint meaning, respectively. The two-level analysis of meaning makes it possible to account for cases in which commitment attributions are at stake and that may, as a result, give rise to a special form of discursive injustice.

This paper argues that García-Carpintero’s theory of proper names (the Mill-Frege theory) and his theory of fiction-making do not work well together. On the one hand, according to the Mill-Frege theory, proper names have metalinguistic senses which are involved in ancillary presuppositions. These metalinguistic senses and the name-bearing relation depend on acts of naming that create words for referential use. On the other hand, his theory of fiction-making claims that when the creator of a fiction uses sentences, she is not really performing the speech acts that one typically performs with those uses in default contexts; instead, they are merely pretended acts. Specifically, when she uses the sentences that typically perform speech acts of naming in default contexts, she merely pretends to do so. In this situation, these acts do not establish a name-bearing relation and thus these acts do not have a semantic significance. This result entails a flawed conceptualization of the speech act of fiction-making; specifically, one where such speech act is rendered defective.

According to what we call the neutral view of poisoning the well, poisoning the well is an argumentative move that appeals to an opponent’s social identity as an attempt to diminish their credibility. This view holds that poisoning the well is a very special and dangerous fallacy, because it silences the recipient on the basis of their social identity, and therefore never counts as a legitimate move in a debate. In this paper, we take issue with this view. First, we show that this account is committed to the ideal of neutrality, which is highly problematic. Second, we argue that after abandoning the ideal of neutrality, it’s clear that not all cases of poisoning the well constitute silencing. Finally, we reflect on the phenomenon of poisoning the well from a non-neutral approach, and explore further situations that could count as instances of it. Poisoning the well is, many times, a virtuous move.

Following and extending Searle’s speech act theory, both Pragma-Dialectics and the Linguistic Normative Model of Argumentation characterize argumentation as an illocutionary act. In these models, the successful performance of an illocutionary act of arguing depends on the securing of uptake, an illocutionary effect that, according to the Searlean account, characterizes the successful performance of any illocutionary act. However, in my view, there is another kind of illocutionary effect involved in the successful performance of an illocutionary act of arguing, which affects both the speaker’s and the hearer’s set of rights, obligations, and entitlements. In order to give an account of this second type of effect, I will argue that it is necessary to distinguish two levels in the analysis of the illocutionary act of arguing. The first one is related to the illocutionary effect of securing of uptake and thus to the speech act performed by the speaker, while the second one allows us to account for the changes produced by the performance of the illocutionary act of arguing in the deontic modal competence of both the speaker and the hearer.