LANGUAGE AND ARGUMENT

This paper has a dual purpose: it both seeks to introduce the other works in this issue by illustrating how they are related to the field of arguments a whole, and to make clear the tremendous range of research currently being carried out by argumentation theories which is concerned with the interaction and inter-reliance of language and argument. After brief introduction to the development of the field of argumentation, The conclusion makes it clear that these branches of study all are themselves interconnected and that it is the fusion of methodologies and theory from linguistics and the philosophical study of argument which lends this area of research its dynamism.

Keywords: Corpus linguistics, argumentation, informal logic, discourse, rhetoric, fallacy.

It should be clear at once that arguments are generally expressed in language, and that, therefore, it is both difficult to fully separate them and natural to study them together: both their influence upon one another and the degree to which they get in one another’s way.  Argument, here, is to be understood in the philosophical sense: arguments are not disputes. Rather they are what rational agents use to try to resolve disputes, to reach the truth and to achieve a consensus. This is what makes argumentation such a special field: the use of arguments, the employment of reasoning within a community, is part of what it means to be human. Arguments are the communication of reason, and it is our ability to communicate and share our reasoning that makes our species so successful, so powerful and, sadly, so dangerous. There can be no study more fundamental to the understanding of the human mind than the study of the arguments with which we attempt to persuade each other, the reasons we give to ourselves and to those with whom we must cooperate if we are to survive and thrive. It should come as no surprise, then, to find that argumentation is a truly cross-disciplinary field of research. As well as philosophers and linguists, lawyers, psychologists and computer scientists all follow and contribute to the development of argumentation theory.

What is argument?

Argument is series of sentences, statements, propositions where some are the premises and one is the conclusion and where the premises are intended to give a reason for the conclusion.

Deductive argument – It is an argument that is presented to be valid. Therefore, it cannot have a false conclusion when it is possible that all of its premises are true.

Example: All humans have brain. I am human. So, I have brain.

Inductive arguments – It is an argument that strength comes in degrees. It is NOT supposed to be valid. Inductive arguments are defeasible, which means they might be strong or weak, but not true or false.

Types of inductive arguments – Statistical Generalizations, Causal Reasoning, Probability, Inference to Best Explanation or Arguments from Analogy.

The importance of language to argument

While there were always scholars looking at the language of arguments, recent years have seen a growing interest in the intersection of argumentation and linguistics, of which the papers in this issue are a product. Many researchers in the field come from a background in linguistics or communication studies, as well as computer science.  Although not touched upon any further here, the development of artificial intelligence and the necessity for software to understand human speech has led to the strong engagement of programmers with the analysis of natural language arguments. The combination of theories and techniques from linguistics with the tradition of fallacy theory and philosophical approaches to inference has created a tremendous number of opportunities for scholars with an interest in reasoning, persuasion and debate in all their manifestations. 

Argument as act

Acceptance that arguments may have other impacts and even other motivations than simply to show another by means of reason that a certain proposition is true, has been slow, but a wider view of the purposes and effects of engaging in argumentation is emerging. Some work has been done on the act of arguing as an expression of identity (Hamble and Irion’s 2015, Hinton 2016), and, given the importance attached to issues of identities in modern political debate, this is an area of research which seems ripe for further development.

Conclusion

The division into as many as eight different areas in which linguistics and the study of reasoning come into contact within the field of argumentation does reveal the multiplicity of approaches being taken by scholars interested in both language and argument, one might also argue that rhetoric cannot be sensibly separated from discourse analysis anyway, nor from the study of emotive language, The important point, and the one which this paper and the collection of articles it appears alongside has sought to make, is that the combination of techniques and theory from linguistics and philosophical approaches to argumentation is proving fruitful within the rapidly developing field of argumentation.