Non-propositional meanings and commitment attribution
More arguments in favor of a cognitive approach
In this paper, I elaborate on the cognitive pragmatic approaches of commitment attribution. I argue that
non-propositional meanings (Sperber and Wilson 2015) play a role in the reconstruction
of arguments (see Oswald 2016) and I underline that this constitutes a further argument
in favor of a cognitive approach to the study of commitment attribution. I focus on an authentic example of a straw man fallacy
consisting in (a) an implicit misattribution of commitments to the speaker with the form “Excuse me for having done p” and (b) a
refutation of the attributed position by means of non-propositional effects (in this case, the refutation is implicitly conveyed
through an ironical utterance). I conclude that non-propositional effects can serve as a criterion to distinguish a mere false
attribution of commitments from a full-fledged straw man fallacy.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Cognitive-pragmatic accounts of commitment attribution
- 2.1The explicit-implicit divide of linguistic communication
- 2.2Searching for relevance
- 2.3Spotting misattributions of commitments: The case of straw man fallacies
- 3.Commitment cues beyond propositional meanings
- 3.1Defining non-propositional meanings
- 3.2Refuting a position by non-propositional means: An authentic case of straw man fallacy
- 4.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References
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Cited by
Cited by 1 other publications
Stevens, Katharina
2021.
Fooling the Victim: Of Straw Men and Those Who Fall for Them.
Philosophy & Rhetoric 54:2
► pp. 109 ff.
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