This chapter offers a cognitively-grounded account of manipulative strategies speakers may use to challenge and discredit scientific discourse in times of crisis, in which the perceived reliability of scientific communication is vulnerable. Specifically, we explore how such an overwhelming… read more
The introduction to this special issue provides an overview of the notion of disagreement in relation to argumentative practices and presents the rationale for investigating disagreement management in argumentative discourse from a pragmatic perspective. It describes how existing accounts of… read more
This chapter discusses features of conspiratorial discourse related to the representation of social actors through the lens of rhetorical and argumentative analysis. Specifically, it identifies a previously undocumented variant of the straw man fallacy (a misrepresentation of an opponent’s… read more
This special issue aims to explore the semantic and pragmatic dimensions of meaning in terms of their significance and relevance in the study of argumentation. Accordingly, the contributors to the project, who have all presented their work during the 2nd Argumentation and Language conference,… read more
This chapter defends a cognitive-pragmatic take on rhetorical effectiveness by hypothesising that information-selection mechanisms at play in the interpretation of verbal stimuli positively influence the outcome of subsequent argumentative evaluation. Moreover, this chapter also shows that… read more
This paper proposes a cognitive-pragmatic alternative to the traditional, speech-acttheoretic, account of the notion of commitment. The perspective adopted here questions the relevance of addressing actual commitment as a speaker category and shifts the focus of the discussion from properties of… read more
This paper investigates the tentative compatibility of two pragmatic approaches, Pragma-Dialectics (PD) and Relevance Theory (RT). The development of pragmatics historically led to conceptions of communication that supplied answers formal logic approaches had trouble capturing. Within argumentation… read more