Explaining argumentative practices from a pragma-cognitive perspective

Document Type : Original Article

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Department of Arabic Language and Literature, Faculty of Arts, Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt

Abstract

This research is aimed to introducing Arabic readers to selected contributions of some researchers who approach argumentative practices from a pragma-cognitive perspective, particularly a relevance-theoretic one. Adopting such a perspective is proven to be instrumental in critically reviewing the two most prominent approaches to argumentation: the dialectical and rhetorical ones, seeking for developing and enriching them.
The pragma-cognitive approach to argumentation concentrates on the objective of explanation, making it prior to the dialectical objective of evaluation and the rhetorical objective of description. The approach at issue attempts to scrutinize the interpretative and evaluative processes of utterances that take place in the human brain, starting out from the infallibility of cognition and the inevitability of processing information on a shallow basis.
Two aspects of studying the argumentative reality are concentrated upon. The first is fallacies as examples of manipulative, non-cooperative behavior. This research illustrates how, on a pragma-cognitive basis, arguers who commit fallacies can make them persuasive by means of context-constraining, forcing their interlocutors to interpret these argumentative moves in irrelevant contexts.
The second aspect is related to reconstructing the argumentative discourse, with regard to identifying the pragmatic optimum of an unexpressed premise. The research explains how an analyst can make use of the relevance-theoretic equilibrium of least cognitive effort and highest epistemic effect when selecting the pragmatic optimum from a list of probabilities. This tool can help analysts duly attribute the actual commitments to arguers.

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