Pragmatic Principles of Communication in Argumentation

Many of the kinds of messages that argumentation scholars call fallacies involve something false or mistaken, but something less than full-fledged lies or less even than just the overt and explicit expression of premises or reasons with false propositional content. How such verbal frauds work is the subject of this paper. Based on the analysis of four such deceiving messages, it shows the importance of pragmatic principles in understanding how arguments work and how they go awry. It suggests that verbal frauds are made possible by exploiting the very presumption of rational standards that make communication (and good argument) possible in the first place. The principles by which people reason to representations of arguments and messages in general have an intrinsically normative quality. That normative attitude is as much an empirical property of argumentation as is the meaning of the message that conveys an argument or the occurrence of the practices that produce an argument.