Fabrizio Macagno

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University of Lisbon | UL · Departamento de Linguística Geral e Românica

A logical or argumentation theory should provide clear criteria for distinguishing between types of arguments and fallacies. Fallacy overlap, namely the possibility of classifying a case under two distinct fallacies, poses a substantial challenge to the system-aticity and theoretical and practical reliability of a theory. However, despite its centr...

It is broadly admitted that social contexts of reasoning may prompt children and adolescents to improve the quality of their reasoning. However, it is not clear how this quality may be assessed when it comes to arguments expressed within oral interactions in diverse settings (whole-class or small-group discussions) by students of different ages and...

This paper aims to develop the criteria for assessing semantic arguments. However, while this notion constituted the core of ancient dialectics and is addressed in several approaches to argument analysis, the criteria for evaluating such arguments are insufficient. This paper intends to address this problem by combining the insights of classical an...

Cancellability – one of the most important tests for implicatures – has been attacked from different perspectives, and its reliability challenged by several cases and examples in which conversational implicatures seem to be hard or even impossible to cancel. To account for these phenomena, distinct approaches have been advanced aimed at weakening G...

Spotlighting case studies of manipulation practices at the onset of the Covid-19 crisis in different countries and socio-political circumstances, the authors expose context-specific discourse and argumentation strategies of 'infodemics’ (misleading information and fake news), public policy mismanagement, deceptive online and offline communication t...

Presuppositions are at the same time a crucial and almost neglected dimension of arguments and fallacies. Arguments involve different types of presuppositions, which can be used for manipulative purposes in distinct ways. However, what are presuppositions? What is their dialectical function? Why and how can they be dangerous? This paper intends to...

Bad jokes are not simply non-humorous texts. They are texts that are humorous for someone––their author at least––but not for their audience. Bad jokes thus involve a contextual––pragmatic––dimension that is neglected in the semantic theories of humor. In this paper, we propose an approach to humor based on the Aristotelian notion of surprising ent...

Cancellability is an essential feature of implicatures. However, its reliability has been challenged by several cases and examples in which conversational implicatures seem to be hard or even impossible to cancel. Should it then be concluded that not all implicatures are cancellable, and therefore Grice's cancellability test should be weakened or a...

Questions, and more specifically authentic questions, are at the core of dialogue-based learning and teaching. However, what is a question, and how can it be authentic? This paper addresses this problem by analyzing the distinct dimensions of questions, showing how their pragmatic nature is interwoven with the syntactic and semantic one, and how it...

Despite the emphasis on dialogue and argumentation in educational settings, still not much is known about how best we can support learners in their interthinking, reasoning, and metadialogic understanding. The goal of this classroom intervention study is to explore the degree of students' dialogicity and its possible increase during a learning prog...

The interpretation of religious texts is an area of research in which rhetoric and the use of arguments play a central role. The analysis of the persuasive message expressed in many biblical passages, the reconstruction of the implicit messages conveyed by the texts, and the justification of an interpretation are questions that concern directly arg...

The Holy Scriptures can be considered a specific kind of normative texts, whose use to assess practical moral cases requires interpretation. In the field of ethics, this interpretative problem results in the necessity of bridging the gap between the normative source – moral precepts – and the specific cases. In the history of the Church, this probl...

Dialogue and argumentation are two processes that complement and mutually influence each other. However, this essential relationship is not sufficiently acknowledged by current educational research. This neglected relation is also mirrored by the lack of sufficient dialogue between two fields that are defined by the dialogical approach to education...

Goal. The problem of the authenticity of teacher questions has not received sufficient attention from educational researchers interested in the intersection between dialogue and argumentation. In this paper, we adopt a definition of authentic questions as dialogical units that prompt teacher-student interactions that are both productive (i.e., seve...

The analysis of verbo-visual argumentation in advertising is a crucial and problematic area of research. Despite such importance, the methods used to interpret and reconstruct the structure of arguments expressed through verbal and visual media capture only isolated dimensions of this complex phenomenon. This article aims to present a methodology f...

In pragmatics, it is a commonly accepted view that the cooperative activity of conversation is based on the “common ground” between the interlocutors - a concept that only apparently is uncontroversial. Described in cognitive terms as “knowledge of each other’s beliefs and attitudes” (Gibbs 1987) (or “shared knowledge”, see Kecskes and Zhang 2009)...

A análise da argumentação verbo-visual na publicidade é uma área de pesquisa: crucial e problemática. Apesar dessa importância, os métodos ainda utilizados para interpretar e reconstruir a estrutura dos argumentos expressos através de meios verbais e visuais capturam apenas dimensões isoladas desse fenômeno complexo. Este artigo objetiva, assim, ap...

The logic of humor has been acknowledged as an essential dimension of every joke. However, what is the logic of jokes, exactly? The modern theories of humor maintain that jokes are characterized by their own logic, dubbed “pseudo,” “playful,” or “local,” which has been the object of frequent criticisms. This article intends to address the limitatio...

This coded database presents a corpus of argumentative tweets published by four politicians (Matteo Salvini, Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, and Joe Biden) within 6 months from their taking office, which corresponds to the official end of their election campaign. The coding is based on a threefold method of analysis based on the instruments of argume...

Empathy, broadly defined as the ability to experience another's emotions and perceptions, is one of the major attitudes and actions underpinning an individual's participation in dialogue across diversity. The goal of this methodological paper is to operationalize empathy as a discursive construct, manifested in children and adolescent dialogic inte...

An argumentation profile is defined as a methodological instrument for analyzing argumentative discourse considering distinct and interrelated dimensions: the types of argument used, their quality, and the emotions triggered. Walton’s theoretical contributions are developed as a coherent analytical and multifaceted toolbox for capturing these aspec...

The phrase secundum quid et simpliciter is the Latin expression translating and labelling the sophism described by Aristotle as connected with the use of some particular expression “absolutely or in a certain respect and not in its proper sense.” This paper presents an overview of the analysis of this fallacy in the history of dialectics, reconstru...

The detection of hate speech and fake news in political discourse is at the same time a crucial necessity for democratic societies and a challenge for several areas of study. However, most of the studies have focused on what is explicitly stated: false article information , language expressing hatred, derogatory expressions. This paper argues that...

Most of the tools developed in the area of Science Education aimed at analyzing either the product or the process of argumentation do not consider the following: (a) arguments are a part of dialogues, (b) dialogues present different objectives, (c) dialogues start from different assumptions, and (d) dialogues shape the roles and moves of interlocut...

The fallacy of ignoring qualifications, or secundum quid et simpliciter, is a deceptive strategy that is pervasive in argumentative dialogues, discourses, and discussions. It consists in misrepresenting an utterance so that its meaning is broadened, narrowed, or simply modified to pursue different goals, such as drawing a specific conclusion, attac...

Walton’s theory has had an enormous impact on different fields, starting from philosophy. His perspective of argumentation as a phenomenon inherently pragmatic, in which logics is interwoven with context and dialogue, is presented as the backbone of his approach to his approach to argument, fallacies, dialogue, and persuasion in general. This theor...

Apresentação do dossiê "Estudos de argumentação multimodal em distintas perspectivas"

This paper proposes a method for analyzing the dialogical functions of metaphors in communicative interactions, and more specifically in the context of medical interviews. The dialogical goals proposed and pursued by the interlocutors are coded using a coding scheme that captures seven mutually exclusive categories of dialogical moves. The function...

Argumentation schemes are a relatively recent notion that continues an extremely ancient debate on one of the foundations of human reasoning, human comprehension, and obviously human argumentation, i.e., the topics. To understand the revolutionary nature of Walton’s work on this subject matter, it is necessary to place it in the debate that it cont...

This dataset belongs to a large-scale educational intervention project introducing cultural literacy learning in schools. The dataset includes transcribed dialogic interactions from 111 lessons conducted in classrooms of five countries: England, Portugal, Germany, Spain, and Cyprus. The lessons were part of the same Cultural Literacy Learning Progr...

Neste ensaio, discutimos alguns aspectos metodológicos sobre a argumentação na Educação em Ciências, especificamente: o emprego dos conceitos argumentação como produto e como processo por alguns pesquisadores; a ênfase dada à argumentação como produto nas pesquisas; e o uso de determinados instrumentos de coleta de dados para analisar e avaliar a a...

In the domain of medical science, factual evidence is usually considered as the criterion on which to base decisions and construct hypotheses. Evidence-based medicine is the translation of this approach into the field of patient care, and it means providing only the type of care that is based on evidence that proves its effectiveness and appropriat...

The analysis of multimodal argumentation in advertising is a crucial and problematic area of research. While its importance is growing in a time characterized by images and pictorial messages, the methods used for interpreting and reconstructing the structure of arguments expressed through verbal and visual means capture only isolated dimensions of...

Together with the volume “Inquiries in philosophical pragmatics: Theoretical developments,” this book collects selected contributions to the conference Pragmasophia II held in Lisbon in 2018. The eleven essays of this volume focus on how a linguistic structure or expression manifests a pragmatic phenomenon, and are ordered considering their relatio...

This paper investigates the emotive (or expressive) meaning of words commonly referred to as “loaded” or “emotive,” which include slurs, derogative or pejorative words, and ethical terms. We claim that emotive meaning can be analyzed from a argumentative perspective at distinct levels, which can forexplain some essential aspects of ethical terms, i...

Together with the volume “Inquiries in philosophical pragmatics: Linguistic and theoretical issues,” this book collects selected contributions to the conference Pragmasophia II held in Lisbon in 2018. This first volume intends to contribute to the dialogue between philosophers and linguists, trying to broaden the boundaries of this discipline defin...

In the literature, the pragmatic dimension of metaphors has been clearly acknowledged. Metaphors are regarded as having different possible uses, especially pursuing persuasion. However, an analysis of the specific conversational purposes that they can be aimed at achieving in a dialogue and their adequacy thereto is still missing. In this chapter,...

Together with the volume “Inquiries in philosophical pragmatics: Linguistic and theoretical issues,” this book provides a journey through the more recent developments of pragmatics, considering both its philosophical and linguistic nature. This first volume is devoted to the theoretical models developed from a philosophical perspective, including b...

This book addresses the interconnection between linguistics and pragmatics, proposing new theoretical approaches to linguistic issues relevant to discourse analysis, communication, and rhetoric, such as implicatures, temporal ordering, implicit constituents, presupposition, polysemy, and the strategic use of pronouns. Contributing authors in pragma...

Statutory interpretation involves the reconstruction of the meaning of a legal statement when it cannot be considered as accepted or granted. This phenomenon needs to be considered not only from the legal and linguistic perspective, but also from the argumentative one - which focuses on the strategies for defending a controversial or doubtful viewp...

Dialogue moves are a pragmatic instrument that captures the most important categories of “dialogical intentions.” This paper adapts this tool to the conversational setting of chronic care communication, characterized by the general goal of making reasoned decisions concerning patients’ conditions, shared by the latter. Seven mutually exclusive and...

Metaphors are considered as instruments crucial for persuasion. However, while many studies and works have focused on their emotive, communicative, and persuasive effects, the argumentative dimension that represents the core of their “persuasiveness” is almost neglected. This paper addresses the problem of explaining how metaphors can communicate a...

The analysis of multimodal argumentation in advertising is a crucial and problematic area of research. While its importance is growing in a time characterized by images and pictorial messages, the methods used for interpreting and reconstructing the structure of arguments expressed through verbal and visual means capture only isolated dimensions of...

In this book, we present the argumentative approach to academic writing that we used in classroom. What characterizes it and makes it unique is the perspective that is adopted. We do not start from preexisting ideas that only need to be presented in a way that is suitable to an academic public. We intend to show that writing academically is a conse...

The definition and the assessment of the quality of argumentative texts has become an increasingly crucial issue in education, classroom discourse, and argumentation theory. The different methods developed and used in the literature are all characterized by specific perspectives that fail to capture the complexity of the subject matter, which remai...

Two fundamental critical thinking skills that students are expected to develop during their formal education are: the use of evidence for justifying their positions, and the consideration of objections or contrary opinions in their own reasoning. These skills, fully manifested in argumentative reasoning, have not been sufficiently addressed in high...

Twitter costituisce uno strumento non solo di condivisione delle informazioni pubbliche o personali, ma anche di persuasione. Tuttavia, mentre per l’analisi dei dati macro-analitici esistono specifiche piattaforme e programmi e per quella linguistica specifici studi, la dimensione argomentativa è ad oggi inesplorata. Questo articolo propone un meto...

The analysis of how context affects meaning, and how utterances affect a conversational situation is a fundamental and little acknowledged dimension of educational and argumentative dialogues. Pragmatics is presupposed by any discipline addressing how dialogic teaching affects learning or how argumentative dialogues can improve critical thinking sk...

Relevance is one of the crucial criteria for assessing the quality of argumentation in education. In argumentation and education, relevance has never been analyzed or coded. While several theories have included in their analysis some indicators of cohesion or clarity, this characteristic of dialogue and discourse has never been addressed as a disti...

Donald Trump's speeches and messages are characterized by terms that are commonly referred to as "thick" or "emotive", meaning that they are characterized by a tendency to be used to generate emotive reactions. This paper investigates how emotive meaning is related to emotions, and how it is generated or manipulated. Emotive meaning is analyzed as...

Resumo: O conceito de definição é controverso, em primeiro lugar, pela sua ambiguidade. O conceito de definição refere-se, ao mesmo tempo, a estruturas proposicionais, nomeadamente diferentes tipos de relações conversíveis entre definiens e o definiendum, e diferentes atos de fala com propósitos definitórios vários. Por um lado, as definições podem...

This article proposes a coding scheme for identifying and assessing linguistic evidence of problematic understanding in health-care provider communication with patients affected by type 2 diabetes mellitus. Drawing on the existing literature in pragmatics and linguistics, the scheme is grounded on the distinctions between the different types of lin...

RESUMO: Neste artigo demonstra-se como os esquemas argumentativos (esquemas que representam argumentos refutáveis, combinados com perguntas críticas correspondentes), podem ser usados para representar a estrutura lógica dos vários tipos de argumentos reconhecidos como fundamentais na interpretação da lei por Tarello (1980). Defende-se que o proces...

Metaphors can be used as crucial tools for reaching shared understanding, especially where an epistemic imbalance of knowledge is at stake. However, metaphors can also represent a risk in intercultural or cross-cultural interactions, namely in situations characterised by little or deficient common ground between interlocutors. In such cases, the us...

Pragmatic presuppositions are analyzed considering their relation with the notion of commitment, namely the dialogical acceptance of a proposition by an interlocutor. The attribution of commitments carried out by means of pragmatic presupposition is shown to depend on the reasonableness of the underlying presumptive reasoning, ultimately grounded o...

This paper builds a nine-step method for determining whether a straw man fallacy has been committed in a given case or not, by starting with some relatively easy textbook cases and moving to more realistic and harder cases. The paper shows how the type of argument associated with the fallacy can be proved to be a fallacy in a normative argumentatio...

Este artigo tem por objetivo comparar as formas atuais de modelar a estrutura inferencial de argumentos de raciocínio prático (baseados em objetivos) e propor uma nova abordagem na qual esta estrutura é considerada de maneira modular. O raciocínio prático não é visto simplesmente como um raciocínio que parte de um objetivo e de um meio para uma açã...

In the tradition stemming from Aristotle through Aquinas, rational decision making is seen as a complex structure of distinct phases in which reasoning and will are interconnected. Intention, deliberation, and decision are regarded as the fundamental steps of the decision-making process, in which an end is chosen, the means are specified, and a dec...

This paper compares current ways of modeling the inferential structure of practical (goal-based) reasoning arguments, and proposes a new approach in which it is regarded in a modular way. Practical reasoning is not simply seen as reasoning from a goal and a means to an action using the basic argumentation scheme. Instead, it is conceived as a compl...

The detection and analysis of misunderstandings are crucial aspects of discourse analysis, and presuppose a twofold investigation of their structure. First, misunderstandings need to be identified and, more importantly, justified. For this reason, a classification of the types and force of evidence of a misunderstanding is needed. Second, misunders...

The purpose of this chapter is threefold: 1) to describe the schemes, showing how they evolved and how they have been classified in the traditional and the modern theories; 2) to propose a method for classifying them based on ancient and modern developments; and 3) to outline and show how schemes can be used to describe and analyze or produce real...

This paper advances an approach to presupposition rooted in the concept of commitment, a dialectical notion weaker than truth and belief. It investigates ancient medieval dialectical theories and develops the insights thereof for analyzing how presuppositions are evaluated and why a proposition is presupposed. In particular, at a pragmatic level, p...

This paper advances an approach to relevance grounded on patterns of material inference called argumentation schemes, which can account for the reconstruction and the evaluation of relevance relations. In order to account for relevance in different types of dialogical contexts, pursuing also non-cognitive goals, and measuring the scalar strength of...

The purpose of this chapter is twofold. On the one hand, our goal is theoretical, as we aim at providing an instrument for detecting, analyzing, and solving ambiguities based on the reasoning mechanism underlying interpretation. To this purpose, combining the insights from pragmatics and argumentation theory, we represent the background assumptions...

The fields of linguistic pragmatics and legal interpretation are deeply interrelated. The purpose of this paper is to show how pragmatics and the developments in argumentation theory can contribute to the debate on legal interpretation. The relation between the pragmatic maxims and the presumptions underlying the legal canons are brought to light,...

The reasoning process of analogy is analyzed as a strict interdependence between a process of abstraction of a common feature and the transfer of an attribute of the Analogue to the Primary Subject. The first reasoning step is regarded as an abstraction of a generic characteristic that is relevant for the attribution of the predicate. The abstracte...

In this chapter, an argumentative approach to ambiguity and commitment attribution is advanced in order to address the problem of establishing the speaker’s commitments in case of ambiguity of his utterance. The goal is to analyze how a doubtful or potentially doubtful interpretation of an utterance can be supported dialectically by providing a dia...

Quotations are selections of an Original Speaker’s words that can be used for different argumentative purposes, such as supporting a viewpoint through the authority of an expert source, or attacking the interlocutor by confronting him with his past commitments. However, quotations can be also distorted for pursuing different goals. In this chapter,...

This chapter investigates the structure and the strategies of the straw man fallacy. A straw man fallacy consists in the speaker’s attacking a distorted version of the other’s viewpoint or commitments, in order to rebut his argument more easily by attacking a position that has been simplified and weakened. This strategy, however, can lead to the ri...

This chapter analyzes the notion of commitment and shows how speakers’ commitments can be reconstructed. To this purpose, some models of utterance interpretation and the notions of speaker’s intention and dialogue acts will be discussed. A commitment is a dialogical obligation, a responsibility of the speaker for the intended effects of his utteran...

This chapter is focused on rhetorical strategies based on indirect reporting and distortion of a party’s viewpoint. We begin by clarifying the role of the notion of argumentative relevance for assessing when a viewpoint is correctly reported or manipulated. We will describe relevance as a sequential concept referring to the number of premises and i...

This paper analyzes selected examples of uses of argumentation tactics that exploit emotive language, many of them criticized as deceptive and even fallacious by classical and recent sources, including current informal logic textbooks. The analysis is based on six argumentation schemes, and an account of the dialectical setting in which these schem...

In this paper it is shown how certain defeasible argumentation schemes can be used to represent the logical structure of the most common types of argument used for statutory interpretation both in civil and common law. The method is based on an argumentation structure in which the conclusion, namely, the meaning attributed to a legal source, is mod...

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the structure and the defeasibility conditions of argument from analogy, addressing the issues of determining the nature of the comparison underlying the analogy and the types of inferences justifying the conclusion. In the dialectical tradition, different forms of similarity were distinguished and related to...

In this article, we describe the notion of dialogue move intended as the minimal unit for the analysis of dialogues. We propose an approach to discourse analysis based on the pragmatic idea that the joint dialogical intentions are also co-constructed through the individual moves and the higher-order communicative intentions that the interlocutors p...

Pragmatic presupposition is analyzed as grounded on an implicit reasoning process based on a set of presumptions, which can define cultural differences. The basic condition for presupposing a proposition is represented as a reasoning criterion, namely reasonableness. Presuppositions, on this view, need to be reasonable, namely they need to be the r...

This book shows how research in linguistic pragmatics, philosophy of language, and rhetoric can be connected through argumentation to analyze a recognizably common strategy used in political and everyday conversation, namely the distortion of another’s words in an argumentative exchange. Straw man argumentation refers to the modification of a posit...

Argumentation schemes can be described as abstract structures representing the most generic types of argument, constituting the building blocks of the ones used in everyday reasoning. This paper investigates the structure, classification, and uses of such schemes. Three goals are pursued: 1) to describe the schemes, showing how they evolved and how...

In order to model relevance , we use argument diagrams (graphs), argumentation schemes, profiles of dialogue, and some tools from artificial intelligence. We show how this method helps an analyst judge relevance or irrelevance of an argument in four real examples, including a criminal trial and a parliamentary debate. We contend that this method of...

The classification of a state of affairs under a legal category can be considered as a kind of condensed decision that can be made explicit, analyzed, and assessed using argumentation schemes. In this paper, the controversial conflict of opinions concerning the nature of " marriage " in Obergefell v. Hodges is analyzed pointing out the dialecti-cal...

The purpose of this paper is to show whether the two crucial dimensions used for assessing the quality of argumentation, argument-as-a-product (argument structure) and argument-as-a-process (relevance), are interrelated, and how they can be used to assess the effect of argumentative mode on students’ arguments. To this purpose, a twofold coding sch...

The purpose of this paper is to show how microargumentation mechanisms of presumptive reasoning and reasoning from best explanation can be used to explain some cases of presupposition suspension. It will be shown how the relationship between presupposition triggers and pragmatic presuppositions can be analyzed in terms of presumptive and nonpresump...