Following Chapter 2’s thesis that the only way to overcome the justification problem of Argumentation Theory’s normative models is to deal with the concept of argumentative value as the constitutive goal of the activity of arguing, I propose a characterization of argumentation as a communicative activity aimed at showing a target claim to be correct. My contention throughout this work is that this characterization makes it possible to integrate the logical, dialectical and rhetorical dimensions of argumentation, regarding both its interpretation and its evaluation.
In Section 3.2, I explain that the theoretical object of the linguistic normative model to be developed in this book is acts of arguing, and I distinguish these communicative acts from arguments as abstracts objects representing certain semantic features of acts of arguing.
Then, in Section 3.3, I characterize this theoretical object as a second order speech act complex. To this end, I adopt Bach and Harnish’s Speech Act Schema (SAS), as presented in Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts (1979). Despite Bach and Harnish do not consider second order speech acts or speech act complexes, I show that their schema can be extended so as to characterize both features of the speech act of arguing.
On this account, an act of arguing will be described, at the same time, as the illocution of showing a target-claim to be correct and as the perlocution of inducing reasonings.
In the last section of this chapter, I deal with the relationship between reasoning and arguing by considering one aspect of the relationship between justifying and persuading, namely, the way in which argumentation is able to induce reasonings paradigmatic perlocutionary effect. Thus, a parallelism is made between acts of arguing and acts of reasoning that enables the representation of both types of acts by means of arguments.