Employing and Exploiting the Presumptions of Communication in Argumentation: An Application of Normative Pragmatics

Argumentation occurs through and as communicative activity. Communication (and therefore argumentation) is organized by pragmatic principles of expression and interpretation. Grice's theory of conversational implicature provides a model for how people use rational principles to manage how they reason to representations of arguments, and not just reason from those representations. These principles are systematic biases that make possible reasonable decision-making and intersubjective understandings, but also make possible errors and abuses. Much that is problematic in argumentation involves the ways the pragmatic principles of communication are exploited and the difficulties audiences and interlocutors have detecting and managing these abuses.