I show that in our theoretical representations of argument, vicious infinite regresses of self-reference may arise with respect to each of the three usual, informal criteria of argument cogency: the premises are to be relevant, sufficient, and acceptable. They arise needlessly, by confusing a cogency criterion with argument content. The three types of regress all are structurally similar to Lewis Carroll’s famous regress, which involves quantitative extravagance with no explanatory power. Most attention is devoted to the sufficiency criterion, including its (...) relation to the view au courant that inferring necessarily involves the thinker taking her premises to support her conclusion. I contend that this view is mistaken and likewise that arguments make no such assumption or inference claim as that the premises support the conclusion. The core of the positive alternative model I propose is that there is commitment to, but not claiming, the proposition that the premises support the conclusion. (shrink)

When a speaker states an argument in arguing—in its core sense—for the conclusion, the speaker asserts, as opposed to merely implies or implicates, the associated inference claim to the effect that the conclusion follows from the premises. In defense of this, I argue that how an inference claim is conveyed when stating an argument is constrained by constitutive and normative conditions for core cases of the speech of arguing for a conclusion. The speech act of assertion better reflects such conditions (...) than does implication, conversational implicature, or conventional implicature. (shrink)

Arguments figure prominently in our practices of reason-giving. For example, we use them to advance reasons for their conclusions in order to justify believing something, to explain why we believe something, and to persuade others to believe something. Intuitively, using arguments in these ways requires a certain degree of self-reflection. In this paper, I ask: what cognitive requirements are there for using an argument to advance reasons for its conclusion? Towards a partial response, the paper’s central thesis is that in (...) order to so use an argument one must believe the associated inference claim to the effect that the premises collectively are reasons that support the conclusion. I then argue against making it a further cognitive requirement that one be aware of one’s justification for believing such an inference claim. This thesis provides a rationale for the typical informal-logic textbook characterization of argument and motivates a constraint on adequate accounts of what are referred to as inference claims in the informal logic and argumentation literatures. (shrink)

The article develops and justifies, on the basis of the epistemological argumentation theory, two central pieces of the theory of evaluative argumentation interpretation: 1. criteria for recognizing argument types and 2. rules for adding reasons to create ideal arguments. Ad 1: The criteria for identifying argument types are a selection of essential elements from the definitions of the respective argument types. Ad 2: After presenting the general principles for adding reasons (benevolence, authenticity, immanence, optimization), heuristics are proposed for finding missing (...) reasons, for deductive arguments, e.g., semantic tableaux are suggested. (shrink)