Unexpressed Premisses: Part II
Frans H. van Eemeren, Rob Grootendorst · Argumentation and Advocacy · 1983
Although unexpressed premisses generally present few problems in discussions in colloquial speech, it is nevertheless sometimes difficult to determine exactly what premiss is unexpressed in a particular argumentation. Neither the approach to unexpressed premisses that is commonly taken in logic, nor the approach whereby unexpressed premisses are regarded as presuppositions, provides a satisfactory explanation of the behaviour of interlocutors with regard to unexpressed premisses, nor do they provide sufficient usable guidelines for explicitizing unexpressed premisses. The authors demonstrate that with the help of the insights of Grice it is impossible to improve this situation. They regard unexpressed premisses as conversational implicatures (part I) and formulate guidelines for detecting such conversational implicatures (part II).