The Anatomy of Arguments in Natural Language Discourse
Una Stojnić · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2022
According to tradition, in assessing the validity of an argument expressed in a natural language, context must be fixed. This chapter argues that one cannot adequately capture validity for natural language arguments by imposing a ban on context-shifting because expressions within discourses, and so arguments, carry linguistically encoded effects on context that determine the meanings of context-sensitive items. These effects are induced not only by the sentences the discourse comprises, but also by the linguistically-encoded relations between them. While research in dynamic semantics has long stressed the importance of context-change for capturing intuitions about validity, it still represented arguments as relations between sets of sentences and sentences, the premises and conclusion. This is a mistake: an adequate account requires individuating argument patterns as structured discourses, the structure of which determines the information expressed by the premises and conclusion.