• Oswald Steve

This seminar tackles a classical topic in argumentation studies, namely fallacious argumentation. Traditionally defined, quite loosely, as arguments in which the conclusion does not follow from the premises, fallacies have been studied in Western thought ever since Aristotle, and the ramification of their study extends to contemporary theories of argumentation. The goal of this seminar will be to offer students a linguistically and pragmatically motivated approach to these argumentative phenomena. Building on the idea that before arguments can be evaluated, the contents of their premises and conclusions need to be understood, special attention will be paid to the linguistic and pragmatic processing of meaning that these argumentative objects prompt, in an attempt to show, document and discuss how meaning interpretation can be thought to play a crucial role in argumentative evaluation.

At the end of the seminar, students should:

• be able to describe in detail what fallacious arguments are and know classical typologies of fallacious arguments
• be familiar with different takes on fallacy theory
• be able to analyse argumentative texts in English in which fallacious arguments are used, so as to (i) precisely identify their fallaciousness and (ii) provide a principled explanation of the way they work

Bibliographical references will be given on Moodle week after week.