Abstract
This paper deals with the phenomenon of erotetic argumentation, which is characterized by a speaker using premises to argue in favor of a question rather than a proposition as in standard cases of argumentation. We discuss some properties of erotetic argumentation and propose a Bayesian formalisation for these properties based on the idea that erotetic argumentation is marked by an increase of entropy rather than a decrease as in the standard cases. We then examine a series of natural language argumentative constructions (adversative conjunction, disjunction, epistemic modals and questions) and their (in)compatibility with erotetic argumentation. We conclude with a brief look at other types of semantic messages (imperatives and exclamatives) and the possibility of also targeting them as conclusions of an argument.
The author would like to thank Jonathan Ginzburg, two anonymous reviewers and the audience of LENLS for their comments, insights and inspiration on this topic. All errors and inaccuracies remain of course my own responsibility.
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- 1.
The constraints in (5) also match how Merin (1999, fn. 30) describes the relation of being relevant to a question. His goal however is not to deal with erotetic argumentation, but with standard argumentation. His notion of being relevant to a question, is to be understood as being relevant to solve the question, rather than being about raising a question.
- 2.
As mentioned above, the locution “raises the question” would be intuitively closer to the relation between premises and conclusion set in erotetic argumentation rather than “argues for”, but we want to underline the similarities between all forms of argumentation.
- 3.
We notably ignore the corrective uses of adversative markers which behave differently with regards to the argumentative properties of utterances, see e.g. Jasinskaja (2012) for details and discussions.
- 4.
Here, the second conjunct could be uttered by either the speaker of the first utterance or by the addressee, though the latter might be more natural. The possibility of having both utterances by the same speaker is related to the polyphonous nature of adversative conjunction which we will not discuss here (Ducrot 1984).
- 5.
Note that the argumentative profile of polar questions is (at least partly) independent from the question of their bias. Thus, positive polar questions as in (20-b) are often taken to be unbiased (i.e. not favoring one answer over another), though they still argue in the same direction as the negative answer (though not necessarily in favor of the negative answer, which would correspond to a bias). A more thorough investigation of these interactions lies beyond the scope of this paper, but the case of Chinese languages, especially Cantonese, that have several particles to indicate various (un)biased questions (Yuan and Hara 2013; Hara 2014) would be a good testing ground for this matter.
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Winterstein, G. (2019). A Probabilistic View on Erotetic Argumentation Within Language. In: Kojima, K., Sakamoto, M., Mineshima, K., Satoh, K. (eds) New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. JSAI-isAI 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11717. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31605-1_28
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