Premissary Relevance

Abstract

I argue that the property of premissary relevance needs to be tied to arguments understood as speech act complexes, with the pragmatic, social, and communicative implications this connection implies; but premises must not only be formulated to communicate support, they must also actually lend support, and their relevance is a function of their doing so. Explicating premissary relevance is thus a matter of explicating the idea of a premise’s lending support to a conclusion. Our inference warrants make explicit, or are the ground of, our belief that our premises are relevant, by making explicit how we take them to link up with the conclusion. Actual relevance is a function of premises belonging to a set that authoritatively warrants an inference to a conclusion. An authoritative inference warrant will have associated with it a conditional proposition that is true, i.e., that can be justified. A task that remains is to classify inference warrants and their associated conditionals by type, and draw up the general conditions that their justification needs to satisfy. It may be that parallel scholarship studying the Aristotelian doctrine of topoi or argument schemes will contribute to this task.

Reprinted, with permission, from Argumentation, 6(2), pp. 203–217. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992. I thank Frans van Eemeren, James Freeman, Kevin Gaudet, Rob Grootendorst, David Hitchcock, Sally Jackson, Ralph Johnson, Erik Krabbe and others at the 1990 McMaster Conference on Relevance for their comments on an earlier version of this chapter.