The appraisal of conductions

Abstract

I argue that conductions are a special type of inference indeed, but that this does not mean that we need to develop novel standards of inference goodness or specific argument schemes for properly assessing them. Following LNMA's theoretical frame-work, I provide a semantic account of conductions and explain the interesting pragmatic properties of a certain type of conductions (i.e., balance of consid-erations or pro-and-con argumenta-tion) in terms of the rhetorical dimen-sion of the speech-act of arguing.