Types of conversational backgrounds and arguments

Abstract

The chapter reconstructs the most relevant “flavors” of modality (alethic, deontic, deontic-practical, anankastic, and epistemic) in terms of a relational, discourse sensitive, context dependent, procedural approach to the interpretation of modal constructions. The approach, while inspired by Relative Modality and the formal semantics tradition, integrates pragmatic insights and it is cast as a tool for the actual analysis of discourse and argumentation. This approach to the typology of modal “flavors” is needed because the full indicative potential of a modal emerges only when its conversational background has been specified. At this point, the modal will act as a guide in the clarification of argumentative confrontations, in the specification of the logical type of the standpoint, in the recovery of premises as well as in the determination of the inferential structure of the argument (argumentation scheme ), where the flavor of modality can help by suggesting the locus-relation invoked by the argumentation scheme. The semantic category of evidentiality, which is closely related to epistemic modality, is also briefly examined in relation to argumentation, with a survey of the most basic categories of evidence sources encoded by languages (perception, testimony, inference ).