A VERDADE NA/DA ARGUMENTAÇÃO

Abstract

My central concern in this paper is to argue that no linguistic argument (in the sense of ‘argument made in and through language’) is so hermetically sealed as to be proof against all further critical interventions. In fact, the very structure of an argument is such that it is for ever open and ready to receive further extensions. Contrary to what we are frequently led to believe, however, the ways in which an argument may be extended or ‘enriched’- as in the case of so-called enthymemes - are not predetermined or delimited by the intrinsic properties (structural, semantic, or whatever) of the particular argument in question. The possible extensions of an argument are, in principle, limitless, though in actual practice they may indeed turn out to be, to a considerable extent and within a resonable margin of error, predictable. I argue that the concept of “semantic retroaction”, as recently developed by Oswald Ducrot and his colleagues, naturally paves the way for the sort of ‘‘open-endedness’’ that I claim to be the hall-mark of all argumentative structures.