Arguments and Speech Acts

© 2003 by Teed Rockwell

An argument is what philosophers call a speech act. It is something that we do with words in order to fulfill a goal or purpose. But there are many other speech acts which have different goals and/or means of achieving those goals, which are sometimes mistakenly seen as arguments. A child might say “Mommy and Daddy are arguing”, when in fact they are only insulting each other, or complaining. One effective way of identifying a speech act is by identifying what it is trying to achieve, and how it is trying to achieve it. The goal of an argument is to convince someone that a particular statement or set of statements is true. This set of statements is called the conclusion of the argument. This goal is achieved (sometimes) by using other sentences, which are called the premises of the argument. Premises are sometimes called reasons, or reasons why, which is why this process is called reasoning.

Argument is not the only way we attempt to persuade people about the truth of statements. Sometimes we use emotional blackmail, or inflammatory rhetoric, or spin, or hype. Argument, however, is the most authentic and honest way of persuading someone, because you use the same kinds of techniques to persuade others that you would use on yourself. A crooked used car salesman may use all sort of tricky and misleading strategies to convince a customer to buy a bad car. But he would never use those kinds of techniques to decide what kind of car to buy for himself. He would use arguments that followed the principles of reason because he wants the best car possible. These are the kinds of persuasive techniques that I will be talking about here— techniques that will help you choose the best possibilities from a variety of options, and understand why you should make those choices.

Before you can learn how to construct a good argument, it helps to be able to distinguish argument from other speech acts i.e. other human activities in which we use words as tools. The following text makes distinctions amongst many different kinds of speech acts, and gives you some advice on how to tell these kinds of speech acts apart. It’s not always easy to do this, because the same words could be used in different contexts to perform different speech acts. If someone says “I’d like to order a pizza” in front of a pizza counter, most of the time they are performing the speech act called “ordering a pizza”. However, a person who said those lines in a play is performing a different speech act, because he really…