内容简介 

      Most scholars agree that argumentation, in its natural conversational form, is rather messy. Arguers are very often ambiguous, unstructured and unsystematic in the way they express standpoints and arguments, and, additionally, they rely a great deal on implicit meaning to convey argumentative meanings. This complicates the task of analysts, who must find systematic ways of reconstructing speaker meaning before they can describe the structure of a given argumentation or normatively evaluate its quality. To overcome this challenge, most contemporary theories of argumentation draw on some form of pragmatic model of meaning for their reconstructions, even if many times these still involve some measure of intuition.  In this lecture I first illustrate the problem and the problematic consequences that uncharitable argumentative reconstructions can have in the analysis of argumentation. I then provide an overview of existing solutions and present a procedure for the reconstruction of implicit argumentative meaning which resorts to relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson 1995); I will show that this procedure supplies justifiable argumentative reconstructions as it rests on a cognitive account of verbal information processing.