Université de Fribourg

Give the Standard Treatment of Fallacies a Chance! Cognitive and Rhetorical Insights into Fallacy Processing

Oswald, Steve ; Herman, Thierry

In: From Argument Schemes to Argumentative Relations in the Wild, 2019, p. 41-62

While we acknowledge the inadequacy of the standard treatment of fallacies (see Hamblin 1970, p. 12) when it comes to assessing the normative dimension of argumentation, we suggest that its definition of fallacious arguments sheds light on another issue of interest to argumentation scholars, namely rhetorical effectiveness. Specifically, we contend that this definition contains a fundamental...

Université de Fribourg

The Linguistic Formulation of Fallacies Matters : The Case of Causal Connectives

Oswald, Steve ; Schumann, Jennifer ; Zufferey, Sandrine

In: Argumentation, 2020, p. 1-28

While the role of discourse connectives has long been acknowledged in argumentative frameworks, these approaches often take a coarse-grained approach to connectives, treating them as a unified group having similar effects on argumentation. Based on an empirical study of the straw man fallacy, we argue that a more finegrained approach is needed to explain the role of each connective and ...

Université de Fribourg

Everybody Knows that There Is Something Odd About Ad Populum Arguments

Herman, Thierry ; Oswald, Steve

In: The Language of Argumentation, 2021, p. 305-323

In the wake of research on linguistic resources of argumentation (Doury, 2018; van Eemeren Houtlosser, & Snoeck Henkemans, 2007), this chapter considers the argumentative nature and rhetorical potential of the expression “everyone/everybody knows P”, which is likely to be used to fulfil a justificatory purpose in appeals to majority in the form of ad populum arguments (Godden, 2008). In...

Université de Fribourg

Defining manipulative discourse : the pragmatics of cognitive illusions

Maillat, Didier ; Oswald, Steve

In: International review of pragmatics, 2009, vol. 1, p. 348-370

Manipulative discourse has attracted a lot of attention in various adjacent domains of linguistic research, notably in rhetoric, argumentation theory, philosophy of language, discourse analysis, pragmatics, among others. We start with a review of the existing definitions provided in these fields and highlight some of the difficulties they encounter. In particular, we argue that there is still a...