A Logical Pragmatics Study of Argument in Islamic-Christian Debates

Abstract

Lately, pragmatics has attracted the attention of linguists and philosophers. It has been integrated into many fields of study that have contributed to the study of language. A debate is a special form of an argumentative dialogue in which two or more parties take part in attacking and defending certain claims through reasoned discourse. This study has set itself to pragmatically analyze and evaluate selected arguments of religious debates. Islamic-Christian debates are specifically chosen as data for the current study because they have not received due attention in language studies. This study is essentially concerned with investigating the logical pragmatics in the context of Deedat-Swaggart‟s debate. Consequently, the study aims at: identifying the most frequently utilized logical pragmatics strategies; showing whether the pragmatic criteria are frequently kept to or violated. To fulfill the aims, it is hypothesized that debaters utilize certain logical pragmatics strategies (grounds, warrants, claims, backings, qualifiers, and rebuttals, certain types of reasoning, and argumentation schemes), the pragmatic criteria are frequently violated. The study employs a mixed method (qualitative and quantitative) to analyze the data and to verify or reject the hypotheses. The results of the study reveal that the most frequent pragmatic strategies utilized by Deedat are: grounds, deductive reasoning, argument from expert opinion. Swaggart, on the other hand, highly employs: grounds, presumptive reasoning, argument from expert opinion. The results have also shown that Deedat‟s chains of arguments are stronger and more persuasive than Swaggart‟s in terms of satisfying the logical criteria of argument evaluation.