Causality, Argumentation and Connectives

Abstract

The paper deals with the relation between argumentation and causality. After having defined causality (referring to D. Hume) and its language representation, we distinguish three types of argumentative discourse articulated by an argument-introducing connective (parce que, puisque, car, en effet etc.), i.e. argument for the utterance content, argument for the illocutionary act and argument for the act of enunciation. Afterwards, we examine the relation between argument and conclusion in these three types of discourse from the point of view of causality. We show that causality operates as a principle which the argumentation is based on only in the case of truth-conditional acts. We try to explain some restrictions concerning the distribution of the causally related entities which are observed.