Ignoring Qualifications as a Pragmatic Fallacy: Enrichments and Their Use for Manipulating Commitments

Fabrizio Macagno

doi:10.3390/languages7010013

Abstract

The fallacy of ignoring qualifications, or secundum quid et simpliciter, is a deceptive strategy that is pervasive in argumentative dialogues, discourses, and discussions. It consists in misrepresenting an utterance so that its meaning is broadened, narrowed, or simply modified to pursue different goals, such as drawing a specific conclusion, attacking the interlocutor, or generating humorous reactions. The “secundum quid” was described by Aristotle as an interpretative manipulative strategy, based on the contrast between the “proper” sense of a statement and its meaning taken absolutely or in a certain respect. However, how can an “unqualified” statement have a proper meaning different from the qualified one, and vice versa? This “linguistic” fallacy brings to light a complex relationship between pragmatics, argumentation, and interpretation. The secundum quid is described in this paper as a manipulative argument, whose deceptive effect lies in its pragmatic dimension. This fallacy is analyzed as a strategy of decontextualization lying at the interface between pragmatics and argumentation and consisting of the unwarranted passage from an utterance to its semantic representation. By ignoring the available evidence and the presumptive interpretation of a statement, the speaker places it in a different context or suppresses textual and contextual evidence to infer a specific meaning different from the presumable one.

Highlights

The fallacy of “secundum quid et simpliciter”, or ignoring qualifications, is commonly defined as a deceitful “logical” strategy consisting of neglecting the qualifications that would invalidate the use of a general proposition in a particular case (Walton 1990a, p. 113)
The fallacy consists in taking a premise that is normally accepted as a plausible generalization (“normally horseback riding is healthful”) as a universal one, admitting no exceptions. This explanation is exhaustive in the cases above; if we look at how this fallacy was analyzed in the dialectical tradition, we find examples that can be hardly accounted for in terms of hasty generalization: (c) (1) Chimaeras do not exist
The secundum quid is a fallacy of decontextualization—a strategy consisting in omitting contextual information, leading the interlocutor to enrich the meaning based on the presumptions and inferring a specific semantic representation incompatible with the conclusion

Summary

Introduction

The fallacy of “secundum quid et simpliciter”, or ignoring qualifications, is commonly defined as a deceitful “logical” strategy consisting of neglecting the qualifications that would invalidate the use of a general proposition in a particular case (Walton 1990a, p. 113). The modern, purely logical treatment of the ignoring qualification fails to explain these classical cases This modern perspective on the fallacy mirrors a reductive attitude towards the relationship between argumentation and meaning, which tends to overshadow an essential component of argument and argumentation, i.e., its pragmatic dimension. Both in the logical textbooks and in the contemporary argumentation theories, generalizations and premises are regarded as propositions—namely representations of meaning—almost ignoring the essential inferential step from an utterance to its meaning. The secundum quid will be shown to be a pragmatic fallacy, whose cause of deceipt and apparent acceptability do not result from a generalization incorrectly used, but from the misinterpretation of what the speaker says

The Secundum Quid in Contemporary Argumentation Theory

A Pragmatic Perspective

The Pragmatic Insights of the Tradition

The Secundum Quid through the Pragmatic Glasses

Secundum Quid and the Strategic Uses of Presumable Explicatures

Conclusions