On questions in standard pragma-dialectics
Abstract
The purpose of the paper is to add the concept of a question to standard pragma-dialectics in such a way that the hitherto basic concept of a standpoint can be defined through it. Consequently, the concept of a question becomes the basic concept of standard pragma-dialectics. Being basic, the concept of a question cannot be defined. However, a number of things can be said to help understand how the concept might work within standard pragma-dialectics. This is the task the bulk of the paper tries to fulfil. Among the most important properties of questions as they play a role in argumentation the following should be mentioned: discussions are always triggered by questions; no question stands alone but is always part of a network of questions; there is always a degree of specificity of a question which is crucial to the discussion; questions are never fully verbalizable; background information is based on the specificity of questions. These properties seem to depend on questions being correctly conceptualized as abstract objects—and thus different from requests, which are speech acts.References
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