ABSTRACT
As we’ve seen, once we’ve determined that a text or a speech contains an attempt to persuade by argument, the remainder of argument-reconstruction is largely a matter of interpreting the speech or text as accurately as possible. Here we are trying to work out what the speaker or writer intends readers or listeners to understand, and consequently do or believe, on hearing or reading their words. Phenomena in ordinary language sometimes make this task more difficult because they obscure speakers’ and writers’ intended meanings and therefore make it hard to tell which proposition their sentences are supposed to convey. So aspirant critical thinkers need to be aware of the ways in which
language can work to hide writers’ and speakers’ meanings and must practise spotting potentially problematic sentences. We begin this chapter by examining some of these problematic phenomena and explaining how they work. At this stage you should aim to be able to recognise these sentences and to be able to give the possible interpretations of them; that is, the propositions that they could be used to convey. In the second part of the chapter, we continue our focus on language by considering rhetorical ploys; that is, various ways in which the power of words is used to persuade us to do or believe things in the absence of giving us reasons in the way that an argument does.
