PHL 131 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Sorites Paradox, Syntactic Ambiguity, Rhetorical Question
8 Jun 2020
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Rhetoric: the aspects of a speaker"s language that are meant to persuade, but have no bearing on the strength of the argument: some rhetorical effects: Word choice, hesitations in speech, use of italics, prosodic features of speech (the way something is said), quantifiers (many, lots, some), qualifier and weasel words, etc. Rhetorical question: when arguments contain a premise that is in the form of a question to oblige the audience to look for evidence against the claim rather that providing evidence in favor of it. Presuppositions: a proposition that may not be explicit, but which must be granted is the statement is to be meaningful. But there are also cases where it is unclear if it fits into clear case or a borderline case. It is unclear if this object is a clear case of a red object or a borderline case (there can be borderline cases of borderline cases!)
