Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 1 of 1
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Mark Twain, Argumentation Theorist, Chris Campolo
Mark Twain, Argumentation Theorist, Chris Campolo
OSSA Conference Archive
Commentators have read Twain’s Is Shakespeare Dead? as the strained work of a man worried about his own literary legacy. But it is actually an essay about argumentation. Twain writes about the burden of argument, premise relevance, understanding and inference, and norms and practices of argumentation. I will argue that what is taken to be a thoroughgoing cynicism on Twain’s part is best understood as a thoughtful scepticism about the scope of reasoning.