Citation: Lewi ´ nski, Marcin. 2022. Challenging Authority with Argumentation: The Pragmatics of Arguments from and to Authority. Languages 7: 207. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/languages7030207 Academic Editors: Juana M. Liceras, Raquel Fernández Fuertes and Steve Oswald Received: 8 February 2022 Accepted: 21 July 2022 Published: 3 August 2022 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2022 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). languages Article Challenging Authority with Argumentation: The Pragmatics of Arguments from and to Authority Marcin Lewi ´ nski Nova Institute of Philosophy, Nova University Lisbon, 1099-032 Lisbon, Portugal; m.lewinski@fcsh.unl.pt Abstract: Authority is both a pragmatic condition of much public discourse and a form of argu- mentative appeal routinely used in it. The goal of this contribution is to propose a new account of challenging authority in argumentative discourse that benefits from the interplay of the resources of recent speech act theory and argumentation theory. Going beyond standard approaches of the two disciplines, the paper analyzes nuanced forms of establishing and, especially, challenging discourse- related authority. Can Donald Trump advise his own scientific advisors on potential COVID-19 treatments? Addressing questions like this, the paper identifies various paradoxes of authority and the forms of authority discussed in the literature. It then distinguishes between argument from authority (or expert opinion) and argument to authority (or expert opinion) and argues that this rearranged structure mutually benefits the pragmatic account of speech act theory and the schematic account of argumentation theory in the task of better understanding and critiquing discourses such as Trump’s. Keywords: advice; argument from expert opinion; argumentum ad verecundiam; authority; expertise; illocution; speech act theory 1. Introduction As early as in his Rhetoric, Aristotle (2007, p. 39, 1356a) claimed that ethos, the character of the speaker, is “the most authoritative form of persuasion”. In turn, contemporary speech act theory demonstrates how for virtually all speech acts to be felicitously performed, the speaker needs to be in a position of an epistemic (theoretical) or deontic (practical) authority (Austin 1962; Searle 2010). 1 However, while fundamental in understanding how authority functions in discourse, these classic approaches have a specific, and somewhat limited, focus. Aristotle looked exclusively into the speaker’s “entechnic” authority, which was established explicitly in discourse. By contrast, speech act theorists typically draw on what Aristotle would call an “atechnic” authority, namely one that is pre-established and formally recognized in terms of the “deontic powers” of speakers. In this paper, I turn instead to more nuanced forms of establishing and, especially, challenging discourse-related authority. This is in line with recent work in speech act theory, which has defended a subtler account of various “authoritative illocutions” (Langton 1993) extending beyond institutional contexts to common speech acts, such as ranking someone or something. Inspired by insights from Austin (1962) and Lewis (1979), this work high- lights how authority can be negotiated on the fly as conversation develops. In its turn, argumentation theory has successfully examined the details of various forms of argument from authority, and of argument from expert opinion in particular. The goal of this contribution is to propose a new account of challenging authority in argumentative discourse that benefits from the interplay of the resources of recent speech act theory and argumentation theory. The guiding question is, accordingly: In which ways can the authority of the speaker be challenged for argumentative purposes? To address this question, I first present, in Section 2, an interesting case of (ab)using authority in public discourse: an April 2020 press conference during which Donald Trump remarked Languages 2022, 7, 207. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages7030207 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/languages