Aspects of scientific discourse: Conditional argumentation

Abstract One of the purposes of scientific discourse is to convince or persuade a scientific audience of the truth or value of the ideas presented. The manner in which this is attained is by careful reasoning or argumentation. We examine scientific argumentation from the following angles: (a) type of reasoning involved (inductive or deductive); (b) a frequent semantic relation, namely conditionality; (c) the constituent elements of the semantic relation of conditionality; and (d) the strength of dependence in this semantic relation. Finally, we apply a formal model of argumentation and a natural model of reasoning to three passages in the domain of the hard, applied, and social sciences.