The concept of an argument

The conception of an argument that I propose has the following distinctive features: •It takes the ultimate constituents of arguments to be illocutionary act types rather than propositions, statements, utterances, and the like .•It allows for arguments against something as well as arguments for something. •It allows the reasons in an argument to be any kind of representative illocutionary act. •It allows arguments to have as their target any kind of illocutionary act. •It distinguishes arguments as abstract structures that may never beexpressed or even thought of from expressed arguments. •It locates the unity of an expressed or mentally entertained argument in a second-order illocutionary act of adducing, which may be actual ormerely hypothetically entertained. •It allows for a variety of uses of arguments, since neither the abstract conception of an argument nor the act of adducing that constitutes a complex of illocutionary act types as a single argument includes anyconception of the purpose or function of an argument. •It provides explicitly for complex arguments to be constructed inductively by steps of chaining and embedding.