The Stoic sign and the pragmatic or implicit premises in the formal theories

Abstract

The current formal theories trying to account for reasoning and language often need to resort to the thesis of the pragmatic or implicit premises to explain the real role pragmatics plays in the human inferential activity. The main aim of this paper is to show that, although they did not propose theories in this way, the Stoics, by means of their concept of ‘sign’, already offered the essential arguments and foundations necessary to describe the real action of both pragmatics and the premises coming from general knowledge when we make inferences.