November, 2003
Peter Shea
Some Thoughts about Starting Points in Informal Logic Teaching: Public Argument, Private Reflection, and the Bridge Between the Two
---------
“At our first step,
we are free. At our second, we are slaves.” Goethe
A child is asked
whether talking to oneself is like talking to someone else. He says, “No,
because when you talk to someone else, you have to be respectful.” From the BBC
documentary Socrates for Six Year Olds.
“You gotta get your
act together, but you don’t gotta take it on the road.” Jackie Alfonso,
quoting, I think, Mae West.
I want to take
through with some care the beginning paragraphs of Trudy Govier’s A
Practical Study of Argument. Her
approach makes justification and persuasion and defense – the public side of
thinking – into the central issues for a beginning informal logic class. The
root idea here seems to be that “getting one’s thoughts in order” means
preparing to go public with them: preparing, in specific, for something like a
debate. I am worried about her approach – and others like it – because it
leaves no space, within the teaching of thinking, for the private side of
argument, the use of argument in one’s internal conversations. It surely
presupposes that some private and internal process of reflection has taken
place, but that work is all “off the books.”
There is nothing
inherently pernicious about Govier’s approach: a writer gets to define what he
or she is talking about, and nobody can talk about everything. But there is
something pernicious about the context in which Govier writes. Many of the
tools of logic are primarily of use in certain quite sophisticated
philosophical enterprises: they figure most centrally in logical and
mathematical proof, and, to a lesser extent, in the arguments that appear in
the professional literature of philosophy. But the support for the folks who do
that specialized work comes from thousands of undergraduates who take logic
courses which are recommended to them or required of them as basic courses in
thinking. So when such a course leaves no space for some important intellectual
process or work (private or public), it
is natural for students to think that that process or work is of little value
for thinking. Misleading people in that way is, I think, pernicious.
Of course, one might
think that “talking is talking.” To teach people to have internal dialogues,
teach them to have dialogues. The standards for good internal debate are the
standards for good debate, generally. If one teaches people the public
standards for arguing well, one will also teach them everything worth knowing
about how to mull things over. This view needs to be taken very seriously. It
has a kind of Wittgensteinian, anti-private language feel to it, and it greatly
simplifies the teacher’s life, if true.
I want to say that it
is important to understand the full complexity of argument and rational
activity in public, and that that understanding may well reveal connections
between public thinking and private thinking. But the crucial preliminary step
to any such discussion is getting the public side of persuasion, argument,
debate complex enough to do some justice to what happens. And this is the
second problem I find with Govier’s treatment: she fixates on one kind of
example of public argument. Part of the simplicity of Govier’s account is that,
having located logic in the public world, she then provides examples suggesting
that what happens in the public world is largely debate: efforts to persuade,
efforts to criticize opposing positions, and defenses. It is important to see that that is just one
model, within a vast range of public activity aiming at changing or redirecting
minds. It is a model curiously close to democratic institutions and traditions
of equality, traditions that hold very seldom in human life, even in those
societies that make enormous fusses about being democratic. And so the account
of public argumentative action presupposed in Govier’s book is in some sense
outside of the main folk traditions of informal logic, which are importantly
traditions of inequality: arguments upwards from servants and children and
employees to masters and parents and bosses.
This worry about a
one-sided diet of examples is really two different worries. First, I am
concerned that Govier’s focus on a fairly narrow range of public activity as
the model for good thinking leaves students with unhelpful basic concepts for
putting their own thoughts in order, in non-public spaces. This may partly be
because there are some differences between private and public argument and
partly because private argument may be like public argument but not like the
kinds of public argument that Govier chooses to highlight. Second, I am
concerned that Govier’s treatment cuts students off from a rich logical
tradition embodied in the wisdom and folk literature of the world, a tradition
that responds to quite different pressures than those present in democratic
debate.
It is perhaps unfair
to attach this criticism to Trudy Govier. She is writing in a tradition of
informal logic/ critical thinking texts, and her emphases are widely shared.
The idea that the sources of our logic are primarily Aristotle and those who
worked within his structures is perhaps close to universal. It is part of my
purpose in this brief treatment to suggest that there is a whole world of
material available outside of this standard tradition waiting to be mined for
insights to address the needs of contemporary undergraduates. Part of my
purpose is to try out one way of placing this material within a broad
conception of ordinary argument. I don’t pretend to have done much with this
material; my own courses in logic still emphasize traditional models of debate
far more than any richer conception.
I have however begun
to make some changes in tradition teaching of informal logic, aimed at
addressing some of the concerns I have about Govier’s approach. In the last bit
of this paper, I want to sketch an alternative approach to making the first
moves in informal logic and critical thinking courses.
------
“This is a book about
arguments. It is about the nature of arguments – what arguments are and the
different structures they have – and about the standards for judging arguments
to be good or bad. Many people think that if a question is controversial, then
what somebody says about it is “just a matter of opinion.” This view ignores
the fact that even for controversial issues such as abortion and nuclear
strategy, there is evidence supporting various views. The evidence may be
reliable or unreliable, and it may give good or poor support to the position.
One opinion is not just as good as another,
even though we cannot prove beyond every doubt that our own position is
correct. In this book we hope to convince you that opinions on important
controversial matters can and should be defended by rational arguments, and
that rational arguments can be analyzed in a careful, logical way. You can do
better than saying “that’s just a matter of opinion” when someone disagrees
with you; you can learn to critically assess the reasons for the view and defend
your positions with solid arguments of your own.
What is an argument?
An argument is a set
of claims that a person puts forward in an attempt to persuade an audience that
some further claim is true. There are many ways of trying to persuade others;
when we use arguments, we try to persuade in a rational way by citing premises,
and the view being defended is called
the conclusion. A person who argues does not merely state what she thinks; she
states what she thinks and gives some reasons intended to back up her view.”
(Trudy Govier, A Practical Study of Argument)
Govier starts by
imagining a situation. Someone has expressed an opinion. It is not taken
seriously. This isn’t a situation that would happen very often. Imagine a kid
saying, “There’s no point in going to college.” His parents are unlikely to
say, “That’s one way of looking at the matter. We have another, equally good,
way.” This sort of response, “That’s a
matter of opinion” generally comes up with respect to issues that aren’t of
immediate practical concern to the parties discussing them. One says this sort
of thing about abortion if one is not about to have one, or about nuclear
strategy if one is not Condolezza Rice. So Govier begins her book by addressing
an attitude that is really quite rare within the range of attitudes we take
toward controversial issues. It is an attitude people take toward some
controversial issues, to which they stand in certain distanced relationships.
This book would begin
very much differently if Govier addressed instead the more frequent problem: “I
have to make a decision and I am confronted with various conflicting opinions
and I have no opinion of my own.” To get to the point at which relativism
becomes a problem, one has to somehow form opinions. Govier’s starting point
here puts that whole process off stage. She says, in effect, “Once you have opinions, we can tell you
how to test them, how to support them, how to help them win in various
competitive contests. “
It is important to
Govier to say that some opinions are better than others. Govier comes close to
saying that a good opinion is one for which good arguments are given. A bad
opinion is an opinion for which bad arguments are given. She might be saying
something more modest and more sensible: that one can in general tell that an opinion is a good or a bad
opinion by the quality of arguments used to support it. Whatever her point is
here, it is useful to see its limits:
clearly, dumb ideas can have clever defenders and good ideas can have
dumb defenders. Somewhat less clearly: there may be claims that are true and
important for which no very good argument can be given: they are in some way
basic. If one thinks about argument as a deductive system, there have to be
some initial premises not themselves supported. One thinks of the axioms of
geometry and arithmetic, as possible examples of this sort of basic claim. But
there may also be quite complex claims that emerge from long experience, like
“Take it easy with schizophrenics” or “Don’t force yourself to work on math
when you’re tired” or “With teens, always distrust your first impression.”
These may also not admit argument: they may be the shibboleths by which
experienced people recognize each other, and they may recognize as
inexperienced the person who asks for an argument on matters like that. On the other side, we want to say about
Zeno’s paradoxes: they are superb arguments to impossible conclusions. That’s
why people get PhD’s out of the paradox of the heap.
As advice about
managing one’s internal structure of belief, what Govier says here is quite
misleading. Suppose one takes her seriously, and sorts through one’s basket of
beliefs, separating them into two piles: beliefs for which one has reasons and
beliefs for which one has no reasons. Surely, it would be odd, perhaps
suicidal, to label the beliefs with reasons attached “promising” and the
beliefs without reasons “doubtful.” Surely what the piles will mostly reflect
is the sorts of conversation one has engaged in, and the kind of perplexities
and choices onee has encountered. My neighbor mows his lawn in curved patterns.
That makes me think about why I mow in straight patterns. A friend once
suggested that eating peas aggressively communicated and reinforced an angry
disposition: after that, I can never eat peas without thinking “to mash or not
to mash.” So Govier is encouraging people to take seriously a difference among
their own – or other people’s – beliefs that really doesn’t matter much at all.
I think Govier is
influenced here by thinking primarily about certain contexts of public debate,
in developing her treatment of logic. Surely, in forums like courtrooms and
deliberative committees, the standing
of any position is based on the level of support one has available for
that position. As a canny participant in such forums, one only brings up points
one can defend if challenged. But as one prepares for one’s day in court, one’s
appearance before a committee, one sorts through a vast amount of stuff one has
various kinds of confidence in for that much smaller subset that one can allow
out in public, at this time. And after the hearing, after the courtroom
appearance, one’s thinking once again takes account of this much larger body of belief. One does
not simply transport the discipline of the courtroom or the committee room back
into one’s mental life.
It seems unlikely
that making that mental change would be a good idea. The result of 2300 years
of Western experience in philosophy is to establish that many views, including
views universally regarded as absurd, can be supported by substantial arguments
– arguments that take great intellect to answer. Further, we know that good
ideas arise quite mysteriously: someone becomes fascinated with a thesis that
initially has no support, and gradually develops the experiments and context
within which it can be tested. So we would not be very hopeful about the
prospects of someone who censored his or her mental life to give standing to
all those claims for which he or she had found plausible arguments and to
refuse standing to all other claims. The internal mental economy has to be much
more complicated than the discipline of a courtroom.
It’s important to
look at Govier’s initial move here, of which this point about opinions is one
part. Govier is introducing logic as a way of grading opinions. But then she
falls back to the more sensible position that logic is a way of grading
arguments. What connects these views is the idea that logic, critical thinking,
learning to think, is about evaluating some “artifact” – the opinion, the
argument – as strong or weak, good or bad, better or worse.
It is not easy to say
when an argument is good or bad, all things considered.
I can produce some
special, technical standard and then evaluate arguments by that standard. For
example, I might say: an argument is good if and only if it is impossible for a
rational person to believe the premises and yet deny the conclusion. Consider
the argument: “(1) All dogs go out of existence when they bark. (2) Fido is a dog.
So, (3) Fido goes out of existence when he barks.” That is, on this standard, a
good argument, and the argument, “(1) He’s fat, so (2) he’s lazy” is, on this
same standard, a bad argument. But there is no context in which the first
argument has to be taken seriously. It does no work outside of logic classes.
The second does some work, in some contexts. It has to be taken seriously. If
it misleads, then at least clearing up the ways it misleads in a particular
circumstance is likely to shed light on:
(a) being fat, (b) being lazy, and (c) whatever issue prompted the
person who gave the argument to give it. There are many ways an argument can be
bad. There are many ways an argument can be good. Most of those ways are
invisible until one places the argument in some context of discussion or
decision-making.
There may be some
place for general judgments of the goodness or badness of arguments. Think of
the way movies are evaluated by sensitive critics. Someone like Roger Ebert,
who knows movies, generally spends a lot of time placing a movie in its genre,
sorting out what the directors and writers are trying to accomplish, and then
making sense of the strengths and weaknesses of the movie in that context. He
never compares “Citizen Kane” to “Bambi.” Occasionally, something about a movie
drives him to a more general judgment: “this movie is a complete waste of time,
there are a hundred things of this sort you could rent that would do what it is
doing better” – or “this movie is one everyone should see, even if they don’t
generally like this sort of thing, because it holds up some important value in
a very effective way.” These judgments are very rare in his writing. They are the necessarily the fruits of very
broad experience. In a similar way,
someone who has encountered lots of arguments might call some argument totally
without merit. But that’s an expert’s judgment, one that calls for considerable
sensitivity to the context, a grasp the history of the discussion, and a good
mental inventory of the range of possible moves to be made in this situation.
It is a much more complicated judgment than, for example, saying that a chess
move is a bad move.
Given the complexity
of argument evaluation, it seems odd to say that the primary thing one needs to
learn to think well is how to tell good arguments from bad arguments. There
would have to be so many preliminary steps, before one could make that judgment
with any assurance.
So, Govier’s
progression is this: your opinions need to be good, not bad. That is what is important
for becoming a good thinker. Fortunately there is a way of identifying good
opinions. For an opinion to be good, it
has to be supported by good arguments. (Or perhaps, “One mark of a good opinion
is that it is supported by good
arguments.”) This book will teach you to recognize good arguments. That will
help you to make your own opinions good and to show other people that their
opinions are bad.
My first worry about
this whole progression is that it ignores the work necessary to form opinions,
jumping immediately to discussion of matters that seem most relevant to public
discussion.
I am also worried
that public discussion is over-simplified, in Govier’s introductory remarks. In
her second paragraph, she characterizes arguments as tools of persuasion. In
one way, there is nothing objectionable about this: people do use arguments
that way. But I think something important would be gained for the teaching
project if the difficulties of persuasion were confronted right away in the
discussion and if the various purposes of argument that fall short of
“convincing someone that a claim is true” were given space, from the beginning.
Many different
processes hide behind this little word “persuade.” Sometimes, l encounter
someone who has no opinion about something. I give him or her an argument to my
opinion, and the person straightaway adopts my opinion. One might call this
encounter “persuasion.” Consider, at the other end of the continuum, the
interchange between Socrates and Crito in Plato’s Crito. Crito comes in
with a mass of arguments, urging Socrates to escape from prison. He blurts them
all out in a great rush, and then urges quick action. Socrates slows things
down, and shows, over the course of the dialogue, what a long and intricate
history of commitments and loyalties would have to be repudiated, if he were to
escape. In this case, Socrates at the end gives some response to each of
Crito’s initial arguments. But one could easily imagine someone in Socrates’
position looking curiously at Crito’s arguments, the way we look curiously at
Zeno’s arguments that motion is impossible, saying: ‘I wonder what’s wrong with
that; I wish I had time to sort it out.’ Changing a mind that’s made up is no
small trick, and giving an argument to which the other person has no immediate
response is not going to do the job.
In important matters,
persuasion is often a long and difficult process. I can bring someone with no
opinion to have my opinion, in some limited way, quite quickly, just by giving
an argument. (I might, for example, persuade someone in New Hampshire to cast
his primary vote for Bradley.) But
usually, when I take the trouble to try to persuade someone of something, I am
hoping for some long-term commitment and some investment of time, money, or
energy. Persuasion is often connected with enlisting someone in a project or a
cause. And for that to work, I must somehow bring about in that person a
conviction that will endure through difficulties and will stand up to
objections. Consider what might be involved in persuading a high school
sophomore not to join her friends in Air Force ROTC, as a way to pay for
college. This is likely only to be accomplished by a long process of quite
various argument, a real course of treatment – or perhaps better, a real education
in the logical geography around this issue.
If one takes this
long sort of persuasion to be the sort that generally matters, then the idea of
using an argument to persuade will seem limited and partial. One will instead
begin talk about persuasion with a discussion of the ways one comes to
understand how someone else’s position is structured and what difficulties
would be involved in abandoning that structure. My job is not to induce
conviction that lasts just until the person encounters the first difficulty. My
job is to show someone how he or she can believe something, within a life that
throws up these difficulties and objections and problems. Surely argument has a
place in such a project, both as an exploratory tool: to find out how someone’s
position is put together, and as a way of suggesting new ways of thinking. But
the idea that one can, in most important contexts, change someone’s mind by
giving a good argument, will come to seem very much too simple.
Changing someone’s
mind, converting someone to our point of view, is often very difficult. We
usually settle for much more modest victories. We spend our lives among people
who think differently than we do, on all sorts of matters, about which we have
all different levels of personal confidence. Normally, these differences are
not settled by persuasion. They are settled by some sort of compromise or
negotiation or public tolerance of ambiguity. For example, we define our areas
of agreement and develop a policy that is designedly ambiguous on the points of
difference. Or we limit our cooperation to those matters about which we are in
agreement.
The problem with
Govier’s discussion of argument as a
means of persuasion is that it suggests
that the choice one faces, when confronted with a different opinion, is either
persuading someone that one’s view is correct or being persuaded that it is
incorrect. But those are both extremely drastic solutions, extreme
energy-hungry solutions, to the problem of disagreement. More often, what is
required is much more subtle change in
each party’s relationship to the position he or she holds. It may be that all I
need to do, to produce a livable compromise on some issue, is to make someone
somewhat less sure that she is right, or to convince my opponent that her view
is somewhat less important than she thinks it is. And a similar shift in my own
position is likewise enough to allow us to muddle through.
There is perhaps a
connection between my two critical points about Govier’s introductory
paragraphs. I complain first of all that Govier leaves the formation of opinion
shrouded in mystery: logical actors arrive on the stage with opinions. I also
complain that she defines public logical activity in very narrow and drastic
terms: one undertakes to persuade people of something, to change their minds.
Perhaps the relation between the points is this: a lively consciousness of the
difficulty of coming to an opinion might make folks less demanding of those who
disagree with them. It takes a sort of supreme confidence to undertake
persuasion, and becoming conscious of the difficulties with own views might
shake that confidence a bit. Further, a sense of the place that an opinion
occupies in one’s own psychic economy: the way it it is a kind of achievement,
how much comes together to support that opinion and how much depends on it,
might make one a bit more realistic about the prospects of changing anyone
else’s mind.
-------
What Govier says is
most at home in the Athenian assembly: a group of people debating matters at
some distance from their personal lives, prior to a vote that will commit the
city to a course of action. In that situation, speakers are presumed to be
equal, as citizens, in their right to be heard.
Compare the elements
of this story:
David has claimed the wife of Uriah and has ordered Uriah, a loyal soldier, to be abandoned on the battlefield, so that he is killed. Nathan the prophet came to him and said, “A poor man in your kingdom had only one sheep, which he loved. A rich man, who had many sheep, came by and decided he wanted the poor man’s sheep for his dinner. When the poor man protested, the rich man killed him.” David replied, “The rich man shall surely die.” Nathan said, “You are the man.”
Nathan is giving an
argument to David. The topic is: the way David is conducting his life. And
Nathan is David’s subject: David can ignore anything he says and do whatever he
wants. David is the only earthly judge of David’s conduct.
Compare the David and
Nathan story to the stories in this collection:
1. A woman from the Hamar tribe was given to a man
in marriage, but he would not sleep with her, because, he said, she was too
little. So one night, the woman put a piece of manure in the man’s sleeping
sack. He got into the sack and then, a bit later, shot out of it again,
furious. “There’s a piece of
manure in my sleeping sack,” he said. The woman said, “It is only a little
piece of manure.” The man said, “What is little about a piece of manure?”
The woman said, “What is little about a woman?” (From the documentary, “Hamar
Women.”
2. The general of the Assyrian army was a leper. He had in his household a
slave girl taken from Israel. One day she said to him, “My lord, in my
country there is a prophet who can make you clean.” So the general went to
Israel and met the prophet, who said, “Go and wash seven times in the river
Jordan.” The general left in disgust, unwilling to do as the prophet
required. The slave girl came to him and said, “If the prophet had asked you
to do something difficult, you would surely have done it.” The general went
to the Jordan, washed, and was made clean.
3. Men came to Jesus to trap him, asking, “Is it lawful to pay tribute to
Caesar?” Jesus asked them for a coin of the sort in which the tribute was
paid. They gave him a coin, and he said, “Whose picture is on this coin?”
They answered, “Caesar’s.” Jesus said, “Give to Caesar what belongs to
Caesar and to God what belongs to God.”
4. A Syro-phonecian woman approached Jesus, asking to be healed. Jesus said,
“Shall I take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs?” And the woman
responded, “Even dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”
Jesus said, “Great is your faith” and healed her.
5. Bruno Bettelheim was in a concentration camp and suffering from a wound.
He went to the camp infirmary and, when his turn came, ripped the scab off
the wound and said to the doctor: “I cannot work with this wound.” The
doctor treated him.
6. Socrates was in a conversation with a man who had contempt for philosophy
and pursued instead the path leading to political advancement. He said that
political power was surely the best thing for human beings, because the person
with power could get whatever he wanted and kill anyone who stood in his way.
Socrates said something like this, “Why would one bother to study to attain
that sort of power? Surely any man with a knife under his cloak
can kill whoever gets in his way.”
7. Socrates encountered another man who had contempt for philosophy,
believing that the point of life was to amass pleasure in great quantity,
and that philosophy had little hope of providing much pleasure. He
maintained that the best life for a human being was the life that contained
the greatest amount of pleasure, of whatever sort. Socrates responded,
“Well, if that’s right, then surely the boy prostitutes in the marketplace,
scheduled 10 hours a day, are living the best possible human life.” The man
retreated, because he was after all an aristocrat and had bottomless
contempt for the boy prostitutes.
It is fairly rare
that two people have equal power or standing with respect to a controversial
issue. In hierarchical societies, this reflects a political fact: kings are
answerable to no other person. But, even in societies in which equality is
highly valued, few questions are located equal distances from those discussing
them. I can give my son all sorts of arguments about doing his math homework or
avoiding cigarettes, but it is his life, and I have very little control over
his actions. Whatever argument he accepts, even if it is objectively very bad,
will govern his behavior. Similarly, when I try to enlist other people in some
project or cause, I must take very seriously the fact that they are sovereign
over their own lives. My considerations
do not have the same weight as their considerations.
If inequality of
power, and the particular problem it presents, is the human norm, at least in
contemporary societies, then cases like those in my little anthology are
central examples for teaching people how to argue. The “Athenian Forum” case is
a special case, and the idea of introducing considerations to be weighed
disinterestedly by judges equidistant from the decision-making levers, is a
specialized strategy.
One might say: the
point of teaching thinking is to encourage people to transform situations in
which there is inequality of power into situations in which disinterested
judges weigh evidence and decide based on the relative merits of arguments,
without regard to differences in power. One might take Nathan and the Hamar
woman to be engaged in the old game of “making the boss think that the good
idea is his idea” – a game that
mature people grow out of. In some ways, defining the argument “space” as a
space of equality is promulgating an ideal rather than describing a reality.
But, first of all,
why should enterprises like informal logic address an ideal situation? Students
don’t argue in an ideal situation. And it should be one important job of
critical thinking and informal logic classes to prepare people to argue in the
situations they will actually encounter.
Also, it is worth
asking whether the general imposition of an ideal of equality is a particularly
good idea. Think about the issues that folks encounter in their personal lives
– romantic issues, issues regarding family relations, questions about
lifestyle. On all of these matters, one could stage a debate, bring
considerations to bear on either side, and declare a winner. But for a broad
range of personal issues, what matters is what the person whose life is in
question can whole-heartedly accept. One might agree that one side or the other
has the best arguments but be wholly unable to live out the view that side
presents. And that is a more general
problem: with respect to all sorts of enterprises, the mere admission that the
preponderance of evidence favors a particular policy is not sufficient to
motivate the responsible people to work to bring that policy into effect.
One might think of
all deliberation on the model of the decision by the city council about where
to put the new sewer line. They
formulate alternatives, debate,
make a decision, and then put out the contracts. But it would be very
odd for a couple to decide to have a child that way. Children require “buy-in”
– and the success of the project of raising them depends importantly on the
parents’ commitment.
Consider the Hamar
Women story. The elders of the village might come to the husband and point out
that several men had married women of that age and size, and had had children
with them, and were quite happy. They might
point out that the man’s refusal to sleep with his wife is making her
unhappy, making the in-laws unhappy, disrupting the whole village. And, at some
point, the fellow might reluctantly agree to sleep with her. But compare what
happens in the story. One can imagine that the husband thinks of the wife as
like a little girl, of no account or weight – someone perhaps not even
interested in sleeping with him. When she plays a joke on him, one that is
simultaneously outrageous and clever and self-deprecating (comparing herself to
a piece of manure), she makes the point that she is both determined and someone
to be reckoned with, a substantial person. She forces him to acknowledge her.
So the argument is good in lots of ways. She provokes his admission: “Things of
small size are sometimes important” to criticize his earlier argument, (1)
She’s little, so (2) she isn’t of any importance. But the argument would be
quite different if she had put a small poisonous snake in his sleeping sack,
though the snake would have provoked roughly the same recantation of the
earlier prejudice.
When Jones and Smith
disagree about something, Jones has (at least) a couple of options for thinking
through the situation:
1. Jones can ask, “What considerations, of the sort a
reasonable person would find compelling, count in favor of my position and
against Smith’s?”
2. Jones can ask, “Does
Smith always think the way he is thinking now? If not, how can I move
him to think in some other of his own ways of thinking, about the subject of
our disagreement?”
One could explore
either of these approaches in a course in public argument. But the second
approach emphasizes that, if Jones is going to argue with Smith, Jones had
better understand Smith very well. The first approach does not make an
understanding of Smith part of the project of arguing with Smith. If Jones and
Smith are arguing in front of the Athenian Assembly, it is not necessary for
Jones to understand Smith particularly well. The Assembly will settle the
disagreement. But if Smith is the final arbiter, the second approach makes the
most sense. My suspicion is that, in many cases of argument, there is no
Athenian Assembly looking on, and pretending there is one will not conjure one
into being.
Books on reasoning
start with examples. They encourage students to go on from those examples. If
the examples chosen are out of touch with the realities of argument, they won’t
help much. Imagine the difference between an informal logic book that begins
with the Hamar Women story and one that begins with the argument: “All squares
are rectangles. This is a square. Therefore, this is a rectangle.”
-----
I began this discussion of the introduction to Govier’s book complaining that she gave too little attention to the formation of opinion, to “thinking in private.” I questioned whether the model of public debate underlying her account would translate well to an internal “forum.” I introduced another model of thinking in public, and now the question is pressing: does this other model provide any better guidance for the internal conversations that lead to the formation of opinion?
The wisdom literature
of humankind, exemplified in the little anthology of stories quoted in the last
section, carries this message: people may be in disagreement with themselves,
without knowing it. People may carry within them the rationale and the
motivation for quite different commitments than their current commitments. The
supplicant, seeking to change the king’s mind, tries to understand those
different strands of thought and motivation, the one’s not current effective
but waiting in the wings. Does this model apply to the single person as well?
One might think of
the individual as a cloud of beliefs, among which the necessity relations are
not fully worked out. David believes that the king should enforce justice, and
also that the king can have any woman he wants. Nathan points out that those
conflict. David forgets how he thinks as a judge, once he goes home. Nathan
reminds him.
When I teach informal
logic, I start by suggesting that argument is a kind of conversation game. I
imagine this game as continuous with all sorts of early play. One wants to know
what things have to go together. That sets up some of the basic games. One can try insisting that two things go
together, and one can try separating things that start out together. One sets
up rules: first a bite of cookie, then a sip of milk. One deconstructs the
doll: it has always had the head attached, but maybe the head comes off.
An argument is a kind
of insistence: if this is true, this other must also be true. If Jones is a
crook, Jones should not be re-elected. If the house is too small, we should
move. If I have failed my exam, I am worthless. And the game we play with that
insistence is twofold: we try very hard to think of the world in such a way
that the first claim makes the second necessary, and we try very hard to think
of ways that the first claim could be true and the second false. Both of these
are part of systole and diastole of thinking. Hundreds of times a day we
surmise and then identify the counter-examples to our surmises. Public argument
is just the public expression of this pervasive game. And what motivates the
game, what keeps it going, is that we notice things about the world as we posit
necessary connections and we notice other things about the world as we find the
counter-examples to those posited necessities. I burrow into the world by
making theories and throwing them away.
This way of thinking
avoids some of the moves I found problematic in Govier’s introduction. I don’t
have to take argument-giving in general to be an exercise in persuasion. It may
be part of a persuasive project, or it may be something more like an invitation
to play chess. We carry a project of orienting ourselves forward from the
earliest stages of our development to interpersonal adventures. Also, I don’t
immediately have to focus on evaluating arguments, on developing criteria for
good arguments. Arguments are tools for exploring the world, for testing
possible necessities. They work well if they bring up interesting stuff.
If this activity is
going right, in someone’s life, the regions of that person’s life will be in
constant communication, and commitments in one area of life will have their
effect on commitments in other areas. Public persuasion is a matter of
something like bringing the circulation back to a limb that has fallen asleep:
bringing one part of someone’s life into dialogue with the rest of that
person’s life.
Peter Shea
October 30, 2003