ISSA Proceedings 2002 – On Reasonable Question-Begging Arguments

• by: Juho Ritola - Department of Philosophy, University of Turku, Finland

1. Introduction
This paper will criticize the claim that arguments that beg the question can, in some special cases, yield reasonable belief to the conclusion, made by Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen (2001). Lippert-Rasmussen presents and examines two possible cases of arguments that appear to beg the question, but arguably give the addressee a reason to believe the conclusion. Based on these cases, Lippert-Rasmussen puts forth the following criterion:

A question-begging argument is reasonable if:
1. the addressee of the argument has reasons independent of the conclusion to accept the premises of the argument;
2. the addressee of the argument fails to conduct his reasoning on the basis of these reasons; and
3. the reasons for which the addressee rejects (or accepts) the conclusion are bad ones (Lippert-Rasmussen, 2001, 126).

What does this criterion amount to? Lippert-Rasmussen builds on the view of David Sanford (see 1972, 1981, 1988, 1989). The details of Sanford’s account need not concern us here, but two essential elements on which Sanford builds should be noted. Namely, according to Sanford, whether an argument begs the question should be decided based on the 1) the logical relations between the propositions involved and 2) the way belief in these propositions has been acquired, namely that the belief in the premise is not due to the belief in the conclusion. In essence, if one has the right reasons for holding a belief and uses these beliefs appropriately, one reaches conclusions worthy of belief. Lippert-Rasmussen argues that a comparison between the content of belief-set and arguments is what decides the value of the argument, not the manner in which the contents of belief-set are actually used: if the addressee of the argument has good reasons to accept the conclusion, the argument is reasonable, irrespective of the way these reasons affect the process of reasoning.
The intuitively good thing about Lippert-Rasmussen’s cases is that they look like a situation where a person sees the error of his or her ways and says: “Okay, I admit it now: I did actually have good reason to accept the premises (I just didn’t remember them), and the reasons why I originally rejected the conclusion were bad ones (I never should’ve trusted that fellow anyway). It was indeed a good argument.” It is this way of looking at arguments that we need to discuss. Is it tenable? Is it acceptable to evaluate arguments solely by the content of the arguer’s belief-set?
I will argue that Lippert-Rasmussen’s argument can be challenged on two main points. First challenge objects to his argument against the division between being justified in believing (situationally justified) and justifiedly believing (doxastic justification). I will argue that this division is important for the explication of fallacies. Second, and closely related, challenge is that it can be questioned whether it is these arguments that actually provide reasons for believing the conclusion. At the end of the paper, I will also briefly consider the nature of second-order conditions in argument evaluation. My conclusion is that Lippert-Rasmussen fails to show that arguments that beg the question can make the addressee’s belief in the conclusion reasonable. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2002 – Madison, Mill And The Public Sphere: A Classically Liberal Approach To Public Deliberation

• by: Robert C. Rowland - The University of Kansas

There is something decidedly odd about dominant theories concerning how the public sphere should operate. Public sphere theories focus on how societies make decisions about issues involving the public. They focus on the public in two closely related ways:  a concentration on decisions involving issues of public concern and a consideration of how the public participates in those decisions. Although the philosophical underpinnings of the two related foci of public sphere are rarely stated, it is clear that the very existence of the public sphere depends upon a society that is in some broad sense liberal. The public sphere cannot exist in a meaningful way without some sort of democratic system that protects the rights of individuals to speak their minds. The oddity in all of this is that public sphere theorists largely have ignored classical liberalism as a source for their theories of how the public sphere should operate.
Rather than draw on liberalism in order to develop theories to explain and evaluate the functioning of the public sphere, theorists have tended to be quite dismissive of traditional liberalism. For example, in Liberalism and the Problem of Knowledge, Charles Arthur Willard discusses what he calls the “crisis of liberal democracy (1996, 15) and eventually calls for “liberalism… to surrender a sweeping problematic: the problem of the public sphere” (1996, 294). In fact, Willard discusses the views of Madison, Mill, Jefferson and other classical liberals in much more detail that do most public sphere theorists, but his ultimate conclusion is to reject their views as inadequate, even antiquated.

In this essay, I argue that argumentation and communication scholars have been too quick to reject the relevance of classical liberalism for understanding the public sphere. It is certainly worth noting that at a time when many in academia dismiss liberalism as an utterly failed ideology, in the real public sphere traditional liberalism stands utterly triumphant. Traditional liberalism, a philosophy embracing representative democracy, limited government, protection of human rights, especially the right to self-expression, and a reliance on the marketplace both in the economic sphere and also the realm of public knowledge, is clearly the dominant ideology in the world today. Given this situation, it seems sensible to consider what a liberal theory of the public sphere would look like.
In order to begin to build a liberal theory of the public sphere, I will focus on the implicit theories of the public sphere found in the writings of two of the foremost liberal theorists, James Madison and John Stuart Mill. Madison, the primary author of both the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights, is the theorists upon whom “we unavoidably depend to comprehend its [the Constitution’s] intellectual foundations” (Banning, 1995, 2). Madison more than any other single individual shaped the debate that created the system of limited government and representative democracy in the United States. He was, as Matthews has argued, the “quintessential liberal” (1995, 21). If Madison is important both as a practical politician and also a democratic theorist, Mill can be seen as the supreme theorist of liberalism. Writing at the very beginning of modernity, Mill expressed the liberal vision of society more clearly than any writer before or since. It is for this reason that in a collection of Mill’s works on politics and society, Geraint L. Williams labeled him as “the philosopher of liberalism” (1976, 9) and Graeme Duncan chose to pair Mill against Marx as “the creators of the classical communist and liberal theories” (1973, 1).
In the remainder of this essay, I will develop the implicit theory of the public sphere in the political writings of Madison and Mill. In order to reveal their liberal theories about the public sphere, I will sketch the goals that they identified for public deliberation, assumptions they made about society, problems that they identified in achieving the goals, and their diagnosis of the best means of overcoming those difficulties. In the conclusion, I will draw implications for contemporary studies of the public sphere. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2002 – “I See Your Point” – On Visual Arguments

• by: Menashe Schwed - Ashkelon Regional College, Israel

1. Can a visual object be an argument?
The prevailing assumption in analyzing arguments is that the form of an argument is linguistically expressed as a set of propositions. However, Willard, for instance, has argued that argument diagrams based on Toulmin’s model, which presuppose the linguistic expression of propositions in arguments, cannot describe other forms of arguments that are conveyed by various media, as television commercials (Willard, 1976: 315). The question is not whether such criticism as Willard’s is correct. Instead, the question must be extended: What is the range of the concept of argument or what sorts of things may be considered as arguments?
The medium in which an argument is formulated does not usually get the same focus as its structure. The implicit assumption is usually that language is the medium and, thus, the possibility that visual objects can be considered as a type of argument faces the position that will disqualify them as real arguments. For instance, when Daniel O’Keefe tries to clarify the difference between an argument and argument-making, he says that a paradigm case of argument-making must not be merely linguistically explicable but indeed linguistically explicit (O’Keefe, 1982).
However, another reading of O’Keefe’s account would focus on his structural analysis of making an argument and not on the final medium in which argument-making must be described. O’Keefe argues that an argument as an entity has to be part of being engaged in an act of making an argument. Thus, identifying what is the argument and its analysis or reconstruction should be done by identifying the circumstances in which that argument was argued. The distinction between the way in which an argument is actually made or communicated, and the abstract object of “argument” is theoretically important for the possibility of a visual argument: while the visual argument is an object, its reconstruction as a linguistically explicit argument is part of analyzing the case of its making. Thus, the possibility of visual arguments is based on the distinction between its being a visual object and the ability to reformulate it as a linguistically explicit case of making an argument. In this way, the issue of the medium of the argument becomes a central part of an argumentation theory in addition to its analysis and reconstruction.

In order to make the distinction between the visual argument as an object and its final linguistic reconstruction as a case of making an argument, there is a need to reject a common assumption regarding the nature of an argument. The paradigm characterization of the concept of argument is by describing it as a type of speech act. However, such a characterization might jeopardize the possibility of visual arguments, since, strictly speaking, they are not speech acts. O’Keefe rejects this characterization and bases his claim on analyzing the concept of Argument-making (O’Keefe, 1982: 12f). According to O’Keefe, an argument is not a speech act but a notion, while “arguing” is the speech act that conveys an argument.
This distinction can be the starting point for the possibility of a visual argument, for it illuminates an important difference between two things: First, what sorts of things would be classified as arguments, which is part of the meaning and application of the concept of argument, and, second, what sorts of circumstances would entitle making an argument, which is part of argument-making. Therefore, a visual argument is an object, an instance of the notion of argument. It is neither a speech act nor an instance of the notion of argument-making. As a visual instance of the notion of an argument, both the claim and the reasons are not fully linguistically explicit. Nevertheless, they are both overtly expressed via other mediums than language. However, when a visual argument is part of a communication process of making an argument, then the need to reconstruct the visual argument in a linguistically explicit way emerges. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2002 – Rationality And Judgment

• by: Harvey Siegel - University of Miami

Philosophical/epistemic theories of rationality differ over the role of judgment in rational argumentation. According to what Harold I. Brown (1988) calls the ‘classical model’ of rationality, rational justification is a matter of conformity with explicit rules or principles. On this view, a given belief, action or decision is rational only in so far as it is rendered so by a relevant rule or principle. These rules or principles must themselves be justified by appeal to other rules or principles. According to the classical model,  judgment plays no role in the determination of rationality; whether a belief or action is rational is a matter, not of judgment, but of its relation to the appropriate rules(i). Critics of the classical model, e.g. Brown and Trudy Govier (1999), argue that the model is subject to insuperable difficulties. They propose, instead, that rationality be understood in terms of judgment rather than (or in addition to) rules. Govier criticizes some of my previous work on the subject for being overly committed to the classical model, and for equivocating on ‘judgment.’
In this paper, I consider Brown’s and Govier’s criticisms of the classical model and their defense of what I will call the ‘judgment model’ of rationality, as well as Govier’s critique of my earlier discussions. While my own commitment to the classical model is (I think and hope) somewhat more nuanced than Govier alleges, and so avoids at least some of her criticisms, the main burden of my paper will be not so much to defend my view from those criticisms, but rather, first, to articulate what I think are two deep problems for the view that Brown and Govier advocate: its inability to distinguish between rational and irrational judgment, and its inability to avoid recourse to rules. This inability, I will argue, renders the view inadequate as an account of rationality, critical thinking, or argument appraisal. Second, and more positively, I hope to show that, properly understood, an adequate account of rationality will centrally involve both rules and judgment.

The Classical Model and its Problems
According to Brown, it is basic to any acceptable account of rationality that “rational beliefs must be based on reasons” (p. 38; see also p. 183). That is, whatever else a given theory says about the character and constitution of rationality, it must at least include a provision according to which reasons are fundamental. The point is perfectly general, and runs far beyond belief: for a belief, but also an action, a hope, a fear, a decision, a vote, or anything else to be rational, it must in some sense be ‘based on reasons.’ It is endorsed by most contemporary theorists of rationality, including myself(ii), and I will presume it in what follows. Granting that rationality involves reasons, what else is needed for a belief, action, decision or whatever to be rational? Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2002 – Indicators Of Analogy Argumentation

• by: A. Francisca Snoeck Henkemans - University of Amsterdam

1. Argumentative indicators
Every argument can be characterized by an argumentation scheme, which defines the justificatory relation between the argument and the standpoint. In the pragma-dialectical approach, a distinction is made between three main categories of argumentation schemes: argumentation based on a causal relation, argumentation based on a relation of analogy and argumentation based on a symptomatic relation (van Eemeren and Grootendorst 1992). A similar division of types of schemes can be found in the classical rhetorical literature, in the traditional American debate textbooks and in the work of modern rhetoricians such as Weaver (1953).
In a research project on argumentative indicators that Frans van Eemeren, Peter Houtlosser and I are carrying out, we investigate which clues in the verbal presentation can be used to reconstruct the relationship on which an argumentation is based and to determine what type of argument is used. The project is embedded in the theoretical framework of the pragma-dialectical approach to argumentation. Its aim is to make a systematic inventory of the verbal means used in the Dutch language to express an argumentative function of language use, to classify these means in terms of the ideal model of a critical discussion and to identify the conditions under which they can fulfill a specific argumentative function.
In our project we pay attention to all elements that are crucial to the evaluation of the argument and need to be represented in an analytic overview of an argumentative text or discussion, such as the type of dispute, the argumentation structure and the argumentation schemes. For each discussion stage we establish which words and expressions can function as indicators of the relevant moves in that particular stage and as indicators of the relations between these moves.
Each type of argumentation has its own assessment criteria: for each type of justificatory relation different critical questions are relevant. Someone who makes use of a particular argumentation scheme, thereby takes the first step in a dialectical testing procedure that requires the arguer to deal with specific forms of criticism in order to defend the standpoint successfully (see van Eemeren, ‘The importance of being understood’). In anticipation of possible criticism, the protagonist of a standpoint can follow up his argument with further arguments dealing with relevant objections. In a fully externalized discussion, the reactions of the opponent will relate to the evaluation issues that are relevant to the argumentation scheme concerned. It is therefore not only in the presentation of the argumentation itself, but also in the critical reactions of the opponent, and in the speaker’s follow-up to his argument, that clues can be found as to the type of relation between argument and standpoint.
In this paper, I shall illustrate our approach to argumentative indicators by discussing various types of indicators of argumentation based on a relation of analogy. I shall make a distinction between 1) clues in the presentation of the argumentative relation, 2) clues in the critical reactions of the opponent, and 3) clues in the speaker’s follow-up to his argument. I shall first explain why the expressions concerned can be seen as indicators. Then I shall discuss some problems in reconstructing the relationship on which an argument is based. Read more

ISSA Proceedings 2002 – Critical Thinking: Two Views

• by: Jan Sobocan - University of Windsor

I will briefly describe critical thinking in terms of two views. The first view, and most commonly held view, is that critical thinking consists of dispositions and skills, where the role of non-cognitive factors or dispositions are emphasized or considered primary to the exercise of critical thinking skills. I will refer to this as the ‘dispositions plus skills’ view, one which is held by Robert H. Ennis, Richard Paul and Harvey Siegel. When defining and describing critical thinking activity, these theorists include descriptions of what they consider to be an ideal critical thinker. The second view, one which I will refer to as the Askills’ view, is that critical thinking is the exercise of cognitive skills or abilities – particularly the skills associated with the interpretation and evaluation of arguments. Fisher and Scriven clearly hold such a view as they define critical thinking specifically in terms of such skills, and so do not focus on what are considered to be the non-cognitive aspects that may or may not be necessary to any critical thinking exercise deemed as such(i). In the first section of this paper, I will discuss critical thinking and curriculum. In part two, I provide reasons for defining critical thinking as a set of skills. In part three, I outline and assess Alec Fisher and Michael Scriven’s conception of critical thinking in terms of an ideal curriculum. In part four I conclude with a proposal for curriculum development.

1. Critical Thinking and the Ontario High School Curriculum 
I examined both conceptions of critical thinking in terms of the implications they might have for curriculum development and the teaching of critical thinking based upon the learning objectives described in curriculum documents. Thus, I am not addressing here philosophical issues with respect to critical thinking, but practical ones. The main point of this paper is to illustrate how the theoretical content implied by the conceptions I examine may or may not inform the practice of teaching critical thinking in Ontario high schools. I think a skills-based definition and the content implied by that definition is consistent with Ontario curriculum objectives and course descriptions, and also with the primary aim of teaching critical thinking skills. My conclusion is that in order to find a common vocabulary among teachers of specific subjects, and teachers of philosophy, reasoning, critical thinking, informal logic – however it is verbally clothed in curriculum documents and in textbooks – is that a skills based definition would be most useful to secondary school teachers. Importantly, a skills-based definition is a less complicated basis from which teachers can develop their course content. I think that the skills-based definition and the assessment of that definition given by Scriven and Fisher provide this basis – a coherent and specific focus for teachers of all subjects working within the guidelines of the New Ontario Curriculum.

Although I will argue for the skills view, I must make clear that I am not rejecting the dispositional accounts given by Ennis, Paul, or Siegel or the value of them in arguing for critical thinking as a central educational objective. In other words, trying to instil in students the value of learning generally, and in this case the value of learning critical thinking skills, is a primary aim for all teachers. However, I do not think that the aim of instilling a critical attitude or spirit so to speak is one that curriculum guidelines and objectives specifically address, and therefore trying to incorporate such an aim into conceptions of critical thinking complicates the development of curriculum appropriate content and successful completion of board assessment requirements. How content is geared to instill such dispositions or attitudes is vague, as when one looks in the content of critical thinking textbooks, ways that students might develop or learn the appropriate character traits, values, dispositions, attitudes etc. argued for in dispositions plus skills accounts is conspicuously absent. For example, in his article ‘Critical Thinking: A Streamlined Conception’, Ennis gives an account of critical thinking with an emphasis on the importance of teaching dispositions(ii).Yet, in twelve of the fourteen Chapters in his textbook, he outlines the knowledge and skills associated with the critical interpretation and evaluation of arguments(iii). Placing importance on such an aim as teaching dispositions and values, and then teaching critical thinking as primarily a set of skills, brings us then to that all too familiar and frustrating gap between theory and practice. Read more