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Problems in Argument Analysis and Evaluation PROBLEMS IN ARGUMENT ANALYSIS AND EVALUATION Windsor Studies in Argumentation Volume 6 TRUDY GOVIER Windsor Studies in Argumentation Windsor Ontario Canada Problems in Argument Analysis and Evaluation by Trudy Govier & Windsor Studies in Argumentation is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted. Copyright Trudy Govier and Windsor Studies in Argumentation ISBN 978-0-920233-83-2 CONTENTS WSIA Editors v WSIA Editors' Introduction vii Preface viii 1. Rigor and Reality 1 2. Is a Theory of Argument Possible 20 3. The Great Divide 56 4. Two Unreceived Views about Reasoning and 84 Argument 5. The Problem of Missing Premises 123 6. A Dialogic Exercise 161 7. A New Approach to Charity 203 8. Reasons Why Arguments and Explanations are 242 Different 9. Four Reasons There are No Fallacies? 271 10. Formalism and Informalism in Theories of 311 Reasoning and Argument 11. Critical Thinking in the Armchair, the Classroom, 349 and the Lab 12. Critical Thinking about Critical Thinking Tests 377 13. The Social Epistemology of Argument 413 WSIA EDITORS Editors in Chief Leo Groarke (Trent University) Christopher Tindale (University of Windsor) Board of Editors Mark Battersby (Capilano University) Camille Cameron (Dalhousie University) Emmanuelle Danblon (Université libre de Bruxelles) Ian Dove (University of Nevada Las Vegas) Bart Garssen (University of Amsterdam) Michael Gilbert (York University) David Godden (Michigan State University) Jean Goodwin (North Carolina State University) Hans V. Hansen (University of Windsor) Gabrijela Kišiček (University of Zagreb) Marcin Koszowy (University of Białystok) Marcin Lewiński (New University of Lisbon) Catherine H. Palczewski (University of Northern Iowa) Chris Reed (University of Dundee) Andrea Rocci (University of Lugano) Paul van den Hoven (Tilburg University) Cristián Santibáñez Yáñez (Diego Portales University) Igor Ž. Žagar (University of Maribor & University of Primorska) Frank Zenker (Lund University) PROBLEMS IN ARGUMENT ANALYSIS AND EVALUATION v Windsor Studies In Argumentation Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation and Rhetoric University of Windsor 401 Sunset Avenue Windsor, Ontario, Canada N9B 3P4 vi TRUDY GOVIER WSIA EDITORS' INTRODUCTION We are pleased to publish this WSIA edition of Trudy’s Govier’s seminal volume, Problems in Argument Analysis and Evaluation. Originally published in 1987 by Foris Publications, this was a pioneering work that played a major role in establishing argumentation theory as a discipline. Today, it is as relevant to the field as when it first appeared, with discussions of questions and issues that remain central to the study of argument. It has defined the main approaches to many of those issues and guided the ways in which we might respond to them. From this foundation, it sets the stage for further investigations and emerging research. This is a second edition of the book that is corrected and updated by the author, with new prefaces to each chapter (but without the previous appendix). We want to acknowledge the work of Ms. Tamilyn Mulvaney who assisted in the editorial process and prepared the final manuscript for publication. Leo A. Groarke Christopher W. Tindale PROBLEMS IN ARGUMENT ANALYSIS AND EVALUATION vii PREFACE Preface to the First Edition My interest in the subjects covered in this book dates from 1978, when I came across several texts in informal logic, and was fascinated both by their practicality and by their recommendations for rethinking central philosophical traditions regarding logic and argument. I thought at that time that very fundamental issues were at stake but that the context of textbooks did not provide sufficient opportunities to explore them in depth. This book is an attempt to fill that gap. I have profited very much over the intervening years from philosophical exchanges with Tony Blair, Ralph Johnson, and David Hitchcock. Comments and analyses from Jonathan Adler, Douglas Walton, Richard Paul, Dennis Rohatyn, John McPeck, David Ennis, Frans van Eemeren, and Rob Grootendorst have also been helpful, as have the interesting questions posed when parts of this book have been read to audiences in Canada (Lethbridge, Windsor, Calgary, Ottawa, Edmonton, Saskatoon, Waterloo, and Peterborough); the United States (Newport News and Sonoma); and the Netherlands (Amsterdam). Materials on critical thinking tests were willingly supplied by Matthew Lipton, Robert Ennis, Stephen Norris, and John McPeck, whose cooperation is appreciated. I would also like to thank the editors and contributors to the Informal Logic Newsletter (now the journal Informal Logic) for their interest in, and comments on, my work, especially in the period 1979-1982. viii TRUDY GOVIER I am extremely grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for generous financial support during the period 1982-1984. Without this support, the book would not have been completed. Trent University also provided some support in 1981, enabling Jennifer Dance Flatman to lend valuable bibliographical assistance. Equally important has been moral support – especially that of David Gallop, William H. Dray, Bernard Hodgson, Sandy McMullen, Michael Scriven, Nettie Wiebe, Janet Keeping and, most of all, my husband, Anton Colijn. For errors or omissions that may remain, I am solely responsible. Preface to the Second Edition For many years, this book has been difficult to obtain, and I felt badly about that. I was delighted to learn that the series Windsor Studies in Argumentation was interested in re-publishing the work so as to make both electronic and print versions available. After some difficulties, I was able to retrieve the copyright from the large Walter de Gruyter firm (Berlin), which had taken over the original publisher, Foris (Dordrecht, the Netherlands) and dramatically increased the price of the work. Hopefully, this new edition will be accessible to all who wish to consult it. People often expressed to me their frustration about the inaccessibility of the original book. They did not indicate a desire for a re- working of its themes in the light of subsequent research. That, in any event, would require a massive amount of work. In this second edition I have for the most part kept the original material intact, while adding introductory essays to each chapter in an effort to convey my present sense of what I said decades ago. This book was an early one in the development of informal logic and argumentation studies. My youthful excitement about topics and problems in these fields stemmed of course from their intrinsic interest but also from my sense that they had rarely been explored and seemed to emerge, when they did, mainly from pedagogical experience and treatments in textbooks. I PROBLEMS IN ARGUMENT ANALYSIS AND EVALUATION ix wrote my own textbook A Practical Study of Argument (currently in its seventh edition), and I enjoyed doing that, but I was convinced that such topics as missing premises, the inductive/ deductive distinction, and the principle of interpretive charity required treatment different from what would be appropriate in a textbook. Hence, this work. Some topics here — for example, fallacies and social epistemology — have subsequently been explored by many other theorists. Others, including the argument/explanation distinction, a priori analogies, and the principle of charity, have received less attention. In any event, I hope that this version of Problems in Argument Analysis and Evaluation will be of interest to persons now active in the study of argumentation. I am extremely grateful to Michael Williams for his assistance in scanning the original book so as to generate electronic files. He and his fast scanner saved me weeks of work. The research, thinking, and writing for this work was done in the period 1982 – 1986. During much of that time I was an independent scholar based in Calgary, Alberta, and I benefited from financial support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada. Presently my finances are secure, but my gratitude to the council persists. x TRUDY GOVIER CHAPTER 1. RIGOR AND REALITY This chapter was written in an atmosphere of challenged change in the teaching of logic. According to Howard Kahane, whose book on fallacies (Logic and Contemporary Rhetoric) went through many editions, his interest in that topic stemmed from the career of Spiro Agnew. Spiro Agnew was Vice President of the United States from 1969 to 1973. His highly imaginative and well-publicized rhetoric, incorporating such famous expressions as “nattering nabobs of negativism,” led several of Kahane’s students to ask what the tools of logic could offer for the evaluation of Agnew’s claims and arguments. Kahane realized that formal logic had little to offer, a realization that led him to develop his own text, emphasizing the understanding of fallacies. In that work, the examples were taken from American politics, a selection that prompted Ralph Johnson and Tony Blair to produce their book, Logical Self-Defence, with Canadian material. That work was an important stimulus for my own. In the early nineteen eighties, “logic” as used by philosophers, meant “formal logic”, and the standard presumption was that by studying logic, students could learn to reason, detect poor reasoning and argument, and construct good arguments. This presumption was coming into question in the nineteen eighties but in my experience it was still strongly defended by many philosophers. In the context, I was astounded when I heard in 1978 from Michael Scriven – still active in the field – that formal logic had little or nothing to offer as applied to real arguments PROBLEMS IN ARGUMENT ANALYSIS AND EVALUATION 1 expressed in natural language. There were problems of translation, argument type, structure, premise assessment, dialectical context, audience, and much else. For all its rigour and status, formal logic was of little use as applied to real arguments. To me the discovery was shocking. How could philosophers have been so wrong about practicalities? Were they deceiving themselves? They prided themselves on knowing how to argue, but were sadly lacking when it came to theorizing about that.
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