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Argument Or Explanation: Who Is to Decide?

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Argument Or Explanation: Who Is to Decide? Argument or Explanation: Who is to Decide? MICHEL DUFOUR Institut de la communication et des médias (ICM) Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3 [email protected] Abstract: Granting that explana- Résumé : Une fois concédé que les tions that answer a why-question, explications répondant à une ques- and arguments, are the products of tion “Pourquoi?” et les arguments two species of the activity of reason- sont deux espèces de l’acte consis- giving, do they make an exclusive tant à fournir des raisons, l’article and exhaustive classification? The demande si elles en forment une orthodox distinction between expla- classification exclusive et exhaus- nation and argument is based on tive. La distinction orthodoxe entre the status of their conclusion: is it une explication et un argument re- accepted or not? However, this view pose sur le statut de sa conclusion : faces some tough cases, which are est-elle acceptée ou non ? Cette discussed. Most of the criteria used distinction fait cependant face à des to distinguish argument and explana- cas embarrassants que l’on va discu- tion according to the orthodox view ter. La plupart des critères utilisés cause tough cases to proliferate and pour distinguer argument et explica- hardly accommodate common com- tion dans le respect de cette ortho- municative situations. This suggests doxie induisent une prolifération de that the orthodox distinction is not cas embarrassants et peinent à rendre satisfactory. compte de situations communica- tionnelles banales. Ceci invite à pen- ser que la distinction orthodoxe n’est pas satisfaisante. Keywords: argument, explanation, reasons, evidential reasons, explanatory reasons, epistemic asymmetry. 1. Introduction For the purposes of this study, I will assume that argument and explanation are two species of the same genus, which I will call a rationale, understood as the public manifestation of the activi- ty of putting reasons forward.1 It typically results in propositions 1 Some people may consider that a rationale takes place in the mind and ar- guments take place in conversations. This is not the distinction I make be- tween rationale and argument. In this paper, a rationale is a piece of reason- ing that can be a communicative event. I use the word rationale in order not to use argument as a generic term but only as a specific term, so that some room is left for something that is a rationale but is not an argument. The can- didate I am interested in is explanation. © Michel Dufour, Informal Logic, Vol. 37, No. 1 (2017), pp. 23-41. 24 Michel Dufour offered for another proposition, which I will call the conclu- sion.2 Do arguments and explanations constitute an exclusive and exhaustive classification of rationales? This vexed question is the topic of this paper. Two paradigmatic practical situations inspire the explana- tion/argument distinction. The first one is explanation-seeking: Some people agree about the truth of a proposition p and then try to answer “Why-p?”. Tom’s car does not start. Why? A pos- sible explanation is that the battery is dead. The second para- digmatic situation is controversy. Does God exist? You propose your reasons; I propose mine. A distinction, that I call “ortho- dox”3, links explanation with the first situation, and argument with the second. Can any rationale that is put forward be re- duced to only one or the other of these two prototypical situa- tions? Can it be both an argument and an explanation? Can it be neither? Both theses—exclusivity and exhaustivity—depend on the very definition of argument and explanation. For some authors, for instance, Sinnott-Armstrong and Fogelin (2010, p. 3), an ar- gument amounts to what I have called a rationale: They consider that giving reasons for a proposition is a necessary and sufficient condition to produce an argument. An explanation is then a kind of argument or a kind of use of argument.4 Other authors have a more restricted concept of argument that can leave room for ra- tionales that are not arguments. In this case, the four expected answers to the question “Is this rationale an argument or an ex- planation” are: it is an argument, it is an explanation, it is both, it is neither of them. The third one challenges the exclusivity thesis; the fourth the exhaustivity one. The exclusivity thesis— no explanation is an argument and no argument is an explana- tion—has been the most widely discussed. Before going further, let us stress two points about expla- nation. First, it is a generic term that covers several varieties that can be roughly classified according to the kind of question they answer (how? what? why?...). Not all explanations are subject to my question. Only an explanation that proposes a reason of Tom’s trouble with his car has the required logical structure to be involved in this debate. From now on, I will deal only with 2 I leave aside the possibility that a rationale has several conclusions. 3 It seems to be orthodox at least among many people interested in argumen- tation theory. In some other places it is not orthodox at all. In this paper, I am interested in the world of argumentation theory. 4 For a discussion of a possible classification of argument, see, for instance, Blair (2004). © Michel Dufour, Informal Logic, Vol. 37, No. 1 (2017), pp. 23-41. Argument or Explanation 25 this kind of explanation, namely explanations that are or can be seen as answers to a why-question. Second, to say, like van Fraassen, that an explanation is an answer to a why-question (1980, p. 126) may not be sufficient: some authors claim that other conditions are required, for instance, to provide under- standing or to state a causal relation (Salmon 1978, 1984, 1989; Kitcher 1989; Potochnik 2010). Yet in the debate on the distinc- tion between argument and explanation, to answer a why- question is a necessary condition for a rationale to be an expla- nation, and it is a necessary and sufficient condition if this ques- tion is about a proposition that is not controversial. I will discuss the argument/explanation distinction only from this minimal view on explanation, which seems to have been inherited from logical positivism and has become orthodox in many critical thinking books. The discussion would be quite different if other conditions were required in addition to answering a why- question. The main aim of this paper is to show the issues that result from the orthodox distinction between argument and ex- planation based on this minimal view. No alternative approach of explanation will be discussed, let alone elaborated, in this pa- per. 2. Tough cases In Reasons why arguments and explanations are different, Go- vier (1987) discusses some cases that Thomas called “tough cas- es” because he saw them as challenges to the exclusivity thesis. The possibility of an overlap between argument and explanation presupposes that their definitions were not worked out to avoid it. On the other hand, if an overlap is possible but some argu- ments are not explanations and some explanations are not argu- ments, then neither of these two subsets of rationale is included in the other. Govier thinks that this is the case because of what she calls the “pragmatic asymmetry” between argument and ex- planation, which I will discuss later. What makes a case tough? Thomas’s examples are short fragments (typically a few lines) coming from books. Each text provides enough information to acknowledge that it reports a rationale, but not enough to decide if it is an argument or an ex- planation. Both Thomas and Govier seem to grant the exhaus- tivity thesis because they do not consider the possibility that a rationale is neither an argument nor an explanation. As far as I know, no attention has been paid to the fact that these tough cases come from written documents. Thus, they are © Michel Dufour, Informal Logic, Vol. 37, No. 1 (2017), pp. 23-41. 26 Michel Dufour conveyed through a slow communication medium that can reach an unforeseen audience and that usually offers no possibility of reply. They do not appear during a lively dialogue where, for instance, a participant would wonder “Do I argue or ex- plain?” or would be embarrassed by someone asking “Do you explain or argue?” Thomas's cases are tough because it is diffi- cult to answer a third person question: “Does the author argue or explain?” In a face-to-face dialogue, an easy solution would be to ask the person who puts forward the rationale. However, this presupposes that she knows what she does. Does she? The an- swer may not be that simple. “She explains, because she says that’s what she is doing” could even be suspected to be a falla- cious ad verecundiam rationale. Hence my question: “Who is to decide if a rationale is an argument or an explanation?” This kind of tough case is likely to proliferate as long as no answer is given, and I intend to show that, even when you get one, it is unconvincing, if not arbitrary. Govier stresses that the distinction she makes between ar- gument and explanation has pedagogical importance, but is dif- ficult to grasp for students who are not trained in argumentation theory.5 This confirms that folk opinions on this topic are not reliable, perhaps less because they would sometimes be false than because the distinction is not clear or familiar to students. Accordingly, they may hesitate. So, on what grounds is this dis- tinction made by theorists? Should their theoretical definitions nevertheless first try to rely on folk concepts or intuitions, and then accommodate some theoretical preferences? If folk opin- ions were clear but change from place to place or from time to time, theoretical definitions based on them would be likely to change too.
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