Circular Reasoning
Cognitive Science 26 (2002) 767–795 Circular reasoning Lance J. Rips∗ Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, 2029 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208, USA Received 31 October 2001; received in revised form 2 April 2002; accepted 10 July 2002 Abstract Good informal arguments offer justification for their conclusions. They go wrong if the justifications double back, rendering the arguments circular. Circularity, however, is not necessarily a single property of an argument, but may depend on (a) whether the argument repeats an earlier claim, (b) whether the repetition occurs within the same line of justification, and (c) whether the claim is properly grounded in agreed-upon information. The experiments reported here examine whether people take these factors into account in their judgments of whether arguments are circular and whether they are reasonable. The results suggest that direct judgments of circularity depend heavily on repetition and structural role of claims, but only minimally on grounding. Judgments of reasonableness take repetition and grounding into account, but are relatively insensitive to structural role. © 2002 Cognitive Science Society, Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Reasoning; Argumentation 1. Introduction A common criticism directed at informal arguments is that the arguer has engaged in circular reasoning. In one form of this fallacy, the arguer illicitly uses the conclusion itself (or a closely related proposition) as a crucial piece of support, instead of justifying the conclusion on the basis of agreed-upon facts and reasonable inferences. A convincing argument for conclusion c can’t rest on the prior assumption that c, so something has gone seriously wrong with such an argument.
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