Abstract
Given my defense, in Chapter 2, of the idea that the regulative conditions for argumentation have to be specified in terms of its constitutive conditions, it follows that, if argumentation is a complex of logical, dialectical and rhetorical properties, as contended in Chapter 3, then good argumentation will be argumentation satisfying logical, dialectical and rhetorical conditions.
Yet, the other side of this coin is that argumentative normativity cannot be reduced to rhetorical, dialectical or logical conditions alone.
Thus, this chapter is devoted to characterizing the logical dimension of argumentation as the dimension providing the semantic normative conditions of acts of arguing and acts of reasoning; but, additionally, it seeks show that logical normativity is not equivalent to argumentative normativity tout court.
To this end, my first task in this chapter is to introduce the ideas that Toulmin first presented in The Uses of Argument (1958), both as a leading work on the nature of Logic and as an attempt at providing a tool for argumentation appraisal. Afterwards, I explain the differences between Toulmin’s approach and mine by considering the criticisms that his conception of Logic has received. One of the main differences between both approaches has to do with two alternative conceptions of the warrant of an argument. In the last section of this chapter I argue for my account of warrants by considering how far Toulmin’s model of argument is committed to relativism.
The result of this discussion will be an alternative model of argument that is meant to be a representation of the type of acts in which inferences supervene, namely, acts of reasoning and acts of arguing. This model incorporates most Toulminian insights but it includes a distinction between epistemic and ontological qualifiers that is based on our characterization of the speech act complex of arguing.
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- 1.
In order to underline the distinction between arguments and acts of arguing, I am going to use the terms “data,” “warrant” and “conclusion” to refer to the elements of arguments and the terms “reason,” “inference-claim” and “target-claim” to refer to the elements of acts of arguing. Yet, Toulmin does not distinguish between “conclusion” and “claim,” or between “reason” and “data.”
- 2.
On this account, Toulmin’s model of argument would be one of these theories for inference appraisal.
- 3.
In The Uses of Argument, Toulmin does not explicitly take into account the inferences that we make in reasoning, but I assume that his proposal can easily be extended to them. This is important to our goal of understanding Toulmin’s model of argument as capturing the pragmatic constitutive conditions of inferences, i.e., the normative conditions that acts of reasoning and acts of arguing have in common.
- 4.
Actually, I would say “that turn the mere entertaining-that-p into a full-fledged belief that p.”
- 5.
A correct attribution of qualifiers is an attribution that makes explicit the pragmatic force with which we ought to believe or put forward the corresponding contents.
- 6.
I owe this observation to one of my referees in Bermejo-Luque (2008). Toulmin might answer that the consequence of that argument cannot really “be obtained by appropriate shuffling of the terms in the data and warrant.” But in that case, he should give further explanations on what “appropriate shuffling” consists in, and it is doubtful that he can do so without already adopting certain formal criteria of argument validity.
- 7.
If we assume the Quinean thesis that the only type of analytic propositions are logical ones, we may come to believe that the only possible type of analytic arguments are formal ones, as defined above (more precisely, formal, first-order classical arguments, in Quine’s view). But this is neither Toulmin’s, nor my view. Formally valid and analytic arguments are not co-extensive, because, in principle, “formal” truths should be considered at most a sub-set of “analytic” truths: an argument like “he is unmarried; therefore, he is a bachelor” would be analytic but not “formally” valid. For my part, I am even willing to say that the distinction between analytic and substantial arguments is good as far as it goes; that is, as far as the distinction between analytic and synthetic truths is tenable.
- 8.
- 9.
Following Toulmin’s analysis of “cannot,” it is easy to see that this warrant is a statement that can be established by appeal to other statements, namely, those of a claim like “national laws being as they are, you cannot oblige a defendant’s wife to testify. That would be a violation of such and such law and it would amount to losing the case.”
- 10.
Among scholars, the very question of what a field is is a matter of controversy. For example, B. Burleson (1979: 147) says that fields provide the substantive context of an argument, which “either implicitly or explicitly, provides the criteria against which the merits of an argument should be evaluated. Each language game is a locus of communally shared and tested standards of intelligibility, truth, sincerity and correctness – the components of rationality which all good arguments must meet.” However, for Klumpp (1981), fields are subject matter and they determine what types of data can be used to support a claim; on the other hand. Zarefsky (1982: 191) considers that Toulmin “proposed that, for any given field, there are accepted standards for judging the worth of arguments.”
- 11.
However, in A Theory of Argumentation (1989), Willard has proposed a more nuanced account of fields. Yet, my concern here is with the way the concept of field-dependency can give rise to a treacherous form of relativism, and Willard’s earlier view provide a good example of this.
- 12.
Toulmin says that warrants can be written as the corresponding conditional of every argument so as to render it formally valid, but he considers that the proper way to make them explicit is as follows: “Data such as D entitle one to draw conclusions, or make claims, such as C” (1958: 98). Hitchcock among others, has objected that “Toulmin equivocates on whether a warrant is a statement or a rule,” but he considers that “the equivocation is harmless, since a warrant-statement is the verbal expression of a warrant-rule” (2002: 484).
- 13.
That is, they may constitute backings of arguments as much as “categorical statements of fact” because, certainly, grammatical differences do not necessarily amount to functional ones. Within this picture, the backing, as the representation of a reason for the inference-claim, can either represent a general rule or a categorical statement of fact, and this rule or categorical statement is required when the inference itself is challenged. Analogously, as we will see in the next chapter, a rebuttal would turn out to be a defeater of the backing as a reason for the inference-claim.
- 14.
This claim or belief may justify inference-claims or inference-motivations like “if John has a mutation in the bone morphogenetic protein receptor 2 gene, then he will probably develop pulmonary hypertension.”
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Bermejo-Luque, L. (2011). The Logical Dimension of Argumentation. In: Giving Reasons. Argumentation Library, vol 20. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1761-9_4
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