The Parts of Public Thinking; Deductive Argument Here is Shakespeare's Macbeth. After first being told by three witches that he will become both thane of Cawdor (a title equivalent to earl) and king of Scotland, Macteth discovers that he has in fact been made thane of Cawdor. He muses to himself, This supernatural soliciting ‘annos be il; cannot be good: if ill ‘Why hath it given me earnest of success Commencing, in a truth? Lam thane of Cawdor If good, why do I yield to that suggestion Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair ‘And make my seated heart knock at my ribs, Against the use of nature? (Macbeth 1, ii, 130-37) Or, as one might say less elegantly but more accessibly: “Is this prediction by the witches good or evil? I can’ decide. If it’ evil, why has it foretold successes that have already started to appeas, ike my. becoming thane of Cawdor? If is good, why does it already have me thinking about murdering the king so I can take his place, even though the thought disturbs me deeply? I just don't know what to make of i all.” Macbeth in this passage is doing what we all do from time to time: taking a tangled collection of thoughts that weigh for and against some idea, and trying to lay them ‘out in a coherent and easily surveyed form. He's doing i by talking to himself, a practice unjustly frowned upon in some circles as a sign of being either slightly crazy or a professor. But every time you write something down for the purpose of making a problem clearer, in solving an arithmetic problem, for example, or sketching the outline of an essay, you are talking to yourself in more or less the same way. You are figuring out what its rea- sonable to say, what it’s reasonable to think, by putting your best reasons out where they can be seen and marshalling them into a form that clearly shows what follows from what.FIGURE 1.1 Rational Sli Ups Are Easy in Some Cognitive Terrain Careful habits in thinking and reasoning are the cognitive equiva lent of walking carefully when you know you are ‘crossing a stream with tricky step= ping stones. You need to pay atten- tion to avoid the hazards and reach a successful conclusion. Like many endeavours, this is much easier to do badly than well. For example, those of us lucky enough to be able to walk had to learn how to do it at some point, though we rarely remember the process. Walking is actually a difficult and fragile series of controlled falls from one foot to the other, and for a toddler just getting the hang of it, there's no shortage of ways it can all end in tears. But we ‘manage to make a habit of it, eventually. We even adapt to difficult walking con- ditions—gravel, ice, cow pastures, stepping stones—by slowing down and moving more gingerly. When we're walking, we automatically recognize circumstances that call for greater care. Reasoning t00 is easy to do badly and hard to do well. Unlike walking, we tend not to get much better at it when we are just left to our own devices. When it comes to skating or walking or aerial gymnastics, i's obvious if you're systematically doing it badly: if you wake up in the hospital, something has gone wrong. The same is not always true of critical thinking. There are many, many ways that errors in reasoning. can be reinterpreted, overlooked, or rationalized away. So we tend not to be very effective at spontaneously minimizing our ways of reasoning poorly. It takes some special effort to gradually acquire the habit of pulling off those fragile manoeuvres called “good reasoning,” or the closely related habit of automatically slowing down and being more careful when you encounter the rational equivalent of a cow pas ture or slippery stones. To acquire these habits is to become a more critical thinker. And a first step in. this process is learning how to think clearly about thinking itself. That's where we are starting. This chapter introduces some basic concepts by which reasoning can be categorized and evaluated, and its various roles clarified, We'll begin by reflecting| pl, Present ting on bic dil, asMackth di dhough he me Presnaton ofthe fundamental ui of reasoning he eer an The alte enceps lating to eens th we wll onder ig re sone vale some fly power ideaenons: kere they teat we noe along Te MEY were sharin away thar wil Bea on arene making as some of he ineps mon cna to ana a ‘Why wing formal og ns Mah YO might ak, when the point of te Cock oe en? iad remy BU take the Bartines of the word seriously ek idesticing it away? en roe sso Fes the elie concep ae simple and ear et os peopel ea complete mat nee Sod ins of toes a ‘sue fa sire alse in accordance withthe mere idealized conte ae ea searing mm nowidea se ele arprosch arguments enabler isto undecen nk ing Chea mets (he such more to be encom) ha on work tonsa heal One we eh ase canny, HO me lamig heme See approach a sometime carb es fs hi caming how to fctor nad ake sro thesbetes wad of reasoning. wn aman th sche the, wl be on deduce ape = the rl deat 2: logy sigh or are intnded obese he corn iu concen in place, we an hen move sae wh ay common, comple, and sbvearguens inthe follow donc ve ings HAVING REASONS Ap,oterarching goal we all share, presumably, is to hold reasonable beliefs. Bur Iuhat sito lieve something fora good reason? On the ye hand, Tava eens. Having reasons for such bei is clearly tually thinking about either the reasons or the Beis har’ ough that we could, if necessary, call such reasons en For many such beliefs, no such need will ever ance J important hat we could provide them if the need arose, though. From time ‘Orin: a Beit that seems basic and ssighforward to some pele ao our SMAITER The Parts of Public Thinking: Deductve Argumentotto be shared by others Sometimes this may not be worth bothering about Wet ems obvious to me that potatoes with gravy taste etter than Pin boiled si cif you diagre, thats no problem. fat, you can have my tere) Cora ey circumstances, twill be important to find out whether one (oF aa pc coping claims is a geuine mistake. The way 0 pursue an ane aon co cupres thei easos or thei beliefs, For the purposes of seting dis tires, comparing explanations and teaching new information, Becomes essential that we are able to make our reasoning public: SERTIONS AND ARGUMENTS The most basic kind of communication foreach ofthese purposes i the pracy of Presenting statements a cue, Typically the pont of saying someshing We think is Pr ye other people also accept that is rue. Or even if they don't apres =f tra seta and enlightening to have thei disagreement explained, vo we C2” a ege they part ways with what's been sid. To present some claim as were see ere gasent it, Whether in classroom, in the workplace, in social environ re ahrough the media, a great deal of ur communicative exchanges ons rer elions as we go about telling one another che facts as we see them. 18 28 a to hens to invade Sil during the Peloponnesian Wat.” think thas ‘rues and I'd be fairy pleased for you to think so as wel ‘Tring nsertions were the ull extent of such communications ehough, ther woul hoch point oi all we did in such contexts was to declare this. of at ed hon you'd say your pice, and V'd say mine. And if we disagreed? "Noy wooed op it was perfectly good idea for Athens to invade Sty” Then ane na co repeat my assertion, and we'd both jst Keep repeating ures “until we got bored or hungry. Ot cross there s much more tot. To asert i among ater things fo under ake Kind of obligation: the obligation to defen or retract the assertion in he fore i gucationing or when confronted with evidence othe contary. Fos this rasan the Cantera units of rational exchange are not assertions, but arguments Ma urgument” is often used to mean a disagreement or even fish ee had am argument,” one might say, without meaning to suggest that any ine enietary involving reasonableness or crioality took place, But sere i 26) acer natural sense of the word that means the presentation of reasors snr cense that we're refining forthe purposes of explaining and analyzing rae Nrkigg: An argument, we wl ay is ast of statements shat are presented 8 aa eee have a very important incenal relation: some ofthe statements 2° ‘Gemises, which are imended ro provide atonal suppor for (and ideal 0 estab aires ah of) afrther statement, the conclusion, An arguments premises vet in support of a conclusion. pe sroperty of an argument that succeeds in supporting its concTusion soundness, Srictly speaking, a sound argument proves tha its conclusion i 8 saeemoperry can be broken down into two sub-properties of the argument: fs ra eeore and second that has al tue premises. Like the team argument va and and “valia” have ordinary uses that can vary widely Below we wil cuavren The Parts of Public Thinking: Deductive Argument es WHAIdefine them in more specialized ways that let us speak precisely about the virtues and failings of argument. The overall picture, then is that assertions rest on arguments that support them, uscally implicitly, but that could be made explicic if necessasy. I's somemhat ancien {gous toa simple currency system, in which people exchange papet money instead ol of goods because they're confident they can swap the paper for the goods when they need to, The idea of the gold or the goods, available if requested, underwrite, theexchange of paper money and coins; the idea of reasoning and arguments, eval able if requested, underwrrtes the exchange of assertions. Speakers ae not normally taken co be making wild guesses when they assert. The idea is that a speaker has an argament tucked in her pocket that can be pulled out if necessary; she could produce atleast ehe bare bones of reasons that supported her assertion. Moreover, just as we saw with Macbeth and his dilemma, its important to understand that one of the people who might be informed and affected by some ‘tgument you produce in support of an assertion is you. One of the central chemes ofthis book is that critical thinking begins at home, that its immediate application is in understanding how your own reasoning succeeds and fails. Quite apart from the effects of your argument on others, you may change your own mind in various ‘ways by going through the process of mounting an argumen:. You might convince yourself of something altogether new, or you might strengthen ot weaken some epinion you'd already held. You might even convince yourself that one of your beliefs should be rejected, The process of making reasons public is not just about Persuading other people. I's also about evaluating ones own reasoning by putting ‘tin the clearest and most explicit form possible. The image ofthe argument tucked in your pocket is doubly appropriate, given how hard it cam be to precisely identify the jumbled contents of your own pockets: che best way of deciding whats really in there isto pull it all out into the open and get a cleat look ae it WHAT MAKES AN ARGUMENT (GOOD)? ‘There are at least ewo ways of approaching the study of arguments and arguing. Eack approach carries with ita distin conception of how arguments succeed and fail. We will make use of both notions of argument, which ae closely related and normally travel together. Definition 1: Argumentation is a rational practice. This approach to arguments stresses the fact that arguing is @ process, one that ‘occurs in a communicative context. Argumentation is a practice by which we aim to show the reasonableness of an assertion, up to whatever standard of reasonable. ness is called for in that context. (Or, in failing to do 50, to learn that the assertion was not ax well founded as it had first appeared.) Presenting an argument is a way of making good on the obligation to support an assertion, ard there areas many different practical aims of argument, in this sense, as there can be reasons for ‘making an assertion, An argument can be a means of education or of explanation, ‘CHAPTER 1 The Parts of Public Thinking: Deductive ArgumentIt can be a way of rationalizing or ordering reasons, and it can be a way of explic- itly weighing competing reasons against each other. In each of these roles, though, 4 good argument is the presentation of a collection of premises that jointly are rationally persuasive of a conclusion, Taken together, the premises make it reason able to bekeve the conclusion. Definition 2: Arguments are linguistic or logical objects. It can also be very illuminating to think of an argument just as a set of sentences or propositions, factoring out considerations about the speaker the audience, the con text,and te broader goal of giving the argument. Are these sentences true, and do they jointly imply this conclusion? This way of asking whether the argument isa good one just sets as de worries like whether an audience will ind the premises reasonable, wor- ties that can be viewed as merely practical complications that arise when speakers use the argument. In other words, 2 good argument in ths sense can be defined in terms of the teuth ofthe premises and their logical relation to the conclusion, without any allusion to speakers or heaters or context. I is inthis sense that a good argument is defined assound. This means, frst, tha itis valid its premises are relevant to its com y philosophers today. Partly this is because it’s difficult to spell our just what kins of talk are and are not beyond the ‘categories of truth and falsity. If we think ofa satement’s truth as consisting in some arrangement of physical things, for instance, on the model of the cat's being on the mat, then certainly i's difficult co think of some straightforward eruth condition for the statement that something immoral has occurred, But it is equally hard to vis alize just what arrangement of physical chings would suffice to make true various ‘other kinds of statement that may seem less contentious than the moral or aesthetic cases. What are the truth conditions for the claim that monetary inflation has cccurred, for example? That there are now more ways than ever of proving some theorem? That celebrity isa fetish within the mainstream media? In each case we ‘might answer the question by appeal to other concepts inherent to the relevant field—economics, logic, sociology-—but so t00in the moral case might we appeal to justice, fairness, rights, and so forth. Tracing the important differences between (CHAPTER 1 The Parts of Public Thinking: Deductive Argument ”ANOTHER EXAMpig J The Dog Walking Ordinance! lie Doo Walking OSU era ae a ae ‘The folowing repute transcript ofa borough coun meeting in England ilustiates the potenta dficuy Of finding precise and unambiguous language to express something that seems like a simple ides, Councilor Taford took exception to the proposed notice a the entrance of South Park: “No dogs must be brought to this Park except on a lead.” He pointed ‘out that this oer would not prevent an owner from releasing his pets, or pet, fom a lead when once satel inside the Pat The Chairman (Colonel Vine): What alternative wording would you propose, Councilor? Councilor Trafford: “Dogs ae not allowed in ths Park without leads.” ‘Counclor Hoge Mr. Chairman, Lobjet. The order shoul be adresse tothe owners, pot to the dogs. ‘Councilor Trafford: Thats a rice point. Very well then: "Overs of dogs are not alowed in this Park unless they keep them on leads." (Councilor Hogg: Mr. Charman, object. Sicty speaking, this would prevent me 2s a dog-owner from leaving my doq in the back-garden at home and ‘walang with Mrs, Hogg across the Park. Councilor Traffo: Me. Chatman, | suggest that ‘our legalistic fiend be asked to redraft the notice ase. Councilor Hogg: Mr. Chairman, since Counclor Trafford fins it 0 ditficut to improve on my otginal ‘wording, accept. “Nobody without his dog on a lead is alowed inthis Fark.” Councilor Trafford: Mr. Chairman, | object. Strictly speaking, this notice woul prevent me, 25 2 citizen, whe owns 90 deg, from walking inthe Parc without fist acquiring one Councilor Hogg (with some warmth): Very simply, then: "Dogs must be led in this Pak.” Councilor Tafford: Mt. Chaieman, | object: tis reads a iit were a general injunction tothe Borough to lea their dogs into the Park ‘Councilor Hogg interposed a remark for which he was ealed to order; upon his withdrawing i, it was directed to be expunged from the Minutes, The Chairman: Councilor Trafford, Councilor Hogg has had three tries; you have had only two. ‘Counciey Tafford: All dogs must be kept on leads in his Park The Charman: | see Counelor Hogg rising quite fighty to rise another objection. May | anticipate him with another amendrnent “All dogs in this Park ‘must be kent onthe lead.” This draft was put to the vote and carried unani- ‘moush, with two abstentions Ee value-theoretic discourse like aesthetics or morality and other discourses is a subtle matter; in the absence of such subtlety itis unwarranted to dismiss moral and ethical claims as meaningless, or as lacking truth values. For our purposes i is safest to treat moral discourse as differing from other dis courses, notin being tion factual where they are factual, but in being less apt ro gen- tral agreement on fundamental assumptions. Statements about morality, humour, ttiquette, aesthetics, and other matters with some significant degree of subjectivity tan be perfectly acceptable as premises in an argument, provided the interlocutors share the relevant assumptions. If at fist they do not, then discussion may bring hem around to agreement; otherwise, however, it may be dificult fr them to have | meaningful exchange. But then, this much is true whenever fundamental assump- tions are not shared, no matter what their topic. ° 2 (CHAPTER The Parts of Public Thinking: Deductive Argument me‘This is not co say there are no lasting philosophical issues regarding the alleged contrast between subjective and objective statements or disciplines. 1 am, however, counselling thar we treat the distinction (whatever it amounts to) as inrelevant, focusing instead on the mote general communicative problem of set- ting on ‘premises acceptable to those involved in a discussion. Labels like “objective” and “subjective” can easily do more harm than good, leading us to polarize the categories under discussion, se that we take the terms deemed objec: five to be immune to conceptual criticism while lumping the subjective issues in with matters of whim or fleeting conventions. While many writers over the past few decades have claimed chat objectivity isn’t all's cracked up to be, an equally important observation is that strictly subjective ways of speaking—ones that implicate human responses or judgments in theie truth-conditions—are also much more robust than a simplistic conception would have it. Judgments about colour, for example, are in some sense subjective, But if “Hurting the innocent is wrong” ‘were no worse off truth-wise than “The sky is blue,” there would be no obvious general reason to worry about arguments involving allegedly subjective moral People considering the following argument, for example, might agree on the first (non-moral) premise but disagree over ‘he second (morally loaded) premise. Mixed moral and non-moral premises in argument 1. If we allow inflation to rise, then the shoe manufacturers will lose thei jobs 2. It would be unjust for the shoe manufacturers to lose thei jobs ‘Therefore, 3. If we allow inflation to ise, then something unjust will occur. Bat then, they might just as easily disagree over the truth of the first premise while all accepting the second. Either way, the argument appears valid, and it seems entirely reasonable for someone defending the argument to offer reasoning in sup. port of either disputed premise, So we end up treating value-theoretic statements ‘much the same way we treat statements more generally: as open to disagreement, but effective in argument provided they are acceptable to all discussant, Reasoning about values is discussed in more detail in Chapter 3. CONCLUSION For the most part we want to believe reasonable things and to communicate our beliefs in a way that makes their reasonableness clear Arguments are the basic units ‘of these processes. The clearest and most idealized conception of argumentation is that of deductive argument, according to which a good argument is a sound one— fan argument that is valid and has all true essential premises. An argument is valid just in case there is no way for its premises to be true and its conclusion false; the {dea is that ifthe premises are true, they prove the conclusion. To say thatthe prem ises are tue is to say that they describe the world accurately, or that they are laid down as commonly accepted definitions. Premises can be treated as true for CHAPTER |The Parts of Public Thinking: Deductive Argument 3argumentative purposes when they are jointly acceptable ro both the speaker and dence. If they are not accepted by the audience then, whether oF not the prem ises are true, farther argument in support of them may be requied as a practical measure for the argument to be rationally persuasive. The tuth values of compound premises and conclusions are determined by the truth values oftheir subsentences tnd vary according to the way those subsentences are connected. Validity and Ssoundnes are technically all-or nothing threshold concepts, though we will see how this deacon ius iy ouly approximated to some degree in actual argumentation REVIEW QUESTIONS 1. For every valid argument form listed in chis chapte example, 2. Explain the concepts of linked, convergent, and sequential arguments. Which is the most fundamental kind, and why? 3, Read through recent national or local newspapers to find examples of ambiguous negation. For each example, explain the diferent possible inter- pretations of what is being denied. struct your own NOTES 1. From R. Graves and A. Hodge, The Reader Over Your Shoulder (New York: ‘Maca, 1943). Reine tu E Nugch "Syrulc Nowaton, Haddocks! Eyes and the Dog-walking Ordinance,” in The World of Mathematics, Vo. ed J. Newnan, 1890-91 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956) 34 (CHAPTER |The Parts of Public Thinking: Deductive Argument ne