25
2
Appraising
Argumentation
CHAPTER
KEY TERMS
criteria, p. 25
critical decision, p. 26
reasonable, p. 26
belief system, p. 27
worldviews, p. 28
starting points, p. 32
interpretation strategies, p. 32
facts, p. 33
presumption, p. 33
probabilities, p. 34
commonplaces, p. 35
When you interview for a job, you and the interviewer are engaged in reasoned
argumentation. The position announcement should set the broad criteria that
will be used to judge your application, and the interview will flesh them out.
Here is a position announcement:
We are looking for an administrator in our downtown office. This person will sup-
port our Information Technology consulting services operations for our national clients.
In return, you can expect the following:
■ Join a stable, fast growing technology company
■ To be treated with respect and make a contribution to our growth and success
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26 PART 1 Principles
When you go to the interview, they could well ask, “Why should we hire you?” This
is an invitation for you to present arguments on your behalf, complementing those in your
application. What will be the strongest arguments you can make? At this stage, your best
bet is to follow the criteria set out in the job announcement and argue this way:
FIGURE 2.1
Arguments Based on Criteria
ULTIMATE PURPOSE : TO BE HIRED BY THIS COMPANY
PROPOSITION : I have the ability to be an excellent employee.
CLAIM #1: I have excellent MS Office and solid Excel and PowerPoint skills, and
I have a general understanding of IT terminologies and technologies.
SUPPORT : My transcript shows courses in these areas;
If you can convince the interviewers of each of these points, and if they truly are the cri-
teria being used to make this decision, it would be reasonable for them to hire you. It would
be a critical decision . Of course, they could interview five people, all of whom meet these
criteria. It would be reasonable to hire any one of them. So, a critical decision does not mean
resolution of uncertainty. It does not necessarily mean finding the one correct decision. It
means selecting and applying a set of criteria designed to generate the best possible decision.
What will probably happen is this: During the interview, the employer will refine the
criteria as you develop your arguments. They will try to make value judgments about the
quality of your credentials compared to other applicants, and, before making a hiring
decision, they will probably discuss the applicant pool with other colleagues to add their
particular criteria.
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CHAPTER 2 Appraising Argumentation 27
ARGUMENTATION AND BEING REASONABLE
Critical appraisal of argumentation applies to you in two interacting ways: (1) When you
present an argument, the better you understand the way it will be evaluated, the stronger
you can make it; (2) When you evaluate an argument, the better you understand the
Why People Advance Unreasonable Arguments
Unreasonable arguments cannot stand up to critical appraisal. Often, the sphere defines
what counts as an unreasonable argument. For example, in hiring decisions, laws specify
that the company may not use criteria based on age, gender, religion, race, national ori-
Beliefs Are Not Necessarily Reasonable
The Wizard’s First Rule tells us, “Given proper motivations, almost anyone will believe al-
most anything.... They will believe a lie because they want to believe it’s true, or because
they are afraid it might be true” (Goodkind 560). Even when no one actually believes
something, if no one can disprove it, then “a lie unchallenged is very soon stronger than a
truth unsupported” (Hill 238). Novelist and law professor Stephen L. Carter puts it this
Patrick Colm Hogan reports a variety of studies showing that beliefs operating in
systems are behind a good deal of our tendency to conform to political and ideologi-
cal positions even when the beliefs are quite untrue or at least without clear support
(58–86). People develop fundamental beliefs during childhood that continue to influence
their decisions throughout life. “They distort people’s perceptions and even their memo-
ries, reforming individuals’ experience in their image. For many years, cognitive scien-
tists have been aware of a broad human tendency to reinterpret experience in conformity
with basic beliefs ” (74).
Glenn D. Walters argues that criminal behavior can be best understood by examining
the development of individuals’ belief systems. He defines a belief system as a “group of
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28 PART 1 Principles
Your beliefs function, as these authors suggest, in belief systems that we will call
worldviews . It is from your worldviews that you experience stereotypes, prejudices, norms,
folkways, language, and culture. Worldviews are neither inherently reasonable nor unrea-
sonable. They enable you to make it through life more comfortably. Having a common
Thinking Is Not Necessarily Reasonable
More than a half-century of psychological research supports the claim that people use a
variety of biases and heuristics (shortcuts in thinking) to guide their decision making in
ways that depart from what rational theory would predict (Gilovich and Griffin 4–16).
For example, thinking may be guided by facts that happen to be readily available or easy
to access rather than those most significant to supporting your point. For example, when
you do an Internet search to prepare a research paper, you may be confronted with thou-
sands of items. Do you evaluate all the hits and make sure you are using only the most
A study of juror decision making found that jurors’ race, the interpretation of the pre-
sumption of innocence, and the amount of evidence they were expected to consider had
the “potential to decisively alter the outcome of critical judgments” (Tamborini et al. 354).
Researcher Ron Tamborini and his associates observed that people can approach decision
making from two forms of cognitive processing: systematic processing (what we describe
FIGURE 2.2
[We were once told by a clerk of courts that he and his judge could tell just by
looking whether the defendant was guilty or not. He thought it a special gift
they had.]
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CHAPTER 2 Appraising Argumentation 29
The point is that while people are capable of systematic processing, the use of heu-
ristic processing is easier and thus quite likely to be employed when motivation is low
(Gilovich & Griffin 16).
The Mind Is Not Necessarily Reasonable
Ever since Plato assumed a separation of mind and body, and Aristotle proclaimed human
beings to be rational animals, scholars have operated on the assumption that our mind
functions in an inherently logical way. Aristotle’s rhetorical system is premised on the
assumption that people are able to find truth, even when it is mixed in with a great deal
of nonsense, because they have a rational capacity. To this day, some logicians, linguists,
psycholinguists, and cognitive psychologists continue to claim that the human mind
operates according to formal logical rules or probabilities (Braine and O’Brien; Oaksford
and Chater).
Gerald M. Edelman, director of the Neurosciences Institute and chair of the
Department of Neurobiology at the Scripps Research Institute, agrees. He reports that
people are physiological and social beings capable of thinking and feeling, but there is no
evidence of a rationality of mind that can be separated from our totality as human beings.
Research is now able to “observe” the mind at work through various imaging tech-
nologies, and the results are discouraging. It appears as if when you need to make a deci-
sion, you receive inputs from different parts of your brain and nervous system ranging
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30 PART 1 Principles
could well cause you to make the wrong decision: a possible explanation of the Kennedy
crash (Lehrer 217).
Social Influence Is Not Necessarily Reasonable
Solomon Asch reports experiments in which he asked people to judge the length of one
line compared to a series of other lines. He adjusted the task until people judging alone
made almost no errors. He then selected four experimenters who were instructed to an-
nounce an incorrect answer and put them with a series of naive subjects who did not
know the experimenters were being intentionally incorrect. One by one, the experiment-
ers would announce an incorrect choice, and then the naive subject was asked to respond.
Imagine the social pressure this placed on the naive subjects. They had just heard four ap-
parently honest people give answers that seemed obviously wrong. In the research, about
a third of the naive subjects chose to give the same incorrect answer rather than disagree
with the others.
The emergence of social media has demonstrated the power and danger in social
influence. The rise of movements overthrowing autocratic leaders in the Arab world in
2011, according to some observers, could be traced to the availability of more widespread
interaction than had been possible earlier. People could share experiences, learn of inequi-
ties, and discover social support that gave them the courage to revolt. By the same token,
Characteristics of Reasonable Arguments
So, what makes one argument more reasonable than another? From the examples we
have given, you can see that arguments derive their force either from the criteria already
in people’s minds, or from criteria that emerge in their minds during an argument.
When your arguments—claims and support—square directly with the criteria in the
minds of the decision makers, the arguments will draw power from those criteria and
thus be more influential. In contrast to past philosophical thought, arguments are not
necessarily more powerful by virtue of their internal logical validity or by passing some
scientific test. As we will explain in Chapter 4 , concepts of logical validity and scientific
significance, when they are part of the criteria decision makers apply, will support the rea-
sonableness of your arguments. But you cannot count on this process always happening.
If arguments are tested by criteria in the minds of decision makers, how does argu-
mentation differ from persuasion in general? What makes argumentation different from
what we see on TV, read on billboards, or hear from some fast-talking salesperson? The
answer is, first, that argumentation is a relatively distinct dimension of persuasion that
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CHAPTER 2 Appraising Argumentation 31
includes many of the strategies found in ordinary advertising or political campaigning
(Willbrand and Rieke, “Reason Giving” 57).
Second, argumentation is a distinct dimension of persuasion, in that people tend to
use it when they want to make wise decisions, and the strategies used in argumentation
tend to be different from other forms of persuasion. Arguments employ more of the forms
of criteria that we discuss in Chapter 4 than do common persuasive messages, and argu-
mentation occurs within spheres that demand such criteria, as we discussed in Chapter 1
Argumentation serves as the process through which people seek to enhance the posi-
tive contributions of their personal reality while holding in abeyance its unreasonable
tendencies. Argumentation is the process through which people take advantage of the
positive influences in their society and culture while holding in abeyance the perilous
Why People Seek Reasonable Arguments
The ultimate purpose of argumentation is to make the best possible decisions, where best
is defined in various ways. At a basic level, best means to be able to state a basis for
decision that satisfies the expectations and demands of the appropriate decision mak-
ers. When the decision is important enough to do more than trust chance (flip of a coin)
or the of undefined influences of beliefs, thinking, mind, or society, best means to do
the systematic processing or analytic thinking demanded by the sphere: to be able to as-
sure the decision makers that they can rely on your arguments at the highest level and
thereby produce a decision at the highest level. Another meaning of best is a pragmatic
one: decisions that work or do what the sphere seeks to have done: to fulfill the ultimate
Our ability to go beyond the algorithms—to achieve understanding, to appreciate meaning,
to imagine, to consciously deliberate, to reason through boundless problems, and to act as
free agents—is what separates us from lower animals, from computers, and from all other
machines. It is what makes us human (179).
32 PART 1 Principles
THE BASES OF REASON IN ARGUMENTATION
Argumentation is the product of centuries of evolution in social practices aimed at re-
solving or creating uncertainty. We try to resolve uncertainty by making wise decisions
that cannot be held absolutely, and we create uncertainty by raising doubts about ideas
Starting Points for Argumentation
Argumentation works by connecting understandings people possess with claims to which
they are being asked to grant adherence. If they grant adherence to those claims, then
the newly accepted claims can be used as the connectors to still other claims, leading
finally to a decision. The energy or power that drives argumentation is found in peo-
ple: that which they believe provides the foundation for that which they are asked to
Language Interpretation Strategies. The most fundamental starting point is language
and shared interpretation strategies . English is widely spoken in India because of the many
years of British rule, and English is spoken in the United States for the same reason, but
such sharing of a common language does not guarantee sufficient commonality for argu-
mentation. With the development of calling centers in India, training sessions in speaking
U.S. English are being conducted in India. The interactants will need to negotiate some
common strategies for interpreting their common language before critical argumentation
can occur.
Language is commonly referred to as human symbolic activity. The symbols that
make up language are arbitrarily assigned meaning when people interpret them as part of
interaction. You have meanings in mind when you speak or write, but they are based on
Facts. In the discussion of analysis in Chapter 5 , we observe that facts can become issues,
questions around which controversy occurs. However, as starting points of argumentation,
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CHAPTER 2 Appraising Argumentation 33
facts are empirical knowledge (see, taste, touch, hear, smell) derived from observation
or experience over which there is no controversy.
1 The morning sun appears in the east.
Caviar costs more than chopped liver. Mothers who abuse drugs during pregnancy endan-
ger the health of their babies. These are facts that could very well be the starting points of
arguments because the decision makers regard them as facts beyond question.
Think back to that Internet search when writing a paper. The sequence in which items
appear in the search has nothing to do with the quality of the facts they allege. On the
contrary, they may reflect what someone is willing to pay the search engine to put first.
The Internet is a sea of garbage with occasional gems of value floating here and there.
Special interests will do their best to have you accept what they say as fact. Even friends
can forward messages with strange claims of fact that have been passed along without
fact checking. People use techniques such as stating facts without justification, using spu-
rious examples, or graphics such as this:
FACT : Eating asparagus can cure cancer.
Or they can beg the question (a fallacy, see Chapter 11 , that assumes as fact that which
has not yet been accepted as fact):
DID YOU KNOW that eating asparagus can cure cancer? It’s true!
The Internet is filled with efforts to have you accept what they say as fact. When you ac-
cept their word without doing your own testing, your arguments may be rejected when
others, who have done their homework, show you to be wrong.
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34 PART 1 Principles
overturned. In fact, people may start with a presumption they really do not believe, just
to get the argumentation going. Without a presumption to work from (say, the presump-
tion of innocence), they would not know who has to start the argument and who wins in
the absence of clear superiority of one argument over another. The U.S. criminal law pre-
Part of understanding the reasonableness of argumentation is examination of pre-
sumptions. Because presumption is more or less arbitrary, it is possible for one position
in the discussion to claim presumption and use it as a tool to force others to defend their
position. In a university class on argumentation, a student said, “There has never been
Probabilities. As starting points of argument, probabilities consist of commonly held be-
liefs about what is likely to happen, what is ordinary, and what is to be expected. Such
beliefs can be used as premises for arguments. After extensive observations, we hold pow-
erful concepts of such probabilities as the times of the tides, the movements of the planets,
the changing of the seasons, or the behavior of matter under various conditions. We reason
from biological probabilities such as what plants will survive in certain climates, how ani-
Like presumptions, probabilities vary from one sphere to another. Many hold the
probability that human beings will seek to avoid death, but some spheres hold that death
in a holy cause is desirable.
Where presumptions may be points that are taken for the sake of argument without
solid proof of their validity, probabilities get arguments started because they are likely
Stephen Toulmin says that when people qualify claims, they “authorize ... hear-
ers to put more or less faith in the assertions ... treat them as correspondingly more or
less trustworthy” ( The Uses of Argument 91). Because argument functions within uncer-
tainty, there is always some degree of qualification on claims. Sometimes you use words:
likely, almost certainly, probably, maybe. Sometimes you use numbers: 90% chance, p < .05,
three to one odds. No matter how you express these probabilities, they communicate the
force with which an argument is advanced, the degree of faith you authorize others to
place on your claims.
The reasonableness of arguments, then, necessarily involves an examination of the
probabilities on which they rest and the qualifications with which they are presented. A
point of criticism is to ask the basis of the probability statement.
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CHAPTER 2 Appraising Argumentation 35
In deciding what and how much higher education you need, you may turn to statis-
tics that indicate probabilities about what kinds of majors will be most in demand when
you graduate and what value advanced degrees may produce. The U.S. Bureau of Labor
Statistics projects that between 2008 and 2018, the careers most likely to increase, pro-
duce a high salary (ranging from $70,000 to $85,000), and require a bachelor’s degree
include biomedical engineers, network systems and data communication analysts, finan-
cial examiners, and computer software engineers. In the same time, a similar increase will
Commonplaces. In argumentative practice, various ways of putting arguments together
become standardized, common, widely recognized, and accepted. These commonplaces
are lines of argument or places from which arguments can be built. Aristotle spoke of
logic in the form of induction or generalization: reasoning from specific instances to a
generalization; or deduction (syllogisms or enthymemes): reasoning from a generalization
The reasonableness of arguments is measured, in part, by the commonplaces on
which they are developed. For centuries, logic was considered the prime example of how
to put an argument together, but today we see that logic has a limited application in ac-
tual argumentation. We have mentioned the commonplace of opposites as an example. If
one argues from this commonplace, the critic must test the assumption of opposition. Up
and down do not work the same in the weightlessness of space, of which Aristotle never
heard, and in the war on terror, for example, countries such as Pakistan seemed to be
both with us and against us.
A fortiori (more or less) argues, for example, that if you can perform the more dif-
ficult task, you can surely perform the easier one. Or, conversely, if you can’t do an easy
task, you won’t be able to do a more difficult one. The argument “If we can put a man
on the moon, we should be able to solve the hunger problem” rests on the commonplace
of a fortiori. So does this one: If you cannot pass the introductory course, you surely will
flunk the advanced one.
Considerations of time work as commonplaces. Professionals charge fees based on
the time spent for a client or patient. Most wages are calculated on time. Forty hours is
36 PART 1 Principles
deemed enough work for a week, and any more deserves better pay. Students argue for a
better grade on the basis of how much time was spent on an assignment. We presume that
a person can’t be in two places at the same time; so, the accused may argue an alibi based
on the time to go from point A to point B. Commonplaces vary from sphere to sphere.
For example, the commonplace of cause and effect is interpreted in quite different ways
within different spheres.
CONCLUSION
When you evaluate the reasonableness of argumentation, when you try to decide what ar-
guments are acceptable, what ones are not, and what decision makes the most sense, you
will necessarily make your judgments under the influence and within the limits of your
genetic make-up, the environments in which you have lived, your worldviews, and the
social interactions you have experienced. Sometimes these factors will help you act wisely,
and sometimes they will get you into trouble.
EXERCISES/PROJECTS
1. Write a description of a job interview you have had. Did you understand the criteria to be used
in making a hiring decision? Did you make arguments in response to the criteria? Did the job
decision rest on the criteria? In all, do you think the decision was critical or uncritical, and
why?
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