Making Arguments: Reason in Context

Preface

First things first. Yes, we are related. We’re brothers separated by a decade, but with a common love for rhetoric, argument, and jazz. And we both have advanced degrees in speech (rhetorical theory and argumentation). Between us we represent well over half a century of teaching people to make arguments—in speeches, debates, essays, proposals, and deliberative assemblies. From boardroom to classroom, we have experienced argument not only in a variety of settings, but also in a variety of forms. And based on this long and varied experience, we thought it was time to share what we have learned about arguments—designing them, strengthening them, making them, evaluating them, and, yes, winning them.

We entered this project knowing that there is already a library of books about argument. After all, argument was codified as a formal study in ancient Greece. It is even possible that the study of making arguments is the oldest formalized educational subject in Western Civilization. Originally simply called rhetoric, this branch of learning is now covered within many academic disciplines, including (informal) logic, critical thinking, philosophy, English composition and writing, public speaking, journalism, law, business communication, debate, and argumentation. Almost every discipline or profession includes the ability to argue convincingly within its repertoire of skills.

So what can we say about argument that has not already been said? Let’s examine, first, how argument is usually taught. Nearly all argumentation courses and textbooks tilt toward one of two extremes:

• Critical thinking/informal logic , in which the laws of reasoning are universal and not affected by audience or context

• Public speaking , in which adaptation to the audience and winning assent trumps logic and reasoning

At the first extreme are texts that stress flaws in arguments and how to discern them. Their focus tends to be on the logic (making deductive inferences and avoiding deductive mistakes or other errors of inference) and/or the recognition of fallacies (deficient or fake arguments). They also deal with the messy ambiguities of language. Generally, this approach omits the concept of an audience. And it does not explain how spotting the flaws in argumentative reasoning, or improving one’s reasoning, translates into the ability to make an effective argument. Further, it is not clear how to address audiences whose grasp of logic is shaky.

At the other extreme are books (especially public speaking textbooks) that err in the opposite direction. They are fixated on audience. As a result, their advice about how to argue is grounded in audience adaptation. In fact, the process of reasoning is nearly subordinated to such secondary considerations as style, delivery, and organization. And again, the connection between critical thinking/logic and audience is rarely examined.

In addition, there are other courses/texts that single out a particular argumentative facility, one thread in the weave:

• Many texts on writing have a rhetorical focus, where the skills of English composition are extended beyond formal style and organization to a consideration of writing with an audience in mind.

• Some textbooks on debate are, at their essence, bound by the rules and formats for an idiosyncratic way of arguing, the arbitrary rules for academic debates.

• A smattering of books considers argument as an entirely social process, and concentrate on the skills of listening, empathy, and leadership.

• Many small-group communication texts view argument as a process that needs controls placed on it, rules meant to prevent manipulation and intellectual dishonesty during discussions.

Don’t get us wrong. We believe that there are many fine methods for teaching and learning argument. We ourselves learned argument through those traditional means. But we wish to advance a newer understanding based on our reading of contemporary sources: to go beyond schema that can become nothing more than abstract formulas. Indeed, on the one hand, Aristotle already said most of what critical thinking texts say today about argument. And, on the other, ancient sophists and rhetoricians enunciated most of what audience-centered texts say.

In particular, we want to answer some questions that are seldom addressed in print. In particular,

• What is the starting point for augmentation? When do we even need to argue?

• When should one embrace, and when should one avoid, arguing?

• Why does the same argument work in one place and fail in another?

• Are most audiences capable of understanding a complex argument?

• With what authority can one make an argument—absent expertise in the field in which the argument takes place?

• Are there substantive differences between oral and written argument?

• What does it mean to present an argument?

• Can someone control the argumentative situation/context to the benefit of his/her position?

• How can argument educate and improve the arguer?

• Can we learn the truth by arguing?

In Making Arguments, we propose to consider argument at the nexus of invention and judgment, the two endpoints from which logic and public speaking examine argumentation, respectively. By looking at the stuff that comes between an argument’s design and its delivery, we hope to enrich the understanding and the study of argument, as both a theoretical and applied discipline.

If we consider the whole process of argumentation as a series of concatenated intellectual decisions involving how arguments are created, ordered, rendered, and produced—with judgment as the over-arching concern—we can completely re-invigorate the process of how argument is studied and learned. We can view organizing and stylizing arguments as strategies tied to the beginning and end points of argumentation.

Arguments are more than artifacts. For argument to be learned, the subject needs novelty and freshness. We feel education in argumentation needs to get away from the artifact model: long lists of fallacies with mostly Latin names, as well as cumbersome rules, derived primarily from symbolic logic. Similarly, we dislike seeing argument taught merely as a variant of persuasion, where the goal is just to impress an immediate and transitory audience. Nor do we wish to see argument calcified into formal rules and formats (often with arbitrary criteria), like those imposed on it by the rules of academic debate. Finally, while we applaud the rhetorical turn taken in the teaching of writing, we feel that teaching argument as argumentative writing misses the rich interactive tradition provided through Socratic dialectical questioning.

So let’s have an argument, shall we?

Chapter 1: Modes and Principles of Argumentation

Lee and Bailey, two attorneys, are airing their frustrations with the process of presenting cases in court.

Lee:

I don’t think it’s worth the effort any more. I just concluded a trial in which I offered five compelling and independent lines of argument in favor of my client, the plaintiff in the case. My logic was flawless, my evidence unimpeachable, my witnesses solid. It was a slam-dunk. Yet the jury voted a 0 award. I was so perplexed by their decision that I asked the judge if I could interview them about their verdict. He and the jurors agreed that this would be OK.

To my surprise, one—and only one—silly question asked by the defense attorney turned them against me. When I heard the question during the trial, I blew it off in my own mind as inconsequential and petty. I didn’t even attempt to respond, so insignificant was it. Nevertheless, that’s what got to them and made up their minds. I asked the jury about my five compelling points. To a person they agreed with all my points and felt that I had presented a virtually ironclad case. Yet they voted on that one question.

What’s the point? Since rationality and logic can’t prevail in a court, why bother to do it the right way, if at all?

Bailey:

I’ve had a successful run as an attorney. But I find increasingly that I can’t win, because juries can’t deal with complex technical issues put before them. Jurors don’t have Ph.D.’s, they are not scientists, and they can’t follow complex technical issues in the law. If I can’t boil down a case to something that a twelve-year-old could process, I have very little chance of assuring a good outcome for my client. For instance, I recently was in a case where the jury, mostly high school graduates or less, had to listen to weeks of forensic and medical evidence that was very difficult to follow. In fact, before the jury even heard this evidence a consultant had to give them an orientation to understanding the evidence. It was How to Understand Evidence 101, and I could see on the jury’s faces that they were checking out, just like bored and under-prepared students check out from a monotonous science lecture they don’t understand. If I can’t get to the jury, how can I win?

Lee and Bailey represent the two main threads of thought that weave through the study of argument and have woven through it almost since the beginning of discourse studies. Lee believes that argument is, ultimately, a rational enterprise. His yardstick for success in argumentation is pure and formalistic, almost mathematical. He believes that if his arguments are logical, the evidence true and unchallenged, the positions meticulously and unambiguously organized… that in such cases he cannot lose. In this view, the rational process must triumph over its opposite or its lesser, necessarily and inevitably. Lee doesn’t just present a case: he proves it. And the proof—true facts linked with universally accepted logical connections—should hold for any audience, anywhere, any time.

Bailey on the other hand, is focused almost entirely on the immediate audience for her case. She is not unconcerned with truth or logic, but she knows that if she can get to the jury, then the complexities of evidence and reasoning will matter less. For her, argument is about what works, what hooks this particular audience (or jury or market) into the conclusion and outcome she wants. As an attorney, she is reluctant to admit that there are universal standards or criteria for well-made arguments, because, in her view, a given case requires a specific strategy keyed to a particular audience, in a particular context, on a particular day. Logic and evidence alone rarely prevail—unless the advocate can also tap into, and manipulate, the evaluative processes of the decision makers. Her approach is anathema to Lee, who can’t imagine why any group of reasonable people would not be convinced by the irresistible logic of his case.

Both these threads can be traced two and a half millennia to Aristotle. In his Rhetoric, the first comprehensive treatment of argument, he discussed—in separate sections—first, how one can build logical arguments, or, second, how one can appeal to the responses of the audience. In Aristotle’s conception, the logical argument is the province only of the rational person—the philosopher—who can be dispassionately devoted to the study of reasoned discussion. In contrast, the need to examine the audience—including its prejudices and even its ignorance—recognizes that not all people are as rational as philosophers. These lay, less-than-fully-rational audiences—driven by emotion and susceptible to flattery and pity—are so different from philosophers that logical, rational argumentation may be regarded as the philosopher’s proprietary method of reasoning (dialectic), which is an entire, separate system in its own right..

Argument as Presented in this Book

For as long as people have been teaching and learning this set of skills, the field has typically distinguished sharply between argumentation (meaning logic and dialectic) and persuasion (meaning rhetoric and the influencing of a particular audience). As a result, the subject is frequently divided into:

• The formal (critical thinking, logic, and fallacies), sometimes called inquiry , and

• The practical/applied (debate, delivery, adaptation, and analysis of the audience), sometimes called advocacy .

In a typical college course, argumentation is usually taught in both the Lee and Bailey versions simultaneously. The traditional course teaches both the formal and applied versions, inquiry and advocacy, side by side. Rarely, however, will a course or textbook in argumentation attempt to show that adherence to logical rules translates into success in arguing, or that a successful argument was the result of flawless reasoning. On the contrary, it is apparent that many effective arguments succeed without the force of reason, and, similarly, many well-formulated arguments fail utterly, unable to convince an audience.

A New Standard

When Lee and Bailey presented their respective views, each missed an opportunity to enrich the other’s viewpoint. (Incidentally, enriching the other’s viewpoint is a principal purpose of having arguments in the first place—although you would never guess it from watching political debates on television.)

Lee complained about the jury’s paying attention to a petty question. By doing so, Lee is accusing the audience, in the tradition of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, of being less than rational. Lee designed an argument for a rational audience and when the audience wanted the answer to a question other than the ones Lee was answering, that audience was tagged as non-rational. That is, they seemed immune to the Laws of Reason.

Conversely, but with the same mistaken exclusiveness, Bailey places her audience of jurors outside of the rational domain of the educated experts, lawyers and witnesses (including the judge) who populate the courtroom. She feels she must appeal to the jury directly, and sees the process of winning an argument as that of perhaps simplifying or dumbing down the argument, reducing it to a short list of simple talking points, understandable to the least sophisticated person in the audience, possibly triggering reactions that engage their feelings or prejudices.

Making Arguments: Reason in Context

Is there a standard for evaluating arguments broad enough to apply to both models? Is there a set of criteria that both Lee and Bailey might use?

The process of simultaneously designing a rational case and delivering it to a real audience can be appraised within this single standard: We argue with a judge in mind. How does this standard differ from the standards invoked by Lee and Bailey, those historically used in the study of argumentation?

In the traditional approach, judgment is only important insofar as it entails the persuading of a particular audience that is qualified to evaluate a claim. If jurors were scientists, like those that present the evidence in court cases, then Lee would have no frustration about their listening to his rationally constructed evidence. Similarly, Bailey’s adaptation of her case to the jury would involve designing it for a predictable audience, with known attitudes and limitations, and with predictable rules for evaluating evidence. In other words, her particular audience would not be much different in kind from the nearly abstract (rational) audience that Lee has in mind: both would follow predictable rules of reasoning and inference.

In contrast, our goal here is to merge whatever standards we have for success in argumentation with the notion of those who will judge the argument itself. In our approach, how one argues and whom one argues for are not separate dimensions of argument, but, rather, can be viewed as one and the same thing.

The implication is straightforward. When Lee became upset by the jury’s abandoning him over a petty question, he missed an essential component in argument. He shouldn’t have made any distinction between the rationality of his points and the quality of the decision makers. He should have, moreover, anticipated how his jury would have responded to a question like the one the defense asked. Ironically, it is Bailey’s viewpoint (what the audience needs) that should have been paramount in Lee’s proceeding with his case. More important, however, Lee need not have replaced his way of arguing with Bailey’s; rather he should have added Bailey’s technique of argument to his own and included it in the rationale for arguing his case. Likewise, Bailey could have taken advantage of every possible rational inclination of her audience by absorbing some of Lee’s way of arguing.

Lee and Bailey represent respective extremes, archetypes, of the application of reason-based and context-based standards for argumentation. The viewpoint of this book is that, insofar as argumentation is concerned, reason and context occupy the same argumentative space. They are neither opposite, nor even alternative ways to argue. They are fused into a single notion: Who judges your argument, and how you construct your argument, are often indistinguishable.

Why study argument?

For some, arguing is as natural as breathing. In fact, there is a type of person labeled argumentative. Often, the association with this label is negative, connoting a disagreeable person, a curmudgeon. Why would someone want to learn to be this type of person?

Although argumentativeness is a trait, and although having an argument can be psychologically uncomfortable, the values of arguing, and of being able to argue effectively, are well established. Success in argumentation translates into success in many aspects of life. Good arguers tend to have the following traits:

• Leadership

• Effectiveness in Writing and Speaking

• Ability to Think Critically

• Confidence

• Decisiveness

Learning to argue can lead to specific goals and special types of success. It is tied obviously to careers in law, politics, and journalism. Less obviously, arguing is associated with success in such fields as advertising, public relations, and religion. Virtually every scholarly and scientific profession has an argumentative community that serves as the judge for claims advanced in those fields—including the humanities, social science, and physical science. The professional guilds and organizations to which virtually everyone belongs have business meetings characterized by spirited debate and deliberation.

Teachers who argue well have a powerful pedagogical tool for working with their students. They also possess a skill that they can carry over into their instruction of students in speech, language arts, debate, and activities like model U.N.

Because argument is a communication skill, knowing how to use it has a synergistic benefit for other skills of communication as well. Good arguers tend to be good public speakers, debaters, writers, and proofreaders. Those who study argumentation learn to read critically and to make good policy analyses; they also acquire the ability to do sound research. Many debaters go on to law school, where their research skills are often valued as much as their skills of advocacy and public speaking.

Arguing can be enjoyable, an intellectual sport, akin to chess, or any other contest that involves strategy. Often though, the stakes in argument are more than a game, involving real issues in one’s community. Argument can help someone fight a parking ticket and has been known even to get a teacher to change a grade.

How do we study argument?

Like many other fields, argument is studied by attention to its principles, which have developed since the time when the ancient Greek Sophists began teaching clients how to win cases in court. Argument is one of the oldest of all intellectual disciplines and involves a number of related skills, including logic, linguistics, grammar, composition, critical thinking, and public speaking. For at least 2500 years, those skilled in argument have been sought after as leaders and professionals.

Because the field of argumentation has such a long history, it has a tremendously rich tradition, including a vocabulary of terms, concepts, and definitions that comprehensively describe its scope. To study it not only means mastery of these concepts, and how they operate, but also their application in debates, discussion, and argumentative writing.

The word argument shows up in many forms, both colloquial and formal. Here are some examples:

• In logic, formal deductive reasoning, where premises lead to a conclusion.

• The universe of discourse characterized by reason-giving (the notion explored in this book)

• The social communicative act entered into by parties in dispute; their dispute may be political, legal, or otherwise. More particularly, their dispute can be of an interpersonal nature, as in having an argument.

• An extended and justified case for some belief or action; it develops a thesis and may provide a comprehensive set of sub-arguments and sub-claims. If a historian offers a book-length argument about the causes of WWII, he or she provides many sub-arguments along the path to the conclusion.

• The study of argumentation. In Britain, the words argumentation and argument are synonymous in describing the arguments an advocate makes.

To argue can mean to make an argument or it can just mean, colloquially, to be disagreeable. The famous Monty Python Argument Clinic sketch focuses on the question of whether just being disagreeable is tantamount to having an argument.

Man:   Well, an argument's not the same as contradiction.

Mr.   Vibrating: It can be.

Man:   No, it can't. An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a definite proposition.

Mr.   Vibrating: No it isn't.

Taking all these definitions and traditions into consideration, we propose that an argument is the process in which one gives good reasons for a particular judge to accept a disputed claim or proposal. This definition includes all the methods associated traditionally with both models (Lee’s and Bailey’s approaches, respectively). Most important though, under this definition, those traditional approaches are shaped and tempered by a constant mindfulness—awareness and anticipation—of the importance of judgment.

Studying argument, then, converts an everyday activity into a formalized study. In that sense, it is like any study that transforms what people acquire naturally into the realm of an artistic enterprise. And just as a naturally good musician benefits from music instruction, often more than someone with no musical ability, so does studying argumentation either enhance the effectiveness of those that already have ability, or, alternately, build that ability from scratch in others.

Not surprisingly, students of argumentation come to their study with vastly different expectations. Some feel that they already argue well and often, so that the study of argumentation should come easily to them. Other students, perhaps because of shyness or introversion, fear the prospect of publicly defending arguments with evidence, organization, and reasoning. Whether or not students feel comfortable with argumentation, however, seems to have little to do with their ability to master it. That is, being naturally argumentative or comfortable in public debates seems to have little effect on the student’s success in studying or mastering the subject.

About the only student who cannot learn to argue is the one we call the opinion monger; this student is given to asserting that everyone’s entitled to his or her opinion, that one opinion is as valid as another, and so forth. Of course, such students are indeed entitled to that opinion, but, so long as they hold it, they are not likely to learn much or have much influence in their communities. (And if they cannot argue their point, they’ll never convince us.)

What is important is that nearly every student, regardless of temperament, can succeed at, and learn from, this subject matter. And, what is even more important, the skills acquired in the study of argumentation will serve the student well in nearly every academic course —and in most professions as well.

How We Argue: The Principles of Argumentation

Nearly everyone argues. In fact, some people argue so much that we have an adjective that describes them—argumentative. The connotation of this adjective is nearly universally negative. One Communication Theory student, when asked to describe a person she didn't like, provided this description: He's disagreeable. He challenges me on everything. He's one argumentative son of a gun.

From the time we are young we are admonished against arguing. Don't argue with your sister. Don't talk back to me. "I really don't want to argue