Informal Logic

For more than 25 years, I taught an informal logic class to working adults. They exerted substantial resistance to anything they regarded as stupid or pointless, and, over time, they taught me how reasoning works. By the time the course ended, I had a text I was proud of, one that reflected  a different conception of reasoning than I found in standard course offerings. I will, at some point, try to do a paper that reflects this approach to teaching. The piece I post here contains some general thoughts about the problems with   conventional approaches and the outline of a suggestion about how to teach differently.

November, 2003

Peter Shea

Some Thoughts about Starting Points in Informal Logic Teaching: Public Argument, Private Reflection, and the Bridge Between the Two

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“At our first step, we are free. At our second, we are slaves.” Goethe

A child is asked whether talking to oneself is like talking to someone else. He says, “No, because when you talk to someone else, you have to be respectful.” From the BBC documentary Socrates for Six Year Olds. 

“You gotta get your act together, but you don’t gotta take it on the road.” Jackie Alfonso, quoting, I think, Mae West.

I want to take through with some care the beginning paragraphs of Trudy Govier’s A Practical Study of Argument.  Her approach makes justification and persuasion and defense – the public side of thinking – into the central issues for a beginning informal logic class. The root idea here seems to be that “getting one’s thoughts in order” means preparing to go public with them: preparing, in specific, for something like a debate. I am worried about her approach – and others like it – because it leaves no space, within the teaching of thinking, for the private side of argument, the use of argument in one’s internal conversations. It surely presupposes that some private and internal process of reflection has taken place, but that work is all “off the books.” 

There is nothing inherently pernicious about Govier’s approach: a writer gets to define what he or she is talking about, and nobody can talk about everything. But there is something pernicious about the context in which Govier writes. Many of the tools of logic are primarily of use in certain quite sophisticated philosophical enterprises: they figure most centrally in logical and mathematical proof, and, to a lesser extent, in the arguments that appear in the professional literature of philosophy. But the support for the folks who do that specialized work comes from thousands of undergraduates who take logic courses which are recommended to them or required of them as basic courses in thinking. So when such a course leaves no space for some important intellectual process or work (private or public),  it is natural for students to think that that process or work is of little value for thinking. Misleading people in that way is, I think, pernicious. 

Of course, one might think that “talking is talking.” To teach people to have internal dialogues, teach them to have dialogues. The standards for good internal debate are the standards for good debate, generally. If one teaches people the public standards for arguing well, one will also teach them everything worth knowing about how to mull things over. This view needs to be taken very seriously. It has a kind of Wittgensteinian, anti-private language feel to it, and it greatly simplifies the teacher’s life, if true. 

I want to say that it is important to understand the full complexity of argument and rational activity in public, and that that understanding may well reveal connections between public thinking and private thinking. But the crucial preliminary step to any such discussion is getting the public side of persuasion, argument, debate complex enough to do some justice to what happens. And this is the second problem I find with Govier’s treatment: she fixates on one kind of example of public argument. Part of the simplicity of Govier’s account is that, having located logic in the public world, she then provides examples suggesting that what happens in the public world is largely debate: efforts to persuade, efforts to criticize opposing positions, and defenses.  It is important to see that that is just one model, within a vast range of public activity aiming at changing or redirecting minds. It is a model curiously close to democratic institutions and traditions of equality, traditions that hold very seldom in human life, even in those societies that make enormous fusses about being democratic. And so the account of public argumentative action presupposed in Govier’s book is in some sense outside of the main folk traditions of informal logic, which are importantly traditions of inequality: arguments upwards from servants and children and employees to masters and parents and bosses.

This worry about a one-sided diet of examples is really two different worries. First, I am concerned that Govier’s focus on a fairly narrow range of public activity as the model for good thinking leaves students with unhelpful basic concepts for putting their own thoughts in order, in non-public spaces. This may partly be because there are some differences between private and public argument and partly because private argument may be like public argument but not like the kinds of public argument that Govier chooses to highlight. Second, I am concerned that Govier’s treatment cuts students off from a rich logical tradition embodied in the wisdom and folk literature of the world, a tradition that responds to quite different pressures than those present in democratic debate.

It is perhaps unfair to attach this criticism to Trudy Govier. She is writing in a tradition of informal logic/ critical thinking texts, and her emphases are widely shared. The idea that the sources of our logic are primarily Aristotle and those who worked within his structures is perhaps close to universal. It is part of my purpose in this brief treatment to suggest that there is a whole world of material available outside of this standard tradition waiting to be mined for insights to address the needs of contemporary undergraduates. Part of my purpose is to try out one way of placing this material within a broad conception of ordinary argument. I don’t pretend to have done much with this material; my own courses in logic still emphasize traditional models of debate far more than any richer conception.

  

I have however begun to make some changes in traditional teaching of informal logic, aimed at addressing some of the concerns I have about Govier’s approach. In the last bit of this paper, I want to sketch an alternative approach to making the first moves in informal logic and critical thinking courses.

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“This is a book about arguments. It is about the nature of arguments – what arguments are and the different structures they have – and about the standards for judging arguments to be good or bad. Many people think that if a question is controversial, then what somebody says about it is “just a matter of opinion.” This view ignores the fact that even for controversial issues such as abortion and nuclear strategy, there is evidence supporting various views. The evidence may be reliable or unreliable, and it may give good or poor support to the position. One opinion is not just as good as another,  even though we cannot prove beyond every doubt that our own position is correct. In this book we hope to convince you that opinions on important controversial matters can and should be defended by rational arguments, and that rational arguments can be analyzed in a careful, logical way. You can do better than saying “that’s just a matter of opinion” when someone disagrees with you; you can learn to critically assess the reasons for the view and defend your positions with solid arguments of your own.

What is an argument?

An argument is a set of claims that a person puts forward in an attempt to persuade an audience that some further claim is true. There are many ways of trying to persuade others; when we use arguments, we try to persuade in a rational way by citing premises, and the view being defended  is called the conclusion. A person who argues does not merely state what she thinks; she states what she thinks and gives some reasons intended to back up her view.” (Trudy Govier, A Practical Study of Argument)

Govier starts by imagining a situation. Someone has expressed an opinion. It is not taken seriously. This isn’t a situation that would happen very often. Imagine a kid saying, “There’s no point in going to college.” His parents are unlikely to say, “That’s one way of looking at the matter. We have another, equally good, way.”  This sort of response, “That’s a matter of opinion” generally comes up with respect to issues that aren’t of immediate practical concern to the parties discussing them. One says this sort of thing about abortion if one is not about to have one, or about nuclear strategy if one is not Condolezza Rice. So Govier begins her book by addressing an attitude that is really quite rare within the range of attitudes we take toward controversial issues. It is an attitude people take toward some controversial issues, to which they stand in certain distanced relationships.

This book would begin very much differently if Govier addressed instead the more frequent problem: “I have to make a decision and I am confronted with various conflicting opinions and I have no opinion of my own.” To get to the point at which relativism becomes a problem, one has to somehow form opinions. Govier’s starting point here puts that whole process off stage. She says, in effect,   “Once you have opinions, we can tell you how to test them, how to support them, how to help them win in various competitive contests."

It is important to Govier to say that some opinions are better than others. Govier comes close to saying that a good opinion is one for which good arguments are given. A bad opinion is an opinion for which bad arguments are given. She might be saying something more modest and more sensible: that one can in general  tell that an opinion is a good or a bad opinion by the quality of arguments used to support it. Whatever her point is here, it is useful to see its limits:  clearly, dumb ideas can have clever defenders and good ideas can have dumb defenders. Somewhat less clearly: there may be claims that are true and important for which no very good argument can be given: they are in some way basic. If one thinks about argument as a deductive system, there have to be some initial premises not themselves supported. One thinks of the axioms of geometry and arithmetic, as possible examples of this sort of basic claim. But there may also be quite complex claims that emerge from long experience, like “Take it easy with schizophrenics” or “Don’t force yourself to work on math when you’re tired” or “With teens, always distrust your first impression.” These may also not admit argument: they may be the shibboleths by which experienced people recognize each other, and they may recognize as inexperienced the person who asks for an argument on matters like that.  On the other side, we want to say about Zeno’s paradoxes: they are superb arguments to impossible conclusions. That’s why people get PhD’s out of the paradox of the heap.

As advice about managing one’s internal structure of belief, what Govier says here is quite misleading. Suppose one takes her seriously, and sorts through one’s basket of beliefs, separating them into two piles: beliefs for which one has reasons and beliefs for which one has no reasons. Surely, it would be odd, perhaps suicidal, to label the beliefs with reasons attached “promising” and the beliefs without reasons “doubtful.” Surely what the piles will mostly reflect is the sorts of conversation one has engaged in, and the kind of perplexities and choices onee has encountered. My neighbor mows his lawn in curved patterns. That makes me think about why I mow in straight patterns. A friend once suggested that eating peas aggressively communicated and reinforced an angry disposition: after that, I can never eat peas without thinking “to mash or not to mash.” So Govier is encouraging people to take seriously a difference among their own – or other people’s – beliefs that really doesn’t matter much at all. 

I think Govier is influenced here by thinking primarily about certain contexts of public debate, in developing her treatment of logic. Surely, in forums like courtrooms and deliberative committees, the standing  of any position is based on the level of support one has available for that position. As a canny participant in such forums, one only brings up points one can defend if challenged. But as one prepares for one’s day in court, one’s appearance before a committee, one sorts through a vast amount of stuff one has various kinds of confidence in for that much smaller subset that one can allow out in public, at this time. And after the hearing, after the courtroom appearance, one’s thinking once again takes account of  this much larger body of belief. One does not simply transport the discipline of the courtroom or the committee room back into one’s mental life. 

It seems unlikely that making that mental change would be a good idea. The result of 2300 years of Western experience in philosophy is to establish that many views, including views universally regarded as absurd, can be supported by substantial arguments – arguments that take great intellect to answer. Further, we know that good ideas arise quite mysteriously: someone becomes fascinated with a thesis that initially has no support, and gradually develops the experiments and context within which it can be tested. So we would not be very hopeful about the prospects of someone who censored his or her mental life to give standing to all those claims for which he or she had found plausible arguments and to refuse standing to all other claims. The internal mental economy has to be much more complicated than the discipline of a courtroom.

It’s important to look at Govier’s initial move here, of which this point about opinions is one part. Govier is introducing logic as a way of grading opinions. But then she falls back to the more sensible position that logic is a way of grading arguments. What connects these views is the idea that logic, critical thinking, learning to think, is about evaluating some “artifact” – the opinion, the argument – as strong or weak, good or bad, better or worse.

It is not easy to say when an argument is good or bad, all things considered. 

I can produce some special, technical standard and then evaluate arguments by that standard. For example, I might say: an argument is good if and only if it is impossible for a rational person to believe the premises and yet deny the conclusion. Consider the argument: “(1) All dogs go out of existence when they bark. (2) Fido is a dog. So, (3) Fido goes out of existence when he barks.” That is, on this standard, a good argument, and the argument, “(1) He’s fat, so (2) he’s lazy” is, on this same standard, a bad argument. But there is no context in which the first argument has to be taken seriously. It does no work outside of logic classes. The second does some work, in some contexts. It has to be taken seriously. If it misleads, then at least clearing up the ways it misleads in a particular circumstance is likely to shed light on:  (a) being fat, (b) being lazy, and (c) whatever issue prompted the person who gave the argument to give it. There are many ways an argument can be bad. There are many ways an argument can be good. Most of those ways are invisible until one places the argument in some context of discussion or decision-making.

There may be some place for general judgments of the goodness or badness of arguments. Think of the way movies are evaluated by sensitive critics. Someone like Roger Ebert, who knew movies, generally spent a lot of time placing a movie in its genre, sorting out what the directors and writers are trying to accomplish, and then making sense of the strengths and weaknesses of the movie in that context. He never compared “Citizen Kane” to “Bambi.” Occasionally, something about a movie drove him to a more general judgment: “this movie is a complete waste of time, there are a hundred things of this sort you could rent that would do what it is doing better” – or “this movie is one everyone should see, even if they don’t generally like this sort of thing, because it holds up some important value in a very effective way.” These judgments are very rare in his writing.  They are the necessarily the fruits of very broad experience.  In a similar way, someone who has encountered lots of arguments might call some argument totally without merit. But that’s an expert’s judgment, one that calls for considerable sensitivity to the context, a grasp the history of the discussion, and a good mental inventory of the range of possible moves to be made in this situation. It is a much more complicated judgment than, for example, saying that a chess move is a bad move.

Given the complexity of argument evaluation, it seems odd to say that the primary thing one needs to learn to think well is how to tell good arguments from bad arguments. There would have to be so many preliminary steps, before one could make that judgment with any assurance. 

So, Govier’s progression is this: your opinions need to be good, not bad. That is what is important for becoming a good thinker. Fortunately there is a way of identifying good opinions.  For an opinion to be good, it has to be supported by good arguments. (Or perhaps, “One mark of a good opinion is that it is  supported by good arguments.”) This book will teach you to recognize good arguments. That will help you to make your own opinions good and to show other people that their opinions are bad.

My first worry about this whole progression is that it ignores the work necessary to form opinions, jumping immediately to discussion of matters that seem most relevant to public discussion. 

I am also worried that public discussion is over-simplified, in Govier’s introductory remarks. In her second paragraph, she characterizes arguments as tools of persuasion. In one way, there is nothing objectionable about this: people do use arguments that way. But I think something important would be gained for the teaching project if the difficulties of persuasion were confronted right away in the discussion and if the various purposes of argument that fall short of “convincing someone that a claim is true” were given space, from the beginning. 

Many different processes hide behind this little word “persuade.” Sometimes, l encounter someone who has no opinion about something. I give him or her an argument to my opinion, and the person straightaway adopts my opinion. One might call this encounter “persuasion.” Consider, at the other end of the continuum, the interchange between Socrates and Crito in Plato’s Crito. Crito comes in with a mass of arguments, urging Socrates to escape from prison. He blurts them all out in a great rush, and then urges quick action. Socrates slows things down, and shows, over the course of the dialogue, what a long and intricate history of commitments and loyalties would have to be repudiated, if he were to escape. In this case, Socrates at the end gives some response to each of Crito’s initial arguments. But one could easily imagine someone in Socrates’ position looking curiously at Crito’s arguments, the way we look curiously at Zeno’s arguments that motion is impossible, saying: ‘I wonder what’s wrong with that; I wish I had time to sort it out.’ Changing a mind that’s made up is no small trick, and giving an argument to which the other person has no immediate response is not going to do the job.

In important matters, persuasion is often a long and difficult process. I can bring someone with no opinion to have my opinion, in some limited way, quite quickly, just by giving an argument. (I might, for example, persuade someone in New Hampshire to cast his primary vote for Bradley.)  But usually, when I take the trouble to try to persuade someone of something, I am hoping for some long-term commitment and some investment of time, money, or energy. Persuasion is often connected with enlisting someone in a project or a cause. And for that to work, I must somehow bring about in that person a conviction that will endure through difficulties and will stand up to objections. Consider what might be involved in persuading a high school sophomore not to join her friends in Air Force ROTC, as a way to pay for college. This is likely only to be accomplished by a long process of quite various argument, a real course of treatment – or perhaps better, a real education in the logical geography around this issue. 

If one takes this long sort of persuasion to be the sort that generally matters, then the idea of using an argument to persuade will seem limited and partial. One will instead begin talk about persuasion with a discussion of the ways one comes to understand how someone else’s position is structured and what difficulties would be involved in abandoning that structure. My job is not to induce conviction that lasts just until the person encounters the first difficulty. My job is to show someone how he or she can believe something, within a life that throws up these difficulties and objections and problems. Surely argument has a place in such a project, both as an exploratory tool: to find out how someone’s position is put together, and as a way of suggesting new ways of thinking. But the idea that one can, in most important contexts, change someone’s mind by giving a good argument, will come to seem very much too simple.

Changing someone’s mind, converting someone to our point of view, is often very difficult. We usually settle for much more modest victories. We spend our lives among people who think differently than we do, on all sorts of matters, about which we have all different levels of personal confidence. Normally, these differences are not settled by persuasion. They are settled by some sort of compromise or negotiation or public tolerance of ambiguity. For example, we define our areas of agreement and develop a policy that is designedly ambiguous on the points of difference. Or we limit our cooperation to those matters about which we are in agreement.

The problem with Govier’s discussion of  argument as a means of persuasion is that  it suggests that the choice one faces, when confronted with a different opinion, is either persuading someone that one’s view is correct or being persuaded that it is incorrect. But those are both extremely drastic solutions, extreme energy-hungry solutions, to the problem of disagreement. More often, what is required is much more subtle  change in each party’s relationship to the position he or she holds. It may be that all I need to do, to produce a livable compromise on some issue, is to make someone somewhat less sure that she is right, or to convince my opponent that her view is somewhat less important than she thinks it is. And a similar shift in my own position is likewise enough to allow us to muddle through. 

There is perhaps a connection between my two critical points about Govier’s introductory paragraphs. I complain first of all that Govier leaves the formation of opinion shrouded in mystery: logical actors arrive on the stage with opinions. I also complain that she defines public logical activity in very narrow and drastic terms: one undertakes to persuade people of something, to change their minds. Perhaps the relation between the points is this: a lively consciousness of the difficulty of coming to an opinion might make folks less demanding of those who disagree with them. It takes a sort of supreme confidence to undertake persuasion, and becoming conscious of the difficulties with own views might shake that confidence a bit. Further, a sense of the place that an opinion occupies in one’s own psychic economy: the way it it is a kind of achievement, how much comes together to support that opinion and how much depends on it, might make one a bit more realistic about the prospects of changing anyone else’s mind.

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What Govier says is most at home in the Athenian assembly: a group of people debating matters at some distance from their personal lives, prior to a vote that will commit the city to a course of action. In that situation, speakers are presumed to be equal, as citizens, in their right to be heard.

Compare the elements of this story:

David has claimed the wife of Uriah and has ordered Uriah, a loyal soldier, to be abandoned on the battlefield, so that he is killed. Nathan the prophet came to him and said, “A poor man in your kingdom had only one sheep, which he loved. A rich man, who had many sheep, came by and decided he wanted the poor man’s sheep for his dinner. When the poor man protested, the rich man killed him.” David replied, “The rich man shall surely die.” Nathan said, “You are the man.”

Nathan is giving an argument to David. The topic is: the way David is conducting his life. And Nathan is David’s subject: David can ignore anything he says and do whatever he wants. David is the only earthly judge of David’s conduct.

Compare the David and Nathan story to the stories in this collection:

1. A woman from the Hamar tribe was given to a man in marriage, but he would not sleep with her, because, he said, she was too little. So one night, the woman put a piece of manure in the man’s sleeping sack. He got into the sack and then, a bit later, shot out of it again, furious. “There’s a piece of manure in my sleeping sack,” he said. The woman said, “It is only a little piece of manure.” The man said, “What is little about a piece of manure?”The woman said, “What is little about a woman?” (From the documentary, “Hamar Women.”)

2. The general of the Assyrian army was a leper. He had in his household a slave girl taken from Israel. One day she said to him, “My lord, in my country there is a prophet who can make you clean.” So the general went to Israel and met the prophet, who said, “Go and wash seven times in the river
Jordan.” The general left in disgust, unwilling to do as the prophet required. The slave girl came to him and said, “If the prophet had asked you to do something difficult, you would surely have done it.” The general went to the Jordan, washed, and was made clean.

3. Men came to Jesus to trap him, asking, “Is it lawful to pay tribute to Caesar?” Jesus asked them for a coin of the sort in which the tribute was paid. They gave him a coin, and he said, “Whose picture is on this coin?” They answered, “Caesar’s.” Jesus said, “Give to Caesar what belongs to
Caesar and to God what belongs to God.”

4. A Syro-phonecian woman approached Jesus, asking to be healed. Jesus said, “Shall I take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs?” And the woman responded, “Even dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.” Jesus said, “Great is your faith” and healed her.

5. Bruno Bettelheim was in a concentration camp and suffering from a wound. He went to the camp infirmary and, when his turn came, ripped the scab off the wound and said to the doctor: “I cannot work with this wound.” The
doctor treated him.

6. Socrates was in a conversation with a man who had contempt for philosophy and pursued instead the path leading to political advancement. He said that political power was surely the best thing for human beings, because the person with power could get whatever he wanted and kill anyone who stood in his way. Socrates said something like this, “Why would one bother to study to attain that sort of power? Surely any man with a knife under his cloak can kill whoever gets in his way.”

7. Socrates encountered another man who had contempt for philosophy, believing that the point of life was to amass pleasure in great quantity, and that philosophy had little hope of providing much pleasure. He maintained that the best life for a human being was the life that contained
the greatest amount of pleasure, of whatever sort. Socrates responded, “Well, if that’s right, then surely the boy prostitutes in the marketplace, scheduled 10 hours a day, are living the best possible human life.” The man
retreated, because he was after all an aristocrat and had bottomless contempt for the boy prostitutes.

It is fairly rare that two people have equal power or standing with respect to a controversial issue. In hierarchical societies, this reflects a political fact: kings are answerable to no other person. But, even in societies in which equality is highly valued, few questions are located equal distances from those discussing them. I can give my son all sorts of arguments about doing his math homework or avoiding cigarettes, but it is his life, and I have very little control over his actions. Whatever argument he accepts, even if it is objectively very bad, will govern his behavior. Similarly, when I try to enlist other people in some project or cause, I must take very seriously the fact that they are sovereign over their own lives.  My considerations do not have the same weight as their considerations. 

If inequality of power, and the particular problem it presents, is the human norm, at least in contemporary societies, then cases like those in my little anthology are central examples for teaching people how to argue. The “Athenian Forum” case is a special case, and the idea of introducing considerations to be weighed disinterestedly by judges equidistant from the decision-making levers, is a specialized strategy. 

One might say: the point of teaching thinking is to encourage people to transform situations in which there is inequality of power into situations in which disinterested judges weigh evidence and decide based on the relative merits of arguments, without regard to differences in power. One might take Nathan and the Hamar woman to be engaged in the old game of “making the boss think that the good idea is his idea” – a game that mature people grow out of. In some ways, defining the argument “space” as a space of equality is promulgating an ideal rather than describing a reality.

But, first of all, why should enterprises like informal logic address an ideal situation? Students don’t argue in an ideal situation. And it should be one important job of critical thinking and informal logic classes to prepare people to argue in the situations they will actually encounter. 

Also, it is worth asking whether the general imposition of an ideal of equality is a particularly good idea. Think about the issues that folks encounter in their personal lives – romantic issues, issues regarding family relations, questions about lifestyle. On all of these matters, one could stage a debate, bring considerations to bear on either side, and declare a winner. But for a broad range of personal issues, what matters is what the person whose life is in question can whole-heartedly accept. One might agree that one side or the other has the best arguments but be wholly unable to live out the view that side presents.  And that is a more general problem: with respect to all sorts of enterprises, the mere admission that the preponderance of evidence favors a particular policy is not sufficient to motivate the responsible people to work to bring that policy into effect.

One might think of all deliberation on the model of the decision by the city council about where to put the new sewer line. They  formulate alternatives, debate,  make a decision, and then put out the contracts. But it would be very odd for a couple to decide to have a child that way. Children require “buy-in” – and the success of the project of raising them depends importantly on the parents’ commitment. 

Consider the Hamar Women story. The elders of the village might come to the husband and point out that several men had married women of that age and size, and had had children with them, and were quite happy. They might  point out that the man’s refusal to sleep with his wife is making her unhappy, making the in-laws unhappy, disrupting the whole village. And, at some point, the fellow might reluctantly agree to sleep with her. But compare what happens in the story. One can imagine that the husband thinks of the wife as like a little girl, of no account or weight – someone perhaps not even interested in sleeping with him. When she plays a joke on him, one that is simultaneously outrageous and clever and self-deprecating (comparing herself to a piece of manure), she makes the point that she is both determined and someone to be reckoned with, a substantial person. She forces him to acknowledge her. So the argument is good in lots of ways. She provokes his admission: “Things of small size are sometimes important” to criticize his earlier argument, (1) She’s little, so (2) she isn’t of any importance. But the argument would be quite different if she had put a small poisonous snake in his sleeping sack, though the snake would have provoked roughly the same recantation of the earlier prejudice.

When Jones and Smith disagree about something, Jones has (at least) a couple of options for thinking through the situation:

Jones can ask, “What considerations, of the sort a reasonable person would find compelling, count in favor of my position and against Smith’s?”

Jones can ask, “Does  Smith always think the way he is thinking now? If not, how can I move him to think in some other of his own ways of thinking, about the subject of our disagreement?”

One could explore either of these approaches in a course in public argument. But the second approach emphasizes that, if Jones is going to argue with Smith, Jones had better understand Smith very well. The first approach does not make an understanding of Smith part of the project of arguing with Smith. If Jones and Smith are arguing in front of the Athenian Assembly, it is not necessary for Jones to understand Smith particularly well. The Assembly will settle the disagreement. But if Smith is the final arbiter, the second approach makes the most sense. My suspicion is that, in many cases of argument, there is no Athenian Assembly looking on, and pretending there is one will not conjure one into being.

Books on reasoning start with examples. They encourage students to go on from those examples. If the examples chosen are out of touch with the realities of argument, they won’t help much. Imagine the difference between an informal logic book that begins with the Hamar Women story and one that begins with the argument: “All squares are rectangles. This is a square. Therefore, this is a rectangle.”

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I began this discussion of the introduction to Govier’s book complaining that she gave too little attention to the formation of opinion, to “thinking in private.” I questioned whether the model of public debate underlying her account would translate well to an internal “forum.” I introduced another model of thinking in public, and now the question is pressing: does this other model provide any better guidance for the internal conversations that lead to the formation of opinion?

The wisdom literature of humankind, exemplified in the little anthology of stories quoted in the last section, carries this message: people may be in disagreement with themselves, without knowing it. People may carry within them the rationale and the motivation for quite different commitments than their current commitments. The supplicant, seeking to change the king’s mind, tries to understand those different strands of thought and motivation, those not currently effective but waiting in the wings. Does this model apply to the single person as well? 

One might think of the individual as a cloud of beliefs, among which the necessity relations are not fully worked out. David believes that the king should enforce justice, and also that the king can have any woman he wants. Nathan points out that those conflict. David forgets how he thinks as a judge, once he goes home. Nathan reminds him. 

When I teach informal logic, I start by suggesting that argument is a kind of conversation game. I imagine this game as continuous with all sorts of early play. One wants to know what things have to go together. That sets up some of  the basic games. One can try insisting that two things go together, and one can try separating things that start out together. One sets up rules: first a bite of cookie, then a sip of milk. One deconstructs the doll: it has always had the head attached, but maybe the head comes off.

An argument is a kind of insistence: if this is true, this other must also be true. If Jones is a crook, Jones should not be re-elected. If the house is too small, we should move. If I have failed my exam, I am worthless. And the game we play with that insistence is twofold: we try very hard to think of the world in such a way that the first claim makes the second necessary, and we try very hard to think of ways that the first claim could be true and the second false. Both of these are part of systole and diastole of thinking. Hundreds of times a day we surmise and then identify the counter-examples to our surmises. Public argument is just the public expression of this pervasive game. And what motivates the game, what keeps it going, is that we notice things about the world as we posit necessary connections and we notice other things about the world as we find the counter-examples to those posited necessities. I burrow into the world by making theories and throwing them away. 

This way of thinking avoids some of the moves I found problematic in Govier’s introduction. I don’t have to take argument-giving in general to be an exercise in persuasion. It may be part of a persuasive project, or it may be something more like an invitation to play chess. We carry a project of orienting ourselves forward from the earliest stages of our development to interpersonal adventures. Also, I don’t immediately have to focus on evaluating arguments, on developing criteria for good arguments. Arguments are tools for exploring the world, for testing possible necessities. They work well if they bring up interesting stuff. 

If this activity is going right, in someone’s life, the regions of that person’s life will be in constant communication, and commitments in one area of life will have their effect on commitments in other areas. Public persuasion is a matter of something like bringing the circulation back to a limb that has fallen asleep: bringing one part of someone’s life into dialogue with the rest of that person’s life.

Peter Shea

October 30, 2003