Reasoning and giving reasons

Australasian Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 78, Issue 4, 2000, Pages 575-594

  Hoaglund, John ^a  

^a CHRISTOPHER NEWPORT UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 40049092839     PISSN: 00048402     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00048400012349811     Document Type: Article

References (58)

1. Douglas N. Walton, 'What Is Reasoning? What Is an Argument?', Journal of Philosophy, Vol. LXXXVII (1990), pp. 399-419.
2. Ralph H. Johnson, The Rise of Informal Logic (Newport News: Vale Press, 1996), p. 91f.
3. The Fixation of Belief in The Essential Peirce, ed. Nathan Houser & Christian Kloesel, Vol. I (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 111.
4. George Teschner, 'Semiotic Contrasts between Trial and Discovery', p. 3. I am grateful to the author for supplying a copy of this paper.
5. S.L. Phipson, On Evidence, 13th edn., ed. by M.N. Howard, R. May, and J. Huxley Buzzard (London: Sweet & Maxwell, 1982).
6. quoted in Carol A.G. Jones, Expert Witnesses (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), p. 102.
7. '...determining whether a particular statement should be classified as an opinion or as a fact is often an extremely difficult task, as many a trial judge who has been forced to spend hours wading through a stack of medical records sorting out fact from opinion will testify.' Charles E. Friend, The Law of Evidence in Virginia, 4th edn., Vol. II (Charlottesville: The Michie Co., c. 1993), p. 4.
8. J.B. Thayer, A Preliminary Treatise on Evidence at the Common Law (Boston: Little Brown, 1898; reprinted New York: Rothman Reprints, 1969), p. 524
9. See also Jones, Expert Witnesses, who quotes this source (p. 103).
10. For useful distinctions, e.g. Perry Weddle, 'Fact from Opinion,' in Trudy Govier, ed., Selected Issues in Logic and Communication (Belmont: Wadsworth, 1988), pp. 55-64.
11. Paul W. Ewald, Evolution of Infectious Diseases (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 23-27.
12. Stephen P. Norris & Ruth King, The Design of a Critical Thinking Test on Appraising Observations (St. Johns, Newfoundland: Institute for Educational Research and Development, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1984), p. 14.
13. Stephen P. Norris & Ruth King, The Design of a Critical Thinking Test on Appraising Observations (St. Johns, Newfoundland: Institute for Educational Research and Development, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1984), p. 14; cf. Robert H. Ennis, Critical Thinking (Upper Saddle River NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1996), pp. 74-76.
14. In Norris & King, op. at., pp. 127-150.
15. Robert Putnam, 'Bowling Alone,' Journal of Democracy, Vol. VI, No. 1 (1995), pp, 65-78.
16. Nicholas Lemann, 'Kicking in Groups,' Atlantic Monthly (April 1996), pp. 22-26.
17. Alexander Hamilton et al, The Federalist Papers, ed. Clinton Rossiter (New York: New American Library [Mentor], 1969), p. 510-520.
18. Johnson, op. cit., pp. 92-94.
19. Frans H. von Eemeren, Rob Grootendorst & Tjark Kruiger, Handbook of Argumentation Theory (Dordrecht: Foris, 1987): 'Argumentation is a social, intellectual, verbal activity serving to justify or refute an opinion, consisting of a constellation of statements and directed towards obtaining the approbation of an audience.' (p. 7)
20. I borrow a paragraph here from my 'Informal Logic: The Two Schools,' see below, note 27.
21. Douglas Walton, Argument Structure. A Pragmatic Theory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), p. 32.
22. Johnson, op. cit., pp. 90-92.
23. James B. Freeman, Dialectics and the Macrostructure of Argument (Berlin: Foris, 1991), p. 30f.
24. E.g. E.M. Barth and E.C.W. Krabbe, From Axiom to Dialogue (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1982), pp. 14-19.
25. Trudy Govier, Problems in Argument Analysis and Evaluation (Dordrecht: Foris, 1987), pp. 1-10.
26. A.N. Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, Principia Mathematica, 2nd edn., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927); the basic materials are treated in Vol. I, pp. 91-97, where the axioms are called 'primitive propositions'.
27. Gerhard Gentzen, 'Investigations into Logical Deduction', in The Collected Papers of Gerhard Gentzen, ed. M.E. Szabo (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1969), pp. 68-131; quotes from pp. 68, 80.
28. J. Fang, Logic Today. Basics and Beyond (Memphis: Paideia, 1979), p. 210.
29. On this distinction see my 'Informal Logic: The Two Schools', in Frans H. van Eemeren et al., eds., Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference of the International Society for the Study of Argumentation (Amsterdam: SIC SAT, 1999), pp. 348-352.
30. John Woods, 'Who Cares about the Fallacies?' in Frans H. van Eemeren et al., eds., Argumentation Illuminated (Amsterdam: International Society for the Study of Argumentation [SIC SAT]: 1992), p. 26.
31. E.g. S. Morris Engel, With Good Reason, 5th edn. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994).
32. Douglas Walton, Informal Logic. A Handbook for Critical Argumentation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 114f.
33. Johnson, op. at., pp. 263-265 and 'The Principle of Vulnerability', paper read at Conference 95 on Critical Thinking and Informal Logic, George Mason University, June 18, 1995. Johnson's distinction is illative core/dialectical tier. For reasons I cannot explore here I prefer semantic core/dialectical tier.
34. Stephen Toulmin et al, An Introduction to Reasoning, 2nd edn. (New York: Macmillan, 1984).
35. Stephen N. Thomas, Practical Reasoning in Natural Language (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1973).
36. Michael Scriven, Reasoning (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976)
37. Howard Kahane, Logic and Contemporary Rhetoric (Belmont: Wadsworth, 1971): Ralph H. Johnson and J. Anthony Blair, Logical Self-Defense (Toronto: McGraw-Hill-Ryerson, 1977). 'New wave' was introduced by Johnson and Blair; see Johnson, op. cit., p. 14.
38. I side with the Amsterdam School (Frans H. van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst, Speech Acts in Argumentative Discussions [Dordrecht: Foris, 1984], p. 93) in classifying the argument with one premise and one conclusion as a separate type.
39. Robert J. Yanal, '"Convergent" and "Linked" Reasons', American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Teaching Philosophy (Summer 1984), pp. 1-3.
40. Linked: Malcolm Acock, Informal Logic Examples and Exercises (Belmont: Wadsworth, 1985), p. 89.
41. Convergent: paraphrased from Philip K. Howard, The Death of Common Sense (New York: Random House, 1994), pp. 34-38.
42. Basic Logic (St. Paul: West Publishing, 1988).
43. David A. Conway, 'On the Distinction between Convergent and Linked Arguments', Informal Logic, Vol. XIII (1991), pp. 145-148.
44. Argument Structure, pp. 116-118.
45. John Wisdom, 'Gods', in Anthony Flew, ed., Logic and Language, First and Second Series (Garden City, NY: Doubleday [Anchor], 1965), p. 203.
46. J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 2nd edn., eds. J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisa (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 150f.
47. But let me report briefly what I do find. In Thomas, Instructor's Manual for Practical Reasoning in Natural Language, 2nd edn., 2 vols. (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1986), Exercises 2-1 and 2-2 contain 20 arguments diagrammed as linked. Of these I classify four as compound, i.e. containing arguments of more than one basic type such as linked and serial. This leaves 16 basic linked arguments. Thomas evaluates arguments on a scale from strongest to weakest as deductively valid, strong, moderate, weak, and nil. Of the sixteen, 6 classify as deductively valid or strong to deductively valid, and 6 classify as weak or nil-to-weak. No basic linked argument falls entirely in the moderate range, the remaining four being nil to moderate, weak to moderate, and moderate to strong. One would of course like to compare these with the evaluations of basic convergenta arguments. Unfortunately I find not a single basic convergent argument diagrammed and evaluated in the Thomas Solutions Manual. Acock (see note 37 above), diagrams and evaluates only occasionally. He has seven arguments I would diagram as basic linked, ten as basic convergent. But I cannot evaluate these or use them as evidence. I seek evidence to address a hypothesis here, and this is too close to manufacturing my own evidence. This also rules out my own Instructor's Manual to Accompany Critical Thinking, 2nd edn. (Newport News: Vale Press, 1997), in which 29 arguments are diagrammed basic linked or basic convergent. Yanal, in the Instructor's Manual for Basic Logic (St. Paul: West Publishing, 1988), makes extensive use of diagramming. But nearly all the basic arguments of interest to us are linked, and most are assessed as deductively valid or not based on formal features. So this is really not informal logic. Irving M. Copi and Keith Burgess-Jackson, in Informal Logic, 2nd edn. (New York: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 332-341, employ some diagramming but seem never to evaluate these arguments as weak or strong. One would have taken facilitating evaluation to be the main point of diagramming.
48. Robert H. Ennis, 'Identifying Implicit Assumptions,' Synthese, LI (1982), pp. 61-86.
49. Govier, Problems in Argument Analysis and Evaluation, p. 81f.
50. Hans V. Hansen, 'An Informal Logic Bibliography', Informal Logic XII (1990), pp. 155-184, the fullest I know of, contains over 900 items.
51. Reasoning (see note 32 above); the gap-filler example is on p. 81f; the three problems pp. 188-194.
52. Gerald M. Nosich, Reasons and Arguments (Belmont: Wadsworth, 1982), pp. 211-217; the linked gap-fillers are nos. 1, 2, and 3 (turns on a subtlety), and the one on p. 217.
53. Michael Burke, 'Unstated Premises', Informal Logic VII (1985), pp. 107-118.
54. Wayne Grennan, 'Are "Gap-Fillers" Missing Premises?' Informal Logic, XVI (1994), pp. 185-196.
55. James Gough and Christopher Tindale, '"Hidden" or "Missing" Premises', Informal Logic VII (1985), pp. 99-106.
56. Gough and Tindale, p. 100.
57. David Hitchcock, Critical Thinking (Toronto: Methuen, 1983).
58. Stephen Toulmin, The Uses of Argument (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958). Op. cit., pp. 98, 260.