Making an Argument
The Engagement Clinic is a group of long time RL teachers who have put together a course about rational thinking. The group specifically hopes to give people tools to help them navigate a world full of misinformation and disinformation. The classes are Sundays at am Linden time. If you are interested let me know and I'll connect you.
This week's class talked about making an argument. An argument in this context is not like a fight or quarrel. It's a set of statements that persuasively support a conclusion. There's even a fairly recent formal definition of an argument from 1970 by Stephen Toulmin that apparently contrasts to more ancient ideas of an argument. I'd guess that he was trying to get rhetoric out.
The idea isn't unfamiliar. You make a claim, provide relevant premises assumed to be true, provide evidence and then come to a conclusion (called a warrant). An argument whose logic is sound but has bad premises is a 'valid' argument. An argument has to be logically valid and also have true premises to be considered to be a 'sound' argument.
In everyday discourse it is rare that all of the parts of the argument are explicitly stated. When Zappa sang "Watch out where the huskies go' and concluded 'don't you eat that yellow snow' I think he was making a sound argument with a lot of bits left unsaid.
In fact, in popular culture making a complete sound argument is quite rare. A reason for that might be that the complete argument generally has lots of premises and evidence that everyone in a culture shares and it is both boring and condescending to repeat it all. I'd say it's the sort of social force that creates the kind of intellectual silos that are so common these days. We tend to gather with people who share our information and premises.
I think that the main reason that it's so hard for people to communicate across belief boundaries is that it's hard for people to make sense of each other if their intellectual premises differ. Each can seem crazy or bad to the other.
20 or 30 years ago when Intelligent Design and Creation Science were all the rage I found to my pleasure that a lot of those people were eager to discuss their views. We'd have challenging and enlightening discussions that would go on for years and we'd part as good friends because we understood each other pretty well. We found that we actually shared most of our premises and information with a thin gloss of disagreement.
One of the reasons to make an argument is to be persuasive but outside of disciplines like science or medicine or law or even a discussion group, a Toulmin type argument is rarely persuasive. We are bombarded with irrational arguments all the time from ads to politicians who never speak the truth that are way more persuasive, if persuasion is causing people to act in a certain way.
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.