Epistemic Normativity, Argumentation, and Fallacies - Springer Link

Epistemic Normativity, Argumentation, and Fallacies HARVEY SIEGEL University of Miami Department of Philosophy P.O. Box 248054 Coral Gables, FL 33124-4670 USA

and JOHN BIRO University of Florida Department of Philosophy P.O. Box 118545 Gainesville, FL 32611-8545 USA

ABSTRACT: In Biro and Siegel (1992) we argued that a theory of argumentation must fully engage the normativity of judgments about arguments, and we developed such a theory. In this paper we further develop and defend our theory. KEY WORDS: Argumentation, epistemology, epistemic normativity, normativity, fallacies, methodology.

INTRODUCTION

In Biro and Siegel (1992) we argued that a theory of argumentation must fully engage the normativity of judgments about arguments: it must provide criteria by which to evaluate the normative status of arguments; and it must explain the normative status that arguments have (that is, it must explain why a good argument is good and a bad one bad). We developed such a theory, according to which the relevant criterion is the ability of the premises of an argument to warrant belief in its conclusion, and the explanation of an argument’s normative status is given directly in terms of that ability. We applied the theory to the fallacy of begging the question, showing that among the various accounts currently advocated it alone could accomplish these tasks. Our earlier discussion, while successful, we believe, as far as it went, did not go far enough. In this paper we address some objections to the sort of theory we favor in the hope of clarifying certain important aspects of it further. We then apply our theory to some other fallacies to illustrate Argumentation 11: 277–292, 1997.  1997 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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its generality and explanatory power. We close with some methodological remarks about appropriate criteria by which theories in this domain should be judged. We begin by briefly rehearsing the argument for our claim that a theory of argumentation must engage the normativity of argumentation, and that that normativity must be construed as epistemic in nature.

NORMATIVITY AND THE ‘EPISTEMIC’ APPROACH TO ARGUMENTATION

On our view,1 an adequate theory of argumentation must conceive of it as fundamentally normative and must explain the normative judgments we make about particular arguments. We contrast normative theories with descriptive ones, which fail to explain why good arguments are good and bad ones bad.2 And we cash out normativity in epistemic terms: arguments aim at the achievement of knowledge or at least of justified belief; good arguments warrant their conclusions, bad arguments fail to do so. In particular, fallacies must be understood as epistemic failures: arguments which fail to produce knowledge of, or to justify belief in, their conclusions. For the case of the fallacy of begging the question, since the premises are not (in the argument in question) justifiable independently of the conclusion, they cannot provide such warrant. We call arguments that fail in this way ‘epistemically non-serious’ and suggest that epistemic seriousness is a necessary condition of non-fallaciousness (where an argument is to be understood as an attempt to effect a rational belief transition, or to justify as rational such a transition in oneself or in others – rather than merely a set of propositions related by validity in the logician’s sense). Insofar as arguments have the purpose of (at least conditionally) warranting their conclusions by providing (in their premises) good reasons for them, fallacies – and failed arguments more generally – must be seen as failures of rationality. Hence the centrality of the normative notion of rationality to argument theory: an argument succeeds to the extent that it renders belief rational.3 There is obviously much more to say concerning this approach to fallacy/argumentation theory. We hope that the remarks which follow will contribute to its further articulation and defense. We begin by considering briefly some general challenges to the approach offered by Jonathan E. Adler and Gyoªzoª Széll.

CRITICISMS OF THE EPISTEMIC APPROACH TO ARGUMENTATION

Adler (1993) criticizes epistemic accounts of fallacies – accounts which take it as a necessary condition for an argument’s being fallacious that it have ‘a tendency to produce false or unwarranted beliefs’ (263) – on the

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grounds that (1) such accounts unduly enlarge the class of fallacies, and (2) fallaciousness need not lead to unwarranted beliefs, but, rather, might harm argument practices. Adler discusses the (allegedly) epistemic account offered by Robert J. Fogelin and Timothy J. Duggan (1987). We agree with at least some of Adler’s criticisms of the Fogelin and Duggan account. But these criticisms do not seriously challenge our, or indeed any, genuinely epistemic account. Whatever the merits or shortcomings of the Fogelin/Duggan account, it is not, contrary to its superficial appearance, really an epistemic account. Adler, and for that matter Fogelin and Duggan themselves, are misled into thinking that it is by the appearance in it of epistemic expressions such as ‘false belief ’, ‘unfounded belief ’, and the like. But the presence of such expressions in an account does not make it an epistemic one. In this case, the explanandum – a tendency to produce beliefs of a certain sort (even if that sort is epistemically characterizable, e.g., as unfounded) – is a statistical fact. The explanans – whatever it turns out to be – must be a causal/psychological one. Neither statistical facts nor psychological explanations of them touch on the normative dimension of the notions of argument and fallacy in the way that (we have argued) is required for any adequate account of them. Since the Fogelin/Duggan account does not do so, it cannot be an epistemic account, notwithstanding their so labelling it and despite the presence of epistemic expressions in it. For this same reason, Adler’s criticisms of it cannot be regarded as criticisms of epistemic accounts. We will briefly show that those criticisms do not successfully challenge ours. Adler’s first criticism of Fogelin and Duggan is that their account is not limited to arguments, but is meant to apply to ‘any general procedure’ (266) for fixing beliefs, and is therefore unacceptably broad. We agree. But our account is so limited and therefore avoids this objection. Adler’s second criticism raises deep issues, some of which will be considered below in our discussion of Frans H. van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst’s ‘pragma-dialectical’ theory of argumentation and of fallacies. But we want to draw attention to the fact that our account of fallacies does not rest upon any characterization of argumentative practices, such as those conforming to the rules which (on van Eemeren and Grootendorst’s view) govern argumentative discourse; nor does it depend upon any actual tendency to generate false or unwarranted beliefs. Of course on our view of fallacies, the practice of reasoning fallaciously will have such a tendency. But having such a tendency is not what marks out an argument as fallacious; rather, what renders an argument fallacious is the inability of its premises to provide warrant for its conclusion. Consequently, Adler’s second criticism of ‘epistemic’ accounts of fallacies misses our account altogether. Adler’s point that increasing the number of false or unwarranted beliefs is not a necessary condition for something’s being a fallacy, is, we think,

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well taken. (Nor of course is it a sufficient one.) But one might ask: if fallaciousness need not lead to unwarranted beliefs, and yet might harm argumentative practices, what sort of harm would this be? It is unclear what could be meant by argumentative practices’ being ‘harmed’, other than that they lead to more false or unwarranted beliefs. But then, the harm with which Adler is here concerned is ultimately explicable only in terms of the epistemic considerations which motivate such an account in the first place. Consequently, Adler’s plausible claim here does nothing to obviate the need for an epistemic account. The main thing wrong with any approach that analyzes fallacies in terms of their consequences for either arguments or argumentative practices, however, is that before one worries about what fallaciousness might ‘lead to’, one has to understand what it is. It cannot be defined as something that ‘might harm argumentative practices’, for anything might to that. It must harm them in a particular way – namely, by rendering them more likely to produce false or unwarranted beliefs – and do so in a certain way – i.e., through the failure of an argument’s premises adequately to ground its conclusion. But as we have just noted, that is to grant that an epistemic account is the only adequate sort of account. Adler’s point that a fallacious argument need not lead to a conclusion that is unwarranted is correct – after all, that conclusion may be warranted by other premises. The crucial question is whether the premises of the argument in question provide warrant for the conclusion. What an epistemic account maintains is that their failing to do so is both a necessary and a sufficient condition of fallaciousness. The reason why these disputes between Fogelin and Duggan and Adler by-pass epistemic accounts is that, unlike the latter, they focus merely on the products of arguments and argumentative practices, rather than on how those products are produced. Whether an argument or a practice tends to produce true or justified beliefs is independent of whether it is adequate to do so. And whether an argument or argumentative practice is bad cannot be (just) a function of whether it produces or tends to produce false beliefs, for even good arguments can do that, given an uncooperative world or sufficiently weird psychologies. Consequently, an account of fallaciousness must focus on the relation between the premises and the conclusion of an argument, between the product and what is supposed to produce it. We think people miss this all-important point because of a common conflation of epistemic and causal/psychological factors. Only the former are internal to the concept of an argument (in the sense we explained in our earlier paper, that of connecting it with that of rational – that is, justified or warranted – belief transition) in the way required for a definition of what a good argument or a fallacy is.4 Széll (1995) is also critical of our epistemic account of fallacies (and, by implication, of argumentation generally). He distinguishes several different sorts of fallacies, and argues that not all fallacies involve epistemic


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difficulties: for example, fallacies of language, of (deductive) logic, and of dialectical procedure, while resulting in argumentative failure, do not involve any particularly epistemic shortcoming; consequently, it is a mistake to try to understand all fallacies (and argumentation) in epistemic terms. But this seems to us to be mistaken. Consider an argument which involves a fallacy of language – say, equivocation. Such an argument will fail to warrant its conclusion: that is the epistemic price the equivocator pays. If so, then for any (sort of ) fallacy – even, in Széll’s terms, a ‘grade one’ fallacy, i.e., a fallacy of language – fundamental theoretical understanding of it will turn on the fallacious argument’s inability to warrant its conclusion or to establish its conclusion as a new item of knowledge. Széll is right to point out that this may happen for a variety of reasons and that the feature responsible for its happening need not itself be a matter of distinctively epistemic failure. So we can agree that if, for example, the cause of the trouble is equivocation in the premises, that cause itself should not be characterized as an epistemic failure. But what it leads to, viz., the argument’s failure, must be, given the fact that the goal of argumentation is essentially epistemic. (Of course instances of argumentation can have other goals as well, e.g., to bore or entertain the audience, but these goals are clearly not what explanatory theories of argumentation set out to capture.) So far as we can see, then, ‘modularizing’ fallacies in Széll’s way (that is, locating different kinds of failures that may be responsible for the overall failure of an argument at different levels and requiring different treatments for them) does nothing to challenge our epistemic account of fallacies. Széll also defends van Eemeren and Grootendorst against our (1992) criticism that they slight the epistemic dimension of argumentation by saying that their theory is meant to focus on what he calls the dialectical (dispute-resolution) level and is thus not intended to speak to the same (epistemic) considerations as ours. We are not sure whether van Eemeren and Grootendorst would endorse this line of defense, since doing so would, it seems to us, be in conflict with their claim to be providing a complete and fully normative theory of argumentation. The line of defense offered here by Széll confronts van Eemeren and Grootendorst with a dilemma: either they intend to provide a complete account of argumentation, but fail to do so; or they succeed in providing a complete account of something, but that something is not argumentation. We develop this point further in the next section, in which we discuss van Eemeren and Grootendorst’s ‘pragma-dialectical’ theory of argumentation in more detail.

PRAGMA-DIALECTICS, ‘RATIONAL’ DISPUTE RESOLUTION, AND NORMATIVITY

Van Eemeren and Grootendorst have developed probably the most influential current account of argumentation. According to their ‘pragma-dialec-

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tical perspective’, ‘argumentative discourse’ is construed as ‘critical discussion’, which is in turn ‘conceived of as an interactional procedure aimed at resolving a difference of opinion through a regular exchange of speech acts.’ (van Eemeren and Grootendorst (1992: xiii)5 On the pragma-dialectical view, argumentation aims at dispute resolution, and the rules governing argumentative interchanges put forward by van Eemeren and Grootendorst are rules which, if followed, contribute to such resolution. Fallacies are conceived of as violations of these rules. Such a view might initially be thought to lean too heavily in the direction of rhetoric and persuasion – after all, if you and I are in a dispute, and one of us manages to convince the other to change his or her mind, then our original dispute has been resolved, irrespective of the rationality of our argumentative exchange. Van Eemeren and Grootendorst are keenly aware of this and want to distance themselves decisively from such a rhetorical approach. On their view argumentation has a crucial normative component; they view argumentative success not simply as effective dispute resolution, but as rational resolution: Scholars of argumentation are interested in how argumentative discourse can be used to justify or refute a standpoint in a rational way. In our opinion, argumentative discourse should therefore be studied as a specimen of normal verbal communication and interaction and it should, at the same time, be measured against a certain standard of reasonableness. (1992: 5, emphases added) . . . [We treat] argumentation as a rational means to convince a critical opponent and not as mere persuasion. The dispute should not just be terminated, no matter how, but resolved by methodically overcoming the doubts of a rational judge in a well-regulated critical discussion. (1992: 10–11)

What ‘standard of reasonableness’ do van Eemeren and Grootendorst invoke? They write: For dialecticians who maintain a critical outlook [as van Eemeren and Grootendorst identify themselves], reasonableness is not solely determined by the norm of intersubjective agreement but also depends on the ‘external’ norm that this agreement should be reached in a valid manner. As they regard all argumentation as part of a critical discussion between two parties who are trying to resolve a difference of opinion, their extra criterion for reasonableness is whether an argumentative procedure is adequate for achieving this goal. Because of the linking of the ideal of reasonableness to the methodic conduct of a critical discussion, the dialectical approach can be characterized as criticalrationalist. (1992: 6–7)6

The ideal of reasonableness is cashed out here in terms of dialectical method: certain dialectical moves in argumentative discourse are reasonable, others not. How are the reasonable ones distinguished from the unreasonable ones? By seeing whether they conduce to the achievement of the goal of such discourse: the resolution of a dispute.7 This seems to land van Eemeren and Grootendorst back in the rhetorical camp, since a dispute can in fact be resolved in unreasonable as well as in reasonable ways. Van Eemeren and Grootendorst attempt to avoid this by invoking a further characterization of the ideal of reasonableness:


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. . . scholars of argumentation give shape to their ideals of reasonableness by presenting a particular model of what is involved in acting reasonably in argumentative discourse. An ideal model aims at providing an adequate grasp of argumentative discourse by specifying which modes of arguing are acceptable to a rational judge in view of a certain philosophical conception of reasonableness. (1992: 7, emphasis added)

In the passage we cited just before this one, the ‘extra criterion for reasonableness’ is ‘whether an argumentative procedure is adequate for achieving’ the resolution of a difference of opinion. As we just suggested, this ‘extra criterion’ is not a criterion of reasonableness at all, since disputes can be resolved in unreasonable as well as in reasonable ways. In the last passage cited, the ‘extra criterion’ is not adequacy for resolving a dispute, but rather dispute resolution by way of ‘modes of arguing’ which ‘are acceptable to a rational judge in view of a certain philosophical conception of reasonableness.’ Now this appears to avoid the slide into rhetoric, since not any argumentative move will constitute a means of dispute resolution which will be acceptable to a rational judge; if the judge has a philosophical conception of reasonableness which rules out certain argumentative moves as unreasonable, not any dispute resolution will be judged by that judge to be a reasonable one. We applaud this embrace of ‘criticalrationalism’, and the concomitant rejection of mere resolution as a standard of reasonableness. But it must be noted that the specification of the ‘extra criterion of reasonableness’ is so far completely without content, since a move which is adequate for the resolution of a dispute will be a reasonable one only if it is judged to be reasonable by a rational judge. What makes a move reasonable? It is so if so deemed by a rational judge. What makes a judge rational? So far, we have no idea. Until van Eemeren and Grootendorst explain and defend their preferred ‘philosophical conception of reasonableness’ in accordance with which a rational judge will decide on the reasonableness of argumentative moves, they have not in fact articulated the extra criterion of reasonableness which they agree they need if their view is to have a normative dimension missing from rhetorical approaches to argumentation.8 Moreover, as the several cited passages amply demonstrate, van Eemeren and Grootendorst understand ‘reasonableness’ in terms of particular argumentative ‘moves’: it is particular types of speech acts (in particular contexts) that are or are not reasonable. On this view, reasonableness is not a function of the ability of a speech act – i.e., a premise, when uttered – to provide warrant for its standpoint – i.e., the conclusion in question. But then their sense of ‘reasonableness’, whatever else it is, is not related to the epistemic sense of the term we have been emphasizing throughout this discussion. In fact, we think that van Eemeren and Grootendorst are left with a dilemma: either their account is at bottom a descriptivist or rhetorical one which fails to account for the normativity of judgments concerning arguments, or it does account for that normativity, in which case it is in fact an epistemic account of the sort we have been advocating. To the extent

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that van Eemeren and Grootendorst are committed to evaluating argumentative moves in terms of a philosophical view of rationality and/or reasonableness, as they say they are, they are in fact advocating the sort of epistemic view of argumentation we favor. But it is unclear whether they are in fact committed to this, since the only substantive thing they say concerning an ‘extra criterion of reasonableness’ is that moves meeting it be adequate for dispute resolution, and this seems a patently rhetorical criterion which neither constitutes nor depends upon either a philosophical view of rationality/reasonableness or an epistemic conception of argumentation. In fact, it seems to us that van Eemeren and Grootendorst want to have it both ways: they want argumentation to answer to epistemic criteria of rationality – ‘when we explain our pragma-dialectical theoretical viewpoints against the background of critical rationalist philosophy . . . we give shape to the ideal of reasonableness is critical discussion’ (1992: 10) – and also to be evaluated strictly in terms of dispute resolution. As we argued in our (1992), they cannot so have it. The problem facing van Eemeren and Grootendorst here, insofar as they embrace epistemic criteria of argument evaluation at all, is in fact a variant of the same problem we identified earlier in our consideration of Adler and of Fogelin and Duggan: all of these accounts, while they focus on the epistemic status of the conclusion, fail to focus on the epistemic relationship between premises and conclusion. In so doing, they in fact altogether fail to provide a theory of argument, since an argument is essentially a matter of such relationships. In any case, either the ‘external’ criteria which van Eemeren and Grootendorst embrace are genuinely independent of rhetorical/causal considerations concerning persuasiveness and dispute resolution, or they are not. If they are not, then their account collapses into the sort of rhetorical account from which they are at pains to distance themselves. If they are, then it in fact constitutes a commitment to our sort of epistemic approach. Such a commitment creates a deep problem for the internal consistency of van Eemeren and Grootendorst’s overall position, because the two criteria – dispute resolution, and epistemic legitimacy – pull (sometimes) in opposite directions, and that position provides no way of ranking these conflicting criteria. This difficulty infects van Eemeren and Grootendorst’s account of fallacies as well.9 According to that account, an argument’s fallaciousness has nothing to do with the warrant its premises (fail to) afford to its conclusion, but rather is constituted by a violation of one of van Eemeren and Grootendorst’s ten rules governing argumentative exchanges in critical discussions. These rules are intended to aid in the parties’ attempts to resolve their dispute; a fallacy is committed when one of the rules is violated, which violation harms the prospects of achieving such a resolution. But, as Blair and Johnson (1993: 189) point out, an argumentative move which is counter-productive with respect to the goal of dispute


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resolution, and is thus fallacious on the pragma-dialectical account, may nevertheless be perfectly correct with respect to its reasoning – that is, the reasons offered for the relevant conclusion may render it warranted. An argument can be pragma-dialectically fallacious even when its conclusion is warranted by its premises; similarly, an argument can be pragma-dialectically non-fallacious, in that its articulation violates none of the rules governing argumentative discourse and even contributes to the resolution of the relevant dispute, even when its conclusion is completely unwarranted by its premises. Consequently, the pragma-dialectical account of fallaciousness, in terms of the tendency to promote or frustrate the resolution of disputes, completely by-passes the issue of the ability of the premises of an argument to justify its conclusion. In this sense van Eemeren and Grootendorst’s theory of fallacies misses entirely the epistemic, normative dimension that we are claiming is central to the theory of argumentation and of fallacy, and has, despite their insistence to the contrary, little to do with rational dispute resolution.

FALLACIES

According to the epistemic conception of argumentation we are defending, fallacies fail as arguments because they fail, for systematic reasons, to render belief in their conclusions rational. In Biro and Siegel (1992), we applied our epistemic theory to the fallacy of begging the question. In this section we apply it to some other fallacies, to illustrate its generality and explanatory power. The traditional list of fallacies notoriously includes argumentative failures of very different kinds. In some cases, the fallacy consists in violating some rule of logic. In these cases, since the problem supposedly lies in the form of the argument, all particular arguments having the form in question are judged fallacious. Unlike these so-called formal fallacies, however, the traditional list also contains examples of fallacies where arguments sharing a certain form are sometimes judged fallacious and sometimes not, depending on some other properties. This is why purely logical theories of fallacies are bound to fail and why many have looked – following hints already to be found in Aristotle – to epistemic, dialectical, or rhetorical dimensions of argumentation for a more adequate account. To take just one example in illustration, one to which we will apply our theory below: the fallacy in (some) arguments from authority (and ad hominem arguments generally) obviously cannot be captured by the hallowed logictext definition of a fallacious argument as one that seems to be valid but is not.10 This is so because (a) such arguments are either obviously valid or obviously invalid, depending on whether certain suppressed premises are supplied and (b) they are sometimes judged to be good arguments and sometimes not, depending on our view of the truth of the premises. Thus

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in ‘The Pope is infallible; the Pope opposes contraception; therefore contraception is wrong,’ everything depends on what we think of the premises. Those who reject the major premise, say, will for this reason judge the argument fallacious. But note that the very same people may well endorse an argument such as this: ‘What our best science tells us about the origin of human life is correct; the best science tells us that humans have evolved; hence we should believe in evolution’. These two arguments have the same underlying logical form,11 so if one is valid, so is the other. So the contents of the differing judgments made about them must be spelled out in some other way. This is not to deny that there are some fallacies to which the logic-text definition does apply. Later we will argue that even when this is the case, the real reason why arguments that commit a logical fallacy are judged bad is that, while pretending to, they fail to advance us epistemically, and that a theory that recognizes this explicitly has explanatory advantages over one that does not (cannot) do so. But first we want to show in more detail how our theory handles the fallacy of arguing from authority. We think that this fallacy provides a particularly clear example of one that can be explicated only in epistemic terms; we also think that it provides a model for the proper treatment of ad hominem fallacies generally. What is wrong with arguing from authority? The short answer is, nothing – if the authority is a good one (for the conclusion in question). The reason why arguing from authority as such is sometimes classified as a fallacy is that it is not distinguished from arguing merely from putative authority. When we rest a conclusion on an appeal to authority without being ready to justify (a) the genuineness of the authority we are appealing to and (b) its relevance to the conclusion we are trying to establish, we are not giving an argument for the conclusion, in the sense of providing rational grounds for believing it. The point of giving an argument is, generally speaking, to show that knowing, or being justified in believing, the premises warrants knowing, or being justified in believing, the conclusion. If one succeeds in doing this, to oneself or to another, one succeeds in enlarging one’s or another’s knowledge or stock of justified beliefs. An argument that does this is, in our terms, an epistemically serious one; arguments of all forms, valid or invalid, can fail to do it. Equally important, one’s judgment of whether an argument from authority is epistemically serious in this sense depends on one’s view of the epistemic status of the premises (that is, on whether one thinks one knows or is justified in believing that the authority appealed to is genuine and relevant), and not on whether or not the argument succeeds in persuading anyone. It is easy to overlook this allimportant difference, for in the limiting case, where one is one’s own audience, these two things are inseparable: one is persuaded when and only when one judges positively the epistemic status of the premises. Yet this is clearly not so in the case of two-party argument: one’s opponent may


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fail to be persuaded in spite of one’s own confidence in the epistemic status of one’s premises, or she may be persuaded even when one is merely putting forward as grounds for the conclusion a putative authority one does not oneself accept but hopes that one’s opponent will. Paying too much attention to the latter kind of case, that of the deliberate, sophistical use of false authority to persuade an opponent, is one thing that leads to the traditional view that arguments from authority are always fallacious. Another is focussing on the case where an arguer (perhaps a solitary one) is indeed convinced of the genuineness and relevance of the authority to which she is appealing but is, in our view, mistaken in that conviction. Each of these pictures of argument from authority mistakes one species of such argument for the genus and, having done so, is unable to account for the obvious fact that we regard some arguments from authority as perfectly good arguments and are right in doing so. In this way they fail to save the phenomena and fail to provide an explanation of them. The application of this account to other kinds of ad hominem arguments is straightforward.12 The most obvious kind of example is one which is essentially a reverse of the argument from authority, what we might call the ‘argument from lack of authority’. Here we attempt to persuade ourselves or our audience that some property of the advocate of a certain claim justifies us in rejecting that advocacy as providing reason for the claim. Again, everything turns – should turn – on the genuineness and relevance of the property in question. When it is really present and when its presence bears on whether the advocacy of the claim by its defender provides warrant for our not believing it, there is nothing wrong with appealing to it.13 (It is, of course, a mistake to think that doing so is, in and of itself, to provide an argument for the denial of the claim. Whatever the rhetorical intentions and consequences, the only conclusion for which one has an argument, strictly speaking, is one against accepting the claim without other grounds being offered.) Thus in the third of the three variants of ad hominem argument distinguished by van Eemeren and Grootendorst (1992: 111), undermining one’s opponent’s credibility by drawing attention to ‘the contradiction in one’s opponent’s words or between his words and his deeds’ is insufficient to establish the falsity of his claim. All that can be shown in this way is that the claim continues to stand in need of support.14 We suggest that all ad hominem arguments, whatever superficial differences may exist among them, are, at bottom, cases of what we have just called ‘arguments from lack of authority’. In every case, such arguments are good when, and only when, their premises provide warrant or grounds for their (negative) conclusion; and they are bad when, and only when, their premises fail to do so. Thus van Eemeren and Grootendorst are wrong to say that every use of ad hominem argument ‘must be regarded as a fallacy’ (1992: 110). If one’s opponent is really ‘unreliable, inconsistent, or biased’ (ibid.), and these faults are relevant to his authority on

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the subject in question, then drawing attention to them to undermine his credibility is a perfectly legitimate thing to do. They are right to point out that this will not in and of itself prove anything about ‘the intrinsic merits of the opponent’s standpoint’ (1992: 111). But neither is it, as they suggest, ‘aimed at his person’ (ibid.); its target is, rather, the probative force of his support of the thesis in question. Whether his arguments for the thesis are any good is an independent question conceptually (if not practically, given the audience’s possible reluctance to examine them objectively). Let us now return, briefly, to the so-called logical or formal fallacies. Here it may seem that the same considerations cannot apply. Arguments involving an undistributed middle term, for example, are, it may be said, always fallacious, hence their fallaciousness must lie in this formal feature. But there are at least two reasons for thinking that this is a mistake. First, the feature in question is, arguably, not really a formal one, involving, as it does, the meaning of the middle term. Second, there are other fallacies properly classified as logical, if any are, where differing judgments as to fallaciousness seem possible analogously to the non-logical cases such as the ad hominem ones just discussed. Consider affirmation of the consequent. I believe that q. I come to believe that p entails q. Have I not, thereby, acquired some grounds for believing that p? And would you, who, knowing that I believed that q, pointed out to me that p entailed q in order to provide such grounds, have necessarily committed a fallacy? It seems to us that the answers to these questions are, respectively, ‘yes’ and ‘no’. In some situations, arguing in this way is perfectly legitimate; it amounts to offering empirical evidence for p. (Of course, such an argument could not prove, in the strict sense of ‘proof,’ that p. But not all arguments are intended to be proofs and not all good arguments are. In particular, good inductive arguments often involve affirming the consequent. To use an example van Eemeren and Grootendorst (1992: 181) concede to be a good argument: ‘If it snows, the roofs turn white; the roofs are white; therefore it has snowed.’) In other cases this pattern of argument is defective. Only an epistemic account such as our own can explain this fact about logical or formal fallacies. Before concluding this brief discussion of how our theory applies to fallacies other than that of begging the question (in the context of which it was originally developed), we want to recall for the reader our response to Adler’s objection to epistemic theories. He – and, ironically enough, as we noted, the allegedly epistemic theorists Fogelin and Duggan too – confused the causal question of whether an argument (or an argument type) tends to lead to true (or justified) beliefs with the epistemic question of whether an argument warrants belief in its conclusion. We have urged that only the latter can be relevant to the normative standing of an argument and that our actual judgments about arguments confirm this. The results of this application of our theory to some other fallacies of very different kinds bear this out. Whether or not a particular argument from authority


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(or an instance of some other kind of ad hominem argument) is fallacious does not depend on whether it actually leads someone to a belief that is true (or justified on other grounds). Nor could arguing from authority in general be classified as arguing fallaciously, even if it tended to lead to false or unjustified beliefs (which, to say the least, it is not obvious that it does). This is because, as we have argued throughout, fallaciousness depends not on such causal matters but on epistemic ones. Little further discussion is needed, we think, to show that the results of this discussion buttress our criticism of van Eemeren and Grootendorst’s account of argumentation in terms of rational dispute-resolution. For, as we argued above, their theory also commits a version of the same mistake: they, too, conflate causal/psychological questions concerning disputeresolution with epistemic questions concerning the warrant provided by the premises of an argument for its conclusion.

CONCLUDING METHODOLOGICAL REMARKS: HOW SHOULD THEORIES OF FALLACY AND ARGUMENTATION BE ASSESSED?

Underlying our defense of the epistemic theory of fallacy and argumentation are a number of general views about the appropriate criteria by which to judge theories in this domain. First, we believe that it is important, as far as possible, to have a unified account of the different sorts of failures arguments are heir to. This requires a theory whose central explanatory concepts are at a level of sufficient generality. At the same time, these concepts must not be pitched at a level so general that they fail to distinguish the failures of interest (those properly called ‘fallacy’) from other failures of arguments, e.g. unpersuasiveness. Throughout our defense of our theory, we have tried to show that only epistemic concepts satisfy this double requirement. We do think that fallacies form a natural kind and that an epistemic account succeeds in capturing that kind’s essence. It is only because of this that the notion of a fallacy retains a link with those of argumentation and rationality. Any theory of fallacies that relies on non-epistemic concepts, be these rhetorical, dialectical, psychological or whatever else, will end up either severing the link between fallacies and argumentation conceived as essentially a means to rational belief change or, in retaining a link with argumentation, turning such belief change itself into something non-rational. Either option seems to us untrue both to the phenomena (i.e., to the judgments we actually make in assessing arguments) and to the traditional conception of fallacies. This is not to say that the traditional list of fallacies should, or, indeed, can, be regarded as sacrosanct. It may well turn out that some items on that rather rag-tag list do not belong to the natural kind a good theory succeeds in isolating and explicating. As long as the exceptions are minor

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and their exclusion well-motivated, this will not impugn the explanatory adequacy of such a theory. What matters in choosing among competing theories is their respective overall explanatory success, and in this regard, while open to challenges, we still see ours as doing better than its rivals. It accounts better than they for the judgments we make pre-theoretically about whether an argument is fallacious or not, and, unlike them, it explains the content of these judgments in terms of conceptual truths about rational argument.

NOTES 1

See also our other relevant writings, cited in Biro and Siegel (1992). Of course we are not the only ones to defend an epistemic account of argumentation. Other analyses/defenses include those by Blair and Johnson (1993), Feldman (1994), and Lumer (1990, 1991). 2 One might think that a descriptive theory of argumentation is impossible: as Susan Haack has pointed out (in conversation), any theory which acknowledges the distinction between validity and invalidity is ipso facto normative, since ‘valid’ has normative content. Haack is, of course, right about this. But some theories which draw this distinction do not satisfactorily explain why valid arguments are to be valued or preferred, or they attempt to explain this without any reference to the quality of the argument in question. For example, a theory which regards arguments as ‘valid’ if they succeed in persuading their audience to accept their conclusions, without regard to the ability of the premises to support those conclusions, assesses ‘validity’ independently of the degree to which the premises of arguments provide warrant for their conclusions. (This is not, of course, the logical notion of validity, which is itself clearly normative.) Such a theory, while normative in the sense Haack notes, is nevertheless insufficiently normative on our view, since it ignores the epistemic properties of arguments, which, we claim, must underlie any normative judgment in this domain. See Biro and Siegel (1992) for further discussion of non-normative theories. 3 For further development of this theme, see Biro and Siegel (1992: Section 3, esp. 96). Feldman (1994: 176) offers an ‘epistemic account of good arguments’ to which we are quite sympathetic, according to which a good argument is characterized as ‘one that provides good reasons for its conclusion, one that makes belief in its conclusion justified.’ 4 Thinking in terms of the distinction between illocutionary and perlocutionary dimensions of speech acts may be helpful here. The distinction we are relying on is analogous to one that needs to be drawn between two sorts of connections: that between the meaning of an utterance and its illocutionary force, on the one hand, and that between its meaning and its perlocutionary force, on the other. The former is internal and analytic, whereas the latter is external and contingent. 5 In what follows, all parenthetical page references to van Eemeren and Grootendorst are to their (1992). 6 Van Eemeren’s and Grootendorst’s insistence that not any resolution will do – that, for a dispute to be properly or adequately resolved, some additional, ‘external’ ‘correctness’ or ‘problem validity’ criterion must be met – is emphasized throughout their discussion, e.g. at (1992: 30, 34, 158–159, 162–164, 169), and the entire Chapter 17 (1992: 184–194), which presupposes the existence and relevance to argument evaluation of standards of reasoning which apply independently of the pragmatic purpose of dispute resolution. 7 One might amend this formulation by saying that reasonable moves are distinguished from unreasonable ones by seeing whether they conduce to the rational resolutions of disputes, but this would be unhelpful, since it would uninformatively identify reasonable moves as those which enhanced the rationality of dispute-resolutions. In order to tell the reasonable


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from the unreasonable moves, we would need to be able to distinguish the rational resolutions from the non- or irrational ones. But this is the very thing that the original distinction is supposed to help us do. So this reformulation is not an improvement over the formulation in the text. The cited passage says that a dialectical move in a critical discussion is reasonable if it is adequate for achieving the goal of resolving a difference of opinion, but this seems to us too strong, since a move can be reasonable even though it does not suffice to bring about the resolution the parties to the dispute seek. Conversely, an unreasonable move can suffice. But we will not pursue this point further here. 8 Of course we think we have at least begun to articulate such a view, according to which the ‘extra criterion’ is explicitly epistemic. See our (1992). 9 See their (1992: Part II, esp. 102–106). 10 Hamblin (1970); for critical discussion see Biro (1977). 11 We say ‘underlying logical form’ because we have deliberately kept the examples unregimented with respect to their form in order to display their real-world character. But it will, we trust, be readily seen that the surface differences between the two arguments (e.g., that only one involves a premise with an overtly evaluative predicate, or that the normativity of only one of the conclusions is explicit in its syntax) are not matters of the arguments’ logical form. 12 See van Eemeren and Grootendorst (1992: 111 ff.); Walton (1985). 13 A good one is: ‘The Pope believes that humans did not evolve; but the Pope has no relevant expertise in evolutionary biology; therefore, we should not accept (on the basis of his alleged authority, which is not genuine) that humans did not evolve.’ This is a good argument from lack of authority, we think, because the alleged lack of authority is genuine and is relevant to whether or not we should accept the belief in question. Of course if we are wrong about either its genuineness or its relevance, then the argument turns out to be a bad one. Moreover, even if it is a good one, the argument does not provide any positive reason for believing that humans did evolve. For that we must look elsewhere, presumably to science. All that the good argument warrants is our not accepting, on the basis of the Pope’s alleged authority, his judgment that humans did not evolve. 14 Compare the view of Socratic dialectic according to which all it can show is the interlocutor’s inconsistency, rather than the denial of the thesis he has advanced. (For arguments for and against such a view of elenchus, see Vlastos (1971, 1983), Brickhouse and Smith (1994: esp. Chs. 1–2), and Benson (1987).)

REFERENCES Adler, J. E.: 1993, ‘Critique of An Epistemic Account of Fallacies’, Argumentation 7, 263–272. Benson, H.: 1987, ‘The Problem of the Elenchus Reconsidered’, Ancient Philosophy 7, 67– 85. Biro, J.: 1977, ‘Rescuing “Begging the Question” ’, Metaphilosophy 8(4), 257–271. Biro, J. and H. Siegel: 1992, ‘Normativity, Argumentation, and An Epistemic Theory of Fallacies’, in F. H. van Eemeren, R. Grootendorst, J. A. Blair and C. A. Willard (eds.), Argumentation Illuminated, SICSAT, Amsterdam, pp. 81–103. Blair, J. A. and R. H. Johnson: 1993, ‘Dissent in Fallacyland, Part 1: Problems with van Eemeren and Grootendorst’, in R. E. McKerrow (ed.), Argument and the Postmodern Challenge: Proceedings of the Eighth SCA/AFA Conference on Argumentation, Speech Communication Association, Annandale, VA, pp. 188–190. Brickhouse, T. C. and N. D. Smith: 1994, Plato’s Socrates, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Eemeren, F. H. van and R. Grootendorst: 1992, Argumentation, Communication, and

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Fallacies: A Pragma-Dialectical Perspective, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, New Jersey. Feldman, R.: 1994, ‘Good Arguments’, in F. F. Schmitt (ed.), Socializing Epistemology: The Social Dimensions of Knowledge, Roman and Littlefield, pp. 159–188. Fogelin, R. J. and T. J. Duggan: 1987, ‘Fallacies’, Argumentation 1, 255–262. Hamblin, C. H.: 1970, Fallacies, Methuen, London. Lumer, C.: 1990, Praktische Argumentationstheorie: Theoretische Grundlagen, Praktische Begrundung und Regeln Wichtiger Argumentationsarten, Vieweg, Braunschweig, Germany. Lumer, C.: 1991, ‘Structure and Function of Argumentations – An Epistemological Approach to Determining Criteria for the Validity and Adequacy of Argumentations’, in F. H. van Eemeren, R. Grootendorst, J. A. Blair and C. A. Willard (eds.), Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Argumentation, vol. 1A, SICSAT, Amsterdam, pp. 98–107. Széll, G. Á.: 1995, ‘Levels of Argumentative Rationality’, in F. H. van Eemeren, R. Grootendorst, J. A. Blair and C. A. Willard (eds.), Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Argumentation, SICSAT, Amsterdam, pp. 300–307. Vlastos, G.: 1971, The Philosophy of Socrates, Anchor Books, New York. Vlastos, G.: 1983, ‘The Socratic Elenchus’, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 1, 27–58. Walton, D. N.: 1985, Arguer’s Position: A Pragmatic Study of Ad Hominem Attack, Criticism, Refutation and Fallacy, Greenwood Press, Westport, CT.