Investigación Acción Participativa

H C D E F A B

Figure 4.9 Linked, serial, and single argument.

would go along with H in a linked argument supporting G. It is often a matter of how much depth you want to go into in analyzing an argument that determines whether it is useful to add additional assumptions that were not explicitly stated in a case but that might play some role in how the argumentation in the case is to be criticized or evaluated.

In this textbook, we can’t go any further into the four techniques for cleaning up a text of discourse prior to diagramming the argumentation in it. Suffice it to say that such an operation is based on the critic’s under- standing of natural language discourse. There is no mechanical set of rules that can be given. Thus, below, some cautionary remarks about the process are added. What needs to be seen is that without some process of trans- forming the natural language discourse, with all its idiosyncrasies, into an argument diagram, there is no possibility of applying critical argumenta- tion methods to real cases of everyday arguments of the kinds encountered in magazines and newspapers.

Normally, an argument in a media text has the format of a dialogue as its normative structure even although the intended readership or audience has no active role as respondents in the dialogue. But the structure of the argument is a dialogue, normatively speaking, because the reader (or audience member) should raise critical questions about the argument he or she has been presented for acceptance. However, care is needed in reconstructing such texts of discourse. In many cases, the media discourse is not itself a direct argument but a report of someone else’s argument that the media text may then support or endorse (or argue against). Care is needed to separate, in such cases, the original argument and the media report of it – a second-hand account that may be highly selective. And remember, you may not have access to the text of discourse of the original argument.

EXERCISE 4.7

Apply the process of transformation in order to identify the premises and conclusions in the following natural language texts of discourse. Draw an argument diagram to represent the ultimate conclusion and the reasons given to support it. Cite evidence from the text of discourse to support each step in your process of transformation.

(a) Spray Nine claims that it kills the HIV virus on a dry surface in thirty seconds. But Bob Howard, of the Centers for Disease Control, says that the HIV virus would die in thirty seconds on a dry surface even if nothing was put on it. It seems, then, that you aren’t really getting any additional safety by using Spray Nine. I don’t think I am going to buy this product to protect me from HIV transmission.

(b) “Don’t you wish we could just do away with CFCs? In a way we can – if we cool our buildings with natural gas. Natural gas absorp- tion cooling equipment cools with water, rather than with CFCs, which deplete the ozone layer. It also has fewer moving parts than conventional cooling systems, which means maintenance costs are lower. And, because it costs much less to operate, it cuts the energy costs of cooling – by up to 50%. There’s another big benefit, too. It saves electricity during the heat of the summer, when demand is at its highest. As a result, we can help our cities avoid brownouts. And help reduce the need for power plants. Best of all, we can help America balance the use of its energy resources. No doubt about it, natural gas is a high-tech, low-cost way to keep cool without CFCs. It’s a cool way to help save our ozone layer, too” (American Gas Association, Wall Street Journal, April 10, 1995, p. A19).

(c) “The Japanese are not simply masterful adapters of other people’s works. They make them their own, contributing flair in design and efficiency in manufacture. These qualities derive in part from a desire for simplicity. From chairs to soy sauce bottles, Japanese designs offer a clean, minimalist profile. Space is precious in Japan, so products that don’t waste it are particularly valued. The most obvious example is in the miniaturization of electronic devices. Thirty years ago, Sharp Corporation introduced the first solid-state calculator. It was described as desk-top even though at 25 kilograms it weighed nearly as much as the desk on which it sat. Today the calculator is small enough to fit in a pocket. Then there is crafts- manship. Japanese cars began to outsell their competitors not only because of their pleasing designs but also because they were very well made. In objects as disparate as sewing machines, household

8. Summary 169

furniture and motorcycles, the Japanese have achieved visual har- mony and elegance. Anyone acquainted with rollerblading has the Japanese to thank, or blame. In 1969, Yoshisada Horiuchi designed a booted skate with four wheels mounted in a line. An Ameri- can invented an in-line skate in the 19th century, but his design didn’t catch on, apparently lacking the Japanese elegance” (“Japan Excels by Design,” The Economist, reprinted in the Globe and Mail, April 10, 1995, p. A9).

EIGHT

Summary

There are four basic types of argument structure central to argument dia- gramming. A single argument presents only one premise that is used all by itself as the basis offered to support the conclusion. In a linked argument, the premises function together to support the conclusion. In a conver- gent argument, each premise functions by itself to fulfill the probative function. Thus a convergent argument can be viewed as several different arguments used to support the same conclusion. In a serial argument, the conclusion of one argument becomes a premise of the next argument used in the sequence of reasoning. In a divergent argument, two propositions are inferred as separate conclusions from the same premise. In some cases, it is not a straightforward matter to tell whether the argument is linked or convergent. As a basis for determining whether the argument is linked or convergent, four kinds of evidence are used: indicator words, inference structure, the blackout test, and the context of dialogue. In cases where there is insufficient evidence to determine firmly whether an argument is linked or convergent, it is best to diagram it as convergent.

An incomplete argument is an argument with a statement, a premise, or conclusion that was not explicitly stated in the text of discourse of the given case but that needs to be made explicit in order to offer a basis for critically evaluating the argument as a whole. The process of filling in unstated premises or conclusions is part of a more general process called transformation. The four kinds of transformations used to make up an argument diagram from a given text of discourse are deletion, addition, permutation, and substitution. Some premises or conclusions that were not explicitly stated may have to be filled in to make the argument useful to prove something that contributes to settling an issue in a dialogue. Such an argument may assume that an audience will fill in these missing premises or draw the unstated conclusions by themselves. If these missing parts are left out, however, the arguer’s reasoning may not be properly represented.

An implicit premise or conclusion needs to be marked as such in an argument reconstruction (by using a convention on the diagram, to sep- arate it from explicit premises and conclusions). Thus, such an implicit premise, it must always be remembered, is being attributed to the arguer on a basis of presumption only, when the textual evidence justifies such an addition to the case. But in the end, judging whether a proposition should be inserted as an unstated addition to an argument is best done on a contextual basis of determining how the argument is being used in the context of dialogue in a given case. Judgments of how to complete incomplete arguments are best done on a case-by-case basis, utilizing the evidence from the context of dialogue.

The examples studied before the first six sections of this chapter are meant to be clear and straightforward in exhibiting simple illustrative cases of arguments. But the reality of diagramming natural language argu- mentation, as indicated in section7, can be much more difficult. In deal- ing with difficult cases of the kind that are encountered in many cases of real texts of discourse, arguments need to be re-expressed by transform- ing them. One needs to identify a set of premises and a conclusion or an orderly sequence of them. But in some cases, this sequence is buried in an unclear and confused text of discourse. It can be very hard in such cases to judge which unstated assumptions are needed to complete an argument or even to identify clearly the premises and conclusions supposedly being explicitly stated.

The reality is that people are often deceptive. They use ambiguity and obscure language to hide their meaning and even to try to disguise it so they won’t be held accountable. In many cases, arguers even use innuendo and other clever deceptive techniques of obfuscation to provide ‘plausible deniability’. For example, an unstated premise or conclusion may be put forward in an argument to persuade an audience, but then later, when critically questioned, the proponent of the argument may deny that she meant to assert this proposition at all. These techniques of trying to weasel out of one’s prior commitments are all too familiar in political argumentation. But there are even cases where arguers try to avoid the fulfillment of this burden in advance of any challenge that may come later. For example, an arguer may say: “I have heard rumors that proposition A is true, but it would be unfair of me to repeat these rumors because I can’t prove they are true. But just in case they may turn out to be false, I’d like to deny that they are true.” In a case such as this, the arguer is trying to get you to accept A as a plausible presumption that might be true, without having to accept a burden of proof for having put A forward as a claim for

8. Summary 171

your acceptance. Fortunately, not all cases of arguments are put forward in such a tricky manner to evade responsibility for having to support premises and conclusions with evidence. But in critical argumentation, we need to be aware that such cases exist.

Thus a certain cautionary restraint and judgment is called for. It would be counter-productive to always go around plugging in additional premises that would make an argument structurally correct, even if it is clear that the argument is a bad one, and is not being presented in a way that represents structurally correct reasoning or the author’s position being advocated in the text of discourse. Such an attribution needs to be seen as subject to repudiation by the proponent of the argument. It is well to keep this limitation in mind because, as we saw in connection with argument from commitment in chapter3, there can be serious problems with wrongly attributing unstated premises or conclusions to arguers in some cases. The main problem is the danger of committing the straw man fallacy, by misattributing to an arguer some statement he is not committed to6_{and does not represent the position he is arguing for. Despite these dan-}

gers, the four transformations, including the technique for the addition of unstated premises and conclusions, are necessary and useful meth- ods of argument diagramming. We could not properly identify, analyze, and evaluate everyday arguments in natural language conversations if we didn’t deploy them. But we need to use them cautiously, always back- ing up an attribution by appealing to the textual and contextual evidence given in the case.

6_{On the notion of commitment as a central concept for critical argumentation, see Douglas}

N. Walton and Erik C. W. Krabbe, Commitment in Dialogue (Albany: State University of New York Press), 1995.