quandaries
We have said a good deal about the ways in which arguments can be set out and analyzed, once they have got started. But we have not yet looked carefully at how arguments begin-what sort of situations trigger them off and how they get going in the first place. This will mean looking more carefully at the factors that give rise to arguments and the ways in which one party to a discussion may come to find himself on the defensive, obliged to produce a "justification" of his beliefs, attitudes, or actions.
GROUNDS FOR DOUBT AND OCCASIONS FOR ARGUMENT
Notice, first of all, that there is not always a basis for raising an "issue" whether a scientific, legal, ethical, or other kind of issue. There has to be some thing about a situation that provides an "occasion" for challenging somebody's statements; there has, that is, to be something in the situation that gives rise to a doubt about the claims made in those statements. Unless we can point to the fac tors that create these grounds for doubt, we may simply find the people whose views or actions we are challenging sweeping our questions aside and replying that there is nothing to explain, apologize about, or justify. And they may, in many cases, be entitled to respond in just that way.
What, then, is involved in deciding whether an issue really arises at all, in the first place? Regardless of the context and type of argumentation, the question can always be raised,
"Why does this particular position need to be justified?"
And unless that question can be met-unless a genuine ground for challenging it can be recognized-the challenge, as such, will fail in advance of any critical 103
discussion about its merits. The need for rational argumentation is established only after a genuine ground for questioning has been isolated and some reasons have become apparent for taking the proposed issue seriously.
Recall the colloquial phrases we commonly use to stop an argument from beginning:
"What are you complaining about? I'm not breaking any law."
"You don't have to be puzzled. This kind of weather is an everyday occur rence around here."
"Why are you worried? It's a perfectly healthful food, isn't it?"
"There's nothing to get anxious about. That's quite a normal way for a five year-old child to react."
"Don't fuss! That much administrative hassle is par for this particular course."
All of these remarks are ways of short-circuiting argument by denying that there is really anything to argue about-legal, scientific, medical, psychological, and so on:
.. . . . So don't trouble to ask 'Why?' or 'What?' or 'How?' The question does not arise!"
The purpose of such phrases is to cut off argument before it gets started. As the respondent sees the matter, there is really no issue and so nothing to argue about-nothing substantial for the challenger to prove and so no counterargu ments for him to think up. And until it has been demonstrated that some real matter of substance exists, there is no occasion for getting an argument started. As we say, the challenger has not discharged his "initial burden of proof." And for so long as that remains the case, the rest of the world is entitled to go its own way without taking any notice of his questions.
This "burden" is not confined to cases in which the issues involved are tech nical ones. In familiar everyday situations, we may find our questions ignored or swept aside for lack of "occasion":
"Why do you ask, will I really come and pick you up after school? I've told you I will, haven't I?"
"What do you mean, is this really a cucumber? What sort of a question is that? Don't you trust your own eyes?"
In the situation that precedes the actual presentation of an "argument," the various parties involved are not all on the same footing. The potential challenger, who wishes to raise the issue, has an initial task to perform before the potential respondent is obliged to say anything in reply. The burden is on the challenger to "show cause" for his challenge:
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"Don't you see? By filling that job vacancy without advertising it and so giving women and minority candidates no chance to apply, you were probably con travening their civil rights under affirmative action. How do you meet the charge of discrimination?"
"Look, this is really very odd. Meteorologically speaking, we shouldn't be getting both heavy rain and thick fog at the same time, so just what is going on? Is the fog really industrial pollution, or what?"
"Take care! Not all supermarket products are as safe as they may seem. Are you sure the artificial coloring and other additives in this particular product are approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)?"
"Well, last week you said you would pick me up and you didn't." "It looks to me more like an odd kind of melon than a cucumber."
It is only when enough has been said to create a genuine and specific ground for doubt-about the legality of an action, the naturalness of a phenomenon, the safety of a food product, or whatever-that there exists an occasion for rational discussion. And only at that point need the respondent begin to collect and mar shal the relevant arguments in "justifying" his particular position.
Burden of proof and policy considerations
To see the full subtlety of burden of proof, let us consider the food-additive example in greater detail. The question "What food additives are dangerous?" may not look like a question about burden of proof but rather like a straightfor wardly technical question of a sort that medical research scientists alone can investigate and answer:
"Has this or that particular preservative or coloring agent ever been shown, in fact, to increase the rate of stomach cancer in experimental animals? If so, by how much, and for what dosage?"
Yet that is too simple a view. What does the term food additive cover any way? Does it mean only "commercially developed food additives introduced since 1 930" or something like that? Almost everything that passes our lips, including salt, sugar, and coffee-to say nothing of alcohol-can have pathological effects on living creatures of one kind or another, if taken in a large enough dosage. So the question of just what food- and drug-licensing procedures should be used to protect the public is a question of practical decisions as well as biomedical science. True, without information from scientific research we cannot arrive at an "informed" decision about such issues. But taken by itself, this information is rarely unambiguous enough to settle the policy matter-by itself. For example, we do not need to be warned against treating strychnine as a "food." The risks are too clear. By contrast, recall the current debate about the perils and blessings of saccharine. There the balance of pros and cons is much harder to strike. In most
practical cases, therefore, we must weigh all the available scientific evidence, and then ask the policy-relevant question:
Not "Are there any risks?" but rather "Just what risks are to be tolerated?" To go further, in situations like this, just what actual risks we are prepared to tolerate will depend in part on what procedures exist for protecting us against various risks. Putting Red Dye #2 on the list of unacceptable food additives is administratively feasible, but banishing sugar from the nation's kitchens or alco hol from its living rooms probably is not. Yet scientifically speaking, sugar and alcohol very likely do more harm to more people than Red Dye #2 ever will.
Thus the simple-looking inquiry "What food additives are dangerous?" transforms itself on closer inquiry into the practical question.
"What food additives should be brought under administrative regulation?" And this question, in turn, rapidly transforms itself into the burden-of-proof
question:
"To what extent should commercial food processors be free to use whatever additives they please, without regulation by the Food and Drug Administration? And in what respects should such practices be subject to challenge and regulation?"
Let us fill in the background of this example. The enterprise of commercial food-processing provided no particular occasions for legal challenge-beyond those normally covered by personal injury suits and the law of tort (broken glass in the bread, for example )-until it began to create significant risks to which consumers could not effectively respond on an individual basis. (As individuals, we can tell if there is broken glass in the bread but not if there are risky preserv atives in it.) So it was only when those risks were judged to be "significant" in specific cases-by both technical and political standards-that the occasion arose for challenging the manufacturing processes involved. For only then was the "pre sumed" harmlessness of food, and food processing, put in genuine doubt. Only then had the first step been taken by which the "burden of proof' was shifted so that instead of the FDA's having to show that there was a risk demanding regu lation, it was up to the processors themselves to show that the "risk" was in fact negligible.
The first practical problem in launching a rational discussion of such a prob lem is, thus, to make it clear who exactly needs to establish what, that is, what "presumptions" govern the discussion and when "rebuttals" may therefore be called for.
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Q: Should you really be using that dye in your food processing?
A: It's a standard preservative that has been in routine use for many years,
so presumably there's no objection to using it.
Q: That's no longer so clear. There is now a real suspicion that it may pose a genuine health hazard.
A: If the FDA were to substantiate your fears, that would of course change
matters. But you should not let yourself be worried by the scaremon gers. Rumors are only rumors. So as matters stand, this really isn't a serious practical issue for the food industry.
Q: Maybe that's how you see it now. But you had better keep a sharp look out for adverse research reports. Otherwise you could have the FDA breathing down your neck.
The practical discussion of such an issue thus has two closely interlinked aspects: (1) On the one hand, the food processor is entitled to continue with a long-established practice, arguing that the longstanding, routine use of this pre servative indicates that it is presumably free from significant toxicity, lacking solid evidence to rebut that indication. (2) Procedurally speaking, on the other hand, the practical issues involve questions about burden of proof Should com mercial food processors have been in the position, all along, of having to justify their use of particular additives in advance of actually using them? Or was the initial burden, rather, on biomedical scientists and the FDA to "show cause" by producin� specific evidence of risk?
Such questions as these have to be dealt with in practice before any question arises of raising an issue for rational discussion and critical argumentation. It is these questions and presuppositions that set the stage on which subsequent debate and criticism are performed and against which they must be judged.
THE NEED FOR INITIAL PRESUMPTIONS
In all practical affairs, we begin with some general ideas about:
1 . What position it is reasonable to accept, failing a strong enough argu ment for doing otherwise.
2. Whose task it is in such a situation to make out the "strong enough argument" without which we are entitled to stand by our original views.
In practical affairs, the task of argumentation is not so much to give the hearer an opinion about some topic he had no opinion about before as to change his opinion by producing reasons for him to give up his former opinion in favor of a new one. Correspondingly, an opinion is not in itself "rational" or "irrational."
Rather, it is someone's argumentative conduct that is "rational" or "irrational" to the extent that he either is prepared to change his opinion when offered good reasons for doing so or else refuses to change it despite those reasons.
Those opinions that it is in general reasonable to adopt, in the absence of solid arguments to the contrary, we may call initial presumptions. We can find out a good deal about our various rational enterprises by looking to see what initial presumptions are operative within them and how those presumptions change from one situation to another or from one historical epoch to another. To begin with examples from science and law:
1 . Within a natural science, we can normally identify the "established body of knowledge" in the field concerned-that is, the ideas and beliefs that are currently presumed as the basis for scientific argument. If a scientist suspects that one or another of these ideas and beliefs is unreliable or misleading, it is up to him to make out the case for changing it. The established ideas and beliefs thus serve as collec tive intellectual benchmarks against which novel ideas and beliefs have to be measured and justified, to the extent that they would require us to move those benchmarks.
2. Similarly, in the law courts, some initial presumption is always oper ative at the moment a trial begins. There is always a clear understand ing not only about the standard of proof relevant in arguing a partic ular case but also about who bears the prime responsibility for making out this argument. Most often, this burden rests on the prosecutor or complainant. The defendant can initially rely on her right to be free of arbitrary arrest or financial exactions, unless the charges or com plaints made against her have been supported.
So, in general, the practical demands of everyday argumentation make it unavoidable that we should rely on "initial presumptions," "prior probabilities," and the like. In most practical fields, the claims, decisions, and problems that we have to make up our minds about cannot wait indefinitely for the collection of further material. A moment arrives at which a balance must be struck. After that time, it will be more unreasonable not to reach some conclusion, on the basis of our admittedly imperfect material, than to delay a decision while collecting still further information, on the off chance that something will eventually turn up to change our minds.
In the world of business decisions, we often have to take action with much less evidence than we should like about the prospects to be expected from different courses of action. Suppose that after a large-scale deal, a business corporation finds itself with an unforeseen windfall-namely, an uninvested cash balance of perhaps $1 million. This windfall has been sitting in the firm's current account at the bank since yesterday morning; so what is to be done with it?
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something. Leaving $1 million cash in a current bank account amounts, in effect, to "investing it at low interest." Something has to be done-and done today-if the affairs of the corporation are to be carried on in a reasonable and responsible manner. And this action has frequently to be taken in advance a/full information about the alternative courses of action open to the firm.
Does this mean that business decisions have to be taken in an "irrational" manner? Not at all. One might certainly criticize a businessman who habitually took decisions without even attempting to collect the information readily obtain able within the time constraints of his situation. To act always in that way would indeed be to run the business in an irrational-because needlessly and willfully
uninformed-manner. But it would be equally irrational for him to persist in delaying and to refuse to make up his mind simply because he had not collected
absolutely all the information relevant to his decision.
The rational or reasonable way of reaching a conclusion is therefore also the timely way of reaching that conclusion. We have to choose between the need to spend time collecting more grounds (evidence, testimony, factual material) and the need to settle the matter at issue promptly. Hence the practical question is not so much how to achieve "absolute certainty" in our arguments but how to set them "beyond a reasonable doubt" within the time available and to ensure that they have "all the weight they need," given the nature of the case.
We have to weigh the arguments that are offered in favor of changing our ideas and be ready to accept or reject those arguments when the time to do so arrives. But until the time comes for making up our minds, we may reasonably stand by our previously established positions, treating them as "initial presump tions" that continue to hold good until a case is built up for changing or aban doning them.
QUANDARIES AND PUZZLES
Even when we have overcome this preliminary hurdle and are satisfied that a real question arises, a further difficulty may face us before we can get down to the business of collecting, marshalling, and criticizing the arguments for and against some particular answer to that question.
Ideally, it would be nice if "logic" or "rational criticism" could provide us with a completely effective method. It would be nice, that is to say, if we always found ourselves with only one plausible answer to any given question, and so needed to ask ourselves only:
"Is there a good argument in favor of this particular answer?"
Unfortunately, many of the real-life situations we find ourselves in are ones to which this ideal model is irrelevant. All too often, we begin either with too many
possible and plausible answers to our initial question or else with none at all.
Rather than having all the relevant facts needed to pick on one and only one correct and certain way of settling an issue, we are frequently unable to justify even moderately reliable answers to our most pressing questions and problems.
In this way, the posing of a problem may at first put us in a quandary. That is to say, we may find ourselves with no clear and satisfactory way of resolving the problem. Such quandaries arise in two forms. Suppose that two incompatible views, C) and C2, are offered as answers to a question or solutions to a problem.