13 The Social Epistemology of Argument
Social epistemology was not a major topic within philosophy when this chapter was written in 1985. It came into prominence some years later, emerging from concerns in the philosophy and sociology of science and the careful attention to testimony of C.A.J. Coady. The conception of epistemic individualism came to be questioned, and theorists sought to acknowledge social factors without lapsing into relativism. The notion that evaluations of an argument’s cogency could be relative to the understanding and beliefs of its audience, defended in this chapter, points to concern about relativism in justification and hence in epistemology more generally. It is fair to say that such concerns persist today.
A crucial point, not always observed even in recent theorizing, is that acceptability must be distinguished from acceptance. The latter notion is descriptive; the former is normative – as argued here. In seeking criteria that are audience-sensitive but genuinely normative, the notion of the universal audience retains its interest. There is a quest for non-literal interpretations of this ideal. Its contrary, the idea of the self as audience, has received little attention.
At one point, discussing pragmatic inconsistency, I argued that if a person A fails to do X, which is required by a principle that A accepts, then A is not committed to that principle. This point is too strong, I think. A could be committed to X but unable to act accordingly or fail to do so due to weakness of will. To qualify my original point, one needs to reflect on what is required by commitment to a principle.
This chapter shows intimations of my subsequent and enduring interest in the topic of trust. That interest is indicated here in the discussions of credibility and testimony. Given limitations in our experience, expertise, and knowledge, there are many occasions when our acceptance of the claims of others requires that we trust them. In such contexts it is not irrelevant or fallacious to take into account personal characteristics bearing on their trustworthiness. The qualities of persons and relationships between them gain epistemic relevance.
Communicating reasons and arguments is a social practice. Standardized PC models of argument are somewhat misleading in these contexts because we need to consider not a bare proposition detached from its surroundings, but a claim as asserted in context by a person whose (understood) personal characteristics are relevant to its rational acceptability. Within traditional topics of informal logic, such considerations bear most obviously on accounts of the fallacies of ad hominem, tu quoque, and authority. They are clearly important, as well, in considerations about the logic and epistemology of testimony.
The detachability of propositional content from these and other features of context is a theme explored by subsequent theorists including Andrea Nye, Douglas Walton, Harald Wohlrapp, and Christopher Tindale. An appreciation of the significance of credibility has been greatly enhanced by Miranda Fricker’s Epistemic Injustice and work stemming from it, at an intersection between epistemology and social philosophy.
Standard logical treatments of argument detach premises and conclusion from the surrounding verbal discourse, and also from the social and psychological context in which that discourse occurs. Interpretation may require some reference to this context, of course, but once premises and conclusion are isolated, their acceptability and inferential relationships tend to be considered apart. This strategy is appropriate for many purposes. Nevertheless, it is a considerable abstraction. Arguers and their audiences are persons with emotions and interests as well as beliefs, and with histories that may bear significantly on the context in which the argument occurs.
1. Arguer’s Credibility
An obvious aspect to consider here is that of credibility. Credibility, or worthiness to be believed, is something persons addressing an audience are normally assumed to possess. Personal and social relations presume a basic underlying trust between people. In contexts of argument, this trust takes the form of our tacitly assuming that people are competent observers and witnesses, that they speak sincerely, intending to express their genuine beliefs, and that they try to support those beliefs with good reasons. In stating and considering arguments, we are engaged in an activity of mutual persuasion and reflection. This activity requires the exchange of information and evidence and the careful consideration of the reasons of others. Of course, not all contexts in which arguments are put forward measure up to this ideal, though it is the norm of the practice. Normally, we grant others credibility, or worthiness to be believed, as a matter of course. We presume that they are perceptually competent, reasonable participants in the discourse, genuinely asserting what they believe to be the case. But this standardly presumed credibility may be diminished or lost. As H.H. Price put it,
Of course no one believes everything that he is told, nor everything that he reads; still less does he always believe it with complete confidence. But in nine cases out of ten, we do give at least some credence to what we are told or what we read. There is, of course, the tenth case.1
Logical tradition has stressed the erroneous nature of much reasoning from alleged defects of people to alleged substantive error in their claims or arguments, and has tended to brand as fallacious any inference from the personal inadequacy of an arguer or speaker to the unacceptability of that person’s argument or claim. This stringent insistence on the separation of the personal and the logical may have emerged because many people are so sensitive to the social aspects of argumentation that they too easily allow personal characteristics to overwhelm the detached consideration of premises and conclusions.
Still, some personal features of arguers bear on their credibility, and this is relevant to the proper understanding of the dynamics of argument. Recent accounts of credibility, authority, and the ad hominem argument have recognized these points.2 When we are dependent on the authority or testimony of an arguer in order to decide whether to accept his or her premises, a number of personal and situational qualities are genuinely relevant to that decision. The point has been emphasized by Lawrence Hinman in a paper on ad hominem, acknowledged in several recent textbooks on practical logic, and most interestingly portrayed in a recent article by John Hardwig entitled ‘Epistemic Dependence’. Hardwig emphasizes our dependence on others – especially those who are experts in specialized areas – for beliefs and knowledge. He maintains that this is such a pervasive feature of modern life that the epistemic individualism issuing in the general advice to think for yourself is overly simple. Hardwig reminds readers that more is known that is relevant to the truth of our beliefs than anyone could know by himself or herself. The extent to which wholly autonomous thinking is impossible in modern life is vividly illustrated by Hardwig’s citation of an article on particle physics with ninety-nine authors.
Experts depend on each other and, of course, non-experts depend on experts. We must trust others to build up knowledge and beliefs. Because trust is needed, the personal qualities of others are genuinely relevant to the rationality of our relying on them. Given this dependence, there are many ad hominems that permit us to withdraw our normal rational deference; such references to background information about arguers do not always involve us in fallacies. They are likely to be more important and relevant in discussions with experts than with peers. As we have seen elsewhere, standardized Critical Thinking tests even sometimes include sections on which respondents are to judge which claims are less believable on the basis of aspects of the persons who assert those claims and their circumstances.3
There are two fundamentally different ways in which an arguer’s credibility may be upset so as to affect the dynamics of his or her argument. These correspond to what logical tradition termed the abusive ad hominem and the circumstantial ad hominem. In the abusive ad hominem, an attack is made on the arguer’s character or background and this attack is used, irrelevantly, to undermine that person’s credibility and thereby lessen acceptance of his claims or arguments.4 In the circumstantial ad hominem, credibility is attacked on the grounds that the arguer fails to practice what he preaches. These are tu quoque attacks; they are branded as fallacious because typically what an arguer does has no rational bearing on the truth or plausibility of his claims or on the merits of his inferences.
In effect, logical tradition requires that premises and conclusions be considered in detachment from the social and psychological relations of arguers and their audiences. Tradition seems to presume the epistemic individualism Hardwig criticizes in his article. The tacit model is that of the solitary thinker who can check each claim for himself or herself. We often cannot do this. The unsatisfying nature of this view is most apparent when we consider the long-established relevance of personal characteristics of witnesses to the acceptability of their testimony in courts of law.5 The greater sensitivity of recent accounts to the many circumstances in which personal characteristics of arguers do bear legitimately on the acceptability of their premises is a substantial improvement in the direction of bringing logicians’ advice closer to sensible reasoning in law, science, and everyday life.
Trust and confidence in others as a source of information are crucial in circumstances where the audience is not independently competent to appraise the premises and must rely on an arguer’s statement that these are true. This often happens because the premises involve what is, in effect, testimony from the arguer as to the occurrence of events in inaccessible times and places. It also happens when the arguer is functioning as a kind of expert, using premises about a specialized subject in which his or her knowledge substantially exceeds that of the audience. Strict logical tradition on the ad hominem has tended to ignore the significance of these special circumstances in which an audience is epistemically dependent on an arguer. There is epistemic dependence if acceptance of claims can be based on little or no evidence save the testimony of the arguer in asserting the claim. If the audience is to accept the claims made, this will be because the arguer has said that they are true. (In the immediate context, little further supporting evidence is available.) Thus, the trustworthiness of the arguer is crucially important in deciding whether to accept his or her claim.
In a fallacious ad hominem argument in which the arguer is attacked, there is an unsuccessful and poorly founded attempt to show that such trust is unwarranted. The attempt fails, from a rational point of view, because the characteristics cited do not affect the reliability of the testimony or authority of the person as alleged. The argument may be used in a context in which there is little or no epistemic dependence in any case, and the audience would be competent to judge claims on their independent merit. The allegations may concern characteristics irrelevant to the arguer’s reliability as a source of information on this issue or not possessed by the arguer at all. Irrelevant personal attacks may succeed to some extent: credibility is based on attitude and response as much as on reasoned belief. Once trust is questioned, it is hard to fully restore it.
The effects of personal attack on the process of rational debate can be striking. Some are to be deplored from a logical point of view. But others are legitimate and point to the social dynamic presupposed by the normal workings of argumentative discourse.6
The presumption of trust in contexts of argument is again indicated when we consider the circumstantial ad hominem, though matters here are more intricate. In the circumstantial ad hominem or ‘tu quoque‘ argument, the arguer is accused of failing to live up to his or her own expressed principles. For example, a President criticizing terrorism might be accused of practicing it by proxy, or political leaders urging the public to restrain wage demands might be accused of seeking high wage increases for themselves. In such cases, arguers express a normative principle as part of their argument (either conclusion or premise), but then, through their own actions, indicate that their support for that principle is flawed because they do not apply it to their own case. Critics accuse them of inconsistency: if the inconsistency is demonstrated, the position of such arguers is seriously affected. Yet, contrary to logical tradition, it does seem to be the case that their credibility is undermined, because there seems to be evidence that they do not in a full sense support what they assert.
In a recent book, Douglas Walton has discussed such cases at some length.7 He explains that these arguers are accused of a special kind of inconsistency, a species of pragmatic inconsistency that he and John Woods have called ‘deontic-praxiological’ inconsistency. Such arguers say that we should do X, but themselves do Y, where Y is, in a sense, contrary to X. The arguer’s principle indicates he should do X; what he in fact does is correctly describable as doing Y; and doing Y amounts, in this context, to not doing X.
Walton points out the subtle relationships which may hold between X and Y, and the room for debate as to whether there really is the right kind of pragmatic inconsistency. For instance, suppose that a student accuses a businessman of making weapons that kill innocent people in the developing world. Suppose next that the businessman accuses the student of (by his participation) supporting a university which, as an institution, invests funds in such a way as to support repressive governments that kill innocent people in the developing world. The issue of whether the student’s omission in failing to oppose this institution constitutes a support for the killing of innocent people in the developing world. Here, whether Y constitutes not X is a tricky question.
In other cases, the inconsistency may be obvious, but other complex questions may arise. Perhaps there are issues as to whether an arguer’s actions, taken as support for a principle contrary to the one professed, are involuntary or are excusable. Some cases where pragmatic inconsistency is alleged are complex and contestable, to say the least. Walton’s account is appropriately sensitive to these matters.
Here, we focus on another aspect, one bearing more directly on arguers’ credibility. Suppose that a pragmatic inconsistency clearly does exist. This pragmatic inconsistency does undermine the arguer’s credibility in some way. It shows the arguer to be failing in commitment or sincerity. On Walton’s account, the demonstration of such an inconsistency shifts the burden of proof. If an arguer can be shown to be pragmatically inconsistent and accordingly less than wholehearted in support for his or her own principle, then he or she is put on the defensive in the circumstance of back-and-forth argument. Attention moves away from the practices initially criticized to the arguer as a person, and to that person’s actions or omissions. According to Walton it is then up to the arguer to show that the inconsistency is merely apparent, that he or she has changed the practice, or that the practice was involuntary or excusable in the light of circumstances.
Walton discusses a number of fascinating examples. Particularly vivid and interesting is a book review he quotes as an Appendix. In this review, called ‘The Myth of Szasz’, Gordon Lowe is reviewing a book called The Myth of Mental Illness. He attacks the iconclastic critic of psychiatry, Thomas Szasz. Reviewing a number of Szasz’s books, Lowe first accuses him of not being a sufficiently radical critic of illness and medical practice, on the grounds that Szasz wishes to dispute the patient-doctor relationship for mental, but not physical, illness. Lowe adds that, despite his claims that mental illness is a myth, Szasz supports therapy when the relationship between therapist and client is voluntary. The final stage of Lowe’s criticism of Szasz is that he does not live up to his principles. It is at this point that we find a tu quoque argument.
… he launches his attack on psychiatry from a unique and special position. He is an M.D., Professor of Psychiatry at the State University of New York Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse. He is on the editorial board of at least four medical and psychiatric journals, and on the board of consultants of a psychoanalytic journal. That is, he is not only a practicing psychiatrist and a teacher of psychiatry, but a veritable pillar of the psychiatric community.
What on earth can he tell his students?… If Szasz teaches in his classes what he writes in his books he guarantees that any student who follows his teachings will fail his finals. How can Szasz reconcile what he professes with a professorship? He sees the whole psychiatric subculture as ‘a medical tragedy’, and ‘a moral challenge’, insists that it must be improved, then adds ‘but we cannot do this so long as we remain psychiatrists’. Why then is Szasz still a psychiatrist? The more telling his criticisms of psychiatry the more obvious his own conflict of interest… His logic is relentless only when he applies it to his colleagues. He appears to regard himself as exempt from his own criticism merely because he is critical.8
Walton’s comment on this stage of Lowe’s argument is that it is a good argument against Szasz, but not conclusive. Were Szasz engaged in an actual two-way discussion with Lowe, he might be able to defend his credibility in various ways, particularly if he were to show that by working from within the discipline of psychiatry he had a better chance of reforming it than he would by becoming an outsider.
This account is in line with Walton’s general solution to the tu quoque: He says that the allegation of pragmatic inconsistency shifts the burden of proof back to the arguer who is criticizing the practice of another. The arguer must show that he or she is not inconsistent, or suffer a loss of credibility. With Lowe’s attack, the burden of proof moves from the tenets of the psychiatric profession which Szasz has attacked to Szasz himself. Attention moves from the original argument to the person of the arguer, because the critic has shown that the arguer apparently does not live up to his own principles. (No doubt it is this shift of attention, resulting from the tu quoque move, that underlies the logical tradition of branding this a fallacy of relevance.) Walton seems to grant that this shift to the person is appropriate and makes a legitimate difference to the course of the debate.
Walton’s account presumes, correctly I think, that the arguer’s credibility has been upset by the allegation of inconsistency. The burden of proof shifts. However, how and why this should be the case needs further explanation, in virtue of the lack of relation between the arguer’s behavior and the actual content of the premises and conclusion of the argument. If an arguer does not behave as a moral principle would prescribe, this failing does not show that the principle is incorrect. Walton emphasizes this point. So, interestingly enough, does Lowe. He begins his review of Szasz’s books by granting all of his substantive criticisms of the psychiatric profession.
At this point it is important to reflect on the differences between the circumstantial ad hominem and the abusive ad hominem. In context of tu quoque the audience is (typically) not dependent on the arguer either for his testimony or for his authority. It is not the arguer’s observations or personal experience that are at issue.9 Nor is the arguer speaking in a role as an epistemic authority. The issue is one of moral practice. To defend the idea that tu quoque is a fallacy, we would need to explain why it is logically appropriate to regard an arguer who is pragmatically inconsistent as less credible than one who is pragmatically consistent. The latter practices what he preaches and the former does not. But why does this make a difference to the logical merits of their arguments? That is the question.
Walton fails to answer this question. If the burden of proof is shifted, as he claims, does that shift occur for good reason? I suggest that if the unpracticed preachings pertain to the principle or principles used as premises in an argument, there is a sense in which those premises ‘dangle’. They are expressed. But there is a sense in which they are not endorsed by the arguer as premises employed by a sincere arguer would normally be.
To the logician looking at premises and conclusion isolated from the context of the argument, there would seem to be no relevance of the pragmatic inconsistency to the force of the argument. Walton notes this near the end of his book:
Our point is that an argument should not be treated merely as a set of propositions so that the arguer himself is entirely external to the argument. Rather, in dialectic, the argument is defined as a pair of sets of propositions, each indexed to a participant in a game of dialogue. Thus each participant has a set of propositions identified as his thesis and commitment-store (collectively, his position). Thus a legitimate goal of criticism is the establishment of an inconsistency – in some games an action-theoretic sort of inconsistency among the opponent’s position propositions.10
The first sentence here is the important one. Walton appears to recognize that when people argue, their premises and conclusions are not suspended in a kind of logical space. Rather, they are asserted in a social context where people are communicating with each other. However, instead of exploring the social relations involved as such, it appears that Walton seeks to reduce them. He seeks to represent them in terms of sets of propositions to which arguers are committed. He regards pragmatic inconsistency as one kind of inconsistency that may be shown to exist in an arguer’s position, propositionally understood. This strategy ignores the normal support for premises that comes from their being asserted by a person relating to other persons in a context presumed to involve sincerity and trust.
This approach misses the socio-personal element in rational discussion. This aspect can explain why pragmatic inconsistency of the type alleged in tu quoque is such a serious problem. What is wrong concerns not proposition sets but the trust between persons. When an arguer cannot be regarded as a person committed to principles asserted, it is almost as though the arguer is lying. If these principles are conclusions, the lack of sincerity with which they are held will reflect back on the entire argument. The arguer appears to want to convince us of something, but it appears that that something is not sincerely asserted. It appears, then, that the arguer cannot, then, be fully persuaded of his own argument. Since this is so, we can only presume that he or she does not believe the premises or does not find the expressed reasoning from those premises to be convincing.
We may set out this reasoning, based on the pragmatic inconsistency of an arguer, in the following way:
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A advocates that P be followed, which would require him to do X.
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A does Y, which is tantamount to not doing X.
So,
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A is not committed to P.
Therefore,
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A’s advocacy of P need not be taken seriously by others.
Therefore,
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Whatever reason A’s audience might have for accepting P, this reason does not come from A.
Tu quoque in some of its forms may be fallacious, but there appears to be no fallacy in this line of reasoning.11
The question remaining is why these considerations should affect our analysis of A’s argument. Granting that the premises and conclusion expressed will not be regarded as claims that the arguer sincerely endorses, this still leaves us the possibility of assessing those claims on their merits. It is this possibility that traditional logic directs us to, in those accounts of ad hominem and tu quoque that emphasize the irrelevance of personal defects of arguers to evaluations of the validity of their arguments and the truth or acceptability of propositions they assert. The move from (3) to (4) in the above argument needs a rationale.
Logical tradition demands, in effect, that we detach propositions constituting premises and conclusion from the context of personal and social relations that are normally presupposed when there is argumentative interchange. Walton questioned this logical tradition. But he is still enough within it to reduce his own amendments to consideration of a larger set of propositions. What is relevant is, I think, something broader yet. The purpose of argumentative exchanges is for persons to communicate information, beliefs, and opinions both in order to persuade others, by reason, that their beliefs and opinions are true or acceptable and in order to check and possibly revise their own beliefs and opinions as a result of rational criticism and evaluation.12 Such exchange presumes the sincerity of participants. An arguer asserting a principle he does not hold cannot do so in order to communicate his beliefs, because what he asserts is not in the full sense one of his beliefs. The insincerity that we infer from pragmatic inconsistency upsets the credibility of the arguer because it leads us to think that he or she is not genuinely participating in an argumentative exchange. The arguer only appears to be doing so; we do not have real and honest communication. Thus the framework of argument is upset, although the details of the content of the argument are, from an abstract point of view, left unaffected.
When people appear to be arguing, we normally presume that they are in fact doing so. When we attend to their arguments, we grant their sincerity as a matter of course. But we may discover that they are not sincere, and if we do so, the discourse is upset. Its purpose cannot be served. I suggest, then, that the shift in burden of proof, noted by Walton, is a result of the fact that the arguer must seek to re-establish himself or herself as a genuine participant in argumentative discourse. He or she will typically do this by seeking to show that, despite the alleged contradiction between behavior and stated principles, those principles are really held. (The arguer may submit that the pragmatic contradiction is alleged and not real; that the behavior criticized is involuntary and does not indicate the arguer’s beliefs; that behavior is about to change; and so on.) Such attempts are efforts to re-establish argumentative discourse by reinstating conditions of trust. Appearances to the contrary, the arguer is committed to what he or she says.
To apply this back to the provocative review of Szasz, what effect should Lowe’s attack on Szasz as failing to practice what he preaches have on the reader of Szasz’s works? As noted, it should not lead us to conclude either that Szasz’s conclusions are false or that his arguments are inadequate. That would be a mistake regarding relevance; that kind of irrelevance is just why tradition brands tu quoque a fallacy. Rather, Lowe’s account should make the reader wonder just what Szasz is doing in writing these works. If we do not decide that Szasz’s moral position is that of a reformer trying to work from within psychiatry, we will, after Lowe’s attack, no longer be able to read Szasz as an author fervently expressing his reforming zeal in powerful prose. Szasz does not really believe what he says, apparently – at least not in the full sense in which normative belief commits to action. The moral power of his attack will be undermined. To the extent that he fails to believe what he is saying, Szasz will correctly be regarded as an author who appears to be offering arguments in order to participate in a strenuous and genuine discussion about the role of psychiatry in contemporary life, but is actually doing something else. (Earning royalties, or building up a list of publications, or gaining attention for himself, perhaps.)
Argumentative discourse has as its purpose the mutual persuasive and reflective communication of beliefs.13 This purpose cannot be served if one or more participants is not expressing his genuinely held beliefs. Logical tradition is correct in emphasizing the irrelevance of personal commitment and behavior to the abstract correctness of the principles and propositions put forward. But it is misleading in its suggestion that bringing out pragmatic inconsistency cannot have a logical bearing on the acceptability of claims and the force of arguments. The relationship is there, though it is best understood as a failing of framework rather than specific content. The shift in burden of proof noted by Walton is something real, and he is correct to see that it requires important revisions in the traditional logicians’ account of the tu quoque fallacy. But the shift needs explanation.
That explanation can be found, I suggest, in the disturbance of the general presumption of trust and sincerity underlying argument as a social institution. Personal character and characteristics really do have something to do with the force of argument, and that ‘something’, far from being due to incidental psychological or sociological eccentricities. It is founded upon the very nature of argument.
2. Acceptability, Truth, and Audience-Relativity
Another area where socio-personal characteristics bear on the · logical evaluation of arguments has to do with their audiences. Audiences must reason from accepted beliefs to further beliefs. What arguments they find forceful will depend on what they antecedently believe.14
This messy qualification was avoided by logical tradition, which insisted that in a sound argument, the premises were true. Whatever anybody believes, if the premises are true, they are just true, and if the argument is, in addition, valid, it is sound in an absolute and timeless sense. The problem is, though, that if we stipulate that people should be convinced only by those arguments that have true premises, we would in effect be stipulating that in many times and places, people should not be convinced by arguments at all. In fact, it would be a tough epistemological task to show that we ourselves should often be convinced by arguments, on this model.
The traditional account of soundness might be preserved as a kind of regulative ideal, but standards of argument appraisal that are intended to give real practical guidance will have to move from truth of premises to acceptability. Note here: acceptability is not to be confused with acceptance. It is a normative notion; acceptability is rational acceptability. Yet still, acceptability is a relative notion: acceptability to whom? The answer brings in the audience to whom the argument is addressed.15
Recognition of this fact pushes standards of argumentation in a dialectical direction, towards the context in which the argument occurs and the audience to which it is addressed. An audience is given cogent argumentation if it is given argumentation in which premises are rationally acceptable to it and are connected to the conclusion in a way that is appropriate.16 This conception does not remove the normative aspects from argument evaluation, nor does it push logic and epistemology into the social sciences. There are norms here, regarding acceptability of premises and appropriacy of their link with the conclusion, but these norms incorporate some relativity to the beliefs, knowledge, and inferential capacities of the audience.
Shifting away from truth in the direction of acceptability is difficult for many people to accept, possibly because it is such a substantial departure from a tradition which is so much more succinct, elegant, and tidy. To say which premises are normatively acceptable to which audience and why, in detail, is a demanding task, whereas to insist that premises be true is something we can do finitely and neatly.
A possible way of avoiding such relativity to audience is through the concept of the universal audience. Traditionally, arguing to the beliefs and interests of a particular audience has been regarded as a lesser activity than proving substantive issues from a (supposedly) independent non relative standpoint.17 If we see argumentation as inevitably directed to some audience and constructed with that audience in mind, and yet wish to preserve the idea that some justifications have a correctness that transcends particular times and places, we may appeal to the concept of the universal audience. This interesting notion is introduced by Chaim Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca in The New Rhetoric.18 Scientific and philosophical writing is typically impersonal in tone, and might be regarded as addressed to the audience of all attentive mature minds in all places and at all times. Much abstract writing has an ahistorical tone, as if it emerged from a transcendent non-earthly vantage point to express a message for all. This style of discourse tends to disguise the fact that French noblemen of the seventeenth century, or English clerics of the eighteenth, or philosophers in the twentieth century are the people being addressed.
Taken literally, the concept of a universal audience is not viable. The language and level of difficulty of an argument cannot possibly be such that it is equally intelligible to all mature adult human beings at all times and places. (Even if it could, mature adults are a subset of all human beings, and human beings may be a subset of intelligent creatures.) Its content too is embedded in the beliefs and background assumptions of historical context in which it arises.19 Questions make sense only in certain contexts, given particular interests and background assumptions. Information and structure presume background concepts and knowledge. Some historical context is presumed for the sense of any argument.
The notion of a universal audience has an important heuristic use if we do not take it literally. As an arguer, one may wish to broaden one’s audience as much as possible. To this end, it will be useful to reflect on the background presumed to understand the argument. One might render some background knowledge explicit to increase the accessibility to the audience. One might wish to have one’s discourse intelligible to persons in other cultures or far into the future. One can try to achieve this goal. But discourse that is literally designed for everyone does not exist.
The acceptability of premises is relative to context and audience. We may broaden the notion of who is in the audience to envisage readers in future generations, in other cultures, and from other traditions. But to think that this prospect eliminates all relativity to audience would be a mistake. Premises, to be acceptable, must be acceptable to some persons and these persons will deem them acceptable only on the basis of some other beliefs they hold. A maximally universal audience would hold in common with the arguer only basic logical principles and a minimal core of common sense beliefs about the existence of other people and material objects. Though possibly transcultural, these are beliefs nonetheless.20
There is a degree of audience relativity even in inferential relationships because argumentation must be intelligible to the persons to whom it is addressed.21 Premises cannot provide reasons for a conclusion if they are connected to it by a logical link that no one understands. If premises deductively entailed the conclusion, but could be seen to do so only by one world super-expert, the argument based on such an entailment would not be cogent for most audiences, even though it was deductively valid.
Another aspect of audience-relativity for inferences in deductively valid argument emerges when we reflect on the fallacy of begging the question. This fallacy occurs when one or more premises is so intimately related to the conclusion that the audience to whom the argument is addressed would not accept that premise unless it accepted the conclusion. In such a case, the argument cannot possibly serve its purpose of rationally persuading the audience of the conclusion. Such an argument will be adequate from the point of view of strict deductive logic, and yet inferentially flawed, because the audience cannot rationally move from acceptance of the premises to acceptance of the conclusion.22
In non-deductive arguments, audience and context relativity enter in other ways. The degree of certainty required for the conclusion, and hence the standards for evaluating inductive or analogical inferences, may vary depending on the context. The seriousness with which countervailing factors in conductive arguments are considered may be similarly affected.23
Appeals to the notion of a universal audience do not eliminate the requirement that a cogent or persuasive argument is one that is cogent or persuasive for a particular audience.
Nor does the curiously related concept of the self as audience. In philosophical writing, particularly of the confessional type, an author may report deliberations and reasonings that led him or her to various problems, dilemmas, and conclusions. He or she may write as though trying to convince the self and the self alone. If we took this style at its face value, we would have a limiting case of an audience. The arguer and the audience seem to be one. But clearly, this style is one particular literary and rhetorical device. The self stands for a representative person in the broader culture the writer addresses. The self is presumed to have beliefs, interests, and problems that will be of broad concern, and standards of evidence and argument that will gain general respect.
Often, as in Descartes’ writing, that representative individual is intended as a representative of the universal audience. Thus, what is prima facie a maximally narrow audience is intended in fact to be maximally broad. The self is to serve as the universal person, or so the author intends. But of course such a guise, even when as successful as it could possibly be, does not achieve full universality of audience. Any self is a culturally developed and informed person, necessarily not representative of mind in general.
Less metaphysical uses of the self as audience preserve its representative character, but the group this self aspires to represent is typically smaller. Scientists and philosophers seeking to convince themselves of results are of course not really interested in convincing just themselves. They are also interested in argumentation that will stand as rational to those in the cultural subgroup within which they are working. Here, the self represents an individual standing within that subculture, within which projects, problems, and standards have been developed.24 There is always an audience to whom argumentation is addressed, and that audience is always informed with a tradition of beliefs and equipped with pertinent logical norms and abilities. Whatever the rhetorical pretensions, it is always less than universal.
The cogency of an argument is in some important respects relative to the knowledge and beliefs of the audience to which it is addressed.
Argumentation is linked importantly with justification, and thus with every area of philosophy and human knowledge. If we move from truth to acceptability and from validity to a variety of less determinate and clearcut standards, we are allowing, in effect, that justification is relative to time, place, and background beliefs. Given a background belief that germs cannot cause disease, arguments would be cogent which are not cogent in our own society. Within one and the same society, an argument might turn out to be cogent in one context and not cogent in another. Similarly, an argument might be cogent in one decade and not cogent in another, since its premises might first be rationally acceptable and later not so. Departing from tradition, some fear, will lead to all-out relativism and intellectual anarchy.
I submit that this alarming conclusion need not follow. Justification must proceed from what is already believed. This is true whether what is believed is based on truths of sense perception, elementary propositions of logic and mathematics, or culturally remote statements.25 In a society that holds different beliefs from our own, argument will proceed from different premises and on the basis of different interests and assumptions. But in no society is everything believed. To say that different people in different contexts will ground their arguments differently is not to say that people in a particular context can ground their argument just any way at all. Furthermore, justification can proceed in a number of distinct ways. Different styles of argument will be reasonable and intelligible to different audiences, but for every audience there are limits on what can be used. There are many sources from which justification can proceed and many ways in which it can proceed. But that is not to say that just anything will do. Premises must be statements which the arguer and audience can rationally accept, and inferences must be correct according to reasonably endorsed standards, intelligible to arguer and audience, and capable of providing a level of certainty adequate to the context. We can allow that an argument not cogent in one context might be cogent in another without allowing that whatever people think is cogent is cogent for them. Moving from acceptability to truth incorporates only a degree of audience-relativity. Acceptability is not acceptance: there is no need to reject the distinction between what is in fact taken as cogent by an audience and what that audience ought, rationally, to take as cogent. Such a distinction can be drawn with the appropriate sensitivity to the context in which the argument is presented, the beliefs of that audience, and the standards of relevance and rationality that are accepted, whether tacitly or overtly, as norms of rationality in the broader culture in which the audience and the argument appear. Baneful relativism arises only if we relinquish any distinction between what is thought to be and what is.
This distinction with reference to relativism can be brought out by contrasting the accounts of Chaim Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca on the one hand with that of Carl Wellman on the other. For Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca the theory of argumentation is an entirely descriptive enterprise. There are many types of argument that have been used and that continue to be in use. The ‘new logic’ or ‘new rhetoric’ seeks to describe these while at the same time describing conditions in which audiences commonly find such arguments persuasive or convincing. If audiences are more or less moved by various features, their response is noted; it is not judged to be logically or epistemically correct or incorrect. There is no attempt in this work to articulate and rationalize appropriate norms for the variety of argument types described.26
For Wellman, on the other hand, moving from a formalist account of validity to a broader account does not entail renouncing normative judgments about the logical and epistemic merits of arguments. To include the conductive and the inductive gives us a better description of what is going on in natural argumentation than deductivism would, according to Wellman. Yet he employs a notion of validity that retains some normative force, and emphasizes this point. To say that an argument is valid, in Wellman’s umbrella sense of ‘valid’, is to say that it is ultimately persuasive for anyone who thinks in the normal way.27 Validity is a critical concept on this account. An argument which in fact persuades people may nevertheless not be valid, because it may not have characteristics enabling it to retain its persuasiveness in the long run. Its original persuasiveness may have been due to the social power of the person presenting it, to an unnoticed bit of irrelevance, or to the limited logical acumen of the particular group to which it was addressed.
The notion of cogency might be developed in a somewhat comparable way. To say that an argument is cogent would be to say not that some audience in fact has found it convincing, but rather that it would be found convincing, in the long run, by any audience relevantly similar to the audience to whom it was in fact addressed. Such an account can incorporate context and audience relativity without relinquishing the application of norms and dropping the distinction between those arguments that in fact convince people and those arguments that rightly (correctly, appropriately) convince people. Some analysts see a stark alternative between timeless, absolute, non-contextual standards and no standards at all. This presumed alternative amounts to a false dichotomy, because standards of a qualified and complex sort may exist.
Perhaps an example can illustrate this point. The context is that of a formal lecture, by an established scholar, on the topic of war and religion. The lecture has been completed. The lecturer stands at his lectern, in the hall of a small art gallery. He is at ease, and elegantly dressed; his lecture has been received with interest; his jokes appreciated. He has been introduced as person of high credentials and many accomplishments. He has developed his thesis to the effect that the sincerely religious citizen has to accept a degree of violence in order to accept state-order at all, and that sincerely religious citizen is therefore contaminated with some degree of evil. He has claimed that the just war theory cannot, on his account, have any real meaning in the conduct of war. He argues that the existence of war and violence is a permanent tragic reality in human affairs. The account does not condone war but suggests that from a religious point of view there will be no moral basis for opposing it as a state activity.
In this context and against this background, there are a number of questions from the floor. A man sitting near the back of the crowded hall stands to ask a question. He is about the same age as the speaker (in his fifties), also well-spoken, but less formally dressed. He is unknown to many members of the audience and has no recognized status (in this context) as an expert on war, religion, or any related subject. He asks the speaker how he would apply his account to nuclear weapons, pointing out that in the lecture, all historical references were to events prior to1945. The speaker replies that his account will apply equally well to nuclear weapons, stating that there is, in his view, no distinction of kind between nuclear weapons and conventional ones. They differ only by degree, he says, because both are fundamentally similar in that they kill. Once a person is dead, he or she is dead and is not going to care whether the death resulted from nuclear weapons or conventional ones. The questioner has no opportunity to reply to these comments, because there are many other people waiting to ask questions. The audience appears satisfied with the lecturer’s response.
Suppose, as seemed likely on the actual occasion, that the audience has been convinced by this lecturer that there is no difference, save of degree, between conventional and nuclear weapons. On a wholly relativistic account, we should then have to say that the lecturer’s argument was a cogent one: it convinced the audience to which it was addressed. However, a more qualified contextual account leaves open the possibility of judging that the argument is not cogent, even if it does convince the audience to whom it was addressed. Such a judgment must take into account the knowledge available to the audience and that audience’s capacity and long-term tendency to recognize pertinent norms of acceptability and relevance, and to base convictions on those rather than on epistemically extraneous features such as the socially powerful position of such a lecturer in such a context. A social scientific account of argument cannot ignore such factors, but they are strictly irrelevant to its norms.
When the premise and conclusion are considered as parts of an argument, it is entirely clear that the arguer’s vocal, physical, and social advantages do not serve to make his premises more acceptable or his inferences more reasonable. The argument offered is not cogent. The premise that the dead do not care whether they have been killed by nuclear or conventional weapons is not one that can be supported by reasonable evidence. The dead, if wholly dead, have no opinions. If they survive we have no access to those opinions. (For all we know, they might well prefer death by conventional weapons to a nuclear death that could eliminate all surviving people and future generations, if they care about us in the afterlife.) Their opinions, if any, are far from adequate to support any final judgment on the difference between the weapons since this depends on a broad range of environmental effects and on numbers of victims, not just on the effects judged by an immediate victim, who couldn’t judge them in any event, being dead.
In making these judgments about the cogency of the argument we refer to standards common in our culture and to conventional beliefs almost certainly accepted by this particular audience. Ordinary beliefs about death render the premise unacceptable; ordinary standards for judgments about weapons render it clearly insufficient as support. Furthermore, in this case, there is empirical evidence both that the speaker later regarded his own argument as unsatisfactory, and the audience would, on reflection, have come to the same decision. The speaker admitted to me in correspondence that he did not have a satisfactory view on nuclear weapons and nuclear war and thus, implicitly, that he was uneasy about fully assimilating nuclear weapons and conventional ones. A group of adults similar to the original audience in background and attitudes found the argument totally unconvincing, for reasons similar to those presented above. The questioner was not satisfied with the response: in a later conversation with me, he referred to the speaker’s argument in response to his question as a sophism. If, as seemed to be the case, the audience found the argument convincing on the occasion, this is most plausibly seen as a function of the lack of time for analysis and reflection and the prestigious position of the arguer.
Thus by departing from the classical model of argument soundness, we are not endorsing the view that cogency reduces to what an audience in fact finds convincing. Rather, an argument is cogent for an audience if, according to standards that audience would deem on reflection to be relevant, the premises are acceptable and in the appropriate way sufficient to support the conclusion.28 An argument may be deemed cogent when these conditions are not met, as the example here illustrates. When that happens it is thought to be cogent but is not. Thus the distinction between what seems to be and what is preserved.
For arguments, tradition has pushed us to dichotomies. Is an argument valid, or invalid? Is it sound or unsound? Are its premises true or false? Even within this framework there is implicitly more than a dichotomy, as it is clearly possible that an argument might be good in one respect (valid) but bad in another (have false premises), so that whether it is a good or a bad argument is either moot, or an improper question. Results will not be clearcut as they are in formal systems.29 Sometimes, the apparently straightforward question ‘is this a good argument or not?’ is too simple.
3. The Specter of Relativism
When a view that is in any sense relativistic is put forward, there is always the suspicion that it will somehow undermine or defeat itself. Either it will apply to itself, and will thereby lose its claim to rationality and truth, or it will not apply to itself, and will thereby constitute a counterexample to what it claims. Many recent philosophical articles dealing with varieties of relativism concentrate on this line of criticism. A representative version is that of Harvey Siegel, who recently put the point this way:
Assume (radical) relativism is correct. Then the relativist position has strong, indeed compelling, justification – it is a rationally justifiable position. Justification involves good reasons. But good reasons cannot be based on anything non-neutral or arbitrary or framework-bound, by definition of ‘good reason‘. Therefore if we are justified in holding that relativism is correct, there must be some non-arbitrary, neutral, absolute framework or ground from which we can make that judgment. Thus, relativism which denies the possibility of that framework is incorrect.30
If relativism is (justified as) true, it is false, and if it is false, it is false. Thus, it would appear, relativism is false.31
There are many different respects in which the appraisal of human beliefs and conventions have been said to be relative. We may have relativity to cultures, cultural subgroups, or individuals; relativity of perceptions, norms, or scientific beliefs; relativity of meaning, conceptual framework, or justification. What is most pertinent in the context of the theory of argument is relativity in justification. Siegel is quoted here because he focuses directly on this aspect. For any relativism that would entail relativity in the cogency of justifications, Siegel alleges self-destructive incoherence. Such an account would apply with a vengeance to the analysis offered here.
Let us first examine Siegel’s particular argument, and then approach the broader issue. The problem with Siegel’s argument is very obvious. The question is begged in his definition of ‘good reason’. Siegel says that good reasons cannot be based on anything non-neutral or framework bound; in fact he regards any reasons that are so based as ‘arbitrary’. This is clearly a view that would be opposed by anyone who saw justification as relative to a framework or (as here) to the beliefs and standards of an audience. Such a person would have an account of good reasons as those that are incorporated in a central role within the framework or (as here) as those that are deemed reflectively adequate by an audience using its own considered norms. Siegel begs the question against those who have a relativistic or contextual view of justification. His argument employs a notion of good reason which negates what they explicitly assert, and employs that notion in a context in which he is trying to demonstrate that what they assert is false.
Furthermore, to deem Siegel’s argument question-begging is entirely consistent with the current contextual account of argumentation. The argument is unsuitable for the audience for which it is intended, because a crucial premise is bound to be unacceptable to that audience. It does not just happen to be so, but must be so in virtue of the very aims of the argument. The argument is question-begging (on any plausible account of what question-begging is), because the conclusion is that a relative account of justification is false and the premise, that good reasons cannot be good in any relative way says, in effect, the very same thing. Thus, Siegel’s argument is inadequate and need not worry us further.
However, this leaves the broader issue open. Does an account of argument cogency that is audience relative self-destruct, as a matter of logic? The account argued in this and preceding essays is an account about arguments – not just some, but all. Thus, it must apply to itself and is intended to do so. Does it refute itself, in expressing an audience-relative account of the cogency of argument and in thereby implicitly claiming for itself only this, and not absolute, cogency? The many considerations here are offered to a particular audience and claim for themselves cogency for that audience. They claim for premises acceptability to that audience, and for its judgments and inferential claims, force and intelligibility for that audience. I can see no problem in this.
The intended audience is philosophers, linguists, and other students of natural argumentation, capable of pertinent rational analysis of materials in English and other European languages, in the latter part of the twentieth century. The observations made are intended to be acceptable to those people, and to appeal to their pertinent beliefs and assumptions. Where it is deemed appropriate to change these, evidence is offered in the way of examples, selected so as to seem interesting and familiar to the audience. Reasoning is put forward, designed to begin with statements credible to this audience and to proceed in an intelligible fashion to conclusions seen as at least partially novel to this group. There is no idea that the account will be intelligible or acceptable to Russian astronauts, children, or physical scientists with no interest in natural language argumentation. Examples are all in English. Perhaps most natural languages work in similar ways32, but some may not, and there is little in the account that would preclude such a possibility.
It is of course understood that details of evidence and argumentation may be wrong. This is not at issue here. What is at issue is the matter of coherence. Does it make sense to put forward an argument that arguments hold for those-in-a-context, and not necessarily for all in all contexts? I cannot see any paradox here. We might derive one from an understanding of assertion and inference in terms of absolutes, I suppose. If asserting a statement actually entails claiming that it is true in a universalistic sense, we have a paradox. However, assertion need not be understood in this way. It requires only the intention to convey to others statements believed to be true or adequately warranted by evidence. This is compatible with the recognition that what one believes to be true might be shown, someday, not to be so. What the evidence warrants today, another day’s evidence may not support. But for all that, today’s argument may be cogent, and correctly defended as such.
Notes
1. H.H. Price, Belief. (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1969), p. 113. In Lecture 5, Price discusses ‘The Evidence of Testimony’. I have been influenced by Price’s account, but think that he makes our general presumption of reliability sound more optional than it really is. Price makes it sound as though it would be vastly inconvenient and inefficient not to adopt the policy of generally taking testimony to be right. In fact, if we did not trust the word of others, we could not develop into social human beings at all.
2. Cf. Trudy Govier, ‘ Ad Hominem: Revising the Textbooks’, (Teaching Philosophy, 6, (1983), pp. 13-24; Lawrence Hinman, ‘The Case of Ad Hominem Arguments’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 60 (1982), pp. 338-345; and Robert H. Ennis, ‘The Believability of People’, The Educational Forum, March, 1974, pp. 347-354. Hardwig’s ‘Epistemic Dependence’ is in the Journal of Philosophy LXXXII, 7, (July, 1985), pp. 335-349. Also relevant is Alan Brinton, ‘A Rhetorical View of the Ad Hominem’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 63, no.1 (March, 1985), pp. 50-63.
3. Such sections of these tests do, however, evoke controversy about the weighting of various factors and their significance taken apart from other considerations. Compare ‘Critical Thinking about Critical Thinking Tests’, above.
4. Most recent revisions have focused on the abusive ad hominem, with the important exception of Douglas Walton’s The Arguer’s Position: A Pragmatic Study of Ad Hominem Attack, Criticism, Refutation, and Fallacy (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985). Nothing about the necessity for revision is intended to imply that the abusive ad hominem is, in general, non-fallacious.
5. The point is not that people haven’t understood the relevance of personal credibility to testimony but rather that many standard accounts of abusive ad hominem have been formulated so sweepingly as to entail that such considerations would be fallacious. The point is developed and documented in my ‘Ad Hominem: Revising the Textbooks’. Hinman and Brinton also note this point, as does Hardwig in his essay on epistemic dependence.
6. The distinction between those personal ad hominem considerations that in fact serve to make an argument lack force and those that rationally should do so must, of course, be preserved.
7. Arguer’s Position. I have a brief review of this book in Canadian Philosophical Reviews (Fall, 1985), which anticipates some of the points developed here.
8. Lowe, in Walton, p. 284.
9. This is usually true. The moral hypocrisy of an arguer is something quite other than his or her epistemic unreliability. In the special case of Szasz, there are many complex inter relationships, insofar as many of Szasz’s readers will be epistemically dependent, for some claims, on his expertise as a trained psychiatrist, and, for others, on his personal testimony as to how relationships between psychiatrists and their patients actually go on. The lack of seriousness Lowe points out will no doubt affect his credibility in the more strictly epistemic sense as well, conveying a general lack of reliability.
10. Walton, p. 234.
11. Compare my ‘Worries about Tu Quoque as a Fallacy’, Informal Logic Newsletter 3, no. 3 (1981), pp. 2-4.
12. See ‘A New Approach to Charity’, where I use this account of the purpose of argumentative discourse to ground a principle of moderate charity, by adopting Grice’s account of the purposes of conversation to contexts of rational argument. In ‘A Rhetorical View of the Ad Hominem‘, Alan Brinton advocates a rather similar position. He says ‘There are, in general, but also relative to particular contexts, certain presuppositions of discourse and of argumentation. Especially important among these presuppositions are some having to do with the credentials, commitments, and intentions of those who participate and especially of those who take the lead. The ad hominem typically raises doubts about whether these ethotic presuppositions have been fulfilled.’ Brinton’s account differs from mine in being directed both to the abusive and to the circumstantial ad hominem.
13. This is its standard normal purpose, not its only purpose.
14. Walton, Arguer’s Position; Nicholas Rescher, Dialectics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977); Chaim Perelman, The Realm of Rhetoric (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982); Carl Wellman, Challenge and Response, (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971).
15. Compare C.L. Hamblin’s discussion in Fallacies (London: Methuen, 1970) and texts by R.H. Johnson and J.A. Blair and myself.
16. Hamblin makes this point about inferential relationships. See also Hinman, op.cit., and the discussion below.
17. For instance, in Aristotle, such arguments are rhetorical, as contrasted with logical and dialectical arguments. See F. van Eemeren, R. Grootendorst , and T. Kruiger, The Study of Argumentation, (New York : Irvington Publishers, 1984) pp. 55-78. Alan Brinton also makes extensive use of Aristotle in his discussion of ad hominem in a rhetorical context.
18. Chaim Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969). Second edition.
19. The historical context presumed may be richer or poorer. It may be sufficiently thin to be very easily understood by those not part of that immediate history. Nevertheless, it is still there.
20. Compare my ‘Theory, Common Sense, and Certainty’, in Metaphilosophy, 1981.
21. ‘Intelligible’ should be taken, not as indicative of de facto comprehension under all circumstances but rather of capacity to understand.
22. Cf. my discussion in A Practical Study of Argument, (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1985), Chapter 4.
23. If there is some reason against C, and many reasons for C, how seriously those countervailing points are taken will vary depending, among other things, on how important it is in the context to be right about C.
24. As emphasized by Kuhn and others for the special case of scientific reasoning.
25. The point is that there is a basis in some other beliefs. As it stands here, this point is neutral as between holism and foundationalism, both of which would obviously agree this far.
26. Compare the discussion in van Eemeren et al., The Study of Argumentation, pp. 208-251.
27. Wellman, Challenge and Response, pp. 90-109.
28. ‘Acceptable’ and ‘sufficient’ are used here as normative or, in Wellman’s sense, critical, concepts.
29. A point noted many times in preceding essays, due both to indeterminacies in interpretation and to open issues of evaluation.
30. Harvey Siegel, ‘Goodmanian Relativism’, Monist, Vol. 67, no. 3, (July 1984), pp. 359-376. Quoted passage is on p. 336.
31. There is, of course, the possibility that it is true but not justified as true by good reasons. I take it that Siegel finds this possibility to be devoid of practical interest.
32. Some seem inevitable concommitants of the basic facts about human life, such as the continuing use of language in changing circumstances, and others to be concommitants of the activities of arguing and persuading. Thus, we might urge universality. But such judgments should not be pronounced with confidence.
