Preface

Preface to the First Edition

My interest in the subjects covered in this book dates from 1978, when I came across several texts in informal logic, and was fascinated both by their practicality and by their recommendations for rethinking central philosophical traditions regarding logic and argument. I thought at that time that very fundamental issues were at stake but that the context of textbooks did not provide sufficient opportunities to explore them in depth. This book is an attempt to fill that gap.

I have profited very much over the intervening years from philosophical exchanges with Tony Blair, Ralph Johnson, and David Hitchcock. Comments and analyses from Jonathan Adler, Douglas Walton, Richard Paul, Dennis Rohatyn, John McPeck, David Ennis, Frans van Eemeren, and Rob Grootendorst have also been helpful, as have the interesting questions posed when parts of this book have been read to audiences in Canada (Lethbridge, Windsor, Calgary, Ottawa, Edmonton, Saskatoon, Waterloo, and Peterborough); the United States (Newport News and Sonoma); and the Netherlands (Amsterdam). Materials on critical thinking tests were willingly supplied by Matthew Lipton, Robert Ennis, Stephen Norris, and John McPeck, whose cooperation is appreciated. I would also like to thank the editors and contributors to the Informal Logic Newsletter (now the journal Informal Logic) for their interest in, and comments on, my work, especially in the period 1979-1982.

I am extremely grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for generous financial support during the period 1982-1984. Without this support, the book would not have been completed. Trent University also provided some support in 1981, enabling Jennifer Dance Flatman to lend valuable bibliographical assistance. Equally important has been moral support – especially that of David Gallop, William H. Dray, Bernard Hodgson, Sandy McMullen, Michael Scriven, Nettie Wiebe, Janet Keeping and, most of all, my husband, Anton Colijn. For errors or omissions that may remain, I am solely responsible.

Preface to the Second Edition

For many years, this book has been difficult to obtain, and I felt badly about that. I was delighted to learn that the series Windsor Studies in Argumentation was interested in re-publishing the work so as to make both electronic and print versions available. After some difficulties, I was able to retrieve the copyright from the large Walter de Gruyter firm (Berlin), which had taken over the original publisher, Foris (Dordrecht, the Netherlands) and dramatically increased the price of the work. Hopefully, this new edition will be accessible to all who wish to consult it. People often expressed to me their frustration about the inaccessibility of the original book. They did not indicate a desire for a re-working of its themes in the light of subsequent research. That, in any event, would require a massive amount of work. In this second edition I have for the most part kept the original material intact, while adding introductory essays to each chapter in an effort to convey my present sense of what I said decades ago.

This book was an early one in the development of informal logic and argumentation studies. My youthful excitement about topics and problems in these fields stemmed of course from their intrinsic interest but also from my sense that they had rarely been explored and seemed to emerge, when they did, mainly from pedagogical experience and treatments in textbooks. I wrote my own textbook A Practical Study of Argument (currently in its seventh edition), and I enjoyed doing that, but I was convinced that such topics as missing premises, the inductive/deductive distinction, and the principle of interpretive charity required treatment different from what would be appropriate in a textbook. Hence, this work. Some topics here — for example, fallacies and social epistemology — have subsequently been explored by many other theorists. Others, including the argument/explanation distinction, a priori analogies, and the principle of charity, have received less attention. In any event, I hope that this version of Problems in Argument Analysis and Evaluation will be of interest to persons now active in the study of argumentation.

I am extremely grateful to Michael Williams for his assistance in scanning the original book so as to generate electronic files. He and his fast scanner saved me weeks of work.

The research, thinking, and writing for this work was done in the period 1982 – 1986. During much of that time I was an independent scholar based in Calgary, Alberta, and I benefited from financial support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada. Presently my finances are secure, but my gratitude to the council persists.