Notes for January 28

Toulmin and Logical Premises

I. Today we’re talking about argumentative structure, working to understand how arguments are built so that we can design counterarguments and rebuttals, weigh the evidence, and look for fallacies.

A. When we write to evaluate we are asking two kinds of questions: (1) What are the rules or the criteria that shape how we see a person, event, object, or issue, and (2) How do we support or make a case for particular criteria to be used in judging an artifact?

B. Understand the rules that we live in to gain a sense for how criteria work to shape expectations and judgments about how things should unfold.

C. When we talk about argumentation structure we are working with two overarching concepts: the notion of movement and the idea of rhetorical presence.

1. Toulmin articulates this idea of movement as an argument moves from accepted data, through a warrant, to a claim (Brockriede and Ehninger 102).

2. Rhetorical presence has to do with how the choices we highlight in building arguments make present particular elements of those arguments.

D. Aristotle’s concept of logos is the place to begin because he starts with the idea of probabilities or the realm of the contingent and intersubjective meaning to make arguments.

1. Hawhee and Crowley state, “Greek rhetoricians called any kind of statement that predicts something about human behavior a statement of probability (eikos)” (160).

2. Probabilities are based in human action/behavior and are therefore not reliable, predictable, or easy to calculate.

E. Aristotle discusses two types of reasoning: induction and deduction or in our terms: example and enthymeme.

1. Hawhee and Crowley talk about these two types of reasoning as two different “discovery processes” and directions.

2. Induction—inducere, to lead into--is reasoning from example—movement from particulars to universals.

3. Deduction—“to lead down”—“is a discussion in which, certain things having been laid down, something other than these things necessarily results from them” (162).

4. Enthymeme comes from the Greek thymos, “spirit,” the capacity whereby people think and feel” (166); there is shared knowledge between speaker and audience in enthymemes—we don’t have to state every premise.
5.“Enthymemes are powerful because they are based in community beliefs” (170).

II. Stephen Toulmin’s The Uses of Argument helps us to think through how to use some of these different reasoning processes.

A. Toulmin wrote The Uses of Argument primarily because he was concerned about the “isolation of logic and its virtual irrelevance to the problems of knowledge in most academic disciplines, and by its separation from practical reasoning that is essential in law, ethics, and daily life” (Bizzell and Herzberg 1410).

1. Toulmin comes up with his model to rival Aristotle’s syllogism, noting that everyday reasoning is more complex in structure than merely having major premises and minor premises.

2. As Wayne Brockriede and Douglas Ehninger note, Toulmin’s model is about movement from data to a claim through a warrant.

3. Claims, according to Toulmin, are conclusions in arguments; they are the explicit appeals produced by the argument.

a. Claims of fact: appeal based on what is or is not true—court of law.

b. Claims of value/judgment: what is right/wrong, good/bad, moral/immoral; Obama is (or is not) a better president than Bush.

c. Claims of policy/action: appeal to immediate action—sign this petition to stop pollution of the Puget Sound; action that is necessary, beneficial, or desirable; we should support legislation that will help to clean up Puget Sound.

4. Data answers the question “What have you got to go on?” thus data corresponds to what we commonly call evidence.

a. Evidence: brief or extended examples—examples used in inductive reasoning to build a case of particular to more general kinds of conclusions.

b. Fictional examples or stories add character and drama to arguments by illustrating specific parts of an argument.

c. The use of statistics or case studies are also helpful in giving breadth and scope to an argument.

5. Warrants are the part of an argument “which authorizes the mental ‘leap’ involved in advancing from data to claim; “Its function is to carry the accepted data to the doubted or disbelieved proposition which constitutes the claim, thereby certifying this claim as true or acceptable” (Brockriede and Ehninger 103).

6. There are three types of warrants: substantive warrants—ideas based on what is thought to be actual fact.

a. Chaim Perelman talks about associative reasoning: “schemes which bring together and allow us to establish a unity among them, which aims at organizing them or at evaluating them, positively or negatively, by means of one another” (qtd. in Hauser 269).
b. Dissociative reasoning: “techniques of separation which have the purpose of dissociating, separating, disuniting elements which are regarded as forming a whole or at least a unified group within some system of thought: dissociation modifies such a system by modifying certain concepts which make up its essential parts” (Hauser 270).

c. Dissociation works to drive a wedge between appearance and reality so that new worlds may come into being.

7. Ethical or authoritative warrant: you believe a claim to be true based on the authority of the author or person speaking; “ideas based on the credibility of the speaker or on the source of testimony offered by the speaker” (Hart 99).

8. Pathetic or motivational warrants: “ideas suggesting that some desirable end must be achieved or that some desirable condition is being endangered” (Hart 99).

9. Roderick Hart argues that the best way to get at these different pieces of argument is to follow these steps:

a. Isolate the Major Claims being offered by the speaker, keying particularly on repeated or re-paraphrased statements.

b. Isolate the Major Data presented, many of which (but not all of which) will be found contiguous to the Major Claims made.

c. Without consulting the message directly, isolate the range of warrants that could reasonably authorize data-claim movements.

d. Categorize these warrants as logical proofs, ethical proof, or pathetic proof.

e. Determine which of these warrants were explicitly supplied by the speaker and which were left unspoken.

10. Take time now to analyze Brewer’s arguments in “Fanatomy: As a sports town, we’re underrated.” What are his main claims? What does he use as evidence? Focus on the types of warrants: associations he creates, use of authority in his evidence, and the motivational or emotional appeals present in the language to describe the benefits of being a “sports fan.”

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/sports/2010604068_fansseattle27.html