Lesson for Week 12: Day 1
12.1
Your assingment for today was to . . .
Write an analysis of both sides based on stasis theory and send it to me.
Now that you have looked at both sides of the argument generally as competing logoi and have analyzed the points of conflict using stasis, you're ready to look at individual arguments carefully. You've already encountered the terms logos, pathos, and ethos when we discussed rhetorical criticism. We are going to revisit the concept of logos in more detail.
Analyzing logos. We analyze the logical dimension of arguments to make sure that we aren't making errors ourselves and to detect falacies in our opponent's case. Although reason, or logic, is only one kind of proof, it is one that people often focus on exclusive as the others because they think that if they can build an irrefutable case, they will win. Of course that really isn't true, but reason is an important dimension of persuasion.
Using Toulmin. One way to analyze your own or your opponent's argument is to try to map it onto Toulmin's description of argument structure.
__Backing__
|
|__Warrant__
|
|Grounds --------------[Modality]-------------> Claim
|
|__Rebuttal__
When you look at an argument based on reason using this pattern, you first look for the assertion (claim) being made. Then you see what evidence (data) is given to support it. Any claim without evidence is mere assertion and can be dismissed as not being grounded: there is no reason to believe it.
If evidence is offered in support of the claim, then you ask whether or not the evidence offered is relevant to the claim. If the relationship of the evidence to the claim is not immedieately clear, then an explanation about how the evidence supports the claim is in order. That kind of statement is called the warrant.
Occasionally the reasoning in the warrant may be contested with a question something like, "What gives you to right to reason that way?" The answer to that question is called the backing, and it usually refers to the common reasoning practices of a specialized field, something like, "In plant biology, we regularly do such and such." The backing is an appeal to authority, and so it is strengthened by actually citing an authority.
Most claims are true only in certain circumstances. Therefore any claim that seems to say, "this is ALWAYS the case" may well be an overstatement. To avoid the charge that you have overstated your claim, you add two things to the argument: (1) the rebuttall indicates conditions under which the claim would not be expected to be true; (2) the modality qualifies the strength of the claim, indicating the level of certainty associated with the claim.
If a close analysis of an argument shows that any of these elements is left out, the argument is vulnerable to rebuttal. For yourself, you know what you need to do to protect the argument by addressing each of these points. If you are trying to find weaknesses in your opponents' argument, you can point to their failure to address one of these points and ask them to address them. How you do this will determine whether you are arguing polemically in order to win or trying to find common ground.
Using classical deductive logic. Another way to analyze reason is to read your text or your opponent's carefully through the lens of deductive reasoning, looking for syllogisms and enthymemes. Deductive reasoning starts with what is already known or believed and brings something in under that belief, showing the new thing to be a subpart of the known, and then deduces that the new thing shares the qualities of the old.
The old thing (that which is already known or believed) is stated first as the MAJOR PREMISE. The major premise is basically an overstatement because it does not have a modality or a rebuttal attached to it. So we get something like "Water flows down hill." Now we know, or at least believe, this to be true, but there may conditions under which it is not true (that would be the rebuttal) and if we are not absolutely sure, we should qualify the claim, saying "It is almost certainly true that water flows downhell." Nevertheless, in deductive reasoning, we usually dispense with rebuttals and modalities.
After stating the common belief, the reasoner then claims that something new is an instance of the general statement. Imagine that you are at an amusement park and you are in some kind of fun house that creates the appearance that water is flowing uphill (I've see such a thing myself, and I might add that there are places near the continental divide in Colorado where water appears to flow uphill). To bring this instance under the domain of the major premise, a reasoner would say, "This is water." That statement is called the MINOR PREMISE. Notice that the first term in this sentence points to the new thing, and the second term in the sentence repeats the first term in the major premise.
Logically, then, the deduction must follow that "This water is flowing down hill." Notice that the first term in the conclusion points to the new thing, and the second term repeats the second term in the major premise.
An ENTHYMEME is simply a syllogism with the one of the premieses unstated. In our case, a possible enthymeme would be, "This water is flowing down hill, despite appearances, because as water it behaves as water always behaves." Notice that the major premise goes unstated. The reasoner expects the listener to know how water behaves and expects the listener to add that information to the equation silently. The enthymeme could have suppressed the minor premise instead of the major premise. Then it would have been, "This water must be flowing downhill, because water flows down hill." The minor premise is collapsed into the subject phrase "this water."
Syllogisms and enthymemes are almost always open to contestation because they rely on overstatements in the major premise and because they assert that the new think is identical with the first term in the major premise. You may be thought a sophist, but you can always argue that one or the other of these assertions is not true. If you do, you force the opponent to supply evidence and warrants and other elements in Toulmin's diagram.
Using classical inductive reasoning. Inductive reasoning is assoicated with experience and empirical reasoning. Instead of reasoning from a general claim that everyone believes, the inductive reasoner relies on accumulating many observations. These various observations are claimed to be similar; that is, they are thought of as separate instances of something (they have something in common). Reasoning from the separate instances, the reasoner finally determines what they share in common and brings them together under a common term. The statement that says "Observations a, b, c, and d indcate that e is the case" is not a deduction; rather, it is an induction. However, when people argue, the argue inductively by say that this new instance "t" is like the previous instances of "q, r, and s." This is an argument from example. Such arguments do not emphasize the category that all the instances belong to; instead they emphasize the similarities between instances.
The argument from example is almost always open to contestation on the grounds that two things are never identical. What the reasoner is claiming to be similar is only a part of the instance, and the other factors, many of them unknown, may well be different. Therefore, "t" is not "q" and these things are more different than they are similar.
You can take courses in logic that go into far greater detail, but for our purposes, it is enough to understand these two types of reasoning and to see a few logical fallacies that are drawn out of them. If you find one of the fallacies listed in the linked document just above, you know that there is a vulnerable spot.
Trying out the analysis. Moving from principle to actual analysis is not always a clean process. I'll take a shot at it here by trying to analyze an argument on one slide in Phil McClean's PowerPoint presentation. Here's the slide.
If we look at it using Toulmin, we see that there is the claim that vitamin A deficiency is a major health problem. Curiously, the screen design seems to indicate that he is offering two pieces of evidence to support the claim (causes blindness, and influences severity . . .), but logically, the next bullet (>100 million children suffer from the problem) is also evidence supporting the claim that this is a "major" health problem. Visually, the argument should look like this:
We can say that the claim seems to be supported with evidence, and that the relationship of the evidence to the claim is clear enough that we do not need warrant and backing statements. However, it may still be an overstatement because it does not specify the conditions or locations in which it is not the case. Still, if I were to make that argument, I can imagine some people saying, "You're grasping at straws." To contest this claim is probably not worth the fight: this is not a good point of stasis to engage in argument. Most of us will grant this MAJOR PREMISE of Phil's syllogism to be true.
The rest of the slide looks like a syllogism because the next statement (for many countries, the infrastructure doesn't exist to deliver vitamin pills) appears to be the minor premise to the syllogism, and the last statement (improved vitamin A content in widely consumed crops an attractive alternative) appears to be the deduction. But the minor premise is supposed to point to something new and then claim that the new thing is an instance of the first term in the major premise, something like "this childe suffers from vitamin A deficiency."
Clearly, this bullet is not a minor premise. Instead it is an assertion of fact. What we end up with is a compound set of claims and a deduction, that could be stated as, "Because vitamin A deficiency is a major problem, and because many countries don't have the means of delivering vitamin pills, improved vitamin A content in widely consumed crops an attractive alternative." This is really an enthymeme with parts of the reasoning left out.
At this point, I could ask, "How do you arrive at that conclusion?" Such a question would shift our focus back to Toulmin's model because now the final claim (improved vitamin A content in widely consumed crops is an attractive alternative) is taken to be the claim and the two previous statements (vitamin A deficiency is a major problem, and many countries don't have the means of delivering vitamin pills) are taken to be evidence to support it. When I ask how the evidence supports the claim, I'm asking for a warrant, and the warrant would fill in the missing part of the syllogistic argument.
This is about the best I can do with this argument. It isn't fully satisfying, but I have a much better sense of the argument than I did when I started.
For next time, find an argument in one of your sources and take a shot at analyzing it in terms discussed in this lesson, as I have just attempted to do. Here's an example by Kari LaFrance and another by Aaron Nagel that uses Toulmin's system. Notice that in both cases, when you read the claim, that is the final position the person wants you to believe; the data is the basic evidence to support it; the warrant is the explanation of how the data support the claim. You'll probably find that a living argument does not always divulge itself completely to analysis. Send me your analysis in an email message or as an attachment. Tell me where you found the argument.