Note: one page of photocopied material from other sources (The William Raspberry column referred to below) will be provided separately.

From

RADISH LOGIC, (Camas Press, Eugene, OR: 1991)

by J. W. Powell
(Copyright J.W. Powell: All rights reserved)

This course text is about arguments--how to read them, how to think about them.In this introduction is a start toward thinking about what arguments are, about how this book is different from others in the field, and a map of how we'll proceed.

The author (I, for short), during his graduate school days, taught sections of study skills classes, including units on how to predict questions, how to take notes, how to write essay exams, and so on. During the course of doing this, I realized slowly that one of the things that had been told me about higher education is a myth, even if I had repeated it to my students. The myth is this; during most of elementary and high school, your teachers will ask you to absorb information, answers to questions, and then you have to be a tape recorder, play it back--but in college you learn how to ask questions, how to think about what is given to you. Public school asks you to memorize; college asks you to think, to question.

The fact is very different from the myth; most college classes only ask you to come up with answers too, and they provide those answers to you in textbooks and lectures. I went over hundreds of university professor's tests in many dozens of different courses.In going over those tests I found that the main differences between high school and college are that in college there are a lot more answers per week or term, and the teacher provides more answers that are not in the text. But, at least in the colleges where I have taught, it is a small minority of courses, a small minority of teachers, in which you are asked to question what is set before you.

Perhaps this is old news. Encouraging questions takes a secure teacher with a lot of time and patience for discussion; but security, time, patience are not abundant commodities in most colleges.

This book though and your teacher are committed to your learning some skills of questioning what you hear and read.We will teach by focusing on those places in which questions most obviously ought to be asked, namely places in which people offer arguments.

The quicker among you will have noted that these skills may be useless, since you believe what I said above about the skills being so rarely encouraged or called for in most college classes. And in my grimmer days I think this is true. It is certainly true if we think of Critical Thinking as a study skill, like notetaking or predicting essay questions. Yet it may not be totally useless, for a couple of reasons. As you progress through your college major, you will find that mastery in your major gradually requires you to think more about the parts of your field in which new discoveries are being made and claims·are being debated. There, these skills directly apply. Further, your teachers can verify that the very best students are often those who know how to ask good and unsettling questions. And finally, there are enormous benefits to be had from feeling independant of the information you are fed.For one thing, much of the information you receive in the course of your education will change or become irrelevant within a couple of dozen years--you might as well be one of those who helps think about how to replace it. For another, asking questions of the right kind can be fun, in a perverse way. I often announce as one of my course goals that at least a couple of my students will be thought of as troublemakers by my colleagues at the University.

* * * *
The word 'argument' is an educated person's ordinary word. It is not like 'hot,' 'mommy,' or 'up,' but it is not a technical word, despite some efforts by logicians to make it one. It is a word you will find in city council debates, on the editorial pages of newspapers, in political discussions. The possibility of people talking about arguments for this or that arises any time people discuss disagreements or possible disagreements. (And we all know of the related use of the word to mean a verbal dispute, as in "She and her brother are forever getting into arguments about everything from choices of TV shows to who used the last of the toilet paper.)· Since it is an ordinary word, it is fairly easy to summarize how people do use it. The following is meant as a reminder, a rule of thumb, for you to memorize. It is not meant as a definition, at least not in the way that students learn to misuse definitions. That is, it is not legislation to use in outlawing disputed cases--those definitions can be good or bad, and so need to misuse definitions. That is, it is not legislation to use in outlawing disputed cases--those definitions can be good or bad, and so need to be argued for, often in ways that only cloud the issue they were meant to settle. This is a reminder about how the word is actually used.

We have an argument when someone takes a stand on some issue and backs it up.
Arguments are everywhere, but suppose a domestic example: I flunk out of the University, despite my Critical Thinking class (or because of it), and spend the next half-dozen years lolling around my parents' house drinking beer and watching television. My younger sister and brother think this is terrific, at least for a while, but tension gradually builds in the household until someone confronts me with one of the versions of a question:

What are you going to do with your life? (this is how my mother might put it, or:)

When are you going to get off your dead ass and get a job? (This from my father.)

Shouldn't you be pursuing a vocation? (This from the earnest high school sister, on her way to becoming just like my mother.)

--These stereotypes courtesy of "Leave it to Beaver" and my teen years watching TV.

Confronted with one of these questions, we can imagine the family proceeding in any of several awful directions we never saw on those old sitcoms; My father starts shouting and making threats, my mother cries, my little sister stomps off and slams the door, my nine-year old brother kicks me in the groin. But we can imagine the discussion (or at least maybe you can) taking a different turn; we all sit down and the people try to work toward answers to those questions put above.

That is, while the family might fall apart faced by such an issue, it also might not; it might do some work toward resolving the tension, the controversy, the issue. Thus, my mother might say at our dinner table, "I think you ought to give college another try--you got some good grades--there is not really a question about your ability. And you've developed some interests since then; I see you reading the police reports and crime stories every day, and you are interested in legal issues, criminal rights. You could even think in terms of going to law school. And if you do not get into law school, a college degree would at least make you eligible to apply to Police Academy to become a detective or policeman."

My mother, then, does not leave in tears but addresses the issue, has an answer to the question of what I ought to do. Her answer (what we will often call a stand or position) is that I ought to go back to school with the goal of going into some sort of work in law or law enforcement. She provides something to us to show that this is a good answer to the question--that is, she supports her answer. She does this by reminding me of my abilities and interests: I can get good grades, and I am interested in legal matters. Her argument is a good example of something which would come from a mother's point of view; her concern is for my future and my welfare, and she has paid some attention to me, what I like and what I might want.

--I (the author, not the failed college student couch potato) will continue this story in a moment, but want to point out that we have in these last few paragraphs a small model of what the next few sections are about. You are given a quote, something someone has said, which is relevant to some QUESTION or ISSUE. That issue is spelled out or clarified. What the person said in the quote is described in terms of that issue, and also in terms of POSITION, SUPPORT, and POINT OF VIEW. And then, as in this very paragraph you read now, I try to make you conscious of what we are doing. I as it were hold a mirror up to have you watch what you do. I remark on what I see and invite you to watch yourself too, much as someone teaching weightlifting or ballet or public speaking might do, in hopes that paying attention and becoming self-aware might help you with the skills.

Meanwhile, back at the dinner table, my father is putting in his oar. "What a crock. So what if you're smart. You were smart before, and you still flunked out. What makes you think it will be any different this time? Be realistic, instead of dreaming of castles years down the road. Jeff Murphy is now the foreman on swing shift at the mill, and he owes me favors; you can get on down there right away."

So my father too has presented an argument. His is for the claim that my mother's solution will not work, and he supports that by pointing to my past record and to how long and uncertain a process my mother's solution would involve, when a quicker solution is available. It is probably a bad rap for fathers to say that this comes from a father's point of view--it comes, let us say, from someone who has strong opinions about what I ought to do, and who has concerns for finding a quick and practical solution. And, again, what he has done is to be contrasted with all the other routes these discussions often take; he did not start shouting and making threats, nor turn his back and stomp off. Arguments are noble things.

My sister joins the discussion carrying a manila envelope."Look at these," she says, spilling a bunch of mouldy and yellowed·newspaper clippings onto the dining table. "Remember your cartoons? the strip you did for the paper your senior year? and the drawings·you sent off to FAMILY CIRCLE? You loved doing this stuff. And it is FUNNY. Remember the fan letter you got from the man in Portland? This is a waste, letting your talent go. You should be following this up. Even when you just doodle at the kitchen phone, it sometimes is very good. Here's one right here. You wanted to go work with that guy at the Portland Museum Art School--you could still do it. Look at this. Read this one. Look at the lines in this one."

My sister has an argument too. Her method is to bring in evidence to support her claim that I should be pursuing a career in cartooning. My father will roll his eyes, but my sister will keep pushing drawings at us, reminding us how much I liked doing this kind of work and how good it is. Her point of view is like my mother's, in that it is based on a concern for me and on paying attention to things I did. She also has looked at this evidence quite a lot harder than anyone else at the table, and has confidence in her own ability to decide how good and how important it is. Is she biased so much that she should not be taken seriously? Well, that is one question to ask on the way to deciding whether her argument is a good one, but for now that is jumping ahead--we will discuss the distinction between description and evaluation in a bit.

My little brother chimes in. "I think you ought to be a fireman." We all look at him with carefully solemn faces while he twitches. "Well, I wanna be a fireman." And he runs off.

Was that an argument? Perhaps the right answer is to chuckle. He was trying to enter in. But here again is a place for the reminder that our rule of thumb is not a device to use for sorting arguments from non-arguments.

Remember too that whether an argument is good or bad may not be enough to settle an issue. My mother may be right about my interests and abilities, and even have hit on the kind of life that would make me happy, but still my father could be right about it not being enough because I just would not persevere. Also, it is possible that they could ALL be off the mark, though with the best of intentions (if, for example, my interest in legal matters, criminal cases, and rights of the accused comes from my secret life as a small-time cocaine dealer). And yet if everything is brought out and dealt with, the kinds of arguments they give may offer some hope of a resolution.

We are going to work through an example of reading and evaluating an argument, with some pauses to reflect on what the process involves. The example is a quote from a student paper, but it is an argument most of us have heard, an argument which seems to be accepted by a significant portion of students, and an argument which shows up sometimes in letters to the editor.In other words, this is a live one, on a live issue; if you were to bring it up for discussion in a group or class you would likely find the discussion fairly heated, and people could have real disagreements with each other.

Abortion cannot be substituted for birth control, because if the woman was not responsible in taking precautions against becoming pregnant, she ought to have to live with the consequences.

Our first question is,

"What is the argument?"

In asking this, we are observing a distinction between DESCRIPTION and EVALUATION. While there are some problems with this distinction, for now we can think of it as just the difference between answering the question, What is the argument? (that's description) and answering the question, Is it a good argument? (evaluation).î

Describing arguments is one of the parts of critical thinking which often feels artificial to us--often we want not to talk about what someone has said but to attack or defend it, but for a while we will put off judgment or appreciation until we have given a reading or description. That is, when we ask for a description, we are asking that we reserve judgement. After a career in education built on learning to read more quickly, we are now engaged in learning to go slow. It is not quite as bad as the story of the philosophy professor who assigned his students Wittgenstein's _Philosophical Investigations_ the first week, the first forty pages the second week, . . . and by the last week the assignment was the first sentence. But some readers may like that story better at the end of this text. Later we will get to the question of evaluation, answering the question, "Is the argument a good one?" We can think of this as part of an effort to be fair; when we disagree with someone, we want them to be sure to hear us clearly and understand what we say, and that means we may want to do the same for them. Implicit in giving a fair description, then, is that we try to say what the argument is in terms that the arguer would agree with. We paraphrase in ways calculated to get the arguer to nod. This is akin to what is sometimes called active listening in counseling. If the arguer disagrees with what we say here, we have little chance of furthering the discussion on the issue. Give her view and leave ours out for now. No cheap shots, no distortions; this is part of reading arguments fairly.

What is this argument? As a pedagogical device, we analyze that question into four parts. Each part is a question, more specific than the question asking for a description of the argument. We ask,

What is the issue?

What is the arguer's stand or position on that issue?

How does the arguer support that position?

What is the arguer's point of view?

Remember too that these questions seem to be implied by our reminder or rule of thumb about how educated people use the word "argument," namely that we have an argument when someone takes a stand on an issue and backs it up. We will now answer those four questions for the quote above, with some comments about how we might have gone awry.

What is the issue? We might be tempted to say that the issue is abortion, but that would be lazy and over-broad. As soon as people seriously enter into a discussion of abortion, abortion is not one issue but a whole nest of issues. One of the ways we can avoid making the mistake of choosing an overly general wording of the issue comes from reminding ourselves that issues are QUESTIONS about which people disagree (or could disagree). For now, then, we will insist on giving an issue in the form of a question, and try to give the particular question the quote is addressing. The result is that we will not say the issue to which this argument is addressed is abortion, or even that the issue is, "Is it okay for women to get abortions?" The first is not a question but a topic which covers a lot of questions, and the second is not even answered in the quote; the person quoted could go either way. We need to be more specific:

May abortion morally be used as a means of birth control?

This is pretty close, since the quote clearly answers this question and provides something which is supposed to back up that answer. Further, none of the quote needs to be thrown away as irrelevant--that is, our reading of the issue doesn't leave us with the question of why the speaker said some large part of what she did say. Though it is not always reliable, this is a sign that we may have the question right. Too, this really is an issue we can recognize apart from the quote. Part of the debate about abortion centers on whether women too often are making the decision merely on grounds of convenience, and on the other side whether women should have to give some more compelling reason for getting an abortion than that they will be inconvenienced by the pregnancy. In other words, one large question in the debate about abortion is, Is not wanting to be pregnant good enough grounds for getting an abortion? That would misrepresent this particular argument, though, since the speaker never directly answers this question. Though we can tell that the speaker would say a strong no in those cases where the woman used no birth control, it is unclear what the speaker's position would be in those cases in which the woman took every precaution and was terribly responsible but the birth control measures failed. So we are left with our original formulation of the issue as, May abortion morally be used as a means of birth control?

As we practice this process, we will find that often getting clear about the issue is the most difficult part of our work. We are going to return to examine the process of clarifying issues, but the issue in this quote may be clear enough. Still, getting the issue right helps make much of the rest of the work of describing the argument easy. And that is the last indicator for us to notice; if the other parts of the description fall easily into place, that is a sign that we do have the issue properly articulated.

Position? What is the speaker's answer to the question at issue? For this quote, the answer is simple. The answer is no. A woman may not morally use abortion in place of birth control.

Sometimes students are tempted to give a paraphrase of the whole argument as the position. "No, because. . . ."· Don't. Just answer the question, you might say to the quote. Leave the reasons alone for a moment. That's next. May a woman morally use abortion as a means of birth control? The position in the quote is no. Period. Sometimes we might use the word CLAIM or CONCLUSION instead of position.î Since we have given the issue as a question, this part of the description of the argument is the answer to that question.

Support? The speaker offers something to show that that "No" is the right answer, namely that women should be responsible during sex, and if they are not, they should live with the consequences. That is, if the woman risked a pregnancy by having unprotected sex, then she should not be able to avoid the consequences of taking that risk.

Point of view? The speaker has a concern that people be responsible during sex. He or she also believes that people who take risks should not be coddled or bailed out when the risk proves to have consequences. The speaker is not someone with special expertise or experience; at least none of that is shaping the thinking in this quote. We might be inclined to think the speaker is male, or cynical about human beings or women shirking responsibilities, but that may or may not be true. We have no grounds for thinking the speaker is an expert or scientist or is speaking out of purely religious concerns.î In some ways, the speaker may be regarded as having an ordinary point of view rather than a specialized one--she or he is like you and me.

This ends the description part of our work with this quote. We will practice this sort of description again. We start with a quote. The quote will allegedly have an argument in it. We will try to reserve judgement about the value of what the speaker says while we answer the question of what the speaker's argument is. We break that question down into parts in order to help us describe clearly.
* * * *

Logicians often think of logic as a study of the proper evaluation of arguments, and the part of the work which involves description or reading arguments is merely a prelude to the part which matters. The part which matters, on this view, is passing judgement on arguments, and constructing theory which justifies the judgements. The emphasis in this text on learning how to read arguments is one thing which sets it apart from the usual text.

Surely evaluation of arguments does play a part in thinking them through. Let us finish thinking this one through, and be self-aware, that is, pay attention to how we do that.

We are already aware of how classroom discussions of arguments often proceed--if someone were not moderating the discussion, the discussion could easily turn into a free-for-all, partly because some people naturally wish to press disagreements. The distinction between description and evaluation sometimes helps to frame the discussion and give it a common purpose. This is true because the first part of the discussion, namely describing the argument, puts a severe limitation on what sort of comments are in order. Only things with which the arguer would agree help to further this part of the discussion. We can abbreviate this as a kind of maxim or suggestion, though it is a bit strong: Description requires us to

Think like the arguer.

Psychologists and counselors sometimes call this active listening--we show we have heard by paraphrasing so that the speaker will agree.

EVALUATION



There is an interesting history of the teaching and theory of evaluation of arguments. For the moment, though, let us only remind ourselves of a rough division between schooled methods of evaluation and naive methods. Schooled methods include what we can learn from logic and philosophy of science, courses on research methods, and the study of logical fallacies. In this text we will spend some time thinking about and looking at these methods, but that comes later. Naive evaluation is evaluation not informed by any method we get from teachers or books. Take a look at how those evaluations might look.

Under the heading of naive evaluations, we can sort out a couple of basic approaches. The first might be the method (if we can call it that, since it isn't), of passing judgement on arguments based on whether we agree or disagree with the position put forward. So, on the topic of abortion, if we are pro-choice, we then decide that all arguments which are pro-choice are good arguments, and all arguments which are against the possibility of abortion are bad arguments. Or if we ourselves are, say, against corporal punishment for children, or for a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget, or would claim that sociology is a legitimate field of study, or are for much stiffer prison sentences for repeat offenders without exception--or if we have an opposing position on any of these--we use this method when our own position is the sorting device to separate good arguments on the issue from bad.

This method has some striking advantages. It is simple. We hardly ever seem to make a mistake in using it, partly because its use protects us from the possibility of ever looking at mistakes. It is easy to pass on to our children. Its use is quite popular and familiar. It is comfortable; it leads us naturally to spend time with people who reinforce us and our stands on controversies, and people whom we can pat on the back in turn for being right and right-thinking.

In contrast to that, though still under the heading of naive methods of evaluation, is another method which for some strange reason is also practiced fairly commonly. We can abbreviate our description of this method by saying that it consists of taking the issue seriously. In some ways it is more like an attitude than a method; we use this method when we entertain the possibility that we have not arrived at a final answer on the question at issue. We worry. Perhaps we might change our mind. When someone says something we disagree with and offers support--an argument, then--we take it in as something which may help us to think about how we stand on the issue. And when someone gives an argument with which we do agree, we still worry--we consider how we might answer if we were on the opposing side.

This method is a pain. We alienate our acquaintances, especially those who are used to just pronouncing The Word on issues or potential issues. We are not comfortable. There are lots of times we wish we could just agree with someone but we cannot. People who disagree with us can seem to be as helpful to us as those who think every word we speak is gospel. We are restless, furrow our brows a lot, keep having to ask questions. Our friends get impatient with us. God help our spouses. Our kids hate it and go crazy. We stick out like sore thumbs at PTA meetings and in committees. The advantages, if that is what they are, seem perverse. If we are wrong about something, this method may help us find that out. Arguments and arguers seem to seek us out, once they realize we will give them a hearing. Our humility requires us to assume that we are making mistakes which are too subtle for us to catch yet, and so sometimes it seems we are on an ascending spiral of misteps, like a video game in which we move to new levels by blowing it on this one but recognizing and understanding how we blew it.

This has been a caricature, of course. The method of worry can be overdone, and it takes some time and dedication to get to be good at it. You do not suddenly have a worry about an issue just by saying you do. Usually, worrying about an issue requires us to have some background, and takes practice. And those of us who are inclined to try to please the teacher or to try to master critical thinking skills as though they are a game will sometimes learn to mouth the questions instead of think. So we needn't worry that this way of thinking will suddenly possess us like some awful and unshakable Zen enlightenment that alienates us from our familiar world. It will do that, but it can be avoided by learning the moves of description and evaluation as if they are just to get a good grade--as a substitute for thinking instead of a serious enterprise that we might really worry about.î And if we do get sucked in and become this kind of worrier, we might be able to get along with people still. For one thing, we can always hold our tongue, and suffer in silence.

A couple more comments about evaluation before we finish up with our example. It should be clear by now that what is being advocated here is this latter kind of evaluation, what I have called the method of worry. It is not an unfamiliar method. We can see it at work in any good City Council meeting or a committee taking up a debate, on the editorial pages or in the editorial columns of newspapers and news magazines, in scholarly journals. I have said it is a naive method, but not to put it down. I mean rather to make clear the distinction between this sort of argument evaluation and those methods of evaluation which are taught in schools and proceed out of theory. My argument that this is the method of choice is simple; we must use this method, because it is the method against which we measure any other. That is, if another method is to be considered, we will decide whether that method (whether from formal logic, philosophy of science, the study of fallacies) is good or bad by how it helps us think through real arguments when we are worrying about the real issues those arguments address.

Worrying about the issue is the method we are trying out. Remember the quote we started with:

Abortion cannot be substituted for birth control, because if the woman was not responsible in taking precautions against becoming pregnant, she ought to have to live with the consequences.

This is a good quote to work with, since many people have a hard time taking the issue seriously. Many people, that is, have their minds made up on the question of whether women can be justified in getting an abortion as a substitute for birth control. When we do have our minds made up, we may need something to help us with the job of thinking the question through. We are inclined to take our own opinions as the correct view to hold, with varying degrees of certainty. We may think anyone who disagrees is crazy or immoral or ignorant or ·-----·(fill in this blank yourself).

What could help? Sometimes the reminder that this is a live issue, that perhaps not all the people on the other side are idiots or have antennae, will do it. Sometimes the question "Why do you take the stand you do?" will help.

Given an argument, there is another possible help, in the form of an admonition, parallel and opposite to the admonition for describing arguments. This one is

Think like an opponent.

In its simplicity (and Zen unhelpfulness) are hidden some problems. The HOW of thinking like an opponent remains obscure, for one thing. Real opponents often do not do a good job and so we have to do better, for another. Yet we can try. And to help with the how, we can organize our opposition by keying off the terms we used to describe the argument. And we can enlist our friends, or even better, our enemies. (A group of people can often be more resourceful in opposing an argument than one person.)

Issue? One thing an opponent might say is that this question, of whether a woman can substitute abortion for birth control, never takes up the crucial questions. Asking this question, that is, bypasses the questions of whether a woman has moral rights that can extend so far as aborting, whether the fetus should have its interests taken into account, whether the method of conception has anything to do with whether the fetus should be allowed to survive.

Position? Simple opposition here is certainly possible. It is likely to come in the form of arguments, and most will have to do with support more than just the position.

Support? There are several things for an opponent to say here.

--The support in the quote is sexist, in that it assumes the responsibility is basically the woman's, and the consequences are to be the woman's as well. It neglects the responsibility of the man in the sexual act and the high stakes put up by the fetus in the consequences.

--The support seems to assume a contractual view of sex, as though having sex with someone is like signing a piece of paper which carries obligations. While there may be times and places in which this is a proper view of sex, as perhaps in sex within a marriage, it is at least an issue whether sex always carries obligations with it.

--The support embodies a view of pregnancy (and possibly parenthood) which treats pregnancy as an appropriate means of punishment for some wrongdoing, as though being pregnant were like being under house arrest. This is questionable. It might be possible, for instance, that we should think of pregnancy and parenthood as something we might wish to reserve for the best people among us, and as something which is valued by the society as being among the most noble things we do. Thinking of pregnancy and parenthood as punishment is to put them down, improperly so.

--The support takes a view toward people who take risks which is sometimes inappropriate. Sometimes we do want people to take the consequences of their actions; if my junior-high-school daughter keeps forgetting her lunch, it may be that I will decide to quit bailing her out the way I have been doing, by dropping the lunch off at school on my way to work. Some of the progress we have made in treating alcoholics and addicts has come from the realization that often it is a complete mistake to cover up for them or give them more chances or bail them out--what is often recommended is that we let them "hit bottom" in the hopes that they may then change. But in occupations and sports where people take risks or make dangerous choices we do not necessarily insist that they face all the possible consequences; a construction worker on high steel is not required to work without a safety line just because he freely chose the job, nor a skydiver to jump without a reserve chute. It is not clear that a woman who engages in unprotected sex is more like an absent-minded child who needs to be taught a lesson than she is like a worker entitled to limit her risks.

What we have done is to cast a cold eye on the argument. We have spent some time trying to think like an opponent, even if we happen to agree with the position the arguer defends. This is in a way a schizophrenic enterprise; we put our own views on hold until we have spent time thinking about what someone else could say. There are times, as we will see, when the effect is like a hall of mirrors--he could say this, but she could reply that, but then he could reply in turn with this other thing, and so on. That sort of progression cannot be taken far or all hope of progress on the issue will be lost in confusion. Fundamental at this point is that we have left ourselves out of the talk about the issue until we have in mind what an arguer is saying and what that arguer's opponent could say in reply. Someday we will get to what WE want to say. But not yet.

. . .
(p.35)

Are advertisements arguments?
This is a live issue, despite the position taken in many high school speech classes, college rhetoric and journalism classes, and many Critical Thinking courses that the answer is yes. It is a live issue by virtue of the fact that this author and a very few others (notably Prof. Don Levi in the Philosophy Dept. at the University of Oregon) are convinced the proper answer is no, and we have arguments.

Perhaps we can think about this better if we work with a particular example. We could use any ad, but in order to sharpen the debate, I'll use one for which the opposing position is taken, from Howard Kahane's Logic and Contemporary Rhetoric, several editions (1974-2001: Wadsworth, Belmont, CA).

More people in America drink Budweiser than any other beer.

Now we can take on the question, are ads arguments? at least in a preliminary way, by taking up the question, is the Bud ad an argument?

Just what is the issue? By now, we have some tools for trying to figure out what the issue is. Strikingly in this case, there are live related issues: all those issues having to do with drinking, perhaps those having to do with handling problems associated with drinking, and perhaps some having to do with whether there should be restrictions on ads for alcoholic beverages. This clearly is not meant to settle any of those issues even if we can tell what the speaker would probably say. The ad is meant to influence individual viewers buying beer. Kahane takes the position the ad supports to be that I should drink Bud, so the question for which that must be the answer is,

What beer should I drink?
This way of putting the issue has some corroboration in the fact that it makes the rest of the description of the argument easy.

Position? Bud. I should drink Budweiser.

Support? Because Budweiser is drunk by more Americans than any other beer.

Point of View? Ah, well, this is a problem. The voice-over is not the voice of God at an early age, though it sounds that way. It is not even the voice of Anheuser Busch Brewing Company, or the president of A. B. The voice is likely to be that of a person who has much more expensive tastes than Bud. The voice is that of someone who was hired by an advertising agency because it sounds authoritative, trustworthy, and up. The advertising agency is rich in concerns and expertise--this quote does not come from someone like you and me, nor from anyone like the beautiful people on the screen. The concerns are not concerns about any of the issues alluded to above; they are concerns for such things as what will appeal to a wide audience, especially those who now drink Bud and need reinforcement for that and those who might drink Bud if they are reached somehow by an ad. There is a concern (at the very least in the background) for what their bosses will think and their bosses concerns for sales figures, which means money. It seems we can give an answer to the question about point of view, after all; we've specified who's talking and something of the concerns behind the quote.

We have been successful, then, at reading the ad as an argument. Kahane too has been successful at laying out what the argument is in the ad. These readings would be some of the main grounds or support for the position that the ad does contain an argument. There is more support possible for a Yes answer to the question, does this ad contain an argument? One way to support such a claim, which is consistent with some current psychological theories about human cognition, might be to say that ads influence people's decisions--ads persuade or attempt to persuade people to do things, and so they must be offering a choice to people and support in the form of reasons or evidence or some such for picking a particular alternative faced in that choice. A choice in this kind of setting means that the consumer faces a situation in which there are several possible courses of action--that sounds a lot like an issue, and the course of action the ad is hoping the consumer takes looks like a conclusion or position. And then of course what ads excel in is the subtle push toward that course of action (putting a product in your shopping cart, for example), which can be easily seen as support or premises for the decision the consumer makes. Faced with a choice, an ad offers an answer and some grounds for that answer. What more could an argument be? Of course ads are arguments.

The paragraph above, then summarizes arguments for the claim that this ad and other ads are arguments. There may be some lack of clarity regarding the point of view--who would care about this? what concerns would anyone have to lead them to making a case that ads are arguments? But we will leave this.

Now look at the opposition. What follows, that is, is an argument that ads are not arguments. It has several pieces.

--Consider the Budweiser ad, and consider the issue the ad supposedly addresses. Now think about the live issues about beer and drinking. Some of those could be easily listed.

How strict should we be with drunken drivers?

What level of blood alcohol in a driver should be tolerated by law?

What should be done about underage drinkers?

How can school education regarding alcohol be improved?

When and how should a family be helped to intervene in cases of alcoholism?

What is the best way to deal with a recovering alcoholic if one gives a party?

How can parents best help their children prepare to cope with decisions about drinking?

Now, take a deep breath and try this one:

Which beer should I drink?


It is a joke. This is not an issue at all. The word "should" is completely out of place. People do not (except in odd situations) choose their beer based on shoulds or oughts. And while we can think of situations in which someone could raise a similar question, those people are not the target audience for this ad.

Let's spell that out: Suppose the Critical Thinking class traditionally ends with a two-day keg party. We collect money and draft Vickie to buy the beer because she has a pickup. However, Vickie unfortunately acquired a taste in Ireland last summer for Irish green lager with bitters, and finds an importer who has five kegs of it in stock from a shipment which went awry in New York last St. Patrick's Day. Delighted, she shows up at the party with a truckload of this stuff. Those of us who are there early are either shocked and appalled or treat it as a joke, and send her off. Now we have the proper situation for her to face a serious question, namely, what beer should I buy? (not, you'll notice, quite the same thing as, what beer should I drink?). And in this situation, the Budweiser ad could be a help, a help which even offers evidence for its providing the right answer to her question.

Of course the ad was not targeted to people whose pickups are full of the wrong choice of beer. To read the ad as an argument on this sort of issue requires that a strange situation be read into the background. In the absence of such a background, we have no way to take the ad as such an argument.

The issue, "What beer should I drink?" is a fake or bogus issue, or a joke. This becomes even clearer when we consider another issue which sometimes arises, namely, "Should I drink?" Though even that one is a special case, since few people drink or abstain based on shoulds or oughts. The question, that is, is more likely to be, "Shall I drink?" The proper response to that is just as likely to be a simple decision as it is to be arguments.

There is not an argument here. The support so far for that claim is that there is only a fake or bogus issue.

--Further, if there is an argument, what is it? Kahane gives two different readings to the argument, and I have given another above. The one I give above is very odd on retrospect, and Kahane gives us no way to choose between the two readings he gives. This is another way of casting doubt on the claim that there is an argument in the ad. That is, the ad is not an argument because we cannot tell what argument it is.

--Still more. Think about advertisements and how they do their work. (Kahane's book is actually a good reference for following up on this matter, in his later chapter on advertising. Many others have also written on this topic.) Often ads are at their most effective when they get people to avoid thinking about their choices. That is, ads may have the objective of keeping you from looking at the shelves as you trundle along, pulling off merchandise on autopilot. You can see this with children on Saturday afternoons in the cereal sections. Many times the ad is interested in keeping you reassured that you have been drinking the right thing all along, using safe and effective and prudent and cheap and sexy automobiles, booze, mouthwash, makeup, deodorant, cigarettes, sanitary napkins, brands of clothing--and so you do not need to think the next time you spend money. Research about just what makes ads effective is equivocal, but we may sometimes more properly think of modern ads as just causing us to buy rather than thinking of them as talking us into buying.

Take a case. The author is a shade tree auto mechanic, with a phase in his checkered past of working on and racing performance cars. He is a perfect sucker for certain kinds of ads, namely ads like those for Alfa Romeos detailing the superiority of DeDion rear suspensions, and the ads for Porsche on how Porsches (finally, now) minimize acceleration-induced camber changes and therefore oversteer in hard corners. The ads are terrific, and are easy to read as arguments. But the descriptions of how these ads are put together and the market research that goes on along with them makes clear that the main message is not directed at the question Which car should John Powell buy? It is rather like a subtle massage of the lower ego, an insinuation that this is your kind of car, J. P., the kind of car for fading ex-hotrodders with pretentions to understanding engineering. The fact that so many people read the ads who never buy a new car and never will speaks to how good those ads are at making people feel good.

Other ads operate by raising anxieties and then pointing us toward a product which will alleviate those anxieties. Worries about body odor, dandruff, bad breath, how likely I am to be decapitated in an auto accident, whether my wife and children will have to live under a bridge if I die soon; all these are anxieties which advertisers want me to have, anxieties they are careful to manufacture and then to cultivate like rare orchids.

*****

Consider another ad, this one too brought to our attention courtesy of Howard Kahane's book. This was a print ad, consisting of a quote in the middle of quite a lot of white space:

100,000 doctors have quit smoking cigarettes.

(Maybe they know something you don't.)

followed by a small footnote that this message has been brought to us by the American Medical Association.

Shouldn't we read this one as an argument? We certainly could, and it would make a certain kind of sense. The issue is a live one for smokers, namely "Shouldn't I quit?" The ad supports a position of yes, by pointing to a certain set of health authorities, our physicians, who not only say yes but act accordingly. The point of view is that of our doctors, concerned for our health and long life. Corroboration of this reading comes from its placement in the book in a chapter which includes the fallacy of questionable authority, and a discussion of bandwagon effect, since the numbers used make it look as if it is saying we ought to do something because lots of others are doing it too. I have had students claim that it is a good argument, since medical doctors are after all generally well-informed, have proper opportunity to acquire experience, are in the right field to speak on this, don't get higher fees if they quit, and seem generally to agree that smokers ought to quit.

This, then, is an appeal to authority, where someone claims something is so because an authority (or authorities) endorses that claim. Not only that, it is an appeal to authority which may have some legitimacy. We could think still of some niggling worries, but it is possible that they could be resolved, and the argument emerge unscathed. For instance, 100,000 is a suspiciously round number, (perhaps explained by the fact that the AMA is being careful and conservative though it has reason to believe that 108,560 doctors have quit). We do not know how many doctors there are, either, and it may make a difference if the other percentage of doctors who continue to puff away (leaving out those who never did smoke) is 2 percent rather than 60 percent, especially since we like agreement among our authorities. But perhaps the right answers to these questions could be had.

That is the case for the claim that the AMA ad is or contains an argument. By now, you have some tools to make the case for the other side. Go ahead.

Think about the message of this ad. Is this ad aimed at smokers? Think about the point of view, the concerns out of which this ad came. Do those who paid for this ad want people to quit smoking? What are their concerns? Think about the issue, and about the other possible arguments which could be made to help resolve that issue.

The answer is that if there is an argument here it is a side effect, sort of like the terrific tan I got by working as a kid picking cotton. It has little or nothing to do with the ad in its purpose, message, or audience, nor does it address the questions about smoking which you and your doctor might discuss.

What is this ad about? It is, I suggest, about doctors being good guys--sensible, knowledgable, authorities, examples for the rest of us to look up to from our state of ignorance. The purpose of the ad is to reaffirm a kind of image of doctors as those the rest of the nation properly entrusts its welfare to (and so does not regulate or tax too heavily). The ad depends for its force on its audience already knowing what the right position is on the issue of whether smokers should quit. Hell, yes, smokers should quit, and doctors are on the side of the angels and the Surgeon General. The audience then for this ad is not just smokers but anyone who knows a smoker or sees smokers in moving around in the world. Further, if the ad had wanted to help those who face the issue, Should I quit? it could have done so by rehearsing a summary of research results and nailing the American Tobacco Institute's objections up for all to see tegether with the AMA's replies.

The trouble is that not very many people are interested in that issue; most smokers are not, and one of the problems smokers have is with people who think the smokers are ignorant of what they are doing (especially galling in the case of small children who bring the smoker the latest research results or clip stories and leave them on the mirror). Among smokers, it is much more likely that the live issue will be, not Should I quit? but rather, How can I quit?--what works, won't cause me to pork out, and doesn't take too much hassle? (Footnote: There are lots of possibilities here which vary in insight level and thoughtfulness, from "Why do I seem intent on killing myself off?" and "How do I find an insurance company that does not require a medical exam?" through "Granted I have good reasons for killing myself off, what if I change my mind after it is too late?") If this were an argument on whether I should quit, the AMA is just the outfit to put together some good arguments which would address the issue. Instead they pat each other on the back and face us, the public, to say, "See how united we stand? See what good guys we are? Remember how much we know?"

In support of the claim that this ad is not properly read as an argument, then, I have suggested that it has a purpose unrelated to the issue, a purpose which is much more crucial for us to see than any possible reading of it as an argument. Further, that purpose helps to make sense of the ad in a grim, cynical, moneygrubbing sort of way which might be preferable to the overly wholesome and romanticized view of doctors that we have from reading it as an argument. And last, if the AMA wanted to put together an argument for quitting smoking, they could have done the job so much better.

I have made a case against those who would read ads as arguments by taking up a couple of ads which could be read as arguments and showing that those readings are misleading. Reading the ads as arguments makes us miss what the ads are about, what their purpose is, and how they work. Because these two were plausible candidates for being arguments but they are not, I suggest that other ads should not be taken as arguments without some further thought.

from

CHAPTER THREE: CLARIFYING ISSUES

Read the following essay by Michael Levin, reprinted from the freelance My Turn column in Newsweek. The response which follows is part of this author's description and evaluation of the argument, concentrating on the question,
What is the Issue?

and written with an eye to prompting discussion. You can, of course, drift through both Levin's column and my response, and then furrow your brow a little and wait for someone else to say something about them. But I have used Levin's column partly because in my teaching it has proven to be pretty good at getting people mad at each other. I suggest that you watch your back while you make your way through the next couple of pages. In particular, you might pause after reading Levin and ask yourself what the issue is (I'll remind you of this on the page after his column). You might consider whether you like his argument or find it persuasive. Make a couple of notes on what you like or do not like, and then go on.

In review, recall that the question, What is the Issue? is often the biggest and most difficult of the questions we answer in describing an argument. We treat issues as questions, and if they really are issues we should be able to state the question in such a way that the opposing sides could agree that, yes, that is the question about which we disagree. If the issue is clear, then we can go on with our other steps to complete a description. But if there is still some uncertainty about why people disagree or what the disagreement involves, then we immediately slow down and work through some more questions which are meant to help in clarifying issues. Some of the main ones are the following:

a. How did this question arise? What is the beginning of the controversy? What history or background will help us understand the question?

b. Can we make this multiple choice? What are the possible answers to this question--especially the speaker's opponents' answer?

c. So what? What are the stakes? What difference does it make whether we go with one answer rather than another? What turns on the argument? If the speaker is right, what has to change? What are the consequences if the speaker is wrong or right?

d. Linked issues? What other issues are related to or distinguished from this one? Is there a big (or small) issue which needs to be answered first or which will be partially decided when this one is settled?

Levin's column is a good piece for trying out these questions. Have at it.

The Case for Torture

By Michael Levin

It is generally assumed that torture is impermissible, a throwback to a more brutal age. Enlightened societies reject it outright, and regimes suspected of using it risk the wrath of the United States.

I believe this attitude is unwise. There are situations in which torture is not merely permissible but morally mandatory. Moreover, these situations are moving from the realm of imagination to fact.

Death: Suppose a terrorist has hidden an atomic bomb on Manhattan Island which will detonate at noon on July 4 unless ... here follow the usual demands for money and release of his friends from jail. Suppose, further, that he is caught at 10 a.m on the fateful day, but preferring death to failure, won't disclose where the bomb is. What do we do? If we follow due process, wait for his lawyer, arraign him, millions of people will die. If the only way to save those lives is to subject the terrorist to the most excruciating possible pain, what grounds can there be for not doing so? I suggest there are none. In any case, I ask you to face the question with an open mind.

Torturing the terrorist is unconstitutional? Probably. But millions of lives surely outweigh constitutionality. Torture is barbaric? Mass murder is far more barbaric. Indeed, letting millions of innocents die in deference to one who flaunts his guilt is moral cowardice, an unwillingness to dirty one's hands. If you caught the terrorist, could you sleep nights knowing that millions died because you couldn't bring yourself to apply the electrodes?

Once you concede that torture is justified in extreme cases, you have admitted that the decision to use torture is a matter of balancing innocent lives against the means needed to save them. You must now face more realistic cases involving more modest numbers. Someone plants a bomb on a jumbo jet. I He alone can disarm it, and his demands cannot be met (or they can, we refuse to set a precedent by yielding to his threats). Surely we can, we must, do anything to the extortionist to save the passengers. How can we tell 300, or 100, or 10 people who never asked to be put in danger, "I'm sorry you'll have to die in agony, we just couldn't bring ourselves to . . . "

Here are the results of an informal poll about a third, hypothetical, case. Suppose a terrorist group kidnapped a newborn baby from a hospital. I asked four mothers if they would approve of torturing kidnappers if that were necessary to get their own newborns back. All said yes, the most "liberal" adding that she would like to administer it herself.

I am not advocating torture as punishment. Punishment is addressed to deeds irrevocably past. Rather, I am advocating torture as an acceptable measure for preventing future evils. So understood, it is far less objectionable than many extant punishments. Opponents of the death penalty, for example, are forever insisting that executing a murderer will not bring back his victim (as if the purpose of capital punishment were supposed to be resurrection, not deterrence or retribution). But torture, in the cases described, is intended not to bring anyone back but to keep innocents from being dispatched. The most powerful argument against using torture as a punishment or to secure confessions is that such practices disregard the rights of the individual. Well, if the individual is all that important, and he is, it is correspondingly important to protect the rights of individuals threatened by terrorists. If life is so valuable that it must never be taken, the lives of the innocents must be saved even at the price of hurting the one who endangers them.

Better precedents for torture are assassination and pre-emptive attack. No Allied leader would have flinched at assassinating Hitler, had that been possible. (The Allies did assassinate Heydrich.) Americans would be angered to learn that Roosevelt could have had Hitler killed in 1943, thereby shortening the war and saving millions of lives, but refused on moral grounds. Similarly, if nation A learns that nation B is about to launch an unprovoked attack, A has a right to save itself by destroying B's military capability first. In the same way, if the police can by torture save those who would otherwise die at the hands of kidnappers or terrorists, they must.

Idealism:There is an important difference between terrorists and their victims that should mute talk of the terrorists' "rights." The terrorist's victims are at risk unintentionally, not having asked to be endangered. But the terrorist knowingly initiated his actions. Unlike his victims, he volunteered for the risks of his deed. By threatening to kill for profit or idealism, he renounces civilized standards, and he can have no complaint if civilization tries to thwart him by whatever means necessary.

Just as torture is justified only to save lives (not extort confessions or incantations), it is justifiably administered only to those known to hold innocent lives in their hands. Ah, but how call the authorities ever be sure they have the right malefactor? Isn't there a danger of error and abuse? won't "WE" turn into "THEM?" Questions like these are disingenuous in a world in which terrorists proclaim themselves and perform for television. The name of their game is public recognition. After all, you can't very well intimidate a government into releasing your freedom fighters unless you announce that it is your group that has seized its embassy. "Clear guilt" is difficult to define, but when 40 million people see a group of masked gunmen seize an airplane on the evening news, there is not much question about who the perpetrators are. There will be hard cases where the situation is murkier. Nonetheless, a line demarcating the legitimate use of torture can be drawn. Torture only the obviously guilty, and only for the sake of saving innocents, and the line between "US" and "THEM" will remain clear.

There is little danger that the Western democracies will lose their way if they choose to inflict pain as one way of preserving order. Paralysis in the face of evil is the greater danger. Some day soon a terrorist will threaten tens of thousands of lives, and torture will be the only way to save them. We had better start thinking about this.

Now, before you go on, take a pencil (not a pen) and answer the following:
a. Do you think Levin is basically right?


b. Why or why not?

c. What is the issue Levin addresses?

d. Who are Levin's opponents?

e. What difference does it make whether Levin is right or not? (That is, what are the stakes?)

f. Levin talks as though he is writing in response to an increase in terrorism. Could this have come up before the advent of modern terrorism? What background could help us make sense of this piece? Where are there controversies regarding torture around the world today, and when in history have these controversies arisen?

* * * * *

Now take a look at one possible way of answering the question, what is the issue in Levin's piece on torture?



We could start by giving Levin's issue, the question he is trying to answer, as "Is torture permissible?" When we work on trying to make the issue clear, we begin to uncover problems with Levin's argument. As we clarify the issue this first way of stating the question looks muddy--it won't do.

Is torture permissible? One way to ask about the question is to explore the possible answers to it. What positions could someone take on this issue? Here are some.

There have been governmental agents and church authorities during different times of history who apparently thought torture was a perfectly good method of achieving desirable ends--extracting information or confessions from political dissidents or heretics or providing examples, through horrible punishment, to deter others from straying. And, of course, this is not just history. According to such authorities as Amnesty International, torture is used routinely by many totalitarian governments around the world, notoriously in Argentina, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Laos, South Africa, Cambodia, Viet Nam, Uganda, and Pakistan. There are live issues centered on the use of torture.

Another possible position is that torture is awful but sometimes justified (of course this may be the position taken by those governments listed above.) These positions will differ depending on the methods of justification proposed, but are in an important way the same if the justification is merely to weigh the good to be achieved against the awful means required to achieve it.
Another possible position is that torture is to be prohibited. Something like this has to be Levin's opponent's position and it may be wise to remind ourselves of what that position is and what is supposed to back it up. One of the barriers to the police using torture in the U.S. is the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution, in particular the Fifth Amendment's protection against compelling someone to testify against himself or herself, and the right to due process and equal protection. These are part of a package of civil liberties Americans often take for granted, including the right to know what you have been charged with and the right to trial by jury. It may help to remind ourselves how the reasons went. For example, trial by jury, though people seem to think it was meant as a way of reaching an accurate verdict, was viewed as much more likely to result in injustice than a fair, impartial judge--the reason for the right to trial by jury was the fear (sometimes amounting to a cynical conviction) that governments would become corrupt, too powerful, would attack its citizens for not doing what government agents want.

Trial by jury, habeus corpus, the right to remain silent are protections for citizens against bad government. Jefferson seems to regard free public education as another such civil liberty, something to equip citizens to vote against those who are in power. The motive for the Bill of Rights is less respect for individual citizens than it is distrust of those in power.

Power corrupts, and citizens need ways to fight back and to exercise control over those in power. And this remains so even for Madison and Jefferson, who do not trust ordinary citizens all that much (and so built in limitations on the power of the crowd of citizens along with limitations of power of cops, judges, and congresspersons).

Another way to help make the question or issue clear is to ask what is at stake. What would change if we buy Levin's argument? What would he do if he had things his way? Some parts of this are difficult to tell. With the background of the Constitution's authors in mind, we want to know just who is authorized to administer torture and who is going to keep watch over them. We want to know, too, just what means are to be used. Torture is an ancient science, maybe more ancient than logic, and there have been devoted researchers, ingenious experiments, and much learned over the years. But it is not an exact science. One of its hardest lessons is that there are no sure-fire ways to torture people. Another is that some people--people who are fanatics or who have strong religious beliefs or who are crazy or patriots are real hard to crack. Under what circumstances will we use one method rather than another? Levin is vague on methods, assumes torture always works, may assume that electrodes can generate more pain than other methods.

It changes the atmosphere around the issue, makes it seem a little less sanitary, if we think of particular forms of torture, and ask whether Levin would endorse them if they are more effective than electrodes (they often are--torturers in North Korea found that electrodes are not very effective, though the fear of electrodes may be): breaking off teeth with pliers, applying lit cigarettes to hands and mouth, bamboo shoots under the fingernails, cattle prods to the genitals, or even the rack. Is any police desk sergeant authorized to decide when and which methods to use? Will some of the tools be in his desk drawer or in every police cruiser? Sometimes the most effective means of torture might be to torture not the terrorist himself but the terrorist's five-year-old daughter. Levin says to torture only the guilty but his argument and his conclusion leave us no grounds, no reason, to torture only the guilty. The reasons he gives for torturing do not stop with torturing only the guilty. What is at stake is shadowy, unclear, at least with regard to what methods will be used, who will use them, who will enforce limitations. All we know for sure is that the legal provisions must change--the First Amendment and the Fifth Amendment must be eliminated in order to provide a legal basis for government experts to use torture.

We might also ask, in order to make the issue clear, just how this question comes up. Levin uses the example of a terrorist with a nuclear device, but doesn't want the issue limited to those sorts of cases. And in a way even these cases are not new. In the past a terrorist may not have had a nuclear bomb, but he sometimes had an army instead, and an army will often serve as well as a bomb. There may be something here of the resentment commonly felt against criminals who seem to enjoy more protection under the law than do victims of crime. It sometimes seems that those protections lead to blunders, as when someone who is quite clearly guilty is freed because the police used illegal methods to collect crucial evidence. Levin undoubtedly would use such incidents to back up his side, but his interest here is not in compensating victims or in deterrence of crime through harsher punishment. It is pretty clearly focused on the rights of people who have come under the power of the police, and on what the police should by policy be allowed to do. Levin's worry is whether the police might not have had their hands tied by idealists who are moral cowards, who could not themselves apply the electrodes, who are likely to suffer "paralysis in the face of evil." One gets the impression Levin thinks of himself as hard-headed in the midst of romantic fools, reminding us of the hard and sordid facts of life when we were all starry-eyed and ill-informed. The issue has become, how much power should we give the police as a matter of policy or law? That's a bit long. Should we legalize torture? leaves out that this is about all the limitations on the police and not just about torture, but captures most of it.

That's the issue. Now think about whether Levin has a chance to make his argument a good one. (At this point the distinction between description and evaluation should be kept in mind, even though we will go back and forth.) This could be hilarious irony if it were not so frighteningly ignorant. Levin has missed the issue as much as any sentimental Sunday-school teacher could. Many of his mistakes are trivial--thinking that torture always works, that the mother of a kidnapped baby is an appropriate moral spokesperson on kidnappings, that his argument will stop where he wants with torturing only the guilty, that his opponents are softies and cowards. But a couple of his mistakes are crucial: he thinks government can be trusted to keep its own evils under control; and he shows a complete and absurd blindness both toward his opponents' arguments and toward any of the real cases of torture, the policies of torture, carried in the world's news. If there is a man blind to the hard and sordid facts of life, the issues raised by torture (and addressed in the Constitution) it is Levin.

It is a curious thing that the first and crucial example used to support Levin's argument pulls us in so quickly. We can, I think, with the right details, imagine a case in which a cop, her family at risk, all other routes explored, a terrible time limit pressing, a silent but scared terrorist in hand, finally loses it and starts beating up her prisoner. Think of the police review hearing which follows after the incident is over. Will they charge her with violating the prisoner's rights? Lots of the details will make a difference. How soon did she lose her cool? Did she have a cattle prod handy--she kept it in her car trunk to use in cases like this? How hard did she work on reasoning with him first? Did he say "Never. I'll never tell you, unless you torture me"? Did she have some reason to think torture would work? Did she enjoy torturing him? Did it work?

With the right answers to these and other questions, with the right details (details shape our moral judgements of her), we can imagine the case in which she is on good moral grounds. Suppose the case is like that, and those at the hearing decide she has to be charged with a crime anyway. Do we need to change the law? No. We need to provide her in turn with civil liberties, a fair trial, the right to trial by jury. And given those, the current legal system may provide just what Levin says we need to change the law to provide--permission for the police to torture. Except, of course, that it is not permission for anyone else, and it is not policy which lets her off; rather it is the package of civil liberties Levin would axe which paves the way for us to get clear on her moral standing in the case and excuse her even if she breaks the law.

Excerpt: another model of description.

Model answer for reading William Raspberry's 19 Jan 90 column, under the headline, "U.S. near bottom in school spending.Oregonian, p. E9.

As a first runthrough, a skeletal answer might look like the following, organized by the list of questions we use to answer the question, What is the argument?

Issue? Is the U.S. funding of education high or low? (we will come back to this.)

Position? Raspberry's position is that U.S. spending on public schools (exclusive of colleges) is low.

Support? A briefing paper from the Economic Policy Institute by M. E. Rasell and L. Mishel, which separates public education from college spending, shows the U.S. placing 12th out of the 16 industrialized nations on pre-college education.

Point of View? We have talked about problems with the syndicated columnist as a point of view, and how often the need to write three columns a week produces arguments with hardly any concerns, or any audience, in mind. Raspberry often writes on racial matters, but is not taking up this as a racial question. He does have some privileged information, and could be read as only reporting someone else's argument (Rasell and Mishel's) rather than giving his own. His concern may also be seen as a concern for getting good figures in the debate about whether funding in the U.S. is high or low. Most nobly, (and perhaps charitably put,) his concerns may be for the quality of education of children.

The above would be an acceptable written answer in class. There are some more things you could say. Most of these come under the heading of clarifying the issue.

The argument, whether it is Raspberry's or someone else's, is not the only main point of the column. Raspberry goes on to use the argument to support the claim that spending, in particular Federal spending, still is something we should be debating, and that the level of money needed is not the only item to be debated even when spending is debated--that what the money is to go for is as important.

We need to revisit the issue. Is U.S. spending on education high or low? Try out our suggestions for clarifying the issue.

How does this arise? Raspberry helps us on this. Some in the federal government are making the case that what is needed cannot be money, because there is already plenty of money. That is the main opposition to this report and to Raspberry, and it is that argument which Raspberry's column is meant to deal with--that is, Raspberry's argument can be seen as a reply to the effect of, "sure there is plenty of money in comparison to other countries if you include this one category (Higher ed) that is not part of the issue. But that should not be included, and without it the figures show you are wrong."

This argument, then, is part of the debate on whether the U.S. is shorting education in money, and what part money and spending questions should play in reforming education in this country.

What are the possible answers to the question, in particular the opposition's answer? There are some hints in the column on this. President Bush and Secretary of Education Cavazos think our spending is high, and so are in favor of other reforms which do not have impact on the federal budget. They could be doing this because they are convinced that we are already spending so much on education that there must be other more urgent needs. We may recall Bill Bennet, the past Secretary of Education, who advocated such things as a new and tougher high school curriculum to be adopted (and financed as well) by each school district. This points toward our third question for clarifying issues:

What is at stake? An admission that the U.S. is low in spending for public education would put pressure on the federal government to start helping, especially in districts whose spending is particularly low. It would also lead to debate which would threaten local control of school budgets, and possibly local control of where the increased spending should go. "Helping" here means providing money and raising taxes in order to do that. How much? Raspberry quotes $20 billion annually. Compared to the federal budget this may not seem like much, but in a political read-my-lips climate a great deal of political image is also at stake. Bush may then have some built-in biases against accepting Raspberry's argument.

What other issues are linked to this one? The answer to this one is, as always, a bunch of questions. How should we reform the schools? (to be distinguished from, Should we reform the schools? which is a non-issue, ever since Cain's going bad was blamed on the lack of discipline in P.S. #1. Everybody agrees that the schools should be reformed--it is the How that adds the heat.) Should the U.S. keep its present system's preservation of control by local school boards overseen by the states? Just how crappy are our schools? Are teachers generally competent? How can we ensure better teaching? (administrative reform? teacher training reform?) Should the school year be longer? the school day? How come many church schools and private schools seem to turn out better-educated kids on half the money?

It is odd in retrospect that Raspberry lays out an argument which he could have used to hammer his opponents, but instead winds up agreeing with them on one of the main questions, a where-do-we-go-from-here question. Instead of calling for a bill in Congress to fund more help to education, Raspberry calls for more methodical work to figure out what the money should be spent on. In some ways his argument seems to be a good one, but he does not follow it to what might be the expected next conclusion. It is perhaps a measure of his thoughtfulness that he is careful not to overextend his argument.

. . . .

Using the Fallacy Approach

The study of fallacies stands in opposition to much of the rest of this course. Think about fallacies as evaluation, and compare the fallacy approach with other approaches to argument.

First, if we have any interest in the argument or the issue, we find the fallacy approach adds in to the complexity of our task. Let me explain.

The fallacy approach is basically to apply a rudimentary evaluation apparatus to a quote. The apparatus consists of definitions or descriptions of reasoning patterns with some examples showing some ways arguments go bad.

Thus, we commit the fallacy of ad hominem when in response to someone's claim or argument we attack the person instead of considering (or, even, attacking) the person's argument. For example, I might reply to a person who is defending the possibility of a woman morally getting an abortion by saying to the audience that that person failed to get tenure at the university and has had two marriages end in divorce.

We master the fallacy approach by being able to identify new examples as belonging in particular categories--that is, we are given a new quote and we can tell with what description and set of examples that new quote belongs. Sometimes it gets tricky, but then the thing to say is that it is tricky, and explain why. For instance, the fallacies of Popularity, Traditional Wisdom, and Provincialism all fall under the general heading of Fallacious Appeals to Authority, and some cases may be able to be read as all or any of those three ("the thing that shows this is right is that all of us in this end of the county have always done it this way").

When we read with fallacies in mind, then, we are doing something different from anything we have talked about before under the heading of either description or evaluation. We are not trying to think like the arguer, nor are we thinking like an opponent. Instead we have a bit of theory we are trying to apply. The successful application gives us an evaluation of the argument in the quote, namely that it's crap, and lack of success leaves us where we were before.

Where were we before? Well, we were trying to read the arguments sympathetically (think like the arguer), and then evaluate (think like an opponent), and worry about the issue (sort out all the arguments for ourselves). Does the fallacy approach help? Perhaps it does in a roundabout way, but it certainly has some dangers:

the fallacy approach invites wholesale violation of the Principle of Charity, to the extent that it probably prompts some of us to commit the fallacy of Straw Man;

looking for fallacies makes it even easier to lose track of the issue being addressed;

success at assassinating arguments using the fallacy approach makes us into loose cannons in argument, and may lead us to have, as my mother used to say, a swelled head (we need a drawing of this, don't we?--a loose cannon with a swelled head.)

. . . .

p85

What is the standard of a good argument?

Can we make this multiple choice? What are the possible answers? Consider the alternatives. One story might go, the possibilities come under the main headings, roughly, of the formal model's theory of a good argument, or the model we get from inductive logic and theories of scientific reasoning, or perhaps the fallacy approach can provide at least a piece of the standard of a good argument. Or, just for the sake of good form, none of the above.

The correct answer is none of the above. Each of the alternatives named above fails importantly to be able to supply us with evaluations to the effect that an argument is good. Look at each in turn.

The model of argument we get from formal logic is incapable of justifying us in saying whether an argument is relevant, trivial, crucial, or better or worse than any other formally correct argument. Further, that model is not able to tell arguments from non-arguments (viz. the mortality of Socrates). Except in philosophy and highly mathematical disciplines, it is very seldom that anything remotely like formally valid arguments are offered in the ordinary give and take of scholarly debate. Even when they are offered, the evaluation of those arguments is conspicuously not just an effort to apply the formal theory to see if the arguments measure up. Further, the formal model only begins to do its work, only can begin to be applied, after the work of reading the argument and translating it into the proper form is over. Thus, the formal model cannot help with any judgements as to whether the argument has been fairly represented in the form to which the model is brought to bear.

The situation is more complicated in the case of inductive models. In a way this is to be expected, since inductive models were hatched as a result of a cooperative process on the parts of logicians of formal stripe, scientists (most of whom believe in logic), and philosophers of science. Logicians have tended to think their discipline has something to offer people who are trying to figure things out, and who better than scientists? Inductive and scientific models of good arguments are what happen when logic meets the world.

The result is an improvement on logic, perhaps, but still has its problems. Because scientists are often trying to defend, not the certainty, but rather the likelihood of some claim or solution, much of the work in applying logic to science has been in developing a model which will admit of degrees of evaluation rather than being limited to "this argument is valid" or "this argument fails." A great deal of attention has thus been paid to elucidation of the forms of arguments from sampling and to the role of disconfirmation of hypotheses in advancing scientific progress. We need not deal with these in detail to see that some of the same problems still will be inherited from formal logic. In particular, in so far as the evaluation of arguments rests on an appeal to the argument's form, it is not possible to say whether the argument has to do with the issues at hand, nor can the evaluation help with our deciding whether we have found a form which properly represents the argument. And nothing in the form of an argument can tell us whether a sample has been drawn in a manner appropriate to the content of an argument, so that the differences in doing a good job of getting, say, blood samples, soil samples, demographic samples, atmospheric pollution samples, or makeup color samples, cannot show up in the argument form. As a matter of fact, when scientists disagree they do not use the materials or formal concerns they inherit from logicians or philosophers of science or those of their own who are logically inclined. We will take a look at a couple of these later.

Fallacies? Well, of course not. The fallacy approach never pretended to tell us what a good argument is, only bad. The fact that an argument does not commit a fallacy says next to nothing about its being a good argument. Even if we knew all two thousand-odd fallacies cold and never missed an instance, no one has ever claimed that these are all or even most of the possibilities. Too many of the fallacies also depend on context for their being labeled a fallacy to be just. Saying something which would be a vicious ad hominem in a city council meeting may be exactly the right thing to bring up in a criminal trial when the credibility of a witness is a legitimate issue. The fact that an argument commits a fallacy is not a matter of determining the argument's characteristics separate from its setting; to make a fallacy label stick requires us to be able to evaluate the argument separate from the theory--that is, the fallacy name and characteristics. That is, being able to tell whether an argument commits a fallacy requires us to be able to tell separately whether is it is a good argument.

What then is the standard of a good argument?

The suggestion at this point is that there is no standard of good argument separate from individual issues and debates. As we have seen, the method advocated in this work is what I call the method of worry. It requires us to hear all the arguments which bear on the issues, to provide the best possible answers to each argument, and then to array the arguments in front of us on the way to arriving at our own positions on the issues. It is a joke to call it a method, since it is the opposite of any shortcut, and it apparently yields nothing in one field which can be profitably brought to another. Are there any arguments for this approach rather than another? Here is one: if any other procedure is to be proposed for helping us to evaluate arguments, it must make its case partly by being able to do better than this procedure of worry. That is, this procedure will in fact be the standard against which any other evaluative procedure must be measured. For a standard of good argument to prevail, it must do better at sorting out good arguments from bad in particular issues, than the actual debate on that issue does. To engage in thoughtful debate on the issue is to use the method of worry. The standard of standards, then, just is the method of worry.

ISSUE: What Causes Racism?

I want to summarize reading I've been doing, and give you some references if you wish to follow up on this issue. This first handout will serve as a preface.The main trouble with the reading is that I can find people willing to take positions or spell out answers to the question, but few of them spend any time backing up their answers. Answers are plentiful but arguments are rare. That is one of the main reasons I feel compelled to write these handouts--working through the essays of those I have read would give us a huge amount of reading to wade through in order to derive a very few pages of arguments.

First, we need to remember to spend some time thinking about the issue. If we can clarify what we are worried about, that may save us work later. I'll organize this by the four questions for clarifying issues which by now are becoming automatic for all of us.

How does this question arise?î This question could have arisen in other ways, but for us it happens to have had a personal beginning--one student began my work on this by talking about his being the target of racism. That is, we do not raise the question out of a sociological curiosity in which racism is one on a list of social behaviors we are trying to explain. It is remarkable, and seems to me to be terrific, that he does not ask, (at least later) in response to a carload of white men yelling "nigger" at him, "How can I get back at those bastards?" or, even, "How can I avoid this crap?" Instead he asks a rather thoughtful question, one which removes part (but not all) of the emphasis on blame from our question about the incident. His question is, "What could have made them act that way?"

I said, "but not all" of the emphasis on blame had been pulled out of the question, and want to underline the fact that moral judgment against racism is part of the background for us here. We are NOT asking, Is racism bad? That means, among other things, that we are not required to listen to Pieter Botha defending apartheid. In this class that is not an issue. Our issue arises out of personal experience rather than scientific curiosity, presupposes a moral judgement against racism, and at the same time reflects a thoughtfulness and curiosity which is much in contrast to reacting to racism with blind anger and hate.

What are the possible answers to our question? We might find ourselves in a short and pungent debate, for instance, over whether racism is innate or learned. But we find ourselves unable to proceed very far with thinking of possible answers, or knowing how settling whether racism is innate or learned helps us answer the question. Whether it is innate or learned, that part of an answer seems to only push the question back a step--why would people TEACH racism?î Or, if innate, what causes racism to be innate? This is one of the places where our starting with the question instead of starting with a quoted argument seems to put us at a loss. When we start with a quote in which someone offers an answer in some controversy and supports that answer, the quote usually cannot help but give us clues as to what the range of possible answers are. But starting without a quote leaves us standing in unknown terrain with very little light to guide our way.

What are the stakes? King's letter from Birmingham jail, you may recall, addressed part of this. Racism causes suffering, lots of particular suffering for which he provided some details, among children and parents, job seekers, travelers. We ask this question and the background moral judgment makes clear that we are asking in hopes of putting an end to racism and the suffering that goes with it. If this is the main thing at stake--putting an end to racism--that might tempt us to think that the real issue, the one we should be working on, is "How do we put an end to racism?" But this would be a mistake, since that question, though certainly a legitimate issue, is not the one we started with, and answering that question could possibly leave our question--the one we actually started with--wide open. That is, we might possibly find a way to end racism though we do not know what causes it.

In effect, we have already started in with our fourth question for clarifying issues, namely, what other questions are linked to this one?î "How do we put an end to racism?" is surely linked, because if we can answer our question about causes, that is likely to influence how we answer our question about how we combat racism. Another, broader question linked to this one is, "What causes prejudice?" where prejudice is meant to include sexism, anti-Semitism, homophobia. A more specific question would have to do with the particular carload of jerks who started our involvement with this issue, and what their background or lack of background is which led them to act this way. We distinguish our question from this broader and that narrower question by reminding ourselves that our concerns are, at least for now, neither for prejudice in general nor for this particular night's incident, but rather for explanations of what brings racism about in our society. If those causes turn out to be like the causes of other kinds of prejudice, so much the better; if they turn out to be exactly what made this carload go, so much the better; if not, we still have our question, neither too broad nor too narrow.

We will continue by bringing in some of the answers suggested by some classroom discussions and by our reading.

You might look this over and note that quite a lot of this clarifying of the issue seems to be given to saying what we are NOT taking up--this question did not have an apersonal, scientific beginning; we are not putting moral judgement entirely aside, so that this is a question with an implied moral background; since we are working without a quote, this is not really a multiple choice question, at least not yet; we are not taking up a broader, nor a narrower, question. This is a common characteristic of critical thinking at this level, and it is also often useful in the face of huge issues, where paralysis sets in if we try to take on the whole monster. In other words, learning these questions well enough that they are a reflex sometimes gives you an entry, a way to start when you don't otherwise know where to start. The problem takes on a definite shape as these questions separate out what you do not have to do from the issue.

What Causes Racism? (continued)

I want first to continue with clarifying the question. Recall that the first part of this handout at least raised matters having to do with how the question arose for us, what the possible positions on the question could be, what is at stake.

Now consider what other issues are related to this one. At one step further removed from the actual examples of racism is the question of what causes prejudice in general. Gordon Allport's 1958 classic, _The Nature of Prejudice_, though mostly about the manifestations of prejudice rather than about the causes, is one of the first references for anyone to go to who is interested in this. We have already seen too that one of our interests is in how to combat racism, and there have certainly been disagreements over that question. Partly because of how affirmative action has worked in this country, and partly because the two are related as being kinds of prejudice or discrimination, there is a question of how racism is like or different from sexism. As varieties of social injustice and as properties of different movements (the feminist movement as opposed to gay rights advocates or black power movement), there is a nest of issues raised by those who think the movements should have or should not have a common agenda. That is, any of the movements to try to right these wrongs may look at other movements and ask, Are we on the same side? And the question is likely to be a live issue.

I've said that positions on what causes racism are not hard to come by, but that arguments are rare. Here are some of the positions we have tried briefly in my classes to think through I will put some abbreviated notes about how those positions were or might have been supported in parentheses.

1. Racism is caused by a more or less natural tendency in people to project onto others those qualities we unconsciously hate and fear about ourselves, along with the tendency to unconsciously displace anger and hatred which is caused by those who have power in our lives so that the anger and hatred is attached to those it is less risky to hate. (This is Peter Leowenberg's claim.) Some of the support for this is an appeal to our own experience and to cases such as the former member of The Order who explains his own actions in ways which sound a lot like Leowenberg's talk of displacement and projection, and seem to help explain what is going on.

2. Racism is innate, found all over the world and even in animals, where it is plausible to suppose there is an evolutionary payoff in increased survival if a creature keeps away from or is hostile to any creature which is visibly different from its own family, since the unknown may turn out to be dangerous.

3. Racism is learned. We each learn it from our parents and the adults around us. Part of the reasoning here seemed to go, this must be so, because otherwise it just doesn't make sense that people would come up with the idea that other races are inferior or subhuman.

4. Racism serves the interests of those with power, property, and privilege, and so is defended by them and only given up under extreme pressure. Part of the support here could involve an appeal to history.î That is we might cite a reading of history of, especially, black racism in this country and sexism since the Industrial Revolution. Both those can bring in what seems to be a strong connection between owning property and having privilege, and the exploitation of blacks and women.

5. (Somewhere in here we should try this one too.) Racism is caused by the fact that races other than our own are inferior. People from other races are stupid, violent, dangerous. The men are lazy drunks and the women are fat and have too many children. They smell bad, they do not do things the way that we do them, they are ignorant of the proper ways to do things, they are sexually immoral. God is the same race as me.

6. Racism is caused by lack of curiosity and lack of education. We are not taught that there are writers who are not white males. Our educational tradition is that of a white middle class who have few interests in the wider world or in questions of what makes human lives valuable. We are invited by a materialistic and unthinking society to accumulate possessions, to work to make money by providing our labor to someone else, to spend that money on things someone else tells us we want, and to sleepwalk through our lives. It is important then that we stay the same as those around us, that we do not become deviant so much that we become unhappy with the society or the society with us. We learn then to cling to those who are like us and to unthinkingly shun those who are different.

Note that we have not argued yet. We are only working on clarifying the issue. On this issue, clarifying the issue is a crucial step which is almost always skipped, and so this work may help make progress possible.