J. Anthony Blair
1. Introduction[1]
This chapter reviews what is involved in identifying, interpreting, displaying, evaluating and responding to arguments. The term ‘judging’ encompasses all these activities, since all of them call for judgment. Most critical thinking textbooks focus on arguments that are reason-claim complexes. These are arguments about what is claimed to be true or reasonable to believe or what to do. Their conclusions are either propositions—sentences with truth values (i.e., are true or false, probable or improbable, plausible or implausible)—or else they are prescriptions—recommendations or imperatives, (which are not true or false, but rather are sensible or ill-advised, wise or foolish, virtuous or vicious, and so on). It might turn out that different kinds of judgment are appropriate for these two kinds of aims of argument.
[Other chapters in this book go into these matters in greater detail. In Chapter 10, pioneers and experts in diagramming arguments, Martin Davies, Ashley Barnett & Tim van Gelder, explain how to use computer programs to teach students how to map the structure of arguments. In Chapter 14, Christopher Tindale offers a theoretically up-to-date introduction to using fallacy analysis in evaluating arguments.]
Here “judging arguments” includes: (1) judging that a particular text of discourse is or contains an argument, (2) judging just what the contents and structure of each such arguments consist of, (3) judging the strengths and weaknesses of each such argument, and (4) judging how best to respond to the argument(s). Correspondingly, judging arguments in this sense will have these four components, in this order: (1) argument identification, (2) argument analysis or mapping, (3) argument evaluation, and (4) responding to an argument.
The order matters, because each successive judgment presupposes the successful completion of its predecessor(s). Also, the judging can break off at any point. Obviously if it’s determined that there is no argument, the exercise ends at (1). But sometimes although it is clear that someone is trying to argue, their communication can be so unclear that it is impossible to decide just what the argument is supposed to be, so the exercise ends at (2). Furthermore, it’s often the case that there is no response to make beyond registering and defending one’s assessment of the argument, so the exercise ends at (3).
Finally, while these four judgments can be distinguished, in practice there is usually interaction among them. For instance the presence of illatives such as ‘since’ and ‘therefore’ can signal (among other things) both (1) the presence and (2) the structure of an argument. Also, often the analyst’s attribution of (2) one structure instead of another can depend on which of the two renders (3) the more plausible or stronger argument.[2] And (4) what response to make to an arguer obviously depends partly on (3) how one assesses the merits of the argument, and perhaps even on (2)