Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill [130]
To use an analogy, if the Aristotelian syllogism appears to offer us the promise of never mistaking the forest for the trees, Toulmin’s revision of that model is to never let us forget that the forest is in fact made up of trees.
As a writer, you will naturally want some guidelines and workable methods for selecting evidence and linking it to claims. But what you can’t expect to find is a set of predetermined slots into which you can drop any piece of evidence and find the truth. Rather, analyses and arguments operate within the complex set of details and circumstances that are part of life as we live it. An argument depends not only on whether or not its premises follow logically but on the quality of the thinking that produces those premises in the first place and painstakingly tests their accuracy. This is the job of analysis.
ROGERIAN ARGUMENT AND PRACTICAL REASONING
Most people want to be reasonable and have others think of them as reasonable. It has long been hoped by some people that we might devise a foolproof system for demonstrating that one person’s argument is clearly right and another’s is clearly wrong. Certainty is an attractive goal for many people.
The kind of formal argument analysis we have been considering is a piece of this hope. The rules of argument—whichever model you try to apply—do have a significant capacity for discriminating sound arguments from less sound ones. Moreover, the challenge of translating real world propositions into the forms required by this or that argumentative system is not insurmountable. A number of books out there can teach you to do it.
Our discussion, however, has disclosed the problems that logical analysis of the forms of argument faces. It is difficult to incorporate into the prescribed forms much of the detail that is actually significant in making the argument sound. Even these problems can be negotiated, though, if you don’t expect too much and if you take a practical approach, such as focusing on enthymemes (the form that everyday arguments most often take) and learning to supply the missing assumptions.
There are, however, other objections to prioritizing the rules of argument. These objections come from contemporary rhetoricians who are less concerned about testing the adequacy of arguments than they are with making argument better serve the needs of people in everyday life and in the larger arena of public discourse. The view of argument offered throughout this book—for example, in the discussion of counterproductive habits of mind in the latter half of Chapter 2—is aligned with the thinking of two such rhetoricians, Carl Rogers and Wayne Booth. For these rhetoricians, the aim is not primarily to defeat opponents but to locate common ground. (Many have noticed the presence of militaristic rhetoric in argument analysis.)
Both Rogers and Booth place their emphasis on listening. They stress the need to be able to understand and accurately represent the positions of “opponents” in an argument. This goal is very much the norm in academic writing, where people try to put different points of view into conversation rather than set out to have one view defeat another. As Zachary Dobbins has argued, “For Booth, reasoning equates not just with rational thought but instead with inquiry, a term that more expansively describes the process all of us are daily engaged in to shape and make sense of the world—a process the ends of which are seldom certain or empirically measurable” (“Wayne Booth, Narrative, and the Rhetoric of Empathy”—an unpublished talk delivered at the 2010 Conference on College Composition and Communication). Dobbins quotes Booth to the effect that “The supreme purpose of persuasion […] should not be to talk someone else into a preconceived view; rather it must be to engage in mutual inquiry or exploration […]” (Modern