Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill.original_ [130]
All men are mortal. (All x’s are y.)
Socrates is a man. (Socrates is an x.)
Therefore, Socrates is mortal. (Socrates is a y.)
At what price, asks Toulmin, do we simplify our phrasing of complex situations in the world in order to gain this appearance of truth? In how many situations, he asks, can we say that “all x’s are y”?
The strictness of the rules necessary for guaranteeing formal validity, Toulmin argues, leaves out the greater amount of uncertainty that is a part of reasoning about most questions, issues, and problems. Toulmin observes, using his own argument structure as a case in point, that as soon as an argument begins to add information in support of its premises, the complexity and inevitable tentativeness of the argument become apparent, rather than its evident truth.
Here is Toulmin’s explanation of what must happen to the form of an argument when a person begins to add more supporting information, which Toulmin calls backing. The backing for the warrant in the example above about the British citizenship of people born in Bermuda would inevitably involve mentioning “the relevant statutes”—acts of Parliament, statistical reports, and so forth—to prove its accuracy. The addition of such information, says Toulmin, would “prevent us from writing the argument so that its validity shall be manifest from its formal properties alone” (The Uses of Argument, 123).
Not everyone agrees with Toulmin’s revision or his reasoning. The rhetorician Edward Corbett, for example, argues that the Toulmin system lacks rules and guidelines for assessing the “logicality of the argument” (The Elements of Reasoning, Macmillan, 1991, p. 44). Corbett also argues that Toulmin’s system is less easy to use than it appears, noting that recognizing claims, data, warrants, and backing in an argument may not be any easier than finding conclusions, minor premises, and major premises in a syllogism.
The rules of argument are important for clarifying and testing our thinking. And, of course, many more forms and structures are available in logic than this brief account could begin to suggest. There are, for example, a number of rules for arriving at claims about evidence inductively. Syllogistic reasoning is deductive; it works by bringing premises into accord with some larger governing premise.
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.