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H.W Chap.5 (Ph)

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108

CHAPTER 5 ■ Deep Analys is

knowledge (“studies”) and to show that we have knowledge instead of just
a hunch. That point is lost if we drop the assuring terms.

Unfortunately, there is no mechanical method for determining when
guarding or assuring terms and phrases can be dropped, or whether certain
sentences are unnecessary tangents or repetition. We simply have to look
closely at what is being said and think hard about what is needed to support
the conclusion. It takes great skill, care, and insight to pare an argument
down to its essential core without omitting anything that would make it bet-
ter. And that is the goal: If you want to understand someone’s argument,
you should try to make that argument as good as it can be. You should in-
terpret it charitably. Distorting and oversimplifying other people’s argu-
ments might be fun at times and can win points in debates, but it cannot
help us understand or learn from other people’s arguments.

In the quotation above, is it fair to drop “I think” from the start of Edwards’s
sentences “I think these are decisions the states should have the power to make”
and “I think that’s wrong—that power should not be taken away from the
states“? Why or why not? Is this phrase “I think” used for guarding or assuring
or some other purpose in this context? Explain why Edwards adds these words.

Discussion Question

Put the following arguments into standard form and omit anything that does
not affect the validity of the argument or the truth of its premises.

1. Philadelphia is rich in history, but it is not now the capital of the United
States, so the United States Congress must meet somewhere else.

2. Not everybody whom you invited is going to come to your party. Some of
them won’t come. So this room should be big enough.

3. I know that my wife is at home, since I just called her there and spoke to
her. We talked about our dinner plans.

4. I’m not sure, but Joseph is probably Jewish. Hence, he is a rabbi if he is a
member of the clergy.

5. Some students could not concentrate on the lecture, because they did not
eat lunch before class, although I did.

6. The most surprising news of all is that Johnson dropped out of the race
because he thought his opponent was better qualified than he was for
the office.

7. The Democrat is likely to win, since experts agree that more women sup-
port him.

8. It seems to me that married people are happier, so marriage must be a
good thing, or at least I think so.

Exercise I

Note:
Remember that you may need
to revise claims when putting
the argument into Standard
Form – in fact, this exercise is
specifically targeting this!

115

Arrang ing Subarguments

premises) provide separate reasons for a conclusion, draw separate arrows
from each reason to the conclusion. When a conclusion of one argument is
a premise in another, put it in the middle of a chain. The whole diagram
together will then show how the parts of the argument fit together.

Put the following arguments into standard form. Break up the premises and
form chains of arguments wherever this can be done without distorting the
argument. Then diagram the argument.

1. Either Jack is a fool or Mary is a crook, because she ended up with all of
his money.

2. Our team can’t win this Saturday, both because they are not going to play,
and because they are no good, so they wouldn’t win even if they did play.

3. Mercury is known to be the only metal that is liquid at room temperature,
so a pound of mercury would be liquid in this room, which is at room
temperature, and it would also conduct electricity, since all metals do.
Therefore, some liquids do conduct electricity.

4. Since he won the lottery, he’s rich and lucky, so he’ll probably do well in
the stock market, too, unless his luck runs out.

5. Joe is not a freshman, since he lives in a fraternity, and freshmen are not
allowed to live in fraternities. He also can’t be a senior, since he has not
declared a major, and every senior has declared a major. And he can’t be a
junior, because I never met him before today, and I would have met him
before now if he were a junior. So Joe must be a sophomore.

6. Since many newly emerging nations do not have the capital resources
necessary for sustained growth, they will continue to need help from
industrial nations to avoid mass starvation.

Exercise II

In “A Piece of ‘God’s Handiwork’” (Exercise II in Chapter 4), Robert Redford
argues that the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) should not allow Conoco
to drill for oil in Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. The
following passage is a crucial part where Redford answers an objection.
Arrange its subarguments in standard form so as to reveal the structure of his
argument. Then diagram the overall argument.

The BLM says its hands are tied. Why? Because these lands were set aside subject
to “valid existing rights,” and Conoco has a lease that gives it the right to drill.
Sure Conoco has a lease—more than one, in fact—but those leases were originally

Exercise III

(continued)

These arguments have a more
complex structure to them
because they have
subarguments. Sometimes it
can be tricky to sort out what
that structure is. There are 2 key
tools you have at your disposal:

o Rely on those explicit
argument markers to let you
know where inferential
relationships hold (they won’t
always be present, but when
they are use them!)

o Where there is ambiguity,
make a choice based on charity.
Attempt to put the argument in
what is the most sensible
arrangement.

122

CHAPTER 5 ■ Deep Analys is

The following arguments depend for their validity on suppressed premises of
various kinds. For each of them, list enough suppressed premises to make the
argument valid. This might require several suppressed premises of various
kinds. Then put the arguments into Standard Form and Diagram them.

1. Britney Spears is under age thirty-five. Therefore, she cannot run for
president of the United States.

2. Nixon couldn’t have been president in 1950 because he was still in the Senate.

3. There must not be any survivors, since they would have been found by now.
4. Lincoln could not have met Washington, because Washington was dead

before Lincoln was born.
5. That’s not modern poetry; you can understand it.
6. Harold can’t play in the Super Bowl, because he broke his leg.

7. Dan is either stupid or very cunning, so he must be stupid.
8. Susan refuses to work on Sundays, which shows that she is lazy and

inflexible.
9. Jim told me that Mary is a professor, so she can’t be a student, since

professors must already have degrees.
10. This burglar alarm won’t work unless we are lucky or the burglar uses the

front door, so we can’t count on it.

Exercise VI

THE METHOD OF RECONSTRUCTION

We can summarize the discussion so far by listing the steps to be taken in re-
constructing an argument. The first two steps were discussed in Chapters 4
and 3, respectively.

5-I
5-II
5-VI

Understanding
Arguments

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Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
Dartmouth College

Robert J. Fogelin
Dartmouth College

Understanding
Arguments

An Introduction to Informal Logic

EIGHTH EDITION

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Understanding Arguments:
An Introduction to Informal Logic,
Eighth Edition
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and
Robert J. Fogelin

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PREFACE xv

PART I HOW TO ANALYZE ARGUMENTS 1

Chapter 1
USES OF ARGUMENTS 3

What Arguments Are 3

Justifications 4

Explanations 7

Combinations: An Example 10

CHAPTER 2
THE WEB OF LANGUAGE 17

Language and Convention 17

Linguistic Acts 19

Speech Acts 22

Performatives 23

Kinds of Speech Acts 26

Speech Act Rules 28

Conversational Acts 32

Conversational Rules 34

Conversational Implication 37

Violating Conversational Rules 40

Rhetorical Devices 42

Deception 45

Bronston v. United States 46

Summary 48

CHAPTER 3
THE LANGUAGE OF ARGUMENT 51

Argument Markers 51

If . . . , then . . . 53

CONTENTS

vi i

v i i i

Contents

Arguments in Standard Form 55

Some Standards for Evaluating Arguments 57

Validity 57

Truth 59

Soundness 60

A Tricky Case 60

A Problem and Some Solutions 62

Assuring 63

Guarding 65

Discounting 66

Evaluative Language 69

Spin Doctoring 72

CHAPTER 4
THE ART OF CLOSE ANALYSIS 77

An Extended Example 77

Clerk Hire Allowance, House of Representatives 77

CHAPTER 5
DEEP ANALYSIS 105

Getting Down to Basics 105

Clarifying Crucial Terms 109

Dissecting the Argument 109

Arranging Subarguments 111

Suppressed Premises 116

Contingent Facts 117

Linguistic Principles 119

Evaluative Suppressed Premises 120

Uses and Abuses of Suppressed Premises 121

The Method of Reconstruction 122

Digging Deeper 125

An Example of Deep Analysis: Capital Punishment 127

PART II HOW TO EVALUATE ARGUMENTS:
DEDUCTIVE STANDARDS 139

CHAPTER 6
PROPOSITIONAL LOGIC 141

The Formal Analysis of Arguments 141

i x

Contents

Basic Propositional Connectives 142

Conjunction 142

Disjunction 150

Negation 150

Process of Elimination 153

How Truth-Functional Connectives Work 154

Testing for Validity 156

Some Further Connectives 160

Conditionals 162

Truth Tables for Conditionals 163

Logical Language and Everyday Language 169

Other Conditionals in Ordinary Language 172

CHAPTER 7
CATEGORICAL LOGIC 179

Beyond Propositional Logic 179

Categorical Propositions 180

The Four Basic Categorical Forms 182

Translation into the Basic Categorical Forms 184

Contradictories 187

Existential Commitment 189

Validity for Categorical Arguments 190

Categorical Immediate Inferences 192

The Theory of the Syllogism 194

Appendix: The Classical Theory 203

The Classical Square of Opposition 205

The Classical Theory of Immediate Inference 209

The Classical Theory of Syllogisms 210

PART III HOW TO EVALUATE ARGUMENTS:
INDUCTIVE STANDARDS 213

CHAPTER 8
ARGUMENTS TO AND FROM GENERALIZATIONS 215

Induction versus Deduction 215

Statistical Generalizations 219

Should We Accept the Premises? 220

Is the Sample Large Enough? 220

Is the Sample Biased? 222

Is the Result Biased in Some Other Way? 223

Statistical Applications 225

Contents

CHAPTER 9
CAUSAL REASONING 231

Reasoning About Causes 231

Sufficient Conditions and Necessary Conditions 233

The Sufficient Condition Test 236

The Necessary Condition Test 237

The Joint Test 238

Rigorous Testing 240

Reaching Positive Conclusions 242

Applying These Methods to Find Causes 243

Normality 243

Background Assumptions 244

A Detailed Example 245

Calling Things Causes 249

Concomitant Variation 250

CHAPTER 10
INFERENCE TO THE BEST EXPLANATION AND

FROM ANALOGY 257

Inferences to the Best Explanation 257

Arguments from Analogy 267

CHAPTER 11
CHANCES 277

Some Fallacies of Probability 277

The Gambler’s Fallacy 277

Strange Things Happen 278

Heuristics 279

The Language of Probability 282

A Priori Probability 283

Some Rules of Probability 285

Bayes’s Theorem 291

CHAPTER 12
CHOICES 303

Expected Monetary Value 303

Expected Overall Value 306

Decisions Under Ignorance 308

x i

Contents

PART IV FALLACIES 315

CHAPTER 13
FALLACIES OF VAGUENESS 317

Uses of Unclarity 317

Vagueness 318

Heaps 320

Slippery Slopes 322

Conceptual Slippery-Slope Arguments 322

Fairness Slippery-Slope Arguments 325

Causal Slippery-Slope Arguments 327

CHAPTER 14
FALLACIES OF AMBIGUITY 333

Ambiguity 333

Equivocation 337

Definitions 343

CHAPTER 15
FALLACIES OF RELEVANCE 353

Relevance 353

Ad Hominem Arguments 354

Appeals to Authority 360

More Fallacies of Relevance 364

CHAPTER 16
FALLACIES OF VACUITY 369

Circularity 369

Begging the Question 370

Self-Sealers 375

CHAPTER 17
REFUTATION 381

What Is Refutation? 381

Counterexamples 382

Reductio Ad Absurdum 386

Straw Men and False Dichotomies 390

Refutation by Parallel Reasoning 392

x i i

Contents

PART V AREAS OF ARGUMENTATION 401

CHAPTER 18
LEGAL REASONING 403

Components of Legal Reasoning 404

Questions of Fact 404

Questions of Law 405

The Law of Discrimination 411

The Equal Protection Clause 411

Applying the Equal Protection Clause 412

The Strict Scrutiny Test 413

The Bakke Case 414

Regents of the University of California v. Bakke 416

Legal Developments Since Bakke 418

Grutter v. Bollinger 419

Gratz v. Bollinger 425

Burden of Proof 430

CHAPTER 19
MORAL REASONING 433

Moral Disagreements 433

The Problem of Abortion 434

The “Pro-Life” Argument 435

“Pro-Choice” Responses 437

Analogical Reasoning in Ethics 442

Weighing Factors 444

“A Defense of Abortion,” by Judith Jarvis Thomson 446

“An Argument that Abortion Is Wrong,”
by Don Marquis 459

CHAPTER 20
SCIENTIFIC REASONING 477

Standard Science 477

Scientific Revolutions 479

“Molecular Machines: Experimental Support for the
Design Inference,” by Michael J. Behe 481

“Living with Darwin,” by Philip Kitcher 494

x i i i

Contents

CHAPTER 21
RELIGIOUS REASONING 505

“Five Reasons to Believe in God,” by William Lane Craig 506

“Seven Deadly Objections to Belief in the Christian God,” by
Edwin Curley 512

CHAPTER 22
PHILOSOPHICAL REASONING 523

“Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” by A. M. Turing 524

“The Myth of the Computer,” by John R. Searle 536

Credits 543

Index 545

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Traditionally, logic has been considered the most general science dealing
with arguments. The task of logic is to discover the fundamental principles
for distinguishing good arguments from bad ones.

For certain purposes, arguments are best studied as abstract patterns of
reasoning. Logic can then focus on these general forms rather than on par-
ticular arguments, such as your attempt to prove to the bank that they, not
you, made a mistake. The study of those general principles that make cer-
tain patterns of argument valid and other patterns of argument invalid is
called formal logic. Two chapters of this work are dedicated to formal logic.

A different but complementary way of viewing an argument is to treat it
as a particular use of language: Presenting arguments is one of the impor-
tant things we do with words. This approach stresses that arguing is a lin-
guistic activity. Instead of studying arguments as abstract patterns, it
examines them as they occur in concrete settings. It raises questions of the
following kind:

What is the place of argument within language as a whole?

What words or phrases are characteristic of arguments?

How do these words function?

What task or tasks are arguments supposed to perform?

When an approach to argument has this emphasis, the study is called infor-
mal logic. Though it contains a substantial treatment of formal logic, Under-
standing Arguments, as its subtitle indicates, is primarily a textbook in
informal logic.

The eighth edition of Understanding Arguments differs from the seventh
edition in a number of significant ways. The uses of arguments have been
brought right up front for emphasis. The chapters have been split up and re-
organized for clarity. Some of the more difficult and confusing topics have
been dropped to simplify and streamline the text. This edition also contains
new readings on scientific reasoning in Chapter 20 and on religious reason-
ing in Chapter 21. These new readings make the text more relevant to con-
temporary debates. Finally, this edition includes a large-scale updating of
examples, exercises, and discussion questions throughout the text, includ-
ing a liberal sprinkling of quotations from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert

PREFACE

xv i

Preface

as well as Colin Powell’s argument that Iraq was seeking weapons of mass
destruction.

This new edition has been influenced by our teaching of this material
with various colleagues, including visitors, at Dartmouth College. In this re-
gard, we would like to thank three student assistants—Ben Rump, Jane
Tucker, and especially David Lamb—in addition to the many others who
helped us on previous editions. We are also indebted to the following re-
viewers: André Ariew, University of Missouri, Columbia; John Zillmer,
Michigan State University; K. D. Borcoman, Coastline College; Barbara A.
Brown, Community College of Allegheny County; Marina F. Bykova, North
Carolina State University; Eric Parkinson, Syracuse University; and Alison
Reiheld, Michigan State University. At Wadsworth and Cengage Learning,
we received expert advice and assistance from Worth Hawes, former Acqui-
sitions Editor for Wadsworth; Joann Kozyrev, Sponsoring Editor for Philoso-
phy and Religion; Sarah Perkins, Assistant Editor; Deborah Bader, copy
editor; and Abigail Greshik, Pre-PressPMG Project Manager. Finally, we owe
a great debt to Bill Fontaine (librarian) as well as Sarah Kopper and Kier
Olsen DeVries (research assistants). Without all of these people, this book
would contain many more mistakes than it undoubtedly still does.

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
Robert J. Fogelin

How to Analyze
Arguments

Arguments are all around us. They bombard us constantly in advertisements; in

courtrooms; in political, moral, and religious debates; in academic courses on

mathematics, science, history, literature, and philosophy; and in our personal lives

when we make decisions about our careers, finances, and families. These crucial

aspects of our lives cannot be understood fully without understanding arguments.

The goal of this book, then, is to help us understand arguments and, thereby, to

understand our lives.

We will view arguments as tools. To understand a tool, we need to know the pur-

poses for which it is used, the material out of which it is made, and the forms that it

takes. For example, hammers are normally used to drive nails or to pound malleable

substances. Hammers are usually made out of a metal head and a handle of wood,

plastic, or metal. A typical hammer’s handle is long and thin, and its head is per-

pendicular to its handle. Similarly, in order to understand arguments, we need to

investigate their purposes, materials, and forms.

Chapter 1 discusses the main purposes or uses of arguments. The material from

which arguments are made is language, so Chapters 2–3 explore language in gen-

eral and then the language of argument in particular. Chapters 4–5 use the lessons

learned by then to analyze concrete examples of arguments in detail. The following

chapters turn to the forms of arguments, including deductive forms in Part II

(Chapters 6–7) and inductive forms in Part III (Chapters 8–12). Each form of argu-

ment comes with its own standards of adequacy. Part IV (Chapters 13–17) will then

consider the main ways in which arguments can go astray, including fallacies of

clarity, relevance, and vacuity. Finally, Part V (Chapters 18–22) will explore exam-

ples of arguments in different fields—law, morality, religion, science, and philosophy—

in order to see both how such arguments differ and how they share common features

of arguments in general. By the end of this journey, we should understand argu-

ments much better.

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Uses of Arguments

What are arguments? In our view, arguments are tools, so the first step toward

understanding arguments is to ask what they are used for—what people are trying

to accomplish when they give arguments. This brief chapter will propose a defini-

tion of arguments and then explore two main purposes of arguments: justification

and explanation. Both justifications and explanations try to provide reasons, but

reasons of different kinds. Justifications are supposed to give reasons to believe their

conclusions, whereas explanations are supposed to give reasons why their conclu-

sions are true. Each of these purposes is more complicated and fascinating than is

usually assumed.

WHAT ARGUMENTS ARE

The word “argument“ may suggest quarrels or squabbles. That is what a
child means when she reports that her parents are having an argument.
Arguments of that sort often include abuse, name-calling, and yelling. That
is not what this book is about. The goal here is not to teach you to yell
louder, to be more abusive, or to beat your opponents into submission.

Our topic is the kind of argument defined by Monty Python in their justly
famous “Argument Clinic.” In this skit, a client enters a clinic and pays for
an argument. In the first room, however, all he gets is abuse, which is not
argument. When he finally finds the right room to get an argument, the per-
son who is supposed to give him an argument simply denies whatever the
client says, so the client complains that mere denial is different from argu-
ment, because “an argument is a connected series of statements to establish
a definite proposition.” This definition is almost correct. As we will see, the
purpose of an argument need not always be to “establish” its conclusion,
both because some conclusions were established in advance and because
many reasons are inconclusive. Nonetheless, Monty Python’s definition
needs to be modified only a little in order to arrive at an adequate definition:

An argument is a connected series of sentences, statements, or propositions
(called “premises”) that are intended to give reasons of some kind for a sentence,
statement, or proposition (called the “conclusion”).

This definition does not pretend to be precise, but it does tell us what
arguments are made of (sentences, statements, or propositions) and what
their purpose is (to give reasons).

Another virtue of this definition is that it is flexible enough to cover the
wide variety of arguments that people actually give. Different arguments
are intended to give reasons of very different sorts. These reasons might be
justificatory reasons to believe or to disbelieve some claim. They might, in-
stead, be explanatory reasons why something happened. They might even
be practical reasons to do some act. Because reasons come in so many kinds,
arguments are useful in a great variety of situations in daily life. Trying to
determine why your computer crashed, why your friend acted the way she
did, and whether it will rain tomorrow as well as trying to decide which
political candidate to vote for, which play to use at a crucial point in a foot-
ball game, where to go to college, and whether to support or oppose capital
punishment—all involve weighing and evaluating reasons.

It is inaccurate, therefore, to think of arguments as serving only one
single simple purpose. People often assume that you always use every
argument to make other people believe what you believe and what they did
not believe before hearing or reading the argument. Actually, however,
some arguments are used for that purpose, but others are not. To fully un-
derstand arguments in all their glory, then, we need to distinguish different
uses of argument. In particular, we will focus on two exemplary purposes:
justification and explanation.

JUSTIFICATIONS

One of the most prominent uses of arguments is to justify a disputed claim. For
example, if I claim that September 11, 2001, was a Tuesday, and you deny this
or simply express some doubt, then we might look for a calendar. But suppose
we don’t have a calendar for 2001. Luckily, we do find a calendar for 2002.
Now I can justify my claim to you by presenting this argument: The calendar
shows that September 11 was on Wednesday in 2002; 2002 was not a leap year,
since 2002 is not divisible by four; nonleap years have 365 days, which is 1
more day than 52 weeks; so September 11 must have been on Tuesday in 2001.
You should now be convinced.

What have I done? My utterance of this argument has the effect of chang-
ing your mind by getting you to believe a conclusion that you did not
believe before. Of course, I might also be able to change your mind by hyp-
notizing you. But normally I do not want to use hypnosis. I also do not want
to change your mind by manufacturing a fake calendar for 2002 with the
wrong dates. Such tricks would not satisfy my goals fully. This shows that
changing your mind is not all that I am trying to accomplish. What else do I
want? My additional aim is to show you that you should change your mind,

CHAPTER 1 ■ Uses of Arguments

Just if icat ions

and why. I want to give you a good reason to change your mind. I want my
argument not only to make you believe my conclusion but also to make you
justified in believing my conclusion.

The above example is typical of one kind of justification, but there are
other patterns. Suppose that I share your doubts about which day of the
week it was on September 11, 2001. Then I might use the same argument to
justify my belief as well as yours. Indeed, you don’t even need to be present.
If I am all alone, and I just want to figure out which day of the week it was
on September 11, 2001, then I might think in terms of this same argument.
Here the goal is not to convince anybody else, but the argument is still used
to find a good reason to believe the conclusion.

In cases like these, we can say that the argument is used for impersonal
normative justification. The justification is normative because the goal is to
find a reason that is a good reason. It is impersonal because what is sought
is a reason that is or should be accepted as a good reason by everyone ca-
pable of grasping this argument, regardless of who they are. The purpose
is to show that there is a reason to believe the conclusion, regardless of
who has a reason to believe it. Other arguments, in contrast, are aimed at
specific people, and the goal is to show that those particular people are
committed to the conclusion or have a reason to believe the conclusion.
Such individualized uses of arguments seek what can be called personal
justification.

There should be nothing surprising about different people having differ-
ent reasons. I might climb a mountain to appreciate the view at the top,
whereas you climb it to get exercise, and your friend climbs it to be able to
talk to you while you climb it. Different people can have different reasons
for the same action. Similarly, different people can have different reasons to
believe the same conclusion. Suppose that someone is murdered in the ball-
room with a revolver. I might have good reason to believe that Miss Peacock
did not commit the murder, because I saw her in the library at the time the
murder was committed. You might not trust me when I tell you that I saw
her, but you still might have good reason to believe that she is innocent, be-
cause you believe that Colonel Mustard did it alone. Even if I doubt that
Colonel Mustard did it, we still each have our own reasons to agree that
Miss Peacock is innocent.

When different people with different beliefs are involved, we need to
ask who is supposed to accept the reason that is given in an argument.
A speaker might give an argument to show a listener that the speaker has a
reason to believe something, even though the speaker knows that the audi-
ence does not and need not accept that reason. Suppose that you are an athe-
ist, but I am an evangelical Christian, and you ask me why I believe that
Jesus rose from the dead. I might respond that the Bible says that Jesus rose
from the dead, and what the Bible says must be true, so Jesus rose from the
dead. This argument tells you what my reasons are for believing what I
believe, even if you do not accept those reasons. My argument can be used

to show you that I have reasons and what my reasons are, regardless of
whether you believe that my reasons are good ones and also regardless of
whether my reasons really are good ones.

The reverse can also happen. A speaker might give an argument to show
a listener that the listener has a reason to believe something, even though
the speaker does not accept that reason. Suppose that you often throw loud
parties late into the night close to my bedroom. I want to convince you to
stop or at least quiet down. Fortunately, you think that every citizen ought
to obey the law. I disagree, for I am an anarchist bent on undermining all
governments and laws. Still, I want to get a good night’s sleep before the
protest tomorrow, so I might argue that it is illegal to make that much noise
so late, and you ought to obey the law, so you ought to stop throwing such
loud parties. This argument can show you that you are committed to its
conclusion, even if I believe that its premises are false.

Of course, whether I succeed in showing my audience that they have a
reason to believe my conclusion depends on who my audience is. My
argument won’t work against loud neighbors who don’t care about the law.
Consequently, we need to know who the audience is and what they believe
in order to be able to show them what reason they have to believe a
conclusion.

In all of these cases, arguments are used to show that someone has a
reason to believe the conclusion of the argument. That is why all of these
uses can be seen as providing different kinds of justification. The differences
become crucial when we try to evaluate such arguments. If my goal is to
show you that you have a reason to believe something, then I can be
criticized for using a premise that you reject. Your beliefs are no basis for
criticism, however, if all I want is to show my own reasons for believing the
conclusion. Thus, to evaluate an argument properly, we often need to deter-
mine not only whether the argument is being used to justify a belief but also
which kind of justification is sought and who the audience is.

CHAPTER 1 ■ Uses of Arguments

Write the best brief argument you can to justify each of the following claims to
someone who does not believe them.

1. Nine is not a prime number.

2. Seven is a prime number.

3. A molecule of water has three atoms in it.

4. Water is not made up of carbon.

5. The U.S. president lives in Washington.

6. The Earth is not flat.

7. Humans have walked on the moon.

8. Most bicycles have two wheels.

Exercise I

EXPLANATIONS

A different but equally important use of arguments is to provide explanations.
Explanations answer questions about how or why something happened. We
explain how a mongoose got out of his cage by pointing to a hole he dug
under the fence. We explain why Smith was acquitted by saying that he got
off on a technicality. The purpose of explanations is not to prove that some-
thing happened, but to make sense of things.

An example will bring out the difference between justification and expla-
nation. One person claims that a school’s flagpole is thirty-five feet tall, and
someone else asks her to justify this claim. In response, she might produce a
receipt from the Allegiance Flagpole Company acknowledging payment for a
flagpole thirty-five feet in height. Alternatively, she may put a stick straight
up into the ground, measure the stick’s length and its shadow’s length, then
measure the length of the flagpole’s shadow, and calculate the length of the
flagpole. Neither of these justifications, however, will answer a different ques-
tion: Why is the flagpole thirty-five feet tall? This new question could be
answered in all sorts of ways, depending on context: The school could not
afford a taller one. It struck the committee as about the right height for the
location. That was the only size flagpole in stock. There is a state law limiting
flagpoles to thirty-five feet. And so on. These answers help us understand
why the flagpole is thirty-five feet tall. They explain its height.

Sometimes simply filling in the details of a story provides an explanation.
For example, we can explain how a two-year-old girl foiled a bank robbery
by saying that the robber tripped over her while fleeing from the bank. Here
we have made sense out of an unusual event by putting it in the context of a
plausible narrative. It is unusual for a two-year-old girl to foil a bank robbery,
but there is nothing unusual about a person tripping over a child when run-
ning recklessly at full speed in a crowded area.

Although the narrative is probably the most common form of explanation
in everyday life, we also often use arguments to give explanations. We can
explain a certain event by deriving it from established principles and ac-
cepted facts. This argument then has the following form:

(1) General principles or laws
(2) A statement of initial conditions

(3) A statement of the phenomenon to be explained

The symbol “ ” is pronounced “therefore” and indicates that the premises
above the line are supposed to give a reason for the conclusion below the

Explanat ions

When, if ever, is it legitimate to try to convince someone else to believe something
on the basis of a premise that you yourself reject? Consider a variety of cases.

Discussion Question

line. By “initial conditions” we mean those facts in the context that, together
with appropriate general principles and laws, allow us to derive the result
that the event to be explained occurs.

This sounds quite abstract, but an example should clarify the basic idea.
Suppose we put an ice cube into a glass and then fill the glass with water to
the brim. The ice will stick out above the surface of the water. What will
happen when the ice cube melts? Will the water overflow? Will it remain at
the same level? Will it go down? Here we are asking for a prediction, and it
will, of course, make sense to ask a person to justify whatever prediction he
or she makes. Stumped by this question, we let the ice cube melt to see what
happens. We observe that the water level remains unchanged. After a few
experiments, we convince ourselves that this result always occurs. We now
have a new question: Why does this occur? Now we want an explanation of
this phenomenon. The explanation turns upon the law of buoyancy, which
says that an object in water is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of
the water it displaces. This law implies that, if we put an object in water, it
will continue to sink until it displaces a volume of water whose weight is
equal to its own weight (or else the object hits the bottom of the container).
With this in mind, go back to the original problem. An ice cube is itself
simply water in a solid state. Thus, when it melts, it will exactly fill in the
volume of water it displaced, so the water level will remain unchanged.

We can now see how this explanation conforms to the argumentative
pattern mentioned above:

(1) General principles or laws (Primarily the law of buoyancy)
(2) Initial conditions (An ice cube in a glass of water filled to the brim)

(3) Phenomenon explained (The level of the water remaining
unchanged after the ice cube melts)

This explanation is fairly good. People with only a slight understanding of
science can follow it and see why the water level remains unchanged. We
should also notice that it is not a complete explanation, because certain things
are simply taken for granted—for example, that things do not change
weight when they pass from a solid to a liquid state. To put the explanation
into perfect argumentative form, this assumption and many others would
have to be stated explicitly. This is never done in everyday life and is only
rarely done in the most exact sciences.

Is this explanation any good? Explanations are satisfactory if they remove
bewilderment or surprise by telling us how or why something happened in a
way that is relevant to the concerns of a particular context. Our example
does seem to accomplish that much. However, it might seem that even the
best explanations are not very useful because they take so much for granted.
In explaining why the water level remains the same when the ice cube melts,
we cited the law of buoyancy. Now, why should that law be true? What ex-
plains it? To explain the law of buoyancy, we would have to derive it from
other laws that are more general and, perhaps, more intelligible. In fact, this
has been done. Archimedes simultaneously proved and explained the law

CHAPTER 1 ■ Uses of Arguments

of buoyancy by deriving it from the laws of the lever. How about the laws of
the lever? Can they be proved and explained by deriving them from still
higher and more comprehensive laws? Perhaps. Yet reasons give out, and
sooner or later explanation (like justification) comes to an end. It is the task
of science and all rational inquiry to move that boundary further and further
back. But even when there is more to explain, that does not show that a par-
tial explanation is totally useless. As we have seen, explanations can be use-
ful even when they are incomplete, and even though they are not used to
justify any disputed claim. Explanation is, thus, a separate use of arguments.

Explanat ions

Houses in Indonesia sometimes have their electrical outlets in the middle of
the wall rather than at floor level. Why? A beginning of an explanation is that
flooding is a danger in the Netherlands. Citing this fact does not help much,
however, unless one remembers that Indonesia was formerly a Dutch colony.
We can understand why the Dutch might put their electrical outlets above
floor level in the Netherlands. It is safer in a country where flooding is a dan-
ger. Is flooding, then, a similar danger in Indonesia? Apparently not; so why
did the Dutch continue this practice in Indonesia? The answer is that colonial
settlers tend to preserve their home customs, practices, and styles. The Dutch
continued to build Dutch-style houses with the electrical outlets where (for
them) they are normally placed—that is, in the middle of the wall rather than
at floor level. Restate this explanation in the form of an argument (that is, spec-
ify its premises and conclusion).

Exercise II

Write a brief argument to explain each of the following. Indicate what facts
and what general principles are employed in your explanations. (Do not for-
get those principles that may seem too obvious to mention.)

1. Why a lighter-than-air balloon rises.

2. Why there is an infield fly rule in baseball.

3. Why there is an international date line.

4. Why there are more psychoanalysts in New York City than in any other
city or, for that matter, in most countries in the world.

5. Why average temperatures tend to be higher closer to the equator.

6. Why there are usually more college freshmen who plan to go to medical
school than there are seniors who still plan to go to medical school.

7. Why almost no textbooks are more than eighteen inches high.

8. Why most cars have four tires (instead of more or fewer).

9. Why paintings by Van Gogh cost so much.

10. Why wages go up when unemployment goes down.

Exercise III

COMBINATIONS: AN EXAMPLE

Although justification and explanation are distinct uses of arguments, we
often want to know both what happened and also why it happened. Then we
need to combine justifications and explanations. We can see how this works
by considering a fictional example.

Imagine that Madison was arrested for murdering her husband, Victor.
Now she is on trial, and you are on the jury. Presumably, the police and the
prosecuting attorneys would not have arrested and prosecuted her if they
did not believe that Madison committed the murder, but are their beliefs
justified? Should she be convicted and sent to prison? That’s up to you and
the other jurors to decide.

You do not want to convict her arbitrarily, of course, so you need argu-
ments to justify you in believing that Madison is guilty. The goal of prose-
cuting attorneys is to provide such justification. Their means of reaching this
goal is to present evidence and arguments during the trial. Although their
ultimate conclusion is that you should find Madison guilty of murder, the
prosecutors need to justify lots of little claims along the way.

It might seem too obvious to mention, but the prosecution first needs an
argument to show that the victim died. After all, if nobody died, nobody
was killed. This first argument can be pretty simple: This person was walk-
ing and talking before he was shot in the head; now his heart has stopped
beating for a long time; so he must be dead. There can be complications,
since some gunshot victims can be revived, but let’s assume that an argu-
ment like this justifies the claim that the victim is dead.

We also want to know who the victim was. The body was identified by
several of Victor’s friends, we assume, so all the prosecution needs to argue
is that identifications like this are usually correct, so it was Victor who died.
This second argument also provides a justification, but it differs from the
first argument in several ways. The first argument referred directly to the
facts about Victor that show he died, whereas this second argument does not
say which features of the victim show that it was Victor. Instead, this argu-
ment relies on trusting other people—Victor’s friends—without knowing
what it was about the victim’s face that made them think it was Victor. Such
appeals to authority will be discussed in more detail in Chapters 3 and 15.

The third issue is the cause of death. Here it is common to appeal to a
medical authority. In our case, the coroner or medical examiner makes
observations or runs scientific tests that provide premises for another

CHAPTER 1 ■ Uses of Arguments

It is sometimes said that science tells us how things happen but does not tell us
why they happen. In what ways is this contention right, and in what ways is it
wrong?

Discussion Question

argument that is supposed to justify the conclusion that Victor’s death was
caused by a bullet to the head. This argument is also an appeal to an author-
ity, but here the authority is a scientific expert rather than a friend.

Yet another argument, possibly based on firing marks on the bullet, can
then justify you in believing that the bullet came from a certain gun. More
arguments, possibly based on eyewitnesses, then justify the claims that
Madison was the person who fired that gun at Victor. And so on.

All of these arguments depend on background assumptions. When you
see the marks on the bullet that killed Victor line up with the marks on
another bullet that was fired from the alleged murder weapon, you as-
sume that guns leave distinctive marks on bullets and that nobody
switched the bullets. A good prosecutor will provide arguments for these
assumptions, but nobody can prove everything. Arguments always start
from assumptions. This problem will occupy us at several points later, in-
cluding parts of Chapters 3 and 5. The point for now is just that the prose-
cution needs to produce several arguments of various kinds in order to
justify the claim that Madison killed Victor.

It is also crucial that killing violates the law. If not, then Madison should
not be found guilty for killing Victor. So, how can the prosecutor justify the
assumption that such killing is illegal? Prosecutors usually just quote a
statute or cite a common law principle and apply it to the case, but that ar-
gument assumes a lot of background information. In the case of a statute,
there must be a duly elected legislature, it must have jurisdiction over the
place and time where and when the killing occurred, it must follow required
procedures, and the content of the law must be constitutionally permissible.
Given such a context, if the legislature says that a certain kind of killing is il-
legal, then it is illegal. It is fascinating that merely announcing that some-
thing is illegal thereby makes it illegal. We will explore such performatives
and speech acts in Chapter 2. For now we will simply assume that all of
these arguments could be provided if needed.

Even so, Madison might have had some justification for killing Victor,
such as self-defense. This justification for her act can be presented in an ar-
gument basically like this: I have a reason to protect my own life, and I need
to kill Victor first in order to protect my own life, so I have a reason to kill
Victor. This justification differs in several ways from the kind of justification
that we have been discussing so far. For one thing, this argument provides a
reason for a different person—a reason for Madison—whereas the preced-
ing arguments provided a reason for you as a juror. This argument also pro-
vides a reason with a different kind of object, since it justifies an action
(killing Victor) whereas the previous arguments justified a belief (the belief
that Madison did kill Victor). It provides a practical reason instead of an in-
tellectual reason. Despite these differences, however, if her attorneys want
to show that Madison has this new kind of justification, they need to give an
argument to show that she was justified in doing what she did.

Even if Madison had no justification, she still might have had an excuse.
Whereas a justification is supposed to show that the act was the right thing

Comb inat ions : An Example

to do, an excuse admits that the act was wrong but tries to show that the
agent was not fully responsible for doing it. Madison might, for example,
argue that she honestly believed that Victor was going to kill her if she did
not kill him first. If she offers this only as an excuse, she can admit that her
belief was mistaken, so she had no justification for killing Victor. Her claim
is, instead, that she was not fully responsible for his death because she was
only trying to defend herself.

Excuses like this are, in effect, explanations. By citing her mistake, Madi-
son explains why she did what she did. If she had killed Victor because she
hated him or because she wanted to take his money, then she would have
no excuse. Her act is less blameworthy, however, if she was mistaken. Of
course, you should be careful before you shoot someone, so Madison could
still be guilty of carelessness or negligence. But that is not as bad as killing
someone out of hatred or for money. Her mistake might even be reasonable.
If Victor was aiming a gun at her, then, even if it turned out not to be loaded,
any rational person in her position might have thought that Victor was on
the attack. Such reasonable mistakes might reduce or even remove responsi-
bility. Thus, by explaining her act as a mistake, Madison puts her act in a
better light than it would appear without that explanation. In general, an
excuse is just an explanation of an act that puts that act in a better light by
reducing the agent’s responsibility.

To offer an excuse, then, Madison’s defense attorneys will need to give
arguments whose purpose is not justification but explanation. This excuse
will then determine what she is guilty of. Whether Madison is guilty of first-
degree murder or some lesser charge, such as second-degree murder or
manslaughter, or even no crime at all, depends on the explanation for her act
of killing Victor.

Several of the earlier arguments also provided explanations. The medical
examiner cited the head wound to explain why Victor stopped breathing.
The victim’s identity explained why his friends said he was Victor. The fact
that the bullet came out of a particular gun explained why it had certain
markings. The legislature’s vote explained why the killing was illegal. And
so on.

In this way, what appears appears at first to be a simple case actually
depends on a complex chain of arguments that mixes justifications with
explanations. All of these justifications and explanations can be understood
by presenting them explicitly in the form of arguments.

One final point is crucial. Suppose that Madison has no justification or
excuse for killing Victor. It is still not enough for the prosecutor to give any
old argument that Madison killed Victor. The prosecution must prove guilt
beyond a reasonable doubt. This burden of proof makes the strength of the
argument crucial. You as a juror should not convict, even if you think Madi-
son is guilty, unless the prosecution’s argument meets this high standard. In
this case, as in many others, it is not enough just to be able to identify the ar-
gument and to understand its purpose. You also need to determine how
strong it is.

CHAPTER 1 ■ Uses of Arguments

For such reasons, we all need to understand arguments and to be able to
evaluate them. This need arises not only in law but also in life, such as when
we decide which candidate to vote for, what course to take, whether to be-
lieve that your spouse is cheating on you, and so on. The goal of this book is
to teach the skills needed for understanding and assessing arguments about
important issues like these.

Comb inat ions : An Example

The following arguments mix justification with explanation. For each part of
the argument, determine whether it is a justification or an explanation. How
does each sub-argument work? How strong is it? How would you respond if
you disagreed? How would you defend that part against criticisms?

It will, of course, be difficult to answer these questions before studying the
rest of this book. However, it is worthwhile to reflect on how much you al-
ready understand at the start. It is also useful to have some concrete examples
to keep in mind as you study arguments in more depth.

1. Dinosaurs are fascinating, and we cannot help but wonder what killed
these magnificent creatures. The following argument tries to show that
they were killed when a giant meteor struck the earth, but first the authors
need to argue against alternatives to this impact hypothesis.

AN EXTRATERRESTRIAL IMPACT

by Walter Alvarez and Frank Asaro

from Scientific American (October 1990), pp. 78–92

About 65 million years ago something killed half of all the life on the earth.
This sensational crime wiped out the dinosaurs, until then undisputed mas-
ters of the animal kingdom, and left the humble mammals to inherit their
estate. Human beings, descended from those survivors, cannot avoid asking
who or what committed the mass murder and what permitted our distant
ancestors to survive. . . .

Murder suspects typically must have means, motive and opportunity. An
impact [of a giant meteor, probably in the Yucatan peninsula] certainly had the
means to cause the Cretaceous extinction, and the evidence that an impact
occurred at exactly the right time points to opportunity.

The impact hypothesis provides, if not motive, then at least a mechanism
behind the crime. How do other suspects in the killing of dinosaurs fare?

Some have an air-tight alibi: they could not have killed all the different
organisms that died at the KT boundary. The venerable notion that mammals
ate the dinosaurs’ eggs, for example, does not explain the simultaneous extinc-
tion of marine foraminifera and ammonites.

Discussion Questions

(continued)

Stefan Gartner of Texas A&M University once suggested that marine life
was killed by a sudden huge flood of fresh water from the Arctic Ocean, which
apparently was isolated from other oceans during the late Cretaceous and
filled with fresh water. Yet this ingenious mechanism cannot account for the
extinction of the dinosaurs or the loss of many species of land plants.

Other suspects might have had the ability to kill, but they have alibis
based on timing. Some scientific detectives have tried to pin the blame for
mass extinction on changes in climate or sea level, for example. Such changes,
however, take much longer to occur than did the extinction; moreover, they do
not seem to have coincided with the extinction, and they have occurred repeat-
edly throughout the earth’s history without accompanying extinctions.

Others consider volcanism a prime suspect. The strongest evidence impli-
cating volcanoes is the Deccan Traps, an enormous outpouring of basaltic lava
in India that occurred approximately 65 million years ago. Recent paleomag-
netic work by Vincent E. Courtillot and his colleagues in Paris confirms previ-
ous studies. They show that most of the Deccan Traps erupted during a single
period of reversed geomagnetic polarity, with slight overlaps into the preced-
ing and succeeding periods of normal polarity. The Paris team has found that
the interval in question is probably 29R, during which the KT extinction
occurred, although it might be the reversed-polarity interval immediately be-
fore or after 29R as well.

Because the outpouring of the Deccan Traps began in one normal interval
and ended in the next, the eruptions that gave rise to them must have taken
place over at least 0.5 Myr. Most workers interested in mass extinction there-
fore have not considered volcanism a serious suspect in a killing that evidently
took place over 0.001 Myr or less. . . .

Moreover, basaltic spherules in the KT boundary argue against explosive
volcanism in any case; spherules might be generated by quieter forms of vol-
canism, but then they could not be transported worldwide. The apparent global
distribution of the iridium anomaly, shocked quartz and basaltic spherules is
strong evidence exonerating volcanism and pointing to impact. Eruptions take
place at the bottom of the atmosphere; they send material into the high strato-
sphere at best. Spherules and quartz grains, if they came from an eruption,
would quickly be slowed by atmospheric drag and fall to the ground.

Nevertheless, the enormous eruptions that created the Deccan Traps did
occur during a period spanning the KT extinction. Further, they represent the
greatest outpouring of lava on land in the past quarter of a billion years (al-
though greater volumes flow continually out of mid-ocean ridges). No investi-
gator can afford to ignore that kind of coincidence.

It seems possible that impact triggered the Deccan Traps volcanism. A few
minutes after a large body hit the earth the initial crater would be 40 kilome-
ters deep, and the release of pressure might cause the hot rock of the underly-
ing mantle to melt. Authorities on the origin of volcanic provinces, however,
find it very difficult to explain in detail how an impact could trigger large-
scale basaltic volcanism.

In the past few years the debate between supporters of each scenario has
become polarized: impact proponents have tended to ignore the Deccan Traps

CHAPTER 1 ■ Uses of Arguments

as irrelevant, while volcano backers have tried to explain away evidence for
impact by suggesting that it is also compatible with volcanism.

Our sense is that the argument is a Hegelian one, with an impact thesis and
a volcanic antithesis in search of a synthesis whose outlines are as yet unclear. . . .

2. In his famous testimony to the United Nations Security Council on Febru-
ary 5, 2003, which was 42 days before U.S. troops entered Iraq, Secretary of
Defense Colin Powell gave several arguments for his main conclusion that
Saddam Hussein was at that time still trying to obtain fissile material for a
nuclear weapons program.

. . . Let me turn now to nuclear weapons. We have no indication that Saddam
Hussein has ever abandoned his nuclear weapons program. On the contrary,
we have more than a decade of proof that he remains determined to acquire
nuclear weapons.

To fully appreciate the challenge that we face today, remember that in 1991
the inspectors searched Iraq’s primary nuclear weapons facilities for the first
time, and they found nothing to conclude that Iraq had a nuclear weapons pro-
gram. But, based on defector information, in May of 1991, Saddam Hussein’s
lie was exposed. In truth, Saddam Hussein had a massive clandestine nuclear
weapons program that covered several different techniques to enrich uranium,
including electromagnetic isotope separation, gas centrifuge and gas diffusion.

We estimate that this illicit program cost the Iraqis several billion dollars.
Nonetheless, Iraq continued to tell the IAEA that it had no nuclear weapons
program. If Saddam had not been stopped, Iraq could have produced a nuclear
bomb by 1993, years earlier than most worst case assessments that had been
made before the war.

In 1995, as a result of another defector, we find out that, after his invasion of
Kuwait, Saddam Hussein had initiated a crash program to build a crude nuclear
weapon, in violation of Iraq’s UN obligations. Saddam Hussein already pos-
sesses two out of the three key components needed to build a nuclear bomb. He
has a cadre of nuclear scientists with the expertise, and he has a bomb design.

Since 1998, his efforts to reconstitute his nuclear program have been fo-
cused on acquiring the third and last component: sufficient fissile material to
produce a nuclear explosion. To make the fissile material, he needs to develop
an ability to enrich uranium. Saddam Hussein is determined to get his hands
on a nuclear bomb.

He is so determined that he has made repeated covert attempts to acquire
high-specification aluminum tubes from 11 different countries, even after in-
spections resumed. These tubes are controlled by the Nuclear Suppliers Group
precisely because they can be used as centrifuges for enriching uranium.

By now, just about everyone has heard of these tubes and we all know
that there are differences of opinion. There is controversy about what these
tubes are for. Most U.S. experts think they are intended to serve as rotors in
centrifuges used to enrich uranium. Other experts, and the Iraqis themselves,
argue that they are really to produce the rocket bodies for a conventional
weapon, a multiple rocket launcher.

Comb inat ions : An Example

(continued)

CHAPTER 1 ■ Uses of Arguments

Let me tell you what is not controversial about these tubes. First, all the
experts who have analyzed the tubes in our possession agree that they can be
adapted for centrifuge use.

Second, Iraq had no business buying them for any purpose. They are
banned for Iraq.

I am no expert on centrifuge tubes, but this is an old army trooper. I can
tell you a couple things.

First, it strikes me as quite odd that these tubes are manufactured to a tol-
erance that far exceeds U.S. requirements for comparable rockets. Maybe
Iraqis just manufacture their conventional weapons to a higher standard than
we do, but I don’t think so.

Second, we actually have examined tubes from several different batches
that were seized clandestinely before they reached Baghdad. What we notice in
these different batches is a progression to higher and higher levels of specifica-
tion, including in the latest batch an anodized coating on extremely smooth
inner and outer surfaces.

Why would they continue refining the specifications? Why would they go
to all that trouble for something that, if it was a rocket, would soon be blown
into shrapnel when it went off?

The high-tolerance aluminum tubes are only part of the story. We also
have intelligence from multiple sources that Iraq is attempting to acquire mag-
nets and high-speed balancing machines. Both items can be used in a gas cen-
trifuge program to enrich uranium.

In 1999 and 2000, Iraqi officials negotiated with firms in Romania, India,
Russia and Slovenia for the purchase of a magnet production plant. Iraq
wanted the plant to produce magnets weighing 20 to 30 grams. That’s the
same weight as the magnets used in Iraq’s gas centrifuge program before the
Gulf War.

This incident, linked with the tubes, is another indicator of Iraq’s attempt
to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program.

Intercepted communications from mid-2000 through last summer showed
that Iraqi front companies sought to buy machines that can be used to balance
gas centrifuge rotors. One of these companies also had been involved in a
failed effort in 2001 to smuggle aluminum tubes into Iraq.

People will continue to debate this issue, but there is no doubt in my
mind. These illicit procurement efforts show that Saddam Hussein is very
much focused on putting in place the key missing piece from his nuclear
weapons program, the ability to produce fissile material. . . .

The Web of Language

Arguments are made up of language, so we cannot understand arguments without

first understanding language. This chapter will examine some of the basic features

of language, stressing three main ideas. First, language is conventional. Words

acquire meaning within a rich system of linguistic conventions and rules. Second,

the uses of language are diverse. We use language to communicate information, but

we also use it to ask questions, issue orders, write poetry, keep score, formulate

arguments, and perform an almost endless number of other tasks. Third, meaning is

often conveyed indirectly. To understand the significance of many utterances, we

must go beyond what is literally said to examine what is conversationally implied

by saying it.

LANGUAGE AND CONVENTION

The preceding chapter stressed that arguing is a practical activity. More
specifically, it is a linguistic activity. Arguing is one of the many things that
we can do with words. In fact, unlike things that we can accomplish both
with words and without words (like making people happy, angry, and so
forth), arguing is something we can only do with words or other meaningful
symbols. That is why nonhuman animals never give arguments. To under-
stand how arguments work, then, it is crucial to understand how language
works.

Unfortunately, our understanding of human language is far from
complete, and linguistics is a young science in which disagreement exists on
many important issues. Still, certain facts about language are beyond
dispute, and recognizing them will provide a background for understand-
ing how arguments work.

As anyone who has bothered to think about it knows, language is con-
ventional. There is no reason why we, as English speakers, use the word
“dog” to refer to a dog rather than to a cat, a tree, or the number of planets
in our solar system. It seems that any word might have been used to stand
for anything. Beyond this, there seems to be no reason why we put words
together the way we do. In English, we put adjectives before the nouns they
modify. We thus speak of a “green salad.” In French, adjectives usually

follow the noun, and so, instead of saying “verte salade,” the French say
“salade verte.” The conventions of our own language are so much with us
that it strikes us as odd when we discover that other languages have differ-
ent conventions. A French diplomat once praised his own language because,
as he said, it followed the natural order of thought. This strikes English
speakers as silly, but in seeing why it is silly, we see that the word order in
our own language is conventional as well.

Although it is important to realize that language is conventional, it is also
important not to misunderstand this fact. From the idea that language is
conventional, it is easy to conclude that language is totally arbitrary. If
language is totally arbitrary, then it might seem that it really does not matter
which words we use or how we put them together. It takes only a little
thought to see that this view, however daring it might seem, misrepresents
the role of conventions in language. If we wish to communicate with others,
we must follow the system of conventions that others use. Grapefruits are
more like big lemons than like grapes, so you might want to call them
“mega-lemons.” Still, if you order a glass of mega-lemon juice in a restau-
rant, you will get stares and smirks but no grapefruit juice. The same point
lies behind this famous passage in Through the Looking Glass, by Lewis
Carroll:

“There’s glory for you!”
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory’,” Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously.
“Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down
argument for you!’”
“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument’,” Alice objected.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means
just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many dif-
ferent things.”

The point, of course, is that Humpty Dumpty cannot make a word mean
whatever he wants it to mean, and he cannot communicate if he uses words
in his own peculiar way without regard to what those words themselves
mean. Communication can take place only within a shared system of
conventions. Conventions do not destroy meaning by making it arbitrary;
conventions bring meaning into existence.

A misunderstanding of the conventional nature of language can lead to
pointless disputes. Sometimes, in the middle of a discussion, someone will
declare that “the whole thing is just a matter of definition” or “what you say
is true by your definition, false by mine.” There are times when definitions
are important and the truth of what is said turns on them, but usually this is
not the case. Suppose someone has fallen off a cliff and is heading toward
certain death on the rocks below. Of course, it is a matter of convention that
we use the word “death” to describe the result of the sudden, sharp stop
at the end of the fall. We might have used some other word—perhaps

CHAPTER 2 ■ The Web of Language

“birth“—instead. But it certainly will not help a person who is falling to his
certain death to shout out, “By ‘birth’ I mean death.” It will not help even if
everyone agrees to use these words in this new way. If we all decided to
adopt this new convention, we would then say, “He is falling from the cliff
to his certain birth” instead of “He is falling from the cliff to his certain
death.” But speaking in this way will not change the facts. It will not save
him from perishing. It will not make those who care for him feel better.

The upshot of this simple example is that the truth of what we say is
rarely just a matter of definition. Whether what we have said is true or not
will depend, for the most part, on how things stand in the world. Abraham
Lincoln, during his days as a trial lawyer, is reported to have cross-examined
a witness like this:

“How many legs does a horse have?”
“Four,” said the witness.
“Now, if we call a tail a leg, how many legs does a horse have?”
“Five,” answered the witness.
“Nope,” said Abe, “calling a tail a leg don’t make it a leg.”

In general, then, though the meaning of what we say is dependent on conven-
tion, the truth of what we say is not.

In the preceding sentence we used the qualifying phrase, “in general.” To
say that a claim holds in general indicates that there may be exceptions. This
qualification is needed because sometimes the truth of what we say is
simply a matter of definition. Take a simple example: The claim that a trian-
gle has three sides is true by definition, because a triangle is defined as “a
closed figure having three sides.” Again, if someone says that sin is wrong,
he or she has said something that is true by definition, for a sin is defined as,
among other things, “something that is wrong.” In unusual cases like these,
things are true merely as a matter of convention. Still, in general, the truth of
what we say is settled not by appealing to definitions but, instead, by
looking at the facts. In this way, language is not arbitrary, even though it is
conventional.

LINGUISTIC ACTS

In the previous section we saw that a language is a system of shared conven-
tions that allows us to communicate with one another. If we examine lan-
guage, we will see that it contains many different kinds of conventions.
These conventions govern what we will call linguistic acts, speech acts, and
conversational acts. We will discuss linguistic acts first.

We have seen that words have meanings conventionally attached to
them. The word “dog” is used conventionally to talk about dogs. Given
what our words mean, it would be incorrect to call dogs “airplanes.” Proper
names are also conventionally assigned, for Harry Jones could have been

Lingu ist ic Acts

named Wilbur Jones. Still, given that his name is not Wilbur, it would be
improper to call him Wilbur. Rules like these, which govern meaning and
reference, can be called semantic rules.

Other conventions concern the ways words can be put together to form
sentences. These are often called syntactic or grammatical rules. Using the
three words “John,“ “hit,” and “Harry,” we can formulate sentences with
very different meanings, such as “John hit Harry” and “Harry hit John.” We
recognize that these sentences have different meanings, because we under-
stand the grammar of our language. This grammatical understanding also
allows us to see that the sentence “Hit John Harry” has no determinate
meaning, even though the individual words do. (Notice that “Hit John,
Harry!” does mean something: It is a way of telling Harry to hit John.) Gram-
matical rules are important, for they play a part in giving a meaning to com-
binations of words, such as sentences.

Some of our grammatical rules play only a small role in this important
task of giving meaning to combinations of words. It is bad grammar to say,
“If I was you, I wouldn’t do that,” but it is still clear what information the
person is trying to convey. What might be called stylistic rules of grammar
are of relatively little importance for logic, but grammatical rules that affect
the meaning or content of what is said are essential to logical analysis.
Grammatical rules of this kind can determine whether we have said one
thing rather than another, or perhaps failed to say anything at all and have
merely spoken nonsense.

It is sometimes hard to tell what is nonsense. Consider “The horse raced
past the barn fell.” This sentence usually strikes people as nonsense when
they hear it for the first time. To show them that it actually makes sense, all
we need to do is insert two words: “The horse that was raced past the barn
fell.” Since English allows us to drop “that was,” the original sentence
means the same as the slightly expanded version. Sentences like these are
called “garden path sentences,” because the first few words “lead you down
the garden path” by suggesting that some word plays a grammatical role
that it really does not play. In this example, “The horse raced . . .” suggests
at first that the main verb is “raced.” That makes it hard to see that the main
verb really is “fell.”

Another famous example is “Buffalo buffalo buffalo.” Again, this
seems like nonsense at first, but then someone points out that “buffalo”
can be a verb meaning “to confuse.” The sentence “Buffalo buffalo buf-
falo” then means “North American bison confuse North American bison.”
Indeed, we can even make sense out of “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo
buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo.” This means
“North American bison from Buffalo, New York, that North American
bison from Buffalo, New York, confuse also confuse North American
bison from Buffalo, New York, that North American bison from Buffalo,
New York, confuse.”

Examples like these show that sentences can have linguistic meaning
when they seem meaningless. To be meaningful, sentences need to follow

CHAPTER 2 ■ The Web of Language

both semantic conventions that govern meanings of individual words and
also syntactic or grammatical conventions that lay down rules for combining
words into meaningful wholes. When a sentence satisfies essential semantic
and syntactic conventions, we will say that the person who uttered that
sentence performed a linguistic act: The speaker said something meaningful
in a language.1 The ability to perform linguistic acts shows a command of a
language. What the speaker says may be false, irrelevant, boring, and so on;
but, if in saying it linguistic rules are not seriously violated, then that person
can be credited with performing a linguistic act.

Later, in Chapters 13–14, we will look more closely at semantic and
syntactic conventions, for they are common sources of fallacies and other
confusions. In particular, we shall see how these conventions can generate
fallacies of ambiguity and fallacies of vagueness. Before examining the
defects of our language, however, we should first appreciate that language
is a powerful and subtle tool that allows us to perform a wide variety of jobs
important for living in the world.

Lingu ist ic Acts

Read each of the following sentences aloud. Did you perform a linguistic act?
If so, explain what the sentence means and why it might not seem meaningful.

1. The old man the ship.

2. Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

3. Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like bananas.

4. The cotton clothing is made of grows in Mississippi.

5. The square root of pine is tree.

6. The man who whistles tunes pianos.

7. To force heaven, Mars shall have a new angel. (from Monk)

8. “’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe.”
(from Lewis Carroll)

And now some weird examples from Dan Wegner’s Hidden Brain Damage
Scale. If these make sense to you, it might be a sign of hidden brain damage.
If they don’t make sense, explain why:

9. People tell me one thing one day and out the other.

10. I feel as much like I did yesterday as I do today.

11. My throat is closer than it seems.

12. Likes and dislikes are among my favorites.

13. I’ve lost all sensation in my shirt.

14. There’s only one thing for me.

15. I don’t like any of my loved ones.

Exercise I

SPEECH ACTS

When we are asked about the function of language, it is natural to reply that we
use language to communicate ideas. This is, however, only one of the purposes
for which we use language. Other purposes become obvious as soon as we
look at the ways in which our language actually works. Adding up a column of
figures is a linguistic activity—though it is rarely looked at in this way—but it
does not communicate any ideas to others. When I add the figures, I am not
even communicating anything to myself: I am trying to figure something out.
A look at our everyday conversations produces a host of other examples of

CHAPTER 2 ■ The Web of Language

1. When an actor on a stage says lines such as “To be or not to be, that is the
question,” does the actor perform a linguistic act?

2. When someone hums (but does not sing) the “Star-Spangled Banner,” does
she perform a linguistic act? Why or why not?

3. Can a speaker mispronounce a word in a sentence without performing any
linguistic act? Why or why not?

Discussion Questions

Image not available due to copyright restrictions

language being used for different purposes. Grammarians, for example, have
divided sentences into various moods, among which are:

Indicative: Barry Bonds hit a home run.

Imperative: Get in there and hit a home run, Barry!

Interrogative: Did Barry Bonds hit a home run?

Expressive: Hurray for Barry Bonds!

The first sentence states a fact. We can use it to communicate information
about something that Barry Bonds did. If we use it in this way, then what we
say will be either true or false. Notice that none of the other sentences can be
called either true or false even though they are all meaningful.

PERFORMATIVES

The different types of sentences recognized by traditional grammarians
indicate that we use language to do more than convey information. But this
traditional classification of sentences gives only a small idea of the wide
variety of things that we can accomplish using language. Sometimes, for
example, in using language we actually do things in the sense of bringing
something about. In one familiar setting, if one person says, “I do,” and
another person says, “I do,” and finally a third person says, “I now pro-
nounce you husband and wife,” the relationship between the first two peo-
ple changes in a fundamental way: They are thereby married. With luck,
they begin a life of wedded bliss, but they also alter their legal relationship.
For example, they may now file joint income tax returns and may not legally
marry other people without first getting divorced.

In uttering sentences of this kind, the speaker thereby does something more
than merely stating something. The philosopher J. L. Austin labeled such utter-
ances performatives in order to contrast performing an action with simply
describing something.2 For example, if an umpire shouts, “You’re out!” then
the batter is out. The umpire is not merely describing the situation but declaring
the batter out. By way of contrast, if someone in the stands shouts, “He’s out!”
the batter is not thereby out, although the person who shouts this may be en-
couraging the umpire to call the batter out or complaining because he didn’t.

Performatives come in a wide variety of forms. They are often in the first
person (like “I do”), but not always. “You’re all invited to my house after the
game” is in the second person, but uttering it performs the act of inviting. In
some circumstances, one person can speak for another person, a group, or
an institution. At political conventions, heads of delegations say things like
this: “The delegates from Kentucky, the Bluegrass State and the home of the
Kentucky Derby, cast their votes for the next President of the United States,
Joe W. Blodgett.” In saying this, the speaker performs the act of casting
Kentucky’s votes in favor of Blodgett. Even silence can amount to a perfor-
mative act in special situations. When the chairperson of a meeting asks if
there are any objections to a ruling and none is voiced, then the voters,
through their silence, have accepted the ruling.

Speech Acts

Because of this diversity of forms that performatives can take, it is not easy
to formulate a definition that covers them all. To avoid this difficulty, we will
not even try to define performatives here. Instead, we will concentrate on one
particularly clear subclass of performatives, what J. L. Austin called explicit
performatives. All explicit performatives are utterances in the first-person
singular indicative noncontinuous3 present. But not all utterances of that
form are explicit performatives. There is one more requirement:

An utterance of that form is an explicit performative if and only if it yields a true
statement when plugged into the following pattern:
In saying “I _____” in appropriate circumstances, I thereby _____.

For example, “I congratulate you” expresses an explicit performative, be-
cause, in saying “I congratulate you,” I thereby congratulate you. Here a
quoted expression occurs on the left side of the word “thereby” but not on
the right side. This reflects the fact that the formula takes us from the words
(which are quoted) to the world (the actual act that is performed). The say-
ing, which is referred to on the left side of the pattern, amounts to the doing
referred to on the right side of the word “thereby.” We will call this the
thereby test for explicit performatives. It provides a convenient way of identi-
fying explicit performatives.

The thereby test includes an important qualification: The context of the ut-
terance must be appropriate. You have not congratulated anyone if you say, “I
congratulate you,” when no one is around, unless you are congratulating
yourself. Congratulations said by an actor in a play are not real congratula-
tions, and so on. Later in this chapter, we will try to clarify what makes a
context appropriate.

Assuming an appropriate context, all of the following sentences meet the
thereby test:

I promise to meet you tomorrow.

I bid sixty-six dollars. (said at an auction)

I bid one club. (said in a bridge game)

I resign from this club.

I apologize for being late.

Notice that it doesn’t make sense to deny any of these performatives. If someone
says, “I bid sixty-six dollars,” it is not appropriate for someone to reply “No,
you don’t” or “That’s false.” It could, however, be appropriate for someone to
reply, “You can’t bid sixty-six dollars, because the bidding is already up to sev-
enty dollars.” In this case, the person tried to make a bid, but failed to do so.

Several explicit performatives play important roles in constructing argu-
ments. These include sentences of the following kind:

I conclude that this bill should be voted down.

I base my conclusion on the assumption that we do not want to hurt
the poor.

CHAPTER 2 ■ The Web of Language

I stipulate that anyone who earns less than $10,000 is poor.

I assure you that this bill will hurt the poor.

I concede that I am not absolutely certain.

I admit that there is much to be said on both sides of this issue.

I give my support to the alternative measure.

I deny that this alternative will hurt the economy.

I grant for the sake of argument that some poor people are lazy.

I reply that most poor people contribute to the economy.

I reserve comment on other issues raised by this bill.

We will call this kind of performative an argumentative performative.
Studying such argumentative performatives can help us to understand what
is going on in arguments (which is one main reason why we are studying
performatives here).

In contrast to the above utterances, which pass the thereby test, none of
the following utterances does:

I agree with you. (This describes one’s thoughts or beliefs, so, unlike a
performative, it can be false.)

I am sorry for being late. (This describes one’s feelings and could be false.)

Yesterday I bid sixty dollars. (This is a statement about a past act and
might be false.)

I’ll meet you tomorrow. (This utterance may only be a prediction that can
turn out to be false.)

Questions, imperatives, and exclamations are not explicit performatives,
because they cannot sensibly be plugged into the thereby test at all. They do
not have the right form, since they are not in the first-person singular indica-
tive noncontinuous present.

Speech Acts

Using the thereby test as described above, indicate which of the following sen-
tences express explicit performatives (EP) and which do not express explicit
performatives (N) in appropriate circumstances:

1. I pledge allegiance to the flag.

2. We pledge allegiance to the flag.

3. I pledged allegiance to the flag.

4. I always pledge allegiance at the start of a game.

5. You pledge allegiance to the flag.

Exercise II

(continued)

KINDS OF SPEECH ACTS

Recognizing explicit performatives helps break the spell of the idea that lan-
guage functions only to transmit information. It also introduces us to a kind
of act distinct from linguistic acts. We will call them speech acts.4 They in-
clude such acts as stating, promising, swearing, and refusing. A speech act is
the conventional move that a remark makes in a language exchange. It is
what is done in saying something.

It is difficult to give a precise definition of a speech act, but we can begin
by contrasting speech acts with linguistic acts. A linguistic act, we said, is the
act of saying something meaningful in a language. It is important to see that
the same linguistic act can play different roles as it occurs in different con-
texts. This is shown by the following brief conversations.

A: Is there any pizza left?

B: Yes.

A: Do you promise to pay me back by Friday?

B: Yes.

A: Do you swear to tell the truth?

B: Yes.

A: Do you refuse to leave?

B: Yes.

CHAPTER 2 ■ The Web of Language

6. He pledges allegiance to the flag.

7. He doesn’t pledge allegiance to the flag.

8. Pledge allegiance to the flag!

9. Why don’t you pledge allegiance to the flag?

10. Pierre is the capital of South Dakota.

11. I state that Pierre is the capital of South Dakota.

12. I order you to leave.

13. Get out of here!

14. I didn’t take it.

15. I swear that I didn’t take it.

16. I won’t talk to you.

17. I refuse to talk to you.

18. I’m out of gas.

19. I feel devastated.

20. Bummer!

21. I claim this land for England.

22. I bring you greetings from home.

Here the same linguistic act, uttering the word “yes,” is used to do four dif-
ferent things: to state something, to make a promise, to take an oath, and to
refuse to do something.

We can make this idea of a speech act clearer by using the notion of an ex-
plicit performative. Explicit performatives provide a systematic way of identify-
ing different kinds of speech acts. The basic idea is that different speech acts are
named by the different verbs that occur in explicit performatives. We can thus
use the thereby test to search for different kinds of speech acts. For example:

If I say, “I promise,” I thereby promise. So “I promise” is a performative,
and promising is a kind of speech act.

If I say, “I resign,” I thereby resign. So “I resign” is a performative, and
resigning is a kind of speech act.

If I say, “I apologize,” I thereby apologize. So “I apologize” is a performative,
and apologizing is a kind of speech act.

If I say, “I question his honesty,” I thereby question his honesty. So “I
question his honesty” is a performative, and questioning is a kind of
speech act.

If I say, “I conclude that she is guilty,” I thereby conclude that she is
guilty. So “I conclude that she is guilty” is a performative, and conclud-
ing is a kind of speech act.

The main verbs that appear in such explicit performatives can be called
performative verbs. Performative verbs name kinds of speech acts.5

Still, the same speech act can also be performed without any performa-
tive verb. I can deny my opponent’s claim by saying either “I deny that” or
simply “No way!” Both utterances perform the speech act of denying, even
though only the former is a performative. The latter is not a performative
and does not contain any performative verb, but it still performs a speech
act. Similarly, I can assure you by saying either “I assure you that I am right”
or “There’s no doubt about it.” Both utterances perform the speech act of as-
suring, even though only the former is a performative.

Thus far, we have emphasized that we do a great deal more with lan-
guage than make statements, assert facts, and describe things—that is, we
do more with language than put forward claims that are either true or false.
But we also use language to do these things, so stating, asserting, and
describing are themselves kinds of speech acts. This can be shown by using
the thereby test:

If I say, “I state that I am a U.S. citizen,” I thereby state that I am a U.S.
citizen.

If I say, “I assert that the defendant was in Detroit at the time of the
crime,” I thereby assert that the defendant was in Detroit at that time.

If I say, “I describe him as being dark haired and just over six feet tall,” I
thereby describe him as being dark haired and just over six feet tall.

Speech Acts

We now have a more accurate conception of the way in which language
functions than the common conception that the function of language is to
convey ideas. Making claims that are either true or false is one important
kind of speech act, but we perform a great many other kinds of speech acts
that are also important.

CHAPTER 2 ■ The Web of Language

Which of the following verbs names a speech act?

1. capture the suspect 6. punish the defendant

2. assert that the suspect is guilty 7. revoke the defendant’s driver’s license

3. stare accusingly at the suspect 8. welcome the prisoner to prison

4. find the defendant guilty 9. order the prisoner to be silent

5. take the defendant away 10. lock the cell door

Exercise III

Using a dictionary, find ten verbs that can be used to construct explicit perfor-
matives that have not yet been mentioned in this chapter.

Exercise IV

SPEECH ACT RULES

The distinctive feature of a performative utterance is that, in a sense we have
tried to make clear, the saying constitutes a doing of something. In saying,
“I pronounce you husband and wife,” a minister is not simply describing a
marriage ceremony, she is performing it. Here, however, an objection might
arise. Suppose someone who is a supporter of family values goes about the
streets pronouncing random couples husband and wife. Unless this person
is a member of the clergy, a justice of the peace, a ship’s captain, or the like,
that person will have no right to make such pronouncements. Furthermore,
even if this person is, say, a crazed member of the clergy, the pronouncement
will still not come off—that is, the utterance will not succeed in making any-
one husband and wife. The parties addressed have to say, “I do,” they must
have a proper license, and so on. This example shows that a speech act will
fail to come off or will be void unless certain rules or conventions are satisfied.
These rules or conventions that must be satisfied for a speech act to come off
and not be void will be called speech act rules.

The main types of speech act rules can be discovered by considering the
following questions:

1. Must the speaker use any special words or formulas to perform the speech act?

Sometimes a speech act will come off only if certain words or formulas are
used. In baseball the umpire must say, “Strike two,” or something very close

to this, in order to call a second strike. In a pickup game it might be all right to
say instead, “Hey, that’s two bad ones on you, baby!” but that way of calling
strikes is not permitted in serious play. Similarly, certain legal documents are
not valid if they are not properly signed, endorsed, notarized, and so forth.

2. Is any response or uptake by the audience needed in order to complete the
speech act?

Sometimes a speech act will come off only if there is an uptake by another
person. A person can offer a bet by saying, “I bet you ten dollars that the An-
gels will win today,” but this person will have made a bet only if the other
person says, “Done” or “You’re on,” shakes hands, or in some other way ac-
cepts the bet. A marriage ceremony is completely void if one of the parties
does not say, “I do,” but instead says, “Well, maybe I should think about this
for a while.”

3. Must the (a) speaker or (b) audience hold any special position or role in order
for the speaker to perform the speech act?

Sometimes a speech act will come off only if it is performed by someone with
an official position. We have already seen that, for someone to make two peo-
ple husband and wife by pronouncing them husband and wife, that person
must hold a certain official position. Similarly, even if a body is plainly dead
when it arrives at the hospital, a janitor cannot pronounce it dead on arrival.
That is the job of a doctor or a coroner. In the same way, although a shortstop
can perform the linguistic act of shouting, “You’re out,” a shortstop cannot
perform the speech act of calling someone out. Only an umpire can do that.
Moreover, even an umpire cannot call out the catcher or a spectator, so some-
times the audience of the speech also needs to have some special position.

4. Are any other special circumstances required for the speech act?

Most speech acts also involve assumptions or presuppositions that certain
facts obtain. A father cannot bequeath an antique car to his son if he does not
own such a car. You cannot resign from the American Civil Liberties Union
or the Veterans of Foreign Wars if you are not a member. These special cir-
cumstances might sometimes include the audience’s desires. In promising
someone to do something, for example, we usually do so in the belief that the
person wants us to do it. For example, I will promise to drive someone to the
airport only if I believe that person wants to go the airport and would like me
to drive her there. Sometimes, however, we do promise to do things a person
does not want done. I can promise to throw someone out if he doesn’t behave
himself. Here, however, I am making a threat, not a promise. Different an-
swers to this question, thus, reveal differences among speech acts.

5. What feelings, desires, or beliefs is the speaker expected to have?

If we apologize for something, we are expected to feel sorry for what we
have done. If we congratulate someone, we are usually supposed to be
pleased with that person’s success. If we state something, we are expected

Speech Acts

to believe what we say. In all these cases—in apologizing, congratulating,
and stating—if the speaker lacks the expected feelings, desires, or beliefs, the
speaker still does succeed in performing the speech act, but that speaker and
speech act are subject to criticism. In this respect, this rule differs from the
preceding rules. Those preceding rules reflected conventions that must be
satisfied for the speech act to come off (for it not to be void). In contrast, the
person who says, “I apologize,” has apologized even if he or she does not
feel sorry. The speech act does come off and is not void, even though the
apology can be criticized as insincere.

6. What general purpose or purposes are served by this kind of speech act?

This final question asks why a certain kind of speech act exists at all. Why,
for example, is there the speech act of promising? That is a rather compli-
cated question, but the primary reason for the institution of promising is
that it helps people coordinate their activities. People who make promises
place themselves under an obligation to do something. When promises are
contractual, this obligation is a legal obligation. Promise making, then, in-
creases the confidence we can have that someone will do what they said
they will do, and, for legal promises at least, provides remedies when they
do not. To cite another example of the purpose of a speech act, apologizing
expresses regret for harming or insulting someone. One of its purposes is to
normalize relations between the speaker and the person harmed or insulted.

Answering the six questions listed above for a particular kind of speech
act is called giving a speech act analysis. For example, here is a brief speech act
analysis of “to appoint,” as in, “I appoint you to the judiciary committee“:

1. Appointments are usually made by using the word “appoint,” but
other words can be used as well; for example, “name” and “designate”
can also be used to do this job. You cannot, however, say, “I wish you
were on the judiciary committee.”

2. Sometimes further actions by others are necessary for an appointment
to come off. Perhaps ratification is needed. Before ratification, the
word “nominate” is often used. In such cases, only after the nomination
is ratified has the appointment been made. Usually the appointment
does not come off if the person declines the appointment.

3. Normally, someone who appoints a person to something must have
the power to make such appointments. For example, Queen Elizabeth
II does not have the power to appoint the commissioner of baseball.

4. This speech act presupposes a wide variety of facts, for example, that
a position exists, that the person appointed to it is eligible for this
appointment, and so on.

5. Appointments are often made with the belief that the person appointed
will do a good job. This is not always the case, however, as appointments
are made for all sorts of different reasons—rewarding an important
supporter, for example.

CHAPTER 2 ■ The Web of Language

6. An important purpose of an appointment is to explicitly designate
someone to play a particular role. For example, it is often important to
know who is in charge. It can also be important that the person who
gains this role does so through regular, authorized procedures.

Speech Acts

1. Imagine that an actor on stage during a modern play screams, “Fire! No, I
really mean it. ” The audience realizes that he is just acting, so they laugh.
Then the actor sees a real fire behind the stage out of view of the audience.
The actor again screams, “Fire! No, I really mean it. Fire!” Which speech
act, if any, does the actor perform in uttering these words the second
time? Why? What does this show about speech acts?

2. Do the speech acts in which people get married presuppose that the peo-
ple who are getting married are of different sexes? Should these speech
acts presuppose this fact? Why or why not?

3. The importance of deciding what kind of speech act has been performed
is illustrated by a classic case from the law of contracts, Hawkins v. McGee.6

McGee performed an operation on Hawkins that proved unsuccessful,
and Hawkins sued for damages. He did not sue on the basis of malprac-
tice, however, but on the basis of breach of contract. His attorney argued
that the doctor initiated a contractual relationship in that he tried to per-
suade Hawkins to have the operation by saying things such as “I will
guarantee to make the hand a hundred percent perfect hand.” He made
statements of this kind a number of times, and Hawkins finally agreed to
undergo the operation on the basis of these remarks. Hawkins’s attorney
maintained that these exchanges, which took place in the doctor’s office
on a number of occasions, constituted an offer of a contract that Hawkins
explicitly accepted. The attorney for the surgeon replied that these words,
even if uttered, would not constitute an offer of a contract, but merely

Discussion Questions

Give a speech act analysis of the ten verbs below by writing two or three sen-
tences in response to each of the six questions above. Speech act analyses can
go on much longer, but your goal here is just to bring out the most interesting
features of the speech act named by each verb.

1. to bet 6. to deny

2. to promise 7. to vote

3. to congratulate 8. to give up (in a fight)

4. to state 9. to thank

5. to apologize 10. to invite

Exercise V

(continued)

CONVERSATIONAL ACTS7

In examining linguistic acts (saying something meaningful in a language)
and then speech acts (doing something in using words), we have largely ig-
nored some central features of language: It is usually—though not always—
a social activity that takes place among people. It is also normally a practical
activity with certain goals. We use language in order to inform people of
things, get them to do things, amuse them, calm them down, and so on. We
can capture these social and practical aspects of language by introducing the
notion of a conversational exchange, that is, a situation where various speak-
ers use speech acts in order to bring about some effects in each other. We
will call this act of using a speech act to cause a standard effect in another a
conversational act.

Suppose, for example, Amy says to Bobbi, “Someone is following us.” In
this case, Amy has performed a linguistic act; that is, she has uttered a mean-
ingful sentence in the English language. Amy has also performed a speech
act—specifically, she has stated that they are being followed. The point of
performing this speech act is to produce in Bobbi a particular belief—
namely, that they are being followed. (Amy’s utterance might also have
other purposes, such as to alert Bobbi to some danger, but it accomplishes
those other purposes by means of getting Bobbi to believe they are being fol-
lowed.) If Amy is successful in this, then Amy has successfully performed
the conversational act of producing this belief in Bobbi. Amy, of course,
might fail in her attempt to do this. Amy’s linguistic act could be successful
and her speech act successful as well, yet, for whatever reason, Bobbi might
not accept as true what Amy is telling her. Perhaps Bobbi thinks that Amy is

CHAPTER 2 ■ The Web of Language

expressed a strong belief, and that reasonable people should know that
doctors cannot guarantee results.

It is important to remember that contracts do not have to be written
and signed to be binding. A proper verbal offer and acceptance are usually
sufficient to constitute a contract. The case, then, turned on two questions:
(1) Did McGee utter the words attributed to him? In other words, did
McGee perform the linguistic act attributed to him? The jury decided
that he did. (2) The second, more interesting question was whether these
words, when uttered in this particular context, amounted to an offer of a
contract, as Hawkins’s attorney maintained, or merely were an expression
of strong belief, as McGee’s attorney held. In other words, the fundamen-
tal question in this case was what kind of speech act McGee performed
when trying to convince Hawkins to have the operation.

Explain how you would settle this case. (The court actually ruled in
favor of Hawkins, but you are free to disagree.)

paranoid or just trying to frighten her as some kind of joke. In that case,
Amy failed to perform her intended conversational act, even though she did
perform her intended linguistic and speech acts.

Here are some other examples of the difference between performing a
speech act and performing a conversational act:

We can warn people about something in order to put them on guard
concerning it.

Here warning is the speech act; putting them on guard is the intended
conversational act.

We can urge people to do things in order to persuade them to do these
things.

Here urging is the speech act; persuading is the intended conversational act.

We can assure people concerning something in order to instill confidence
in them.

Here assuring is the speech act; instilling confidence is the intended
conversational act.

We can apologize to people in order to make them feel better about us.
Here apologizing is the speech act; making them feel better about us is

the intended conversational act.

In each of these cases, our speech act may not succeed in having its intended
conversational effect. Our urging, warning, and assuring may, respectively,
fail to persuade, put on guard, or instill confidence. Indeed, speech acts may
bring about the opposite of what was intended. People who brag (a speech
act) in order to impress others (the intended conversational act) often actu-
ally make others think less of them (the actual effect). In many ways like
these, we can perform a speech act without performing the intended conver-
sational act.

The relationship between conversational acts and speech acts is confus-
ing, because both of them can be performed at once by the same utterance.
Suppose Carl says, “You are invited to my party.” By means of this single ut-
terance, he performs a linguistic act of uttering this meaningful sentence, a
speech act of inviting you, and perhaps also a conversational act of getting
you to come to his party. Indeed, he would not be able to perform this con-
versational act without also performing such a speech act, assuming that
you would not come to his party if you were not invited. He would also not
be able to perform this speech act without performing this linguistic act or
something like it, since he cannot invite you by means of an inarticulate
grunt or by asking, “Are you invited to my party?”

As a result, we cannot sensibly ask whether Carl’s utterance of “You are
invited to my party” is a linguistic act, a speech act, or a conversational act.
That single utterance performs all three acts at once. Nonetheless, we can
distinguish those kinds of acts that Carl performs in terms of the verbs that
describe the acts. Some verbs describe speech acts; other verbs describe

Conversat ional Acts

conversational acts. We can tell which verbs describe which kinds of acts by
asking whether the verb passes the thereby test (in which case the verb de-
scribes a speech act) or whether, instead, it describes a standard effect of the
utterance (in which case the verb describes a conversational act).

CHAPTER 2 ■ The Web of Language

Indicate whether the verbs in the following sentences name a speech act, a con-
versational act, or neither. Assume a standard context. Explain your answers.

1. She thought that he did it. 11. He praised her lavishly.

2. She asserted that he did it. 12. His praise made her happy.

3. She convinced them that he did it. 13. He threatened to reveal her secret.

4. She condemned him in front of 14. He submitted his resignation.
everyone. 15. Her news frightened him half to

5. She challenged his integrity. death.

6. She embarrassed him in front 16. He advised her to go into another
of them. line of work.

7. He denied doing it. 17. She blamed him for her troubles.

8. They believed her. 18. His lecture enlightened her.

9. They encouraged him to admit it. 19. His jokes amused her.

10. She told him to get lost. 20. His book confused her.

Exercise VI

CONVERSATIONAL RULES

Just as there are rules that govern linguistic acts and other rules that govern
speech acts, so too there are rules that govern conversational acts. This
should not be surprising, because conversations can be complicated inter-
personal activities in need of rules to make them effective in attaining their
goals. These underlying rules are implicitly understood by users of the lan-
guage, but the philosopher Paul Grice was the first person to examine them
in careful detail.

We can start by examining standard or normal conversational exchanges
where conversation is a cooperative venture—that is, where the people in-
volved in the conversation have some common goal they are trying to
achieve in talking with one another. (A prisoner being interrogated and a
shop owner being robbed are not in such cooperative situations.) According
to Grice, such exchanges are governed by what he calls the Cooperative Prin-
ciple. This principle states that the parties involved should use language in a
way that contributes toward achieving their common goal. It tells them to
cooperate.8

This general principle gains more content when we consider other forms
of cooperation. Carpenters who want to build a house need enough nails

and wood, but not too much. They need the right kinds of nails and wood.
They also need to put the nails and wood together in the relevant way—that
is, according to their plans. And, of course, they also want to perform their
tasks quickly and in the right order. Rational people who want to achieve
common goals must follow similar general restrictions in other practical ac-
tivities. Because cooperative conversations are one such practical activity,
speakers who want to cooperate with one another must follow rules analo-
gous to those for carpenters.

Grice spells out four such rules. The first he calls the rule of Quantity. It
tells us to give the right amount of information. More specifically:

1. Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current
purposes of the exchange).

and possibly:

2. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.

Here is an application of this rule: A person rushes up to you and asks,
“Where is a fire extinguisher?” You know that there is a fire extinguisher five
floors away in the basement, and you also know that there is a fire extin-
guisher just down the hall. Suppose you say that there is a fire extinguisher
in the basement. Here you have said something true, but you have violated
the first part of the rule of Quantity. You have failed to reveal an important
piece of information that, under the rule of Quantity, you should have pro-
duced. A violation of the second version of the rule would look like this: As
smoke billows down the hall, you say where a fire extinguisher is located on
each floor, starting with the basement. Eventually you will get around to
saying that there is a fire extinguisher just down the hall, but you bury the
point in a mass of unnecessary information.

Grice’s second rule is called the rule of Quality. In general: Try to make
your contribution one that is true. More specifically:

1. Do not say what you believe to be false.

2. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.

In a cooperative activity, you are not supposed to tell lies. Beyond this, you
are expected not to talk off the top of your head either. When we make a
statement, we can be challenged by someone asking, “Do you really believe
that?” or “Why do you believe that?” That a person has the right to ask such
questions shows that statement making is governed by the rule of Quality.

In a court of law, witnesses promise to tell the whole truth and nothing
but the truth. The demand for nothing but the truth reflects the rule of Qual-
ity. The demand for the whole truth roughly reflects the rule of Quantity. Ob-
viously, nobody really tells every truth he or she knows. Here the whole truth
concerns all the known truths that are relevant in the context.

This brings us to our next rule, the rule of Relevance. Simply stated, the
rule of Relevance says:

Be relevant!

Conversat ional Acts

Though easy to state, the rule is not easy to explain, because relevance
itself is a difficult notion. It is, however, easy to illustrate. If someone asks
me where he can find a doctor, I might reply that there is a hospital on the
next block. Though not a direct answer to the question, it does not violate
the rule of Relevance because it provides a piece of useful information.
If, however, in response I tell the person that I like his haircut, then I have
violated the rule of Relevance. Clear-cut violations of this principle often
involve changing the subject.

Another rule concerns the manner of our conversation. We are expected
to be clear in what we say. Under the general rule of Manner come various
special rules:

1. Avoid obscurity of expression.

2. Avoid ambiguity.

3. Be brief.

4. Be orderly.

As an example of the fourth part of this rule, when describing a series of
events, it is usually important to state them in the order in which they oc-
curred. It would certainly be misleading to say that two people had a child
and got married when, in fact, they had a child after they were married.

Many other rules govern our conversations. “Be polite!” is one of them.
“Be charitable!” is another. That is, we should put the best interpretation on
what others say, and our replies should reflect this. We should avoid quib-
bling and being picky. For the most part, however, we will not worry about
these other rules.

CHAPTER 2 ■ The Web of Language

Indicate which, if any, of Grice’s conversational rules are violated by the itali-
cized sentence of each of the following conversations. Assume a standard con-
text. More than one rule might be violated.

1. “What did you get on the last test?” “A grade.”

2. “Did you like her singing?” “Her costume was beautiful.”

3. “The governor has the brains of a three-year-old.”

4. “The Lone Ranger rode into the sunset and jumped on his horse.”

5. “Without her help, we’d be up a creek without a paddle.”

6. “Where is Palo Alto?” “On the surface of the Earth.”

7. “It will rain tomorrow.” “How do you know?” “I just guessed.”

8. “Does the dog need to go out for a W-A-L-K [spelled out]?”

9. “Why did the chicken cross the road?” “To get to the other side.”

10. Psychiatrist: “You’re crazy.” Patient: “I want a second opinion.”
Psychiatrist: “Okay. You’re ugly, too.”

Exercise VII

CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATION

In a normal setting where people are cooperating toward reaching a shared
goal, they often conform quite closely to Grice’s conversational rules. If, on
the whole, people did not do this, we could not have the linguistic practices
we do. If we thought, for example, that people very often lied (even about
the most trivial matters), the business of exchanging information would be
badly damaged.

Still, people do not always follow these conversational rules. They withhold
information, they elaborate needlessly, they assert what they know to be false,
they say the first thing that pops into their heads, they wander off the subject,
and they talk vaguely and obscurely. When we observe actual conversations, it
is sometimes hard to tell how any information gets communicated at all.

The explanation lies in the same conversational rules. Not only do we
usually follow these conventions, we also (1) implicitly realize that we are
following them, and (2) expect others to assume that we are following them.
This mutual understanding of the commitments involved in a conver-
sational act has the following important consequence: People are able to
convey a great deal of information without actually saying it.

A simple example will illustrate this point. Again suppose that a person,
with smoke billowing behind him, comes running up to you and asks,

Conversat ional Acts

Image not available due to copyright restrictions

“Where’s a fire extinguisher?” You reply, “There’s one in the lobby.” Through
a combination of conversational rules, notably relevance, quantity, and man-
ner, this commits you to the claim that this is the closest, or at least the most
accessible, fire extinguisher. Furthermore, the person you are speaking to
assumes that you are committed to this. Of course, you have not actually
said that it is the closest fire extinguisher; but you have, we might say, implied
this. When we do not actually say something but imply it by virtue of a mutu-
ally understood conversational rule, the implication is called a conversational
implication.

It is important to realize that conversational implication is a pervasive
feature of human communication. It is not something we employ only occa-
sionally for special effect. In fact, virtually every conversation relies on these
implications, and most conversations would fall apart if people refused to
go beyond literal meanings to take into account the implications of saying
things. In the following conversation, B is literal-minded in just this way:

A: Do you know what time it is?

B: Not without looking at my watch.

B has answered A’s question, but it is hard to imagine that A has received
the information she was looking for. Presumably, she wanted to know what
time it was, not merely whether B, at that very moment, knew the time.
Finding B rather obtuse, A tries again:

A: Can you tell me what time it is?

B: Oh, yes, all I have to do is look at my watch.

Undaunted, A gives it another try:

A: Will you tell me what time it is?

B: I suppose I will as soon as you ask me.

Finally:

A: What time is it?

B: Two o’clock. Why didn’t you ask me that in the first place?

Notice that in each of these exchanges B gives a direct and accurate answer
to A’s question; yet, in all but the last answer, B does not provide A with
what A wants. Like a computer in a science-fiction movie, B is taking A’s
questions too literally. More precisely, B does nothing more than take A’s
remarks literally. In a conversational exchange, we expect others to take our
remarks in the light of the obvious purpose we have in making them. We
expect them to share our commonsense understanding of why people ask
questions. At the very least, we expect people to respond to us in ways that
are relevant to our purposes. Except at the end, B seems totally oblivious to
the point of A’s questions. That is what makes B unhelpful and annoying.

Though all the conversational rules we have examined can be the basis of
conversational implication, the rule of Relevance is particularly powerful in
this respect. Normal conversations are dense with conversational implications

CHAPTER 2 ■ The Web of Language

that depend on the rule of Relevance. Someone says, “Dinner’s ready,” and
that is immediately taken to be a way of asking people to come to the table.
Why? Because dinner’s being ready is a transparent reason to come to the
table to eat. This is an ordinary context that most people are familiar with.
Change the context, however, and the conversational implications can be en-
tirely different. Suppose the same words, “Dinner’s ready,” are uttered
when guests have failed to arrive on time. In this context, the conversational
implication, which will probably be reflected in an annoyed tone of voice,
will be quite different.

To cite another example of context dependence, if someone says, “I broke
a finger,” people will naturally assume that it is the speaker’s own finger
that was broken. Why? Because when people break fingers, it is almost al-
ways their own fingers that they break. That is the standard context in which
this remark is made. If, however, we shift the context, that conversational
implication can be lost and another can take its place. Suppose the speaker
is a mobster in an extortion racket, that is, someone who physically harms
people who do not pay protection money. Among his fellow extortionists,
the conversational implication of “I broke a finger” is likely to be that it was
someone who refused to pay up who had his finger broken. (We can imag-
ine the extortionist canceling this implication by saying, “No, no, it was my
finger that got broken when I slugged the guy.”)

Conversat ional Acts

Assuming a natural conversational setting, what might a person intend to con-
versationally imply by making the following remarks? Briefly explain why
each of these conversational implications holds; that is, explain the relation-
ship between what the speaker literally says and what the speaker intends to
convey through conversational implication. Finally, for each example, find a
context where the standard conversational implication would fail and another
arise in its place.

1. It’s getting a little chilly in here. (Said by a visitor in your home)

2. Do you mind if I borrow your pen? (Said to a friend while studying)

3. We are out of soda. (Said by a child to her parents)

4. I got here before he did. (Said in a ticket line)

5. Don’t blame me if you get in trouble. (Said by someone who advised you
not to do it)

6. Has this seat been taken? (Said in a theater before a show)

7. These sweet potatoes are very filling. (Said when the cook asks if you
want more)

8. Don’t ask me. (Said in response to a question)

9. Does your dog bite? (Said to a man standing next to a dog)

10. I will be out of town that day. (Said in response to a party invitation)

Exercise VIII

VIOLATING CONVERSATIONAL RULES

If we look at basic conversational rules, we notice that these rules sometimes
clash, or at least push us in different directions. The rule of Quantity encour-
ages us to give as much information as possible, but this is constrained by
the rule of Quality, which restricts our claims to things we believe to be true
and can back up with good reasons. The demands of the rule of Quantity
can also conflict with the demand for brevity. In order to be brief, we must
sometimes simplify and even falsify, and this can come into conflict with the
rule of Quality, which demands that we say only what we believe to be true.
Sometimes it is not important to get things exactly right; sometimes it is. An
ongoing conversation can be a constant series of adjustments to this back-
ground system of rules.

Because conversational rules can come into conflict with one another,
speakers can sometimes seem to be violating the Cooperative Principle by
violating one of its maxims. This can happen when one conversational
rule is overridden by another. Grasping the resolution of such a conflict
can generate interesting conversational implications. This may sound
complicated, but an example from Grice should make it clear. Suppose A
tells B, “I’m planning to visit C; where does he live?” B replies, “Some-
where in the south of France.” If A is interested in visiting C, then B’s reply
really does not give her the information she needs and thus seems to vio-
late the first part of the rule of Quantity. We can explain this departure on
the assumption that B does not know exactly where C lives and would
thus violate the rule of Quality if he said anything more specific. In this
case, B’s reply conversationally implies that he does not know exactly
where C lives.

In a more extreme case, a person may even flout one of these conventions,
that is, may openly violate a conversational rule without, as in the previous
example, there being any other conversational rule that overrides it. Here is
an adaptation of one of Grice’s examples and his explanation of it:

A is writing a letter of recommendation about one of his students who is
applying to law school, and the letter reads as follows: “Dear Sir: Mr. X’s
command of English is excellent, and his attendance in class has been
regular. Yours, etc.” (Gloss: A cannot be opting out, since if he wished to be
uncooperative, why write at all? He cannot be unable, through ignorance, to
say more, since the person is his student; moreover, he knows that more
information is wanted. He must, therefore, be wishing to impart information
he is reluctant to write down. This supposition is only tenable on the assump-
tion that he thinks that Mr. X is not a good student. This, then, is what he is
implicating.)

This is a case of damning with faint praise. Faint praise can be damning because,
under the first part of the rule of Quantity, it conversationally implies that no
stronger praise is warranted.

CHAPTER 2 ■ The Web of Language

We can intentionally violate the rule of Relevance by pointedly changing
the subject. Here is variation on another one of Grice’s examples:

Standing outside a classroom, A says, “Professor X is a moron.” There is a
moment of shocked silence; then B says, “Nice day, isn’t it?”

A would have to be fairly dim not to realize that Professor X, whom he has
just called a moron, may be somewhere nearby. Why else would B reply in
such an irrelevant manner? So in saying, “Nice day, isn’t it?” B conversation-
ally implies that Professor X is nearby.

Winston Churchill reportedly provided a famous example of intention-
ally violating the rule of Manner. When criticized for ending a sentence with
a preposition, he is said to have replied, “That is the type of criticism up
with which I will not put.”

Conversat ional Acts

These sentences appeared in Exercise VII. For each, explain what the speaker is
conversationally implying and how that conversational implication is generated.

1. “What did you get on the last test?” “A grade.”

2. “Did you like her singing?” “Her costume was beautiful.”

3. “The governor has the brains of a three-year-old.”

4. “Does the dog need to go out for a W-A-L-K [spelled out]?”

Exercise IX

For each of the following paired questions and answers, what do the answers
conversationally imply in a normal context? Explain why these conversational
implications hold. (Try to rely on the content of what is said, rather than on the
tone of voice in which it is uttered. In particular, don’t think of these remarks
being uttered with heavy sarcasm.)

1. Are you going to vote for a Republican? I just might.

2. Are you going to vote for a Republican? You can bet on it.

3. Are you going to vote for a Republican? Not unless hell freezes over.

4. Are you going to vote for a Republican? Don’t be silly.

5. Are you going to vote for a Republican? I am voting for an independent.

6. Are you going to vote for a Republican? There is no other choice.

7. Did you vote for a Republican? Maybe yes, maybe no.

8. Did you vote for a Republican? I voted for the winner.

Exercise X

RHETORICAL DEVICES

Many rhetorical devices work by flouting conversational rules in order to
generate conversational implications. Consider exaggeration. When some-
one claims to be hungry enough to eat a horse, it does not dawn on us
to treat this as a literal claim about how much she can eat. To do so would
be to attribute to the speaker a blatant violation of Grice’s first rule of
Quality—namely, do not say what you believe to be false. Consequently,
her audience will naturally interpret her remark figuratively, rather than
literally. They will assume that she is exaggerating the amount she can eat
in order to conversationally imply that she is very hungry. This rhetorical
device is called overstatement or hyperbole. It is commonly employed, often
in heavy-handed ways.

We sometimes use the opposite ploy and attempt to achieve rhetorical ef-
fect by understating things. We say that something is pretty good or not too
bad when, as all can see, it is terrific. In these cases the speaker is violating
something akin to the rule of Quantity. He is not saying just how good
something really is. He expects his audience to recognize this and say
(inwardly, at least) something like this: “Oh, it is much better than that.”
Understatement is often used as a way of fishing for compliments.

Sometimes, then, we do not intend to have others take our words at face
value. Even beyond this, we sometimes expect our listeners to interpret us
as claiming just the opposite of what we assert. This occurs, for example, with
irony and sarcasm. Suppose at a crucial point in a game, the second baseman
fires the ball ten feet over the first baseman’s head, and someone shouts,
“Great throw.” Literally, it was not a great throw; it was the opposite of
a great throw, and this is just what the person who says “Great throw” is
indicating. How do the listeners know they are supposed to interpret it in
this way? Sometimes this is indicated by tone of voice. A sarcastic tone of
voice usually indicates that the person means the opposite of what he or she
is saying. Even without the tone of sarcasm, the remark “Great throw” is not
likely to be taken literally. The person who shouts this knows that it was
not a great throw, as do the people who hear it. Rather than attributing an
obviously false belief to the shouter, we assume that the person is blatantly
violating the rule of Quality to draw our attention to just how bad the throw
really was.

CHAPTER 2 ■ The Web of Language

Image not available due to copyright restrictions

Metaphors and similes are perhaps the most common forms of figurative
language. A simile is, roughly, an explicit figurative comparison. A word
such as “like” or “as” makes the comparison explicit, and the comparison is
figurative because it would be inappropriate if taken literally. To say that the
home team fought like tigers does not mean that they clawed the opposing
team and took large bites out of them. To call someone as dumb as a post is
not to claim that they have no brain at all.

With a metaphor, we also compare certain items, but without words such
as “like” or “as.” Metaphorical comparisons are still figurative because the
vocabulary, at a literal level, is not appropriate to the subject matter. George
Washington was not literally the father of his country. Taken literally, it
hardly makes sense to speak of someone fathering a country. But the
metaphor is so natural (or so familiar) that it does not cross our minds to
treat the remark literally, asking, perhaps, who the mother was.

Taken literally, metaphors are usually obviously false, and then they
violate Grice’s rule of Quality. Again, as with irony, when someone says
something obviously false, we have to decide what to make of that person’s
utterance. Perhaps the person is very stupid or a very bad liar, but often
neither suggestion is plausible. In such a situation, sometimes the best sup-
position is that the person is speaking metaphorically rather than literally.

Not all metaphors, however, are literally false. In John Donne’s Medita-
tion XVII, “No man is an island” is literally true. We treat this remark as
a metaphor because, taken literally, it is so obviously and boringly true
that we cannot imagine why anyone would want to say it. Taken literally,
it would make no greater contribution to the conversation than any other ir-
relevant, obvious truth—for example, that no man is a socket wrench. Taken
literally, this metaphor violates the rule of Relevance and, perhaps, the sec-
ond part of the rule of Quantity. Taken figuratively, it is an apt, if somewhat
overworked, way of indicating that no one is isolated and self-contained.

Conversat ional Acts

Here are some more true metaphors. Explain what they mean and how they work.

1. “Blood is thicker than water.”

2. “Cream rises to the top.”

3. “People who live in glass houses should not throw stones.”

4. Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” begins, “Two roads diverged
in a yellow wood.”

5. China’s Chairman Mao Tse-tung is reported to have said, “A revolution is
not the same as inviting people to dinner, or writing an essay, or painting
a picture, or doing fancy needle-work.”

6. Cuba’s Fidel Castro is supposed to have said, “A revolution is not a bed of
roses. A revolution is a struggle between the future and the past.” (Is this
different from item 5?)

Exercise XI

CHAPTER 2 ■ The Web of Language

Metaphors do not appear only in statements. They also appear in imperatives.
For example, “Don’t rock the boat” can be employed literally in a context where
someone is moving around in a canoe in a way that could tip it. It can also be
used metaphorically to tell someone not to do something that will cause a fuss.
For each of the following metaphors, find a context where the imperative can
be used in its literal way and another context where it is used metaphorically.

1. Keep your eye on the ball.

2. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

3. Look before you leap.

4. Make hay while the sun shines.

5. Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.

6. Don’t change horses in midstream.

Exercise XIII

Unpack the following political metaphors by giving their literal content.

1. We can’t afford a president who needs on-the-job training.

2. It’s time for people on the welfare wagon to get off and help pull.

3. If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.

4. We need to restore a level playing field.

5. The special interests have him in their pockets.

6. The bill was passed through typical horse trading.

7. He’s a lame duck.

Exercise XIV

Identify each of the following sentences as irony, metaphor, or simile. For each
sentence, write another expressing its literal meaning.

1. He missed the ball by a mile.

2. He acted like a bull in a china shop.

3. The exam blew me away.

4. He had to eat his words.

5. It was a real team effort. (Said by a coach after his team loses by forty points.)

6. They are throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

7. The concert was totally awesome.

8. A midair collision can ruin your whole day.

9. This is a case of the tail wagging the dog.

10. “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” (Marx)

Exercise XII

Conversat ional Acts

1. A classic example of rhetoric occurs in Marc Antony’s funeral oration in
William Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar (act III, scene ii). Brutus and
other conspirators had killed Julius Caesar. At Caesar’s funeral, Brutus
first argued that they needed to kill Caesar to prevent him from becoming
too powerful and taking away the freedoms of Roman citizens. Brutus
concludes, “As Caesar loved me, I weep for him; as he was fortunate, I re-
joice in it; as he was valiant, I honor him. But as he was ambitious, I slew
him.” On the other side, Marc Antony sees Brutus as a traitor, but Brutus
now has power, so Antony does not dare to call Brutus a traitor openly.
The central part of Antony’s speech is reprinted below. Indicate which
lines are ironic, and comment on any other rhetorical devices in this
speech. Why was it so effective (and famous) as a speech?

Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral.

He was my friend, faithful and just to me.

But Brutus says he was ambitious,

And Brutus is an honorable man.

He hath brought many captives home to Rome,

Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill.

Did this in Caesar seem ambition?

When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept—

Ambition should be made of sterner stuff.

Yet Brutus says he was ambitious,

And Brutus is an honorable man.

You all did see that on the Lupercal

I thrice presented him a kingly crown,

Which he did thrice refuse. Was this ambition?

Yet Brutus says he was ambitious,

And, sure, he is an honorable man.

I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,

But here I am to speak what I do know.

You all did love him once, not without cause.

What cause withholds you then to mourn for him?

2. At the start of the U.S. war with Iraq in 2003, some described Iraq as another
Vietnam, while others described Saddam Hussein (Iraq’s president) as
another Hitler. Which metaphor was used by supporters of the war? Which
was used by opponents? How can you tell? How do these metaphors work?

Discussion Questions

DECEPTION

In the preceding examples, a speaker openly violates a conversational rule.
The listeners recognize that a rule is being intentionally broken, and the

speaker knows that the listeners recognize the violation. At other times,
however, speakers intentionally break conversational rules because they are
trying to mislead their listeners. A speaker may violate the first part of
Grice’s rule of Quality by uttering something she knows to be false with the
intention of producing a false belief in her listeners. That is called lying. No-
tice that lying depends on the general acceptance of the Cooperative Princi-
ple. Because audiences generally assume that speakers are telling the truth,
speakers can sometimes get away with lying.

Flat-out lying is not the only way (and often not the most effective way)
of intentionally misleading people. We can say something literally true that,
at the same time, conversationally implies something false. This is some-
times called making a false suggestion. If a son tells his parents that he “has
had some trouble with the car,” that could be true but deeply misleading if,
in fact, he had totaled it. It would be misleading because it would violate the
rule of Quantity. In saying only that he has had some trouble with the car, he
conversationally implies that nothing very serious happened. He conversa-
tionally implies this because, in this context, he is expected to come clean
and reveal all that actually happened.

A more complex example of false suggestion arose in a lawsuit that
reached the United States Supreme Court.

BRONSTON V. UNITED STATES

(409 U.S. 352, 1973)

MR. CHIEF JUSTICE BURGER delivered the opinion of the Court:

Petitioner’s perjury conviction was founded on the answers given by him as
a witness at that bankruptcy hearing, and in particular on the following col-
loquy with a lawyer for a creditor of Bronston Productions:

Q. Do you have any bank accounts in Swiss banks, Mr. Bronston?

A. No, sir.

Q. Have you ever?

A. The company had an account there for about six months, in Zurich.

Q. Have you any nominees who have bank accounts in Swiss banks?

A. No, sir.

Q. Have you ever?

A. No, sir.

It is undisputed that for a period of nearly five years, between October 1959
and June 1964, petitioner had a personal bank account at the International
Credit Bank in Geneva, Switzerland, into which he made deposits and
upon which he drew checks totalling more than $180,000. It is likewise
undisputed that petitioner’s answers were literally truthful. (i) Petitioner
did not at the time of questioning have a Swiss bank account. (ii) Bronston

CHAPTER 2 ■ The Web of Language

Productions, Inc., did have the account in Zurich described by petitioner.
(iii) Neither at the time of questioning nor before did petitioner have nomi-
nees who had Swiss accounts. The government’s prosecution for per-
jury went forward on the theory that in order to mislead his questioner,
petitioner answered the second question with literal truthfulness but unre-
sponsively addressed his answer to the company’s assets and not to his
own—thereby implying that he had no personal Swiss bank account at the
relevant time.

It is hard to read the witness’s response to the second question in any other
way than as a deliberate attempt to mislead the Court, for his response
plainly suggests that he did not have a personal account in a Swiss bank,
when, in fact, he did. But the issue before the Court was not whether he in-
tentionally misled the Court, but whether in doing so he committed perjury.
The relevant statute reads as follows:

Whoever, having taken an oath before a competent tribunal . . . that he will testify
. . . truly, . . . willfully and contrary to such oath states or subscribes to any mate-
rial matter which he does not believe to be true, is guilty of perjury.

(18 U.S.C. 1621)

The lower courts ruled that Bronston violated this statute and, thus, commit-
ted perjury. The Supreme Court reversed this decision, in part for the follow-
ing reasons:

It should come as no surprise that a participant in a bankruptcy proceeding may
have something to conceal and consciously tries to do so, or that a debtor may be
embarrassed at his plight and yield information reluctantly. It is the responsibility
of the lawyer to probe; testimonial interrogation, and cross-examination in partic-
ular, is a probing, prying, pressing form of inquiry. If a witness evades, it is the
lawyer’s responsibility to recognize the evasion and to bring the witness back to
the mark, to flush out the whole truth with the tools of adversary examination.

(409 U.S. 352 at 358–359 [1973])

In other words, in a courtroom, where the relationship is typically adversar-
ial rather than cooperative, not all the standard conversational rules are in
force or fully in force. In particular, it would be unrealistic to assume that the
rule of Quantity will be consistently honored in a courtroom clash; therefore,
it becomes the task of the cross-examiner to force the witness to produce all
the relevant facts.

Conversat ional Acts

Refer back to the dialogue quoted in Bronston v. United States. Because it is dif-
ficult to read the witness’s second response as anything but a willful attempt
to deceive, why should this case be treated differently from lying? Alterna-
tively, why not even drop the demand that witnesses tell the truth and make it
the responsibility of the lawyers to get at the truth itself (rather than just the
whole truth) through “probing, prying, pressing” inquiry?

Discussion Questions

SUMMARY

In this chapter we have developed a rather complex picture of the way our
language functions. In the process, we have distinguished three kinds or lev-
els of acts that are performed when we employ language. We have also ex-
amined the rules associated with each kind or level of act. The following
table summarizes this discussion:

Three Levels Of Language

Kinds of Acts Governing Rules

A LINGUISTIC ACT is an act of saying something Semantic rules (such as definitions) and
meaningful in a language. It is the basic act that syntactic rules (as in grammar).
is needed to make anything part of language.

A SPEECH ACT concerns the move a person makes Speech act rules about special agents,
in saying something. Different kinds of speech acts formulas, circumstances, responses,
are indicated by the various verbs found in explicit and feelings appropriate to different
performatives. kinds of speech acts, discovered by

speech act analysis.

A CONVERSATIONAL ACT is a speaker’s act of Conversational rules (the Cooperative
causing a standard kind of effect in the listener; Principle; Quantity, Quality, Relevance,
it is what I do by saying something—for example, and Manner).
I persuade someone to do something.

CHAPTER 2 ■ The Web of Language

1. It is late, and A is very hungry. A asks B, “When will dinner be ready?”
Describe the linguistic act, the speech act, and some of the conversational
acts this person may be performing in this context.

2. Someone is trying to solve the following puzzle: One of thirteen balls is
heavier than the others, which are of equal weight. In no more than three
weighings on a balance scale, determine which ball is the heavier one. The
person is stumped, so someone says to her: “Begin by putting four balls in
each pan of the scale.” Describe the linguistic act, the speech act, and the
conversational act of the person who makes this suggestion.

Exercise XV

NOTES
1 J. L. Austin used the phrase “locutionary act” to refer to a level of language closely related to
what we refer to as a “linguistic act.” See J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 2nd ed.
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 94–109.

2 See, for example, J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words.

3 An example of the continuous present is “I bet ten dollars every week in the lottery.” Since this
sentence is not used to make a bet, this sentence and others with the continuous present do not
pass the thereby test or express explicit performatives.

4 Austin calls speech acts “illocutionary acts.” See How to Do Things with Words, 98–132.

5Although performative verbs name kinds of speech acts, not every kind of speech act has a cor-
responding performative verb. For example, insulting seems to be a kind of speech act, but “in-
sult” is not a performative verb, because you cannot insult someone simply by saying, “I insult
you.” We might have had a convention that enabled us to insult people just by saying, “I insult
you.” In English, however, we do not.

6Supreme Court of New Hampshire, 1929, 84 N.H. 114, A. 641.

7This discussion of conversational rules and implications is based on Paul Grice’s important es-
say, “Logic and Conversation,” which appears as the second chapter of his Studies in the Way of
Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). To avoid British references that an
American reader might find perplexing, we have sometimes altered Grice’s wording.

8Grice states the Cooperative Principle in these words: “Make your conversational contribution
such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the
talk exchange in which you are engaged.”

Summary

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THE LANGUAGE OF ARGUMENT

Using the techniques developed in Chapter 2, this chapter will examine the use of lan-

guage to formulate arguments and will provide methods to analyze genuine arguments

in their richness and complexity. The first stage in analyzing an argument is the dis-

covery of its basic structure. To do this, we will examine the words, phrases, and special

constructions that indicate the premises and conclusions of an argument. The second

stage is to explore the standards that arguments are supposed to meet. Here we will

focus on validity, truth, and soundness. The third stage is the study of techniques used

to protect an argument. These include guarding premises so that they are less subject

to criticism, offering assurances concerning debatable claims, and discounting possi-

ble criticisms in advance.

ARGUMENT MARKERS

In Chapter 2, we saw that language is used for a great many different pur-
poses. One important thing that we do with language is construct arguments.
Arguments are constructed out of statements, but arguments are not just lists
of statements. Here is a simple list of statements:

Socrates is a man.

All men are mortal.

Socrates is mortal.

This list is not an argument, because none of these statements is presented as
a reason for any other statement. It is, however, simple to turn this list into an
argument. All we have to do is to add the single word “therefore“:

Socrates is a man.

All men are mortal.

Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

Now we have an argument. The word “therefore” converts these sentences
into an argument by signaling that the statement following it is a conclusion,
and the statement or statements that come before it are offered as reasons
on behalf of this conclusion. The argument we have produced in this way

CHAPTER 3 ■ The Language of Argument

is a good one, because the conclusion follows from the reasons stated on
its behalf.

There are other ways of linking these sentences to form an argument.
Here is one:

Since Socrates is a man,

and all men are mortal,

Socrates is mortal.

Notice that the word “since” works in roughly the opposite way that
“therefore” does. The word “therefore” is a conclusion marker, because it
indicates that the statement that follows it is a conclusion. In contrast, the
word “since” is a reason marker, because it indicates that the following state-
ment or statements are reasons. In our example, the conclusion comes at the
end, but there is a variation on this. Sometimes the conclusion is given at
the start:

Socrates is mortal, since all men are mortal and Socrates is a man.

“Since” flags reasons; the remaining connected statement is then taken to
be the conclusion, whether it appears at the beginning or at the end of the
sentence.

Many other terms are used to introduce an argumentative structure into
language by marking either reasons or conclusions. Here is a partial list:

REASON MARKERS CONCLUSION MARKERS

since therefore

because hence

for thus

as then

We shall call such terms “argument markers,” because each presents one
or more statements as part of an argument or backing for some other
statement.

It is important to realize that these words are not always used as argument
markers. The words “since” and “then” are often used as indicators of time, as
in, “He’s been an American citizen since 1973” and “He ate a hot dog, then a
hamburger.” The word “for” is often used as a preposition, as in “John works
for IBM.” Because some of these terms have a variety of meanings, it is not pos-
sible to identify argument markers in a mechanical way just by looking at
words. It is necessary to examine the function of words in the context in which
they occur. One test of whether a word is functioning as an argument marker
in a particular sentence is whether you can substitute another argument
marker without changing the meaning of the sentence. In the last example, it
makes no sense to say, “John works since IBM.”

Many phrases are also available to signal that an argument is being given.
Here is just a small sample:

Argument Markers

from which it follows that . . .

from which we may conclude that . . .

from which we see that . . .

which goes to show that . . .

which establishes that . . .

We can also indicate conclusions and reasons by using argumentative perfor-
matives, which we examined briefly in Chapter 2. If someone says, “I conclude
that . . . ,” the words that follow are given the status of a conclusion. More pre-
tentiously, if someone says, “Here I base my argument on the claim that . . . ,”
what comes next has the status of a reason.

Examination of actual arguments will show that we have a great many
ways of introducing an argumentative structure into our language by using
the two forms of argument markers: reason markers and conclusion mark-
ers. The first, and in many ways the most important, step in analyzing an
argument is to identify the conclusion and the reasons given on its behalf.
We do this by paying close attention to these argument markers.

IF . . . , THEN . . .

If-then sentences, which are also called conditionals, often occur in arguments,
but they do not present arguments by themselves. To see this, consider the
following conditional:

If the Dodgers improve their hitting, then they will win the
Western Division.

The sentence between the “if” and the “then” is called the antecedent of the
conditional. The sentence after the “then” is called its consequent. In utter-
ing such a conditional, we are not asserting the truth of its antecedent,
and we are not asserting the truth of its consequent either. Thus, the per-
son who makes the above remark is not claiming that the Dodgers will
win the Western Division. All she is saying is that if they improve their
hitting, then they will win. Furthermore, she is not saying that they will
improve their hitting. Because the speaker is not committing herself to
either of these claims, she is not presenting an argument. This becomes
clear when we contrast this conditional with a statement that does formu-
late an argument:

Conditional: If the Dodgers improve their hitting, then they will win the
Western Division.

Argument: Since the Dodgers will improve their hitting, they will win the
Western Division.

The sentence that follows the word “since” is asserted. That is why “since”
is an argument marker, whereas the connective “if . . . then . . .” is not an
argument marker.

CHAPTER 3 ■ The Language of Argument

Even though conditionals by themselves do not mark arguments, there
is a close relationship between conditionals and arguments: Indicative
conditionals provide patterns that can be converted into an argument
whenever the antecedent is said to be true. (We also get an argument when
the consequent is said to be false, but we will focus here on the simpler
case of asserting the antecedent.) Thus, we often hear people argue in the
following way:

If inflation continues to grow, there will be an economic crisis. But
inflation will certainly continue to grow, so an economic crisis is on
the way.

The first sentence is an indicative conditional. It makes no claims one way or
the other about whether inflation will grow or whether an economic crisis
will occur. The next sentence asserts the antecedent of this conditional and
then draws a conclusion signaled by the argument marker “so.” We might
say that when the antecedent of an indicative conditional is found to be true,
the conditional can be cashed in for an argument.

Often the antecedent of a conditional is not asserted explicitly but is con-
versationally implied. When asked which player should be recruited for a
team, the coach might just say, “If Deon is as good as our scouts say he is,
then we ought to go for Deon.” This conditional does not actually assert that
Deon is as good as the scouts report. Nonetheless, it would be irrelevant and
pointless for the coach to utter this conditional alone if he thought that the
scouts were way off the mark. The coach might immediately add that he
disagrees with the scouting reports. But unless the coach cancels the conver-
sational implication in some way, it is natural to interpret him as giving an
argument that we ought to pick Deon. In such circumstances, then, an
indicative conditional can conversationally imply an argument, even though
it does not state the argument explicitly.

This makes it easy to see why indicative conditionals are a useful fea-
ture of our language. By providing patterns for arguments, they prepare
us to draw conclusions when the circumstances are right. Much of our
knowledge of the world around us is contained in such conditionals. Here is
an example: If your computer does not start, the plug might be loose. This is
a useful piece of practical information, for when your computer does not
start, you can immediately infer that the plug might be loose, so you know
to check it out.

Other words function in similar ways. When your computer fails to
start, a friend might say, “Either the plug is loose or you are in deep
trouble.” Now, if you also assert, “The plug is not loose,” you can conclude
that you are in deep trouble. “Either . . . or . . .” sentences thus provide
patterns for arguments, just as conditionals do. However, neither if-then
sentences nor either-or sentences by themselves explicitly assert enough to
present a complete argument, so “if . . ., then . . .” and “either . . . or . . .”
should not be labeled as argument markers.

Arguments in Standard Form

Indicate which of the following italicized words or phrases is a reason marker,
a conclusion marker, or neither.

1. He apologized, so you should forgive him.

2. He apologized. Accordingly, you should forgive him.

3. Since he apologized, you should forgive him.

4. Provided that he apologized, you should forgive him.

5. In view of the fact that he apologized, you should forgive him.

6. He apologized. Ergo, you should forgive him.

7. Given that he apologized, you should forgive him.

8. He apologized, and because of that you should forgive him.

9. After he apologizes, you should forgive him.

10. He apologized. As a result, you should forgive him.

11. Seeing as he apologized, you should forgive him.

12. He apologized. For that reason alone, you should forgive him.

Exercise I

Indicate whether each of the following sentences is an argument.

1. Charles went bald, and most men go bald.

2. Charles went bald because most men go bald.

3. My roommate likes to ski, so I do, too.

4. My roommate likes to ski, and so do I.

5. I have been busy since Tuesday.

6. I am busy, since my teacher assigned lots of homework.

Exercise II

ARGUMENTS IN STANDARD FORM

Because arguments come in all shapes and forms, it will help to have a
standard way of presenting arguments. For centuries, logicians have used
a format of the following kind:

(1) All men are mortal.
(2) Socrates is a man.

(3) Socrates is mortal. (from 1–2)

CHAPTER 3 ■ The Language of Argument

The reasons (or premises) are listed and numbered. Then a line is drawn be-
low the premises. Next, the conclusion is numbered and written below the
line. The symbol “ “, which is read “therefore,” is then added to the left of
the conclusion in order to indicate the relation between the premises and the
conclusion. Finally, the premises from which the conclusion is supposed to
be derived are indicated in parentheses. Arguments presented in this way
are said to be in standard form.

The notion of a standard form is useful because it helps us see that the
same argument can be expressed in different ways. For example, the follow-
ing three sentences formulate the argument that was given in standard form
above.

Socrates is mortal, since all men are mortal, and Socrates is a man.

All men are mortal, so Socrates is mortal, because he is a man.

All men are mortal, and Socrates is a man, which goes to show that
Socrates is mortal.

More important, by putting arguments into standard form, we perform
the most obvious, and in some ways most important, step in the analysis of
an argument: the identification of its premises and conclusion.

Identify which of the following sentences expresses an argument. For each that
does, (1) circle the argument marker (or markers), (2) indicate whether it is a
reason marker or a conclusion marker, and (3) restate the argument in stan-
dard form.

1. Since Chicago is north of Boston, and Boston is north of Charleston,
Chicago is north of Charleston.

2. Toward evening, clouds formed and the sky grew darker; then the storm
broke.

3. Texas has a greater area than Topeka, and Topeka has a greater area than
the Bronx Zoo, so Texas has a greater area than the Bronx Zoo.

4. Both houses of Congress may pass a bill, but the president may still
veto it.

5. Other airlines will carry more passengers, because United Airlines is on
strike.

6. Since Jesse James left town, taking his gang with him, things have been a
lot quieter.

7. Things are a lot quieter, because Jesse James left town, taking his gang
with him.

8. Witches float because witches are made of wood, and wood floats.

9. The hour is up, so you must hand in your exams.

10. Joe quit, because his boss was giving him so much grief.

Exercise III

Some Standards for Evaluat ing Arguments

SOME STANDARDS FOR EVALUATING ARGUMENTS

Not all arguments are good arguments; so, having identified an argument,
the next task is to evaluate the argument. Evaluating arguments is a complex
business. In fact, this entire book is aimed primarily at developing proce-
dures for doing so. There are, however, certain basic terms used in evaluat-
ing arguments that should be introduced from the start. They are validity,
truth, and soundness. Here they will be introduced informally. Later (in
Chapters 6–7) they will be examined with more rigor.

VALIDITY

In some good arguments, the conclusion is said to follow from the premises.
However, this commonsense notion of following from is hard to pin down
precisely. The conclusion follows from the premises only when the content
of the conclusion is related appropriately to the content of the premises, but
which relations count as appropriate?

To avoid this difficult question, most logicians instead discuss whether an
argument is valid. Calling something “valid” can mean a variety of things,
but in this context validity is a technical notion. Here “valid” does not mean
“good,” and “invalid” does not mean “bad.” This will be our definition of
validity:

An argument is valid if and only if it is not possible that all of its premises
are true and its conclusion false.

Alternatively, one could say that its conclusion must be true if its premises
are all true (or, again, that at least one of its premises must be false if its con-
clusion is false). The point is that a certain combination—true premises and
a false conclusion—is ruled out as impossible.

The following argument passes this test for validity:

(1) All senators are paid.
(2) Sam is a senator.

(3) Sam is paid. (from 1–2)

Clearly, if the two premises are both true, there is no way for the conclu-
sion to fail to be true. To see this, just try to tell a coherent story in which
every single senator is paid and Sam is a senator, but Sam is not paid. You
can’t do it.

Contrast this example with a different argument:

(1) All senators are paid.
(2) Sam is paid.

(3) Sam is a senator. (from 1–2)

Here the premises and the conclusion are all in fact true, let’s assume,
but that is still not enough to make the argument valid, because validity

CHAPTER 3 ■ The Language of Argument

concerns what is possible or impossible, not what happens to be true. This
conclusion could be false even when the premises are true, for Sam could
leave the Senate but still be paid for some other job, such as lobbyist. That
possibility shows that this argument is invalid.

Another very common form of argument is called modus ponens:

(1) If it is snowing, then the roads are slippery.
(2) It is snowing.

(3) The roads are slippery. (from 1–2)

This argument is valid, because it is not possible for its premises to be true
when its conclusion is false. We can show that by assuming that the con-
clusion is false and then reasoning backwards. Imagine that the roads are
not slippery. Then there are two possibilities. Either it is snowing or it
is not snowing. If it is not snowing, then the second premise is false. If it
is snowing, then the first premise must be false, since we are supposing
that it is snowing and that the roads are not slippery. Thus, at least one
premise has to be false when the conclusion is false. Hence, this argument
is valid.

This argument might seem similar to another:

(1) If it is snowing, then the roads are slippery.
(2) It is not snowing.

(3) The roads are not slippery. (from 1–2)

This argument is clearly invalid, because there are several ways for its prem-
ises to be true when its conclusion is false. It might have just stopped snow-
ing or ice might make the roads slippery. Then the roads are slippery, so the
conclusion is false, even if both premises are true.

Yet another form of argument is often called process of elimination:

(1) Either Joe or Jack or Jim or Jerry committed the murder.
(2) Joe didn’t do it.
(3) Jack didn’t do it.
(4) Jim didn’t do it.

(5) Jerry committed the murder. (from 1–4)

The first premise asserts that at least one of these four suspects is guilty. That
couldn’t be true if all of the other premises were true and the conclusion were
false, because that combination would exclude all four of these suspects.
So this argument is valid.

Now compare this argument:

(1) Either Joe or Jack or Jim or Jerry committed the murder.
(2) Joe did it.

(3) Jerry did not commit the murder. (from 1–2)

Some Standards for Evaluat ing Arguments

To show that this argument is invalid, all we have to do is explain how the
premises could be true and the conclusion false. Here’s how: Joe and Jerry
did it together. In that case, Jerry did it, so the conclusion is false; Joe also
did it, so the second premise is true; and the first premise is true, because it
says that at least one of these four suspects did it, and that is true when more
than one of the suspects did it. That possibility of complicity, thus, makes
this argument invalid.

We will explore many more forms of argument in Chapters 6–7. The
goal for now is just to get a feel for how to determine validity. In all of these
examples, an argument is said to be valid if and only if there is no possible
situation in which its premises are true and its conclusion is false. You need
to figure out whether there could be any situation like this in order to deter-
mine whether an argument is valid. If so, the argument is invalid. If not, it
is valid.

This definition shows why validity is a valuable feature for an argument
to possess: There can be no valid argument that leads one from true prem-
ises to a false conclusion. This should square with your commonsense ideas
about reasoning. If you reason well, you should not be led from truth into
error.

What are known as deductive arguments are put forward as meeting this
standard of validity, so validity is one criterion for a good deductive argu-
ment. Other arguments—so-called inductive arguments—are not presented
as meeting this standard. Roughly, an inductive argument is presented as
providing strong support for its conclusion. The standards for evaluating in-
ductive arguments will be examined in Chapter 8. For now we will concen-
trate on deductive arguments.

TRUTH

Although a deductive argument must be valid in order to be a good
argument, validity is not enough. One reason is that an argument can be
valid even when some (or all) of the statements it contains are false. For
example:

(1) No fathers are female.
(2) Sam is a father.

(3) Sam is not female. (from 1–2)

Suppose that Sam has no children or that Sam is female, so premise 2 is false.
That would be a serious defect in this argument. Nonetheless, this argument
satisfies our definition of validity: If the premises were true, then the conclu-
sion could not be false. There is no way that Sam could be female if Sam is a
father and no fathers are female. This example makes it obvious that validity
is not the same as truth. It also makes it obvious that another requirement of
a good argument is that all of its premises must be true.

CHAPTER 3 ■ The Language of Argument

SOUNDNESS

We thus make at least two demands of a deductive argument:

1. The argument must be valid.

2. The premises must be true.

When an argument meets both of these standards, it is said to be sound. If it
fails to meet either one or the other, then it is unsound. Thus, an argument is
unsound if it is invalid, and it is also unsound if at least one of its premises
is false.

ALL PREMISES TRUE AT LEAST ONE FALSE PREMISE

Valid Sound Unsound

Invalid Unsound Unsound

Soundness has one great benefit: A sound argument must have a true con-
clusion. We know this because its premises are true and, since it is valid,
it is not possible that its premises are true and its conclusion is false. This
is why people who seek truth want sound arguments, not merely valid
arguments.

A TRICKY CASE

Our definition of validity yields a surprising result. Consider the following
argument:

(1) Frogs are green.
(2) Frogs are not green.

(3) I am president. (from 1–2)

It is obviously not possible for both premises to be true, so it is also not pos-
sible that both premises are true when the conclusion is false. Consequently,
this argument fits our definition of validity. So does any other argument
whose premises cannot be true. Such arguments cannot ever take us from
truths to falsehoods, because they never start with truths.

This weird example illustrates some of the ways in which the technical
notion of validity differs from the commonsense notion of following from.
The content of its premises has no relation to the content of the conclusion.
Frogs have nothing to do with who is president. Hence, the conclusion does
not follow from the premises. But that does not prevent the argument from
being valid.

This example also shows the importance of distinguishing validity from
soundness. Any argument whose premises cannot all be true is valid, no
matter how ridiculous its conclusion. However, an argument cannot be
sound if its premises can’t be true, and a valid argument that is unsound can-
not show that its conclusion is true. Consequently, this strange case won’t
cause any trouble.

Some Standards for Evaluat ing Arguments

Indicate whether each of the following arguments is valid and whether it is
sound. Explain your answers where necessary.

1. Most professors agree that they are paid too little, so they are.

2. David Letterman is over four feet tall, so he is over two feet tall.

3. Lee can’t run a company right, because he can’t do anything right.

4. Barack Obama is smart and good-looking, so he is smart.

5. Barack Obama is either a Democrat or a Republican, so he is a Democrat.

6. Since Jimmy Carter was president, he must have won an election.

7. Since Gerald Ford was president, he must have won an election.

8. Pat is either a mother or a father. If Pat is a mother, then she is a parent. If
Pat is a father, he is a parent. So, either way, Pat is a parent. (Assume that
this conclusion is true.)

9. People who live in the Carolinas live in either North Carolina or
South Carolina. Hillary Clinton does not live in North Carolina or
South Carolina. Hence, she does not live in the Carolinas.

10. If all of Illinois were in Canada, then Chicago would be in Canada. But
Chicago is not in Canada. Therefore, not all of Illinois is in Canada.

11. If George lives in Crawford, then George lives in Texas. If George lives in
Texas, then George lives in the United States. Hence, if George lives in
Crawford, he lives in the United States.

12. There can’t be a largest six-digit number, because six-digit numbers are
numbers, and there is no largest number.

Exercise IV

Assume that the following sentences are either true (T) or false (F) as indicated.

All my children are teenagers. (T)

All teenagers are students. (T)

All teenagers are my children. (F)

All my children are students. (T)

Using these assigned values, label each of the following arguments as (a) ei-
ther valid or invalid, and (b) either sound or unsound.

1. All my children are teenagers.

All teenagers are students.

All my children are students.

2. All my children are students.

All teenagers are students.

All my children are teenagers.

Exercise V

(continued)

CHAPTER 3 ■ The Language of Argument

A PROBLEM AND SOME SOLUTIONS

Although soundness guarantees a true conclusion, we usually expect even
more from an argument than soundness. In the first place, an argument can
be sound but trivially uninteresting:

(1) Nigeria is in Africa.

(2) Nigeria is in Africa. (from 1)

Compare these arguments:

(1) Al Gore was president. (1*) George W. Bush was president.

(2) Frogs are frogs. (2*) Frogs are frogs.

Are these arguments valid? Why or why not? Are they sound? Why or why
not? Is anything wrong with the argument on the right side? If so, what?

Discussion Question

3. All teenagers are my children.

All my children are students.

All teenagers are students.

4. All teenagers are students.

All my children are students.

Indicate whether each of the following sentences is true. For those that are
true, explain why they are true. For those that are false, show why they are
false by giving a counterexample.

1. Every argument with a false conclusion is invalid.

2. Every argument with a false premise is invalid.

3. Every argument with a false premise and a false conclusion is invalid.

4. Every argument with a false premise and a true conclusion is invalid.

5. Every argument with true premises and a false conclusion is invalid.

6. Every argument with a true conclusion is sound.

7. Every argument with a false conclusion is unsound.

Exercise VI

A Problem and Some Solut ions

Here the premise is true. The argument is also valid, because the premise
cannot be true without the conclusion (which repeats it) being true as well. Yet
the argument is completely worthless as a proof that Nigeria is in Africa. The
reason is that this argument is circular. We will examine circular arguments
in detail in Chapter 16, but it should already be clear why such arguments
are useless. If A is trying to justify something to B that B has doubts about,
then citing the very matter in question will not do any good. Explanations of
a phenomenon that cite that very phenomenon itself also fail to increase our
understanding. In general, for A to argue successfully, A must marshal facts
that B accepts and then show that they justify or explain the conclusion. In
circular arguments, the worries about the conclusion immediately turn into
worries about the premise as well.

Now, however, A seems to run into a problem. A cannot cite a proposition
as a reason for itself, for that would be circular reasoning. If, however, A cites
some other propositions as premises leading to the conclusion, then the
question naturally arises why these premises should be accepted. Does A
not have to present arguments for them as well? Yet if A does that, then A
will introduce further premises that are also in need of proof, and so on in-
definitely. It now looks as if every argument, to be successful, will have to
be infinitely long.

This potential regress causes deep problems in theoretical philosophy. In
everyday life, however, we try to avoid these problems by relying on shared
beliefs—beliefs that will not be challenged. Beyond this, we expect people to
believe us when we cite information that only we possess. But there are lim-
its to this expectation, for we all know that people sometimes believe things
that are false and sometimes lie about what they know to be true. This pres-
ents a practical problem: How can we present our reasons in a way that does
not produce just another demand for an argument—a demand for more rea-
sons? Here we use three main strategies:

1. Assuring: Indicating that there are backup reasons even though we are
not giving them fully right now.

2. Guarding: Weakening our claims so that they are less subject to attack.

3. Discounting: Anticipating criticisms and dismissing them.

In these three ways we build a defensive perimeter around our premises.
Each of these defenses is useful, but each can also be abused.

ASSURING

When will we want to give assurances about some statement we have made?
If we state something that we know everyone believes, assurances are not nec-
essary. For that matter, if everyone believes something, we may not even state
it at all; we let others fill in this step in the argument. We offer assurances
when we think that someone might doubt or challenge what we say.

CHAPTER 3 ■ The Language of Argument

There are many ways to give assurances. Sometimes we cite authorities:

Doctors agree . . .

Recent studies have shown . . .

An unimpeachable source close to the White House says . . .

It has been established that . . .

Here we indicate that authorities have these reasons without specifying
what their reasons are. We merely indicate that good reasons exist, even if
we ourselves cannot—or choose not to—spell them out. When the authority
cited can be trusted, this is often sufficient, but authorities often can and
should be questioned. This topic will be discussed more fully in Chapter 15.

Another way to give assurances is to comment on the strength of our own
belief:

I’m certain that . . .

I’m sure that . . .

I can assure you that . . .

I’m not kidding. . . .

Over the years, I have become more and more convinced that . . .

Again, when we use these expressions, we do not explicitly present
reasons, but we conversationally imply that there are reasons that back
our assertions.

A third kind of assurance abuses the audience:

Everyone with any sense agrees that . . .

Of course, no one will deny that . . .

It is just common sense that . . .

There is no question that . . .

Nobody but a fool would deny that . . .

These assurances not only do not give any reason; they also suggest that
there is something wrong with you if you ask for a reason. We call this the
trick of abusive assurances.

Just as we can give assurances that something is true, we can also give as-
surances that something is false. For example,

It is no longer held that . . .

It is wholly implausible to suppose that . . .

No intelligent person seriously maintains that . . .

You would have to be pretty dumb to think that . . .

The last three examples clearly involve abusive assurances.
Although many assurances are legitimate, we as critics should always

view assurances with some suspicion. People tend to give assurances only

A Problem and Some Solut ions

when they have good reasons to do so. Yet assuring remarks often mark the
weakest parts of the argument, not the strongest. If someone says “I hardly
need argue that . . . ,” it is often useful to ask why she has gone to the trou-
ble of saying this. When we distrust an argument—as we sometimes do—
this is precisely the place to look for weakness. If assurances are used, they
are used for some reason. Sometimes the reason is a good one. Sometimes,
however, it is a bad one. In honest argumentation, assurances save time and
simplify discussion. In a dishonest argument, they are used to paper over
cracks.

GUARDING

Guarding represents a different strategy for protecting premises from attack.
We reduce our claim to something less strong. Thus, instead of saying “all,”
we say “many.” Instead of saying something straight out, we use a qualify-
ing phrase, such as “it is likely that . . .” or “it is very possible that. . . .” Law
school professors like the phrase “it is arguable that. . . .” This is wonderfully
noncommittal, for it does not indicate how strong the argument is, yet it
does get the statement into the discussion.

Broadly speaking, there are three main ways of guarding what we say:

1. Weakening the extent of what has been said: retreating from “all” to
“most” to “a few” to “some,” and so on.

2. Introducing probability phrases such as “It is virtually certain that . . . ,”
“It is likely that . . . ,” “It might happen that . . . ,” and so on.

3. Reducing our level of commitment: moving from “I know that . . .” to “I
believe that . . .” to “I suspect that . . . ,” and so on.

Such terms guard premises when they are used in place of stronger alter-
natives. “Madison probably quit the volleyball team” is weaker than “She
definitely quit” but stronger than “She could have quit.” Thus, if the con-
text makes one expect a strong claim, such as “I know she quit,” then it is
guarding to say, “She probably quit.” In contrast, if the context is one of
speculating about who might have quit the team, then it is not guarding to
say, “She probably quit.” That is a relatively strong claim when others are
just guessing. Thus, you need to pay careful attention to the context in
order to determine whether a term has the function of guarding. When a
term is used for guarding, you should be able to specify a stronger claim
that the guarding term replaces and why that stronger term would be
expected in the context.

Guarding terms and phrases are often legitimate and useful. If you want
to argue that a friend needs fire insurance for her house, you do not need to
claim that her house will burn down. All you need to claim is that there is a
significant chance that her house will burn down. Your argument is better if
you start with this weaker premise, because it is easier to defend and it is
enough to support your conclusion.

CHAPTER 3 ■ The Language of Argument

If we weaken a claim sufficiently, we can make it completely immune to
criticism. What can be said against a remark of the following kind: “There
is some small chance that perhaps a few politicians are honest on at least
some occasions“? You would have to have a very low opinion of politicians
to deny this statement. On the other hand, if we weaken a premise too
much, we pay a price. The premise no longer gives strong support to the
conclusion.

The goal in using guarding terms is to find a middle way: We should
weaken our premises sufficiently to avoid criticism, but not weaken them so
much that they no longer provide strong enough evidence for the conclu-
sion. Balancing these factors is one of the most important strategies in mak-
ing and criticizing arguments.

Just as it was useful to zero in on assuring terms, so it is also useful to
keep track of guarding terms. One reason is that, like assuring terms, guard-
ing terms are easily corrupted. A common trick is to use guarding terms to
insinuate things that cannot be stated explicitly in a conversation. Consider
the effect of the following remark: “Perhaps the secretary of state has not
been candid with the Congress.” This does not actually say that the secre-
tary of state has been less than candid with the Congress, but, by the rule of
Relevance, clearly suggests it. Furthermore, it suggests it in a way that is
hard to combat.

A more subtle device for corrupting guarding terms is to introduce a
statement in a guarded form and then go on to speak as if it were not
guarded at all.

Perhaps the secretary of state has not been candid with the Congress. Of
course, he has a right to his own views, but this is a democracy where
officials are accountable to Congress. It is time for him to level with us.

The force of the guarding term “perhaps” that begins this passage disappears
at the end, where it is taken for granted that the secretary of state has not
been candid. This can be called the trick of the disappearing guard.

What is commonly called hedging is a sly device that operates in the op-
posite direction from our last example. With hedging, one shifts ground
from a strong commitment to something weaker. Things, as they say, get
“watered down” or “taken back.” Strong statements made at one stage of an
argument are later weakened without any acknowledgment that the posi-
tion has thereby been changed in a significant way. A promise to pass a piece
of legislation is later whittled down to a promise to bring it to a vote.

DISCOUNTING

The general pattern of discounting is to cite a possible criticism in order to
reject it or counter it. Notice how different the following statements sound:

The ring is beautiful, but expensive.

The ring is expensive, but beautiful.

A Problem and Some Solut ions

Both statements assert the same facts—that the ring is beautiful and that the
ring is expensive. Both statements also suggest that there is some opposition
between these facts. Yet these statements operate in different ways. We might
use the first as a reason for not buying the ring; we can use the second as
a reason for buying it. The first sentence acknowledges that the ring is
beautiful, but overrides this by pointing out that it is expensive. In reverse
fashion, the second statement acknowledges that the ring is expensive, but
overrides this by pointing out that it is beautiful. Such assertions of the form
“A but B” thus have four components:

1. The assertion of A

2. The assertion of B

3. The suggestion of some opposition between A and B

4. The indication that the truth of B is more important than the truth of A

The word “but” thus discounts the statement that comes before it in favor of
the statement that follows it.

“Although” is also a discounting connective, but it operates in reverse
fashion from the word “but.” We can see this, using the same example:

Although the ring is beautiful, it is expensive.

Although the ring is expensive, it is beautiful.

Here the statement following the word “although” is discounted in favor of
the connected statement.

A partial list of terms that typically function as discounting connectives
includes the following conjunctions:

although even if but nevertheless

though while however nonetheless

even though whereas yet still

These terms are not always used to discount. The word “still,” for example, is
used for discounting in (a) “He is sick; still, he is happy” but not in (b) “He is
still happy” (or “Sit still”). We can tell whether a term is being used for dis-
counting by asking whether the sentence makes sense when we substitute
another discounting term: It makes sense to say, “He is sick, but he is happy.”
It makes no sense to say, “He is but happy.” It is also illuminating to try to spec-
ify the objection that is being discounted. If you cannot say which objection is
discounted, then the term is probably not being used for discounting.

The clearest cases of discounting occur when we are dealing with facts
that point in different directions. We discount the facts that go against the
position we wish to take. But discounting is often more subtle than this. We
sometimes use discounting to block certain conversational implications of
what we have said. This comes out in examples of the following kind:

Jones is an aggressive player, but he is not dirty.

The situation is difficult, but not hopeless.

CHAPTER 3 ■ The Language of Argument

The Republicans have the upper hand in Congress, but only for the
time being.

A truce has been declared, but who knows for how long?

Take the first example. There is no opposition between Jones being aggres-
sive and his not being dirty. Both would be reasons to pick Jones for our
team. However, the assertion that Jones is aggressive might suggest that he
is dirty. The “but” clause discounts this suggestion without, of course, deny-
ing that Jones is aggressive.

The nuances of discounting terms can be subtle, and a correct analysis is
not always easy. All the same, the role of discounting terms is often impor-
tant. It can be effective in an argument to beat your opponents to the punch
by anticipating and discounting criticisms before your opponents can raise
them. The proper use of discounting can also help you avoid side issues and
tangents.

Still, discounting terms, like the other argumentative terms we have
examined, can be abused. People often spend time discounting weak objec-
tions to their views in order to avoid other objections that they know are
harder to counter. Another common trick is to discount objections no one
would raise. This is called attacking straw men. Consider the following re-
mark: “A new building would be great, but it won’t be free.” This does not
actually say that the speaker’s opponents think we can build a new building
for free, but it does conversationally imply that they think this, because oth-
erwise it would be irrelevant to discount that objection. The speaker is thus
trying to make the opponents look bad by putting words in their mouths
that they would never say themselves. To counter tricks like this, we need to
ask whether a discounted criticism is one that really would be raised, and
whether there are stronger criticisms that should be raised.

For each of the numbered words or expressions in the following sentences, in-
dicate whether it is an argument marker, an assuring term, a guarding term, a
discounting term, or none of these. For each argument marker, specify what
the conclusion and the reasons are, and for each discounting term, specify
what criticism is being discounted and what the response to this criticism is.

1. Although [1] no mechanism has been discovered, most [2] researchers in the
field agree [3] that smoking greatly increases the chances [4] of heart disease.

2. Since [5] historically [6] public debt leads to inflation, I maintain [7] that,
despite [8] recent trends, inflation will return.

3. Take it from me [9], there hasn’t been a decent center fielder since [10] Joe
DiMaggio.

4. Whatever anyone tells you [11], there is little [12] to the rumor that Queen
Elizabeth II will step down for [13] her son, Prince Charles.

Exercise VII

E V A L U A T I V E L A N G U A G E

EVALUATIVE LANGUAGE

Arguments are often filled with evaluation. The clearest cases of evaluative
language occur when we say that something is good or bad, that some course
of action is right or wrong, or that something should or should not (or ought to
or ought not to) be done. The meaning of such evaluative terms is very con-
troversial, but we can begin to understand evaluative language by asking
which acts—linguistic, speech, and conversational—it is used to perform.

Evaluative terms often come into play when one is faced with a choice or
decision. If you are deciding which shirt to buy, and a friend tells you, “That
one’s nice,” your friend would normally be taken to be prescribing that
you buy it. A passenger who says, “That’s the wrong turn,” is telling the
driver not to turn that way. In such contexts, evaluative statements are
action guiding—that is, they are used to direct someone to do or refrain
from doing some action. Evaluative terms do not, however, have such direct
prescriptive force when applied to things in remote times or places. Saying
that it was wrong for James Earl Ray to assassinate Martin Luther King does
not tell Ray not to do anything, for it is idle to address imperatives to people
in the past. Someone who says that it would be wrong for the president to
pursue a particular policy is not telling the president not to pursue it, unless
she happens to be speaking or writing to the president. Nevertheless, even

5. The early deaths of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix show [14] that drugs are
really [15] dangerous.

6. I think [16] he is out back somewhere.

7. I think [17], therefore [18] I am.

8. I concede [19] that the evidence is hopelessly [20] weak, but [21] I still think
he is guilty.

9. I deny [22] that I had anything [23] to do with it.

10. The wind has shifted to the northeast, which means [24] that snow is
likely [25].

1. Construct three new and interesting examples of statements containing
assuring terms.

2. Do the same for guarding terms.

3. Do the same for discounting terms, and indicate which statement is being
discounted in favor of the other.

4. Do the same for argument markers, and indicate what is presented as a
reason for what.

Exercise VIII

CHAPTER 3 ■ The Language of Argument

in cases where evaluations lack direct prescriptive force, they sometimes
have prescriptive force indirectly. Calling Ray’s past action bad or wrong
might, through analogy, be a way of telling someone not to do future acts
like it. Evaluative language is, in these ways, used to perform speech acts of
prescribing action.

Evaluative language is also often used for other speech acts. When a fan
says, “That band is great,” this usually expresses admiration for their music
and a desire to hear more. After a meal, someone who announces, “That was
horrible,” is often expressing aversion or even disgust at the food. To say,
“That’s too bad,” is often to express disappointment or sadness. In these ways,
evaluative language is used to perform speech acts of expressing emotion.

These speech acts do not, however, exhaust the meaning of evaluative
language. For one thing, evaluative language is typically also used to bring
about certain effects. When a mother tells her son that that he ought to keep
his promises, she not only prescribes that her son not lie; she also standardly
intends to have an effect on his behavior—she tries to get him to keep his
promises. And when war protesters express their disapproval by calling a
war immoral, they are normally trying to get anyone listening to feel the
same way about the war. Thus, evaluative language is used to perform con-
versational acts of changing people’s behavior and feelings.

There is still more to the meaning of evaluative language. Our lives con-
sist of a constant stream of choices of varying kinds and of various levels
of importance. Because we often have to make these choices or decisions
under time pressure, it is not possible to make all of them on a case-by-case
basis. It is for this reason, among others, that we come to rely on standards
in making evaluations. In most cases, we call something “good” or “right”
because we believe that it meets or satisfies relevant standards, and we call
something “bad” or “wrong” because we believe that it violates some rele-
vant standard. This is, roughly, the content of the linguistic act of uttering
evaluative language.

On this account, calling something good or bad by itself can be fairly
empty of content. Such remarks gain content—sometimes a very rich
content—by virtue of the particular standards they invoke. This explains
why the word “good” can be applied to so many different kinds of things.
When we say that Hondas are good cars, we are probably applying stan-
dards that involve reliability, efficiency, comfort, and so on. We call someone
a good firefighter because we think the person is skilled at the tasks of a fire-
fighter, is motivated to do those tasks, works well with other firefighters,
and so on. Our standards for calling someone an ethically good person con-
cern honesty, generosity, fairness, and so on. The standards we have for call-
ing something a good car, a good firefighter, and an (ethically) good person
have little in common. Even so, the word “good” functions in the same way
in all three cases: It invokes the standards that are relevant in a given con-
text and indicates that something adequately satisfies these standards.

Because evaluative statements invoke standards, they stand in con-
trast to utterances that merely express personal feelings. If I say that I like

E V A L U A T I V E L A N G U A G E

a particular singer, then I am expressing a personal taste. Unless I were
being accused of lying or self-deception, it would be very odd for some-
one to reply, “No, you don’t like that singer.” On the other hand, if I call
someone a good singer (or the best singer in years), then I am going beyond
expressing my personal tastes. I am saying something that others may
accept or reject. Of course, the standards for judging singers may be impre-
cise, and they may shift from culture to culture. Still, to call someone a good
singer is to evaluate that person as a singer, which goes beyond merely
expressing feelings, because it invokes standards and indicates that the
person in question meets them.

The words “good” and “bad” are general evaluative terms. Other eval-
uative terms are more restrictive in their range of application. The word
“delicious” is usually used for evaluating the taste of foods; it means “good-
tasting.” A sin is a kind of wrong action, but, more specifically, it is an action
that is wrong according to religious standards. A bargain has a good price.
An illegal action is one that is legally wrong. Our language contains a great
many specific terms of evaluation like these. Here are a few more examples:

beautiful dangerous wasteful sneaky cute

murder prudent nosy sloppy smart

Each of these words expresses either a positive or a negative evaluation of a
quite specific kind.

Positive and negative evaluations can be subtle. Consider a word like
“clever.” It presents a positive evaluation in terms of quick mental ability. In
contrast, “cunning” often presents a negative evaluation of someone for
misusing mental abilities. It thus makes a difference which one of these
words we choose. It also makes a difference where we apply them. When
something is supposed to be profound and serious, it is insulting to call it
merely clever. Prayers, for example, should not be clever.

Sometimes seemingly innocuous words can shift evaluative force. The
word “too” is the perfect example of this. This word introduces a negative
evaluation, sometimes turning a positive quality into a negative one. Com-
pare the following sentences:

John is smart. John is too smart.

John is honest. John is too honest.

John is ambitious. John is too ambitious.

John is nice. John is too nice.

John is friendly. John is too friendly.

The word “too” indicates an excess, and thereby contains a criticism. If you
look at the items in the second column, you will see that the criticism is some-
times rather brutal—for example, calling someone “too friendly.”

The difference between an evaluative term and a descriptive term is not
always obvious. To see this, consider the terms “homicide” and “murder.”
The words are closely related but do not mean the same thing. “Homicide”

CHAPTER 3 ■ The Language of Argument

is a descriptive term meaning “the killing of a human being.” “Murder” is
an evaluative term meaning, in part at least, “the wrongful killing of a human
being.” It takes more to show that something is a murder than it does to
show that something is a homicide.

Just as it is easy to miss evaluative terms because we fail to recognize the
evaluative component built into their meanings, it is also possible to inter-
pret neutral words as evaluative because of positive or negative associations
that the words might evoke. The word “nuclear,” for example, has bad con-
notations for some people because of its association with bombs and wars,
but the word itself is purely descriptive. To call people nuclear scientists is
not to say that they are bad in any way. The test for an evaluative term is
this: Does the word mean that something is good or bad (right or wrong) in
a particular way?

SPIN DOCTORING

Evaluation need not be problematic, but it is often hidden and abused, most
notoriously in spin doctoring. The expression “spin doctor” seems to combine
two metaphors. The first concerns putting the right spin on things—that is,
presenting things in ways that make them look good or bad, depending on
how one wants them to be perceived. The second concerns doctoring things

Image not available due to copyright restrictions

E V A L U A T I V E L A N G U A G E

up to accomplish this. Spin doctoring often involves trying to find the right
way of labeling something.

A classic example comes from Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar (act III,
scene i). After Brutus and others killed Caesar, Brutus announced, “So are
we Caesar’s friends that have abridged his time of fearing death.” By re-
describing his act in terms of a minor benefit to Caesar, Brutus tries to make
people see his treacherous act of killing his friend as a generous act of doing
his friend a favor!

Spin doctoring is still rampant in politics today. Referring to the Iraq
war, those who favored it spoke of the “liberation” of Iraq, whereas those
who opposed it called it an “invasion” or an “occupation.” Each label in-
volves evaluation, so the disagreement over what to call it was really
about how to evaluate it. This verbal dispute is not purely verbal, because
the label can affect attitudes and behaviors by associating the Iraq war
with good military actions (liberations) or bad military actions (invasions
and occupations).

Often spin doctoring involves attributing questionable views or atti-
tudes to opponents. Supporters of President Bush sometimes refer to his de-
tractors as “the blame-America-first crowd” and describe their policies for
getting out of Iraq as “cut and run.” These negative labels are applied even
to policies, such as partial staged redeployment, that are far from cowardly
in the way suggested by “cut and run.” Similarly, in 2006, conservative com-
mentator David Brooks described opposition to Joe Lieberman’s campaign
as a “liberal inquisition.” Stephen Colbert lampooned this label in a segment
of “The Word” where he joked that, if incumbents like Lieberman continued
to be attacked so harshly, then they would actually be forced to defend their
records. Colbert concluded, “There is only one word for that—inquisition.”
But the sidebar read “democracy.” Sometimes parody is the most effective
response to spin doctoring.

Of course, liberal democrats are often just as guilty of spin doctoring.
When discussing a measure that would repeal a large number of envi-
ronmental regulations, President Clinton sarcastically referred to it as the
“Polluter’s Bill of Rights“—not exactly a generous way of describing a bill
based on the belief that environmental regulations had gone too far. And, to
quote Stephen Colbert again, “Affirmative action is a prime example of
the Leftist campaign to make ideas seem less dangerous than they are,
through the strategic use of positive words. Think about it. How can
something be bad if it is ‘affirmative’? and how can we ignore it if is it
‘action’?” [from I Am America (and So Can You!), New York: Grand Central
Publishing, 2007, p. 174].

Spin doctoring like this makes it harder to discuss the real benefits
and costs of such laws and policies, because nobody wants to argue against
liberation or affirmation or in favor of invasion, inquisition, or pollution.
The task of critical analysis is to see through such slogans to the important
issues that lie behind them, so that we can intelligently address the real val-
ues at stake.

CHAPTER 3 ■ The Language of Argument

For each of the following sentences, construct two others—one that reverses
the evaluative force, and one that is as neutral as possible. The symbol “0”
stands for neutral, “+” for positive evaluative force, and “–” for negative eval-
uative force. Try to make as little change as possible in the descriptive content
of the sentence.

Example: – Professor Conrad is rude.

+ Professor Conrad is uncompromisingly honest in his criticisms.

0 Professor Conrad often upsets people with his criticisms.

1. – Larry is a lazy lout. 6. – Walter is a weenie.

2. + Brenda is brave. 7. + Carol is caring.

3. – Sally is a snob. 8. – Bill is bossy.

4. + Bartlett is a blast. 9. – Oprah is opinionated.

5. – George is a goody-goody. 10. – This is a Mickey Mouse
exercise.

Exercise X

Be a spin doctor yourself by writing upbeat, good-sounding titles or descrip-
tions for the following proposals. Remember that, as a professional spin doc-
tor, you should be able to make things you personally hate sound good.

1. Imposing a $1,000 fee on graduating seniors

2. Requiring all students to participate in a twenty-one-meal-per-week food
plan

Exercise XI

Indicate whether the following italicized terms are positively evaluative (E+),
negatively evaluative (E–), or simply descriptive (D). Remember, the evalua-
tions need not be moral evaluations.

1. Janet is an excellent golfer.

2. The group was playing very loudly.

3. The group was playing too loudly.

4. William was rude to his parents.

5. William shouted at his parents.

6. They mistakenly turned right at
the intersection.

7. Fascists ruled Italy for almost
twenty years.

8. That’s a no-no.

Exercise IX

9. Bummer.

10. Debbie lied.

11. Debbie said something false.

12. Joe copped out.

13. Jake is a bully.
14. Mary Lou was a gold medalist.

15. She is sick.

16. He suffers from a hormonal
imbalance.

E V A L U A T I V E L A N G U A G E

3. Abolishing coed dormitories

4. Abolishing fraternities

5. Requiring women students to return to their dormitories by midnight
(such rules were once quite common)

6. Abolishing failing grades

7. Restoring failing grades

8. Requiring four years of physical education

9. Abolishing intercollegiate football

10. Introducing a core curriculum in Western civilization

11. Abolishing such a curriculum

12. Abolishing faculty tenure

1. What precisely does “That’s too bad” mean?

2. In the Democratic presidential candidate debate on September 26, 2007,
Representative Dennis Kucinich was asked the following question by
MSNBC correspondent Tim Russert. Was Kucinich’s answer spin
doctoring? Was it legitimate or illegitimate? Why?

Russert: . . . Congressman Kucinich, when you were mayor of Cleveland,
you let Cleveland go into bankruptcy, the first time that happened since
the Depression. The voters of Cleveland rewarded you by throwing you
out of office and electing a Republican mayor of Cleveland. How can you
claim that you have the ability to manage the United States of America,
when you let Cleveland go bankrupt?

Rep. Kucinich: You know, Tim, that was NBC’s story. Now I want the peo-
ple to know what the real story was. I took a stand on behalf of the peo-
ple of Cleveland to save a municipal electric system. The banks and the
utilities in Cleveland, the private utilities, were trying to force me to sell
that system. And so on December 15th, 1978, I told the head of the
biggest bank, when he told me I had to sell the system in order to get the
city’s credit renewed, that I wasn’t going to do it. . . . I put my job on the
line. How many people would be willing to put their job on the line in
the face of pressure from banks and utilities? As this story gets told, peo-
ple will want me to be their next president because they’ll see in me not
only the ability to take a stand, but the ability to live with integrity.

Discussion Questions

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THE ART OF CLOSE ANALYSIS

This chapter will largely be dedicated to a single purpose: the close and careful analy-

sis of a speech drawn from the Congressional Record, using argumentative devices

introduced in Chapter 3. The point of this chapter is to show in detail how these meth-

ods of analysis can be applied to an actual argument of some richness and complexity.

AN EXTENDED EXAMPLE

It is now time to apply all of our previously discussed notions to a genuine
argument. Our example will be a debate that occurred in the House of Rep-
resentatives on the question of whether there should be an increase in the al-
lowance given to members of the House for clerical help—the so-called clerk
hire allowance. The argument against the increase presented by Representa-
tive Kyl (Republican, Iowa) will be examined in detail. We will put it under
an analytic microscope.

The choice of this example may seem odd, for the question of clerk hire
allowance is not one of the burning issues of our time. This, in fact, is one
reason for choosing it. It will be useful to begin with an example about
which feelings do not run high to learn the habit of objective analysis. Later
on we shall examine arguments about which almost everyone has strong
feelings and try to maintain an objective standpoint even there.

The example is good for two other reasons: 1. It contains most of the ar-
gumentative devices we have listed, and 2. relatively speaking, it is quite a
strong argument. This last remark may seem ironic after we seemingly tear
the argument to shreds. However, in comparison to other arguments we
shall examine, it stands up well.

We begin by reading through a section of the Congressional Record (vol.
107, part 3, March 15, 1961, pp. 4059–60) without comment:

CLERK HIRE ALLOWANCE,
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

Mr. FRIEDEL. Mr. Speaker, by direction of the Committee on House Admin-
istration, I call up the resolution (H. Res. 219) to increase the basic clerk hire
allowance of each Member of the House, and for other purposes, and ask for
its immediate consideration.

CHAPTER 4 ■ The Art of Close Analys is

The Clerk read the resolution as follows:

Resolved, That effective April 1, 1961, there shall be paid out of the contingent
fund of the House, until otherwise provided by law, such sums as may be neces-
sary to increase the basic clerk hire allowance of each Member and the Resident
Commissioner from Puerto Rico by an additional $3,000 per annum, and each
such Member and Resident Commissioner shall be entitled to one clerk in addi-
tion to those to which he is otherwise entitled by law.

Mr. FRIEDEL. Mr. Speaker, this resolution allows an additional $3,000
per annum for clerk hire and an additional clerk for each Member of the
House and the Resident Commissioner from Puerto Rico. Our subcommit-
tee heard the testimony, and we were convinced of the need for this provi-
sion to be made. A few Members are paying out of their own pockets for
additional clerk hire. This $3,000 is the minimum amount we felt was nec-
essary to help Members pay the expenses of running their offices. Of
course, we know that the mail is not as heavy in some of the districts as it is
in others, and, of course, if the Member does not use the money, it remains
in the contingent fund.

Mr. KYL. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?
Mr. FRIEDEL. I yield to the gentleman from Iowa [Mr. Kyl] for a statement.
Mr. KYL. Mr. Speaker, I oppose this measure. I oppose it first because it is

expensive. I further oppose it because it is untimely.
I do not intend to belabor this first contention. We have been presented a

budget of about $82 billion. We have had recommended to us a whole series
of additional programs or extensions of programs for priming the pump, for
depressed areas, for the needy, for the unemployed, for river pollution proj-
ects, and recreation projects, aid to education, and many more. All are listed
as “must” activities. These extensions are not within the budget. Furthermore,
if business conditions are as deplorable as the newspapers indicate, the
Government’s income will not be as high as anticipated. It is not enough to
say we are spending so much now, a little more will not hurt. What we spend,
we will either have to recover in taxes, or add to the staggering national debt.

The amount of increase does not appear large. I trust, however, there is no
one among us who would suggest that the addition of a clerk would not entail
allowances for another desk, another typewriter, more materials, and it is not
beyond the realm of possibility that the next step would then be a request for
additional office space, and ultimately new buildings. Some will say, “All the
Members will not use their maximum, so the cost will not be great.” And this
is true. If the exceptions are sufficient in number to constitute a valid argument,
then there is no broad general need for this measure. Furthermore, some Mem-
bers will use these additional funds to raise salaries. Competition will force all
salaries upward in all offices and then on committee staffs, and so on. We may
even find ourselves in a position of paying more money for fewer clerks and in
a tighter bind on per person workload.

This measure proposes to increase the allowance from $17,500 base clerical
allowance to $20,500 base salary allowance. No member of this House can tell

An Extended Example

us what this means in gross salary. That computation is almost impossible.
Such a completely absurd system has developed through the years on salary
computations for clerical hire that we have under discussion a mathematical
monstrosity. We are usually told that the gross allowed is approximately
$35,000. This is inaccurate. In one office the total might be less than $35,000 and
in another, in complete compliance with the law and without any conscious
padding, the amount may be in excess of $42,000. This is possible because of a
weird set of formulae which determines that three clerks at $5,000 cost less
than five clerks at $3,000. Five times three might total the same as three times
five everywhere else in the world—but not in figuring clerk hire in the House.

This is an application of an absurdity. It is a violation of bookkeeping
principles, accounting principles, business principles and a violation of com-
mon sense. Listen to the formula:

First, 20 percent increase of first $1,200; 10 percent additional from $1,200
to $4,600; 5 percent further additional from $4,600 to $7,000.

Second, after applying the increases provided in paragraph 1, add an ad-
ditional 14 percent or a flat $250, whichever is the greater, but this increase
must not exceed 25 percent.

Third, after applying the increases provided in both paragraphs 1 and 2,
add an additional increase of 10 percent in lieu of overtime.

Fourth, after applying the increases provided in paragraphs 1, 2, and 3,
add an additional increase of $330.

Fifth, after applying the increases provided in paragraphs 1, 2, 3, and 4,
add an additional increase of 5 percent.

Sixth, after applying the increases provided in paragraphs 1, 2, 3, 4, and
5, add an additional increase of 10 percent but not more than $800 nor less
than $300 a year.

Seventh, after applying the increases provided in paragraphs, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,
and 6, add an additional increase of 71⁄2 percent.

Eighth, after applying the increases provided in paragraphs, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,
6, and 7, add an additional increase of 10 percent.

Ninth, after applying the increases provided in paragraphs 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6,
7, and 8, add an additional increase of 71⁄2 percent.

The Disbursing Office has a set of tables to figure House salaries for office
staffs and for about 900 other employees. It contains 45 sheets with 40
entries per sheet. In the Senate, at least, they have simplified the process
some by figuring their base in multiples of 60, thus eliminating 11 cate-
gories. Committee staffers, incidentally, have an $8,880 base in comparison
to the House $7,000 base limitation.

Now, Mr. Speaker, I have planned to introduce an amendment or a substi-
tute which would grant additional clerk hire where there is a demonstrable
need based on heavier than average population or “election at large” and
possible other factors. But after becoming involved in this mathematical maze,
I realize the folly of proceeding one step until we have corrected this situation.
We can offer all kinds of excuses for avoiding a solution. We cannot offer rea-
sonable arguments that it should not be done or that it cannot be done.

CHAPTER 4 ■ The Art of Close Analys is

Someone has suggested that the Members of this great body prefer to
keep the present program because someone back in the home district might
object to the gross figures. I know this is not so. When a Representative is
busy on minimum wage, or aid to education, or civil rights, such matters of
housekeeping seem too picayune to merit attention. The Member simply
checks the table and hires what he can hire under the provisions and then
forgets the whole business. But I know the Members also want the people
back home to realize that what we do here is open and frank and accurate,
and that we set an example in businesslike procedures. The more we can
demonstrate responsibility the greater will be the faith in Congress.

May I summarize. It is obvious that some Members need more clerical help
because of large population and large land area. I have been working for some
time with the best help we can get, on a measure which would take these items
into consideration. Those Members who are really in need of assistance should
realize that this temporary, hastily conceived proposition we debate today will
probably obviate their getting a satisfactory total solution.

First, we should await redistricting of the Nation.
Second, we should consider appropriate allowance for oversize districts

considering both population and total geographic area.
Finally, I hope we can develop a sound and sensible formula for computing

salaries of office clerks and other statutory employees in the same category.

Before going any further, it will be useful to record your general reactions
to this speech. Perhaps you think that on the whole Kyl gives a well-reasoned
argument on behalf of his position. Alternatively, you might think that he is
making a big fuss over nothing, trying to confuse people with numbers, and
just generally being obnoxious. When you are finished examining this argu-
ment in detail, you can look back and ask yourself why you formed this orig-
inal impression and how, if at all, you have changed your mind.

The first step in the close analysis of an argument is to go through the
text, labeling the various argumentative devices we have examined. Here
some abbreviations will be useful:

argument marker M

assuring term A

guarding term G

discounting term D

argumentative performative AP

evaluative term E (+ or –)

rhetorical device R

The last label is a catchall for the various rhetorical devices discussed in
Chapter 1, such as overstatement, understatement, irony or sarcasm,
metaphor, simile, rhetorical questions, and so on.

If you want to make your analysis extra close, it is illuminating to specify
which rhetorical device is deployed whenever you mark something with “R.”

An Extended Example

It is also useful to specify whether each argument marker marks a reason or a
conclusion (and what the argument is), which stronger term is replaced by
each guarding term marked “G,” and which objection is discounted whenever
you mark a discounting term with “D.”

This simple process of labeling brings out features of an argument that
could pass by unnoticed. It also directs us to ask sharp critical questions. To
see this, we can look at each part of the argument in detail.

Mr. KYL. Mr. Speaker, I oppose this measure. I oppose it

first because it is expensive. I further oppose it because it is

untimely.

This is a model of clarity. By the use of a performative utterance in the open-
ing sentence, Kyl makes it clear that he opposes the measure. Then by twice
using the argument marker “because,” he gives his two main reasons for
opposing it: It is expensive and it is untimely. We must now see if he makes
good on each of these claims.

The next paragraph begins the argument for the claim that the measure is
expensive:

I do not intend to belabor this first contention. We have been

presented a budget of about $82 billion. We have had recom-

mended to us a whole series of additional programs or ex-

tensions of programs for priming the pump, for depressed

areas, for the needy, for the unemployed, for river pollution

projects, and recreation projects, aid to education, and many

more. All are listed as “ must ” activities. These extensions are

not within the budget. Furthermore , if business conditions

are as deplorable as the newspapers indicate, the Govern-

ment’s income will not be as high as anticipated. It is not

enough to say we are spending so much now, a little more

will not hurt. What we spend, we will either have to recover

in taxes, or add to the staggering national debt.

a. “I do not intend to belabor this first contention.” This is an example of
assuring. The conversational implication is that the point is so obvious that
little has to be said in its support. Yet there is something strange going on
here. Having said that he will not belabor the claim that the bill is expensive,
Kyl actually goes on to say quite a bit on the subject. It is a good idea to look
closely when someone says that he or she is not going to do something, for
often just the opposite is happening. For example, saying “I am not suggest-
ing that Smith is dishonest” is one way of suggesting that Smith is dishon-
est. If no such suggestion is being made, why raise the issue at all?

b. Kyl now proceeds in a rather flat way, stating that the proposed budget
comes to $82 billion and that it contains many new programs and extensions

AP
M

CHAPTER 4 ■ The Art of Close Analys is

of former programs. Because these are matters of public record and nobody
is likely to deny them, there is no need for guarding or assuring. Kyl also
claims, without qualification, that these extensions are not within the
budget. This recital of facts does, however, carry an important conversa-
tional implication: Since the budget is already out of balance, any further ex-
tensions should be viewed with suspicion.

c. Putting the word “must” in quotation marks, or saying it in a sarcastic
tone of voice, is a common device for denying something. The plain sugges-
tion is that some of these measures are not must activities at all. Kyl here
suggests that some of the items already in the budget are not necessary. He
does this, of course, without defending this suggestion.

d. “Furthermore, if business conditions are as deplorable as the newspa-
pers indicate, the Government’s income will not be as high as anticipated.”
The word “furthermore” suggests that an argument is about to come. How-
ever, the following sentence as a whole is an indicative conditional (with the
word “then” dropped out). As such, the sentence does not produce an argu-
ment, but instead provides only a pattern for an argument.

To get an argument from this pattern, one would have to assert the an-
tecedent of the conditional. The argument would then come to this:

(1) If business conditions are as deplorable as the newspapers indicate,
then the Government’s income will not be as high as anticipated.

(2) Business conditions are as deplorable as the newspapers indicate.

(3) The Government’s income will not be as high as anticipated.

The first premise seems perfectly reasonable, so, if Kyl could establish the
second premise, then he would have moved the argument along in an im-
portant way. Yet he never explicitly states that business conditions are so
deplorable. All he says is that “the newspapers indicate” this. Moreover, this
appeal to authority (see Chapter 15) does not mention any specific newspa-
per, so he does not endorse any specific authority. Still, Kyl never questions
what the newspapers claim, and it would be misleading to bring up these
newspaper reports without questioning them if he thought they were way
off the mark. So Kyl does seem to have in mind something like the argu-
ment (1)–(3).

e. “It is not enough to say we are spending so much now, a little more will
not hurt.” The opening phrase is, of course, used to deny what follows it.
Kyl is plainly rejecting the argument that, since we are spending so much
now, a little more will not hurt. Yet his argument has a peculiar twist, for
who would come right out and make such an argument? If you stop to think
for a minute, it should be clear that nobody would want to put it that way.
An opponent, for example, would use quite different phrasing. He might
say something like this: “Considering the large benefits that will flow from
this measure, it is more than worth the small costs.” What Kyl has done is
attribute a bad argument to his opponents and then reject it in an indignant
tone. This is a common device, and when it is used, it is often useful to ask

An Extended Example

whether anyone would actually argue or speak in the way suggested. When
the answer to this question is no, as it often is, we have what was called “the
trick of discounting straw men” in Chapter 3 (see also Chapter 17). In such
cases, it is useful to ask what the speaker’s opponent would have said in-
stead. This leads to a further question: Has the arguer even addressed him-
self to the real arguments of his opponents?

So far, Kyl has not addressed himself to the first main point of his argu-
ment: that the measure is expensive. This is not a criticism, because he is re-
ally making the preliminary point that the matter of expense is significant.
Here he has stated some incontestable facts—for example, that the budget is
already out of balance. Beyond this he has indicated, with varying degrees
of strength, that the financial situation is grave. It is against this background
that the detailed argument concerning the cost of the measure is actually
presented in the next paragraph.

The amount of increase does not appear large. I trust,

however, there is no one among us who would suggest that

the addition of a clerk would not entail allowances for

another desk, another typewriter, more materials, and it is

not beyond the realm of possibility that the next step would

then be a request for additional office space, and ultimately

new buildings. Some will say , “All the Members will not

use their maximum, so the cost will not be great.” And this is

true. If the exceptions are sufficient in number to constitute a

valid argument, then there is no broad general need for this

measure. Furthermore, some Members will use these addi-

tional funds to raise salaries. Competition will force all

salaries upward in all offices and then on committee staffs,

and so on. We may even find ourselves in a position of pay-

ing more money for fewer clerks and in a tighter bind on per

person workload.

a. “The amount of increase does not appear large.” Words like “appear”
and “seem” are sometimes used for guarding, but we must be careful not to
apply labels in an unthinking way. The above sentence is the beginning of a
discounting argument. As soon as you hear this sentence, you can feel that a
word like “but” or “however” is about to appear. Sure enough, it does.

b. “I trust, however, there is no one among us who would suggest that the
addition of a clerk would not entail allowances for another desk, another
typewriter, more materials. . . .” This is the beginning of Kyl’s argument that
is intended to rebut the argument that the increase in expenses will not be
large. Appearances to the contrary, he is saying, the increase will be large. He
then ticks off some additional expenses that are entailed by hiring new
clerks. Notice that the whole sentence is covered by the assuring phrase

D A

CHAPTER 4 ■ The Art of Close Analys is

“I trust . . . there is no one among us who would suggest. . . .” This implies
that anyone who would make such a suggestion is merely stupid. But the
trouble with Kyl’s argument so far is this: He has pointed out genuine addi-
tional expenses, but they are not, after all, very large. It is important for him
to get some genuinely large sums of money into his argument. This is the
point of his next remark.

c. “. . . and it is not beyond the realm of possibility that the next step
would then be a request for additional office space, and ultimately new
buildings.” Here, at last, we have some genuinely large sums of money in
the picture, but the difficulty is that the entire claim is totally guarded by the
phrase “it is not beyond the realm of possibility.” There are very few things
that are beyond the realm of possibility. Kyl’s problem, then, is this: There
are certain additional expenses that he can point to without qualification,
but these tend to be small. On the other hand, when he points out genuinely
large expenses, he can only do so in a guarded way. So we are still waiting
for a proof that the expense will be large. (Parenthetically, it should be
pointed out that Kyl’s prediction of new buildings actually came true.)

d. “Some will say, ‘All the Members will not use their maximum, so the
cost will not be great.’ And this is true. If the exceptions are sufficient in
number to constitute a valid argument, then there is no broad general need
for this measure.” This looks like a “trick” argument, and for this reason
alone it demands close attention. The phrase “some will say” is a standard
way of beginning a discounting argument. This is, in fact, a discounting ar-
gument, but its form is rather subtle. Kyl cites what some will say, and then
he adds, somewhat surprisingly: “And this is true.” To understand what is
going on here, we must have a good feel for conversational implication. Kyl
imagines someone reasoning in the following way:

All the Members will not use their maximum.
So, the cost will not be great.
Therefore, we should adopt the measure.

Given the same starting point, Kyl tries to derive just the opposite conclusion
along the following lines:

All the Members will not use their maximum.
If the exceptions are not sufficient, then the cost will be too great.
But if the exceptions are sufficient, there is no broad general need for this

measure.
Therefore, whether it is expensive or not, we should reject this measure.

In order to get clear about this argument, we can put it into schematic form:

Kyl’s argument:

If (1) the measure is expensive, then reject it.
If (2) the measure is inexpensive, then, because that shows there is no

general need, reject it.

An Extended Example

The opposite argument:

If (1) the measure is inexpensive, then accept it.

If (2) the measure is expensive, then, because that demonstrates a general
need, accept it.

When the arguments are spread out in this fashion, it should be clear that
they have equal strength. Both are no good. The question that must be set-
tled is this: Does a genuine need exist that can be met in an economically
sound manner? If there is no need for the measure, then it should be re-
jected, however inexpensive. Again, if there is a need, then some expense is
worth paying. The real problem is to balance need against expense and then
decide on this basis whether the measure as a whole is worth adopting.

Kyl’s argument is a sophistry, because it has no tendency to answer the
real question at hand. A sophistry is a clever but fallacious argument intended
to establish a point through trickery. Incidentally, it is one of the marks of a
sophistical argument that, though it may baffle, it almost never convinces.
We think that few readers will have found this argument persuasive even if
they cannot say exactly what is wrong with it. The appearance of a sophisti-
cal argument (or even a complex and tangled argument) is a sign that the
argument is weak. Remember, when a case is strong, people usually argue in
a straightforward way.

e. “Furthermore, some Members will use these additional funds to raise
salaries. Competition will force all salaries upward in all offices and then
on committee staffs, and so on.” The word “furthermore” signals that fur-
ther reasons are forthcoming. Here Kyl returns to the argument that the
measure is more expensive than it might appear at first sight. Although
Kyl’s first sentence is guarded by the term “some,” he quickly drops his
guard and speaks in an unqualified way about all salaries in all offices. Yet
the critic is bound to ask whether Kyl has any right to make these projec-
tions. Beyond this, Kyl here projects a parade of horrors. (See Chapter 13.) He
pictures this measure leading by gradual steps to quite disastrous conse-
quences. Here the little phrase “and so on” carries a great burden in the
argument. Once more, we must simply ask ourselves whether these projec-
tions seem reasonable.

f. “We may even find ourselves in a position of paying more money for
fewer clerks and in a tighter bind on per person workload.” Once more, the
use of a strong guarding expression takes back most of the force of the argu-
ment. Notice that if Kyl could have said straight out that the measure will
put us in a position of paying more money for fewer clerks and in a tighter
bind on per-person workload, that would have counted as a very strong ob-
jection. You can hardly do better in criticizing a position than showing that
it will have just the opposite result from what is intended. In fact, however,
Kyl has not established this; he has only said that this is something that we
“may even find.”

Before we turn to the second half of Kyl’s argument, which we shall see
in a moment is much stronger, we should point out that our analysis has not

CHAPTER 4 ■ The Art of Close Analys is

been entirely fair. Speaking before the House of Representatives, Kyl is in an
adversarial situation. He is not trying to prove things for all time; rather, he is
responding to a position held by others. Part of what he is doing is raising
objections, and a sensitive evaluation of the argument demands a detailed
understanding of the nuances of the debate. But even granting this, it should
be remembered that objections themselves must be made for good reasons.
The problem so far in Kyl’s argument is that the major reasons behind his
objections have constantly been guarded in a very strong way.

Turning now to the second part of Kyl’s argument—that the measure is
untimely—we see that he moves along in a clear and direct way with little
guarding.

This measure proposes to increase the allowance from

$17,500 base clerical allowance to $20,500 base salary

allowance. No member of this House can tell us what this

means in gross salary. That computation is almost impossi-

ble. Such a completely absurd system has developed

through the years on salary computations for clerical hire

that we have under discussion a mathematical monstrosity.

We are usually told that the gross allowed is approximately

$35,000. This is inaccurate. In one office the total might be

less than $35,000 and in another, in complete compliance

with the law and without any conscious padding, the

amount may be in excess of $42,000. This is possible because

of a weird set of formulae which determines that three

clerks at $5,000 cost less than five clerks at $3,000. Five times

three might total the same as three times five everywhere

else in the world—but not in figuring clerk hire in the House.

This is an application of an absurdity. It is a violation of

bookkeeping principles, accounting principles, business prin-

ciples and a violation of common sense. Listen to the formula.

The main point of the argument is clear enough: Kyl is saying that the present
system of clerk salary allowance is utterly confusing, and this matter should
be straightened out before any other measures in this area are adopted. There
is a great deal of negative evaluation in this passage. Notice the words and
phrases that Kyl uses:

a completely absurd system

weird set of formulae

violation of common sense

mathematical monstrosity

an absurdity

E–

An Extended Example

There is also a dash of irony in the remark that five times three might total
the same as three times five everywhere else in the world, but not in figur-
ing clerk hire in the House. Remember, there is nothing wrong with using
negative evaluative and expressive terms if they are deserved. Looking at
the nine-step formula in Kyl’s speech, you can decide for yourself whether
he is on strong grounds in using this negative language.

Now, Mr. Speaker, I have planned to introduce an amend-

ment or a substitute which would grant additional clerk hire

where there is a demonstrable need based on heavier than

average population or “election at large” and possible other

factors.

a. This passage discounts any suggestion that Kyl is unaware that a gen-
uine problem does exist in some districts. It also indicates that he is willing
to do something about it.

b. The phrase “and possible other factors” is not very important, but it
seems to be included to anticipate other reasons for clerk hire that should at
least be considered.

But after becoming involved in this mathematical maze, I

realize the folly of proceeding one step until we have cor-

rected this situation.

a. Here Kyl clearly states his reason for saying that the measure is un-
timely. Notice that the reason offered has been well documented and is not
hedged in by qualifications.

b. The phrases “mathematical maze” and “folly” are again negatively
evaluative.

We can offer all kinds of excuses for avoiding a solution.

We cannot offer reasonable arguments that it should not be

done or that it cannot be done.

Notice that the first sentence ridicules the opponents’ arguments by calling
them excuses, a term with negative connotations. The second sentence gives
assurances that such a solution can be found.

Someone has suggested that the Members of this great body

prefer to keep the present program because someone back in

the home district might object to the gross figures. I know

this is not so. When a Representative is busy on minimum

wage, or aid to education, or civil rights, such matters of

housekeeping seem too picayune to merit attention. The

Member simply checks the table and hires what he can hire

under the provisions and then forgets the whole business.

E–A

E–

CHAPTER 4 ■ The Art of Close Analys is

But I know the Members also want the people back home

to realize that what we do here is open and frank and accu-

rate, and that we set an example in businesslike procedures.

The more we can demonstrate responsibility the greater will

be the faith in Congress.

a. Once more the seas of rhetoric run high. Someone (though not Kyl him-
self) has suggested that the members of the House wish to conceal informa-
tion. He disavows the very thought that he would make such a suggestion
by the sentence “I know this is not so.” All the same, he has gotten this sug-
gestion into the argument.

b. Kyl then suggests another reason why the members of the House
will not be concerned with this measure: It is “too picayune.” The last two
sentences rebut the suggestion that it is too small to merit close attention.
Even on small matters, the more the House is “open and frank and accu-
rate,” the more it will “set an example in businesslike procedures” and
thus “demonstrate responsibility” that will increase “the faith in Con-
gress.” This is actually an important part of Kyl’s argument, for presum-
ably his main problem is to get the other members of the House to take
the matter seriously.

May I summarize. It is obvious that some Members need

more clerical help because of large population and large

land area. I have been working for some time with the best

help we can get, on a measure which would take these items

into consideration. Those Members who are really in need of

assistance should realize that this temporary, hastily con-

ceived proposition we debate today will probably obviate

their getting a satisfactory total solution.

a. This is a concise summary. Kyl once more assures the House that he is
aware that a genuine problem exists. He also indicates that he is working on it.

b. The phrase “temporary, hastily conceived proposition we debate to-
day” refers back to his arguments concerning untimeliness.

c. The claim that “it will probably obviate their getting a satisfactory total
solution” refers back to the economic argument. Notice, however, that, as
before, the economic claim is guarded by the word “probably.”

First, we should await redistricting of the Nation.

Second, we should consider appropriate allowance for

oversize districts considering both population and total

geographic area.

Finally, I hope we can develop a sound and sensible for-

mula for computing salaries of office clerks and other statu-

tory employees in the same category.

E+

E–

E+

An Extended Example

This is straightforward except that a new factor is introduced: We should
await redistricting of the nation. This was not mentioned earlier in the argu-
ment, and so seems a bit out of place in a summary. Perhaps the point is so
obvious that it did not need any argument to support it. On the other hand,
it is often useful to keep track of things that are smuggled into the argument
at the very end. If redistricting was about to occur in the near future, this
would give a strong reason for delaying action on the measure. Because the
point is potentially so strong, we might wonder why Kyl has made so little
of it. Here, perhaps, we are getting too subtle.

Now that we have looked at Representative Kyl’s argument in close de-
tail, we can step back and notice some important features of the argument
as a whole. In particular, it is usually illuminating to notice an argument’s
purpose, audience, and standpoint.

First, Kyl’s overall purpose is clear. As his opening sentence indicates,
he is presenting an argument intended to justify his opposition to an in-
crease in the clerk hire allowance. Virtually everything he says is directed
toward this single goal. In other cases, arguers pursue multiple goals, and
sorting things out can be a complex matter. Sometimes it is hard to tell
what an argument is even intended to establish. This is usually a sign that
the person presenting the argument is confused or, perhaps, trying to con-
fuse his audience.

Second, Kyl’s argument is addressed to a specific audience. He is not
speaking to an enemy of the United States who would love to see our gov-
ernment waste its money. Nor is he speaking to clerks or to those U.S.
citizens who might be hired as clerks if the clerk hire allowance were
raised. He is presenting his argument to other representatives in Con-
gress. He is trying to show this group that they and he have reasons to
oppose this increase in the clerk hire allowance. His task, then, is to pres-
ent reasons that they accept—or should accept—for rejecting an increase
in the clerk hire allowance.

Third, Kyl not only addresses his argument to a particular audience, he
also adopts a particular standpoint to it. Good arguments are usually pre-
sented not only to specific audiences but also from particular standpoints.
Kyl’s standpoint is clear and powerful. He puts himself across as a tough-
minded, thoroughly honest person who is willing to stand up against
majority opinion. This, in fact, may be an accurate representation of his
character, but by adopting this standpoint he gains an important argumen-
tative advantage: He suggests that those who disagree with him are a bit
soft-minded, not altogether candid, and, anyway, mere tools of the Demo-
cratic majority that runs the Congress. By adopting this stance, Kyl casts
his opponents in a light that is hardly flattering.

By specifying the purpose, audience, and standpoint of an argument,
we get a clearer sense of what the argument needs to accomplish in order
to succeed in its goals. By looking closely at special words in the argument,
as well as at what is conversationally implied, we get a better idea of how
the argument is supposed to achieve its goals. All of this together helps us
understand the argument. It will sometimes remain unclear how well the

CHAPTER 4 ■ The Art of Close Analys is

argument succeeds. It will always require care and skill to apply these
methods. Still, the more you practice, the more you will be able to under-
stand arguments.

Read the following passage. Then, for each of the numbered expressions,
either answer the corresponding question or label the main argumentative
move, if any, using these abbreviations:

M = argument marker

A = assuring term

G = guarding term

D = discounting term

E = negative evaluative term

E+ = positive evaluative term

R = rhetorical device

N = none of the above

This letter to the editor appeared in The Dartmouth on September 23, 1992,
although references to the author’s college have been removed. The author
was president of the student assembly and a member of a single-sex frater-
nity at the time.

GREEKS SHOULD BE CO-ED

by Andrew Beebe

For some time now, people have been asking the question “Why should the
Greek [fraternity and sorority] system go co-ed?” To them, I pose an answer [1]
in a question, “Why not?“ [2]

Learning in college extends beyond the classrooms, onto the athletic fields, into the
art studios, and into our social environs. [3] In fact [4], some [5] say that most [6] of
what we learn at college comes from interaction with people and ideas during
time spent outside of the lecture halls. The concept of segregating students in
their social and residential environments by gender directly contradicts the
ideals [7] of a college experience. This is exactly [8] what the fraternity and
sorority system does.

With all the benefits [9] of a small, closely-bonded group, the poten-
tial for strong social education would seem obvious [10]. But [11] is it fair [12]
for us to remove the other half of our community from that education? [13]
In many colleges, this voluntary segregation exists in fraternities and
sororities.

Exercise I

An Extended Example

From the planning of a party or involvement in student activities to the
sharing of living and recreational space, the fraternity and sorority system is a
social environment ripe [14] with educational potential [15]. The idea that
women and men would receive as complete an experience from these environ-
ments while virtually [16] separated is implausible [17].

But [18] what do women and men learn from one another that they don’t already
know? [19] Problems in gender relations between all ages prove [20] that our so-
ciety is plagued by gender-based prejudice [21]. Since [22] prejudice is the ignorance
of one group by another [23], it will best be addressed by education. The ques-
tion then [24] becomes: Which way is best to educate one another?

Sexism, homophobia, date rape, eating disorders, and other social problems
[25] are often [26] connected to gender-relation issues. As campus experience
shows [27], we have a long way to go in combating these problems. Defenders
of fraternities and sororities may [28] argue that they do not, solely by nature
of being single sex, promote sexism or other prejudices. But [29], if we can rec-
ognize that these problems exist in our society, it is not important to find the
blame, but [30] rather to offer a solution. It is clear [31] that separating people
by gender is not the right [32] way to promote better [33] understanding be-
tween the sexes. To the contrary, bringing different people together is the only
way prejudice, no matter what the cause (or result) may be [34], can be overcome.

Acknowledging that breaking down walls of separation may [35] help foster
better understanding, it is important to look at what might [36] change for the
worse. There would be some [37] obvious [38] logistical changes in rush, pledg-
ing, relationships with national organization, and house leadership. But [39]
where are the real consequences? [40] Men could [41] still cultivate strong bonds
with other men. Women could [42] still bond with other women. The difference
is that there would be a well-defined [43] environment where men and women
could [44] create strong, lasting bonds and friendships between one another.

There are many more benefits [45] to a co-ed system than there are sacri-
fices [46]. Men and women could share the responsibilities of running what
is now a predominantly [47] male-controlled social structure. First-year men
and women could interact with older students in a social environment be-
yond the classroom or the dining halls. People in a co-ed system could find a
strong support group that extends beyond their own sex. With these advan-
tages [48] and more, it is clear [49] that the all-co-ed system offers everything
found in a single-sex organization and more. Although [50] there are some [51]
minor sacrifices to be made, they are insignificant in comparison to the gain
[52] for all.

College is the last place we want to isolate ourselves. The entire idea of the
“holistic education” is based on [53] expanding our knowledge, not separating
ourselves from one another. Our fraternity and sorority system includes many
[54] different types of students. So [55] why should some houses refuse women
simply because [56] they are women? Why do some houses refuse men solely
because [57] they are men? The only solution is desegregation of the fraternity
and sorority system. After all [58], when it comes to challenging one another to
learn, what are we afraid of? [59]

(continued)

CHAPTER 4 ■ The Art of Close Analys is

QUESTIONS:

[1]: Is this sentence an explicit performative?

[2]: Explain the difference between asking “Why?” and asking “Why
not?” in this context.

[3]: Why does the author begin with this point?

[4]–[12]: Write labels.

[13]: What is the expected answer to this rhetorical question?

[14]: What kind of rhetorical device is this? What is its point?

[15]–[18]: Write labels.

[19]: Who is supposed to be asking this question?

[20]–[22]: Write labels.

[23]: What is the point of this definition?

[24]–[33]: Write labels.

[34]: Why does this author add this dependent clause?

[35]–[39]: Write labels.

[40]: What does this question imply in this context?

[41]–[58]: Write labels.

[59]: What is the expected answer to this rhetorical question?

Read the following passage from The Washington Post (November 25, 1997),
page A19. Then, for each of the numbered expressions, label the main argu-
mentative move, if any, using the same abbreviations as in Exercise I:

A PIECE OF “GOD’S HANDIWORK”

by Robert Redford

Just over a year ago, President Clinton created the Grand Staircase-Escalante Na-
tional Monument to [1] protect [2] once and for all some [3] of Utah’s extraordinary
red rock canyon country. In response to [4] plans of the Dutch company Andalex to
mine coal on the Kaiparowits Plateau, President Clinton used his authority under
the Antiquities Act to establish the new monument, setting aside for protection
what he described as “some of the most remarkable land in the world.” I couldn’t
agree more. [5] For over two decades, many have fought battle after battle [6] to keep
mining conglomerates from despoiling [7] the unique treasures [8] of this stunning
red rock canyon country. Now [9], we thought at least some of it was safe.

Not so. Shocking [10] as it sounds, Clinton’s Bureau of Land Management
(BLM) has approved oil drilling within the monument. BLM has given Conoco
Inc., a subsidiary of the corporate giant DuPont, permission to drill for oil and

Exercise II

An Extended Example

gas in the heart [11] of the new monument. You may [12] wonder, as I do, how can
this happen? [13] Wasn’t the whole purpose of creating the monument to
preserve its colorful cliffs, sweeping arches and other extraordinary resources
[14] from large-scale mineral development? Didn’t the president say he was sav-
ing [15] these lands from mining companies for our children and grandchildren?

The BLM says its hands are tied. [16] Why? Because [17] these lands were set aside
subject to “valid existing rights,” and Conoco has a lease that gives it the right to
drill. Sure [18] Conoco has a lease—more than one, in fact [19]—but [20] those leases
were originally issued without sufficient environmental study or public input. As
a result [21], none of them conveyed a valid right to drill. What’s more [22], in decid-
ing to issue a permit to drill now, the BLM did not conduct a full analysis of the en-
vironmental impacts of drilling in these incomparable lands, but instead [23]
determined there would be no significant environmental harm on the basis of an
abbreviated review that didn’t even look at drilling on the other federal leases.

Sounds like [24] Washington double-speak [25] to me. I’ve spent considerable
time on these extraordinary lands for years, and I know [26] that an oil rig in
their midst would have a major impact. What’s more [27], Conoco wants to drill
a well to find oil. Inevitably [28], more rigs, more roads, new pipelines, toxic [29]
wastes and bright lights would follow to get the oil out. The BLM couldn’t see
this, but [30] the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Environmental Protec-
tion Agency did. Both of those agencies recognized [31] the devastating [32] ef-
fects extensive oil drilling would have on this area and urged the BLM to refuse
to allow it, in order to [33] protect the monument.

Maybe [34] the problem [35] comes from giving management responsibility
for this monument to the BLM. This is the BLM’s first national monument;
almost [36] all the others are managed by the National Park Service. The Park
Service’s mission is to protect the resources [37] under its care while the bureau
has always sought to accommodate economic uses of those under its. Even so
[38], the BLM seemed [39] to be getting off to a good [40] start by enlisting broad
[41] public involvement in developing a management plan for the area. Yet
[42] the agency’s decision to allow oil drilling in the monument completely un-
dercuts [43] this process just as it is beginning.

What we’re talking about is, in the words of President Clinton, a small
piece of “God’s handiwork.” Almost [44] 41/2 million acres of irreplaceable red
rock wilderness remain outside the monument. Let us at least protect what is
within it. The many roadless [45] areas within the monument should [46] remain
so—protected as wilderness. The monument’s designation means little if [47] a
pattern of exploitation is allowed to continue.

Environmentalists—including the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, the
Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Wilderness Society—appealed
BLM’s decision to the Interior Department’s Board of Land Appeals. This ap-
peal, however [48], was rejected earlier this month. This is a terrible mistake [49].
We shouldn’t be drilling in our national monuments. Period. As President
Clinton said when dedicating the new monument, “Sometimes progress is
measured in mastering frontiers, but sometimes [50] we must measure progress
in protecting frontiers for our children and children to come.”

Allowing drilling to go forward in the Grand Staircase-Escalante Monu-
ment would permanently stain what might otherwise have been a defining
legacy of the Clinton presidency.

CHAPTER 4 ■ The Art of Close Analys is

Read the following advertisement from Equal Exchange (Copyright © 1997,
1998, 1999). For each of the numbered expressions, label the main argumenta-
tive move, if any, using the same abbreviations as in Exercise I. Then state
what you take to be the central conclusions and premises. What criticisms, if
any, do you have of this argument?

It may [1] be a little early in the morning to bring this up, but [2] if [3] you buy

coffee from large corporations [4], you are inadvertently maintaining the system

which keeps small farmers poor [5] while [6] lining the pockets [7] of rich cor-

porations. By [8] choosing Equal Exchange coffee, you can [9] help to make a

change. We believe in trading directly with small farming cooperatives at mutu-

ally agreed-upon prices with a fixed minimum rate. Then [10], should [11] the cof-

fee market decline, the farmers are still guaranteed a fair [12] price. So [13] have a

cup of Equal Exchange Coffee and make a small farmer happy [14]. Of course [15],

your decision to buy Equal Exchange need not be completely altruistic. For [16]

we take as much pride in refining the taste of our gourmet [17] coffees as [18] we

do in helping [19] the farmers who produce them. For [20] more information about

Equal Exchange or to order our line of gourmet, organic, and shade-grown coffee

directly, call 1 800 406 8289.

Exercise III

An Extended Example

This advertisement appeared in various national magazines in 2008. Circle
and label each of its key argumentative terms. State its central premises and
conclusion, and then put them into standard form. Is the result a good argu-
ment? Why or why not?

Exercise IV

CHAPTER 4 ■ The Art of Close Analys is

Provide a close analysis of the following passages by circling and labeling each
of the key argumentative terms. Then state what you take to be the central con-
clusions and premises. What criticisms, if any, do you have of each argument?

PASSAGE 1

The following encomium was written by an art critic for the New York Times, in
which this review appeared (June 6, 1992, pp. 1, 31). If you are not familiar
with Eakins’s work, looking at some reproductions might help you appreciate
this argument. You might also look up the rest of the essay, as only a small part
is reproduced here.

IS EAKINS OUR GREATEST PAINTER?

by John Russell

There never was a painter like Thomas Eakins, who was born in 1844, died in
1916, and is the subject of a great exhibition that has just opened in the
Philadelphia Museum of Art. It is not simply that in his hands painting be-
came an exact science, so that if he paints two men rowing on a river, we can
tell the month, day, and the hour that they passed under a certain bridge. We
admire Eakins for that, but we prize him above all for the new dimension of
moral awareness that he brought to American painting.

The question that he asks is not “What do we look like?” It is “What have
we done to one another?” And it is because he gives that question so full and
so convincing an answer that we ask ourselves whether Thomas Eakins was
not the greatest American painter who ever lived. Even if the question strikes
us as meaningless, we find it difficult after an exhibition such as this to think
of a convincing rival. . . .

PASSAGE 2

The following passage is an excerpt from an essay that appeared in the Boston
Review (vol. 7, no. 5 [October 1982], pp. 13–19), which is funded by the National
Endowment for the Humanities, a government agency that supports scholarship
and the arts. Its author was professor of drama at Stanford University.

BEYOND THE WASTELAND: WHAT AMERICAN
TV CAN LEARN FROM THE BBC

by Martin Esslin

What are the advantages and disadvantages of a public TV service as compared
to a completely commercial system? One of the dangers inherent in a public
service system is paternalism: Some authority decides what the viewers should

Exercise V

An Extended Example

see and hear simply on the basis of what it arbitrarily feels would be good for
them. Yet in countries where a highly developed public system exists alongside
a commercial one, that danger is minimized because of the market pressure on
the commercial system to give its audience what it wants. Indeed, in a dual sys-
tem the danger is often that the public service may be tempted to ignore its
stated purpose to serve the public interest and instead pander to mass prefer-
ences because of a sense of competition with the commercial networks.

Another problem that plagues public TV service is that it may run short of
money, which in turn can increase its dependence on the government. The ex-
tent of government dependence is intimately connected to how the public
broadcasting service is financed. In West Germany and Italy, for example, the
public broadcasting service takes advertising, but it is usually confined to a
clearly delimited area of the network’s programming. In Britain the BBC . . .
relies entirely on its annual license fee, which guarantees it a steady income
and allows long-term planning. In periods of severe inflation, the license-fee
system leaves the BBC in a dangerous position vis-a-vis the government, and
the network’s income may decline in real terms. In countries where the public
broadcasting service is financed by an annual allocation in the national
budget, long-term planning becomes more difficult and the dependence on the
government is far greater. Nevertheless, public TV services financed on that
pattern, such as the ABC in Australia and the CBC in Canada, provide pro-
grams of high quality that are genuine alternatives to the fare on the numer-
ous popular and prosperous commercial networks. In Canada, this includes
programs from the three commercial American networks.

One of the most important positive features of services under public con-
trol is their ability to provide planned, high-quality viewing alternatives. The
BBC, for example, has two television channels, BBC 1 and BBC 2. The program
planning on these two networks is closely coordinated so that highly popular
material on one channel is regularly paired with more specialized or demand-
ing fare on the other. And though the percentage of the audience that tunes in
to the challenging programming may be small, the scale of magnitude opera-
tive in the mass media is such that even a small percentage of the viewing au-
dience represents a very large number of people indeed. A popular dramatic
series on BBC 1, for instance, may reach an audience of 20 percent of the adult
population of Britain—about ten million people. A play by Shakespeare on
BBC 2 that may attract an audience of only 5 percent nonetheless reaches
about two-and-a-half million people—a substantial audience for a work of art.
It would take a theater with a seating capacity of 1,000 about seven years, or
2,500 performances, to reach an equivalent number of people! Nor should it be
overlooked that this audience will include people whose influence may be
greater in the long run than that of the ten million who watched the entertain-
ment program. In this system, no segment of the viewing public is forced to
compromise with any other. In our example, not only did BBC 1 provide a
popular entertainment program as an alternative to the Shakespeare, but, in
addition, the commercial network offered still another popular program. By
careful—perhaps paternalistic—planning the general audience satisfaction
was substantially increased.

(continued)

CHAPTER 4 ■ The Art of Close Analys is

One of the difficulties of the American situation is that the size of the
United States favors decentralization and the fragmentation of initiatives for
the more ambitious programming of the public service network. A revitalized
PBS would need a strong central governing body that could allocate to local
producing stations the substantial sums of money they require for ambitious
projects—projects that could compete with the best offerings of the rich com-
mercial competitors.

Using existing satellite technology, such a truly national network of public
service television could be made available to the entire country. If a public
service television organization was able to provide simultaneous, alternative
programming along the lines of BBC 1 and BBC 2, the cultural role of televi-
sion in the United States could be radically improved, and the most powerful
communication medium in history could realize its positive potential to in-
form, educate, and provide exposure to diverse cultural ideas.

PASSAGE 3

This article was published in the New York Times (January 15, 2004, p. A33).

LIFE (AND DEATH) ON MARS

by Paul Davies

Sydney, Australia—President Bush’s announcement yesterday that the United
States will soon be pointing its rockets toward Mars will doubtless be greeted
with delight by space scientists. . . . And yet the scientific community’s enthu-
siasm will surely be tempered by skepticism. Scientists, it’s worth remember-
ing, rejoiced when President George H. W. Bush unveiled a Mars project in
1989. The same scientists then despaired when the plan quickly evaporated
amid spiraling projected costs and shifting priorities. . . .

Why is going to Mars so expensive? Mainly it’s the distance from Earth. At
its closest point in orbit, Mars lies 35 million miles away from us, necessitating
a journey of many months, whereas reaching the Moon requires just a few
days’ flight. On top of this, Mars has a surface gravity that, though only 38
percent of Earth’s, is much greater than the Moon’s. It takes a lot of fuel to
blast off Mars and get back home. If the propellant has to be transported there
from Earth, costs of a launching soar. . . .

There is, however, an obvious way to slash the costs and bring Mars within
reach of early manned exploration. The answer lies with a one-way mission.

Most people react with instinctive horror at the suggestion. I recall my own
sense of discomfort when I met an aging American scientist who claimed to
have trained for a one-way mission to the Moon in the pre-Apollo days. And
in the case of the barren Moon, that reaction is largely justified. There is little
on the Moon to sustain human life. Mars, however, is a different story. Because
of the planet’s relatively benign environment, it is theoretically able to support
a permanent human presence. If provided with the right equipment, astronauts

An Extended Example

would have a chance of living there for years. A one-way trip to Mars need not
mean a quick demise.

Every two years the orbit of Mars creates a window of opportunity to send
fresh supplies at a reasonable cost. An initial colony of four astronauts, equipped
with a small nuclear reactor and a couple of rover vehicles, could make their
own oxygen, grow some food and even initiate building projects using local raw
materials. Supplemented by food shipments, medical supplies and replacement
gadgets from home, the colony could be sustained indefinitely. To be sure, the
living conditions would be uncomfortable, but the colonists would have the op-
portunity to do ground-breaking scientific work and blaze a trail that would en-
sure them a permanent place in the annals of discovery.

Obviously this strategy carries significant risks in addition to those faced by
a conventional Mars mission. Major equipment failure could leave the colony
without enough power, oxygen or food. An accident might kill or disable an as-
tronaut who provided some vital expertise. A supply drop might fail, condemn-
ing the colonists to starve in a very public way. Even if nothing went wrong, the
astronauts’ lives would certainly be shortened by the harsh conditions. . . .

Would it be right to ask people to accept such conditions for the sake of sci-
ence, or even humanity? The answer has to be yes. We already expect certain
people to take significant risks on our behalf, such as special forces operatives
or test pilots. Some people gleefully dice with death in the name of sport or ad-
venture. Dangerous occupations that reduce life expectancy through exposure
to hazardous conditions or substances are commonplace. . . .

Who would put their hand up for a one-way ticket to Mars? I work among
people who study astrobiology and planetary science, and there is no lack of
eager young scientists who would sign up right now, given half a chance. But
it would make more sense to pick mature, older scientists with reduced life ex-
pectancy. Other considerations, like weight, emotional stability and scientific
credentials, would of course have to be factored in.

The early outpost wouldn’t be left to wither and die. Rather, it would form
the basis for a much more ambitious colonization program. Over the years
new equipment and additional astronauts would be sent to join the original
crew. In time, the colony would grow to the point of being self-sustaining.

When this stage was reached, humanity would have a precious insurance
policy against catastrophe at home. During the next millennium there is a
significant chance that civilization on Earth will be destroyed by an asteroid,
a killer plague or a global war. A Martian colony could keep the flame of civ-
ilization and culture alive until Earth could be reverse-colonized from Mars.

Would NASA entertain a one-way policy for human Mars exploration?
Probably not. But other, more adventurous space agencies in Europe or Asia
might. The next giant leap for mankind won’t come without risk.

PASSAGE 4

The following letter to the editor was written by Charlie Buttrey, a lawyer, and
published in the White River Junction, Vermont, Valley News on Wednesday,
August 29, 2001.

(continued)

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CHAPTER 4 ■ The Art of Close Analys is

THREE FALLACIES ABOUT GUN RIGHTS

by Charlie Buttrey

In the never-ending debate on these pages over gun ownership, those who fa-
vor expansive gun rights appear to have adopted one (or more) of three lines
of argument:

The Constitution protects the individual right to gun ownership.

The crime rate in Great Britain (where gun ownership is strictly controlled)
is “skyrocketing.”

In colonial days, the vast majority of people owned guns.

Each premise, however, is erroneous.
In our constitutional system, the ultimate arbiter of what the Constitution

says is the Supreme Court. One may not agree with its rulings (for example,
many people do not approve of its ruling extending First Amendment protec-
tions to flag burning or Fourth Amendment protections to the decision to ter-
minate a pregnancy), but, under our system of government, once the Supreme
Court has ruled a certain way, that ruling stands as the law of the land. On the
issue of whether the Second Amendment encompasses an individual’s right to
possess firearms, the Supreme Court has spoken. And the answer is that it
does not. Like it or not, that is the law of the land. It is true that the state con-
stitutions in both Vermont and New Hampshire provide for the protection of
individual gun ownership. In neither instance, however, is such a right ab-
solute. For example, the New Hampshire Supreme Court has ruled that a law
prohibiting felons from possessing firearms is not unconstitutional. Similarly,
a Vermont law prohibiting people from carrying loaded firearms in their vehi-
cles was held to be permissible.

The notion that Great Britain’s crime rate is skyrocketing is belied by the
facts. British government statistics reveal a steady increase in most crime cate-
gories between 1980 and 1995 and a gradual leveling off in the last five years.
Of course, gun-related crimes are minuscule when compared with those in the
United States. Guns are used in robberies in Great Britain less than 5 percent
of the time. And from 1980 to 1999, annual gun-related homicides in Britain
ranged from a low of 7 to a high of 42. In comparison, according to U.S. Bureau
of Justice statistics, an average of 10,000 gun-related homicides occurred each
year in this country during the same period.

Finally, the suggestion that our colonial forebears were almost universally
armed has been thoroughly repudiated. In his recent book, Arming America,
Emory University historian Michael Bellesiles reveals that the average colonial
citizen had virtually no access to or training in the use of firearms, and that the
few guns that did exist were kept under strict control. The fewer than 10 per-
cent of Americans who did possess guns in the years prior to the Civil War
were generally neglectful of the weapons and those guns were expensive,
clumsy, unreliable, and hard to maintain.

There may be sound policy grounds that can be advanced in favor of rela-
tively unrestricted gun ownership. Those arguments should be made, how-
ever, from a perspective of historical truth and legal accuracy.

101

An Extended Example

PASSAGE 5

The following extract comes from Compulsory Mis-Education and the Community
of Scholars (New York: Vintage Books, 1966). Copyright © 1962, 1964 by Paul
Goodman. Used by permission of Random House, Inc.

A PROPOSAL TO ABOLISH GRADING

by Paul Goodman

Let half a dozen of the prestigious universities—Chicago, Stanford, the Ivy
League—abolish grading, and use testing only and entirely for pedagogic pur-
poses as teachers see fit.

Anyone who knows the frantic temper of the present schools will understand
the transvaluation of values that would be effected by this modest innovation.
For most of the students, the competitive grade has come to be the essence. The
naïve teacher points to the beauty of the subject and the ingenuity of the re-
search; the shrewd student asks if he is responsible for that on the final exam.

Let me at once dispose of an objection whose unanimity is quite fascinating.
I think that the great majority of professors agree that grading hinders teaching
and creates a bad spirit, going as far as cheating and plagiarizing. I have before
me the collection of essays, Examining in Harvard College, and this is the consen-
sus. It is uniformly asserted, however, that the grading is inevitable; for how
else will the graduate schools, the foundations, the corporations know whom to
accept, reward, hire? How will the talent scouts know whom to tap? By testing
the applicants, of course, according to the specific task-requirements of the in-
ducting institution, just as applicants for the Civil Service or for licenses in
medicine, law, and architecture are tested. Why should Harvard professors do
the testing for corporations and graduate schools? . . .

There are several good reasons for testing, and kinds of test. But if the aim
is to discover weakness, what is the point of down-grading and punishing,
and thereby inviting the student to conceal his weakness, by faking and
bulling, if not cheating? The natural conclusion of [education] is the insight it-
self, not a grade for having had it. For the important purpose of placement, if
one can establish in the student the belief that one is testing not to grade and
making invidious comparisons but for his own advantage, the student should
normally seek his own level, where he is challenged and yet capable, rather
than trying to get by. If the student dares to accept himself as he is, a teacher’s
grade is a crude instrument compared with a student’s self-awareness. But it
is rare in our universities that students are encouraged to notice objectively
their vast confusion. Unlike Socrates, our teachers rely on power-drives rather
than shame and ingenuous idealism.

Many students are lazy, so teachers try to goad or threaten them by grad-
ing. In the long run this must do more harm than good. Laziness is a character-
defense. It may be a way of avoiding learning, in order to protect the conceit
that one is already perfect. . . . It may be a way of avoiding just the risk of

(continued)

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CHAPTER 4 ■ The Art of Close Analys is

failing and being down-graded. Sometimes it is a way of politely saying, “I
won’t.” But since it is the authoritarian grown-up demands that have created
such attitudes in the first place, why repeat the trauma? There comes a time
when we must treat people as adults, laziness and all. It is one thing coura-
geously to fire a do-nothing out of your class; it is quite another thing to eval-
uate him with a lordly F.

Most important of all, it is often obvious that balking in doing the work,
especially among bright young people who get to great universities, means
exactly what it says: The work does not suit me, not this subject, or not at this
time, or not in this school, or not in school altogether. The student might not
be bookish; he might be school-tired; perhaps his development ought now to
take another direction. Yet, unfortunately, if such a student is intelligent and is
not sure of himself, he can be bullied into passing, and this obscures every-
thing. My hunch is that I am describing a common situation. What a grim
waste of young life and teacherly effort! Such a student will retain nothing of
what he has “passed” in. Sometimes he must get mononucleosis to tell his
story and be believed.

And, ironically, the converse is also probably commonly true. A student
flunks and is mechanically weeded out, who is really ready and eager to learn
in a scholastic setting, but he has not quite caught on. A good teacher can rec-
ognize the situation, but the computer wreaks its will.

PASSAGE 6

The following op-ed appeared in The Dartmouth on April 30, 2007. The author
was a college student at the time.

MAKE IT 18

by Ben Selznick

Did you get wasted this weekend? Are you under the age of 21? Don’t fret, my
underage friends, you are not alone. Across America, hundreds of thousands
of underage men and women enjoyed booze this weekend—illegally. In re-
sponse to a recent news article in The Dartmouth (“Ex-Middlebury president:
lower drinking age to 18,” April 25), I would like to agree with the former
president of Middlebury College that states should try once again lowering
the drinking age to 18.

We must first get our facts straight. The drinking age is not set by the fed-
eral government; it is set by the states. Currently, each state has its law set at
21. However, this figure neither necessarily reflects research and careful con-
sideration nor appeals to constituents. Instead, it reflects the fact that drinking
age became tied to highway funds somewhere along the way. Because of this,
were a state to lower their drinking age, they would also have to significantly

103

An Extended Example

raise taxes to offset the lost highway funds from the government. This hand-
tying is asinine. If the drinking age is a state decision, it should be made by
states independently of funds for highways. Before any progress can be made,
lawmakers must sever this illogical connection.

Were drinking age to become a true state consideration, states could engage
in open debate about the issue. Several arguments could then be made in
favor of lowering the age to 18.

First: A fair portion of drinkers between the ages of 18 and 21 are at colleges
where alcohol can be easily obtained. Just think about this weekend and all the
people without wristbands—because they forgot their IDs at home I’m sure—
who were able to obtain alcohol. This easy availability leads to a very danger-
ous game of cat and mouse between colleges and their students. In this game,
colleges know full well that underage drinking exists. Students know that they
are drinking underage and therefore illegally. And yet, the game continues
with colleges trying to make sure that no alcohol-related tragedies occur. This
game isn’t the fault of colleges, nor is it the fault of students. Instead, it is the
fault of our law, which classifies part of this college-age set as “underage” and
the rest as “of age.” When it comes to colleges, our law simply doesn’t reflect
reality. It must therefore be changed.

Second: At present, keeping the drinking age at 21 prevents America from
having an open and honest conception of alcohol the way, say, continental
Europe does. In France, where the drinking age is 16, alcohol is understood as a
complement to a meal as well as an intoxicant. Though people certainly drink to
get drunk, the concept of binge drinking beer through a funnel is seen as a bar-
baric abuse of alcohol. More importantly, France’s policy reflects the understand-
ing that people are going to drink alcohol whether the activity is legal or not.
America stubbornly refuses to accept this fact. Perhaps it is our long history of
teetotalers, prohibition and general dislike of alcohol by various groups. What-
ever our past, our present situation is one where binge drinking is the norm and
alcohol education to college students reeks of being too little too late.

Third: The main concern against lowering the drinking age comes from
Mothers Against Drunk Driving. MADD has statistics to back up their claim
that a lower drinking age yields more drunk driving accidents. But if the
drinking age were lowered and then supplemented with honest, not pander-
ing, alcohol education programs in schools, perhaps over time our approach
towards alcohol as a culture would change.

America has the highest drinking age of any country on Earth. Although in-
tended to protect us, in the end this high barrier leads to unsafe abuse of alco-
hol nationwide. States must engage in true conversation with their
constituents and consider arguments from frustrated college administrators as
well as MADD.

In the end, a state may conclude that 21 is a good age. But they may also
conclude that lowering the drinking age is a practical solution to a pressing
problem. After all, by changing the definition of “underage drinking,” we
could alleviate its negative effects.

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CHAPTER 4 ■ The Art of Close Analys is

Describe the purpose of, intended audience for, and standpoint in each of the
arguments in Exercises I-VI.

Exercise VII

Practice close analysis some more by doing close analyses of:

1. one of the passages in the Discussion Questions at the end of Chapter 1,

2. one of the articles in Part V of this book,

3. an editorial or advertisement from your local paper,

4. something that you read for another course,

5. a lecture by your professor in another course (or this course!), or

6. a paper by you or by a friend in another course.

Exercise VI

1. If, as some social critics have maintained, the pervasive nature of television
has created generation upon generation of intellectually passive
automatons, why study close analysis?

2. Television commercials are often arguments in miniature. Recount several
recent television commercials and identify the argumentative devices at
work.

Discussion Questions

DEEP ANALYSIS

Arguments in everyday life rarely occur in isolation. They usually come in the mid-

dle of much verbiage that is not essential to the argument itself. Everyday arguments

are also rarely complete. Essential premises are often omitted. Many such omissions

are tolerable because we are able to convey a great deal of information indirectly by

conversational implication. Nevertheless, to give a critical evaluation of an argu-

ment, it is necessary to isolate the argument from extraneous surroundings, to make

explicit unstated parts of the argument, and to arrange them in a systematic order.

This puts us in a better position to decide on the soundness or unsoundness of the

argument in question. This chapter will develop methods for reconstructing argu-

ments so that they may be understood and evaluated in a fair and systematic fashion.

These methods will then be illustrated by applying them to a disagreement that

depends on fundamental principles.

GETTING DOWN TO BASICS

To understand an argument, it is useful to put it into standard form. As we
saw in Chapter 3, this is done simply by writing down the numbered prem-
ises, drawing a line, adding “ ” followed by the conclusion, and indicating
which premises are supposed to be reasons for the conclusion. That is all we
write down in standard form, but there is often a lot more in the passage
that includes the argument. It is not uncommon for the stated argument to
stretch over several pages, whereas the basic argument has only a few prem-
ises and a single conclusion.

One reason for this is that people often go off on tangents. They start to
argue for one claim, but that reminds them of something else, so they talk
about that for a while; then they finally return to their original topic. One ex-
ample occurred during the Republican presidential candidates’ debate on
October 9, 2007, when Governor Mitt Romney said,

. . . We’re also going to have to get serious about treating Ahmadinejad [the
President of Iran] like the rogue and buffoon that he is. And it was outrageous
for the United Nations to invite him to come to this country. It was outrageous
for Columbia to invite him to speak at their university. This is a person who
denied the Holocaust, a person who has spoken about genocide, is seeking the

105

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CHAPTER 5 ■ Deep Analys is

means to carry it out. And it is unacceptable to this country to allow that individ-
ual to have control of launching a nuclear weapon. And so we will take the
action necessary to keep that from happening . . .

Romney’s criticisms of the United Nations and Columbia are not really part
of his argument, because they do not support his conclusion that the United
States needs to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of Ahmadinejad.

Such tangents can be completely irrelevant or unnecessary, and they
often make it hard to follow the argument. Some people even go off on tan-
gents on purpose to confuse their opponents and hide gaping holes in their
arguments. The irrelevant diversion is sometimes called a red herring (after a
man who, when pursued by hounds, threw them off his scent by dragging a
red herring across his trail). More generally, this maneuver might be called
the trick of excess verbiage. It violates the conversational rules of Quantity,
Relevance, or Manner, which were discussed in Chapter 2.

To focus on the argument itself, we need to look carefully at each parti-
cular sentence to determine whether it affects the validity or strength of the
argument or the truth of its premises. If we decide that a sentence is not nec-
essary for the argument, then we should not add it when we list the prem-
ises and conclusion in standard form. Of course, we have to be careful not to
omit anything that would improve the argument, but we also do not want
to include too much, because irrelevant material simply makes it more diffi-
cult to analyze and evaluate the argument.

Another source of extra material is repetition. Consider Senator John
Edwards’s response to a question about the Defense of Marriage Act in the
Democratic presidential candidates’ debate on January 22, 2004:

These are issues that should be left [to the states]. Massachusetts, for example,
has just made a decision—the Supreme Court at least has made a decision—that
embraces the notion of gay marriage. I think these are decisions the states should
have the power to make. And the Defense of Marriage Act, as I understand it—
you’re right, I wasn’t there when it was passed—but as I understand it, would
have taken away that power. And I think that’s wrong—that power should not
be taken away from the states. . . .

Now compare:

These are issues that should be left to the states.

These are decisions that states should have the power to make.

That power should not be taken away from the states.

All three of these sentences say pretty much the same thing, so we do not
need them all.

Why do people repeat themselves like this? Sometimes they just forget that
they already made the point before, but often repetition accomplishes a goal.
Good speakers regularly repeat their main points to remind their audience of
what was said earlier. Repetition is subtler when it is used to explain some-
thing. A point can often be clarified by restating it in a new way. Repetition

107

Gett ing Down to Bas ics

can also function as a kind of assurance, as an expression of confidence, or as
an indication of how important a point is. Some writers seem to think that if
they say something often enough, people will come to believe it. Whether or
not this trick works, if two sentences say equivalent things, there is no need to
list both sentences when the argument is put into standard form. Listing the
same premise twice will not make the argument any better from a logical
point of view.

Sometimes guarding terms can also be dropped. If I say, “I think Miranda
is at home, so we can probably meet her there,” this argument might be rep-
resented in standard form thus:

(1) I think Miranda is at home.

(2) We can probably meet her there. (from 1)

This is misleading. My thoughts are not what make us able to meet Miranda
at home. My thoughts do not even increase the probability that she is at
home or that we can meet her there. It is the fact that Miranda is at home that
provides a reason for the conclusion. Thus, it is clearer to drop the guarding
phrase (“I think”) when putting the argument into standard form. But you
have to be careful, for not all guarding phrases can be dropped. When I say
“We can probably meet her there,” I might not want to say simply, “We can
meet her there.” After all, even if she is there now, we might not be able to
get there before she leaves. Then to drop “probably” from my conclusion
would distort what I meant to say and would make my argument more
questionable, so you should not drop that guarding term if you want to un-
derstand my argument charitably and accurately.

Here’s another example: If a friend says that you ought to buckle your
seat belt because you could have an accident, it would distort her argument
to drop the guarding term (“could”), because she is not claiming that you
definitely will have an accident, or even that you probably will have one.
The chance of an accident is significant enough to show that you ought to
buckle your seat belt, so this guarding term should be kept when the argu-
ment is put into standard form.

It is also possible to drop assuring terms in some cases. Suppose someone
says, “You obviously cannot play golf in Alaska in January, so there’s no
point in bringing your clubs.” There is no need to keep the assuring term
(“obviously”) in the premise. It might even be misleading, because the issue
is whether the premise is true, not whether it is obvious. The argument can-
not be refuted by showing that, even though you in fact cannot play golf in
Alaska in January, this is not obvious, since there might be indoor golf
courses. In contrast, assuring terms cannot be dropped in some other cases.
For example, if someone argues, “We know that poverty causes crime, be-
cause many studies have shown that it does,” then the assuring terms (“We
know that . . .” and “studies have shown that . . .”) cannot be dropped with-
out turning the argument into an empty shell: “Poverty causes crime, be-
cause it does.” The point of this argument is to cite the sources of our