Book Reviews 269 

Such a substantive notion of the web of belief begins in Toulmin with the 
distinction between warrant and backing and the essential role of rebuttal. But 
those deep structural affinities remain disconnected from their natural arena of 
employment (disciplined inquiry) because of the enormous difficulty of articulating 
the relationships within the web and especially how the weighting of nodes changes 
as a function of disturbances across the network. My intuition is that such a model 
can be available working from clear instances, and requires a return to 
metamathematical formulations in places of informal descriptions. On such a view, 
the "constitutive rules" of disciplinary practice are rules for settling cases more 
than they are indications of cases settled. They don't give us acceptable premises 
as much as acceptable modes for exploring hypotheses. Falliblism in the disciplines 
is no mere epistemological posture; it constructs the very tissue of dialectical 
growth and it is the engine of epistemic adequacy over time. But that is a story for 
another place. 

MARK WEINSTEIN Montclair State University 

COOPERATIVE ARGUMENTATION' A MODEL FOR DELIBERATIVE 
COMMUNITY By JOSINA M. MAKAU AND DEBIAN L. MARTY. Prospect 
Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 200 I. Pp. xiii, 1-295. ISBN: 1-57766-139-7. 
US$19.95 

All information, we are told in the first chapter of Cooperative Argumentation, is 
partial and derives from a specific perspective, indeed, often from an intentional 
desire to promote that very perspective. Objectivity is not something we can depend 
on, especially when we are trying to assess information or understand a position. 
"Every perspective is necessarily partial," appears in italics on page II, followed 
by the dictum that understanding viewpoints alternative to our own expands our 
sense of knowing the full story. Thus these two ideas, being critically aware of 
unintended and intended bias, and seeking to expand our understanding of issues 
in an open and critical way form the pillars that underlie this interesting book. The 
emphasis is that being critical involves operating within a community, and that 
doing so requires both cooperative values and specific skills. 

This book is not a traditional book on Informal Logic. The description offallacies 
takes roughly 15 pages, and the entire chapter, "Evaluating Arguments," is the final 
one in the book and uses about 40 pages. The book is largely concerned with 
articulating the following premiss (italics and bold in original): Dialogue is "a process 
of communicating with (rather than at, to or for) others and the sharing of a 
mutual commitment to hear and be heard" (46). There is a fair bit in this statement 
to give pause to a philosopher: how do we distinguish the four types of talking? 
how can we know when someone is "heard"? One must persist in the authors' 
explication to understand the approach. Emotions, for example, playa significant 
role. So-called "critical emotions," viz., empathy and compassion, allow us to better 
understand a position, though not necessarily accept it. Even anger plays a role in 
signaling intensity of feeling and potential problems within a relationship. 



270 Book Reviews 

In order to undertake cooperative argument one needs certain skills. The first is 
a concept of dialogic interaction that emphasizes the idea of interdependence and 
skilled listening. The latter is the kind of listening that permits one to understand 
the content and import of a given position. When listening with empathy and for 
content is achieved then one is doing "critical listening." Similarly, cooperative 
argument is a form of communication in which one systematically avoids the right! 
wrong, true/false dilemmas in favour of understanding someone's position and 
why it differs from one's own. Competitive argumentation is about winning, while 
cooperative arguing permits viewing "those who disagree with us as resources 
rather than rivals (88, italics in original)." This, in turn, can only happen if we, the 
arguers, are willing to take risks and allow that our views can change and include 
some of those of our argument partners. 

It is in Chapter 4, "Elements of Argumentation," that the structural discussion 
of argument components begins. The prior chapters have established the nature 
and value of cooperative communication as one in which all voices are welcomed 
and heard, and competition is set aside in favour of building a consensus that 
utilizes all available resources. The first major element introduced is reasonableness, 
which is, not surprisingly, given a vague definition. Reasonableness involves logic 
and a taste for coherent, linear arguing, but also critical emotions and moral 
imagination. These last, when mixed in with the more traditional ways of evaluating 
arguments in Informal Logic add the humanistic values, the elements of 
reasonableness that keep us from being overrun by mere cold logic. They go on to 
discuss a variety of elements such as claims, issues (i.e., the controversy to which 
the claim is related,) commonplaces (points of agreement between the discussion 
partners,) and other notions. 

The remainder of the text details a combination of active techniques for proper 
advocacy, deliberation and argument evaluation. The emphasis, as in the earlier 
chapters, is on creating a community of discussants who have the goal of agreeing 
to investigate, deliberate, and utilize all the resources available to arrive at an 
intelligent and humane decision. This means involving all the partners to the 
discussion, and avoiding being misled by any extreme - logical as well as emotional. 
When a consensus built upon the resources that all the participants bring to the 
discussion is created, then it will be strong, worthwhile and compelling. This will 
naturally be so because it includes the goals, needs and desires of those involved, 
and has encouraged active participation involvement allowing all parties to feel 
heard and included. 

This is a very interesting book that can provide the instructor of an Informal 
Logic course with interesting insights and ideas. There are concrete plans for 
downplaying competitiveness and increasing cooperation that students in a 
traditional Critical Reasoning course will find beneficial. As I have argued (Gilbert, 
1995), there is a great danger in creating arguers who see their task as one of finding 
fault and beating down opponents. This text certainly speaks against those 
tendencies in explicit terms. Makau and Marty use resources deriving from the 
fields of communication, mediation and social psychology far more than the literature 
of Argumentation Theory or Informal Logic. As a result, most instructors, while 
finding the book interesting and valuable, would not be likely to choose it as a core 
text. There are just too many issues one expects to cover that are not given sufficient 
space from the Informal Logic point of view. There is, for example, no demonstration 



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Book Reviews 271 

of argument diagramming, and though the square of opposition is mentioned, it is 
barely explicated. Fallacies are covered, but quickly, and not as a central tool for 
critical reasoning. 

These comments should not be taken as indicating shortcomings. Rather, the 
text is not intended for courses which now use texts such as Johnson and Blair 
(Logical Self-Defense), Govier (A Practical Study of Argument), or Groarke and 
Tindale (Good Reasoning Matters). The material on which they rely, and there are 
a great number of references, demonstrate that the fields are different. I would have 
preferred if more of the work done in Argumentation Theory had been included, but 
perhaps limitations had to be set. In any case, as a secondary or ancillary text, 
Cooperative Argumentation would serve as an interesting and nicely thought out 
resource for a course in critical reasoning. 

Reference 

Gilbert, Michael A. 1995. "Arguments and Arguers". Teaching Philosophy. 18: 2: 
125-138. 

MIICHAEL A. GILBERT York University 

ABDUCTIVE REASONING. By DOUGLAS N. WALTON. Tuscaloosa, AL: The 
University of Alabama Press, 2004. Pp. xvi, 1-304. ISBN -0817314415, US$40 
cloth. 

Once upon a time there was a philosopher with a bag of beans. The philosopher 
was Charles Sanders Peirce, and he used the beans to cultivate a seminal distinction 
between three types of reasoning: deduction, induction, and abduction. The story 
goes as follows. Suppose we know as a fact that all the beans in a bag are white and 
that a handful of beans have been taken from such bag: then we can safely infer that 
all these beans are white-and we do so by deduction. Now imagine instead we 
have seen a number of beans being drawn from the bag, and all of them were white: 
even if we are not sure that every bean in that bag is white, we can reasonably infer 
such general rule from the statistical correlation we observed, reasoning by 
induction. Finally, let us say that again we know that all the beans in the bag are 
white, and then we notice a handful of white beans on a table nearby: under these 
circumstances, it seems reasonable to presume that those beans were drawn from 
that particular bag-and this is abduction. 

More than a century later, the notion of abduction is still controversial in 
philosophy, linguistics, law, psychology, and computer science. Walton's Abductive 
Reasoning is one of the most recent attempts to struggle with this fascinating 
problem, and one of the most remarkable in its interdisciplinary breadth and scholarly 
erudition. Walton conceives abduction as inference to the best explanation, and in 
this book he endeavours to provide a detailed account of what exactly is meant by 
'best explanation'. His main contribution is to outline a dialogical model of 
explanation, and apply it to the analysis of abductive reasoning. This also reveals 
the connections between abduction and argumentation, since Walton's model of