How Philosophical is Informal Logic? 

JOHN WOODS The University of Lethbridge 

Abstract: Consider the proposition, "Infor-
mal logic is a subdiscipline of philosophy". 
The best chance of showing this to be true is 
showing that informal logic is part of logic, 
which in turn is a part of philosophy. Part 1 is 
given over to the task of sorting out these con-
nections. If successful, informal logic can in-
deed be seen as part of philosophy; but there 
is no question of an exclusive relationship. Part 
2 is a critical appraisal of the suggestion that 
informal logic is applied epistemology. Part 3 
examines the claim that informal logic has failed 
to penetrate into mainstream philosophy, and 
suggestions for amelioration are considered. 

Resume: Examinons la proposition, «La 
logique non formelle est une sous-discipline 
de la philosophie». La meilleure fa~on 
d' augmenter nos chances de montrer qu' elle 
est vraie est d'etablir que la logique non 
formelle fait partie de la logique, qui en son 
tour fait partie de la philosophie. Cet article 
se divise en trois parties. Premierement, on 
c1arifie ces rapports. Si on reussit, la logique 
non forme lie peut en effet faire partie de la 
philosophie, mais iI n'est pas question d'un 
rapport exclusif. Deuxiemement, on evalue 
la suggestion que 1a logique non formelle est 
I'epistemologie appliquee. Troisiemement, 
on examine l'enonce que la logique non 
formeHe n' a pas reussi it se faire accepter 
par la philosophie traditionnelle, et des sug-
gestions pour ameliorer la situation. 

Keywords: informal logic, logic argument, argumentation, logical form, formal logic, 
formal description, idealization, models, epistemology, philosophy, proper basicality, 
justification. relevance, acceptability, sufficiency. 

1 have a great deal of sympathy with the intentions of those philosophers 
who speak of "informal logic", but I don't think that any clarity is gained by 
using the term "logic" for what they are doing. [Hintikka (1985)] 

1. Logic 

1.1 Logic as a Service Discipline 

Although logic has its own parochial objectives, it has always had additional ends 
in view. Aristotle wanted his logic for its role in a wholly general theory of argu-
ment. I The theory of syllogisms was to serve as the logical core of the larger 

© Informal Logic Vol. 20, No.2 (2000): pp. 139-167. 



140 John Woods 

theory; but there was never any prospect of an identity between them. The father 
of logic wanted among other things, a theory of refutation, a theory that would 
discipline the distinction between good refutations and good-looking refutations 
or, as Aristotle himself put it, between genuine and sophistical refutations. There is 
no such account to be found in the theory of syllogisms as such. The theory of 
refutation stands apart from the syllogistic; but does so in a systematic way. It is 
a nonconservative extension of the logic of syllogisms. 

Frege is the independent co-founder of modern logic, which would be an in-
dispensable component in the reduction of arithmetic. Frege's motivation was 
entirely epistemological. He wanted to establish that, pace Kant, arithmetic was 
not a synthetic discipline. This would be done by showing that number theory 
reduces without relevant loss to the union of set theory and a second order func-
tional calculus, both of which Frege took to be analytic. "Logicism" is the name of 
Frege's epistemological thesis, and not (I say in passing) what Johnson and Blair 
take it to be, viz., "the view that logical form (a la Russell) holds the key to 
understanding the structure of all arguments ... " (102).2 . 

The arithmetic ofFrege's interest was being revolutionized by Cantor and oth-
ers. It was a theory that recognized actual but additively incompleteable infinities; 
arithmetic had gone transfinite. This encumbered the reduction process with two 
rather interesting challenges, one ontological and the other semantic. Ontologica\ly 
it was necessary to have convincing examples of transfinite objects. Semantically 
it was necessary to show how discrete and exhaustive reference could be achieved 
within actually infinite domains. The first requirement was met by set theory, the 
second by the theory of quantification. 

It is said that Aristotle is the originator offormallogic, and thus the progenitor 
of a tradition of which Frege was heir. This is a mistake. There are no formal 
languages in Aristotle's logic, and no express manipulation of what later would be 
called logical forms. If indeed Aristotle is the father of formal deductive logic, it 
cannot be true as Johnson and Blair claim that logical form is its "chief analytical 
tool."(94) Nor is Aristotle's logic a theory of validity. Validity is presupposed in the 
syllogistic but it isn't analyzed; it is a theoretical primitive.) Aristotle saw syllo-
gisms as restrictions of valid arguments, and he saw such arguments in turn as de-
contextualized propositional abstractions from real-life interpersonal argumenta-
tive exchanges. 4 Syllogisms are valid arguments which satisfy further conditions. 
These conditions conspire to make of the syllogistic the first stab ever at an 
intuitionistic, nonmonotonic, relevant and hyperconsistent logic; but that is an-
other story. 5 So here, too, I demur from Johnson and Blair. If Aristotle is the father 
offormal deductive logic, it cannot be true to say that validity is its "main evaluational 
function"(94). I must also part company with Hitchcock who holds that what "is 
new [about present-day informal logic] is the central focus on argumentation in 
natural language, as an interpersonal, social, purposive practice" (130). True, yes. 
New, no. 



How Philosophical Is Informal Logic? 141 

Aristotle invented logic and pledged it to service in the general theory of argu-
ment, that is, of real-life argument, of argument on the hoof.6 There is nothing in 
Frege that answers to this interest. Frege was engineering a bold and ultimately 
unsustainable mDve in mathematical epistemics. Even Aristotle's syllogisms were 
constructions of natural language, but Frege distrusted natural languages to the 
point of obsessiveness. His first great accomplishment as a logician was his 
Begrijfsschrift, an artificial language. In this Frege was at one with the other 
independent co-founder of modem logic. Peirce insisted that there could be no 
such thing as a logic of natural languages. He was equally set against practical 
logic. The two rejections are connected. Logic was starting to be understood-
with a hefty boost from Boole'-as a theory which distributed its target properties 
by recursion over syntactic structures. The intended distribution procedures could 
not be made to work smoothly, or even at all, for the objects of ordinary grammar. 
It was necessary to have syntactic structures of appropriate sharpness and sim-
plicity. To this end, the language of logic would now be in Weinstein's apt phrase 
a "stylized language". This precludes practical logic or, as Peirce would say, a 
logic of "vital affairs". Vital affairs can only be transacted in natural languages-
the languages of the trading floor, of love, of making war and biscuits. Vital affairs 
exceed the reach of logic properly understood. 

Frege's Begrijfsschrift shunned the standard structures of the grammar of 
natural languages. Broadly speaking the Begrijfsschrift eschewed constructions 
which lend a language its intensional character. It was also a language purged of 
vagueness. To achieve this, the logical syntax of the Begrijfsschrift would be an 
uninterpreted language save for the logical particles. Some logicians speak of such 
languages as formal languages. What is intended is not so much their artificiality as 
the devices employed to extensionalize and precisify, since in their natural state 
languages are neither extensional nor precise. 

Other uses of "formal" are also common among logicians. In the 1967 Post-
script to "On Formally Undecidable Propositions", GOdel cites with approval the 
work of Turing, and defines a formal system to be "any mechanical procedure for 
producing formulas".! In this use, formal logic serves the still further ends of 
recursion theory, a response to the celebrated Entscheidungsproblem, and a pre-
cursor of computer science, Le., the theory of algorithms. 9 By the midpoint of the 
20th century the new formallogic-mathematicallogic-'-had ramified into the four 
princely domains of proof theory, model theory, set theory and recursion theory. 

It is easy to see that Aristotle, Frege and Turing were pursuing entirely differ-
ent ends. This is frequently not understood by writers of our logic textbooks and 
by many of those who teach from them. There is an altogether entrenched dispo-
sition to tell students that logic is the theory of argument and/or of deductive 
reasoning (which is partly true of Aristotle and not true at all of Frege and Turing), 
and then to give as this logic a version of Frege's logic or (worse) of Turing's. 



142 John Woods 

And so we have it: In classrooms the world over Aristotle's targets were being 
chased down with Frege's ordnance or (worse) with Turing's. SmaIl wonder that 
in the early 1970's students started voicing their skepticism about the prospects of 
modern symbolic logic producing anything like a theory of argument, still less of 
deductive reasoning. But I must disagree with Hitchock who writes (130), "What 
is new too ... is the skepticism about the value of formal logic as a tool for 
analyzing and evaluating natural-language arguments." This was precisely the view, 
in the 19th century, of the independent co-founders of modern formal logic; just as 
it was the view, in the 17th century, of the Port Royal logicians and of John Locke, 
contra the sy llogistic. 

Something important turns on the present point, and it brings forth some rather 
harsh criticism of informal logic. Informal logicians have allowed themselves to be 
derisive towards modern logic for failing to bring off what in fact it never set out 
to achieve, a confusion which arose from the ignorance of authors of elementary 
textbooks and those who teach from them. Properly understood, the complaints 
of informal logicians should have been directed to those who were guilty of the 
confusion, not to the creators of modern logic. So the grumpiness of some of 
those commentators who bridle at the confusion is understandable. 1O 

1.2 Formal Logic: A Bootstrapping Problem 

No doubt some readers will object that I have overlooked the role of canonical 
notation in formallogic. 11 The phrase is Quine's and it denotes an alternative to the 
Fregean (and Carnapian) notion of artificial languages. How much of an alternative 
I can only sketch here. 

A canonical notation is the net result of a set of schematization procedures for 
a fragment of an actual language-a "colloquial language", in Tarski's words. 
These procedures are also (misleadingly) called the "translation" rules from collo-
quiallanguage-structures to their counterparts in canonical notation. The question, 
"Why translate this way rather than that?" has a principled answer. The translation 
of choice is the set of transformations that already constitute the canonical regi-
mentation of that natural language-structure. In the approach I associate with 
Frege and Carnap, artificial languages are built by fiat from the theorist's stipula-
tions. They are original languages, not transformations of existing ones. This makes 
the whole business of mapping, e.g., ordinary mathematical German into the logi-
cian's artificial language a somewhat more difficult thing to understand. A further 
difference between artificial languages and canonical languages pertains to atomic 
formulas, open and closed. In artificial languages such expressions are un interpreted. 
In canonical notation they are allowed their natural language interpretations, but, 
for technical reasons, these don't influence the interpretations of compound ex-
pressions. '2 They are atomic interpretations that "don't matter". So it is distinc-



How Phi!osophicails Informal Logic? 143 

tion without a (relevant) difference. For the purpose of tracking the target proper-
ties of logic, simple sentences of natural languages have no semantic context. 

A language in canonical notation is a sublanguage of a natural language purged 
of vagueness and of syntactic constructions which induce intensionality; and sup-
plemented by neologisms as needed. Again, vagueness is leeched out by suppress-
ing the interpretation of all categories of expression save for the logical particles. 
Quine calls the set of procedures that canonize a fragment of natural language its 
Standard Grammar. Standard Grammar is a branch of linguistics, itself a natural 
science. In as much as the target properties of logic are distributed over the struc-
tures of Standard Grammar, Quine can claim a naturalistic provenance for logic, 
as Dewey had done before himY (And here too, en pass ant, informal logicians 
have missed the boat. Informal logic is not made distinctive in relation to formal 
logic by its enthusiasm for naturalism.)14 The second point to take note of is that in 
Methods of Logic, Quine thinks that a serviceable notion of logical form can be got 
out of canonical notation. IS For any argument constructable in such a sublanguage 
or language-fragment there is a schematization of it in canonical notation, and this 
in tum may be identified as the original argument's logical form (in the logical 
system in question). Schematization procedures 16 are designed to have what I call 
the backwards reflection property with respect to the theory's target concepts. If, 
for example, the logical form of a natural language argument is valid, so too is the 
argument itself. (Similarly for other target properties such as inconsistency and 
logical truth). Informal logicians have been known to heap considerable scorn on 
the very idea of backwards reflection. They are right in sensing difficulties, but 
they look for them in the wrong place. Perhaps the leading example of a misplaced 
fuss is the one made about material "implication". Critics are right to say that 
material "implication" isn't implication, but they are wrong in thinking that this 
compromises the usual schematization procedures and spells the death of back-
wards reflection. Some people are encouraged in these confusions by the unfortu-
nate claims made so often in logic textbooks-Methods is a notable exception-
but they are confusions all the same. 

Peirce saw very clearly that schematization procedures are not part of logic 
proper but rather of linguistics. 17 This is also QUine's view, but with a difference. 
The difference is that Quine' attaches to his regimentation policies a strong philo-
sophical motivation. Natural languages tend to have phrase-structure grammars. 
Phrase-structure grammars have rather weak semantics. IS Regimentation is a com-
plex transformation of a natural language. The transformed language has a categorial 
grammar. Standard Grammar is categorial. Categorial grammars have a rich se-
mantics-model theory, essentially. Model theory delivers a strong and mature 
theory of truth (Tarski's essentially). It is true, and important, that the mapping 
that takes a language with a phrase-structure grammar into a language with a 
categorial grammar does not preserve the structure of the original grammar. This 
puts it in doubt that meaning is preserved between the original and the regimented 



144 John Woods 

language. For many people this is a serious blow to regimentation. For Quine it is 
a virtue. He has long held that meanings are incapable of heavy lifting in science 
and philosophy. All that he needs or wants from semantics is a theory of truth, 
which a categorial grammar makes robustly available, but becomes available only 
after regimentation. 

Even if Quine is right about the backwards reflectivity of such procedures, 
they would hold for only judiciously selected subsets of English, in fact those very 
subsets that gives the assertion of backwards reflection the best chance of being 
true. In a word, they are fragments of English which have the best chance of 
dancing to a categorial grammar. So Quine's Methods of Logic gives no encour-
agement to the claim that first order logic can be seen as a theory of argument for 
whole natural languages; since theirs is a phrase-structure grammar. 

We have noted the impoverishment of the object languages of formal logic. 
Consider the classical system P of propositional logic. The sentences of P are 
contentless; they fail to express a complete thought, as the grammar books used to 
say. Even so, P has the resources to support definitions of and to discern the 
presence or absence of all the target properties of propositional logic. These prop-
erties are 

• the property of being a wff of P 
• the property of being a tautology of P 
• the property of being a contingent wff of P 
• the property of being a contradictory wff of P 

• the property of being a valid argument of P 
• the property of being an invalid argument of P 

• the property of being a consistent set of sentences of P 

• the property of being an inconsistent set of sentences of P 
Each of these properties is decidable in P. For each of them there exists a (l) 
mechanical, (2) infallible and (3) finite procedure which enables us to determine 
with regard to any arbitrarily selected object whether or not it has the property in 
question. 

It is certainly rather remarkable that something with so little expressive power 
should be able, like P, to have such command over the target properties of logic. 
Even so, systems like P stand open to a serious objection. It is that sense we 
neither do nor can do our thinking or our arguing in a language such as that of P, 
the theory of inference and of argument that P develops is useless. 

Can this objection be met? It can, at least up to a point. The reason for this is 
twofold. 

First. It is possible to formalize English arguments in P. 

Second. Formalization has the backwards reflection property, as we have 
said. 



How Philosophical Is Informal Logic? 145 

The first point is one any teacher of formal logic is already acquainted with. The 
second needs some explaining. 

Backwards Reflection. Suppose that T is a target property of our logic 
(e.g.,validity). Let E be an argument in English. Applying the 
schematization rules of P to this English argument E gives its logical 
form, F, in P. Then the schematization that produces the logical form of 
E in P has the backwards reflection property with regard to T (e.g., 
validity). If F is valid, so too is E. 

This really is quite remarkable. It shows that formalizing a conteniful argument in 
English as a contentless argument in P allows us to determine with certainty whether 
the English argument is valid. 

What a wonderful thing formalization is, or so some people will say. Others 
will say that it is too good to be true! To see what their reservation comes down to, 
it is helpful to remind ourselves that there are constraints on what can be inputs to 
our formalization rules. For example, we are not allowed to apply these rules to 
interrogative sentences of English, nor are we allowed to formalize molecular 
sentences of English as atomic sentences of P. And we are not permitted to for-
malize any connective of English other than 'not', 'or', 'and', 'if ... then .. .', 
and' if and only if, and those that can be defined in terms of these connectives. 

Consider in particular the rule that only simple sentences of English can be 
mapped on to atomic sentences of P. Are there any other constraints on this 
atomic rule? Consider the argument 

1. If Sue has been awarded the first university degree, then Sue is a 
bachelor. 

2. If Sue is a bachelor then Sue is an unmarried man. 

3. Therefore, If Sue has been awarded the first university degree, then 
she is an unmarried man. 

If we now apply the formalization rules to this argument, we see that its logical 
form in Pis 

1.* If P then q 
2.* If q then r 

3. * Therefore if p then r. 
This matters. Here is an English argument with a valid logical form in P. But the 
English argument is invalid. We wanted validity to have the backwards reflection 
property, but the present example shows that it doesn't. 

We can solve this problem by noticing that our English argument equivocates 
on the ambiguous term "bachelor". In premiss (1) it means one thing, and in 
premiss (2), it means something quite different. This gives us a way out of our 
difficulty. We can impose upon the formalization of English sentences the 
Disambiguation Rule. The rules says that for any expression of English which has 



146 John Woods 

more than one meaning, its different meanings must be mapped on to different 
expressions of P. Applying this rule to our present example we see that the correct 
logical form of our English argument is 

1. If P then q 
2. If s then r 

3. Therefore, if p then r. 

This gives us the desired result. The logical form is invalid. So it would appear that 
when we add the Disambiguation Rule to our rules of formalization, that validity 
does indeed have the backwards reflection property; for we no longer have an 
argument, which is valid in P but invalid in English. 

What, then, about invalidity? Does it too have the backwards reflection prop-
erty? Consider the following argument. 

1. The shirt is red. 

2. Therefore, the shirt is coloured. 

The premiss is a simple sentence of English which entails the conclusion, also a 
simple sentence of English. Its logical form in P is 

l.*p 
2. * Therefore, q 

which is invalid. 

Here is a second case. 

a) The figure is a triangle 

b) The figure is a circle 

This is an inconsistent set of sentences in English. But the logical form of this set 
in P is {p, q}, and {p, q} is a consistent set. 

In the first case, invalidity fails to have the backwards reflection property. In 
the second case, consistency fails to have the backwards reflection property. But 
we want all our target properties to satisfy the backwards reflection condition. 
We want this because we want P to be useful in the appraisal of real-life reasoning 
and real-life argument. 

As it happens, we can recover the backwards reflection property with regard 
to invalidity and consistency if we agree to impose a further condition on our 
formalization rules. It is called the Logical Inertia Rule, which says that 

Simple sentences of English to which the schematization rules apply 
may not either entail one another or be inconsistent with one another. In 
other words, the simple sentences that are inputs to the formalization 
mechanism of P must be logically inert. 

It seems, then, that we have recovered the backwards reflection of validity by 
imposing the Disambiguation Rule, and likewise that we have recovered the back-
wards reflection of invalidity and inconsistency by imposing the Logical Inertia 
Rule. Even so, there is a cost to these recoveries. 



How Philosophical Is Informal Logie? 147 

Let us deal first with the cost of imposing the Logical Inertia Rule. This re-
quires us to be able to recognize entailment and inconsistencies between simple 
English sentences in a reflective and disciplined way. This is equivalent to saying 
that we must have a theory of entailment and inconsistency for English. But this is 
what our formalization rules were supposed to provide. P would analyze the prop-
erties of entailment and consistency, and our formalization rules would reflect 
them back into English. So P together with the formalization rules would be a 
theory of entailment and consistency for English. But, as we now see, we can run 
the formalization rules until we have a theory of entailment and consistency for 
English. And we don't have a theory of entailment and consistency for English 
until we've executed the formalization rules. So we have a bootstrapping problem. 

Faced with this kind of difficulty, most logicians have, in effect, withdrawn 
the Logical Inertia Rule and, in so doing, have abandoned the hope that invalidity 
and consistency would have the backwards reflection property. 

The Disambiguation Rule is a different matter. If it goes then we loose the 
backwards reflection of validity. So the question now is whether we are able to 
apply this rule in a principled way. The answer is no. We do not yet have a theory 
that permits us to recognize ambiguity in the general case. (In fact, a good many 
philosophical problems have turned out to have resulted from undetected ambigui-
ties.) This leaves us with Hobson's Choice. Either we can give up on the back-
wards reflection of validity or we can try to apply the Disambiguation Rule in 
other than a principled way, that is to say, intuitively. Most logicians opt, in effect, 
for the second option. (I shall return to this point.) 

1.3 Fit Work for Informal Logic 

It would be wrong to leave the impression that informal logic derives entirely from 
misconceptions about what logic is for and what it is capable of. Formal logic-in 
the form of mediaeval variations ofthe theory of syllogisms-has been the subject 
of hostile comment since the Renaissance. In France, under Descartes' influence, 
the Port Royal logicians thought (rightly) that the syllogistic could play only a 
small part in an overall account of the art of thinking, whether in science or every-
day affairs. In England, a like skepticism derives from Bacon, and is present in 
Locke and a strong motivator of Mill's A System of Logic. It is interesting that 
while Arnauld, Nicole and Locke thought that deductive logic was perfectly all 
right in its place, Mill thought that it was a satisfactory complete theory of reason-
ing. By this he meant that for every bit of good (or bad) reasoning there existed a 
paraphrase in the syllogistic which matched the original in goodness (or badness). 
Mill also thought that the syllogistic schematization of these pieces of reasoning 
were invariably imperspicous; that is, they obscured their deep structures or, as 
we ourselves might say, their true logical grammar. 



148 John Woods 

MiII also held the opposite of Peirce's view that there could be no logic of vital 
affairs. Not only did Mill think that a logic of ordinary reasoning was possible, he 
thought that this same logic was the logic of science (a respect in which his 
connection with present-day informal logic is called into question perhaps). 

There is also historical precedent for the claim of informal logicians that formal 
logic is useless, that as a sharpener-up of real-life argument and reasoning it is a 
total failure. This indeed was precisely Locke's opinion too. And there is historical 
precedent for the acrimony which occasionally shows itself in the relations be-
tween formal and informal logicians. We find it in Frege's discussion, in the 
Grundlagen, of Mill's logic. To say that it was a hatchet job would be an under-
statement. Frege's account ofMiII is so riddled with errors and inaccuracies as to 
qualify as a grand, a total sophisticus elenchus. How ironic that today it is often 
informal logicians who display the same scholarly tawdriness in their excoriations 
of the logic of which Frege, of all people, was co-inventor. 

Informal logicians are right to say that modem formal logic is not up to the 
demands of a theory of argument of every stripe that argument comes in. It is 
open to question whether modem logic has a role to play in such theories that is 
anywhere close to the centrality that Aristotle claimed for the logic of syllogisms 
(though I myself doubt it). If the theory of argument, or the theory of inference, 
could be said to possess core logics, the best that I see for classical logic is as 
special cases of the core logics, in much the way that classical logic is seen to be 
a limiting case of quantum logic or of dialethic, or strongly paraconsistent, logic. 

There remain the questions not only of what informal logic is, but rather more 
importantly of what we want it to do for us. I suggest that these questions be 
answered in reverse order. What informal logic is will tum out to be a function 
(loosely speaking) of the purposes for which it was designed. 

If informal logicians are agreed on anything positive, it is surely that informal 
logic should be, or should be a large part of, a theory of argument. (There is, I 
think, a smaller majority who think that it should also be a theory or a large part of 
a theory of deductive inference; but we are here sticking with argument). Argu-
ment is a plural concept. Lots of different kinds of things are arguments. So, if we 
were to set ourselves the task of sketching a modus operandi for the would-be 
informal logician, the first task we would ask him to perform is: 

T I: Identify the kind or kinds of argument he intends to theorize about. 

Then, 

T
2

: Supposing his interest to be confined to arguments of the K-sort, for 
some kind K, announce his theoretical designs upon them. 

T3: Motivate those objectives. (Why is it desirable that they be pur-
sued?) 

As an example, let us say that our theorist opted for arguments of the sort that 
Freeman discusses in these pages (118-119). Suppose, with him, that the theorist 
has designs on the property of argument-cogency, and that his objective is moti-



How Philosophical Is Informal Logic? 149 

vated by his conviction that cogency hasn't yet attracted a satisfactory theory. 
How does he proceed? A partial, but I think central, answer is that it is desirable 
that the theorist satisfy the following adequacy conditions. 

AI: The theory should specify conditions on argument cogency. It should 
try to justify the choice of those conditions. 

A
2

: Suppose, for the sake of discussion, that the conditions in question 
are Freeman's own conditions of relevance, groundedness and ac-
ceptability. Then the theory should give an account of embedded 
properties of relevance, grounding, and acceptability. Another way 
of saying this is that the theory should contain subtheories of these 
properties. I? 20 

If tasks TI to T3 could be accomplished satisfactorily and if adequacy conditions 
Al and A2 were fulfilled, some people might suppose that the resultant account 
would qualify as informal logic. The supposition would be premature. For sup-
pose that our interest were in reductio arguments. The story of such arguments is 
fairly well-known and not much contested.21 Suppose that we managed to per-
form TI to T

J 
and to satisfy Al and A

2
• What point would there be in holding that 

our reductio theory was a contribution to informal logic rather than to logic? Or 
suppose that our theoretical designs fell upon collective bargaining arguments and 
that the target property were "good faith" moves in such arguments. If our theory 
is any good, it would honour the fact that if a party's opening offer is also his tinal 
offer, this constitutes a failure to argue in good faith. Imagine that here too T

I
-T3 

were satisfactorily performed and A I and A2 were satisfied. What point would 
there be in characterizing the theory as informal logic, or indeed as logic? 

1.4 Logic and Informal Logic 

lfwe look fondly on terms such as "logic" and "informal logic" scampering around 
in our favourite metatheory of argument, we would do well to find some useful 
work for them to do. In the context of a theory of argument, one possibility is to 
settle for a decision to reserve the generic name of logic for a theory or subtheory 
whose target properties are either properties of propositions (e.g. logical truth) or 
sets of propositions (e.g. consistency), as well as the properties one encounters in 
the attendant metatheory (e.g., decidability). Target properties that fell beyond the 
reach of this test would not be in the province of logic. A virtue of the this sugges-
tion is that it takes care of the formal-informal divide in a fairly natural way, 
flexibly, and free of unnecessary essentialism (ift may put it that way). Let {PI"'" 
Pn} be the set of target properties of the logical subtheory of a theory of argument 
of the sort we have been discussing. Then, if the formal-informal divide is defin-
able for this set, it will partition into non-empty proper subsets of Pi and Pr Let the 
P be target properties of classical logic (i.e., first-order quantification theory) or 
direct rivals of them in regard to those properties (e.g., higher-order quantification 



150 John Woods 

theory, intuitionism, or relevant logic). Then, although the theory of argument in 
which they are embedded may require some further qualification of those proper-
ties, that part ofthe logical subtheory that deals with them is formal logic. Subject 
to similar caveats, that part of the theory dealing with the P

j 
is informal logic. I 

should quickly explain these caveats. We would expect properties such as consist-
ency and implication to fall within the formal logic component of a theory of 
argument. Even so, given the particularities of real-life argument, the theory might 
adapt or customize their account accordingly; and so, for example, it might crimp 
the generality of the adjunction law, or give up the monotonicity of implication. 
Similarly, I expect that we would find premiss-acceptability to fall within the infor-
mal logic subtheory of a theory of argument. It could be that the theory draws 
upon accounts of acceptability from elsewhere (decision theory, possibly). We 
could expect the borrowing might need to be adapted to the peculiarities of actual 
arguments, by modifying the theory's "perfect information" assumption, to take 
just one example. 

Of course, there is also a more latitudinarian way of understanding logic. Ac-
cording to this second possibility, a logic is a formal idealized description of the 
behaviour of a logical agent. Such a view requires elucidation of the key concepts 
of formality, ideality and agency, an interesting task for which I lack space here."" 
However, it is fairly easy to see that the formality involved in this approach cannot 
be restricted to matters of logical form. What makes this so is that logical form is 
a linguistic notion, and logic in the present sense formally describes logical agents. 
Ideality, too, bears on this matter. Idealized descriptions of what people do are (in 
part) misdescriptions of what they actually do. Even so, idealization is permissible 
to the extent that actual behaviour is an approximation of ideal behaviour, or be-
haviour in an ideal model, and the approximation relation itself is exposed to a 
reasonable measure of theoretical elucidation. Agency in the model will in turn 
mimic the actual behaviour of cognitive agents, subject to the requisite constraints 
or idealizations. Even so slight a sketch as this gives us a conception of logic that 
easily subsumes anything that currently passes for informal logic, and it, too, 
allows for a principled distinction between informal and formal logic. Formal logic 
is a theory oflogical forms; and informal logic is all the restY 

There may well be reasons to prefer the first, rather narrower, conception of 
logic to the present, broader conception. I myself favour the more latitudinarian 
approach, but it is not something to stake one's life on. 

1.5 A Central Problem for Informal Logic 

Whichever conception of logic we are drawn to, serious problems remain. As we 
saw, no formal logic is applicable to natural language structures save those that are 
regulated as inputs by theories of ambiguity, implication and inconsistency. These 
theories allow us to judge when natural language items are admissible as inputs to 



How Philosophical Is Informal Logic? 151 

the schematiziation rules which produce the logical forms of those inputs. Such 
theories are theories of ambiguity, implication and inconsistency for natural lan-
guages. The irony is unmistakable. Formal logicians are drawn to the view that 
natural language accounts of ambiguity, implication and inconsistencies must de-
pend on formal theories ofthese same things. But you can't get a formal treatment 
of these properties in natural language contexts without the aid of informal theo-
ries of ambiguity, implication and inconsistency. But if such theories were avail-
able, what would be the point ofhavingjormal theories of the same things? Point 
to the informalist. A formal logic for natural language arguments is parasitic on an 
informal logic. But-point to the formalist-there is no stable consensus about 
what these informal theories should look like. 

A first task, therefore, of informal logic is production of supportable theories 
of ambiguity, implication and inconsistency for natural languages. Some will see 
this as work for linguistics; others as work for informal logic. It hardly matters. It 
is the work that is important. 

2. Philosophy 

2.1 Contra Philosophical Exclusivity 

Historically and administratively logic has been a part of philosophy for a long 
time. Not even its more recent flourishing in Departments of Computer Science 
and Mathematics has damaged this ancient affiliation. It comes as no surprise, 
therefore, that when a researcher does work that he classifies as informal logic, 
more often than not he is a philosopher. That alone makes informal logic part of 
philosophy as any operational conception of philosophy the work that philoso-
phers do. 

It would seem that Hitchcock and Freeman see informal logic as more sub-
stantially linked to and deeply embedded in philosophy than any mere honorific 
could provide. Hitchcock sees informal logic as a sub-discipline of philosophy. I 
demur from this view if the subsumption is intended exclusively. Ifwe agree that 
informal logic is defined by the Johnson and Blair questions of 1978 (see Hitchcock, 
129-130), then some are questions primarily for philosophy, while others roam 
more freely (as indicated by the parenthesized clauses). Among these latter are: 

• What is the nature of argument? (Rhetoric; linguistics; discourse analy-
sis; conversation analysis; law) 

• What is the nature offallacy? (All the above.) 

• Are the validity/soundness criteria of the evaluation of arguments 
inappropriate or outmoded? (All the above, plus social psychology.) 

• If so, what should replace them? (All the above.) 



152 John Woods 

• Can principles be formulated that assign responsibilities of give-and-
take argumentation? (Debating; law.) 

• How does the context of argumentation affect meaning and interpre-
tation? (Psycholinguistics; computer science.) 

Since answers to the Johnson and Blair questions are at least a large part of what 
passes for informal logic, and since they are not by any means reserved for phi-
losophers, it now strikes me that, contrary to initial appearances, informal logic's 
place in philosophy is for Hitchock rather more contingent and honorific than 
substantial. But the same cannot be said for Freeman. 

As Freeman sees it (120), unlike the key concepts of formal deductive logic 
(e.g., validity and logical truth) which can be defined "without significant philo-
sophical enquiry", the key concepts of informal logic (viz. acceptability, relevance 
and adequacy of ground) are or ought to be matters "for philosophical attention, in 
particular, for epistemology."24 How so? 

The main link is the concept of justification. An argument is cogent if and to 
the extent that its premisses justify believing its conclusion and to the extent that 
the premisses themselves are justifiably believable. But justification is an inherently 
epistemological concept. So, informal logic is intrinsically linked to epistemology. 
I find this doubtful in two ways. One is that there are theories of knowledge that 
have nothing to say about justification (e.g., certain reliabilist theories 25 ). The other 
is that even if there is a concept of justification that is intrinsic to epistemology, it 
does not follow, and in any event seems not to be true, that this is the sole concept 
of justification appropriate to a theory of argument. A theory of argument that 
investigated negotiation arguments would have occasion to say something about 
when it is justified to put one's final offer on the table, but this hasnothing to do 
with epistemology. Similarly, a dialogue logic might pronounce on when it is justi-
fiable for one party to attribute a position to the other party, but this too has 
nothing to do with epistemology. It may be time that an epistemological notion of 
justification is inextricably bound up with the factors of premiss-acceptability, 
premiss-conclusion relevance and adequacy of the groundedness of conclusions 
in premisses; but, as I have been attempting to show, if informal logic is the study 
of arguments on the hoof, then there will be cases galore in which arguments will 
give the theorist no purchase for this trio of properties. So I conclude that Free-
man has not (yet) made good on his claim that informal logic is inherently part of 
epistemology. 

What, then, do we make of the following argument? Freeman points out (122) 
that 

1. Every argumerlt has a basic premiss. 

2. Every basic premiss is in principle the subject of an argument. 26 

For Freeman, these propositions (especially the first) establish that informal logic 
is foundationalist, and he thinks that the foundational ism of informal logic is the 
same thing that one finds in what he calls "common sense foundationalism" in 



How Philosophical Is Informal Logic? 153 

epistemology. Thus P is aproperly basic propositions for me if and only if"there 
is a presumption from my point of view that my cognitive mechanisms which 
generated this belief are generally reliable and functioning properly, in a normal 
environment, with a view to producing true beliefs" (123). 

So, then, "we might [in turn] explicate premiss acceptability as proper basicality 
understood according to common sense foundationalism" (124). But here, too, I 
admit to some doubts. From the point of view of the arguer, the approach is too 
liberal. Virtually all his premisses would qualify as properly basic just by virtue of 
the arguer believing them and having no reason to believe that his belief is abnor-
mal. In other words, it will be an arguer's default position that his premisses are 
such as to satisfy the definition of proper basicality. On the other hand, for anyone 
else, an arguer's proper basicality is not a matter for the external evaluator to 
judge, since it obtains or not strictly on the basis of what the arguer sincerely 
believes. One might think that I have misread the qualification "has not reason to 
believe that his cognitive mechanisms are defective or that his situation is abnor-
mal." If this doesn't mean "doesn't in fact think ... " but means instead "there is 
objectively no reason to think", then judgements of proper basicality, for both 
arguer and evaluator, cease to be made in accordance with a criterion to which 
they have effective and routine access. 

My own view is that given the shaky state of epistemology in general, the less 
that informal logic must have to do with epistemology, the better. But if we must 
have some epistemology to leaven our informal logic, I myself would be more 
disposed to Everitt and Fisher's adaptation of Quine's naturalism to argumentative 
contexts. 27 

2.2 A Further Adequacy Condition 

Even so, perhaps Freeman is right, never mind my own doubts. It strikes me in 
any case that premisses never justify conclusions. It is people who justify, and it is 
actions plans and policies upon which justification bears. In its use as a propositional 
relation, "justification" is a technical term in whose metaphorical character all 
connection with epistemology and ethics is lost or at least made non-obvious. 
Whether or not there is a deep connection with philosophy; it appears that we can 
cite a third adequacy condition on a theory of argument, and then some people 
may see it as a philosophical condition. 

A
l

• A theory of argument should seek to determine conditions under 
which the theory'S target properties and the conditions in which 
they are embedded are recognizable. 

A condition or a property is recognizable when and to the extent that an arbitrarily 
competent and appropriately situated subject can know whether the condition is 
satisfied and whether the property is instantiated. In extremis, recognizability is 
decidability, which is too much to hope for in general, as we know. Perhaps we 



154 John Woods 

could agree that if anything is an exercise in epistemology, it is plotting a strategy 
which aims at satisfying A

J 
It is a far from easy exercise. (I want to say this with 

some emphasis. It is the central methodological problem for the Humanities). Per-
haps it is not surprising that my fellow symposiasts do not in these pages ac-
knowledge AJ" It may strike us that Freeman comes closest to doing so, what with 
his call for an epistemological theory of justification. In fact, it is precisely A

J 
that 

the type of epistemological theory which Freeman envisages fails to satisfy. 

Among present-day informal logicians, A
2

, the requirement that properties em-
bedded in conditions on argument-cogency themselves be the target of subtheories, 
is most explicitly recognized by Weinstein. To be sure, when we need only exam-
ine the research record of the others we see that at least some of their work 
honours the spirit of A2 more or less strongly or weakly. Hitchcock on relevance 
comes again to mind on the strong side, as does the same author on material 
validity. But nobody, I think, has a better methodological appreciation of A2 than 
Weinstein. He is someone who sees the utter importance of the subtheory to the 
overall design of a theory of argument. 

If A
J 

links the theory of argument to philosophy, it is not a distinctive linkage; 
it doesn't differentiate theories of argument from theories of other things. All 
theories are subject to AJ" The extent to which philosophy is involved beyond what 
A

J 
requires will turn on the theorist's way of satisfying AI' which in turn generates 

the target properties of the subtheories called for by A
2

• Seen in Weinstein's way, 
and lately also in Johnson's, truth is a condition on argument-cogency and thus is 
subject (so I say) to A2-level theoretical investigation. What makes me think that 
Weinstein has the right appreciation of A2 is that he has actually produced the 
subtheory of truth, whereas Johnson has not yet done SO.28 

1.3 Toulmanization and Dialectification 

A] is perhaps the most economical way of marking a precise distinction between 
formal and informal logic, according to our first conception of logic of pages ago. 
Formal logic could be seen as handling the A)-question using in-house resources 
and methods. Put somewhat oversimply, it would fall to formal logic itself to 
ascertain whether or not a given instance of its structures satisfies conditions 
defining a target property. These are its proof procedures and (where they exist) 
decision procedures. Informal logic has no analogous in-house strategies. It is 
possible to see two ways in which an informal logician might get on with the 
business imposed on him. One is fairly explicit in the actual practice of some 
informal logicians. The other is surprisingly tacit. On the first of these approaches, 
the theorist Toulmanizes the A)-project. On the second, he dialectifies it. 
Toulmanization transfers the burden of A

J 
to the methodologies of the discipline in 

which the argument in question has been constructed, and it also takes supple-
mentary guidance, if any, from whatever formal logic may have to say about it. 



How Philosophical Is Informal Logic? 155 

Perhaps the leading virtue ofToulmanization is economic. It is a strikingly efficient 
way of generating argument criticism. But its virtue is also something of a liability, 
for informal logic would now seem to have no critical capacity of its own. A3 
commands the theorist to furnish ways of determining whether an argument sat-
isfies the Freeman-set {relevance, acceptability, groundedness} or the Johnson-
Blair-set {relevance, acceptability, sufficiency}. When this requirement is 
Toulmanized, the argument in question is sent to its home discipline ifit has one-
to physical chemistry in Weinstein's favourite example. Whether the premisses are 
acceptable, whether they bear relevantly upon the issue at hand, and whether they 
give adequate support to the conclusion, all these are questions for the physical 
chemist. Now if Toulmanization is considered an appropriate general strategy, 
there is no work for informal logic to do short of satisfying AI and A z. Doing the 
business of AI is largely definitional, and the business of A z' the importantly ana-
lytical business, has by an large been ignored by informal logicians. If this is right, 
it goes some substantial way toward explaining why (to the extent that it is true) 
informal logic is ignored by establishment philosophy and establishment logic. 

The second way of proceeding with A) repairs an deficiency ofToulmanization. 
It is this: A great many arguments are not disciplinarily based. They are about 
everyday things concerning which there are no experts or, if there are, are such as 
not to require their intervention. They are arguments which lie within a general 
competence enriched by the contingencies of shared experience. This leaves these 
arguments oddly positioned. Either they don't admit of criticism or they do. But if 
they do, criticism is what the ordinarily competent real-life thinker happens to 
think of it. 

Dialectification erases this distinction between disciplinarily expert- and ordi-
nary guy-criticism. Let K" ... , Kn be the conditions under which an argument is 
cogent. A} bids the theorist to make the K

j 
recognizable. Dialectification offers a 

way of proceeding by forwarding the K
j 
to a generalized methodology for conflict 

resolution. To take pragma-dialectics as an example, the question of whether an 
argument satisfies a pragma-dialectical rule can it self be subject to a process of 
dispute resolution governed by those same rules. Thus the question of whether an 
argument satisfies a condition K

j 
would be settled in a "rational discussion" gov-

erned by those rules which terminates in agreement that the argument does (or 
does not) satisfy K

j
• As mentioned, there is in actual theoretical practice little 

express recognition of A)-satisfaction through dialectification. But there can be 
little doubt that its applicability is a fairly strict (even if tacit) consequence of the 
dialectical approach to arguments generally. 

By and large, then, informal logic has shown little capacity for doing the busi-
ness of A]" In this informal logic stands in rather stark contrast to formal logic. 
How embarrassing is this? If we find ourselves thinking that a theory of argument 
that lacks a critical apparatus is a hobbled thing at best, then this is bad news for 
informal logic. On the other hand, on the principle that one cannot get blood from 
a turnip, it may be that A3 is an unrealistic condition to impose on the informal 



156 John Woods 

logician. But if so, we need a limitation theorem; the informal logician must estab-
lish A/s inapplicability to what he does. 

I note, however, that these objections largely vanish if we opt for our second, 
more latitudinarian conception oflogic, in which a logic is a principled description 
of what logical agents do. So understood, both Toulmanization and dialectification 
are manoeuvres that fall well within the ambit of informal logic. 

A case can be made that informal logic lies closest to the bosom of philosophy 
in the work of writers such as Finocchiaro (Galileo and the Art of Reasoning, 
especially in Chapters 2 and 16, less so in Chapter 5), and Fisher (The Logic of 
Real Arguments). I see these works as continuous with the Commentaries of 
times gone by. They are detailed interpretations and schematizations of a series, 
often an entire system, of complex arguments. The aim of the commentator to 
unify, clarify, precisify and fill in the missing bits. It is also his function to elucidate 
the manner in which the author has made his case and to subject those methods to 
a critical scrutiny appropriate to the author's time and subject. Of course there are 
clear differences between systematic philosophical commentary and informal logic, 
but in the cases under review there is an impressive overlap.29 

2.4 Ordinariness and Everydayness 

Some of the best work in the theory of argument is rather difficult. Informal 
logicians sometimes show ajaundiced eye to difficulty. Fisher finds Freeman wanting 
on this score. He says that Freeman's "wonderfully insightful theory ... in Dia-
lectics and the Macrostructure of Argument is flawed; it is so complex that it is 
frequently not applicable to real reasoning by the ordinary reasoner" (110). If 
Fisher is right about this (and indeed it is far from being his view alone), it trans-
mits a strong procedural message to the theorist; and it all but puts people like 
Weinstein (and perhaps the present author, too) out of business as informallogi-
cians. There is certainly nothing wrong in (a) seeking accounts of arguments that 
ordinary people are actually capable of making without specific tuition; and there 
is nothing wrong in (b) hoping for theories which the ordinary person can profit-
ably apply without tuition, save that provided by the theory itself. (Such theories 
are what Walton and I once characterized as "manuals of self-help for the argu-
mentatively insecure".) But there is nothing to recommend the converse implica-
tion according to which theories that fulfill (b) are in general theories that more 
naturally "suit" the untutored behaviour of ordinary folk. Even very stupid ordi-
nary folk acquire untutoredly the habit of competent speech; but as any linguist 
will attest, there isn't the slightest prospect of a non-complex theory for such 
behaviour. 

In his "Reconciliation of Formal and Informal Logic",l° Copi tells of some 
correspondence he had with the present writer on the analysis of ad baculum 
arguments. Generous to a fault in his praise of the analysis, Copi nevertheless had 



How Philosophical Is Informal Logic? 157 

a criticism. My analysis would prove too complicated to teach to first year college 
and university students. In this Copi and I disagree, but this is of no mind. Copi 
could be quite right about his pedagogical reservations, but without some rather 
hefty supplementary argument, no one (certainly not Copi) would accept that the 
upper bound on a theory's admissible complexity is what a freshman class can be 
got to swallow. Johnson and Blair also plump for the "everyday" (94-95), as does 
Freeman for "arguments of the polis" (I 18-119), and they do so in a way that 
makes me suspect them of what I see as Fisher's mistake. Van Eemeren and 
Grootendorst, indifferent to the ambiguity of it, also concentrate on "ordinary 
language users"; but they are not in fact making this mistake, even though it may 
seem that they areY 

Still less is there reason to equate real arguments with ordinary arguments ifby 
"ordinary" we mean untutored or something close, as Fisher's own The Logic of 
Real Arguments makes clear. My T! tells the theorist to pick his argument type; T z 
asks him to confess his theoretical designs; and T3 bids him to motivate their 
choice. There is nothing in this that precludes simple theories about commonplace 
events. But there can be no question of an intrinsic preference for the easy and the 
everyday, never mind that this is what many "theorists" appear to believe. This has 
a bearing on the linkage with philosophy. Philosophy is built for the complex, the 
difficult and the uncommon. If informal logic were inherently a matter of simple 
theories about everyday things, there would be (apart from A3) little occasion for 
nontrivial philosophical engagement. Contraposition fails this conditional. Even 
though informal logic is not confined to the simple and easy, it does not follow that 
apart from A3 philosophy has a substantive role in the theory of argument. But the 
door is left open. 

Bearing on the present question is the suggestion of Johnson and Blair (102) 
that developments in fuzzy logic may prove helpful to the informal logician. It is 
useful to compare fuzzylogic with ordinary probability theory. Probability theory 
is the arithmetic of the real line constrained by special aleatory axioms. Fuzzy logic 
is also a kind of probability theory, but a theory of considerably more mathematical 
and axiomatic complexity than the standard account. In an alternative approach, 
fuzzy logic is fuzzy set theory plus something else. Fuzzy set theory models 
l:ukasiewicz's indenumerably many-valued logic. Fuzzy logic is a nonconservative 
extension of this model. It is got by adding fuzzy truth values, which in turn are 
fuzzy subsets of the set of values of the many-valued logic. Thus it is provided 
that in fuzzy logic truth comes in degrees. Either way, fuzzy logic purports to 
model the human capacity for reasoning with inexact concepts. It does this by 
exploring the assumption that when we argue in inexact terms and draw infer-
ences in imprecise vocabularies, we actually (orideally) make computations about-
take the measure of-the embedded imprecisions. My own view is that this is the 
last thing that we do, and indeed that we do the opposite. That is, we omit taking 
the measure of inexactitude, and we do so for the sake of cognitive economy. I 
don't doubt the human being's capacity for an appropriately detailed computa-



158 John Woods 

tional command of even radical fuzziness, but I do doubt that it could be other than 
a subcortical achievement. Once consciousness enters the picture, representation 
becomes a dominant factor, and a linear one. But real-time linear treatments of 
highly complex phenomena are inordinately inefficient. So I conjecture that beings 
like us are hardwired (or something close) for hard-edged, highly bimodal con-
scious experience.32 In this I could very easily be wrong, but one thing is clear. If 
fuzzy logic does have a place in informal logic, then goodbye forever to any idea 
that informal logic should be neither difficult nor complex.33 

2.5 Fallacy Theory 

Over the years there has been a question about the place of fallacy theory in 
informal logic. Unless I am mistaken, Hitchcock resists the inclusion on pedagogi-
cal grounds,34 Freeman for rather more theoretical reasons, perhaps, and Fisher, 
too, possibly in the spirit of Finocchiaro's reservations. 35 Nor are fallacies any-
where to be seen in the Weinstein research programme. Johnson and Blair are 
differently minded, and lean toward a welcoming ecumenism. I hold a twofold 
view of this question. Ifwe stick with the traditional generic idea offallacy as an 
argument or a move in an argument which appears to be all right in a certain way 
but isn't in fact all right in that way, then it falls to the theory of argument itself to 
determine whether this concept is empty or non-empty, and if non-empty, whether 
it can be involved in the discharge of tasks T

j 
and T

2
• Let us suppose that fallacies 

are indeed theoretically scrutable and theoretically well-motivated. Whether they 
fall within the logical ambit of a theory of argument, and, if so, within the formal 
or informal sub-ambits, will be determined one by one by the theory itself, and 
with an exactitude and a determinancy that matches the exactitude and determinacy 
of those very distinctions in the master theory. 

One reason to like the traditional conception of fallacies, and the historical 
accumulation I have called The Gang of Eighteen (which by and large are the 
fallacies discussed in most of the more or less standard texts), is that a clear 
answer is possible to the question of the linkage between informal logic and phi-
losophy. The short answer is that most of the Gang of Eighteen are philosophical 
research programmes in their own right. 36 What chance is there of having theoreti-
cally mature accounts of, for example, inductive fallacies such as hasty generali-
zation, without some substantial headway having been made with issues such as 
the Problem of Induction and whether inductive logics are even possible? How 
realistic is it that we will chance upon really good accounts of the causal fallacies 
without a good account of causality, including perhaps a resolution of Hume's 
Problem? How likely is it that we will have something strong to say about the ad 
ignorantiam short of real insight into the structure of autoepistemic and abductive 
arguments?37 



How Philosophical Is Informal Logic? 159 

Of course, one person's pleasure is another's poison. Efficiently minded argu-
mentation theorists will dislike this link with philosophy on economic grounds. It 
is a connection which makes the theory of argument too sprawling, too disjointed, 
and simply too vast for anyone theorist's canvass, no matter how big. Better, they 
say, to handle the fallacies in a more unified and streamlined fashion, in a way that 
makes the fallacies an entirely self-contained affair. A case in point is the pragma-
dialectical approach,38 which offers a treatment of the fallacies in an overall theory 
of argument which itself admits of an adequate precis in just five pages of printed 
text. 39 Midway between the Gang of Eighteen approach and the pragma-dialetical 
strategy is the work of Douglas Walton, especially in the past dozen years or so, in 
which one finds a degree of philosophical engagement within a general framework 
deriving from pragma-dialectics.40 

This is not the first time that the desiderata of theoretical economy and theo-
retical richness have fallen into contention. On the present issue the jury may still 
be out, but I think I see a recent drift in affection toward economy in fallacy 
theory at the expense of analytical richness. As I see it, it is a drift in the wrong 
direction. 

3. Prospects 

3.1 An Explosion 

No one does a better job than Johnson and Blair, and Hitchcock too, in keeping a 
running inventory of what's on offer in informal logic. Their reckonings are in-
variably thorough, judicious, and accurate. Their contributions to the present issue 
of Informal Logic are no exception. Hitchcock's rehearsals are perhaps a shade 
more judgmental (no bad thing) than those of Johnson and Blair, but nothing that 
comes close to excessive or tendentious. Records of this sort have been kept since 
1980. They chart the well-being or lack of it of a complex intellectual enterprise 
involving tens of thousands research man-hours. They attest to the remarkable 
vigour with which the work of informal logic has been transacted in the past 
quarter century. 

I wonder ifit is well and widely understood how much of an intellectual explo-
sion there has been in this period. Sometimes in our summary moments we tend to 
emphasize the negative. Though irked by it, Johnson and Blair agree that "Informal 
logic has yet to come together as a clearly defined discipline, one organized around 
some well-defined and agreed upon systematic techniques that have a definite 
structure and can be decisively applied by users".41 But these are not the condi-
tions under which something is a discipline. If they were, we would know discipli-
nary impoverishment on a grand scale. We would have lost philosophy, for start-
ers, to say nothing of economics and psychology (and, if Hintikka is right, set 
theory would be a casualty of these conditions as weIl)Y Even so, it might be true 



160 John Woods 

that informal logic isn't a discipline. If so, I for one wouldn't mind. What cannot 
be denied is that it is a research programme, or rather a rich and tumbling congeries 
of them. As I said earlier, deep work on the inductive fallacies requires consider-
able progress in bringing inductive logic itself to a stable maturity. And telling work 
on ad verecundiam fallacies demands significant developments in social epistemol-
ogy. (Here I side with Freeman.) 

If anything is true, it is that we have seen too much work in informal logic 
rather than too little. This explains ratios of good work to bad that we shouldn't be 
entirely happy with. Informal logic suffers the disadvantage of all disciplines and 
research programmes with low thresholds of entry. All that's needed is what no 
one lacks, namely, some confident intuitions about argument. But it is one thing to 
be seized by some primordial beliefs (as Hertzberger calls them) about arguments; 
it is quite another thing to know what to do with them. We should envy disciplines 
whose entry thresholds are forbiddingly high, like recursion theory or topology. 
Of course it is natural that theratio of good work to not so good is less in informal 
logic than in recursion theory or topology. They are different animals whose dif-
ference matters. Nor is it surprising that over the past fifteen years or so editors 
have been holding informal logicians to rising standards. Perhaps our self-im-
provement has not been swift enough; perhaps too much is still let in under benign 
policies of theoretical pluralism. Indeed perhaps this has bearing on Johnson and 
Blair's regret that a "major challenge" to informal logic has been its failure to 
"penetrate the philosophical establishment ... " (101). 

3.2 The Mainstream 

How true is this? It is true that philosophers such as Quine will not give informal 
logic the time of day. Like Peirce, he thinks that there can be no logic of natural 
language argumentation. On the other hand, present company excepted, establish-
ment philosophers such as Lewis, Goldman, Parsons, Boolos, Sorenson, Adler 
and Hintikka do publish papers on informal logic and argumentation; and they 
publish these works in established journals.43 No one wi11 say that the ad hominem 
fallacy or the question of premiss-acceptability is as hot an issue these days as, 
say, the consciousness question in the philosophy of mind. Johnson and Blair are 
right in observing that little if any of the informal logic research record has become 
a staple of Ph.D. programmes in philosophy (other disciples are an exception to 
this; e.g., the Ph.D. programme in Discourse Analysis at the University of Amster-
dam), but the same is true of lots of philosophical research programmes. Even 
mathematical logic typically rates no more than a mandatory one-semester course, 
which properly prepared undergraduates could challenge with relative impunity, 
and sometimes do. 

It is also true that these works on informal logic and argumentation published 
by establishment philosophers in establishment journals have not been much de-



How Philosophical Is Informal Logic? 161 

bated in those circles. But neither have they been much debated by us , whether in 
"our" circles or "theirs". In saying this, two further points become evident. (A) 
We don't much debate one another's work. We cite each other, but for the most 
part we do so without engagement. 44 Are we too nice (are there, as Johnson and 
Blair jokingly suggest, too many Canadians in this field)? Are we too shy? Is ours 
a toothless and over-permissive pluralism? My own view is that it is time long 
since to take the gloves off and punish views we think misconceived or trivial with 
a tenacity that recalls the assault of, say, naturalized epistemology on foundationalism 
and foundationalism's own returning fire. (B) We don't send our work to the 
establishment journals. Even so, if I may be forgiven a personal aside, 145 have 
never had a paper on fallacies or related things turned down by an establishment 
editor. These include, over the years the editors of NoUs, Journal of Philosophical 
Logic, Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, Synthese, Journal of Philosophy. 
Logique et Analyse. Review of Metaphysics and The Canadian Journal of Phi-
losophy. I infer from this that our overall absence from the establishment record is 
more our doing than the establishment's. 

We should do something about it. 

3.3 The Place of Senior Service Research 

The failure of informal logicians to engage one another is a kind of professional 
solipsism and, I believe, a wasting problem for informal logic. A further difficulty 
concerns the relationship between primary research by the senior service, so to 
speak, and introductory textbooks. In healthy disciplines, textbooks are thoroughly 
informed by established and up-to-date senior service research. Since primacy 
attaches to senior service research it can be seen providing the information that 
trickles down to textbooks. Let us say, then, that in such disciplines textbooks 
bear a trickle down relationship to primary research. In this informal logic stands 
truly apart. Its introductory textbooks bear no trickle down relationship to primary 
research. 46 In most cases, there is no acknowledgment of such research, never 
mind an appropriation of it. It is true that the textbook published by Douglas 
Walton and me in 198247 did to some extent draw upon primary research; but it 
was our own primary research, only a small proper subset of a larger total. 

It may bear on the point at hand that in the twenty-seven years since the 
publication of Kahane's Logic and Contemporary Rhetoric: The Use of Reasoning 
in Everyday Life one sees a dearth of research monographs on informal logic. 
Govier's Problems in Argument Analysis and Evaluation, Freeman's Dialectics 
and the Macrostructure of Arguments and Walton's Argument Structure are excep-
tions. (So too are Johnson's Manifest Rationality and Christopher Tindale's Acts 
of Arguing. published since the Boston meetings of 1998.) If we count fallacy 
theory as part of informal logic, Douglas Walton's numerous monographs are 
another large exception. But Woods and Walton's 1989 book, Fallacies: Selected 



162 John Woods 

Papers 1972-1982 is a selection of previously published articles, Blair and Johnson's 
Informal Logic (1980) is the proceedings of a conference, as is Johnson and 
Blair's, New Essays in Informal Logic (1994). And Johnson's The Rise of Infor-
mal Logic (1996) is a selection of previously published articles, as is Woods' The 
Death of Argument (2000). Certainly there is nothing in the contemporary re-
search record of the scale or reach (or ambition or clarity of vision) of A System of 
Logic, written by the greatest informal logician to date,unless the nod goes to 
Aristotle himself. 

It is necessary to ask why there is no trickle down from primary research in 
informal logic to its textbooks. Three possibilities suggest themselves, all bad. One 
is that authors oftextbooks are too lazy to take command of the primary research 
record. Another is pedagogical: First year students aren't up to even an introduc-
tion to senior service research. The third is that senior service research doesn't 
warrant consideration by textbook authors. I shall leave these options without 
further comment, and shall suggest instead that any field that doesn't in a timely 
way solve its problems of solipsism and the absence of trickle down is not likely to 
persist as a viable research programme. Johnson and Blair express their concern 
that our graduate schools are failing to train the next generation of informallogi-
cians. It may turn out not to matter. 48 

Notes 

I And-a different thing-a wholly general theory of what we would call "deductive inference". 
In the interests of space, I shall confine my remarks to the theory of argument. 

2 Parenthesized numerals give page references of the present issue of this journal. Other references 
are given in endnotes. 

3 Some further insight is offered by the comparatively little that Aristotle has to say about valid 
immediate inferences, which, of course, are not syllogisms. 

4 Cf. Hitchcock (J 30): "Traditionally an argument is defined as a system composed of premisses 
and conclusion-a definition which goes back to the early Stoics of the third century BCE." 
Actually it goes back to Aristotle, but applies only to arguments in this latter abstract sense. 

I The point is developed in greater detail in Woods (2000b), Chapter 6. 
(, In this spirit, Freeman writes (118), "The claim that informal logic is focused on the arguments 

of the polis seems uncontroversial. Analyzing and evaluating arguments about what we should 
believe concerning how we may best order our lives together and what we should do as a 
consequence is central to the informal logic enterprise as standardly interpreted." But this is too 
narrow; it fits with neither Aristotle's conception ofa theory of arguments on the hoof nor with 
that of present-day theorists, including Freeman himself. Aristotle's theory encompassed argu-
ments about any matter concerning which there was received opinion, as well as arguments from 
premisses that are in the demonstrative closure of the first principles of the sciences. And 
concerning how things proceed today, I challenge anyone to show that Freeman's own substan-



How Philosophical Is Informal Logic? 163 

tial contribution to informal logic, Dialectics and the Macrostructure of Arguments, is in any 
sense an analysis and evaluation of arguments about "what we should believe concerning how 
we may best order our lives together [etc.] ... ", and to show that in its preoccupation with 
thcoretical matters, Freeman's book deviates from the norm. It is true, of course, that Johnson 
and Blair, in Chapter II of the second edition of Logical Self-Defence, give some handy rules of 
thumb for evaluation advertising messages, these aren't for the most part arguments, and they 
don't for the most part concern themselves with "how to order our lives together." 

7 Boole's contribution to the mathematical turn in logic resembles Descartes' discovery of ana-
lytic geometry. Descartes' showed how to algebraicize planc gcometry. Boole showed how to 
algebraicizc the logic of propositions. 

S GOdel (1986),369-370: "In consequence of latcr advances, in particular of ... A.M. Turing's 
work, a precise and unquestionably adequate definition of the general concept of formal system 
can now be given .... Turing's work gives an analysis of the concept of 'mechanical procedure' 
(alias 'algorithm' or 'computation procedure' or 'finite combinatorial procedure'). This concept 
is shown to be equivalent with that of a 'Turing machine'. A formal system can simply be 
defined to be any mechanical procedure for producing formulas" . 

9 Literally "decision problem", but the term is standardly used to denote the problem of finding 
a mechanical test for validity in first-order logic. 

10 For example: " ... there is a group that advocates a total rejection of formal methods in the study 
and analysis of argument. An appalling example is the informal logic movement [Johnson and 
Blair, 1980]. Their attacks, however, are not totally free ofthe 'strawman fallacy' ... " (Starmans, 
1996, 5). This calls to mind a complaint made by Hobbes against a particularly technical 
manuscript submitted for his opinion: "All scabbed over with algebra!" he thundered. For a 
more sympathetic rejection, see the passage from Hintikka quoted under the title of this paper. 

II This paragraph and the next have benefited from fruitful pressing by John Hoaglund. 
12 Interested readers may wish to consult Woods (200Ib). 
13 Dewey (1981). 
14 See Johnson, (1987), 47-56. See also Fisher (113-114). The fuller story of Quine's naturaliza-

tion of formal logic is told in Quine (1986). 
15 Quine (1982), passim. 
16 Quine's collective name for them is "regimentation". 
17 So we may see Peirce as anticipating in a certain way the Quinean notion of canonical notation. 
IS I emphasize that this is Quine's view. Shalom Lappin tells me that recent work in linguistics 
discourages the idea that the distinction between untampered with and canonical languages 
concurs with the distinction between a weak and strong semantics. 

19 For Freeman on relevance, for example, see Freeman (1992), 219-235. See also Hitchcock 
(1992),251-270, and Gabbay and Woods (2001). 

20 On an unsympathetic reading of Freeman (119), the concepts of relevance and ground adequacy 
haven't fared well in epistemology, so we shouldn't be over-hopeful about their doing any better 
in informal logic. My own view is that, if epistemology can't deliver the analytical goods, we 
should drop epistemology and forge more promising alliances with, e.g., computer science, 
linguistics and psychology. 

21 See, e.g., Quine (1982),254. Cf. Hansen (1994), 329-337. 
22 But see Woods, Johnson, Gabbay, and Ohlbach (200 I). 
23 For a fuller discussion, see Woods (2001 a), Chapter 8; and Gabbay and Woods (2002), Chap-

ters 3 and 5. 
24 Would Freeman disagree that the best account of relevance yet produced has been developed by 

a pair of linguists? (See Sperber and Wilson, 1995.) 
25 It is true that some reliabilists, e.g., Plantinga, try to get a concept of warrant out ofreliabilism. 

Plantinga's critics think that he fails in this, and so do I. 



164 John Woods 

26 I mention in passing the infinite regress to which this pair of statements gives rise. 
21 However, I part company with Fisher on the issue of reflective equilibrium as ajustification of 

principles of inference: Fisher pro and Woods contra. See Woods (2001a), Chapter 8. 
2' Weinstein (1999),868-871. 
29 See also Finocchairo (1984), 3-8, and (1989), 313-335. 
30 Co pi (1995), 84-94. 
31 See, e.g., van Eemeren and Grootendorst (1992). Their theory means to range "from the formal 

context of law in an address to the court to the informal context of an ordinary conversation at 
home" (8). 

32 Honesty compels me to say that when the present writer put this suggestion to Lotfi Zadeh at 
the first Bonn Conference on Formal and Applied Practical Reasoning in 1996, the father of 
fuzzy logic was noticeably underwhelmed. For a more detailed discussion of the connection 
with informal logic, see Woods (200Oc). 

33 For a good sampler offuzzy logics, Kosko (1991). A more rigorous treatment is Hlijek (1998). 
For a more detailed discussion of the connection with informal logic, see again Woods (2000c). 

34 A resistance that doesn't prevent him from characterizing fallacy theory - in comparison with 
analyses ofthe concept of argument - as an "equally substantial and equally important subject 
of investigation within informal logic" (130). 

35 Finocchiaro (1981), 13-22. 
36 For further discussion, see Woods (1992),23-48; reprinted in Woods (2000d). 
31 A fuller discussion can be found in Woods (2000a), 107-134. 
J8 Van Eemeren Grootendorst (1987), 283-301. For reservations, see Woods (1992), 42-44, and 

Woods (1988), reprinted in Woods (2000d). See also Wreen (1994). 
39 Starmans (1996), 77-83. Of course, a compact precis implies not that the theory is simple but 

rather that it is clear, that, in particular, it has a clear structure. 
40 Walton is best known for where most of his work actually lies, namely, in fallacy theory. But 

it is well to note his more broadly oriented contributions, such Walton (1996). 
41 Johnson and Blair (94), quoting Walton and Brinton (1997), 9. 
42 For technical reasons, set theory lacks the resources to determine whether a model of the theory 

is an intended model. See Hintikka (1996), 176. 
43 Lewis (1982), Boolos (1991), Goldman (1994), Sorensen (1989), Parsons (1996), Adler (1994), 

Hintikka (1997). 
44 Of course there are exceptions: see, for example Wreen (1994) and Finocchiaro (1995 and 

1999). 
45 In many of these cases co-authors are Douglas Walton, Brent Hudak and Hans V. Hansen. 
46 In other fields, or sub fields, the trickle down relation is empty, for want of one of the relata. 

Primary research there is, but textbooks are nowhere in sight. The pragma-dialectical approach 
to the theory of argument is a case in point. Van Eemeren and Grootendorst have written 
accessible monographs, relatively free of technical arcana. These works not only showcase the 
primary research in pragma-dialectics, but they also serve as textbooks. See, e.g., van Eemeren 
and Grootendorst (1992). 

41 Woods and Walton (1982). A much revised new edition is Woods, Irvine and Walton (2000). 
4. I thank my fellow symposiasts in Boston for their stimulating papers and for helpful com-

ments on my oral response. The same gratitude goes to Frans van Eemeren and the late Rob 
Grootendorst for penetrating criticisms while I was in their midst in 1998, and to Hans Hansen, 
Harvey Siegel, Jonathan Adler, Robert Pinto, John Hougland and Mark Weinstein. Research 
was supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Professor 
Bhagwan Dua, Dean of Arts and Science, University of Lethbridge, and Vakgroep Taalbeheersing, 
Argumentatietheorie en Rhetorica, University of Amsterdam. 



How Philosophical Is Informal Logic? 165 

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John Woods 
The Abductive Systems Group 

University of Lethbridge 
Lethbridge, Alberta 
Canada 1'1 K 3M4 

woodv@uleth.ca