I nformal Logic 
V11.1, Winter 1985 

Open Forum 

Where are the limits to reconstruction? 

JONATHAN E. ADLER 

Can something be an argument-
contain premises and conclusion; aim at 
persuasion, etc. (fill in your favorite 
standard account) - but yet not best be 
represented in reconstructed (standard-
ized) form, even for the purposes of 
capturing its rational persuasive force? 
A good example is Robert Herrick's 
"To the Virgins to Make Much of 
Time." The first stanza should prick 
the memory and give the flavor of 
Herrick's argument: 

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may 
Old Time is still a-flying; 

And this same flower that smiles 
to-day, 

To-morrow will be dying. 
Now I won't bother laying out the 
standardized argument. I assume it's 
fairly obvious, and alii want agreement 
on it that the result will lack the spirit 
of the original. It will be blunt, flat-
footed, and unattractive. I suppose that 
if we flesh out the assumptions, the 
standardized argument will be valid, 
but of questionable soundness. 

I also want to take the poem in an 
unsophisticated way. I want to avoid 
the questions of interpretation that are 
the stuff of heavy-duty literary criti-
cism. For example, I assume that there 
is no special sort of meaning called 
poetic meaning-metaphors in poetry 
'are to be understood within an account 
of metaphor generally. Finally, I follow 
a not especially attractive part of our 

Brooklyn College, CUNY 

tradition in ripping the poem out of the 
context in which Herrick wrote, These 
presuppositions are made in a prelimi-
nary way. Perhaps we will have cause 
to rethink them later, 

So the poem as standardized fits all 
the definitions of argument that r 
know. But the result of applying the 
usual methods for standardization 
leaves us with something dead. (I'm 
sure I tried this kind of argument as a 
teen-ager-since I tried just about 
everything else-but it never seemed to 
work. Maybe I should have tried poet-
ry? Here is a case in which passion 
came to be the slave of (other's) 
reason.) Should we say that the argu-
ment as reconstructed captures all the 
cognitive force of the poem, whereas 
the life or the point of the poem goes 
beyond an attempt at establishing the 
truth of a preposition? And if we do so 
answer, does that signal a general the-
sis that all rational persuasion in ex-
tended writing is to be viewed (can use-
fully be viewed) as argument? If we do, 
I think it must be because we assume 
that whatever cognitive force a bit of 
reasoning has is a force that extends 
only to what can be explicitly captured 
in statements. This would mean that 
implicit or tacit (using Polanyi's 
term) persuasive power cannot be 
evaluated cognitively and hence is 
perhaps deceptive. This would apply, 
for example, to allusions. 



62 I nformal Log ic 

You might in this regard consider 
how to answer the one-in-every-class 
problem. A teacher painstakingly works 
through a difficult poem with her 
class. (The same point can be made for 
the teaching of some hard passage in 
philosophy.) She does a good job, and 
at the end there is illumination. But 
then one-kid-in-every-class will raise 
her hand to say: "Teacher, if that's 
what the poet (philosopher) meant, 
why didn't she just say so?" 

I'm not raising this as a puzzle or as a 
rhetorical question. I think what it real-
ly concerns is how we understand the 
distinction between the force of words 
and the force of argument. We all know 
that often when we reconstruct an 
argument, the result is something 
incredibly heavy-handed compared to 
the readability of the original piece. My 
question is this: are we losing anything 
other than style by this reconstruction? 
Could there be something rational or 

cognitive that is also lost? If one reads 
a rigorous analytic philosopher like the 
late James Cornman, does his difficult 
method of rendering the reasoning of 
others into explicit premises and con-
clusion lose anything of substance? Is 
Cornman's method an ideal which we 
all would do well to approximate, 
problems of ability, rhetorical style, 
and costs of effort aside? 

I recognize that my query conflates a 
number of questions concerning the 
relationship of readable language to the 
language of standardized arguments. 
But to separate the questions seems to 

require more progress towards answer-
ing them than I am presently ablt to 
muster. So I hope others, by clarifying 
my questions, will cast light on the 
answers. 

Jonathan E. Adler, Department of 
Philosophy, Brooklyn College, CUNY, 
Brooklyn, NY 11210 0