.. free economy" etc. I n one such assignment I ask students to consider whether the abortion controversy is a factual or a verbal dispute. requiring not that they present their views on abortion. but that they attempt to clarify the nature of the dispute and how they think it might be resolved. Overall. it seems to me that we. as philosophers. can ~ake a sp~cial and distinct contribution in teaching mformalloglc. a contribution which is practical in both of the se~ses mentioned. Our skills in logical and conceptual analySIS enable us to serve the immediately practical end of teaching students the basic techniques of critical thinking which they can apply to any subject matter. Our philosophical knowledge of the nature and functions of language and of the principles which philosophically ground and legitimate the rules and techniques of analysis enables us to also stress the ultimate ends which the activity of thought serve. And appreciating the extent to which informal logic can work to clarify and make students aware of the latter ends can help us to appreciate informal logic as a course in which we can fulfill our broader philosophical obligations and objectives. What have I gained personally from teaching informal logic? Just as there are two senses of the word" practical" in my conception of the practical dimension of informal logic, there are also two senses in which I understand the ambiguous expression "teaching informal logic as emanci- patory activity." One of these is the sense in which one teaches students that logically critical thought serves intellectual emancipation and the capacity for individual self-determination. The second sense is that in which the activity of teaching such a course is, or can be, eman- cipating as regards one's own perspective. In my case this has meant specifically that I have begun to envision an underlying compatibility between the two philsophical traditions in which I have studied: the Anglo-American tradition of analysis. with its stress on logic, language and clarity. and the continental traditions of critical theory and hermeneutics. with their stress on the relation between thought and the human condition .• Professor William Maker, Department of History, Philosophy and Religion, Clemson University, Clemson, SC 29631. 20 Appraising Argumentative Texts: Justificatory and t Defensive Components I Dale Moberg Hobart and William Smith Colleges Section One: The Quasiformal Approach . O~e familiar approach to argument appraisal in critical . thl~kmg cou~ses involves. analyzing and arranging the " various premises, conclUSions, and inferences and then. assessing the validity of the inferences (or perhaps the' degree of support given the conclusion by the premises), For appraisal to rise above the intuitive level, it seems necessary to introduce the usual classification of logically complex sentences and natural deduction inference rules ass.ociated with .them. This additional regimentation re- qUires augmentmg analytic procedures; typically, one needs to supply missing intermediate conclusions and premis~s, and paraphrase to achieve greater uniformity of expression by condensing to eliminate irrelevant phrases or by expanding to replace. pronouns. uncover tacit semantic linkages. or clarify elliptical phrases. I think the best way to understand explicitly what is meant by the quasiformal approach is to consider a typical argumentative text (1): (~) What are the economic prospects for the coming year? Either the tax rate structure will have to be modified to generate additional revenue or a federal deficit will occur. Reagan has made it perfectly clear that taxes won't increase. In addition. it seems reasonable to believe that economic improvement now requires a balanced budget It's ap- parent. then. that the economy won't improve in the short term. Text (1) presents a straightforward exercise for quasi- formal analysis. being neither excessively complex in its inferential structure. nor very enthymematic. nor con- taining many extraneous prefixes. phrases. and remarks. A typical quasiformal analysis and structuring for text (1) is provided by diagram (2): - (2) Either tax revenues increase or a federal deficit occurs. & Tax revenues won't increase. Disjunctive inference. (A federal deficit will occur.) & If the economy improves, there can be no federal deficit Modus tollens. The economy won't improve in the short term. Producing analysis (2) usually requires overcoming two major hurdles: noticing the intermediate conclusion that a deficit will occur and extracting the conditional"if the economy improves there can be no federal deficit" from the phrase "economic improvement requires a balanced budget" Extracting the conditionals is the most difficult subtask partly because the conditional is embedded behind parent~eticals and assuring propositional prefixes, partly because it is expressed in a nominalized form, and partly because there is a need to make a semantic link between "balanced budget" and "no deficit (and no surplus)." It seems obvious that the quasiformal approach to argument appraisal conforms to the basic plan, if not the notation and rigor, of approaches in elementary symbolic logic courses. Like the process of formalization the generation of a diagrammed representation is the ex~rcise of a skill acquired and improved by practice on suitably varied examples. The advice and hints needed to extract argument diagrams from actual argumentative texts is extre"'!ely. difficult to codify, as is advice concerning formahzatlon. The absence of a systematic procedure governing diagramming is obviously one disadvantage of the quasiformal approach. A more serious limitation of quasiformal modes of representation of structure and subsequent appraisal of argumentative texts is that there exist components of argumentative texts that deserve appraisal but are not represented in existing graphic displays. In the following remarks, I'll explore some parts of argumentative texts inadequately treated by the quasiformal approach. Section Two: An Epistemological Turn . Wit.hin the quasiformal approach, argument appraisal IS baSically the assessment of inferential validity, de- ~ermined by inferences conforming to a specified set of Inference rules. Because stopping at an assessment of invalidity usually does not advance the state of discussion of the issues underlying the argument, it is usually preferable to augment the premise set in a charitable way until the argument's inferential structure becomes valid. At this point one proceeds to appraise the argument's soundness. At least this is a typical critical procedure. Nevertheless, successful argumentation quite often 21 invo!v~s the p~esen.tation of textual components not e~phcltly appraised In terms of validity and soundness. Glv~n that a~gumentative texts usually emerge in response to disputed Issues, part of the argumentative burden of an e~say is t? cons~~er argu~.ents and objections conflicting With one s positive position. Successful argumentation reflects an awareness of, and critical response to relevant available objections and counter-arguments. An essay ~hat ignores obvious objections and opposed arguments IS rarely taken to be persuasive. One common understanding of the purpose of reasoning and argumentation-to arrive at the truth-makes it diffic~lt t? understand why the anticipation and meeting of obJ~ctlons should be a factor in a successful argu- ~entatlve. text After all,. if a text's positive core argument IS both vahd and so.und,. It clear!y fulfills the goal of arriving at the truth. And If this goal IS the primary purpose of argumentation, it is difficult to understand on what basis we sense a text to be inadequate when it fulfills this aim but ignores a critical examination of objections. ' I'll here assume that not considering objections and opposed arguments is a failure in an argumentative text The question then arises as to how the purpose of argumentative writing is to be reformulated so that the anticipation a~d meeting. of objections becomes integral to argumentation. My baSIC proposal is that the purpose of argumentative writing is to be taken as an author's arti- culating the epistemic position within which the author's resolution of the problem(s) animating his investigation can be see~ by a reader as more worthy of belief than other pOSSible answers (the range of solutions to be specified in a manner analogous to that used in erotetic logic). Th.e eJ;>istemic. position might include understanding and motivating the Issue under consideration and much else, but I'll here take the epistemic position to at least inc~ude ,satisfying the conditions for undefeated, justified behef. I II not attempt to characterize these conditions precisely, because an intuitive understanding will allow some advantages of this enlarged conception of the purpose of argumentation to be formulated. .By unders~ndin~ the purp?se of ~rg~mentative writing to Include articulating a position satisfYing the conditions for undefeated justified belief, we immediately see two sep~~able components of argumentation. One part is the positive core, the argument treated in the quasiformal approach. The other part of argumentation is the defensive perimeter in which one anticipates and meets relevant objections. An epistemic conception of the aim of argu- ment clearly makes each of these components integral to successful argumentation; this unification is a primary advantage of the enlarged understanding of argument prop?sed here. Further ~dvantages of distinguishing the positive core and defenSive perimeter will be discussed in the final section of these remarks. The epistemic characterization of argument function has other a~va~tages, three of which I want to present ~ef?re contln~In.g my remarks concerning meeting ob- Jections as a distinctive component of argument First, because the justification of non basic beliefs involves a subject's being aware of the inferential connection between reasons and conclusion, an author'S failure to articulate inferential connections in a publicly accessible a~d logi~ally explicit way is not merely a stylistic flaw, but a fall.ure With respecttothe primary purpose of an argumen- tative text. I n other words, given that the purpose of an argumentative text is to articulate the epistemic position that reveals the conclusion as worthy of belief, we can understand and explain why defective inference resulting in a true conclusion is defective as argument in terms of the "accidental" character of the justification and the author's not being in the position to know the conclusion to be true. The epistemic understanding of argumentative texts then provides a basis for appreciating the importance of revealing the process of arriving at a result, as opposed to simply announcing it Second, to the extent that basic beliefs provide some of the reasons for our conclusions, we can explain indi- cations of the causal or cultural sources of these beliefs as not merely stylistic assurances, but rather as argumen- tatively relevant indicators of the epistemic status of the basic reasons. Citation of authorities, references to docu- ments, indications of circumstances of observation all allow the reader to discern the epistemic position being developed and to become ale~ed to possibly aberrant or inappropriate modes of production of basic beliefs. This dimension of appraisal is often neglected in the quasi- formal approach to the positive core or is at least not seen as integrally related to the purpose of the argument Finally, the epistemic conception of argument provides a unified and more cooperative understanding of argument, useful not only when we take on the role of a critical audience for argumentative texts, but also when we adopt the role of generators of argumentative texts. The epistemic position to be articulated in an argumentative text is to be understood as a position anyone could occupy. A critic begins to understand the critical task as not so much an attack and rejection as an analysis of why the text fails in showing the conclusion worthy of belief; an arguer understands his task as not so much an attempt to coerce and badger the reader into submission, but instead to make public an epistemic position others may use to resolve or further explore the issue under consideration. It is important to attempt to convey the cooperative and communicative functions of criticism and argument in order to temper the engrained vision of argument and criticism as zero sum competition. While the quasiformal approach doesn't exactly encourage the competitive picture of argument, it does little to encourage a co- operative understanding of argument Section Three: Meeting Conditional Objections in the Defensive Perimeter Context In the preceding remarks, I have urged embedding the quasi-formal approach to argument appraisal within an epistemic understanding of the purpose of argumentation and sketched a few advantages of this proposal. In my final remarks, I want to defend the importance of dis- tinguishing the positive core from the defensive perimeter by showing how the failure to make this distinction can sometimes animate inappropriate critical reactions. let us suppose we are examining an argumentative text whose overall intent is to persuade us of the need for diversified. investment in varied energy producing tech- nologies. Within this text we find the following passage: (3) There are, of course, more immediate reasons to divert capital from petroleum dependent energy technologies to other "softer" and less centralized technologies. U.S. importation of petroleum is massive. Most economists 22 agree that funds required to pay the import bill are interfering with our capital formation. If our capital for- mation is reduced, we become even less able to revitalize the infrastructure of our economy. And we have already seen the undesirability of any reduction in our ability to improve the infrastructure. Not to divert capital from petroleum dependent technologies is, then, disastrous. While it is true that if the petroleum exporting nations reduced their prices considerably, we would then not so much need massive new investment in alternative energy technologies, there is no indication that prices will be lowered over the long run, and the last decade has provided adequate evidence that prices will rise at least to keep pace with inflation. I present passages very much like this one to students who have acquired the basic skills of the quasiformal approach and are being introduced to notions such as assuring, hedging, slanting" and discounting. 1 The intent of the exercise is to structure the roughly reductio positive argument of the first paragraph of (3) and discuss the discounting defensive function of the second paragraph. The" ideal" discussion of the second paragraph is to recognize the author as in effect anticipating a counter- argument to the conclusion of the first argument The conditional of this argument is conceded to be true; but 'I the counterargument is blocked by denying the ante- cedent of the conditional. This common strategy of ' defeating conditional objections owes its impact to re- vealing that the denial of the positive core's conclusion is not established, because the relevant antecedent is un- available to permit detachment However, on many occasions students reconstructed the second paragraph as an additional positive core argument The conceded conditional was interpreted as being combined with the denial of its antecedent to arrive at a missing conclusion, which was the denial of the conse- quent (that denial being that new diversified energy tech- nology investment is needed). Students then observed that the inference conformed to" denying the antecedent," a discredited "rule" of inference. This unexpected response was my first encounter with how the quasiformal approach, combined with a failure to distinguish between the positive core and the defensive perimeter, led to inappropriate critical reactions. Stu- dents assimilated parts of argumentative texts to their only available model of what such texts do (present reasons for the main conclusion), and what should have ~een regar.ded as a moderately successful blocking of an Inference In a counterargument became viewed as an unsuccessful positive argument There are other situations in which failure to dis- tinguish components of argumentative texts leads to inappropriate critical reactions. Authors sometimes pre- sent an entire argument for a conclusion that is in- consistent with their intended conclusion in the project of refuting one of the counterargument's premises. Such texts are surprisingly often criticized as inconsistent by students who simply fail to understand that not every argument presented in a text is being advanced by the author. It seems to me that some distinction between the positive core and the defensive perimeter, with some account of the reasons for such a distinction, is essential in instruction in informal logic, if one hopes to encourage the development of skills flexible enough to apply to com plex argumentation. If the proposed distinctions and orientations toward argumentation I have presented seem promising, there are many open questions deserving further inquiry. The characterization of patterns of objections and successful and inappropriate ways of responding to types of ob- jections seems to me to be in a very undeveloped state. the analytic epistemological literature that emphasizes the "undefeated" condition does provide some useful suggetions, but is not very systematic. I n addition, textual confusions themselves may, when analyzed, provide useful cautionary advice for writing and criticism, and could serve as a basis for exercises involving dialogues of argument and criticism in which problems arise from a critic's misunderstanding of a speaker's argumentative intent A pragmatics of argumentative speech acts might be an appropriate way to approach some of the mysterious "talking through" exchanges so familiar but perplexing to us all. Notes 11 use Robert Fogelin's Understanding Arguments (New York: Harcourut Brace Jovanovich, 1978), Chapter Two, to introduce the notions of discounting and so on. I've used the diagramming approaches of either Stephen Thomas's Practical Reasoning (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice- Hall, 1981) or Michael Scriven's Reasoning (New York: McGraw Hill, 1976) .• Professor Dale Moberg, Department of Philosophy, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, New York, 14456. Ryle On (And For) I nformal Logic Ralph S. Pomeroy University of California at Davis In their account of the rise of the informal logic movement, R.H. Johnson andJA Blair make several important judgments. [1, p.S] They find the movement characterized by two features. One is" a tum in the direction of actual (Le., real-life, ordinary, everyday) arguments in their native habitat of public discourse and persuasion, together with an attempt to deal with the problems that occur as a result of that focus." The other is "a growing disenchantment with the capacity of 23 formal logic to provide standards of good reasoning that illuminate the argumentation of ordinary discourse." In what follows, I accept these as defining features. That is, I'll regard them as necessary if not sufficient conditions for the existence of the I L movement Johnson and Blair go on to estimate "only three mono- graphs of significance to informal logic" as having appeared in the last quarter-century. These include Toulmin' s The Uses of Argument [2], Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's La Nouvelle Rhetorique [3], both published in 1958 (though Perelman's work wasn't translated into English till 1969), and Hamblin's FaDacies [4], published in 1970. These estimates of significance and/or influence are perhaps as minimally arbitrary as such things can well be while a movment is still in progress. Let' 5 not underestimate the task of the estimators. Admittedly it's tough to try to chart even roughly the force, mass, and directional flow of a movement while one is in the middle of it and contributing to it Yet it's worth noting that five years before Toulmin's and Perelman's works came out, a major philosopher made a major statement (actually, a pOSition paper) pro informal and contra formal logic. This statement, moreover, discernibly influenced Toulmin's and Perelman's works. The philosopher was Gilbert Ryle and the statement his set of eight Tamer Lectures, delivered in Cambridge in Lent Term 1953 and published the following year as Dilemmas. [5] For anyone interested in informal logic, the importance of Ryle's lectures generally (but especially the last, "Formal and I nformal Logic") can hardly be gainsaid. I n fact, I would say of them what Johnson and Blair say of Toulmin's, Perelman's, and Hamblin's works [1, xi]: they "require attention by anyone who wants to do theoretical work in the field." Here, then, I have two aims. First, I want to trace, with the aid of Ryle's personal testimony, how he developed the conception of informal logic expressed and applied in Dilemmas. Then I want to examine that conception and to suggest what its value may be for those interested in teaching or studying informal logic. Ryle tells us that When he went up to Oxford in 1919, he worked rather half-heartedly for Classical Honour Moderations, but "took greedily" to "the off-centre sub- ject" of logic. "It felt to me like a grown-up subject, in which there were still unsolved problems." [6, p.2] In 1924 he became a lecturer in philosophy at Christ Church. As an undergraduate and during his first few years as a teacher, he found "the philosophic kettle in Oxford ... barely lukewarm" and" Logic, save for Aristotelian scholar- ship ... in the doldrums." [6, p.4] By the end ofthe 1920's, however, things had started to look up. At the Joint Session of the Mind Association and the Aristotelian Society in 1929, Ryle struck up a friendship with Wittgenstein, whose Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus he had for some time studied and admired. What he found most admirable in the Tractatus was its central concern with "Russell's antithesis of the nonsensical to the true-or-false, an antithesis which mattered a lot to me then and has mattered ever since." [6, p. 5] During the same period he and five other junior philosophy tutors started the "Wee Teas," an informal dining-club that met once a fortnight during term, with the host of the evening