it appeared. This will help you reach a wider 
audience, and help other readers to keep a-
breast of work in the field. 

!-1ake a note of the (Second International) 
Symposium on Informal Logic, tentatively sched-
uled for June 20-21-22-23, 1983 at the Univer-
sity of Windsor. The time will be ripe for a 
review of the progress of the informal logic 
movement since the first Windsor symposium in 
June 1978. Wi th two years t lead time, we hope 
there will be ample opportunity for people to 
work up papers. We herewith issue the first 
call for papers. Papers on any and all topics 
related to the theory and teaching of informal 
logic are welcome. Inexpensive on-campus ac-
commodations and meals will be available. We 
will keep you posted as more detailed plans 
develop. 

Hith this issue we complete the third year 
of publication of the Informal Logfc Newsletter. 
The Newsletter has tripled, since ~ts first 
year, in the amount of material included. We 
are sorry that the increase in the amount of 
material, plus rising costs, have prevented us 
from issuing an Examples Supplement with this 
volume: we have simply run out of money. 
However, we do have a supply of examples--many 
with accompanying analyses--on hand, and we 
will be printing as many of these as we can in 
the Fall 1981 number (Vol. iv, No.1) which 
will be coming out early in the fall--in time 
for first-semester courses. It would help a 
lot if you would comb your last-year's stock 
of examples, and this summer send us a few 
juicy ones for inclusion in that issue. In-
clude your own [succinct) analyses of them if 
you can. 

Note that subscription renewals are now due. 
It has been necessary to increase our rates to 
$6 (individuals) to cover increased costs. We 
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~t will be much easier to read. Please send 
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Have a pleasant summer. (Eo 

Thanks to Vi Smith and Hidge Mailloux for 
typing this issue. Without the (unpaid) edi-
torial and production assistance of June Blair, 
this issue would not have seen the light of 
day~ we are grateful for her help. Our tian-
aging Editor, Peter tiilk,inson, leaves for a 
well-earned sabbatical as we go to press. 

2 

articles 

Worries About 
-r:'u l3uaque as a 
Fallacy 

Trud y Govier 
Trent UniverSity 

Traditionally, the tu quoque argument has 
been regarded as a kind of fallacious ad 
hominem. A classic form of this consists in 
attacking someone for not practicing what he 
preaches, and then going on to impugn on these 
grounds the content preached. l For example, 
several years ago Ontario and Federal govern-
ment officials in Canada, having exhorted 
Canadians to spend winter holiday money at 
home in Canada, nevertheless abandoned our 
northern country for winter vacations in 
Florida and the Caribbean. From such a dis-
crepancy between preaching and personal prac-
tice, one might be tempted to infer that what 
is preached is false, wrong, or unimportant. 
If one did this, then, traditionally, one 
would have committed an ad hominem fallacy of 
the tu quoque variety. -

One may feel doubts about this case. Some-
how, one feels, critics of government ministers 
have got some kind of valid point here. The 
matter has perplexed me for some time, and I'd 
like either to generate a similar perplexity 
in others, or to find someone who can rid me 
of my own. 2 

We may look at such cases in an abstract 
way. A person, A, holds a principle, P, which 
is of the form "People in circumstances of 
type (c) should do actions of type (a)". He 
affirms this principle, communicates it to 
others, advocates that they follow it, argues 
on its behalf, and so on. But A himself, when 
in circumstances of type (c) does not do ac-
tions of type (a); he performs, on the other 
hand, actions of type (x)--quite contrary to 
(a)--and thus fails to conform to his own 
principle. Now consider another person B who 
has been part of A's audience on some of-the 
many occasions on-which he has exhorted others 
to conform their actions to P. B, let us say, 
points out to A in no uncertain terms that his 
action of type-(x) is in violation of his own 
principle, P. So far, B certainly has not 
committed any fallacy. -He has merely made a 



true comment about A, and voiced it to A in 
emphatic language. -B may go on and use-this 
true comment as a basis for criticism of A. 
A does not practise what he preaches, and-this 
fact, which strongly suggests that he i~ 
either hypocritical, unserious, or weak-willed, 
could relevantly and appropriately be used in 
an argument to one of these conclusions. If 
B, in criticizing A, were to construct such an 
~gument, he would-not necessarily commit any 
fallacy. 

A fal,l.acy seems to be committed by B in this 
sort of context only if B wants to argue from 
A's failure to practice what he preaches to 
the erroneousness of what A preaches. Such an 
argument, if used by B, would be typical of 
fallacious ad hominem-arguments insofar as it 
would contaIn an ~nference from a personal de-
fect to the erroneousness of a view held by 
the "defective" person. Certainly if B were 
to argue as in -

* 1. A advocates that P be followed. 
2. A does not himself follow P. 
3. P is false. . 

he would be committing a blatant fallacy of 
relevance. My own experience suggests, how-
ever, that we are unlikely to find instances 
of tu quoque which are so grossly simple. Of 
course, where P is a perfectly general prin=-
ciple about what people should do, and A is 
merely one individual, no facts about A-will 
be relevant to the truth/falsity, unimportance/ 
importance ..• of P. The connection, if any, 
between A's performance and the soundness of 
P is a connection which B makes in this kind 
of context because it is-the particular person 
A who is telling him to follow P. B may ask, 
plaintIVely and rhetorIcally, "Who 1"s he to 
tell me to follow P, when he doesn't even con-
form to it himself?". For S, there is cer-
tainly a very natural tendency to associate 
the character of A with the principle, P, in-
sofar as it is A Who is telling him to conform 
to P. 

Something is going wrong when one receives 
moral or prudential directives from the very 
people who do not follow these themselves. In 
such contexts, one has a kind "gut reaction", 
amounting sometimes almost to rage. Most 
people--even philosophers well indoctrinated 
by traditional accounts of the fallacies--will 
admit to feeling this. Yet, it is quite obvi-
ous that the simple argument (*) has no merit. 
Perhaps one's very natural "gut reaction" 
should be discounted as a natural emotional 
response of no logical relevance. Or should 
it? This is the question which has so puz-
zled me about the tu quoque fallacy. 

In such argumentative contexts one can 
readily construct more subtle and more plau-
sible arguments than (*). Consider: 

** 1. A advocates that P be followed. 
2. A does not himself follow P. 
3. A does not take P seriously. 
4. Others need not take A'S advocacy of 

P seriously. -
5. Whatever reason people may have for 

following P, it does not presently 
come from A. 

Here, (1) and (2) are the basic premises; (3) 
is inferred from them by a kind of inductive 
step; (4) is inferred from (3), and (5) from 
(4). Now none of these inferences is deduc-

3 

tively tight--nor does the sort of conclusion 
adduced suggest that they should be. And 
surely, several of the inferences are open to 
criticism. The move from (3) to (4) would be 
an interesting one to study, as it would seem 
somehow to depend on general assumptions 
about trust, integrity, and communication. 
Granted, the argument (**) does not look so 
impeccable as to be immune to all rational 
criticism. But it is not overtly fallacious 
either. (Is it?) The materials present in 
(1) and (2), and the subsequent moves do seem 
to me to give support to the conclusion(5) • 
I suspect that in many contexts where we might 
at first be inclined to see a tu quoque fal-
lacy, an interpretation of what is going on 
along the lines of (**) would be quite plau-
sible. 

Often, real materials do not contain an ex-
plicit inference from personal failings to 
the falsity of principles, as in (*). Given 
the obvious, blatant erroneousness of that 
argument, this is scarcely surprising. Real 
or realistic arguments wherein people point 
out the failure of others to practice what they 
preach are more plausibly seen as giving the 
moves in (**) than in (*), and when they are 
cast into this more subtle form, there is 
either no fallacy at all, or a rather unobvious 
one. 

For an application to some real cases, con-
sider the following: (i) In 1978, Calgary 
outdoor workers went on a bitter seven week 
strike and eventually settled for a wage in-
crease of 7.5%-8%: they were told by aldermen 
that wages had to be kept down, in order to 
control inflation. When these same aldermen 
voted themselves a 48% increase a year later, 
the outdoor workers were so enraged that they 
launched a campaign to bring the matter to a 
public referendum. Their leader said, "Coun-
cil should remember when they drove us out for 
55 days on the line" (reported in the Toronto 
Globe and Mail, January 15, 1979). 

The point here would seem to be not that 
council members are shown by their actions to 
have said something false when they said it 
was important to keep down inflation, but 
rather that the inconsistency between their 
advocacy of that principle and their quest for 
a fat raise for themselves makes it hard to 
accept from them either the initial principle 
or the SUbSequent demand for their own higher 
wages. 

(ii) In May, 1980, Conservative members of 
the Canadian parliament denounced patronage by 
the Liberal government of Pierre Trudeau. Joe 
Clark, Conservative leader, called Treasury 
Board President Donald Johnston "the president 
of the pork barrel". Writing in the Calgary 
Albertan, columnist Doug Small said, 

One Tory we haven't heard from is the 
party's sole MP from Quebec, Roch 
LaSalle. Why haven't we? By our 
reckoning, he's one of the leading 
authorities on the subject. Remember 
last summer? Shortly after Clark 
named him minister of supply and 
services? 

"Patronage", said LaSalle at the 
time, "is a fact of political life at 
all levels. Obviously it was a tool 
that was used by the Liberals during 
their tenure in office and I doD't 



intend to pass up our opportunity·, 
Tory supporters in Quebec "can look 
forward to being on the receiving end 
of government work and service con-
tracts", he went on. One of his man-
dates would be to "reward our friends". 

For good measure LaSalle noted that 
Liberals appointed to boards, commissions 
and the like would be replaced by Tories 
(in his words "friends of our party") 
when their terms ran out. "That is the 
political way in Canada." 

How easily one forgets. 
(The Calgary Albertan, May 15, 1980) 

Small suggests that the Conservatives' denun-
ciation of patronage is not to be taken seri-
ously. He is not, surely, contending that 
Liberal patronage is all right, because the 
Conservatives who are denouncing it were firm 
supporters of patronage when they themselves 
were in power. # 

FOOTNOTES: 

lCf. John Woods and Douglas Walton, "Ad 
Hominem", The Philosophical Forum, 1977. These 
authors distinguish three different types of 
tu quoque, only one of which is tu quoque in 
the sense I attend to here. They refer to 
this type as involving "deontic-praxiological 
inconsistency", say that it can sometimes 
constitute a good argument which will success-
fully shift the burden of proof, and report an 
interesting old dispute between Whately and De 
Morgan on one particular case. They them-
selves offer no account as to why the "correct" 
cases are correct, or what differentiates them 
from the incorrect ones. 

21 dealt with this issue in a preliminary 
way in "Credibility and Fallacy: Thoughts on 
Ad Hominem", presented at the Canadian Philo-
sophical Association meetings in Montreal in 
June, 1980. 

Charity Begins 
at Horne 

Ralph H. Johnson 
University of Windsor 

Some Reflections on the 
Principle of Charity 

I. INTRODUCTION 

Recent works on informal logic have made re-
ference to something called The Principle of 
Charity. So far as I am aware, the first men-
t~on of this principle is to be found in 
Thomas's Practical Reasoning in Natural Lan-
guage (1973): --

4 
11 When you encounter a discourse con-

taining no inference indicators 
Which you think may nevertheless 
contain an argument, stop and con-
sider very carefully whether such 
an interpretation is really justi-
fiable. . . . A good rule to follow 
is "the Principle of Charity": If 
a passage contains no inference in-
dicators or other explicit signs of 
reasoning and the only possible argu-
mentes) you can locate in it would 
involve obviously bad reasoning, then 
Characterize the discourse as "non-
argument." (9) 

Thomas construes the Principle of Charity as 
a rule to be used in deciding whether or not 
a given passage is to be categorized as an 
argument. 

The next mention that I'm aware of comes 
from Baum's Logic (1975): 
2] The missing premise in this example 

is "Fido is a dog." A general rule 
of thumb for supplying missing pre-
mises is to add whatever premises 
are needed to make the argument as 
good as possible. The rule is some-
times referred to as the principle 
2.f charity. 

Baum construes the Principle of Charity as a 
rule to be followed when adding missing pre-
mises to an argument. 

one of the most complete discussions of the 
principle is to be found in Scriven's Reason-
ins (1976), from which the next two passages 
are excerpted: 
3] Now it's time to introduce you to 

what we might call the ethics of 
argument analysis. The dominant 
principle here is what we can call 
the Principle of Charity. The 
Principle of Charity requires that 
we make the best, rather than the 
worst, possible interpretation of 
the material we're studying. l71) 

Here the scope of the principle--not actually 
formulated--is very broad, for it covers 
every phase of argument analysis. However, 
Scriven very quickly narrows the focus and 
trains his sights on criticism: 

4] The Principle of Charity is more 
than a mere ethical principle, 
but it is at least that. It 
requires that you be fair or just 
in your criticisms. They can be 
expressed in heated terms, if that 
is appropriate; they may involve 
conclusions about the competence, 
intellectual level, or conscientious-
ness of the person putting forward 
the argument, all of which may well 
be justified in certain cases. But 
your criticisms shouldn't be unfair; 
they shouldn't take advantage of a 
mere slip of the tongue or make a 
big point out of some irrelevant 
point that wasn't put quite right. 

This brief survey has turned up four dif-
ferent formulations of the Principle of Char-
ity, and that leads to my first point: there 
appears to be no one principle that informal 
logicians have in mind when they refer to "the