total is within the federal budget. The other 
way in which salespersons take advantage of 
this fallacy is in stressing the monthly pay-
ments associated with a purchase rather than 
the total amount. Anybody can afford pennies 
a week; unless, of course, the total number 
of pennies from all payments is more than the 
weekly income. 

The central thread of discussion in ethics 
during the past two decades has also been 
through part/whole relationships. What I have 
in mind are the examples, arguments, and prin-
=~ples which have led to the dominance of rule 
~tilitarian theories. Whether we examine 
generalization arguments in ethics, the dis-
tinction between acts and practices, or Garret 
Hardin's notion of the tragedy of the commons 
we find the same territory being surveyed. 
Consider the problem of air pollution from 
automob~les. The amount of pollutant coming 
from my car is well within the ability of the 
atmosphere to absorb. Yet the amount coming 
from all of our automobiles is not. Why should 
: have to drive a (relatively) nonpolluting 
vehLcle when the one that I now drive has no 
significant impact on the environment? As an 
Lndividual act, driving my kind of car is not 
harmful But, considered as a social practice, 
=onsiderable harm must arise. It is right for 
~e ~o drive my car if and only if it is right 
tor everyone to drive automobiles in similar 
'~ndition But it is wrong for everyone to do 
sel'hus ~t is wrong for me to do so. At-
~empt~n9 to Justify my activity by reference 
to lts consequences in isolation is irrele-
vant. at least according to the now dominant 
way of thinking among moralists. Individual 
act~ons derive their moral value from the 
who~es of which they are parts. If the 
~hole 1S wrong so are the parts. 

l'his last move is not the fallacy of divi-
s~on This is because to say that an act is 
wrong ~s just to say that the whole of which 
Lt is a part ~s wrong. There is no way, in 
~eneral, to evaluate the morality of acts 
apart from the wholes which they constitute. 
This is what leads to the tragedy of the com-
~ons. We each perform acts (parts) rather 
than practices (wholes). No individual per-
son performs the practice (the whole) and so 
no one person is responsible. What is done 
in =ommon or held in common leads to tragedy 
for no one person is available to take re-
sponsibility. When responsibility is held in 
common it is easy for each of us to ignore it. 
Only by seeing ourselves as entities who are 
people only by being part of a whole can we 
begin to comprehend that we do have respon-
sibility even though no act that we perform 
has serious consequences. 

Let me conclude on this high note. There 
are other areas of modern argumentation or 
philosophy which also demand an analysis in 
terms of part/whole relationships. To name 
only a few: frequency theory of probability; 
the relationship between the high degree of 
accuracy of mortuary tables and the indeter-
minacy of our individual deaths; the recon-
ciliation of the use of determinism in the 
social sciences and the concept of free will; 
the way in which each item in a collection of 
data may be explained away, has a low prob-
ability of confirmation, and yet the collec-
tion may provide strong evidence as a whole; 
and finally, Berkeley's astounding claim that 
obiects are mind-dependent since each part of 

13 
them, their various attributes, are mind-
dependent. The last example brings forth a 
very important point on which to end. Some of 
our most significant disagreements are really 
ones over whether a series should be analyzed 
in terms of its parts or whether it can only 
be understood as a whole. Berkeley assumed 
that objects are mere concatenations of their 
parts; contemporary moralists argue that mor-
ality is a phenomenon of the whole; and we 
still debate these issues •• 

'7.~ 

critical 
• reviews 

Toulrnin~ Bold 
Experiment 

Ralph H. Johnson 
University of Windsor 

EDITORS~ NOTE 

This is the second part of Professor Johnson's 
critical review of An Introduction to Reasoning 
by Stephen Toulmin,~chard Rieke and Allan 
Janik. The first part appeared in ILN, iii.2 
(Harch 1981), pp. 16-27. Section I-01" John-
son's review was his Introduction; Section II 
reviewed Toulmin's ret al.) theory of argument 
in Parts One and Two-of-rhe booR. In Section 
III, below, Johnson focuses on Toulmin's the-
ory of criticism as set forth. in Part Three 
of the text; in Section rv he presents his 
answers to the questions he proposed in Sec-
tion I as the appropriate matrix for this re-
view. 
Footnotes for both parts of Johnson's review 
are found at the end of this second part. We 
apologize for the inconvenience; the omission 
of the footnotes for the first part from the 
last issue was an oversight. 

III. TOULMIN'S THEORY OF CRITICISM (PART III) 

The purpose of Part III, says Toulmin, is 
to shift the focus from the abstract, general 
level of Parts I and II to consider how rea-



soning actually works and to questions that 
arise when arguments encounter criticism in 
actual practice. This description is not 
entirely accurate. After all, Parts I and II 
have not been all that abstract and indeed 
have at times prefigured the theory of criti-
cism that becomes explicit here. It is to 
that theory that I shall address myself, 
though I also want to say something about 
Toulmin's position on two other topics: the 
burden of proof, and fallacies. 

A. Standards of criticism. Let us assume 
that we have adopted Toulmin's pattern of 
analysis. Once we have laid out the structure 
of the argument, what will be the criteria or 
standards by which we assess it? Recalling an 
earlier passage in which Toulmin stated that 
some standards are field-invariant while 
others are field-dependent, let us review the 
criteria that have emerged prior to Part III. 

Here is what Toulmin says in Chapter 2: 

The claims involved in real-life argu-
ments are, accordingly,- well founded 
only if sufficient grounas-Qf the ap-
propriate and relevant kind can be 
offered in their support. These 
grounds must be connected to the 
claims by reliable, applicable war-
rants, which are in turn capable of 
being justified by appeal to suffi-
cient backing of the relevant kind. 
(27) 

Here Toulmin suggests that there are three 
standards or criteria to be used in assessing 
the grounds: (1) sufficiency; (2) appropri-
ateness; (3) relevance. The standards for 
warrants are two: (1) reliability: (2) appli-
cability. The standards for the backing are 
two also: (1) sufficiency; (2) relevance. 

In Chapter 3, however, a slightly different 
picture emerges: 

What makes one particular set of 
grounds or facts acceptable and rele-
vant for the purposes of this or that 
specific claim? (34) 

Here the standards for appraising grounds are 
(1) acceptability and (2) relevance. Suffi-
ciency and appropriateness have been dropped 
from the previous list and acceptability has 
been added. I find this sort of shifting • 
around distressing, the more so because this 
is not an isolated instance. Moreover, of 
the four criteria for the appraisal of grounds 
mentioned thus far, Toulmin attempts an analy-
sis of only one--relevance. 

Toulmin on relevance. One of the knottiest 
problems for logicians, both formal and in-
formal, has been the concept of relevance. A 
formal analysis of the concept appears little 
more than a hope destined to be frustrated, 
in spite of the heroic attempts by Belnap and 
Anderson. Informal analyses have not fared 
much better. Yet argument analysis is hope-
lessly paralyzed unless the critic has mas-
tered the art of making judgements about rele-
vance, and defending them. 

Toulmin's position does not advance matters 
very far. He asks: "What makes one particular 
set of grounds or facts acceptable and rele-
vant for the purposes of this or that specific 
claim?" (34) KnOWing Toulmin's predilection 
for pivoting his position around the concept 
of a field, the reader will not be surprised 

14 
at Toulmin's answer: 

In certain respects, the conditions 
of relevance of grounds are fully 
intelligible only when we take into 
account the larger demands of the ra-
tional enterprise within which A's 
claim is presented. . . • The precise 
status of A's claim (as a scientific 
hypothesis; a criminal indictment, or 
a medical diagnosis, say) will deter-
mine the criteria by which he can 
select certain items of information 
as being to the eOinf for scientific 
(or legal-or med~cal purposes, while 
setting others aside as being beside 
the point and having nothing to do 
with the case. 

Accordingly, relevance is a substan-
tive matter, to be discussed in 
science by scientists, in law by law-
yers, and so on. There are very few 
"conditions of relevance" of an en-
tirely general kind that hold good in 
all fields and forums and apply to 
all types of arguments. (34) 

I find this somewhat bewildering. On the one 
hand, Toulmin says that relevance is a sub-
stantive matter. Presumably this means that 
determinations of relevance are contextual in 
nature and that field-invariant criteria are 
not available. But then he goes on to suggest 
that there are some ("very few") conditions of 
relevance that are-universally applicable; 
i.e., field-invariant! Now so far as I can 
see, Toulmin nowhere lists any such condi-
tions, which leads me to think that he does 
not really mean this. So I take it that his 
real position is that relevance is a substan-
tive matter. 

There is something to be said for this view. 
Certainly we would not expect laymen to be 
able to make judgements about relevance in the 
fields of law and medicine with any degree of 
reliability. But this fact constitutes a 
strong argument for the contextual position 
only if we grant the assumption underlying it: 
that all arguments can be assigned to fields 
and that all fields resemble, in the signifi-
cant respect, those of law and medicine. 
Since I am reluctant to give Toulmin that 
assumption, his position on relevance, though 
plausible, requires further support. 

Let me return then to what Toulmin says 
about standards prior to Part III. In Chapter 
5, while speaking of backing, he says this 
about warrants: 

• . • it is one thing to state a 
warrant, but it is quite another 
thing to show that it can be relied 
on as sound, relevant and weighty. (58) 

Here again we find that the criteria suggested 
for the appraisal of warrants differ from 
those mentioned earlier. Here Toulmin has 
added soundness, relevance and weight as cri-
teria to be used in evaluating warrants. 

In Chapter 7, Toulmin makes the point that 
the elements are functionally interdependent, 
but once again we find him juggling the cri-
teria for grounds: 

We need to remark on three points 
in particular about this inter-
dependence. First, the relevance 
of any factual information (grounds) 

l 
I 



to a claim depends in part on the 
general rules, principles, or other 
warrants available for legitimating 
claims of the type in question ••• 
That is to say, in order to ensure 
that our grounds are not merely true 
but also weighty and relevant, we 
must look at the warrant relied on 
to authorize the step from these 
facts to the present claim. (85) 

So apparently we must add to the list of cri-
teria for appraising grounds two more: truth 
and weight. That aside, we need to understand 
that Toulmin's basic point here is that the 
elements are not to be evaluated in isolation: 

There will be no question, for 
instance, of completing the scrutiny 
of the grounds entirely before we 
have looked at warrants, backing and 
all the rest. Our critical judgement 
of the acceptability of anyone 
element will remain only provisional 
until the whole argument: has been 
set out explicitly and we have had 
the chance of checking back on the 
bearing of possible rebuttals, on 
the relevance of the grounds, and 
on the applicability of the warrant. 
(86) 

We come then, finally, to Chapter 8, where 
Toulmin's account of the standards to be used 
is scaled down considerably. As if to sum-
marize those earlier discussions, Toulmin 
says: 

It must be clear just what kind of 
issues the argument is intended to 
raise (aesthetic rather than 
scientific, say, or legal rather than 
psychological) and what its underlying 
purpose is. (106) 

In other words, we have to be able to assign 
the argument to some field or rational enter-
prise. 

The grounds on which it rests must 
be relevant to the claim made in 
the argument and sufficient to 
support it. (106) 

Here Toulmin mentions only two of the six cri-
teria that have cropped up rn-earlier pas-
sages. What, we must wonder, has become of 
the other four? Perhaps appropriateness is 
only a synonym for relevance, and possibly 
weight is just another term for sufficiency. 
But what of acceptability? and truth? Are 
these criteria to be used in evaluating the 
grounds, or not? If they are, what is meant 
by them? No satisfactory answers are given 
to these questions. 

The warrant being relied on to 
guarantee this support must be 
applicable to the case under 
discussion and it must be based 
on solid backing. (86) 

Here only one of the criteria listed before 
turns up: applicability. \'lhat has happened 
to all the others? What is meant by solid 
backing? 

The modality, or strength, of the 
result~ng claim must be made 
explicit, and the possible rebuttals, 
or exceptions, must be well under-
stood. (86) 

15 
Does this mean that if an argument is put 
forth without any modality (as, I believe, 
happens quite regularly), we may criticize the 
argument for that omission? Does such a mode 
of criticism, if it is one, deserve to be 
ranked with, for example, a criticism of the 
grounds as irrelevant? Questions like these 
receive no answer in the text, which must be 
accounted a fairly serious criticism. 

The topics covered in the remainder of Chap-
ter 8, though not without merit, do nothing to 
remove the clouds which hang over Toulmin's 
theory of criticism. He contrasts the merits 
of pairs of arguments from various fields and 
is able to show why, in each instance, one of 
the pair is a better argument than its partner. 
Cross-type comparisons are ruled out, however. 
An illuminating section contrasting adversary 
with consensus procedures concludes with the 
crucial point: 

Context determines criteria. 

In what terms we criticize and judge 
the merits of particular arguments 
and claims depends on their "type" 
and so on their "field." Whether 
it be politics or ethics, science 
or aesthetics, psychiatry or law, 
the underlying goals of the human 
enterprise concerned determine the 
fundamental context for the arguments 
and claims in question, and so give 
them their power to "carry conviction," 
by establishing claims on a secure 
basis. (120) 

The question of how far Toulmin is willing to 
go in the direction of "field-invariant" stan-
dards has become unmistakably clear. Standards 
or criteria are context or field-dependent. 
Nowhere has Toulmin cited a single instance of 
a "field-invariant" standard or rule of pro-
cedure, in spite of hints in the early going 
that there are some. Nor should one be misled 
by Toulmin's apparent willingness to cite 
standards like relevance and sufficiency, for 
these turn out, on analysis, to be field-
dependent. 

Hence, Toulmin's position on criteria of 
evaluation comes very close to relativism, a 
point that he himself is cognizant of. In the 
Teaching Guide, he says: 

The second main point presented in 
this chapter (Chapter 8) has to do 
with our seemingly "relativist"--but 
by no means arbitrary--approach to 
argumentation. Arguments can be 
rationally compared, only when they 
have to do with the same substantive 
questions. This means that our 
ability to argue effectively is 
directly related to our knowledge 
of the subject under discussion. 
(TG, 35) 

If this is meant to be a rejOinder to the 
charge of relativism, it is not very satisfy-
ing. First, the question of what sorts of 
criteria there are for the evaluation of argu-
ments is not restricted to the com~arison of 
arguments. It has to do as well w~th the 
evaluation of individual arguments. That such 
evaluation must get along without field-
invariant standards has not been shown. Nor 
does this follow from the fact that in order 
to argue and appraise arguments, we must have 



some knowledge of the subject under discussion. 
For it might also be argued (by the non-
relativist) that we also must have a knowledge 
of the standards and criteria of good argu-
ments, and that these standards are not all 
field-dependent. Perhaps some form of relativ-
ism is inevitable, but Toulmin has not, I think, 
shown this to be the case. 

Let me summarize my problems with Toulmin's 
position on standards and criteria before 
making two final points. Toulmin's treatment 
of this business is very loose: he never 
seems to give the same list of standards twice 
and he does not provide the reader with much 
of an analysis of any of them, except rele-
vance. There are apparent inconsistencies in 
what he says, which are most easily reconciled 
by taking Toulmin to be advocating the view 
that all standards or criteria are field-
dependent. Not only does this involve the 
problems earlier mentioned (ILN, iiL2) about 
the whole notion of a field,lOUt it also takes 
him in the direction of relativism--a position 
he apparently wishes to embrace but has not 
provided adequate arguments for. 

In addition to all this, Toulmin says noth-
ing at all about the need for discrimination 
in criticism. Certainly, an argument which 
has omitted a modal qualifier is not guilty 
of a logical failing that is of the same mag-
nitude as an argument that has been found 
guilty of producing irrelevant or insufficient 
grounds. To be an effective critic, one must 
be able to make such discriminations, but 
Toulmin says nothing about this important 
matter. Finally, I think it would have been 
useful had Toulmin taken a specimen argument 
and subjected it to the sorts of criticism 
which, on his theory, are appropriate. That 
would have given the reader a richer under-
standing of how standards and criteria are 
brought to bear on arguments, once they have 
been analyzed. 

B. Burden of proof. In Chapter 9, Toulmin 
spends some time on the question of where the 
burden of proof lies in an argument. This is 
a subject of some importance yet one too rare-
ly dealt with in introductory logic texts. 
Although Toulmin's treatment contains nothing 
new or astonishing, it is quite well worked 
out and presented and should perhaps serve to 
restrain the polemical sort of student who 
wants to challenge everything. For, as 
Toulmin says, "it is only when enough has been 
said to create a genuine and specific ground 
for doubt that there exists an occasion for 
rational discussion". (123) 

The example Toulmin uses here is a timely 
enough one, about the use of food additives .. 
The question is this: 

Should commercial food processors 
have been in the position, all along, 
of having to justify their use of 
particular additives in advance of 
actually using them? Or was the 
initial burden, rather, on biomedical 
scientists and the FDA to "show cause" 
by producing scientific evidence of 
risk? (125) 

Toulmin does not answer this question direct-
ly. Such questions are hard to answer, as he 
notes in the Teaching Guide: 

16 
Questions about "the burden of proof" 
are very important for criticism in 
concrete cases. Unfortunately, 
whereas the law has clear procedures 
for determining just what has to be 
demonstrated by whom and in what 
order, there are very few guidelines 
in everyday life to this all important 
issue. (TG, 37) 

Instead, Toulmin speaks of "initial pre-
sumptions" (128); that is, opinions that it 
is in general reasonable to adopt, in the 
absence of solid arguments to the contrary. 
He illustrates this idea with examples from 
science and law, concluding (somewhat to my 
surprise) : 

So, in general, the practical demands 
of everyday argumentation make it 
unavoidable that we should rely on 
"initial presumptions," "prior prob-
abilities," and the like. (128) 

It would have been instructive had Toulmin 
been slightly more generous and given us some 
examples, from the realm of everyday argumen-
tation, of what might be allowed as an initial 
presumption. Still it is to his credit to 
have raised this issue of the burden of proof. 
That he has not been able to give us the final 
solution is not so much cause for regret as it 
is a summons to informal logicians to further 
inquiry. 

Chapter 9 concludes with sections on "The 
history of practical reasoning" (which should 
give the student an idea of how modes of rea-
soning have changed over time) and "Historical 
variability and skepticism" (which does a fine 
job of showing how to nip jejune skepticism in 
the bud). 

Chapter 10, "Language, communication and 
reasoning," is the least useful chapter. Its 
focus is language and its role, but there is 
not very much of substance here. For example, 
the section on argument and definition is very 
brief. Toulmin does not mention the various 
kinds of definition, nor does he give suffi-
cient attention to the question of just how 
definitions figure in arguments. 

C. Fallacies. I had hoped that Toulmin's 
novel approach to the analysis of arguments 
would give rise to some new insights into the 
topic of fallacies, or at the very least make 
for an exciting treatment of them. Unfor-
tunately, my hopes were frustrated. Toulmin's 
treatment of fallacies never ventures much 
beyond the conventional approach. He divides 
fallacies into two sorts: fallacies of un-
warranted assumptions and fallacies of ambigu-
ity--a fairly standard division. Under the 
former, Toulmin treats: hasty generalization, 
accident, false cause, false analogy, poison-
ing the wells, begging the question, evading 
the issue, appeals to authority, the appeal 
to the people, the appeal to compassion, and 
the appeal to force. (There is some doubt in 
my mind whether the last two are, in any way, 
argumentative strategies, but that's another 
issue.) Under the latter heading, Toulmin 
treats: equivocation, amphiboly, accent, 
composition and division, and figure of speech. 
Following the traditional wisdom about such 
lists, Toulmin says that no list of fallacies 
can be complete. That bromide cannot, it 



seems to me, justify the omission of several 
of the most important fallacies from either 
heading. Certainly inconsistency and straw 
man belong on any roster. TWo wrongs and 
provincialism occur with enough frequency in 
ordinary discourse to have some claim to 
representation also. 10 

There are other problems. The examples 
cited in the text are often artificial and 
thereby diminish the value of the account. 
Sometimes they aren't even bona fide examples 
of fallacy, as when in dealing with the fal-
lacy of accent, Toulmin says: "A second type 
of fallacy of accent may be found in many 
advertisements and newspaper headlines" (182). 
Newspaper headlines can scarcely be construed 
as arguments, so that whatever infelicities 
they may occasionally contain it only confuses 
matters to refer to them as fallacies. 1l Then, 
too, I must wonder if Toulmin's presentations 
are sufficiently clear and rigorous to offer 
the student an adequate inSight into the nature 
of the fallacy. Here, for instance, is Toul-
min on "the argument a~ainst the person: (ad 
hominem) : 

The argument against the person is 
the fallacy of rejecting the claims 
a person advances simply on the basis 
of derogatory facts (real or alleged) 
about the person making the claim. (172) 

There are instances where Toulmin's descrip-
tion is satisfied but we shall not want to 
say that any fallacy has been committed. Sup-
pose, to cite a classic example, a lawyer 
rejects a witness's claim about an incident he 
claims to have seen on the grounds that (a) 
the witness is a known liar or (b) the witness 
was not actually present. In a court of law, 
where the credibility of the witness is a 
crucial factor in deciding whether or not to 
accept the testimony, the lawyer can reject 
the claim without committing any fallacy at 
all. The point is that it is sometimes per-
missible to attack a person's background or 
character instead of (or as a means to) at-
tacking the person's claim, so that the fallacy 
of the argument against the person ought 
really to be defined as irrelevant attacks on 
the person. 

In discussing the appeal to the people, 
Toulmin says: 

The appeal to the people refers to 
fallacious attempts to justify a 
claim on the basis of its supposed 
popularity. The fact that many 
members of a given group hold some 
belief is offered as evidence that 
this belief is true. Cl74 ) 

The account is not quite accurate. For we rea-
son in this way all the time when we draw 
inferences about a population from a sample. 
The fact that many members of a given group (a 
well drawn sample) hold a certain belief (for 
instance, that Reagan will win the election) 
can surely be some evidence for the truth of 
that belief. And isn't the fact that large 
numbers of people buy a certain product (and 
hence presumably believe it is a good one) 
some evidence that the product is a good one? 

Rather than continue to chip away at Toul-
min's accounts of the individual fallacies, I 
would like to look at what he says at the 
beginning of the chapter. Close to the begin-
ning, he says: 

17 
Just as certain widely accepted ways 
of constructing arguments are recog-· 
nized as unsound across a wide range 
of fields, so too certain modes of 
procedure in argumentation have tra-
ditionally been recognized as unsound. 
These are termed fallacies. (157) 

On the next page, Toulmin says; "Fallacies 
are arguments that are persuasive but un-
sound". (158) I don't think this is a good 
definition at all. In the first place, these 
fallacies can't be all that persuasive if 
Toulmin (and many others) can see through 
them. Second, what meaning are we to attach 
to the term "unsound" here? The traditional 
meaning would be "an argument which is either 
invalid or has one or more false premises, or 
both." But what sense can be made of this in 
Toulmin's approach to the analysis of argu-
ments? Hence it seems to me that his defini-
tion of fallacy has not been integrated into 
his pattern of analysis. 

A few lines later, we read: 

Most disturbingly to some people, 
arguments that are fallacious in 
one context may prove to be quite 
solid in another context. So we 
shall not be able to identify any 
intrinsically fallacious forms of 
argument; instead, we shall try to 
indicate why certain kinds of argu-
ment are, in practice, fallacious 
in this or that kind of context. (157) 

I have difficulty squaring this remark with 
the previous one. That is, if, as Toulmin 
said earlier, certain modes of procedure have 
been recognized as unsound, what was the basis 
of that recognition? Was it contextual un-
soundness that was recognized? But what-rs 
that? contextual validity? contextual truth? 
The fuzziness of these remarks caused me to 
look carefully at Toulmin's treatment of the 
individual fallacies for examples of arguments 
that were fallacious in one context but solid 
in another. I thought I might find an illus-
tration of this point in the treatment of the 
argument against the person, but, as I have 
already shown, I did not. 

Let us look at his treatment of the fallacy 
of evading the issue: 

Of course, not all such evasions of 
the issue are necessarily fallacious. 
Questioners do not always have a right 
to the information they request. 
Students, for instance, do not generally 
have a right to ask their teachers what 
questions will appear in their examin-
ation. (171) 

Of course. A teacher who denies a student re-
quest for exam questions can hardly be said to 
have evaded the issue, for there is no issue! 
The fallacy ean occur only when the person 
being challenged is under some sort of logical 
obligation to deal with the issue. Toulmin 
continues: 

The situation in this case is signifi-
cantly different from that between a 
politician and his constituents, whom 
it is his function to represent in 
Congress. Here as elsewhere, there-
fore, whether this argumentative 
procedure is fallacious or no depends 



on the situation in which it is 
empIOYed. (17l) -rinitial-emphasis added) 

Doesn't it seem odd to describe the technique 
of evading the issue as an argumentative 
procedure, since it is the very opposite? A 
politician who attempts to turn aside legiti-
mate questions about a position he has taken 
may indeed be clever rhetorically and may 
succeed. But such manoeuvers hardly seem 
classifiable as argumentative procedures and 
most certainly are instances of evading the 
issue. On the other hand, there may be times 
when a politician can rightfully refuse to 
supply information requested of him by his 
colleagues or constituents. These are not 
situations that can be described as "evading 
the issue." They are rather "the rightful 
withholding of information." So that wherever 
one can truly describe a situation as evading 
the issue, a fallacy has indeed occurred. 

To bring this section to a close, I want to 
talk briefly about the causes of fallacy. 
Here is Toulrnin: 

Many fallacies result from the 
inappropriate or untimely use of 
rational strategies, or procedures 
of argument, so the catalog of 
possible fallacies--like the catalog 
of topics, or types of argument--
will forever remain incomplete. 
(People can always invent new ways 
of going astray in their reasoning!) 12 
(157) 

This is a curious argument. Suppose we in-
vestigate it using Toulmin's schema: 

l ???????? I warrant 
Ground Claim 

Many fallacies result The catalog 
from the inappropriate of possible 
or untimely use of fallacies 
rational strategies, or will remain 
procedures of argument. forever 

incomplete. 

Is this a good argument? Note, first, the 
absence of any modal qualifier or rehuttal. 
Second, I question the ground. Are fallacies 
caused by the untimely or inappropriate use of 
rational strategy? Or rather from the lack of 
mastery and appreciation of their use? I find 
it hard to accept the view that someone who 
commits a common causal fallacy like post hoc 
does so as a result of having misused a ra-
tional strategy. What rational strategy is 
being untimely used when someone begs the 
q'uestion, or is guilty of ad hominem? Such 
fallacies seem rather to be-caused by care-
lessness in reasoning or by the unwarranted 
intrusion of emotion. We reason fallaciously, 
for the most part, when we fail to follow ra-
tional strategy~ when, for example, we forth-
with promote a temporal sequence into a causal 
relationship without sufficient inquiry. 
People do this when their reasoning skills are 
either undeveloped or impaired by other fac-
tors. And I think when it comes right down to 
it, Toulmin agrees with me: 

18 
So the real danger hehind th.e fallacy 
of false cause is the danger of over-
simplification. In ordinary dis-
course, we often do not stop to 
articulate our warrants, let along 
scrutinize our backing and modal 
qualifiers. ~ paYinr closer attention. .• (165 

In speaking of the argument against the per-
son, he says: 

The most blatant forms of this 
fallacy reduce to nothing better 
than name calling--and it is an 
unfort~ate fact that we are all 
of us apt to take such tactics 
seriously when we are on the 
opposite side of an argument from 
the claimant in question. (172-73) 

Third, I would be curious to know how Toulrnin 
would formulate the warrant (and the backing) 
that is being appealed to implicitly here. I 
presume that the warrant comes from the field 
of informal logic, whose province it is to 
formulate and investigate such warrants and 
study their backing. 

D. Summary. The real function of Part III 
is to present a theory of criticism, growing 
out of the theory of argument in Parts I and 
II. The main problem I have with Toulmin's 
theory of criticism is that it is not suf-
ficiently develoeed. This problem-ri par-
ticularly acute ~n the matter of standards or 
criteria, where the exposition is very loose, 
and important concepts are left unanalyzed and 
unexplained. Toulmin gives lots of good ad-
vice about criticizing arguments, but that ad-
vice is too rarely embodied in actual examples 
of criticism and not sufficiently funded at 
the conceptual level. Another serious short-
coming is the absence of any mention of the 
need for discrimination in the presentation of 
one's criticisms of an argument. Some of 
these same problems crop up also in the mate-
rial on the burden of proof, which is fine as 
far as it goes, and in the chapter on falla-
cies, which is quite uneven. 

In some ways, Toulmin's theory of criticism 
seems largely (and strangely) independent of 
his theory of argument. One would have thought 
that a new theory of argument, such as he has 
offered in Part II, would have brought new di-
mensions to the theory of criticism. But this 
is not the case. The questions Toulrnin urges 
us to ask are undoubtedly the right sort: 
Are the grounds relevant and sufficient to 
support the claim? Is the warrant relevant 
and based on solid backing? But these are 
the same sorts of question that one would ask 
(but for terminological differences) if one 
approached the argument from the traditional 
framework. 13 So it seems to me that the inter-
play between Toulmin's theory of argument and 
his theory of criticism is less robust than 
one would nave expected. 

Although I have not had the opportunity in 
this review to deal at all with Part IV, in 
whicn Toulrnin applies his mode of analysis to 
special fields of reasoning, I want to say 
that I thougnt these chapters were extremely 
well-written, lucid, and certain to g~e 
teacher and student alike a deeper insight in-
to and appreciation of various types of rea-
soning. 

l 
! 



On the whole, then, it is my judgement that 
An Introduction to Reasoning is an intriguing 
experiment in argument analysis that does not 
fully satisfy. The theory of argument which 
lies at the core encoUnters some fairly seri-
ous problems, and the theory of criticism does 
not seem sufficiently developed or integrated 
with the theory of argument. The probl~s are 
of such a degree that I must finally answer 
the question posed in the Introduction by say-
ing: "No. This is not the new paradigm. At 
any rate, not yet." However, it is quite pos-
sible that Toulmin's approach can be amended 
or revised to meet the criticisms I have of-
fered. 

Although Toulmin's text fails when judged by 
this criterion, let us remember that the cri-
terion is an exceedingly difficult one to meet 
and not one that would ordinarily be applied 
to a text. The very fact that I decided to 
use it as my criterion says much about the 
vision that informs this experiment, and per-
haps accounts for the l~rgely critical tone of 
my remarks. I would gladly have added page 
after page reciting its virtues but for the 
inordinate length that would have added. 
Briefly, let me say that I cannot think of 
another text which imparts a deeper apprecia-
tion of the reasoning process than does this 
one. So that in spite of its problems, An 
Introduction to Reasoning is, in so many re-
spects, an adm-rrable text and one which should 
achieve the goal implicitly lodged in its 
title. 

Toulmin concludes his Preface with these 
words: 

Finally, in this text we have 
attempted to discuss practical 
argumentation in a wide variety 
of fields and disciplines. We 
shall be grateful for reactions 
from instructors who use the book 
in different kinds of classes. In 
a rapidly developing field of teaching 
and study, we shall need to pool our 
experience if we are to develop a 
well-founded tradition of teaching 
and a common body of understanding 
about practical reasoning and 
argumentation. (vi) 

It may seem that this review, written by one 
who has not yet used the text, has done little 
else but make waves. It is then my hope that 
those waves will, in the long run, contribute 
to the pool of experience and help bring about 
the common body of understanding which this 
bold experiment has certainly enriched. ~ 

19 

FOOTNOTES 

1. Stephen Toulmin, Richard Rieke and 
Allan Janik, An Introduction to Reasoning, 
(New York: Macmillan PUblishIng Co., Inc., 
1979.) References to the text are incorpo-
rated into the citation. I shall hereafter 
refer to Toulmin only as the author and trust 
that Messrs. Rieke and Janik will not feel 
slighted. References to the Teaching Guide 
will be noted by TG. 

2. Cf. Ralph H. Johnson and J. Anthony 
Blair, "The Recent Development of Informal 
Logic," in Blair and Johnson, eds., Informal 
(09iC: The First International Symposium 

Inverness, CA: Edgepress, 1980), pp. 4-28. 

3. Ibid., pp. 11-24. 

4. Cf. for example, R. H. Johnson and J. A. 
Blair, Logical Self-Defense, (Toronto: McGraw-
Hill Ryerson, 1977.) 

5. Ibid., p. 142. 

6. It might be more accurate to refer to 
such a model as a dynamic one. 

7. I think Thomas's approach to missing 
premises is an instance of what I would call a 
quasi-deductivist approach. Cf. Stephen 
Thomas, Practical ReasoninC;'in Natural ~­
guage, 2nd Edition, CEnglewooa Cliffs, N. J • : 
Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1981), pp. 171-183. 

8. Howard Kahane, Logia ~ Contem~or~ry Rhetoric (Belmont, CA: Wa sworth pUEh.sh~ng 
Company, 1971; 3rd ed. 1980), p. 143. 

9. Ralph H. Johnson, "The Shape We're In: 
A Review of Some Non-formal Methods of Argu-
ment Analysis," a paper presented at the "The 
New Logic Course" session of the Western Con-
ference on Teaching Philosophy at the American 
Philosophical Association Western Division 
Meetings, Milwauke~Wisconsin, April 24, 1981. 
The paper is forthcoming in Teaching Philosophy, 
next issue. 

10. For treatments of these fallacies, the 
reader is referred to Johnson and Blair, 
Logical Self-Defense and to Kahane's Logic and 
Contemporary Rhetoric. 

11. Toulmin's parenthetical comment elicits 
this rejoinder from me: "Show us some of the 
new ways of going astray that have been in-
vented recently." I, for one, would welcome 
a revised catalog of fallacies, which deleted 
those that are pretty well out of stock (such 
as amphiboly) and replaced them with newer 
models. 

12. It is also a mistake, though less ob-
vious, to think of advertisements as argu-
ments. For a discussion of this point, cf., 
Logical Self-Defense, Chapter 10. 

13. The approach to argument analysis 
adopted in Logical Self-Defense remains within 
the traditional framework. The standards 
listed there for the evaluation of arguments 
are: relevance, sufficiency, and accepta-
bility. Cf., pp. 7-9. 



Baum and Engel 

Nicholas Griffin 
McMaster University 

Ethical Arguments for Analysis. Brief Edition. 
Ed. by Robert Baum-rNew York: Holt, Rinehart 
and Winston, 1979.) Pp. 220 + vii. 

Analyzing Informal Fallacies. S. Horris Engel. 
(Englewood cliffs: prentice-Hall, 1980.) 
Pp. 184 + xvi. 

Both of these books consist of passages for 
analysis taken primarily from popular sources 
(newspapers, advertisements and political 
speeches, for the most part). Apart from this, 
however, they are very different. Baum's exam-
ples are all concerned with contemporary moral 
issues--indeed, his book was originally design-
ed as a "supplementary text for ethics courses" 
(Baum, p. v)--whereas Engel's are putatively 
all examples of some form of fallacy. Engel 
includes no less than 573 examples, most of 
them, understandably, very short, whereas Baum 
reproduces longer pieces in facsimile (although 
some of Baum's examples are little more than a 
paragraph long; and, like Engel, he occasion-
ally includes cartoons). 

Engel's book is misleadingly titled. The 
"analysis" of which the title speaks consists 
merely of the classification of his examples 
into three main categories (fallacies of ambi-
guity, presumption, and relevance) and their 
attendant subdivisions (there are perfunctory 
comments on selected examples). Even as a 
classification system the book is riddled with 
inadequacies and errors at every level. The 
principles of the classification are not ex-
plained and the subcategories appear largely 
arbitrary: e.g., begging the question and 
question-begging epithets are two distinct sub-
divisions of fallacies of presumption; while 
genetic fallacy and abusive ad hominem are both 
included under "personal attack". Nor is it 
clear why fallacies in which "one argues A is 
so because of B (where B is even more suspect 
than A" (Engel-; pp. 54-5) should be regarded 
as cases of begging the question. 

The various criteria for the different clas-
sifications are often vague and rarely provide 
more detail than could be found in a dictionary, 
and sometimes less. Thus amphiboly is de-
scribed as corning about "from the careless way 
we put our words together in sentences, thus 
giving rise to meanings we had not intended to 
convey" (Engel, p. 2). The Oxford En~sh 
Dictionary, by contrast, gIves us: Ii iguity 
arising from the uncertain construction of a 
sentence or clause, of which the individual 
words are unequivocal", which is much better: 
on Engel's account just about any failure, due 
to careless use of language, to make clear our 
intended meanings would count as amphiboly. 
Hore curiously still the shop sign "Brains 25¢" 

20 
is treated as a fallacy of equivocation, rather 
than amphiboly, despite the fact that equivo-
cations are said to occur when Ita key term in 
an argument is allowed to shift its meaning in 
the course of an argument" (po 14). "Brains 
25¢" involves no argument nor any shift of mean-
ing. On pp. 35-6 Engel treats another shop 
sign, "We never close. Open Every Night til 
Midnight", as an example of amphibo1y rather 
than of self-contradiction Cor misspelling) • 

Even Engel's generic notion of a fallacy is 
defective since it seems to encompass an arbi-
trary selection of linguistic oddities and even 
poetic devices such as personification--though 
not (for unexplained reasons) related forms of 
metaphor. Apart from these cases, many of 
Engel's supposed fallacies do not occur in ar-
guments. For example, "Our low prices are the 
direct result of our lowered price policy" 
(Engel, p. 57) is hardly a case of begging the 
question, nor even of vacuousness Csince the 
low prices might have been a result of some-
thing other than a policy, e.g., a glutted mar-
ket). A similar case occurs on the same page 
where Hamlet's report of the ghost's speech, 
"There'S ne'er a villain dwelling in all 
Denmark/ But he's an arrant knave", is mis-
quoted. (Engel mispunctuates the example in 
such a way as to destroy its sense--and the 
point he wished to make about it.) 

Engel's collection, in fact, is little more 
than a collection of linguistic curiosities, 
ill-organized and poorly explained. Fallacy 
theory is as yet lamentably under-developed, 
but it should nonetheless have been possible 
to produce a claSSification of fallacies less 
subject to vagaries and exceptions. Baum sets 
himself an easier task in that he classifies 
his passages not according to their logical 
features, but by subject matter. He has twelve 
divisions according as his examples relate to 
interpersonal relations, victimless crimes, 
sexual morality, censorship, gun control, ani-
mal rights, abortion and sterilization, eutha-
nasia, corporate rights, civil disobedience, 
punishment, and internal relations. His job 
is also easier because he sets out merely to 
present the passages, rather than to provide 
any analysis of them. He does, however, pro-
vide a longish introduction in which he works 
through one short example and makes some (fair-
ly fragmentary and, by his own admission, in-
complete) remarks about how arguments should 
be evaluated. In this his approach is more 
careful [and also more thoughtful) than Engel's. 
He points out the need to identify clearly the 
conclusion and Cexplicit and implicit) prem-
isses in an argument, and urges, quite properly, 
that context be taken into account and the 
principle of charity used in evaluating argu-
ments. 

His account is not faultless, however. Line 
(7c) in his sample analysis is ambiguous, since 
it is not clear whether "more" modifies "harm-
ful" or "acts". More seriously, he claims that 
moral arguments can only be good ones if the 
conclusion specifies alternative courses of 
action which the agent in question might have 
taken. Since the number of potential alterna-
tive actions is infinite, it is not clear that 
such a proceeding will ever materially strength-
en the conclusion. Surely it would be better 
to require that the conclusion be issued with 
a conditional warranty; that the action in 



question is wrong or right provided certain 
specified circumstances pertain. There is 
also an unwarranted individualism in his ap-
proach to ethics. His requirement that an ar-
gument can be a moral argument only if an indi-
vidual agent can be identified (p. 10) rules 
out important areas of moral discussion, e.g., 
international relations. Nor is he even-handed 
in his selection of passages. The section on 
abortion and sterilization, for example, con-
tains ten anti-abortion texts and only six in 
favour of liberalized abortion laws (either up 
to or beyond the liberalization effected brief-
ly by the U.S. Supreme court decision of 1973). 
(In addition, the section contains two brief 
pieces on the completely separate question of 
sterilization--one from the, Knights of Columbus 
and one from William Buckley advocating the 
"punitive sterilization" of wastrels--together 
with a report of a speech by Spiro Agnew so in-
coherent as to defy classification.) 

The main doubts about Baum's book, however, 
concern its utility. According to Baum it 
could be used either for informal logic courses 
concerned with diagnosing fallacies, or for an 
ethics course concerned with contemporary is-
sues. The trouble is that these two types of 
course require different things of a book of 
readings. Put neatly and overly simply: the 
ethics course requires that the arguments 
presented be reasonably strong ones; the infor-
mal logic course, on the other hand, requires 
that they be relatively weak. From the point 
of view of the logic course there are, it is 
true, plenty of fallacies to expose in Baum's 
selection. But many of the examples are" ex-
tremely long if they are to be used for the 
sort of detailed, extended analysis Saum sug-
gests. And ~ince the book is not arranged ac-
cording to the logical structure of the argu-
ments involved it would be difficult to use in 
a systematic way. In short, it would require 
a good and very selective logic teacher if the 
book were to be successfully used to teach the 
evaluation of informal arguments. On the other 
hand, for an ethics course, the complete lack 
of any philosophically sophisticated texts 
should prove a drawback. Since the book was 
originally designed for an ethics course it is 
hard to understand why philosophers should have 
been completely excluded. The result is that 
important issues which need discussion get 
omitted or fudged. There is nothing, for exam-
ple, of the strongest arguments for abortion 
on demand (those of Judith Thomson, Philosophy 
and Public Affairs, 1971). It cannot be that 
SUCh texts were excluded on the grounds that 
they were too difficult. Thomson's central 
argument is notably simple, can be easily ex-
cerpted from a long article and raises inter-
esting logical questions to boot. Moreover, 
even journalism by philosophers has been es-
chewed. Peter Singer, e.g., has written fre-
quently and vividly about animal rights, but is 
not included--although, ironically enough, two 
letters to the editor of The National Observer 
commenting somewhat naivery-on one of his arti-
cles are (p. 99); This is not to say, of 
course, that all the arguments given are bad 
ones, but anyone using the book to illuminate 
contemporary moral issues will have to plough 
through long pages of tedious confusion and 
prejudice. 

It is not difficult for newspaper readers 
to find examples of fallacies. What is much 
more difficult is to find fallacies which can 

21 
be easily and briefly presented (together with 
their relevant context), are susceptible to a 
relatively straight-forward diagnosis, exem-
plify important logical points and concern 
matters which are worth taking seriously. 
Baum's examples usually satisfy the last two 
requirements, but in many cases not the others. 
Engel's examples almost always satisfy the 
first, but less frequently the other three. 
However, what is most difficult of all is to 
present the fallacies in such a way that the 
collection can be used in a systematic way in 
the classroom to develop skills in logical 
evaluation. This is not easy given the present 
unsatisfactory state of fallacy theory, but in-
formal logic teachers are entitled to more help 
in this regard from the compilers of books of 
passages for evaluation than they get from 
either Bauro or Engel. ~tf. 

'I" 

discussion 
note 

ANOTHER NOTE ON THE "SURPRISE TEST" PUZZLE 

Peter Galle (Capricornia Institute of Advanced 
Education, Rockhampton, Australia) 

[Eds' Note: In ILN, ii.l we ran a discussion 
note from Harry Nielsen--a proposed solution 
of the "surprise test" puzzle. Peter Galle 
writes: "I found myself dissatisfied with 
Nielsen'S analysis and propose the following 
as more clearly what has gone wrong with the 
student's reasoning." Below is a reprint of 
the puzzle as Nielsen presented it, followed 
by Galle's analysis:] 

A schoolteacher announces to her 
class that there will be a surprise 
test during the following week. She 
specifies that by a "surprise test" 
she means one which no one could 
reasonably predict while walking to 
school. Immediately, one of her 
brighter students claims that she has 
contradicted herself. He offers this 
argument: The surprise test could 
take place on Friday, for if there had 
been no test up until Friday, then 
from that fact and the knowledge that 
there will be a test any student could 
predict while walking to school that 
he was going to be given the test on 
Friday. So the test must take place 
between Honday and Thursday. But the