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© Jim Mackenzie. Informal Logic, Vol. 31, No. 4 (2011), pp. 262-278.
What Hamblin’s Book Fallacies Was About
JIM MACKENZIE
Faculty of Education and Social Work A35
University of Sydney
Sydney
Australia 2006
jim.mackenzie@sydney.edu.au
Abstract: The discussion of formal
dialogue in Chapter Eight of Ham-
blin’s book Fallacies is not so much
an outgrowth of the preceding dis-
cussion of fallacies; rather, fallacies
provided an illustration of how oth-
erwise intractable questions about
logic could be transformed by being
considered in the context of dia-
logue. Hamblin’s view that this is
the best way to understand logic can
be seen as combining the strengths
of the kind of philosophy which em-
phasised formal logic, as exempli-
fied by Hamblin’s teacher Karl Pop-
per, with those of the kind of phi-
losophy which emphasised the vari-
ety of ordinary language, as inspired
by the later work of Ludwig
Wittgenstein.
Résumé: La discussion sur le dia-
logue formel dans le chapitre huit de
Fallacies de Hamblin n'est pas tant
un développement de la discussion
précédente sur les sophismes, mais
ceux-ci plutôt illustrent comment
transformer des questions sur la
logique dans le contexte d’un dia-
logue et ainsi éviter des problèmes
difficiles. Si on peut voir cette trans-
formation comme un agencement
des approches philosophiques qui
s’appuient sur la logique formelle,
comme en témoigne Popper,
l’enseignant de Hamblin, et des ap-
proches philosophiques qui insistent
sur la variété du langage ordinaire,
inspirées par les travaux postérieurs
de Ludwig Wittgenstein, on peut
saisir pourquoi Hamblin croit que
ceci est la meilleure façon com-
prendre la logique.
Keywords: Dialogue, Fallacies, Formalisation, Logic, Ordinary language
philosophy
I finished my undergraduate degree at Monash University and
joined Charles Hamblin’s seminar at the University of NSW in
March, 1968. Phil Staines from the University of Newcastle
joined at the same time, and Vic Dudman and Neil Harpley were
established members. Hamblin’s book Fallacies would be pub-
lished in 1970, but the seminar discussions rarely concerned
fallacies. This may have been because Hamblin had been work-
ing for so long and so closely with those ideas that he was now
ready to turn elsewhere. But I shall argue that the book was only
part of a much broader program, other parts of which occupied
us in the seminars. Hamblin never explicitly discussed the writ-
ing of Fallacies with me, and what follows is an attempt to ex-
What Hamblin’s Fallacies Was About 263
plain how the book fitted into his overall project as a logician,
drawn from his published works and from what I remember of
his contributions to the seminar.
The topic which, from various points of view, most often
occupied the seminars was dialogue, and specifically attempts to
understand questions of philosophical logic by considering them
in the context of dialogue. By dialogue was meant the sort of
meeting, without a chairman but nevertheless a distinction be-
tween substantive and procedural points, for simplicity with
only two participants, which we find in chapters 8 and 9 of
Fallacies, which occupies many stretches in Plato’s dialogues,
and which is approximated by the medieval Obligation Game
(on which see more recently Dutilh Novaes, 2007) and in multi-
agent systems (McBurney et al., 2010) Every logical question
was considered as part of a linguistic interaction between at least
two people.1
Hamblin’s book Fallacies was an intellectual phenomenon
for two reasons. In the first place, it broke completely new
ground. It was the first full-length scholarly book on fallacies
since the Middle Ages, and arguably since Aristotle’s Sophisti-
cal Refutations itself (see Hamblin, 1970, pp. 12-13). It was thus
a thorough investigation of a field of inquiry which had not pre-
viously been explored in such detail. In the second place, it ar-
rived in college bookstores just as an educational niche opened
up which it happened to fill, what would come to be called in-
formal logic. During the 1960s authorities had been calling for,
or even prescribing, courses of study in critical thinking or rea-
soning or argumentation. Leo Groarke describes the historical
context in which informal logic developed in the following
terms:
Informal logic is a recent discipline. It has some precedents in
those nineteenth century works on Logic and Rhetoric which
aim to raise general standards of reasoning through public edu-
cation (see, e.g., Whatley [scil. Richard Whately] [1830],
[1844]). But informal logic is a child of the 1960s. It is ulti-
mately rooted in its social and political movements, which were
characterized by a call for an education more “relevant” to the
issues of the day.
1 On one occasion, Hamblin remarked that Quine was an imperialist. Political
sloganeering was not usual in the seminar, but under questioning he revealed
that what he meant was that Quine in Word and Object (1960) chapter two
considers only the attempts by the field linguist to learn the native’s lan-
guage, and ignores the fact that the native would surely be equally making
attempts to learn the linguist’s language. In any linguistic exchange, both
sides have to be taken into account. The various topics considered in the sem-
inar, whether dealing with tense logic, indexicals, referential opacity, etc.,
were always discussed in a dialogical (two-way) setting.
Jim Mackenzie 264
In logic, and especially the teaching of logic, this fostered
the attempt to replace the artificial examples of good and bad
argument that tended to characterize earlier logic texts (e.g.,
Copi [1957]) with instances of reasoning, argument and debate
taken from newspapers, the mass media, advertisements and po-
litical campaigns (Kahane [1971] is a good example of this
trend).
One significant impetus in the development of the infor-
mal logic and critical thinking movements was a 1980 Califor-
nia State University Executive Order that required that post
secondary education include formal instruction in critical think-
ing. According to the order: “Instruction in critical thinking is to
be designed to achieve an understanding of the relationship of
language to logic, which should lead to the ability to analyze,
criticize, and advocate ideas, to reason inductively and deduc-
tively and to reach factual or judgmental conclusions based on
sound inferences drawn from unambiguous statements of know-
ledge or belief” (Dumke [1980], Executive Order 338).
(Groarke, 2008).2
In many institutions the teaching and often the design of
these courses fell to young lecturers or graduate students in phi-
losophy departments. But the textbooks available to them were
sadly inadequate, as indeed Hamblin showed in his first chapter.
Doug Walton recalled:
Those of us, like me, who were asked or told by their depart-
ments to teach a section of logic on the subject of fallacies be-
fore or during the early seventies felt the impact of the current
state of knowledge in this area quite dramatically. Our more
serious and gifted students pointed out to us, with some regu-
larity and sometimes with satisfaction, that the examples of
“fallacious” arguments we were using were just not convincing.
2 Hamblin traced (p. 195) the term “formal fallacy” to Richard Whately
(1848, Book III), but he remarked of the then newish name “informal logic”:
We might remind ourselves that some modern books [In a footnote,
Hamblin here cites Irving M. Copi’s Introduction to Logic, Chapter 3]
even refer to a large class of them specifically as “Informal Fallacies”.
The contrast of ‘informal’ with ‘formal’ suggests the contrast of lounge-
suit with dress-uniform, and this was never the burden of the older ‘for-
mal’–‘material’ dichotomy; but it marks a greater readiness to acknow-
ledge a fundamental difference than, for example, one could read into
Whately. (Hamblin, 1970, p. 205).
The fallacious appeal to lack of formal validity in attempting to convict an
argument of fallacy would later be emphasised by Gerald Massey (1981), and
see Staines (1995); but the relations between an argument in ordinary lan-
guage and any formal structure presented as a “symbolisation” of it were
thrashed out in the seminar (Staines, 1981).
What Hamblin’s Fallacies Was About 265
This was a sobering challenge to young and serious instructors,
armed only with the given knowledge in their field. How could
you convince your students that here was a field worth taking
seriously? (Walton, 1991, p. 356.)
Hamblin obviously wrote his book without foreseeing the
context in which it would take its place, a context which would
come into being only after it had been published. It might be
supposed that he had begun with an interest in fallacies, and de-
veloped from that to a new view of logic. This is precisely the
wrong way round (see 1970, p. 191). The appearance of formal
dialogue in Chapter 8 of Fallacies was not an outgrowth of his
interest in fallacies; rather fallacies provided an illustration of,
or vestibule to, how otherwise intractable questions about logic
could be transformed by being considered in the context of dia-
logue. To understand what he was trying to do with the book,
we must look rather at the philosophical landscape in which he
wrote it in the years before its publication. Hamblin’s work
combined the strengths of two rival philosophical schools.
As the 1950s drew to a close, analytic philosophy was di-
vided between two schools.3 The more traditional, more formal
school regarded the question of linguistic meaning as a matter of
relations between linguistic expressions and the world, to be ex-
plored using the resources of mathematical logic as developed
by Frege, by Whitehead & Russell, and by their successors. In
the extreme, it held that logic is the study of an abstract reflex-
ive, transitive relation with the subformula property (Hacking,
1979). Opposed to it was a school more rooted in everyday life
and emphasising the variety of acts which speakers perform in
their interactions with each other. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus (1921) had been a classic of the first,
formal, school, and his own subsequent self-criticism played a
great part in the birth of the second school. Followers of the first
school regarded the second, ordinary language, school as impre-
cise, unscientific, and woolly.4 Followers of the second school
regarded the first as ignoring the richness and multiplicity of re-
al language in favour of idealised abstract structures. The depth
of the antagonism between the two schools can be seen by re-
calling the response to Gellner’s book Words and Things (1959).
This work was a powerful broadside by a young member of the
first school against the second (see Lessnoff, 2002, pp. 2-4), and
appeared with a preface by Bertrand Russell. Gilbert Ryle as
3 It should be unnecessary to say that within each school there was great di-
versity and disagreement. We are talking about philosophers here.
4 “Reviewers in JSL [the Journal of Symbolic Logic] often complained with
some acerbity that the writings of British philosophers on logical topics are
insufficiently formalized to be discussable.” (Passmore, 1966, p. 592, n. 5.)
Jim Mackenzie 266
Ryle as editor of the journal Mind refused to have the book re-
viewed; Russell wrote a letter to the Times complaining about
this, and the resulting correspondence continued in the news-
paper for nearly three weeks. The kerfuffle provoked Ved Me-
hta, an English-educated Indian working for the New Yorker, to
come to England and interview the various philosophers in-
volved, interviews later published in his book The Fly and the
Fly-Bottle (1963).
Hamblin was connected with the first, formal, school as a
former pupil of Karl Popper—his work on probability is ac-
knowledged in Appendix *ix to Popper’s The Logic of Scientific
Discovery (1959, p. 402, n. 2; p. 403 n. 4; p. 404). Popper was
an admirer of Bertrand Russell and like Russell had little time
for ordinary language philosophy. Popper famously advocated
the refutation of existing views and bold conjecture as the most
productive approach (one hesitates to say “method”) in science
and intellectual life. Popperians should seek topics in their dis-
cipline with which there was a general dissatisfaction, topics
which seemed clearly within the domain of the discipline but
whose treatment by existing theories was not as one might wish,
the untidy corners of the discipline, the regions of anomaly and
discomfort, and then attempt on the one hand to refute whatever
was said about them and on the other hand to develop bold con-
jectural alternatives. Hamblin’s discipline was logic; and falla-
cies constituted a very untidy area of logic:
The truth is that nobody, these days, is particularly satisfied
with this corner of logic. The traditional treatment is too unsys-
tematic for modern tastes. Yet to dispense with it, as some writ-
ers do, is to leave a gap that no one knows how to fill. We have
no theory of fallacy at all, in the sense in which we have theo-
ries of correct reasoning or inference. Yet we feel the need to
ticket and tabulate certain kinds of fallacious inference-process
which introduce considerations falling outside the other topics
in our logic-books. (Hamblin. 1970 p. 11, his emphasis.)
Hamblin’s interest was in the “considerations falling outside”
conventional logic, rather than on ticketing and tabulating falla-
cies. Popper’s influence may have contributed to Hamblin fo-
cusing on the area of fallacies as a site of possible anomalies in
the conventional wisdom of logic.
Unusually for a former student of Popper, Hamblin called
himself a Wittgensteinian. In Fallacies (p. 285 n.), he refers to
“the best examples of dialectical analysis” as Wittgenstein’s
Brown Book (1958). He was thereby allying himself not with the
first formal school but with the second ordinary language
What Hamblin’s Fallacies Was About 267
school; though in investigating the variety of speech acts he
would not abandon the power of formalisation.
Wittgenstein and Popper were in some ways alike. Both
grew up in Vienna, both were of Jewish descent, both had been
closely involved with the Vienna Circle though neither had been
a member of it (Uebel, 2010, § 2.1), both had sought refuge
from Nazism in the West, and both had ultimately settled in
Britain. They also agreed about some central philosophical doc-
trines. First, both emphasised that language comes in sentence,
or speech act, sized bits. Wittgenstein said, “We may say: only
someone who already knows how to do something with it can
significantly ask a name” (1953, I § 31d, p. 15e). Popper il-
lustrated his acceptance of this doctrine by appeal to a diagram
which appears several times in his works, several times, for ex-
ample, 1960, § xii, p. 19-20. Second, both of them opposed rely-
ing on a notion of belief in seeking philosophical understanding.
Wittgenstein suggested, “Ask yourself: What does it mean to
believe Goldbach’s theorem? What does this belief consist in? In
a feeling of certainty as we state, hear, or think the theorem?
(That would not interest us.)” (1953, I. § 578a, p. 152e.) “We
should say that we had told the Frenchman what I believed if we
translated my words to him into French. And it might be that
thereby we told him nothing—even indirectly—about what hap-
pened ‘in me’ when I uttered my belief. Rather, we pointed out
to him a sentence which in his language holds a similar position
to my sentence in the English language.” (Brown Book § 8, p.
147.)5 Popper said flatly that he is “not a belief philosopher”
(1971, p. 25; 1974, p. 115). Hamblin preferred “accepted” to
“believed”, (1970, p. 246, and see also Mackenzie & Staines,
1999).6
5 The rejection of beliefs was an instance of Wittgenstein’s scepticism about
inner or mental processes: “An ‘inner process’ stands in need of outward cri-
teria.” (1953, I § 580, p. 153e.) “The thing in the box has no place in the lan-
guage-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might be empty. —
No, one can ‘divide through’ by the thing in the box: it cancels out, whatever
it is.” (1953, I § 293, p. 100e.) This scepticism led to the Wittgenstein of the
Investigations being regarded as a behaviourist by some of his early critics
(see 1953, I §§ 307-8, pp. 102-3e).
6 We have a natural tendency to think of these various linguistic acts—
making an assertion, expressing a thought – as the external expression of
an interior act of adopting a particular mental attitude. … The analysis of
these interior acts and events is a matter of epistemology, not of logic; but
the linguistic acts should be classified as conventional actions, not as the
external expression of interior states. Assertion, for example, is to be ex-
plained in terms of the conventions governing the use of those sentences
which are understood as having assertoric force, not as the utterance of a
sentence with the intention of expressing one’s interior act of judgment
(or interior state of belief) that it is true.” (Dummett, 1973, p. 311, his
emphasis.)
Jim Mackenzie 268
Third, neither Wittgenstein nor Popper shared the fear of
normativity then widespread and presumably inherited from the
logical positivists, which led students of language and compilers
of dictionaries to proclaim absurdly that their enterprise was
purely descriptive. For Wittgenstein, meaning was intimately
connected with rule following and adopting a form of life (1953
I, § 190, p. 77e; § 198, p. 80e; § 202, p. 81e; § 206, p. 82e). For
Popper, it is our determination to reject contradictions that leads
to intellectual progress (1940, p. 317). Like Frege,7 he took it
that logic does not tell us what people believe, but what they
ought to believe. We can see each of these three accepted doc-
trines in Hamblin’s work. In “Mathematical models” (1971) and
other presentations of dialogue games, Hamblin took the task to
be to define within the set D of possible dialogues a set K of
legal dialogues (1971, p. 132). One began with what was as-
sumed to have been a legal (permissible) dialogue up to a given
point, and then examined what was required for the next event
to result in the continuation being a legal (permissible) dialogue
whose length was one greater. Thus the rule that Questions must
be answered was framed as, no legal dialogue of length n has as
its second-last event a participant A saying a question unless it
has as its last event another participant (say, B) saying some-
thing which is an answer (as defined in the rules) to that ques-
tion. In the simplest case, if a participant says something of the
form “Is it the case that p?”, then the next event must have a dif-
ferent speaker and be one of the set {“p”, “It is not the case that
p”, “I’m not sure that p”}. (See further Hamblin, 1970, rule S2
on p. 266; and 1971, rule R5 on p. 147.) The rules of dialogue
dealt with speech-act (sentence) sized units. Appeals to belief
and other inner states played no part in the theory of formal dia-
logue. And logic not only grew from dialogue, but it was un-
ashamedly normative, indeed prescriptive.
Hamblin’s focus on linguistic acts as conventional actions (as Dummett
would later, in the passage just quoted, recommend) may have owed some-
thing not only to Wittgenstein and to Popper, but to Hamblin’s own under-
standing of computers. He was an early advocate of reverse Polish notation
for computers as suited to their nature as push-down automata (McBurney,
2008). That focus made his work directly applicable to interactions not only
among people but between people and computers and among computers
(McBurney et al., 2010).
7 According to Frege, the laws of logic are the laws of thought “only if we
mean to assert that they are the most general laws, which prescribe univer-
sally the way in which one ought to think if one is to think at all” (1893, p. xv
= 1967, p. 12). Indeed, “Anyone who has once acknowledged a law of truth
has by the same token acknowledged a law that prescribes the way in which
one ought to judge, no matter where, or when, or by whom the judgment is
made” (1893, p. xvii = 1967, p. 15.).
What Hamblin’s Fallacies Was About 269
Nevertheless these two philosophers did not have a high
regard for one another. Popper said dismissively “Russell read
the Philosophical Investigations without deriving any enlight-
enment from it. So did I, I must admit” (in Magee, 1971, p.
138). Among Popper’s students, it was known that “There could
be no greater public expression of loyalty to him [scil., Popper]
than to lunge at Wittgenstein” (Agassi, 2008, p. 170). Wittgen-
stein and Popper seem to have met in person only once, and that
meeting ended unfortunately (Edmonds & Eidinow, 2001).
As a former student of Popper, Hamblin would not be at-
tracted by Wittgenstein’s theoretical quietism (see Wittgenstein,
1953, I § 126, p. 50e) and would not easily give up systematic
philosophising.8 He was also a classical scholar who read Greek
and Latin,9 and both a logician and a historian of logic. Ham-
blin’s Wittgensteinianism was of a heterodox kind, and in some
ways can be seen as uniting the strengths of the Popper and the
formalising school and of the later Wittgenstein and the ordinary
language school.
The study of dialectical systems can be pursued descriptively, or
formally. In the first case, we should look at the rules and con-
ventions that operate in actual discussions: parliamentary de-
bates, juridical examination and cross-examination, stylized
communication systems and other kinds of identifiable special
context, besides the world of linguistic interchange at large. A
formal approach, on the other hand, consists in the setting up of
simple systems of precise but not necessarily realistic rules, and
the plotting of the properties of the dialogues that might be
played out in accordance with them. Neither approach is of any
importance on its own; for descriptions of actual cases must aim
to bring out formalizable features, and formal systems must aim
to throw light on actual, describable phenomena. As a matter of
emphasis, however, I shall lean towards a formal approach in
what follows, since the practical material we aim to illumi-
8 Nor would he surrender the ground of formal systems.
For, although there are reasons for thinking that some of the phenomena
of Logic are outside the bounds of the kind of formal system in which lo-
gicians, ancient or modern, have preferred to formulate their theories,
there are many who do not think this and whom we must meet on their
own ground (1970, p. 192).
9 The posthumously published guide Hamblin edited to Languages of Asia
and the Pacific “(of course) had some thirty authors” (1984, p. vi) who are
listed in its introduction. And he confessed to being unable to decipher pho-
tocopies of medieval manuscripts with their complex abbreviatory marks.
Even so, his linguistic abilities were extraordinary, and he sometimes failed
to realise that others (including students) did not share them.
Jim Mackenzie 270
nate—fallacious argumentation—has already been sufficiently
described. (Hamblin, 1970, p. 256, his italics.)
Hamblin adopted some of the central insights of Wittgen-
stein’s later work. One is that we should look for the use rather
than the meaning of words and linguistic expressions. “The
meaning of a phrase for us is characterized by the use we make
of it. The meaning is not a mental accompaniment to the expres-
sion.” (p. 65 of The Blue Book) “For a large class of cases—
though not for all—in which we employ the word ‘meaning’ it
can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the lan-
guage” (1953, I § 43, p. 20e). Another, following on from the
first, is that we do many things with language, and that no one of
them is central. Language has many uses and they differ wildly
from one another.10 Wittgenstein lists some of the tools one
might find in a tool-box (1953, I § 11, p. 6e), not all of which
(the rule, the glue-pot) serve to modify anything (§ 14, p. 7e).
Language does not consist, as logicians may have implied, al-
most completely of truth-valued statements playing the roles of
premises and conclusions in attempts to prove. Wittgenstein
was here rejecting precisely the vision of language which had
inspired him when he wrote the Tractatus, and which he had
shared with Russell:
In a logically perfect language, there will be one word and no
more for every simple object, and everything that is not simple
10 In the Investigations, Wittgenstein listed some of the uses of language:
Giving orders, and obeying them –
Describing the appearance of an object, or giving its measurements –
Constructing an object from a description (a drawing) –
Speculating about an event –
Forming and testing a hypothesis –
Presenting the results of an experiment in tables and diagrams –
Making up a story; and reading it –
Play-acting –
Singing catches –
Guessing riddles –
Making a joke; telling it –
Solving a problem in practical arithmetic –
Translating from one language into another –
Asking, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying.–
It is interesting to compare the multiplicity of the tools in language and of
the ways in which they are used, the multiplicity of kinds of word and
sentence, with what logicians have said about the structure of language.
(Including the author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.) (Wittgen-
stein, 1953, I, § 23, pp. 11e-12e.)
The reference to “the author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” is of
course Wittgenstein’s somewhat affected way of marking the progress in his
own ideas since writing that work.
What Hamblin’s Fallacies Was About 271
will be expressed by a combination of words, by a combination
derived, of course, from the words for the simple things that en-
ter in, one word for each simple component. A language of that
sort will be completely analytic, and will show at a glance the
logical structure of the facts asserted or denied. The language
which is set forth in Principia Mathematica is intended to be a
language of that sort. It is a language which has only syntax and
no vocabulary whatsoever. Barring the omission of a vocabu-
lary I maintain that it is quite a nice language. It aims at being
the sort of language that, if you add a vocabulary, would be a
logically perfect language. (Russell, 1918, § ii, pp. 197-8.)
That there are different kinds of locutions had in fact been
acknowledged by modern logicians since the beginning, even if
Russell and the early Wittgenstein had forgotten it:
An interrogative sentence and an assertoric one contain the
same thought, but the assertoric sentence contains something
else as well, namely assertion. The interrogative sentence con-
tains something more too, namely a request. Therefore two
things must be distinguished in an assertoric sentence: the con-
tent, which it has in common with the corresponding proposi-
tional question; and assertion. (Frege, 1918, p. 329.)
Dummett would later elaborate:
The theory of sense and reference is then to be supplemented by
an account of the various forms of linguistic force that may be
attached to a sentence: the theory of force thus supplies an ac-
count of the various uses that are actually made of sentences in
actual speech. The separation of sense and force can only be
justified if it is possible, for each variety of force, to give a uni-
form description of the linguistic act which is effected by the ut-
terance of an arbitrary sentence, whose truth-conditions are
supposed known, to which a force of that kind is attached.
There will thus be one general account of the use of sentences
to make an assertion, another of their use to ask a sentential
question, and so on, each applicable independently of the par-
ticular sense and hence the particular truth-conditions of the
sentence. (On Frege’s own account of the matter, this holds
good only for assertions and sentential questions; but, as we
have seen, if a theory of meaning of this general structure is
possible at all, the procedure should be able to be extended to
commands, requests, expressions of desire, etc.) (Dummett, Mi-
chael, 1973, p. 416, his emphasis; see also his ch. 10, pp. 259-
363.)
We may distinguish between asserting, questioning, defining,
promising, expressing doubt about, and other kinds of linguistic
Jim Mackenzie 272
action, each characterised by a kind of Fregean “force”.11 The
crucial relationship between all these kinds of action is one read-
ily recognised by logicians: the relationship between a set Γ of
statements, say {“Every human is mortal”, “Socrates is hu-
man”}, and another statement s, say “Socrates is mortal”, such
that if a person has agreed to all the statements in Γ, that person
may not subsequently deny, question, express doubt about, or
ask for reasons to accept the statement s, and must agree to s if
asked. (A speaker may, however, remove commitment to one of
more of the statements in Γ and thereby recover the ability to
deny, question, express doubt about, or ask for reasons to accept
s.) Logic, that is formal logic, can be thought of as the key to the
jungle of varieties of linguistic action found in ordinary lan-
guage, and conversely logical relations have their function in
regulating discourse.
What defines the various kinds of force is precisely the
different roles which kinds of sentence have in dialogue: “… it
should be borne in mind that it is ultimately their role in the dia-
lectical system that gives sentences this kind of character [scil.,
as statements or questions] rather than the other way about.”
(1970, p. 257) “In the long run, whether a given locution is or is
not a statement, question or the like depends upon its place in a
dialectical system, and not vice versa” (1970, p. 259). Indeed,
“… the primary theoretical job that commitment-stores do for us
is to provide us with a dialectical definition of statements”
(1970, p. 265; compare pp. 285-6).
In “Mathematical models”, Hamblin provides inversion
algorithms for his systems in which one takes the set K of legal
dialogues of the system and defines in terms of it the various
semantic properties: kinds of locutions such as statements, ques-
tions, retractions; logical relations such as immediate conse-
quence and immediate inconsistency; and a mapping of the locu-
tions of the system onto the set of possible worlds (1971, pp.
150-155). Though inversion algorithms were explicitly provided
only for the very restricted toy systems described in that paper,
the project was clearly that semantics could, and should, be seen
as arising from a similar inversion algorithm for much larger
and more complex dialogue systems.
The point is just that, whatever the result of that quest [for a
paradox-free theory of deduction], there are various criteria of
worth of arguments; that they may conflict, and that arguments
11 As Hamblin said, “The scope of Formal Logic is enlarged when Questions
are introduced into it, but it is still not so large as to include the contextual or
dialectical concepts that are needed to give a fully-practical account of the
Fallacy [of Many Questions]” (1970, p. 217).
What Hamblin’s Fallacies Was About 273
may conflict; that when criteria conflict some are more dispens-
able than others, and that when arguments conflict a decision
needs to be made to give weight to one rather than another. All
this sets the theory of arguments apart from Formal Logic and
gives it an additional dimension. This should now be abun-
dantly clear, and we may turn our attention to the filling-in of
details. (1970, p. 231, Hamblin’s italics.)
After all, “Dialectical concepts have a certain claim to be con-
sidered as the fundamental ones, in that the ‘raw’ facts of the
dialectical situation are that the various participants put forward
and receive various statements” (1970, p. 242).
Formal logic began with Aristotle, but (as a Popperian)
Hamblin must have asked To what problem was formal logic the
solution? Further, as a historian he must have asked What was
lost when this solution was adopted? Aristotle made a collection
of commonplaces of argument in the Topics and of fallacious
argument in the Sophistical Refutations, which is in many re-
spects an appendix to the Topics (Hamblin, 1970, p. 11; Kneale
& Kneale, 1962, pp. 23, 43). The source of the examples is often
Plato’s dialogues, and particularly the Euthydemus (a dialogue
sometimes neglected by those who wish to use Plato’s works as
a source for pompous pronouncements about everything in gen-
eral and nothing in particular). Aristotle was wrestling with
questions to which he would later12 propose a systematic solu-
tion with the doctrine of the categorical syllogism in the Prior
Analytics. That theory is to a startling extent a fully modern the-
ory of deduction. Just how modern Aristotle’s treatment there
was had not become really clear until Łukasiewicz’s Aristotle’s
Syllogistic (1951).13 The categorical syllogism does provide a
framework for handling many questions about that kind of dia-
logue and more generally about the structure of deductive argu-
ment which underlies Plato’s elenctic dialogues; but not all. As
Hamblin noted, the standard logical model of proof completely
ignores certain important desiderata, such as forbidding circular
reasoning or equivocation (1970, p. 249, cf. p. 231; Mackenzie,
1984a, 1988). There remains a residue of questions about how
the theory is to be applied to actual cases, and some of these
continue in logic textbooks as the unsystematic chapter on falla-
12 The Prior Analytics appears before the Topics in the traditional ordering of
Aristotle’s works but, though the relative dates of Aristotle’s works are noto-
riously difficult to resolve, it is generally agreed to have been written later.
“There are many passages in the Topics which anticipate points in Aristotle’s
syllogistic” (Kneale & Kneale, 1962, p. 36).
13 This work, with the same writer’s paper “On the history of the logic of
propositions.” (1934), received due emphasis in Hamblin’s course on the
history of logic.
Jim Mackenzie 274
cies. Even so, students continued to study the whole Organon,
including the arguably superseded Topics, through the Middle
Ages and beyond.
As part of the Organon, the Topics continued to influence stu-
dents of philosophy until the seventeenth century, but we cannot
say that it has contributed much to the development of logic,
except indirectly through the impulse it gave to the elaboration
of the medieval theory of consequentiae (Kneale & Kneale,
1962, p. 44).
Since Aristotle’s time, the progress of logic had consisted over-
whelmingly in elaborations of the theory of deduction until logic
was seen by some as simply being the theory of deduction “and
Topics, though carried for many centuries as an appendage, have
finally disappeared from logic books” (Hamblin, 1970, p. 191).
Though the writers of logic books had finally dropped
Topics, they had mostly kept Fallacies.
All our modern books identify and name this Fallacy [Affirm-
ing the Consequent] but only one, the traditionalist Oesterle,
lists it in order with the other Fallacies. The others treat it along
with inferences of the calculus of propositions. The divorce be-
tween Fallacies and the rest of Logic could hardly be more
complete. As soon as a Fallacy has some relation to the rest of
Logic it is removed from its place in the chapter on Fallacies!
(Hamblin, 1970, p. 36.)
Fallacies kept a place in logic books even though they didn’t
really fit with the understanding logicians had of logic. “Falla-
cies have continued to occupy a place in textbooks because they
introduce important considerations outside Formal Logic and
supplementary to it” (Hamblin, 1970, p. 205). Hamblin’s inter-
est in fallacies was that they did precisely this, opening logic to
considerations outside and supplementary to it, and thereby
showing logic to be different from what it has been generally
supposed to be.
Hamblin’s view was that the theory of deduction cannot
suffice for the theory of argumentation, and that it must be ex-
tended “to include features of the context within which argu-
ments are put forward” (1970, p. 254).
One of our first ideas about language is that there are different
species of words—nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs and so
on. As we learn more about language, we come to see that these
species, much refined, reappear as categories in terms of which
we frame rules; and these rules, from among all possible strings
of English words, exclude most as not being sentences. These
What Hamblin’s Fallacies Was About 275
rules are the rules of grammar. Another of our first ideas about
language is that there are different species of sentences—
statements, questions, commands, and so on. Were we to learn
more about language, we might come to see that these species,
much refined, appear as categories in terms of which we frame
rules. These rules, from among all possible strings of English
sentences, would exclude many as not being intelligible dis-
courses. One such rule, for example, would be some require-
ment of the idea that questions must be answered. That there
should be rules of that kind is necessary if we are to explain
how communication—as against independent vocalizers scat-
tered about the landscape uttering sentences at random into the
void—is possible. (Mackenzie, 1984, p. 345b, emphasis in ori-
ginal.)
It is in dialogue, the interaction between language users, that an
understanding of questions of meaning, communication, validity
and indeed mentality are to be sought. Formal dialectic is a
study not only of logical issues, but of how to build a machine to
speak a language, to converse; and thereby to understand what
we language-using animals are. The examination of fallacies
was one path by which we might come to see this.14
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