Maurice A


Book Review 
 
ARGUMENTS ABOUT ARGUMENTS: SYSTEMATIC, CRITICAL AND 

HISTORICAL ESSAYS IN LOGICAL THEORY. BY MAURICE A. 
FINOCCHIARO. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.  478 
pp.  Paperback ISBN 10:0521618533, £20.99, US$35.99. Hardback 
ISBN 10:05218532373, £48, US$80. 

 
 
For a generation Maurice Finocchiaro has made important and distinctive 
contributions to both logic and the historiography of science. The present 
volume collects twenty-three of his papers to form a welcome 
retrospective of this work. As the subtitle reveals, Finocchiaro conceives 
of these pieces as essays in logical theory. Logical theory Finocchiaro 
understands in a broad and attractive way. One might ask whether logic 
is  

 
… an abstract science that studies entailment, truth functions, 
the calculus of propositions, predicates, relations, identity, etc.; 
or is it a special social science that studies the mental activities 
of reasoning and argument? If the former is the case, how does 
logic relate to mathematics? Is it just a branch of mathematics? 
Or does it provide the foundations of mathematics? If logic is a 
social science, how does it relate to cognitive psychology? … 
So we may ask, what is or ought to be the relationship between 
formal or symbolic logic and reasoning and argument? (pp. 6-7) 

 
Like the Church of England, Finocchiaro’s logic is a big tent. It 
encompasses all that is canvassed in the quoted passage, and perhaps 
more. But not everything in the tent is definitively linked to everything 
else in it. In particular, Finocchiaro is one of a growing cohort of 
logicians who queries the fruitfulness of the tie between mathematical 
logic and the logic of argument and reasoning. 
 

… I adopted from Toulmin what seemed to be his solution of 
the problem of the epistemology of the science of logic and 
argument. He seemed to be suggesting a critique of formal or 
symbolic logic as being insufficiently concerned with actual 
human reasoning, with nondeductive arguments, such as are 
common in law, with argumentation in natural language, and 
with practical applications; and he seemed to be making a plea 
for a logical theory that was more empirical, more general, 
more natural, more practical, and more historical. (p. 7) 
 

The Toulmin cited here is the Toulmin of The Uses of Argument, which 
was assigned by Finocchiaro’s teacher, Michael Scriven, as reading for 
Scriven’s graduate seminar at Berkeley in 1967, “Elementary Reasoning 
from an Advanced Standpoint.” Thus was born one of Finocchiaro’s 
signature themes, the idea that the broad tent must make room for 
something that he came to call empirical logic. Part of what gives to 

© John Woods. Informal Logic, Vol. 28, No. 2 (2008), pp. 193-202. 



   John Woods 194 

logic its empirical cast is the historical-textual approach to its study (p. 
14), 
 

… which focuses on the analysis of historically important texts 
containing reasoning, arguments, and critical thinking. It is a 
special case of an approach that is broadly empirical but 
normative, and it may be instructively contrasted not only to the 
apriorist orientation of formal deductive logic but also to the 
experimental approach of cognitive psychology. (p. 14)1 
 

Finocchiaro began his professional life as an historiographer of science. 
His first major work, Galileo and the Art of Reasoning (1980) is a 
masterly examination of the argumentative structure of Galileo’s 
Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems, an investigation which led 
him to see Galileo, first and foremost as “a practitioner of the art of 
reasoning, a critical reasoner, a practical logician, an applied logician, a 
logician in action.” (p. 12). One might suppose that these words apply 
equally as a description of Finocchiaro’s own approach to logic.  

Logic, then, has a fieldwork component. In Finocchiaro’s hands, 
an important link between logic and reasoning on the ground is provided 
by his work on the historiography of science. His analysis of 

 
critical thinking in science (chapters 18-23) is obviously a series of case 
studies in the history of science dealing with past figures and episodes 
of paradigmatic importance; these chapters belong to a genre that has 
now become quite common among historically minded philosophers of 
science, but whereas such case studies often lead such scholars to 
relativist and evolutionist conclusions, I am led into the almost opposite 
direction, for my historical scientific case studies are meant to add 
diversity to the kinds of evidence and data on which my theoretical 
framework is based. (p. 17) 
 

And what figures they are: Galileo, Huygens, Newton, Lavoisier, 
Einstein, Boltzmann and the dramatis personae of the Copernican 
Revolution. It is difficult to over-emphasize the distinctive importance of 
these case studies, not only for the development of logic but for the 
philosophy of science itself. Everyone knows of the dominant importance 
to science of the methods of data collection, experimentation and 
hypothesis-formation, as well as the mechanisms of explanatory force. 
But, as Finocchiaro keenly observes, one of the most powerful 
instruments of scientific progress is the critical thrust of competing 
arguments. Long ago Toulmin recommended the law as a natural place 
for argumentation theorists to test their speculations and refine their 
organizing intentions. Finocchiaro makes the same recommendation with 
regard to science, and follows his own advice in the historiographical 
writings. 

                                                 
1 Chapters exemplifying the historical-textual approach are 2-4, 11, 12, 18-21. Numerals 
alone denote chapters. Numerals preceded by ‘p.’ or ‘pp.’ denote pages. 

 



                                         Finocchiaro: Arguments About Arguments 195 
 

                                                

 The historiographical essays also exemplify—as do his systematic 
and critical chapters, though somewhat unevenly—other important 
features of Finocchiaro’s methodology. A prominent feature of this work 
is its dialectical character; another is the emphasis it places on 
interpretation; and a further feature is what Finocchiaro himself calls 
self-referentiality. His approach is dialectical 

 
in at least two senses of this controversial concept. One is that 
in the subject matter studied, I tend to stress counterarguments, 
objections, criticism, evaluation, potential (and not necessarily 
actual) dialogue, and the clarification (rather than the 
resolution) of differences of opinion …. (p. 14)2 
 

Finocchiaro’s dialectic is not intrinsically dialogical, nor is it invariably 
aimed at the removal of disagreement. In drawing a distinction between 
dialectic and dialogue, Finocchiaro echoes (p. 294) a point advanced by 
J.A. Blair in “The limits of the dialogue model of argument” (Blair, 
1998), according to which a “solo” argument is one in which respondent 
and audience are physically absent, a “duet” argument is one in which 
they are present, and the idea that a solo argument is actually a duet 
argument with oneself is at best a metaphor. We see in Finocchiaro’s 
conception of dialectics, two departures from the pragma-dialectical 
tradition. One is this Blairian resistance to the claim that all argument 
is/or can be “reconstructed” as duet argument. The other is its resistance 
to the assertion (or stipulation) that critical discussions fail unless they 
eliminate the disagreements that occasioned them in the first place. 
 Finocchiaro’s interpretative approach is directly tied to his 
conviction that it is not always appropriate to the goodness of a critical 
argument that it manages to eliminate disagreement, and the 
corresponding conviction that sometimes an argument gives full value 
when it enlarges the parties’ understanding of the issues that (continue to) 
separate them. Thus his approach is interpretative 
 

In the sense that it stresses the understanding and 
reconstruction of arguments (as distinct from their evaluation 
and criticism) to a far greater degree than is commonly the case. 
(p. 14)3 
 

We see in this the influence of Finocchiaro’s teacher, Scriven, whose 
principle of charity bids us to interpret an opponent’s argument fairly, 
with an understanding of his perspective and free of cheap-shots and 
“lawyerly” tricks. The fourth principle, self-referentiality, is a kind of 
meta-precept. 
 

Related to these three methodological traits [historical-textual, 
dialectical and interpretative] is a further approach. That is, in 

 
2 For displays of the dialectical approach, see especially chapters 13, 15 and 17; but see 
also 4, 7, 12 and 16. 
3 The interpretative emphasis is on display in chapters 2, 6, 10 and 16-21. 

 



   John Woods 196 

doing informal logic and argumentation theory (i.e., in 
theorizing about arguments and critical thinking), I take very 
seriously the goal of practicing what one preaches, and so I tend 
as much as possible to treat the views of other scholars … (p. 
15) 
 

in ways that conform to the three methodological principles already 
identified.4  

I have been concentrating so far on Finocchiaro’s methodology, 
and in so doing, I have barely scratched the surface. In addition to the 
four principles presently in view, Finocchiaro develops what he calls a 
conceptual framework (p. 15), which is reflected in a number of 
definitions of key terms and some principal theoretical claims. In the 
interest of space I shall merely list the places where these definitions may 
be found in the book, and give very short formulations of the main 
theses, also with indications of where to find their fuller development in 
the text. In the category of definition, the following are dealt with in the 
places noted: 

 
Reasoning (1, 3, 4, 12, 14, p. 15) 
Argument (17, p. 15) 
Argument analysis (5, p. 15) 
Critical reasoning (5, p. 15)5 
Methodological reflection (5, 22, p. 15) 
Critical thinking (5, 10, p. 15) 
Judgment (12, 14, 21-23, pp. 15-16) 
Informal logic (1-3, 5, p. 16) 
 

In the category of claims or principal theses we find: 
 

Fallacies: “So-called fallacies (so called in textbooks) are 
typically either nonfallacious arguments, non-arguments or 
inaccurate reconstructions of the originals” (6, p. 16) … “but 
many arguments can be criticized as fallacious in various 
identifiable ways” (7, p. 16). 
Asymmetry: “There appear to be various important asymmetries 
between the positive or favorable and the negative or 
unfavorable evaluation of arguments” (8, p. 16) …” although 
one particular alleged asymmetry seems untenable, namely the 
alleged fact that it is possible to show formal validity but not 
formal invalidity” (9, p. 16). 
Ad hominem reasoning: “One of the most effective ways of 
criticizing arguments and reasoning is to engage in ad hominem 
argument in the seventeenth century meaning of this term, 
namely to derive a conclusion unacceptable to opponents from 

                                                 
4 The self-referential approach takes hold especially in chapters 9-11 and 16-17. 
5 Critical reasoning includes what Finocchiaro calls “self-reflective argumentation”, 
which shouldn’t be confused with self-referential thinking. One constructs an argument 
of one’s own in a self-reflective manner when one pays due heed to what interpretation 
it may call for and what evaluation it may deserve. (pp. 94-95) 

 



                                         Finocchiaro: Arguments About Arguments 197 
 

premises accepted by them (but not necessarily by the arguer); 
and correspondingly one of the greatest weaknesses of human 
reasoning is the failure to engage in such ad hominem 
argumentation” (4, 16, 18, p. 16). 
The tie to science: “Argumentation and critical thinking play an 
important and still unappreciated and understudied role in 
science” (18-23, p. 16). 
 
These claims are developed against a background of critical 

inspection of the works of others. It is a rich feast. Included here are: 
 
Perkins: “David Perkins’s psychological experiments on 

the difficulties affecting everyday reasoning” (4). 
Massey: Gerald Massey’s thesis that there is an 

asymmetry between the formal validation and 
formal invalidation of arguments” (9). 

Siegel: “Harvey Siegel’s ‘reasons’ conception of critical 
thinking” (10). 

Cohen: “L. Jonathan Cohen’s metaphilosophical view that 
analytical philosophy consists largely of inductive 
reasoning in which generalizations about concepts 
are based on particular intuitions” (11). 

Gramsci: “Antonio Gramsci’s views on logic, politics, 
dialectics, intellectuals and philosophy” (12). 

Barth and Krabbe: “Else Barth’s and Erik Krabbe’s 
attempt to move logic from an axiomatic to a 
dialogical approach” (13). 

Freeman: “James Freeman’s dialectical account of the 
macrostructure of arguments” (13). 

Arnauld and Nicole: “… the logical instrumentalism and 
the theory of argument in … [the] Port Royal 
Logic” (14). 

Amsterdam: “… the account of complex argumentation by 
the Amsterdam pragma-dialectical school of 
argumentation theory” (15). 

Walton: “Douglas Walton’s dialectical account of the 
distinction between argument and explanation” 
(15). 

Johnstone: “Henry Johnstone’s metaphilosophical view 
that all valid philosophical arguments are ad 
hominem” (16). 

Goldman: “Alvin Goldman’s moderately dialectical 
definition of argument” (17). 

Johnson: “Ralph Johnson’s strongly dialectical definition 
of argument” (17). 

Hamblin: “C.L. Hamblin’s account of argument in general 
and of ad hominem argument in particular” (18). 

Shapere: “Dudley Shapere’s account of scientific change 
and rationality” (22). 

 



   John Woods 198 

Popper: “Karl Popper’s critical rationalism in general and 
account of scientific rationality in particular” (23). 

 
The critical essays are a natural occasion to test Finocchiaro’s 

fidelity to his own methodological principles, especially the fourth (self-
referentiality). Of course, it very much lies in the nature of the texts 
selected for criticism as to whether and to what extent they admit of full-
bore application of the historical-textural, dialectical and interpretative 
modus operandi. On the one hand, the examination of Henry Johnstone’s 
analysis of philosophical argument both admits of and receives a fair 
measure of Finocchiaro’s methodological treatment. Johnstone’s texts are 
much in evidence here. They receive careful interpretation, which is 
frequently sensitive to countersuggestions that a Johnstonean might 
make. On the other hand, Finocchiaro’s rejection of the traditional 
approach to the analysis of fallacies is (as he himself is fully aware) less 
responsive to the probings of the historical-textual and interpretative 
method, as well as being a bit light on the dialectical side. I say these 
things uncomplainingly. The traditional approach to fallacies has 
generated a very large literature, itself falling well-short of overall 
consensus. Finocchiaro sets out his case against mainstream fallacy 
theory in two chapters (6, 7), running to a scant thirty-eight pages. That’s 
not much space to give the methodological precepts free reign. 
Finocchiaro’s methodology, like everyone else’s, is an idealization which 
fits the cut and thrust of actual application with differential smoothness 
and completeness. It is all down to the character of the texts up for 
consideration. 

An overwhelmingly attractive feature of this book is its 
learnedness, its philosophical groundedness, its sheer intellectual range. I 
am hard put to think of a rival in these respects unless it is Stephen 
Toulmin himself, who had such an early influence on Finocchiaro. One 
thinks, too, of Michael Scriven, Finocchiaro’s mentor at Berkeley, and 
Nicholas Rescher, whose contributions to argument analysis are 
comparatively few, but whose vision of a realistic human logic has the 
sweep and boldness of Finocchiaro’s own. Finocchiaro has made a multi-
faceted contribution to issues that matter to readers of this journal. It is 
difficult to over-praise the historiographical writings, and no one should 
doubt the shrewdness of Finocchiaro’s critical insights. There is plenty of 
room for honourable disagreement as to where his greatest contribution 
lies, but my vote goes to his visionary contributions to empirical logic. 

In Finocchiaro’s hands, logic is reconnected to its historical 
mission of a theory of reasoning and argument. Finocchiaro needs no 
reminder of the huge importance of mathematical logic, ensuing from 
mid-nineteenth century, and reaching a solid and brilliant maturity in its 
four main branches: set theory, proof theory, model theory and recursion 
theory. Mathematical logic is an intellectual triumph. But it is not free of 
attendant costs. One is that there are (on purpose) no people in 
mathematical logic. This alone severs the traditional tie to theories of 
human reasoning. A theory of human reasoning is a theory about what is 
done by human agents. Agents pragmaticize logic. Mainline systems of 

 



                                         Finocchiaro: Arguments About Arguments 199 
 

                                                

logic are blends of syntax and semantics. Agent-centred logic adds the 
pragmatic dimension. It takes into account the impact of contexts of use.6 

The admittance of agents as load-bearing entities of theory is 
hardly unknown in the mainstream traditions of formal logic.7 In one 
prominent approach, agents are idealized practitioners of the theory’s 
behavioral norms. This leaves the question of the status of those norms 
for beings like us. One standard answer is that they are binding on us 
even though we fail them routinely in actual practice. In some quarters, 
this triggers a verdict of rather substantial and systematic irrationality. In 
others, mitigation of the harshness of this judgment is sought in the plea 
that in actual practice human beings approximate to these norms without 
fully conforming to them or executing them, with the attendant 
suggestion that you and I are therefore “approximately” rational. 
Finocchiaro will have none of this as a statement of the general state of 
affairs in the logical behaviour of human individuals. For one thing, for 
beings like us, it is less often than not the case that the targets of our 
actual reasonings are governed by the standards of deductive validity 
and/or inductive strength (in the technical sense of the term developed by 
inductive logicians in the slip-stream of Carnap’s ground-breaking work 
in the mid-twentieth century). This is a Toulminian point: Good human 
reasoning is rarely valid or inductively strong. Since it is precisely these 
traits that are the central preoccupation of the theoretical mainstream in 
logic, most of the going exemplars of this orthodoxy are of peripheral 
rather than central importance. It is here that Finocchiaro’s distinction 
between apriorism in logic and a logic that is sensitive to empirical 
considerations bites hard. Mainstream logicians can idealize until the 
cows come home that reasoning is correct only when—or to the extent—
that it is valid or inductively strong. Empirical logicians know better. 
They are struck by the fact that most reasoning on the ground doesn’t 
even approximate to these standards, and yet much reasoning on the 
ground is of excellent quality and high pay-off.  

Finocchiaro understands well that one cannot understand what 
good reasoning is in ways that are wholly divorced from how reasoning 
actually works, and succeeds, on the ground. So he rejects apriorism, and 
yet in doing so has no wish to embrace empiricism in logic. By this he 
means that he is not prepared to adopt as a conception of logic that kind 

 
6 ‘Pragmatics’ occurs in Finocchiaro’s index only as part of a reference to the official 
view of the school of Amsterdam. Of course, this is not to suggest that Finocchiaro is 
unaware of the significance of people for logic. 
7 By “load-bearing” I mean roughly, “indispensably linked to what counts as a 
theorem”. Here is a case in point. In 1962, Jaakko Hintikka published Knowledge and 
Belief ([Hintikka, 1962]), a major step forward in the development of epistemic logic. 
Hintikka’s system was an epistemic adaptation of Lewis’s S4. In making the adaptation, 
Hintikka introduces agents. Agents have a direct bearing on what the system counts as 
logical truths. Included among the logical truths are those sentences whose negations it 
would be self-defeating for an agent to utter, that is, sentences that are self-sustaining 
for that same agent to utter. Suppose that we left Hintikka’s adaptation of S4 entirely as 
he made it except for its provision for agents. Then in that truncated system, the 
category of logical truths could not contain sentences of the sort presently in view. 
Thus, the introduction of agents to Hintikka’s logic was load-bearing. 

 



   John Woods 200 

of empiricism that J.S. Mill postulated for arithmetic (and against which 
Frege railed with such derision). Neither is Finocchiaro a psychologicist 
about logic, at least not in any bare-bones sense. In raising the question 
of how logic relates to cognitive science, Finocchiaro clearly presupposes 
that there exists some positive relationship between the two; but it’s not 
identity. Similarly, in rejecting apriorism in logic, Finocchiaro steers well 
clear of the conceit that logicians are vocationally privileged arbiters of 
the good and the bad, that their apriori insights are stocked with 
normative guarantees. 

This leaves unanswered a number of questions that are critical for 
the articulation of a comprehensive empirical logic. One is that, if the 
opposites of apriorism and empiricism are untenable for logic, how does 
logic manage to escape the one without falling into the other? How is 
logic to be empirical if empiricism is not an option for it? Equally, if 
cognitive science isn’t logic—if, for example, Lance Rips’ excellent 
book, The Psychology of Proof ([Rips, 1994]), is not logic—in what 
sense and to what degree is cognitive science supposed to influence—and 
bring an empirical cast to—logic? Similarly, if the normativity that logic 
has always aspired to is not to be vouchsafed by the logician’s apriori 
apprehension of first principles (or whatever else), in what ways does an 
empirically oriented logic expose the axiological character of reasoning 
and argument? These are not questions that Finocchiaro answers here. 
Aside from passing references on pages 36 and 204, there is no 
discussion of normativity. This is not to say that Finocchiaro eschews the 
making of normative claims or discussing what others say about the role 
of norms in logic or philosophical analysis (as with his discussion of 
Cohen on norms at pages 198-200). But it is to say that there is no 
general account here of how Finocchiaro thinks that an empirical logic is 
able to lay bare the norms of good thinking, and no discussion of what 
confers upon those principles their normative legitimacy. Similarly, 
psychologism is briefly discussed in one place only (pp. 55-56), and only 
in a form of it which Finocchiaro attributes to Frege, namely, that the 
laws of logic are descriptive laws of thought.8 On Finocchiaro’s own 
view, a satisfactory empirical logic will have had something to do with—
will in certain respects have been shaped by—the disclosures of 
cognitive psychologism. This is as it should be. It reflects the fact that 
when you admit human agents to logical theory, you admit them as they 
come, warts and all. Since psychologies are part of the standard 
equipment for human beings, in admitting them you also admit their 
psychological make-ups. So psychologism in logic is somehow true, that 
is, there is a sense—perhaps not either of Frege’s senses—in which the 
theorems of logic are shaped by facts about that make-up. Another way 
of saying the same thing is that were those facts to be suppressed or 

                                                 
8 In his attack on psychologism, Frege rejected at least two different claims. One is that 
the laws of logic have the same justification that empirical generalizations have. The 
other is that the only objectivity the laws of logic can lay claim to is intersubjective 
validity, that is, communal acceptance by practitioners.  

 



                                         Finocchiaro: Arguments About Arguments 201 
 

ignored, then the theorems of the logic of human thinking would have to 
have been different. 

I mention these omissions not to cavil about them, but rather to 
point out that Finocchiaro’s empirical logic is a work in progress. By my 
lights, it is one of the most important and most exciting projects in the 
research programme of contemporary logical theory, and I very much 
hope that Finocchiaro will press ahead with it in his future work.  

In the space that remains to me, I want to reflect on what is 
perhaps Finocchiaro’s most heterodox thesis. This is the view that the 
more or less standard list of the fallacies aren’t fallacies on the more or 
less standard conception of what a fallacy is. The standard list—what I 
have called the Gang of Eighteen—is not canonically fixed, needless to 
say, and in some variations it doesn’t sum to eighteen. But there is a 
substantial overlap between the lists one finds in various of the better-
known textbooks, and that is good enough for present purposes. This is 
the juncture at which I should declare an interest. In recent writings, I 
have advanced what I call “the negative thesis”, according to which the 
(more or less) eighteen so-called fallacies aren’t actually in the extension 
of the traditional conception of fallacy ([Woods, 2007a]). If this is right, 
the traditional fallacies aren’t fallacies in the traditional sense of the term. 
To this is adjoined “a positive thesis” which says that most of the 
eighteen are in fact cognitively virtuous strategies for the transaction of 
our cognitive endeavours under press of scant assets – resources such as 
information, time, storage and retrieval capacity and computation 
complexity ([Woods, 2007b]). I don’t see any clear indication in this 
book as to whether Finocchiaro might be drawn to the positive thesis, but 
there isn’t the slightest doubt that he is a proponent of the negative one, 
although perhaps for reasons some of which are his alone.  

Apart from its radicalness, what stands out about Finocchiaro’s 
subscription to the negative thesis is how long he has held it. “Six Types 
of Fallaciousness”  first appeared in 1987, and it was preceded six years 
earlier by “Fallacies and the Evaluation of Reasoning” (6), in which one 
finds, if not full-bore endorsement, then at least the stirrings of the 
negative thesis. Even more surprising is the, to date, almost wholesale 
indifference of the fallacy theoretic community. Why should this be? Is it 
that the negative thesis is just too crazy for words? Is it that the 
contemporary research community fails to heed the Finocchiaroian 
principles of interpretative and dialectical care? Who knows? Still, one 
thing is clear. Finocchiaro has reasons for liking the negative thesis. Here 
are some of them. If, as Toulmin observes, most good arguments are 
neither valid nor inductively strong, and if, as a great many theorists aver, 
the flaws to be found in the Gang of Eighteen is that they are arguments 
that fail to be valid or inductively strong, how does it come about that in 
those few cases, invalidity and/or inductive weakness make for 
fallaciousness, but in the other cases—those that make up the majority of 
good reasoning—they don’t? Or, to take another example, everyone 
agrees that affirming the consequent fails the standard of deductive 
validity, but what reason have we to think that when in the general case 

 



   John Woods 

 

202 

and in actual practice people affirm the consequent they are even aiming 
at deductive validity? Why isn’t the better interpretation that they are 
reasoning abductively? Similarly, everyone will agree that if someone 
unqualifiedly infers the presence of a causal connection on the strength of 
the temporal succession by one event of another, that would be a mistake. 
But how likely is this to be the correct interpretation of such reasoning? 
Isn’t it a good deal more likely that the significance that such sequences 
has for us causally is that the before-after connection raises the possibility 
(rather than the fact) of a causal tie? So again, the interpretation 
constraint appears to have been violated. Ditto for the dialectical 
constraint. Consider a case in which one is inclined to press the charge of 
post hoc, ergo, propter hoc. How plausible is it that one would follow 
through with that accusation if he gave the slightest attention to what his 
accused is likely to say in reply? Will he say, “Why, ‘after’ is invariably 
a marker for ‘caused by’”? Or will he say “I’m not saying ‘caused by’; 
I’m saying ‘maybe caused by’”? 

The twenty-three essays in this book represent a high point in a 
generation’s research into the logic of reasoning and argument. None of 
the twenty-three has yet reached—to say nothing of exceeding—its sell-
by date. They are as fresh today as they were when originally published. 
Taken together they make a major and multi-faceted contribution to 
logic.  

 
 

References 
 
Blair, J.Anthony.  (1998). “The limits of the dialogue model of 

argument.” Argumentation, 12, pp. 325-339. 
Finocchiaro, Maurice. (1980). Galileo and the Art of Reasoning. 

Dordrecht: Reidel, 1980. 
Hintikka, Jaakko. (1962). Knowledge and Belief. Ithaca, NY: Cornell 

University Press,. 
Rips, Lance J. (1994). The Psychology of Proof: Deductive Reasoning in 

Human Thinking. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 
Woods, John. (2007a). “Lightening up on the ad hominem”. Informal 

Logic 27 (special issue, David Godden, ed.), pp. 109-134. 
Woods, John. (2007b). “The concept of fallacy is empty: A resource-

bound approach to error”. In Lorenzo Magnani and Li Ping, 
editors. Model Based reasoning in Science. Amsterdam: Springer. 

 
 
 
John Woods                                               University of British Columbia 
                                                                              King's College, London