Balance of Consideration Arguments and Constrains on Persuasion

• In Event: Argumentation Studies at the Interface between Rhetoric and Dialectic

Abstract

Informal logicians have for some time been talking about something they call ‘conductive arguments’. The term was coined by Carl Wellman in his seminal work, Challenge and Response (1971), and has been developed by Trudy Govier in successive editions of her textbook, A Practical Study of Argument (7th ed. 2010) and her collection of papers, The Philosophy of Argument (1999
Conductive arguments, according to Wellman and Govier, are neither (i) deductive, (ii) inductive nor (iii) analogical arguments about questions of morality or social policy. They identify three patterns of arguments that can satisfy these conditions: those from a single premiss to a single conclusion, those from two or more independent (convergent) premises to a single conclusion, and those arguments that take counter-considerations into account in reasoning forward to a conclusion. It is this last, third, pattern of conductive arguments – arguments that include both non-entailing premises and non-entailing objections – that will be the focus of this paper. To distinguish them from the other two patterns, I call them “balance of consideration argments”.
Balance of consideration arguments were discussed by George Campbell in The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776). He saw that in moral reasoning there were “contrary experiences, contrary presumptions and contrary testimonies” to balance against each other. At least three problems attend balance of consideration arguments. First, there is a theoretical problem from the logician’s point of view: How can counter-considerations be parts of arguments, since arguments consist of conclusions and reasons for the conclusion? Second, how are the reasons for the conclusion to be measured against the reasons against the conclusion?
Balance of consideration arguments are presently the subject of systematic and critical study both in North America and in Europe. A symposium of twelve invited scholars will be held at the University of Windsor in Canada at the end of April. The outcome of the Windsor symposium will inform the part of my paper that will situate balance of consideration arguments in the wider field of argument studies, especially vis-à-vis dialectical and rhetorical approaches.

Author

• Hans Hansen, University of Windsor