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On the Priority of Agent-Based Argumentative Norms

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Abstract

This paper argues against the priority of pure, virtue-based accounts of argumentative norms [VA]. Such accounts are agent-based and committed to the priority thesis: good arguments and arguing well are explained in terms of some prior notion of the virtuous arguer arguing virtuously. Two problems with the priority thesis are identified. First, the definitional problem: virtuous arguers arguing virtuously are neither sufficient nor necessary for good arguments. Second, the priority problem: the goodness of arguments is not explained virtuistically. Instead, being excellences, virtues are instrumental in relation to other, non-aretaic goods—in this case, reason and rationality. Virtues neither constitute reasons nor explain their goodness. Two options remain for VA: either provide some account of reason and rationality in virtuistic terms, or accept them as given but non-aretaic goods. The latter option, though more viable, demands the concession that VA cannot provide the core norms of argumentation theory.

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Notes

  1. This list remains neutral with respect to the ontological priority of these constituents. Granting that the natural-world, causal priority is actor, activity, product, some theorists might hold that the ontological order matches this causal order (that argument products are produced through the activity of arguing which, in turn, presupposes agents engaged in the activity), while other theorists might maintain that there are abstract objects (e.g., argument types or activity types) that can precede individual, agent-initiated acts of arguing such that the product or the activity have ontological priority.

    As distinct from any ontological or causal priority, this paper is concerned with the logical and explanatory priority of these constituents.

  2. O’Keefe (1977) distinguished two concepts of “argument”: argument1, or arguing that, and argument2, or arguing about, where the first is a communicative act that a person makes while the second is a communicative activity that two or more people engage in. Brockriede (1977) clarified this distinction in terms of product (argument1) and process (argument2), to which Wenzel (1980) added the third perspective of procedure.

  3. This grammatical way of characterizing the relations between the approaches is borrowed from Cohen (2008, 2013b: 482).

  4. But see Brandom’s “Insights and blindspots of reliabilism” (2000: ch. 3).

  5. For a biographical and anecdotal history, see Cohen (2013b: 473ff). Paglieri (2014; forthcoming) offers a similar way of categorizing virtue theories of argumentation.

  6. Importantly, VA is not required to reveal, explain, or remedy this sort of problem. Existing epistemic approaches to arguments1 have this type of problem well in hand.

  7. From a purely logical perspective, the badness of an argument has to do with the connection that obtains (or fails to obtain) between the premises and the conclusion. Thus, failed arguments should never lower the initial acceptability of their conclusions; rather they should only fail to raise that initial acceptability. Yet, Cohen (2005) provides examples of argument types that, ordinarily, would raise an audience’s suspicions about their conclusions, thereby lowering their acceptability.

  8. Some of the early sources on VA, particularly those of Cohen, exist only in the form of talks given at academic conferences. The author has graciously provided copies of the texts of these talks (some of which are already cited in the existing literature) and has granted permission to cite and quote from them. Wherever possible, I have quoted from materials published in print and give the page number when doing so. When quoting from talks, I cite only the talk itself (by its year).

  9. For example, Bowell and Kingsbury (2013: 23) write: “we think that what makes it the case that an arguer has argued well is that they have presented an argument that is good,” where the goodness of an argument is a function of its ability “to provide its intended audience with good reasons to accept its conclusion”.

  10. More recently, Cohen (2013b: 482) asserts that “the core ideas of Virtue Argumentation Theory, as I understand it, can fit on a couple of bumper stickers. First, For a good argument, argue well. … [and second] Arguing well requires good arguers”.

  11. At least part of the point for this qualification is that not all qualities of the virtuous arguer contribute to a normative account of argumentation: e.g., their diet or sartorial preferences are normally irrelevant. Rather the qualities proposed as normatively relevant by VA are the specifically argumentative virtues of the virtuous arguer—their qualities qua virtuous arguer—and their virtues as an arguer are manifested, actualized, or exhibited when they are arguing virtuously.

  12. This is in contrast to what I call below an instrumental account of virtue, which (in a moral context) Zagzebski (1996: 81–82) attributes to Aristotle and Hursthouse. On an instrumental account, “the order of the fundamental moral concepts is as follows. The good in the sense of eudaimonia is conceptually foundational. The concept of a virtue is derivative from the concept of eudaimonia and the concept of a right act is derivative from the concept of virtue. … Virtue is good because of its connection to the thing that is more fundamentally good, namely, eudaimonia.”

  13. This section provides counter examples to the VA definition of good argument1, though I hold that similar counter examples can be constructed for the VA definition of arguing2 well. In his (2008) Cohen addresses a similar objection, attributed to Jonathan Adler, to the VA program. There, Cohen’s defense against this criticism relies on the claim that the objection rests on “the conflation of moral virtues and argumentative virtues [which] is not a necessary part of the virtue argumentation program.” In what follows, I seek to assiduously avoid any such conflation by specifying the relevant virtues as those advertised by VA theorists as specifically argumentative.

  14. It might be objected that the success of this counter-example trades on an unacceptable account of virtue which, as one reviewer suggested, at least “implies excellence in a domain of choice or action” yet which seems to be lacking in the supposedly virtuous but unreliable arguer.

    It must be conceded that adding a sufficiently reliabilist component to our account of the nature of virtue, for example by stipulating that virtuous arguers are more likely than non-virtuous arguers to exhibit some desirable property (e.g., having rationally justified, or true, beliefs) or to arrive at some desirable end (e.g., rationally justified or true beliefs), undermines this line of argument.

    In reply to this objection, several points can be raised. First, to date, VA has opted almost exclusively for a responsibilist account of argumentative virtue (cf. Cohen 2005: 64; Aberdein 2010: 175, 2013: 2–3) such that the possession and exercise of argumentative virtue is entirely consistent with a pronounced, if not complete, lack of reliability concerning the alethic, epistemic, and even rational ends of argumentation. Cohen (2007b: 2, passim) explicitly advocates for an expansionist vision of argumentative goods to include cognitive but non-epistemic goals and achievements. Second, it might seem as though adding a sufficiently reliabilist dimension to our account of argumentative virtue might solve the problem. Yet, having made such a move, it would seem that the responsibilist elements of virtue are swamped by their stipulated reliability. For example, supposing that the agent is reliable, what does it matter whether they responsibly exercised this reliability rather than that their reliability is irresponsibly achieved? Similarly, supposing them to be unreliable, what interest should we have in whether they exercised their unreliability responsibly? Indeed, emphasizing the reliabilist elements of virtue would seem to encourage a reliabilist theory of argumentation, not a virtue-based account. To retain a significant responsibilist element of virtue, it would seem that we require an instrumentalist account of it—a position claiming that a responsible exercise of our capacities and skills makes us reliable, or at least more reliable than we would otherwise be. Lastly then, adopting a more reliabilist account of virtue further commits the VA theorist to an instrumentalist account of virtue (discussed below in Sect. 8) which, in turn, detracts from any claim to the priority of virtue, or indigenously aretaic goods, in argumentation.

  15. As such, I take the dogmatism of the sophistical arguer not merely to be a moral failing of theirs, but a rational, or argumentative one. Indeed the sophistical arguer lacks what might be the quintessential argumentative virtue, namely a willingness to change one’s mind in the face of the better reason. Willingness to modify one’s position is identified by both Cohen (2005: 64) and Aberdein (2010: 175, 2013: 2–3) as an explicitly argumentative virtue, while Godden (2014: 137 ff.) identifies it as a basic rational responsibility.

  16. Importantly, the merits of this point do not rest on whether one accepts the claim that such devices, in fact, lack the relevant agency. Rather, the mere conceivability or coherence of examples where cogent arguments are produced by non-agents demonstrates the conceptual independence of argument cogency and arguer agency.

  17. Cohen does this in the context of providing a warning about the view that a virtue is located in a linear fashion between two polar opposites. “This account misses something important: being closed-minded is not the only way [to] lack the virtue of being open-minded. An open mind is being open to reason, so being inattentive or uninterested is the fundamental equivalent of willful, dogmatic deafness to reasons. A disengaged spectator is no more persuadable than one whose mind is made up” (2013a: 18). That is, there can be a multitude, falling along different axes, of vices in the vicinity of a virtue.

  18. Cohen (2007a) gives the example of open-mindedness, noting that it can be detrimental in the pursuit of knowledge. By risking existing beliefs by placing them open to question, open-mindedness may be a risky or counter-productive cognitive strategy for agents possessing mostly true, justified beliefs.

  19. Cohen takes a similar approach when identifying critical virtues. “[C]ritical virtues,” Cohen (2007a) stipulates “are the acquired habits and skills that help us to achieve the goals of critical thinking,” and “can be defined by the goods that they help us procure and by the accomplishments that they help us achieve in the course of argumentation”.

  20. In addition to demonstrating rational entitlement to belief, rational persuasion and rationally achieved consensus, Cohen (2007b: 6, cf. 2007a) lists cognitive goods such as deepened understanding of a position, improvement of a position, increased attention to, and acknowledgement and appreciation of another’s position.

  21. Cohen (2007b: 7, cf. 2007a) distinguishes four ways that argumentation can achieve these ends: (1) “what many take as the archetypical case” providing reasons, (2) being causes, (3) being evidence, and (4) “(the most important, and a mixture of all of the above), arguments can be initiating catalysts, occasions, or conditions for other processes that eventuate in cognitive transformations”.

  22. This direction of questioning and criticism was inspired by an incisive question posed by Jean Goodwin in the workshop on Virtue Argumentation Theory at the 15th Wake Forest University Biennial Argumentation Conference, Winston-Salem, NC, April 11, 2014. According to my notes, the gist of Goodwin’s question was: “Are there accusations of argumentative vice in actual argumentative practice?”.

  23. This is not to say that we cannot, on occasion, use characteristics of arguers as a proxy for primary reasons, as we do, for example, when arguing from expert opinion, position to know, or (sometimes) testimony and sign. Yet, when we argue in these ways, we presume the cogency of the underlying reasons (i.e., those that the expert or attestor are presumed to know, or those that the sign is presumed to indicate), even though we do not directly appraise or even articulate them. Typically this is because we are not ourselves in a position to assess the primary reasons, either because they are not accessible to us or even if they were we are not competent to appraise them. Yet, in cases like these the characteristics of the arguer cited in argumentation are merely substitutes for the primary reasons. This can be seen by the fact that any failure or defect in the cogency of those primary reasons would either override (in the case of expertise) or undermine (in the case of position to know) any considerations cited in the character-based arguments even when they do not contradict those character-based considerations. Similarly, as Bowell and Kingsbury (2013: 26ff) argue, purely ad hominem and ad verecundiam arguments are only legitimately used when the character of the arguer bears directly on the truth or acceptability of the claim at issue. Thus, it remains the case that, even though we can offer character-based arguments, purely virtuistic accounts of these are mistaken to the extent that they substitute assessments of arguers for assessments of reasons.

  24. Of course, the VA theorist might opt for a third, eliminativist, road of radical autonomy whereby the traditional goods, norms and problems of argumentation theory are abandoned entirely and replaced with an exclusively virtuistic approach. I take it that this road is plainly a dead end.

  25. Importantly, understanding validity narrowly as deductive validity, does not provide the virtue theorist with the foil needed to motivate their approach. Existing, product-based approaches can readily identify narrowly balid arguments, explain their balidity, and prescribe a remedy, doing so entirely with their own theoretical resources.

  26. The author would like to thank the paper’s two anonymous referees for their constructive and challenging comments and for correcting several embarrassing errors. I especially extend my thanks to Andrew Aberdein and Dan Cohen, the guest editors of this issue of Topoi—first for their expert, efficient and meticulous editorial direction, but moreover in recognition of their groundbreaking scholarship in virtue argumentation. Without their efforts not only would there be no special issue of Topoi, but the very subject area of the issue would not exist.

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Godden, D. On the Priority of Agent-Based Argumentative Norms. Topoi 35, 345–357 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-014-9296-x

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