Abstract
This paper offers insights into the nature and design of critical questions as they are found in argumentation schemes. In the first part of the paper, I address some general concerns regarding their purpose and formulation. These include a discussion of their evaluative function, their relationship with the patterns of reasoning they accompany, as well as the differing formulations of critical questions currently on offer. I argue that the purpose of critical questions for humans ought to be to provide the means for a scalar evaluation of the reasoning at hand. To do so, critical questions should be closely paired with individual premises in the accompanying pattern of reasoning and be open-ended. Doing so allows the roles of raising considerations relevant for the reasoning and scrutinizing those considerations to be clearly distinguished. In the second part of the paper, I offer a positive methodological proposal for the construction of questions and premises that aims at overcoming a number of the individual and systematic shortcomings of extant question styles. The paper concludes by arguing that the newly proposed approach is both normatively strong and practically useful for argumentation in context.
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Notes
For a thorough discussion of the history of argumentation schemes, see Rigotti and Greco (2019) who provide an excellent discussion of argumentation schemes from Aristotle, through the Medieval ages, to their own contemporary development of the Argumentum Model of Topics.
A main current focus in the field regards how argumentation schemes ought to be categorized rather than how they ought to be constructed (Bex and Reed, 2011; Walton and Macagno, 2016).
Walton and Gordon (2011) provide a discussion focused on critical questions. However, their focus is on the use of questions within a specific argument diagramming software, rather than the relationship between their nature and design.
One advantage to this definition is that it prevents “argumentation scheme” from becoming synonymous with “pattern of reasoning” and captures the importance of both components. I thank Fabrizio Macagno for discussion of this characterization.
I thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out that this does not mean, however, that they are fundamentally opposed. Since in the end both methods are concerned with determining whether the conclusion ought to be accepted on the basis of the premises, they both make use of thresholds in differing ways.
Walton, Reed, and Macagno (2008, pp. 323–326) specifically include a scheme for “Two-person practical reasoning”, leading me to believe that other schemes for practical reasoning are envisioned for a monological setting. However, this also shows that each scheme can be given a ‘dialogical garb’, i.e., amended to fit a dialogical setting. I thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this point.
Some of the literature on critical thinking also addresses the critical questions from at least two perspectives. There is theoretical work discussing the “questioning approach” to critical thinking (see Brodin, 2015; Trede and McEwen, 2015) and there are practical guides for designing critical thinking questions (see e.g., Elder and Paul, 2019). Since, however, neither approach is directly concerned with testing the use of a pattern of reasoning as found in an argumentation scheme, I leave the investigation of that work and its possible connections to argumentation schemes for a future work.
The exact wording of the questions is flexible.
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Acknowledgements
The central ideas in this paper were co-developed with João Sàágua. I am immensely grateful for his mentorship and the many hours we shared discussing the nature of practical reasoning and argumentation schemes. Thanks also to the audiences at the 2018 ISSA conference and 2021 alumni-month CRRAR speaker series for valuable feedback and insights.
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Baumtrog, M.D. Designing Critical Questions for Argumentation Schemes. Argumentation 35, 629–643 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-021-09549-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-021-09549-z