Abstract
Peter van Inwagen defines a successful argument in philosophy as one that can be used to convert an audience of ideal agnostics in an ideal debate. Sarah McGrath and Thomas Kelly recently argue that van Inwagen’s definition cannot be correct since the idea of ideal agnostics is incoherent with regard to an absolute paradigm of a successful philosophical argument. This paper defends van Inwagen’s definition against McGrath and Kelly’s objection.
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Notes
Socrates offers the following self-description in the Crito: “not only now but at all times I am the kind of man who listens to nothing within me but the argument that on reflection seems best to me” (Plato 1997, 46b).
Some philosophers such as Goldman (1999) and Lumer (2005b, p. 214) make a distinction between argument and argumentation. On their view, an argument is an argument is a set of statements typically schematized as “R1,…, Rn, therefore P” while argumentation is the act of arguing, i.e., the presentation of an argument. Accordingly, one might hold that the criteria of good argument are different from the criteria of good argumentation. But in this paper, no such distinction is made because, on the one hand, the English word “argument” sometimes means the act of arguing as in the sentence “Ian accepted the suggestion without argument;” on the other, I tend to think that good argumentation is simply the presentation of a good argument.
The epistemological approach clearly takes a teleological or consequentialist view on argumentation, that is, a good argument is defined in terms of the aim of argument. Within the consequentialist framework, there are two others influential approaches: (1) the rhetorical approach according to which, the aim of argument is simply to persuade the addressee, and (2) the consensus approach, which takes the aim of argument to be reaching consensus among all those involved. For a detailed classification of competing approaches to good argument, see Goldman (1999, pp. 154–160) and Lumer (2005a, pp. 189–192).
According to some versions of the epistemological approach, consensus is also a necessary condition for good argument. For instance, on Goldman’s view (1999), in order for an argument to be successful, both the speaker and the audience must believe its premises and conclusion—the audience is persuaded by the argument to believe the conclusion.
I will explain these two reasons in detail in the next section.
Van Inwagen writes, “I mean the agnostics to be drawn from our time and our culture; so limiting the jury pool, of course, relativizes our criterion of philosophical success to our time and our culture, for it is certainly possible that an argument that would have succeeded in, say, convincing an eighteenth-century audience that space was infinite would not succeed with an audience of our contemporaries. A present-day advocate of the possibility of the finitude of space could, for example, point to the fact that many scientists think that it is a real possibility that space is finite (although unbounded), a fact that could not have been appealed to in the eighteenth century” (2006, p. 47).
Feldman, Goldman, and Lumer all seem to hold this view. Feldman writes, "An argument is a good argument for person S if and only if: (1) S is justified in believing the conjunction of all the premises of the argument; (2) S is justified in believing that the premises are "properly connected" to the conclusion; and (3) the argument is not defeated for S." (1994, p. 179). Goldman proposes the following two necessary conditions for good argument: (a) “At least some members of the audience to which the argumentation is addressed do not already believe the asserted conclusion (the fewer such members believe it, the better)” (1999, p. 136). (b) “All the premises presented in the argument are credible to at least some members of the intended audience (the more such members, the better)” (1999, p. 137). Lumer defines good argument as a valid argument of situational adequacy. The necessary conditions for situational adequacy include that “h (the hearer of the argument) is not yet sufficiently convinced of the argument's thesis”, that “the argument is sufficiently strong for h's purposes”, that “h has no relevant knowledge about the thesis above the database presumed in the argument”, etc. (2005a, b, p. 234).
Siegel argues that Ahistorical Relativism is incompatible with education for critical thinking, for “if reasons are relative, then we cannot say that one assessment of an argument is better than another; worse, we cannot legitimately think that our argument assessment rules and criteria are superior to our students' untutored rules and criteria (or denial of such). Thus there would no cogent rationale for teaching students how to assess reasons and arguments; no motivation for education aimed at the improvement of critical thinking” (1997, pp. 19–20).
For a response, see Feldman (1994).
Though VIC is about philosophical arguments, van Inwagen never claims nor intends to claim that VIC merely applies to philosophical arguments.
Van Inwagen writes, “Although the ideal philosophers and ideal circumstances of the debate I have imagined do not exist, reasonable approximations of them have existed at various times and places” (van Inwagen 2006, p. 44). And he employs his criterion of successful argument to argue that no well-known philosophical arguments for substantive theses are successful since they have been tested “under circumstances that approximate sufficiently to the circumstances of an ideal debate,” and if any well-known philosophical argument for a substantive thesis were able to covert an ideal audience to belief in its conclusion, then it is very likely that “assent to the conclusion of that argument would be more widespread among philosophers than assent to any substantive philosophical thesis actually is” (van Inwagen 2006, pp. 52–53). Ballantyne (2014b) makes an argument that lend indirect support for van Inwagen’s idea.
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Acknowledgments
I'd like to thank Nathan Ballantyne, Stephen Grimm, David Kovacs, Emily Sullivan, and two anonymous referees for their help comments on earlier versions of this paper.
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Hu, X. Must a Successful Argument Convert an Ideal Audience?. Argumentation 31, 165–177 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-016-9402-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-016-9402-x