Informal Logic and its Implications for Philosophy

Abstract

I take 'informal logic' to be the (descriptive and normative) study of 'real arguments'-arguments which are or have been used with the aim of convincing others of a point of view. I argue that the informal logic tradition thus conceived (i) lends strong support to something like Quine's view that our beliefs really support one another like the filaments in a spider's web--and thus that the traditional view that implication is an asymmetric relation is false; (ii) suggests that the classic division of arguments into deductive and inductive has distorted our thinking about the evaluation of real arguments; and (iii) implies that naturalised epistemology is on the right track.