We arrive now at one of the central issues for the thesis: how do acts of argument relate to their objects? This question has already made an appearance in
connection with Sainsbury’s distinction between the objects logicians assess for validity, and those which are expressed ‘in ordinary circumstances’. Since ‘ordinary circumstances’ are those in which an argument is actively put forward by an arguer, it can be assumed that the argument purports to be sound; that is, its premises are purported to be true, and the inference to the conclusion is purported to be valid. Asserting one or more claims as reasons for another claim commits the proponent to the truth of what is asserted, so that if he knowingly asserts something false as grounds for a conclusion, then obviously he is guilty of lying. But likewise if he knowingly gives as reasons claims that do not warrant the inference to the conclusion, he is also doing something rather like lying, even if the propositions themselves are true. 31
The reasons for the twinning of assertion and argument in the title of the thesis should now be fairly obvious. Acts of argument, like acts of assertion, have objects: premises, conclusions, whole arguments, which are standardly expressed by means of declarative sentences, or compounds of them. Moreover the same commitment to truth applies to the component acts of argument as it does to claims and
31
Lying, it should be noted, is a complex notion, involving more than the truth or falsity of an asserted proposition. Lying is a special case of asserting, and of the act-object relation vis-à-vis assertion. However, its special features do not affect the present point, and are outside the scope of this thesis.
assertions in general. Acts of argument are not so much like assertion as a species
of assertion, as many commentators have observed. John Searle classifies deducing
and concluding as assertives, differing from plainly asserting or stating by ‘the added feature that they mark certain relations between the assertive illocutionary act and the rest of the discourse or the context of utterance’ (Searle 1979: 13). Obviously, it is premises (reasons), given in the discourse, to which concluding and deducing mark a relation. It would seem to follow that an act of premising would conversely mark a relation to a conclusion or deduction, but Searle does not add this. Indeed he does not make reference to a specific speech-act of premising (or reason-giving) at all, possibly because the circularity of a mutual relation would undermine his classification of concluding. He may consider concluding to define premising (and premises), but not vice versa. On that presumption, the stating of a reason or premise would then be a plain assertive, and the special act of deducing or concluding would mark what was previously asserted as a premise.
Hitchcock (2007), with reference to Searle’s taxonomy, also classifies the act of reason-giving as an assertive, and he expressly singles out reason-giving as the defining feature of argument (in all but the purely disputational sense):
A simple argument is a sequence of three objects: a speech act c of any type concerning some proposition, an illative such as the word ‘since’ (in its inferential sense), and a set P of one or more assertives. (Hitchcock 2007: 107)
It is interesting to note that Hitchcock appears to depart from Searle’s classification by not requiring concluding to be assertive, though it ‘concerns’ propositions. In one respect this is evidenced by the various non-standard ways in which we express arguments. An illative need not be succeeded invariably by a declarative sentence – for example: ‘The tide’s turned, so should we leave the island?’ But it is reasonable to suppose that however the conclusion of an argument is expressed, it could always be converted into a declarative sentence. Besides, Hitchcock’s real point is that, whilst inferences can take a variety of forms of expression, reason- giving cannot: it is essentially assertive.
Brandom (1983) also sees an essential connection between the acts of asserting and concluding. Developing a point that he takes from the early writings of Frege,32
he proposes that the key to a correct understanding of assertion lies in its relation to inference:
That is, asserting is issuing an inference license. Since inferring is drawing a conclusion, such an inference license amounts to a warrant for further assertions, specifically assertions of those sentences which can appropriately be inferred from the sentence originally asserted. (Brandom 1983: 639)
Hence, although the two philosophers would agree that the act of warranting a conclusion is characteristically assertive, they come to the view from different directions, and for different purposes, Hitchcock’s being to classify reason-giving Brandom’s to explain assertion. It might seem a step too far to say that warranting conclusions is the whole point and purpose of assertion. There are other ways to explain why we assert things, one of the most obvious being to convey information. Brandom observes this himself, though not in order to detract from his main
contention. For the point and purpose of communicating information is no less in need of explaining than is assertion itself. The value of an item of information is in what we do with it, which can generally be understood in terms of what we infer from it, or how we act on it, which is a mark of what we infer from it. For present purposes all we need take from Brandom’s proposal is that warranting conclusions is a significant function of assertion, consistent with the commitment to truth that is associated with assertion. But it is certainly plausible that the strength of the commitment is at least partly explained by the role assertion plays in warranting inferences. We say that assertions are supposed, expected, meant, etc. to be true, placing the onus on the author of an assertion to be mindful of the truth. We also say that, from the point of view of the audience, assertions are generally trusted or
counted on to be true. We say likewise that the premises of an argument, being
assertions, are supposed to be true, and that the conclusion is supposed to follow
32
‘(W)hen the younger Frege glosses asserting as putting a sentence forward as true, the phrase has the sense of “putting the sentence forward as one from which it is appropriate to make inferences”.’ Brandom (1983: 639, citing various passages from Frege’s first logic published posthumously in Hermes (1979).
from them. Shand (2000: 20), in a definition with echoes of Copi’s, writes: ‘An
argument is a set of propositions where one of the set (the conclusion), is supposed
to follow from the others (the premises)’. Here ‘supposed’ takes the place of Copi’s ‘claimed’, but the two words are not (or not necessarily) interchangeable. It is true that ‘C’ can be supposed to follow from ‘P’ in the sense of someone’s actually supposing it to do so. That, however, is not the only interpretation, nor the most natural one in the context. For ‘supposed’ also has the sense there of ‘ought’. If someone were to respond to an argument by saying: ‘A conclusion is supposed to follow from its premises’, it could have the implicature that the argument was defective. The notion of an argument as a complex in which a certain relation is supposed to obtain gives the impression of something inherently open to criticism; but no more so than one in which the same relation is claimed to hold. Whilst the two terms have different meanings, being supposed to is implied by being
claimed to , (though not the converse) given that in general a claim is supposed to be true.
The view that acts of argument are essentially assertive is, I think, safe from objection. Premises are claimed, and therefore supposed to be true; conclusions are claimed – and therefore supposed – to follow from premises. It is true that some argument is more tentative than other argument but assertive force varies without ceasing to be assertive.33
Besides, if both claims are true, as claims are supposed to be, then the object-argument is sound, whatever level of assertive force or commitment the author happens to put behind them. The soundness of an argument is independent of any act of argument whose object it might be. The premises are true or false, and the inference valid or invalid, regardless of the delivery. To that extent, the argument is an object through and through, and from the logician’s point of view the act of argument is largely an irrelevance. However, there is one question that is not answered by reflecting on the object-sense of argument alone, and that is why it matters whether an argument is valid or invalid
33
See Searle (1979: 412-13): ‘The degree of belief of commitment may approach or even reach zero, but it is clear [...] that hypothesizing that p and flatly stating that p are in the same line of business in a way that neither is like requesting.’
– or indeed sound or unsound. It matters for the same reason that it matters whether an assertion is true or false, or to be more precise whether what is asserted, when an assertion is made, is true or false. It matters in both cases because if there is not a presumption that authors mean their assertions to be true and their arguments to be sound, rational discourse would founder.
The parallels between assertion and argument are striking. Just as Brandom takes inference to provide an explanatory framework for asserting, I take assertion, in return, to throw light on argument, in particular on the relation between acts of argument and their objects. Evaluation, as we have seen, gives us a clear view of the argument-object. Assertion – it will be argued – provides insight on the act. I return to assertion itself in Chapter 5. Most importantly I consider the intersection of the two perspectives in Chapter 6.