"I get what you're saying about the 49'rs, and there's certainly something in it. But is a combination of offense and defense really the crucial thing to look for in a Super Bowl winner?"
"Maybe there's a bit of an emotional relationship between King Kong and the girl. But how does that weigh up against all the implausible anti-business non sense in the second half of the movie?"
"Don't you need to tell us something more about the food-service problem? Is defective dish-washing equipment the sort of thing that could account for an epidemic of this proportion?"
"That doesn't strike me as much of an argument-surely, we could obtain a much higher interest rate from private bonds without much loss of liquidity?"
Now the questioner asks for warrants, that is, statements indicating how the facts on which we agree are connected to the claim or conclusion now being offered. These connecting statements draw attention to the previously agreed gen eral ways of arguing applied in the particular case, and so are implicitly relied on as ones whose trustworthiness is well established.
46
FIRST LEVEL OF ANALYSIS: THE SOUNDNESS OF ARGUMENTSLet us assume that
A
has produced a substantial and significant body of factual material as grounds (G) and presents this as being all the "support" needed in order to establish his initial claim (C). Once this stage is reached, I's critical attention shifts away from the grounds themselves and begins to focus instead on the nature of this step from G to C; that is, on the implications hidden within the word therefore in the statement "G, therefore c."Put colloquially, the central question is now no longer "What do you have to go on?" and has become instead "How do you get there?" The interrogator, I, must now inquire about the general rule or procedure that the assertor,
A,
is rely ing on in presenting the step from G to C as a trustworthy step that we can safely follow him in taking. Notice two things:1 . The assertor's task is normally to convince us not just that it was legit imate for him to adopt the initial claim for himself but also that we should share it and so rely on it ourselves. In a phrase, he argues his case because he wants us to go along with him.
2. While the claim he puts forward (C) and the set of grounds he pro duces in its support (G) are quite particular and specifio--he talks, for instance about chances for this year and about the current form of this or that other specific football team-he will normally have to justify the step from G to C by producing some more general considerations, for example, how things tend to go for football teams in general, not just this year but any year.
THE NATURE OF WARRANTS
At this point, let us consider the new term warrant, which we shall use here in discussing the step from grounds to claims. Consider the following simple exchange:
A: I should choose the ice cream today!
Q: Why do you say that?
A: Jack chose yesterday, and Jill the day before. Q: So?
A: Everyone should have a turn at choosing.
In this exchange, the assertor,
A,
first backs up her original claim, C ("It's my turn!"), by producing her specific factual ground, G ("Jack chose yesterday, and Jill the day before"); and then, when the questioner, I, raises his eyebrows,A
goes on to offer a further additional statement of a more general kind: "Everyone should choose in turn." This last statement has the effect of authorizing the step from G (the turn) to C (the choice). We can in fact read it as meaning "Wherever someone's turn comes around, it can be concluded that it is time for them to act." Such a general, step-authorizing statement is called a warrant.Kinds of warrants
In different areas of discussion, the warrants on which our arguments rely are of different sorts, and go by different names. In practical subjects, we may talk of them as (for instance) rules of thumb, "In costing out office space in the city center, you can reckon on $ 1 00 a square foot." In more theoretical areas, we talk of principles, or in some cases about laws of nature. Elsewhere, we appeal to accepted values, customs, or procedures.
As a first hint, if a complete argument is designed to produce a particular result, then the facts or grounds which go into the argument are like the ingre dients of a cake or casserole. The warrant is then the general recipe used to com bine those ingredients into the finished product.
This comparison has two merits. Firstly, it helps us to see that whenever we produce an argument we put to use a procedure, or way of arguing, about the general reliability of which we are already confident. The warrant of our argu ment is what entitles us to be confident that, in this particular case, the step from grounds to claim is a step of a generally reliable sort. In this respect, it is like the instructions in a recipe, which are intended to apply to any batch of eggs or any
bag of white sugar.
Secondly, this comparison helps us to see that our choice of facts to use as grounds for supporting a particular claim is always selective. As we say, facts have to be relevant if they are to support a claim at all. Therefore, when we set about constructing an argument, the things we already know are like the contents of our kitchen cupboard. We have to know what kind of an argument we need to con struct before deciding which of all those facts to bring forward and put to work as grounds. That is to say, the character of the general ways of arguing that we rely on determines the relevance of particular facts to particular claims.
Warrants as general procedures
How we can argue safely, then, depends on the general ideas we have already mastered in the field of discussion concerned. We approach all situations with prior conceptions about the kind of matter at hand: about how we can argue, think about, interpret, and/or deal with such things. The general ways of thinking and acting that we carry with us to new situations thus commit us to accepting certain warrants as defining the established ways of arguing in such areas.
In other words, the difference between grounds and warrants (facts and rules) is a functional difference. This difference is sometimes concealed, because we use the word all in both contexts, and do so in rather different ways. For example, at the beginning of the school year questions arise about whether the children entering first grade have had the necessary vaccinations. I may then report, as a matter of fact, that all the children in my family have been vacci nated: that is to say, that each and every child has been vaccinated. The school
48
FIRST LEVEL OF ANALYSIS: THE SOUNDNESS OF ARGUMENTSnurse on the other hand, is concerned-as a general matter-that all the new school children are to be vaccinated: that is to say, that any child must have been vaccinated to be admitted to school. No doubt, general rules that apply to any
child are supposed to apply to each particular child. But there remains a func tional difference between the way in which we understand the word all within a general rule, and the way we understand it in a report about the members of a collectivity.
In looking at the idea of grounds, we noticed how necessary it is, in con structing an effective argument, to decide in advance what facts we are prepared to commit ourselves to, at least for the purposes of that argument. What is true of the particular facts that serve as the ingredients of the argument is true also of the general procedures we rely on for the purposes of the argument. We can con struct an effective argument only if we already know what general ways of argu ing we are going to rely on, and employ, in this particular case.
Warrants as licenses
As with claims and grounds, the term warrant is a natural and familiar enough one to use in this context. Historically speaking, the term has always had close associations both with the notion of a license or permit and also with that of a warranty or guarantee. When a medieval monarch conferred on one of his sub jects some noble rank or position of power, the document authorizing that indi vidual to perform the functions of his office was called a royal warrant. And the continuing use of the term warrant in the familiar sense of an "arrest warrant," issued to the police by a judge in the name of the State, is one surviving vestige of this old practice. In this respect, the meaning of the term, as used in police work, indicates what is involved in showing that the step from G to C is a ratio nally defensible one, for its effect is to point out what "authorizes" or "legitimates" the step in question. ("Given smoke, you are entitled to infer fire.")
Notice how our colloquial ways of talking already make use of some related words. For instances, people commonly object to a claim as being unwarranted:
WIFE TO JEALOUS HUSBAND: "You only saw me walking to the bus stop with one of the men from my office, and you at once jumped to the conclusion that I was having a clandestine affair: that inference was quite unwarranted."
Here the wife uses the absence of a satisfactory "warrant" as her reason for object ing to the husband's argument. His one ground, G ("She is walking along the street with a man I do not recognize"), is quite insufficient to legitimate the con clusion, C ("She is having a clandestine affair with this man"). So the step from
G to C is plainly "unwarranted," if not downright irrational. For when we analyze the actual content of the argument, we find that it relies on an implicit but trans parently implausible warrant:
"If a woman is seen walking down the street with a man whom her husband does not know, it may be concluded that she is having a clandestine affair with that man."
Why do we say that the husband's implicit warrant is transparently implau sible? Or to put the same question more generally, how do we tell those warrants for arguing from G to C that are trustworthy and reliable from those that are worthless and implausible? That general question will be our concern in the next chapter, where we shall consider the notion of backing. For the moment, our immediate business is to consider how different kinds of warrants play their parts in practical argumentation within different types of human enterprises and arguments.
EXTENDING THE PATTERN OF ANALYSIS
We can fix the essential task of a warrant within the framework of argu mentation most clearly by adding one feature to the preliminary pattern of anal ysis introduced in our previous chapter. There we simply showed the assertor's claim, C, as linked to his grounds, G, by a simple arrow. Now, we may indicate also that the step from G to C is being taken in the manner authorized by the warrant, W (Figure 5-1). F, F2 · G · · · Fn Grounds "It is agreed that
F, . F2. · · · . Fn";
I n accordance with warrant
w
Support "Given facts of type F, . F2 •
. . . . Fn. one may draw such a conclusion as C " ;
FIGURE 5-1
C
Claim "So. C "
The question is this: Within the varied contexts of different human enter prises, what kinds of general statements may be appealed to as providing the "rational authority" needed to connect any specific set of grounds, G, to the cor respondingly specific claim or conclusion, C? Once our assertor, A, has presented
50
FIRST LEVEL OF ANALYSIS: THE SOUNDNESS OF ARGUMENTShis particular set of grounds, G, what else must he produce in response to Q's critical questioning if he is to show that his conclusion, C, is warrantetf!
SOME TYPICAL WARRANTS
Let us look at the ways in which warrants function in various different fields of argument. We looked already at one colloquial use of such warrants in the context of everyday conversation.
"It's my turn" (A)-"The one whose turn it is should choose" ( W)-"So I should choose" ( C).
A warrant of this kind gives us, of course, only a rough and ready rule or proce dure; and we may expect to find much stronger rules and connections in other kinds of cases. We looked at the difference between fully reliable, universal war rants and approximate, rough-and-ready generalizations, and that might lead us to consider at this point the force of such qualifying phrases as very likely, in all probability, and presumably. This is a topic to which we shall return in Part III.
In science and engineering
It will be convenient to concentrate first on cases in which the warrants are both reliable and exact. Such examples can most easily be found in such profes sional fields of argumentation as natural science and the law. Scientists and engi neers, for instance, often employ exact and general mathematical formulas, with the help of which they calculate the values of unknown magnitudes from the val ues of other related variables that they already know:
Suppose that an engineer is designing a bridge that must be capable of car rying twenty-ton trucks. He will need to figure out what size girders of a given material are required to support the roadbed of the bridge. For this purpose, he has at his disposal certain established equations linking the dimensions of steel gir ders of various shapes to their breaking strength, or shear.
So, when the engineer presents his conclusion, C-"We must use standard I-section girders at least three feet tall"-he will support that claim in two different kinds of ways. He will cite the relevant specific facts about the location of the required bridge and its materials as grounds, G, and in addition, he will appeal to the general formula that relates the breaking strain of a girder to its shape and dimensions, and he will use this formula as a warrant ( W) for the argument from G to C. (See Figure 5-2.) Values of known variables G; Relevant formula w, FIGURE 5-2 Value of unknown variable So, C
In law and ethics
The situations that arise in the legal field give us examples of a similar kind. Suppose the "facts" in a particular case are not in dispute:
You left your car in a parking space next to a meter while you went into the store for a carton of milk. But instead of feeding coins into the meter, you simply set your hazard lights flashing. There was a line at the checkout, and your errand took you much longer than you expected. As a result, by the time you got out of the store, the traffic cop was already writing you a ticket.
You ask a lawyer friend whether there is any point in fighting the charge. He explains, regretfully, that there is no real way out:
The quarter you saved on that meter was a false economy. Given those facts, any traffic court is going to have to find you guilty.
If you press him, he can at this stage show you the statutes governing park ing violations and point out that the wording of the relevant clauses is quite unambiguous:
There is no exception in the statute for people who leave their cars unat tended in a parking space, even for a very short time, with the hazard lights flashing.
If you had merely gone into the store for a moment to change a dollar bill and had come out at once, coin in hand, to operate the parking meter, you might have had a case. The courts must allow you reasonable time and opportunity to put a coin in the meter. As matters stand, however, the facts are all against you, and there is no way of fighting the ticket. (See Figure 5-3.)
You left your car in a metered parking space without putti ng money in the meter.
G;
Anyone who leaves a car in a metered parking space without putting money in the meter can be found guilty of an offense.
W,· FIGURE 5-3
You are liable to be found guilty of an offense.
So, C
More precisely, the argument in this example can be written, "G; W; so pre sumably c." As your lawyer friend explains, this presumption could be met, or rebutted, in case you had left the car for only long enough to get change and put money in the meter. But in your actual situation, no such rebuttal or "excuse" is available by way of defense.
When laws are well framed and the judicial system is working properly, it will in general be clear what legal conclusions are warranted in most typical sit-
52
FIRST LEVEL OF ANALYSIS: THE SOUNDNESS OF ARGUMENTSuations. Indeed much of the knowledge that law students master during their professional training has to do with learning to recognize what general statements of law will serve as satisfactory warrants to legitimate-or alternatively to refute-some particular legal claim, C, given a particular set of specific facts, G. Again, in some straightforward, everyday cases, the role of "moral princi ples" in ethical discussion is similar to that of legal statutes and rules in judicial argument (see Figure 5-4).
Bill habitually spends his evenings at Jimmy's Bar and expects his wife, Joan, to stay home and look after the kids.
It is unjust to expect your wife to give up her spare time to baby· sit without ever taking a turn yourself.
FIGURE 5-4
Bill treats his wife, Joan, unjustly .
So, C.
Once again, of course, the conclusion C in such a case is only "presumptive." If there is nothing more to the relations between Bill and Joan, then the facts quoted indicate that Bill's behavior is highly unfair. But a closer understanding of the ways in which Bill and Joan have chosen to live their life together might possibly "rebut" that presumption.
Notice one thing about this ethical example. As it stands, nothing about its structure and procedures marks it off from an argument in law, or science, or elsewhere. In this respect, the fact that ethical issues and claims involve "values" does nothing, by itself, to take them out of the realm of rationally debatable issues and rationally defensible claims. The basic pattern-"G; W; so, C"-applies here just as well as anywhere else.
THE SCOPE OF WARRANTS
In some areas of human activity and inquiry, exact and reliable decision procedures are available for validating conclusions or for defending claims on the basis of some given body of undisputed data, or grounds. Law, science, and engi neering are three familiar enterprises within which this is normally the case, but they are not the only ones. Wherever a fully established and articulated body of