I hope I'm not making a fool of myself
by taking issue with Douglas Walton, but his brief comment, while
thought-provoking, seems to me off the mark.
(1) The proposal before us is that an argument be defined as an
attempt to justify a claim. (Actually, the term used was
'conclusion', but the use of that word seems to me to make the
definition circular: 'conclusion' will have to be defined in terms
of 'argument', will it not?) Professor Walton says in reply that
an argument "can be used" to justify a proposition. Now if an
argument simply is an attempt to justify a claim, as the
proposed definition says, then to speak of using one to
justify a claim is to speak loosely at best. So I take Professor
Walton to mean that justifying a claim is not what an
argument essentially is or does but is merely something that we
(sometimes) do with arguments. This claim seems to me
unpersuasive in the absence of a competing and at least equally
plausible definition of an argument. (The definition common in
logic textbooks, according to which an argument is a set of
propositions or sentences, one of which is designated as the
conclusion, seems to me implausible and useless outside of formal
logic.)
(2) To say that "an argument can be used . . . to support or
attack another argument" seems to me to have no bearing on the
proposed definition. An argument still has to have a conclusion.
That conclusion may be a claim about some other argument. I don't
see how this is supposed to count against the proposed definition.
(Perhaps the remark was not so intended, and I have misinterpreted
it; but then I don't see what its point is.)
Miles Rind
Douglas Walton wrote:
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An argument can be used to support (justify) a
proposition or to support or attack another argument.
Doug Walton
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