About Argumentation

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About Argumentation

A writing course is not, nor should it be, a course in formal logic. But neither is logic the exclusive province of philosophers, many of whom are primarily interested in the logic that is used in a formal or logical proof. While there is a place for formal logic, the logic of most arguments relies on everyday, or mundane, reasoning. The logic of everyday argumentation grounds claims by drawing on commonly accepted uses of data/information as evidence. In the Warren College Writing Program, we use the concepts of practical reasoning and argumentation developed by the twentieth-century British philosopher Stephen Toulmin. Toulmin’s analysis is based on jurisprudence, which he defines as a field whose principles of argumentation are known and accepted by those who practice law. Toulmin provides a vocabulary for talking about the parts of an argument.

Most professors use informal (everyday, ordinary, or mundane) rather than formal reasoning in their lectures, when they ground their claims by citing studies, quoting or paraphrasing passages from literature or legislation, or citing statistics gathered by the U.S. Bureau of the Census or reported by Harris or Gallup Polls. Statistics are warranted by mathematical probability, which relies on the assumption that patterns of behavior or opportunity can be expressed numerically. Because argument is central to academic work, scholars and scientists are expected to support their conclusions with good reasons and compelling evidence.

Professors are located in fields, and they base their arguments on principles known and accepted by their peers. Their arguments are field specific because the principles or warrants that underwrite the connection between data and claim are generally rather than universally accepted. Cross-disciplinary debates often involve competing warrants. When experts disagree, particularly experts from very different fields, arguments become visible and often easier to understand.

According to Toulmin, arguments always consist of claims, grounds, qualifiers, warrants and backing. One of the principles of our courses is that reasonable people can and do disagree. We are interested in looking at how writers make plausible “cases” by grounding and qualifying their claims. In Warren Writing courses, students summarize, analyze and respond to academic arguments. They also construct their own. In order to establish a common language with which we can discuss academic arguments, we use and adapt the terms introduced by Toulmin in his book The Uses of Argument. We will use the terms claims, grounds, warrants, backing and qualifiers to summarize, analyze and write academic arguments. Here are some basic definitions:

Claim: A conclusion based on data/information.

Grounds: Supporting data/information. Evidence that supports the claim.

Warrant: A rule or principle that connects ground to claim.

Backing: The principle that validates the warrant. The explanation of why this way of arguing is better than others.

Qualifier: A word or phrase modifying a claim to indicate the relative strength of a case.

The most important of these terms are “claim,” “grounds” and “warrant.” A claim is an assertion that represents the whole argument. It often appears at the beginning or end of a text, but it may appear at any point in an argument. The claim is the point of the argument – what the argument is all about. A claim may be thought of as an argument reduced to its simplest possible form. It is an assertion or statement and should be expressed as a complete sentence. It is important when analyzing arguments to begin by reducing the argument to its one-sentence claim. It is only by determining the claim that the other parts of an argument (grounds, warrants) can be identified because grounds and warrants exist primarily in their relationship to the claim. Grounds have a “supporting” relationship to the claim; warrants have a “connecting” relationship between grounds and claim.

A “ground” (information, evidence, data) is given to support a claim. Most arguments consist of a claim and several grounds. Grounds, like claims, can be reduced to simple assertions. Unlike claims, grounds do not function as the point of an argument, but as support for the claim. They are thus identified by their relationship to the claim. A convincing argument needs solid grounding for the claim. Some of the grounds may need support (grounding) themselves.

A claim may be grounded or supported by reasons, information and data, but the existence of grounding does not guarantee that the argument is convincing. The grounds need to be appropriately related to the claim. The “warrant” connects the grounds and claim. Like the claim and grounds, the warrant may be reduced to a simple assertion. In many cases, the warranting assertion is not stated explicitly in the argument and must be determined by the reader on the basis of evidence in the text. In addition to claims, grounds and warrants, Toulmin uses the term “qualifier” to mean a word or phrase that indicates the relative strength of a case.  

The three basic elements of an argument – claims, grounds and warrants – are all “claims” or assertions, but they are functioning in different roles: the claim is the assertion representing the argument as a whole; the ground is an assertion supporting the claim, and the warrant is an assertion linking the claim and grounds. The warrant is the most general of the three assertions and the ground is the least general. Warrants are often considered obvious truths and are frequently not stated explicitly in arguments. It is up to the reader to infer them from the text. The soundness of an argument depends on the acceptability of the warrant. Establishing a warrant that justifies using evidence to support a claim does not settle an argument. Instead a warrant simply makes it possible to see that there is a discernible relationship between a claim and the evidence that grounds it. It is difficult to establish warrants, in part because warrants are not always stated explicitly and in part because people in a field are so accustomed to invoking the same warrants to interpret or analyze data that their arguments seem natural or obvious or self-evident to them.

An argument is sound if it is composed of a clear claim supported by grounds that are accurate and connected to the claim with an acceptable warrant. In other words, the strength of an argument is determined by its claim, grounds and warrant and not by other persuasive qualities of the text, such as vivid or persuasive description, analogy or narration. This does not mean that strong, vivid writing is not important; it means that it is not sufficient to carry an argument that has weak grounding or unacceptable warranting.

The academic arguments you will read and write in Warren Writing make what are called plausible cases in support of claims. Rather than trying to “prove” that all reasonable people must agree, these arguments lay out what is seen from a particular vantage point. The purpose of the inquiry is to persuade readers to look at what can be seen from this position and to take it into consideration. Most academic argumentation rests on the assumption that reasonable people can and do disagree. Some people would even argue that intellectual life thrives on informed disagreements: it is when our opinions are challenged that we are the most likely to review the evidence and ask, “What do I really have to go on?” When we associate only with people who agree with us, or must act as if they do, we are so rarely challenged that our own opinions can seem self-evident to us, and those who disagree with us seem unreasonable.

We make assertions all day long. Some seem trivial: “It’s a nice day.” Others do not: “America is a racist society.” Trivial and serious assertions alike, however, depend on convincing those who challenge us that there is sufficient and appropriate evidence to support the claim. In support of the assertion that it is a nice day, for instance, you might point out that the sun is shining, that the temperature is 74 degrees, and that the weather report predicts sun and mild temperature for the entire day. In other words, you are anticipating that the other person shares your view, and that of many southern Californians, that sunny skies and temperatures in the 70s make a day nice. And you are counting on that person accepting an appeal to the senses, a Fahrenheit thermometer and meteorology to warrant the use of sunshine, temperature and weather reports as appropriate and sufficient evidence. These appeals are of course only warranted if “It’s a nice day” is an assertion about the weather rather than one about a sudden windfall or unexpectedly high grade.

The more trivial the claim, the less likely you are to be challenged, since very little is at stake. For instance, suppose someone says, “I see why you might think a nice day is sunny and mild, but for me a nice day is cool and rainy.” You might readily concede that you need to qualify or modify your claim to include only those who also prefer their days sunny and mild, and you might even amend your original “It’s a nice day” to “It’s a nice day if you like sunny and mild weather.” But you are not likely to feel that making that concession changes things all that much. You still believe it’s a nice day, and you are likely to go on stating your opinion, secure in the knowledge that most if not all people would agree that the data support your position. Challenges come fast and furious when assertions are serious enough to require us to review and qualify or even change our positions. The claim that American is a racist society not only asserts that something is the case, it also challenges a number of other conclusions on which some people may base their thinking, not least among them that the Constitution protects all U.S. citizens regardless of race.

When the stakes are high and the challenges are serious, it is conducive to civil discussion to view arguments in terms of claims, grounds, warrants and qualifications. For in the move from trivial to nontrivial assertions, the shift in content alters not the component parts of an argument, but our stake in it. It matters to many people whether or not America is a racist society. The assertion obviously contains not one but several claims. But since a fair number of people who enter this argument are likely to cite the history of legalized slavery and civil rights legislation, the choice of evidence suggests that the assertion probably consists of several claims having to do with legalized slavery and discrimination in the United States. In other words, the assertion focuses on society, specifically on constitutional law, not on racism or racists. A rendering of the separate claims contained in such an assertion is likely to yield both a better understanding of why someone might conclude that America is a racist society and why assertions that contain several related but entangled claims more often silence or antagonize people than invite arguments.

Arguments are arguable by definition. Not all claims seem worth arguing, and not many of us would bother (nor appreciate being asked) to lay out a case in support of the assertion that it’s a nice day. Laying out arguments in support of our opinions is important for a number of reasons, not least among them that some of our opinions rest not so much on a case as a conviction. Even when we can provide data we sometimes learn that the case is not nearly as well grounded as we believed. That’s when we ask ourselves how committed we are to a particular claim, given what we have to go on. How convincing is the warrant or warrants establishing the use of data or information as evidence? Does the evidence clearly support the claim? Does the evidence suggest qualifying the claim? Does the evidence suggest abandoning the claim altogether?

In Warren Writing 10A and 10B you will encounter a range of positions in the academic arguments we read. And you may be tempted to accept without question those with which you initially agree and to deny out of hand those with which you disagree. The issue is not whether you agree or disagree, but what kind of case is put together in support of a position. If you do not look at the case when you agree with an assertion, you may be assuming either that no evidence is required or that you already know the evidence. If you disagree with an assertion and simply make a counter assertion, all you will have done is pit one opinion against another. In some quarters, people regularly act as if the adage “Everybody has a right to their own opinion” means that no one is obligated to lay out a case in support of their assertions. In the academy, an opinion or an assertion is worthless unless you are also willing to make and examine your case in the light of evidence, asking whether the evidence is sufficiently and appropriately warranted. The drama in academic arguments is not in the claim at all. Claims are a dime a dozen. The action is in the argument.

Making Summaries of Academic Arguments

Scholars commonly communicate in writing. They write and read books, articles and lectures. Each of these is intended to contribute to an ongoing discussion of a topic in a field or discipline. A summary of an argument made by another scholar is one of the ways scholars connect what they have to say to what has already been said. Given the importance of summary to scholarship, students in Warren Writing learn to read with an eye to summarizing arguments. The summary serves several purposes: laying out the claim, grounds, warrant and any qualifier provides readers with a writer’s understanding of the argument; focusing on the argument as an argument assures readers that a writer’s evaluation of it will be relevant to a scholarly discussion of a topic; citing relevant scholarship qualifies a writer to contribute to the discussion.

Warren Writing students are asked to summarize and use summaries of arguments they read in their writing. Most people need to read a text more than once to summarize an argument, since many more claims are made than argued in a text. The intellectual work of summarizing an argument involves isolating a claim asserted, grounded, warranted and qualified by the writer from other claims made but not argued in a text. There will be variation among the summaries produced by a given group of readers. There will be differences in what readers decide is being asserted, grounded and warranted in a text, and there will also be differences in the value readers place on the claim, grounds and warrants asserted in a text. Such variation is a reminder that a summary is a reader’s understanding of an argument, that a reader’s understanding is provisional, and that a summary is a reader’s contribution to the discussion of a topic. Seen in this light, summaries signal a desire to discuss a topic on scholarly terms.