Commentary on: Maurice Finocchiaro\u27s The fallacy of composition and meta-argumentation

N/

Las Falacias en el Pensamiento Crítico

El estudio de las falacias apenas se ha centrado en qué utilidad pueden llegar a tener. Incluso después de la revisión que hace Hamblin a esta disciplina, la teoría de falacias moderna sigue sin haber llegado a ninguna clase de acuerdo sobre cómo se deben tratar estos fallos argumentativos. Argumentamos en este trabajo que la falta de coherencia teórica se debe a que las falacias son principalmente una herramienta práctica y la falta de escritos sobre cómo deberían ser éstas aplicadas debe corregirse. Esta utilidad práctica la enmarcamos dentro del contexto del pensamiento crítico, haciendo de las falacias no solo una habilidad útil a la hora de argumentar y razonar, sino también importante para la vida democrática.Departamento de Filosofía (Filosofía, Lógica y Filosofía de la Ciencia, Teoría e Historia de la Educación, Filosofía Moral, Estética y Teoría de las Artes)Grado en Filosofí

Commentary on: Andrew Aberdein\u27s Fallacy and argumentational vice

N/

The fallacy of composition and meta-argumentation

Although the fallacy of composition is little studied and trivially illustrated, some view it as ubiquitous and paramount. Furthermore, although definitions regard the concept as unproblematic, it contains three distinct elements, often confused. And although some scholars apparently claim that fallacies are figments of a critic’s imagination, they are really proposing to study fallacies in the context of meta-argumentation. Guided by these ideas, I discuss the important historical example of Michels’s iron law of oligarchy

Emerging infectious diseases: coping with uncertainty

The world’s scientific community must be in a state of constant readiness to address the threat posed by newly emerging infectious diseases. Whether the disease in question is SARS in humans or BSE in animals, scientists must be able to put into action various disease containment measures when everything from the causative pathogen to route(s) of transmission is essentially uncertain. A robust epistemic framework, which will inform decision-making, is required under such conditions of uncertainty. I will argue that this framework should have reasoning at its centre and, specifically, that forms of reasoning beyond deduction and induction should be countenanced by scientists who are confronted with emerging infectious diseases. In previous articles, I have presented a case for treating certain so-called traditional informal fallacies as rationally acceptable forms of argument that can facilitate scientific inquiry when little is known about an emerging disease. In this paper, I want to extend that analysis by highlighting the unique features of these arguments that makes them specially adapted to cope with conditions of uncertainty. Of course, such a view of the informal fallacies must at least be consistent with the reasoning practices of scientists, and particularly those scientists (viz. epidemiologists) whose task it is to track and respond to newly emerging infectious diseases. To this end, I draw upon examples of scientific reasoning from the UK’s BSE crisis, a crisis that posed a significant threat to both human and animal health

Scaring the public: fear appeal arguments in public health reasoning

The study of threat and fear appeal arguments has given rise to a sizeable literature. Even within a public health context, much is now known about how these arguments work to gain the public's compliance with health recommendations. Notwithstanding this level of interest in, and examination of, these arguments, there is one aspect of these arguments that still remains unexplored. That aspect concerns the heuristic function of these arguments within our thinking about public health problems. Specifically, it is argued that threat and fear appeal arguments serve as valuable shortcuts in our reasoning, particularly when that reasoning is subject to biases that are likely to diminish the effectiveness of public health messages. To this extent, they are rationally warranted argument forms rather than fallacies, as has been their dominant characterization in logic

Public health reasoning: a logical view of trust

The public has a pact with the experts who deliver public health. That pact can be characterized as a relationship of trust in which the public trusts health experts to act in its best interests in return for its adherence to recommendations and other advice. This relationship clearly has emotional elements, as evidenced by strong feelings of anger and betrayal when public health recommendations are shown to be wrong. But it also has rational or logical components which are less often acknowledged by commentators. In this paper, these components are examined with special emphasis on the role of authority arguments in mediating the trust relationship between health experts and the public. It is contended that these arguments function as cognitive heuristics in that they facilitate decision-making in the absence of expert knowledge. A questionnaire study of public health reasoning was conducted in 879 members of the public. Participants were asked to consider a number of public health scenarios in which various arguments from authority were employed. Epistemic conditions, known to be associated with the rational warrant of these arguments, were systematically varied across these scenarios. Quantitative and qualitative data analyses revealed that subjects are adept at recognizing the conditions under which arguments from authority are more or less rationally warranted. The trust relationship at the heart of public health has logical components which lay people are capable of rationally evaluating during public health deliberations. This rational capacity should be exploited by experts during public health communication

Eight Theses Reflecting on Stephen Toulmin

I discuss eight theses espoused or occasioned by Toulmin: (1) The validity standard is nearly always the wrong standard for real-life reasoning. (2) Little in good reasoning is topic neutral. (3) The probability calculus distorts much probabilistic reasoning. (4) Scant resources have a benign influence on human reasoning. (5) Theoretical progress and conceptual change are connected. (6) Logic should investigate the cognitive aspects of reasoning and arguing. (7) Ideal models are unsuitable for normativity. (8) The role of the Can Do Principle

Circles and analogies in public health reasoning

The study of the fallacies has changed almost beyond recognition since Charles Hamblin called for a radical reappraisal of this area of logical inquiry in his 1970 book Fallacies. The “witless examples of his forbears” to which Hamblin referred have largely been replaced by more authentic cases of the fallacies in actual use. It is now not unusual for fallacy and argumentation theorists to draw on actual sources for examples of how the fallacies are used in our everyday reasoning. However, an aspect of this move towards greater authenticity in the study of the fallacies, an aspect which has been almost universally neglected, is the attempt to subject the fallacies to empirical testing of the type which is more commonly associated with psychological experiments on reasoning. This paper addresses this omission in research on the fallacies by examining how subjects use two fallacies – circular argument and analogical argument – during a reasoning task in which subjects are required to consider a number of public health scenarios. Results are discussed in relation to a view of the fallacies as cognitive heuristics that facilitate reasoning in a context of uncertainty