Key title in Rhetoric, Argumentation, and Debate Series, a classic work once again available. Explores a variety of perspectives and situations in which teachers and learners can find arguments. The book is dedicated to Wayne Brockriede (1922-1985) whose career focused on teaching and learning about argument. The essays demonstrate the important role that reasoning plays in personal, social, philosophical and technical communities. The essays that are not published elsewhere also emphasize the great variety of unique places where students can search for and find arguments.
Decision by Debate broke new ground in argumentation and debate with its publication in 1963. Ehninger and Brockriede were the first to recognize debate as fundamentally a co-operative enterprise, with the competitive clash of ideas occurring within a framework in which everyone has the opportunity to speak, in which everyone agrees to suspend judgment until all arguments are presented, in which everyone agrees to abide by the decision of the adjudicator. The most lasting legacy of the work is its break with formal, deductive logic and its introduction of Stephen Toulmin's model of argument to undergraduate student debaters, which, since then, has become a mainstay of what many have called the Renaissance of argumentation studies. Without the work presented in Decision by Debate, contemporary interdisciplinary views of argumentation that now dominate many disciplines might have never have taken place or at least have been severely delayed.
Decision by Debate broke new ground in argumentation and debate with its publication in 1963. Ehninger and Brockriede were the first to recognize debate as fundamentally a co-operative enterprise, with the competitive clash of ideas occurring within a framework in which everyone has the opportunity to speak, in which everyone agrees to suspend judgment until all arguments are presented, in which everyone agrees to abide by the decision of the adjudicator. The most lasting legacy of the work is its break with formal, deductive logic and its introduction of Stephen Toulmin's model of argument to undergraduate student debaters, which, since then, has become a mainstay of what many have called the Renaissance of argumentation studies. Without the work presented in Decision by Debate, contemporary interdisciplinary views of argumentation that now dominate many disciplines might have never have taken place or at least have been severely delayed.
Grennan bases his evaluation of arguments on two criteria: logical adequacy and pragmatic adequacy. He asserts that the common formal logic systems, while logically sound, are not very useful for evaluating everyday inferences, which are almost all deductively invalid as stated. Turning to informal logic, he points out that while more recent informal logic and critical thinking texts are superior in that their authors recognize the need to evaluate everyday arguments inductively, they typically cover only inductive fallacies, ignoring the inductively sound patterns frequently used in successful persuasion. To redress these problems, Grennan introduces a variety of additional inductive patterns. Concluding that informal logic texts do not encourage precision in evaluating arguments, Grennan proposes a new argument evaluation procedure that expresses judgments of inferential strength in terms of probabilities. Based on theories of Stephen Toulmin, Roderick Chisholm, and John Pollock, his proposed system allows for a more precise judgment of the persuasive force of arguments.
When should I change my mind? What can I believe and what must I doubt? In this new "philosophy of good reasons" Wayne C. Booth exposes five dogmas of modernism that have too often inhibited efforts to answer these questions. Modern dogmas teach that "you cannot reason about values" and that "the job of thought is to doubt whatever can be doubted," and they leave those who accept them crippled in their efforts to think and talk together about whatever concerns them most. They have willed upon us a "befouled rhetorical climate" in which people are driven to two self-destructive extremes—defenders of reason becoming confined to ever narrower notions of logical or experimental proof and defenders of "values" becoming more and more irresponsible in trying to defend the heart, the gut, or the gonads. Booth traces the consequences of modernist assumptions through a wide range of inquiry and action: in politics, art, music, literature, and in personal efforts to find "identity" or a "self." In casting doubt on systematic doubt, the author finds that the dogmas are being questioned in almost every modern discipline. Suggesting that they be replaced with a rhetoric of "systematic assent," Booth discovers a vast, neglected reservoir of "good reasons"—many of them known to classical students of rhetoric, some still to be explored. These "good reasons" are here restored to intellectual respectability, suggesting the possibility of widespread new inquiry, in all fields, into the question, "When should I change my mind?
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