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18.1 Simple Arguments
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18.2 Combined Arguments
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18.3 Independent Arguments
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18.4 Summary
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18.5 Terms and Concepts from Chapter 18
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18.6 Discussion Questions for Chapter 18
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18.7 Exercise for Chapter 18
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Argumentation is the process whereby humans use reason to engage in critical decision-making. The focus on reason distinguishes argumentation from other modes of rhetoric and persuasion. When people use arguments to persuade, not only do they assert claims, they also assert reasons why they believe their claims are plausible or probable. Argumentation is a primary tool of debate, but it serves other activities as well. Argumentation is, for instance, an important tool in negotiation, conflict resolution, and persuasion. Some activities in which argumentation is used could still exist without argumentation as a central element. However, debate is an activity that could not exist without argumentation.
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Argumentation is important in activities like negotiation and conflict resolution because argumentation is the primary means that people use to help find ways to resolve their differences. But in some situations, differences cannot be resolved internally, and an outside adjudicator must be employed. Those situations involving outside adjudication are the most clear-cut examples of what we call debate. Sometimes debate occurs without the presence of an outside adjudicator, such as, in legislative debate, but the clearest instance of debate is one in which someone other than the participants themselves adjudicate the disagreement. According to that view, debate can be defined as a process of arguing about claims in situations where an adjudicator is usually called upon to decide the outcome of the dispute. Chapters 15, 16, and 17 discussed four elements of an argument: claims, evidence, links, and exceptions. This chapter will show how those elements are related to one another in what has become known as the “Toulmin Model” of argument.11The model is only a rough approximation of the four elements of argumentation and their relationships to one another. The model may not provide a complete or perfectly accurate description of actual arguments for a variety of reasons. First, the model describes only those elements of an argument related to reasoning. It does not describe other important elements such as expressions of feelings or emotions, unless those are directly related to reasoning. Second, the model describes only the linguistic elements of reasoning. It does not cover significant nonverbal elements of an argument. Despite those shortcomings, the model has proven itself useful for describing some of the key elements of arguments and how they function together.
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The figures shown on the following pages illustrate the Toulmin Model, which will be used to diagram and understand the structure of relatively simple arguments.
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18.1 Simple Arguments
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Toulmin’s Model, in its original form, described only a simple argument consisting of a single claim linked to a single piece of evidence and, perhaps (but not always), accompanied by an exception. The following shows Toulmin’s diagram of a simple argument:
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Toulmin illustrates this diagram using a simple argument claiming that Harry is a British citizen because he was born in Bermuda. Below, his example has been revised to illustrate the claim that He Jing is an American citizen because she was born in Los Angeles, California. Here is a diagram of the structure of that argument:
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In the above illustration, an arguer claims that He Jing is a United States citizen because of the evidence that she was born in the United States. The link between the claim and the evidence is the statement that “People born in the United States generally are United States citizens.” Links are sometimes only implicit in an argument. In this particular case, one could easily envision the argument being made without a stated link: “He Jing is a United States citizen because she was born in Los Angeles.” The link is so generally accepted that the arguer may not even need to include it in the actual argument. Although the link is generally accepted, an arguer might not wish to support this claim in all situations. In other words, the arguer may want to include an exception to the claim. One of those exceptions is spelled out in the diagram above. In that example, the arguer suggests that the claim is a reasonable one unless He Jing’s parents were Chinese citizens. If her parents were Chinese citizens, she might either be a United States citizen or a Chinese citizen depending on choices made by her parents.
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The illustration below presents an example more related to what might be an actual debate about education policy:
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In that example, the claim is that all children under the age of 16 should be required to attend school. The claim is supported by evidence suggesting that people who attend school are less likely to be poorer than people who do not attend school. That evidence might come in the form of a statistic or an empirical study. The evidence does not lead directly to the claim because the argument contains nothing to suggest that requiring children to attend school will have any effect on their actual attendance. Thus, a link is drawn suggesting that laws requiring children to attend school will help ensure their attendance. Such a link probably takes the form of a causal relationship, indicating that certain laws (the cause) lead to more children attending school (effect), as discussed in Chapter 17. That link connects the evidence to the claim in a way that makes the claim plausible. The illustration also contains an exception regarding children who might need to be exempt from attendance because of medical or religious exemptions.
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One subtlety needs to be added to the discussion of the four elements of argument. In many instances, evidence may consist of a previously supported claim. For instance, in the above example regarding education, a debater may have previously constructed a cause and effect argument that had as its claim, “People who attend school are less likely to be poor.” Then, that claim is used in an argument as evidence to support a new claim that “All children under 16 should be required to attend school.”
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Although the above diagrams clearly illustrate how arguments move from evidence to claim via links, very few arguments are ever that simple. For this reason, we have adapted Toulmin’s Model to illustrate a few different argument structures. In addition to the simple argument structure above, other structures include combined and independent arguments. Although they do not even begin to exhaust all potential argument structures, they are some of the more common ones encountered in debate.
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