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21.1.1 The Standard of Acceptability
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As stated earlier, the standard of acceptability applies to evidence. As suggested in Chapter 16, evidence is the foundation of an argument. Without that element of argument, a claim cannot be established.
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The standard of acceptability means that evidence must be acceptable to the judge or audience before the argument can proceed. Audiences and judges will have different levels of acceptability for any particular piece of evidence. For instance, an audience or judge may view certain evidence as “unquestionably true,” “probable,” “plausible,” etc. At minimum, the judge or audience ought to be willing to accept the evidence “for the purposes of this argument.” To say that evidence is acceptable “for the purposes of this argument” means that the audience or judge is willing to tentatively accept the evidence so that the argument can proceed.
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Realizing that the standards for acceptability of evidence may vary from audience to audience and from circumstance to circumstance, this text suggests three conditions that determine, more or less, the acceptability of evidence. Govier (2009: 140-155) originally posited seven acceptability conditions that this text has reduced to three that are the most useful for debaters. Like other standards of argument quality, the position taken in this book is that evidence should be viewed as “more or less” acceptable rather than absolutely or categorically “acceptable” or “unacceptable.”
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First, evidence can be considered acceptable if it is common knowledge. In other words, if the evidence is known to be accurate by virtually everyone in the debater’s audience, that evidence meets the condition of acceptability. Some examples that most would consider to be common knowledge include statements like “Nelson Mandela served as President of South Africa,” or “Mahandas Gandhi employed non-violent civil disobedience.”
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Second, if evidence is not common knowledge, it could still be considered acceptable if a published source or a recognized authority supports it elsewhere. For instance, most people would not consider as common knowledge the idea that genetically modified food may do harm to our offspring. However, to make this evidence acceptable, a debater could cite a prestigious resource. The knowledge that this evidence was published by a reputable source would make it acceptable to most audiences. Recognized authorities also can be used to help a debater make evidence acceptable. For instance, quoting Liu Yang about challenges for females in the Chinese space program would make that information more acceptable because she was the first Chinese female astronaut.
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Finally, evidence that is not common knowledge can be made acceptable by constructing a cogent sub-argument. In a case where a debater comes to believe that the evidence presented is of questionable acceptability to the judge or the audience, the debater can create a sub-argument to support the evidence. Using a cogent sub-argument to make evidence acceptable is illustrated as follows:
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The debater transforms the evidence of questionable acceptability into a claim supported by evidence that is acceptable. The original evidence of questionable acceptability can lead to an unsuccessful claim. To remedy that situation, the debater can transform or replace the old evidence by producing a new sub-claim, using new acceptable evidence, and that sub-claim can then replace the old evidence that was questionably acceptable, thereby producing a successful claim.
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In summary, the standard of acceptability applies to evidence. Without acceptable evidence, the claim itself cannot be supported. Acceptable evidence meets one of three standards: It is common knowledge; It is supported by a respected publication or an authority, or it is supported by a cogent sub-claim. Those three standards are neither absolute nor perfect, thus, meeting one of them makes the evidence more-or-less acceptable, but not absolutely acceptable.
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21.1.2 The Standard of Relevance
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The standard of relevance is related to the link between evidence and claim. It asks whether the link successfully connects the evidence to the claim. The goal of an argument is to transfer the acceptability of evidence to the claim. The link is what determines success or failure in achieving that goal. The relevance of the link is actually a minimal standard. The standard is met if the evidence has anything at all to do with the claim. In other words, the standard of relevance asks whether or not the link, even minimally, succeeds in transferring the acceptability of the evidence to the claim.
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The previous section provided three criteria of acceptability. However, those criteria do not exist for the standard of relevance. The standard of relevance is met if the acceptability of evidence has anything at all to do with the acceptability of the claim. The standard is such a minimal one that failure to meet it is quite rare. Usually, the evidence is not totally irrelevant to the claim.
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However, one way that evidence in a cause and effect claim can be irrelevant is when the cause comes after the effect. One example of such an argument that fails to meet the standard of relevance is the causal claim that the Warsaw Ghetto uprising caused Kristallnacht, a series of violent anti-Jewish attacks led by Nazi Party officials and Nazi storm troopers. The argument attempts to link the Warsaw Ghetto uprising with Kristallnacht. That link is completely irrelevant because Kristallnacht occurred in November 1938 and the Warsaw Ghetto uprisings did not occur until 1943. The link between cause and effect is not at all relevant because the purported cause happened after the effect.
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Another example involves the claim that the death sentence imposed on Yao Jiaxin was justified because he was a member of the fu er dai, or the “rich second generation.” Whether or not he was rich is not related to whether or not he deserved the death sentence. Thus, the link between the appropriateness of the death penalty and his wealth does not meet the standard of relevance.
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When constructing or evaluating arguments, debaters and judges alike need to pay attention to the question of relevance. Is the evidence related to the claim? That test is a minimal one. A debater’s evidence may be related to the claim but may still be insufficient to support it.
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21.1.3 The Standard of Sufficiency
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The standards of relevance and sufficiency both relate to the link between the evidence and claim. The standard of relevance asks if there is any link at all between evidence and claim, whereas, the standard of sufficiency asks if that link is good enough to convince an audience of the claim. In other words, does the link fully transfer the acceptability of the evidence to that of the claim? For instance, a debater might claim that genetically engineered foods are dangerous to human health on the basis of evidence of five examples. The five examples of genetically engineered foods certainly are relevant to the claim, but they may not be sufficient to support it fully. An opposing debater might respond that, of the hundreds of examples of genetically engineered foods, the selection of five examples is not enough to prove the claim that genetically engineered foods are generally harmful. Thus, the link between the evidence (five examples) and claim (harm to human health) is relevant, but not sufficient.
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The question of sufficiency varies according to the specific situation. Claims argued in legal contexts vary from those argued in social science or in debates about public policy. The standard of sufficiency frequently involves how much certainty is required to accept a claim. In legal contexts, the amount of certainty is different in criminal and civil cases. In a criminal case, courts of some nations require that a claim that a party is guilty of a crime be proven “beyond a reasonable doubt,” whereas, in civil cases, the standard is a “preponderance of evidence.” The “reasonable doubt” criterion is more difficult to meet than the “preponderance of evidence” criterion because a preponderance of evidence might suggest that the party is guilty even though a reasonable doubt remains. Thus, one criterion is more rigorous than the other.
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Another example involves the case of an argument in social sciences. By social science convention, the standard of evidence is set between 95% and 99% for repeatability of results. That standard is called the “level of significance.” Unless the social scientist is able to show that the results are likely to be repeatable 95% or 99% of the time, the social science community is not likely to accept his or her claims, and the scientist’s results would not be considered statistically significant and, thus, not sufficient.
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So, standards of sufficiency vary from field to field and from context to context. One reason that the standards vary so widely has to do with the pragmatic risk of believing a claim to be true versus the pragmatic risks of believing that claim to be false. For instance, a higher standard is set in a criminal case where a person’s freedom or life is at risk than in a civil case where the person’s money but not life or freedom is at risk.
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So, acceptability of evidence and relevance and sufficiency of the link between evidence and claim constitute the standards for assessing the quality of an argument. Those standards do not suggest that the argument is either perfect or completely disqualified. The standards place the argument along a continuum somewhere between very good and very poor.
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Those standards for the quality of argument are useful for assessing whether an argument is relatively good or relatively poor. A specific application of the standards has to do with a concept called “fallacy.” A fallacy is an error in reasoning and has a negative effect on the assessment of an argument’s quality. In the next section, fallacies will be identified that are directly related to the standards of quality presented herein.
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