Abstract
Standards and norms for reasoning function, in part, to manage epistemic risk. Properly used, modal qualifiers like presumably have a role in systematically managing epistemic risk by flagging and tracking type-specific epistemic merits and risks of the claims they modify. Yet, argumentation-theoretic accounts of presumption often define it in terms of modalities of other kinds, thereby failing to recognize the unique risk profile of each. This paper offers a stipulative account of presumption, inspired by Ullmann-Margalit (J Philos 80:143–163, 1983), as an inferentially generated modal qualifier, “presumably, p,” distinguishing it from other, particularly epistemic modalities, e.g., standing commitments, assumptions, assertions, suppositions, hypotheses, and defeasible claims. By avoiding the tranching of inferential instruments of qualitatively different bona fides and risk profiles, this account provides a more accurate risk-rating system that better manages epistemic risk in inference, as well as contributing to the normative theory of the operation of presumption in reasoning and argument.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Individual undertakings can be understood as acts of reasoning, while joint ventures, or acts of arguing, can be understood as undertakings of “reasoning together” (Campolo 2005, p. 38) where Pinto has described the offering of an argument as “an invitation to inference” (Pinto 2001, p. 37). For the remainder of the paper I will talk generally of argument, and the reasoning occurring in it, though I hold that analogous considerations apply in situations of individual reasoning.
Epistemology answers the first question by supplying a set of guidance norms, or rules that allow reasoners to navigate their inferential undertakings in ways that are reasonable or rational, and the second question with a set of appraisal norms, or standards for the rational evaluation of inferential undertakings (cf. Goldman 1980, p. 28). In order that reasoners are able to apply them to their own acts of reasoning, guidance norms must be expressed exclusively in terms of conditions and criteria that are accessible to reasoners themselves. Appraisal norms, by contrast, can make reference to criteria and conditions that are not accessible to the reasoner whose reasoning is being evaluated. In this way, epistemology can evaluate a position or move by saying that a reasoner was rationally responsible in getting to it, and is subjectively rationally entitled to, or justified in, the view, yet nevertheless find the view to be objectively problematic, unwarranted, or irrational.
In this paper, I will use the terms ‘sentence,' ‘claim,’ and ‘proposition,’ to denote claims, understood as content items, and the terms ‘utterance,’ and ‘allocution’ to refer to claimings, understood as acts. When mentioned or discussed in the text, allocutions will appear in double quotations, sentences in single quotations and, when distinguished from sentences, propositions will appear in angle brackets.
I take this basic notion to have some prevalence in the contemporary literature, and to be roughly equivalent to the following definitions:
A presumption indicates that in the absence of specific counterindications we are able to accept how things ‘as a rule’ are taken as standing, and it places the burden of proof on the adversary’s side (Rescher 1977, p. 30; cf. 2006, p. 14).
A presumption is typically what you may take for granted about a particular issue, in default of reasons against so doing. (Cohen 1992, p. 13)
On this point, Macagno and Walton (2012, p. 278) write “Presumptions can be distinguished from assumptions or ordinary statements because the respondent in a dialogue cannot simply reject them; in order not to make a commitment to a presumption, the interlocutor needs to provide a rebuttal (Walton 1993, pp. 139–140).”
In his (1993) Walton defined presumption as “a distinctive kind of speech act half way between assertion and mere assumption (supposition)” that expresses “provisional commitment” to the presumed claim (p. 125). Around that same time, in his (1992) The Place of Emotion in Argument, Walton characterized presumption as a “commitment request” (p. 56, emphasis added), and explained its dialogic operation as follows (p. 58, emphasis added, numbers for discursive stages removed; cf. pp. 60–61):
At some particular point in the dialogue the proponent brings forward a proposition as an assumption that is useful for her argument, asking the respondent to adopt it as a provisional commitment. The respondent has the choice of rejecting it, but if he does not, the proposition is immediately inserted into the commitment sets for both participants, subject to rebuttal. If the respondent is now to successfully rebut the presumption, that is, avoid commitment to it, he must being forward sufficient positive evidence or reasoning. Rebuttal now has a ‘cost.’ Later on, at any subsequent point in the dialogue, if either party wishes to reject the presumption, he or she can do so by bringing forward evidence against it. If new evidence becomes available in the dialogue, the presumption can be rebutted or altered, according to this evidence. The presumption stays in place during the dialogue until such time as it is rebutted by the agreement of both parties … Once in place in the dialogue, it stays in place until retracted. The presumption can be used as a premise, carrying the commitment of both parties, in the argumentation of either party during the course of the dialogue, as long as it has not been rebutted…
Two points are of particular interest for present purposes. First notice that the presumption does not come with a reverse burden of proof if the respondent has the initial option to reject it (or withhold commitment), a point which does not come through as clearly in later accounts. Second the basis of the reverse burden of proof here (the “cost” of rebuttal) is a result of the conversational status of the claim, not its epistemic status. Yet, it is epistemically mistaken to introduce something to a dialogue on the support of an assumption (e.g., with agreement but without support) and then arbitrarily, or by dialectical fiat, assign to it some other epistemic standing.
In (2001) Walton characterized presumptive inference as like abductive inference in its “provisional” nature. “Both types of inferences are hypothetical in nature, and have to do with reasoning that moves forward in the absence of complete evidence. … Presumption, according to the dialectical analysis, is comparable to assertion as a move in dialogue except that the burden of proof is reversed” (pp. 155, 157, emphasis added).
Bermejo-Luque (2016, p. 10) takes this account to distinguish the speech act of presumption from assumptions because “assumptions … are not speech-acts but mere takings as true.”.
Recent correspondence with Kauffeld has not produced a definitive answer to the question of what, precisely, he takes a supposition to be. Indeed, our discussions at the recent (2016) conference “Presumptions, Presumptive Inference, and Burden of Proof,” in Granada, Spain suggest that, for Kauffled, suppositions might not be propositional attitudes, as in ‘on the supposition that p,’ since their cognitive contents need not be conceptually articulated so as to be truth-apt.
A strict epistemic foundationalism, on which there are primitively justified claims (sometimes called “basic beliefs”), faces the following challenge (BonJour 1978, 1985, p. 31). A justifier is something on the basis of which the acceptability of a claim is founded. So, unless justification can be circular and claims can justify themselves, justifiers must be something other than the claim being justified. Primitively justified claims are those that, while being justified, lack justifiers of this sort. Rather, they “wear their justification on their sleeves” as it were, being somehow intrinsically, rather than inferentially, justified. Suppose now that the strict foundationalist asserts that beliefs (of kind), B, are basic. How can the strict foundationalist consistently answer the following question (known as the problem of the criterion): on what basis have you selected these (kinds of) beliefs, B, rather than those, B*, as primitively justified? Answering the problem of the criterion—at least in a non-arbitrary way—seems to require justifying one’s answer. Yet, any account that involves any claim other than B in an effort to establish that B is primitively justified is prima facie evidence that B is not primitively justified.
In this respect, shared background commitments are similar to Stalnaker’s (1999) pragmatic presuppositions. While a semantic presupposition is a sentence that must be true in order for some other sentence to have a truth value, pragmatic presuppositions are propositional attitudes, introduced as follows:
the common background is defined by the possible situations which I intend to distinguish among with my assertions, and other speech acts. Propositions true in all of them are propositions whose truth is taken for granted. … This notion of common background belief is the first approximation to the notion of pragmatic presupposition that I want to use. A proposition p is a pragmatic presupposition of a speaker in a given contest just in case the speaker assumes or believes that p, assumes or believes that his addressee assumes or believes that p, and assumes or believes that his addressee recognizes that he is making these assumptions or has these beliefs. (p. 49; notation for variables changed)
Here, pragmatic presuppositions are described as “assumptions” or (manifestly shared) beliefs “whose truth is taken for granted.” As discussed later (Sect. 4.4), assumptions do not enjoy the reverse burden of proof (falling upon objectors) characteristic of presumptions. The situation is similar with respect to tacit, unchallenged standing commitments, as I argue later in this Sect. (4.2).
This divergence between the demands of theoretical and practical rationality marks the primary similarity between this example (and cases of presumption generally) and the case of Buridan’s ass. While epistemic rationality demands that we withhold judgment (form no opinion as to the truth of the matter), practical rationality demands that we act so as to satisfy our non-alethic goal.
This example is due to Douglas Walton, who offered it at the recent (2016) conference “Presumptions, Presumptive Inference, and Burden of Proof,” in Granada, Spain.
References
Aijaz, I., J. McKeown-Green, and A. Webster. 2013. Burdens of proof and the case for unevenness. Argumentation 27: 259–282.
Bermejo-Luque, L. 2016. Being a correct presumption vs. being presumably the case. Informal Logic 36: 1–25.
Bonjour, L. 1978. Can empirical knowledge have a foundation? American Philosophical Quarterly 15: 281–312.
BonJour, L. 1985. The structure of empirical knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.
Brandom, R. 1994. Making it explicit. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.
Campolo, C. 2005. Treacherous ascents: On seeking common ground for conflict resolution. Informal Logic 25: 37–50.
Cohen, L.J. 1992. An essay on belief and acceptance. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Dare, T., and J. Kingsbury. 2008. Putting the burden of proof in its place: When are differential allocations legitimate? Southern Journal of Philosophy 46: 503–518.
Freeman, J.B. 2005. Acceptable premises. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Godden, D. 2010. The importance of belief in argumentation: belief, commitment and the effective resolution of a difference of opinion. Synthese 172: 397–414. doi:10.1007/s11229-008-9398-3.
Godden, D. 2015. Review of D. Walton Burden of proof, presumption and argumentation. Cogency: Journal of Reasoning and Argumentation 7: 91–107.
Godden, D., and D. Walton. 2007. A theory of presumption for everyday argumentation. Pragmatics & Cognition 15: 313–346.
Goldman, A. 1980. The internalist conception of justification. In Studies in epistemology: Midwest studies in philosophy, vol. 5, ed. P. French, et al., 27–51. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Hahn, U., and M. Oaksford. 2007. The burden of proof and its role in argumentation. Argumentation 21: 39–61.
Hansen, H.V. 2003. Theories of presumptions and burdens of proof. In Informal Logic at 25: Proceedings of the Windsor conference, ed. J.A. Blair et al. Windsor, ON: Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation (OSSA).
Kauffeld, F. 1995. On the difference between assumptions and presumptions. In Argumentation and values: Proceedings of the ninth SCA/AFA conference on argumentation, ed. S. Jackson, 509–514. Annandale, VA: Speech Communication Association.
Kauffeld, F. 2003. The ordinary practice of presuming and presumption with special attention to veracity and the burden of proof. In Anyone who has a view: Theoretical contributions to the study of argumentation, ed. F.H. van Eemeren, et al., 133–146. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Kauffeld, F. 2009. Presuming and presumption in everyday argumentation: A response to Godden and Walton. In Argument cultures: Proceedings of OSSA 09, CD-ROM, ed. J. Ritola, 1–13. Windsor, ON: OSSA.
Laudan, L. 2006. Truth, error and criminal law. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Macagno, F. 2010. Dialectical and heuristic arguments: Presumptions and burden of proof. In Dialectics, dialogue and argumentation. An examination of Douglas Walton’s theories of reasoning, ed. C. Reed, and C. Tindale, 45–57. London: College Publications.
Macagno, F., and D. Walton. 2012. Presumptions in legal argumentation. Ratio Juris 25: 271–300.
Pinto, R.C. 2001. Argument, inference and dialectic: collected papers on informal logic with an introduction by Hans V. Hansen. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Prakken, H. 2004. Analysing reasoning about evidence with formal models of argumentation. Law, Probability & Risk 3: 33–50.
Rescher, N. 1977. Dialectics: A controversy-oriented approach to the theory of knowledge. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Rescher, N. 2006. Presumption and the practices of tentative cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Stalnaker, R. [1974] 1999. Pragmatic presuppositions. In Context and content: Essays on intentionality in speech and thought. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Toulmin, S. [1958] 2003. The uses of argument. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Ullmann-Margalit, E. 1983. On presumption. Journal of Philosophy 80: 143–163.
Walton, D. 1992. The place of emotion in argument. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP.
Walton, D. 1993. The speech act of presumption. Pragmatics & Cognition 1: 125–148.
Walton, D. 1996. Argumentation schemes for presumptive reasoning. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Walton, D. 2008. A dialogical theory of presumption. Artificial Intelligence and Law 16: 209–243.
Walton, D. 2014. Burden of proof, presumption and argumentation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Whatley, R. [1846] 1963. Elements of rhetoric, 7th ed. ed. D. Ehninger. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP.
Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the international workshop, Presumptions, Presumptive Inferences, and Burdens of Proof, on April 27, 2016, at the Carmen de la Victoria, University of Granada in Granada, Spain, under the title “Towards an informal logic of presumptive inference.” Travel for that presentation was supported by Michigan State University’s College of Arts and Letters, and International Studies and Programs. I thank the workshop participants for their comments and discussion, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their constructive criticisms. For all its remaining faults, the paper was markedly improved as a result of these welcome engagements. Most importantly, I offer my sincere thanks to Cristina Corredor and Lilian Bermejo-Luque, for organizing and hosting the workshop and for guest-editing this special issue of Argumentation.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Godden, D. Presumption as a Modal Qualifier: Presumption, Inference, and Managing Epistemic Risk. Argumentation 31, 485–511 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-017-9422-1
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-017-9422-1