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Epistemic Coverage and Argument Closure

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Abstract

Sanford Goldberg’s account of epistemic coverage constitutes a special case of Douglas Walton’s view that epistemic closure arises from dialectical argument. Walton’s pragmatic version of epistemic closure depends on dialectical norms for closing an argument, and epistemic coverage operates at the limits of argument closure because it minimizes dialectical exchange. Such closure works together with a shared hypothetical consideration to justify dismissal of surprising claims.

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Notes

  1. An exception to this is Walton (2008). In the early modern period, also—in Locke, Whately, and Arnauld and Nicole, testimony received attention as a form of authority in argumentation.

  2. The sets of questions have no uniformity in their internal structure: sometimes one question depends on another; sometimes the weighting of questions is open to interpretation; and each list can be extended indefinitely except for pragmatic considerations.

  3. Goldberg uses the terminology of “conditional” and “transition” in different publications. The notion of “conditional” suggests a more logical analysis and “transition” suggests something more cognitive or inferential, but they seem to be different situations more than distinct phenomena. For the purposes of this paper, there seems no need to differentiate them.

  4. The truth-to-testimony transition operates logically opposite to the “testimony-to-truth” transition by which testimony directly supports beliefs and provides justification (Goldberg 2010a, b, 2011).

  5. For a charming and pedagogically useful account of how the “loser” in an adversarial argument can be the epistemic winner, see Daniel H. Cohen’s TEDx video (2013. “For Argument’s Sake: The Way to Win an Argument is by Losing.” TEDxColby, Colby College, Waterville, Maine. https://www.ted.com/talk/daniel_h_cohen_for_argument_s_sake.html).

  6. Arguments among familiars may be increasingly frequent with the growing use of social media, but social media can also create a sense of anonymity that interferes with the mutual responsibility that tends to guide familiars.

  7. A comprehensive bibliography of the recent surge in literature on virtue theories of argumentation is available on-line and regularly updated by Andrew Aberdein: “Virtues and Arguments: A Bibliography,” School of Arts & Communication, Florida Institute of Technology, 150 West University Blvd, Melbourne, Florida 32,901–6975, U.S.A. January 11, 2019. https://www.academia.edu/5620761/Virtues_and_Arguments_A_Bibliography

  8. A species of persuasion dialogue is the critical discourse that pragma-dialectics studies.

  9. Giving such presumptive argumentation the definitive status of an inquiry via deductive logic constitutes the fallacy of “absolutizing the failure of defense,” Walton (2011) recognizes, following Frans van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst (1984, p. 29).

  10. Christopher Tindale’s Fallacies and argument appraisal (2007) provides a textbook version of Walton’s theory of fallacies.

  11. Further, each presumption receives implicit support from an appeal to ignorance. Walton doesn’t spell this out, but consider the following examples of how other presumptive argumentation schemes may be instantiations of the argument from ignorance:

    Appeal to expert opinion: “We do not know with expertise that …”

    Appeal to emotion: “We do not know dispassionately that …”

    Appeal to the person: “We do not know about the credibility of the speaker who says that …”

  12. This is direct from Walton’s text, except that in proposition P5 he writes “For all A in D, A is either true or false” which makes “A” a variable and yet in P1–P4 it is a proposition. So, I have reworked P5 to be consistent with P1–P4.

  13. Because presumptive argumentation depends on a “balance of considerations” or “all things being equal,” they are sometimes viewed as abductive inferences or inference to the best explanation (Walton 2005a, p.7, 2019).

  14. Persuasion dialogue may require a minimal adversariality of the sort identified by Govier (1999), but deliberation dialogue is fundamentally cooperative (Walton et al. 2016; Rooney 2004, 2010). See also Hundleby (2013).

  15. For a current summary of this theory including the stages of critical discussion (10.6 and 10.7) see chapter 10 on The pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation in the Handbook of argumentation theory (2014, van Eemeren F.H., Garssen B., Krabbe E.C.W., Henkemans A.F.S., Verheij B., Wagemans J.H.M. Springer, Dordrecht). The original version can be found in van Eemeren and Grootendorst 1984.

  16. The size may not be so large if we consider that entailment only involves known consequences, as some epistemologists do, rather than all consequences.

  17. Walton also rejects the formulation of defeasible closure that employs contraposition,  following Brewka 1989. The Brewka source is missing from Walton's bibliography and an example using beards does not seem to appear in any published work by anyone named Brewka from that year, suggesting that it may have been a conference presentation. The following describes how Walton (2011, p. 147) follows Brewka in rejecting contraposition as the basis for defeasible inference:

    "Brewka (1989) offers this counterexample: men usually do not have beards, but this does not mean that if someone does have a beard, it is usually not a man. In this example, we have the statement that if a person is a man then he usually does not have a beard. The contraposition of the sentence will be the statement that if a person does have a beard then usually that person is not a man. If we had the statement that this person has a beard, and we accept the contraposition of defeasible rules, we can derive the statement that this person is not a man. This conclusion seems wrong."

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  1. University of Windsor, Windsor, Canada

    Catherine E. Hundleby

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Hundleby, C.E. Epistemic Coverage and Argument Closure. Topoi 40, 1051–1062 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-020-09693-3

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