Abstract
In dialectical argument the questioner’s role, generally speaking, is that of an attacker of the thesis maintained by the answerer. In the dialectical debates of Aristotle’s time, for which the Topics and the Sophistical Elenchi are analyses and guides, and in the academic disputations in the schools from the Middle Ages until the nineteenth century, the questioner (opponent) had the responsibility of securing propositions, some of which were accepted as obviously true by the answerer (respondent, who defended the received opinion) and for others of which the answerer demanded syllogistic proof. The questioner accordingly framed a syllogism whose conclusion was the proposition he was trying to secure. If the syllogism seemed free of fallacy, and if the conclusion did not lie too near the contradictory of the thesis the answerer was defending, the answerer would concede the proposition which was the conclusion of the questioner’s syllogism. In order to triumph in the dialectical contest, the questioner had to secure two propositions which he then used as premises in another syllogism whose (necessary) conclusion the answerer and audience agreed followed without fallacy and which was in turn irrefutable by the answerer.1 The triumph lay in the questioner’s conclusion contradicting the thesis defended by the answerer.
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Notes
For commentary on the questioner-answerer concept of dialectic in Aristotle or in university disputations, see Charles Wesley, A Guide to Syllogism, … Comprehending an Account of the Manner of Disputation Now Practiced in the Schools at Cambridge (Cambridge, 1832) pp. 97–101
W. D. Ross, Aristotle (London: Methuen, 1923) p. 56
W. T. Costello, The Scholastic Curriculum at Early Seventeenth-Century Cambridge (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958) pp. 20–4
P. Moraux, ‘La joute dialectique d’après le huitième livre des Topiques’, Aristotle on Dialectic: The Topics, Proceedings of the Third Symposium Aristotelicum, ed. G. E. L. Owen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968) esp. pp. 279–86; Gilbert Ryle, ‘Dialectic in the Academy’, ibid., p. 74.
Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus, ed. C. Kerby-Miller (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1950) p. 118.
Schopenhauer, The Art of Controversy and Other Posthumous Papers, trans. T. B. Saunders (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1896).pp. 4–5, 10.
Many of these kinds of argument are listed in C. L. Hamblin, Fallacies (London: Methuen, 1970) p. 41, and some are discussed, pp. 42–4.
Drapier’s Letters, p. 104. F. M. Cornford noticed the applicability of the argument ab utili to the academic world in his brief Microcosmographia Academica, Being a Guide for the Young Academic Politician (Cambridge, 1908; rpt. London: Bowes & Bowes, 1983) pp. 2–3.
Quoted in Drapier’s Letters, p. lxv. For a similar stratagem used by Swift against Godolphin over remission of First Fruits in Ireland, see D. Nokes, Jonathan Swift: A Hypocrite Reversed (Oxford University Press, 1985) pp. 89–91.
As did some academic disputations — see Christopher Wordsworth, Scholae Academicae (Cambridge University Press, 1877) p. 22.
M. Price, Swift’s Rhetorical Art (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1953) pp. 94, 110
cf. H. D. Kelling, ‘Reason in Madness: A Tale of a Tub’, PMLA, 69 (1954), 216–18.
By Chrysippus and the Stoic logicians. W. & M. Kneale, The Development of Logic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962) p. 178.
Dilemma (δις, twice, two; λημμα, an assumption) was understood in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries usually as an argument rather than as a practical predicament (see above, n. 41): Thomas Wilson, The Rule of Reason (1551; rpt. London, 1553) fol. 34v
Robert Sanderson, Logicae Artis Compendium, 9th ed. (Oxford, 1680) pp. 135–6
Burgersdicius, Institutionum Logicarum (Cambridge, 1680) p. 342
Narcissus March, Institutiones Logicae (Dublin, 1681) pp. 195–6.
It would naturally be defined as an argument in these and other logics of the time, but it was also defined as such in the dictionaries: Thomas Blount, Glossographia: or, a Dictionary … (London, 1656)
J. B., An English Expositour, Or Compleat Dictionary (Cambridge, 1684)
Edward Phillips, The New World of Words or, Universal English Dictionary, 6th ed. (London, 1706)
Nathaniel Bailey, An Universal Etymological Dictionary, 6th ed. (London, 1733)
‘Dilemma’, defined in Burgersdicius, Monitio Logica: or an Abstract and Translation of Burgersdicius His Logick. By a Gentleman (London, 1697) p. 56.
Henry Aldrich, Artis Logicae Compendium (Oxford, 1691) p. 29
Richard Whately, Elements of Logic, 6th ed. (London, 1836) p. 115.
Others accept the simple destructive as a valid form of a dilemma: G. H. Joyce, Principles of Logic, 2nd ed. (London: Longmans, Green, 1916) p. 210
S. H. Mellone, Elements of Modern Logic, 2nd ed. (London: University Tutorial Press, 1945) p. 168
M. R. Cohen and E. Nagel, An Introduction to Logic (Harbinger Books; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1962) p. 106
S. F. Barker, The Elements of Logic (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965) p. 98.
Referred to in Marsh p. 197; given as an example in Thomas Blundeville, The Art of Logike, 3rd ed. (London, 1619) p. 178; Burgersdicius’s Institutionum Logicarum, p. 201 and his Monitio Logica, p. 57; Joyce pp. 213–14
I. M. Copi, Introduction to Logic, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1961) pp. 231–2.
‘The message to Pilate from his wife furnishes an instance of a single word (“just”) suggesting a Major-premiss, while the Conclusion is stated in the form of an exhortation: “Have thou nothing to do with that just man”. And the succeeding sentence must have been designed to convey a hint of Arguments for the Proof of each of the Premises on which that Conclusion rested’: Whately, Elements of Logic, 9th ed. (London: Longmans, 1864) p. 78. The ref. is to Matt. 27: 19.
Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal Society, ed. J. I. Cope and H. W. Jones (St Louis, Mo.: Washington University Studies, 1959) p. 354.
The ironic elements in this passage are mentioned in I. Ehrenpreis, ‘Swift and Satire’, College English, 13 (1952) 309.
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© 1988 James A. W. Rembert
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Rembert, J.A.W. (1988). Questioner against Answerer. In: Swift and the Dialectical Tradition. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19072-0_8
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