The Making of Arguments

they have a secondary force in testifying to the personal knowledge that the witness has of the subject. We shall see later the danger of the fallacy of generalizing on too narrow a basis: a generalization based on a good body of statistics runs no danger of this fallacy. 31. The Opinion of Recognized Authorities. The other chief source of evidence to establish a fact which consists of a large and complex state of affairs is the opinion of recognized authorities on the subject. The strength of such evidence depends on whether the audience will accept the person you cite as having authority on the matter. Most of us read some newspaper or periodical in the opinions of which we have confidence, because they seem to be based on investigation and competent knowledge. The annual report of the Secretary of the Treasury is excellent evidence on the state of the national finances. The reports of presidents of colleges are excellent evidence from authorities on such questions as the value of the elective system or the effect of raising the standard of admission. The report of a dean or of a schoolmaster on the value of organized athletics is effective if the audience knows that he likes out-of-door sports and takes time to see the games. Evidence drawn from an authority who is likely to be used by the other side is doubly effective, since your readers recognize that his competence is admitted. If a man has given his life to the study of a subject and has published books that are of recognized authority, his evidence will be of especial weight. Mr. Bryce's opinion on all questions concerning a state of affairs in this country would be recognized at once as weighty, for he has given time and study to collecting the multitude of small facts which constitute the large fact. His opinion that political honesty is increasing with us has brought comfort to many good citizens who had grown despondent over the accounts of recurrent rascality in the newspapers and magazines. This is a typical case for the citation of authorities; for the facts are enormous in number, very widely scattered, and often contradictory. Only a man who has taken the pains to keep himself constantly informed, whose judgment has been trained by long consideration and comparison of the facts, and who is born with the judicial temperament can attain the authority of Mr. Bryce. There will be cases on which you will have the right to put yourself forward as an authority, for on many subjects which fall within the range of undergraduates their knowledge is first-hand. On all questions of athletics, especially, an undergraduate is apt to have freshly in mind a considerable mass of facts. In the same way, on the results of certain requirements for admission to college, you can speak from recent experience. In matters concerning your own city, too, you may have original knowledge. If you are going to put yourself forward as an authority, however, you must round out your knowledge of the facts by extending it beyond your own personal experience. If it is a question of entrance requirements, you cannot stop with your own experience, or even with that of your own class at school. You must go back to the records of a number of classes before and perhaps after your own, and talk them over with the principal of the school, to see whether there are any special circumstances which affect any of them. If you are arguing for or against a change in the present rules of football, you would have to go beyond the games of your own college team, and beyond those of the present season. If, for example, it were a question of amending the rules concerning the forward pass, you could not speak with full authority unless you had looked up the accounts of the principal games for two or three years at any rate. If you put yourself forward, then, as a witness on one of these cases of complicated facts, you must make it clear to your readers that you have a right to be considered such. If you have the right, it would be folly to hide your light under a bushel. An example of the care which is taken by men who have made themselves authorities on their subjects is to be found in the following passage from President Eliot's address, "A Wider Range of Electives in College Admission Requirements."21 Notice how broad a basis he lays for his conclusions both in facts and in the opinions of other authorities. What should be the grounds of a just valuation of all the subjects that can be presented at admission examinations which include numerous options? That question introduces us to a difficult inquiry. It is, of course, not an intelligent method to attribute a value to each subject in accordance with the time devoted to the examination in that subject. What clue have we toward a better mode of determining the value which ought to be attributed to each of the numerous electives, when the young men cannot present all the permitted subjects, and hardly three fifths of them, indeed, if the range is adequately widened? I believe that the best criterion for determining the value of each subject is the time devoted to that subject in schools which have an intelligent program of studies. The Committee of Ten22 examined the number of subjects used in about two hundred of the best secondary schools in this country, and the time-allotments for the several subjects. They found a great variety of practice as to both selection of subjects and time-allotments. You can hardly say that there is an accepted time-allotment in these secondary schools for any subject—not even for the old traditional subjects. The time-allotments differ widely in different parts of the country, and even in different schools in the same part of the country. If, then, we are to determine by school time-allotments the valuations of the different subjects, prescribed and elective, which may enter into admission examinations, we must have some sort of standard programs for secondary schools. At present (1896) I know no programs which can answer that purpose, except the provisional programs of the Committee of Ten. They may fairly be said to be the best-studied programs now before the country, and to represent the largest amount of professional consent, simply because they are the result of the work, first, of ninety school and college teachers, divided into nine different conferences by subject, and secondly, of ten representative teachers combining and revising the work of the conferences, with careful reference to the present condition of American schools. 32. Indirect Evidence. The term "indirect evidence" may be used for all evidence as to fact in which reasoning consciously plays a part. Without it we should be helpless in large regions of our intellectual life, notably in science and history, and constantly in everyday life. Clearly the line between direct and indirect evidence is vague and uncertain; it is one of the first things learned in psychology that our perceptions and judgments of things about us are almost never based exclusively on the testimony of our senses, and that we are all the time jumping to conclusions from very partial observations. Professor Münsterberg gives the following example from his own experience of this unintentional substitution of indirect evidence for direct: Last summer I had to face a jury as witness in a trial. While I was with my family at the seashore my city house had been burglarized and I was called upon to give an account of my findings against the culprit whom they caught with part of the booty. I reported under oath that the burglars had entered through a cellar window, and then described what rooms they had visited. To prove, in answer to a direct question, that they had been there at night, I told that I had found drops of candle wax on the second floor. To show that they intended, to return, I reported that they had left a large mantel clock, packed in wrapping paper, on the dining-room table. Finally, as to the amount of clothes which they had taken, I asserted that the burglars did not get more than a specified list which I had given the police. Only a few days later I found that every one of these statements was wrong. They had not entered through the window, but had broken the lock of the cellar door; the clock was not packed by them in wrapping paper, but in a tablecloth; the candle droppings were not on the second floor, but in the attic; the list of lost garments was to be increased by seven more pieces; and while my story under oath spoke always of two burglars, I do not know that there was more than one.23 Constantly in everyday life we make offhand assertions in the full belief that we are giving direct evidence, when as a matter of fact we are announcing inferences. The distinction is of importance in many ways, and not least as a means of avoiding heat in argument; for to question a man's inference is much less likely to make him angry than to deny his statement of fact. For the practical purposes of argument we may let the distinction between observation and inference, and consequently that between direct and indirect evidence, turn on whether the inference is a conscious and readily distinguishable part of the judgment or not. Though bringing to light an unconscious inference is often an essential part of the detection of false reasoning, where there is no such practical consequence, we need not be too curious here about the line between direct observation and inference from observation. For the rough and ready purposes of everyday arguments it is exact enough to say that where you recognize that you are basing your conclusion as to a fact on some process of reasoning, then you are resting on indirect evidence; where you do not recognize the inference without reflection, you are resting on direct evidence. In the following discussion of reasoning I shall sometimes be dealing with proving a fact, sometimes with arguing forward to a policy. In many cases the two processes are practically identical, for if the fact is established the policy follows as a matter of course: in these cases, therefore, for the sake of convenience I shall use the terms interchangeably, and keep them separate only where there is danger of confusion. 33. Reasoning. Though the various forms of reasoning and the principles which they follow are the concern rather of psychology and logic than of a practical work on the writing of arguments, yet these sciences help us to understand the processes of the mind by which we convince first ourselves, and then other people, of the existence of facts, when for one reason or another direct testimony is wanting. Psychology describes the processes of reasoning as part of the activity of the mind, analyzes them into their parts, and shows their working. Logic is concerned rather with the forms of reasoning: its aim is to establish principles and rules the application of which will insure correct reasoning. I shall first briefly and very simply sketch the underlying nature of the reasoning process as it is described by psychologists; then I shall pass on to a practical application of the principles thereby attained; next I shall set forth a few of the simplest and clearest of the processes of reasoning which have been worked out by logic; and, finally, I shall discuss each few of the best-recognized forms of false reasoning. From both the psychological description and the rules of logic we shall derive practical suggestions for establishing facts which may be needed in an argument. The essential feature of the process of reasoning is that it proceeds from like to like, by breaking up whole facts and phenomena,