EVALUATION AND EVALUATORS
In general, to evaluate an argumentative discourse is to make a reasoned positive or negative « value judgment » about that discourse see Value, . The activity of evaluation is one argumentative activity among others, which may be misleading or well-founded, regardless of the quality of the discourse it approves or condemns. In order to avoid arbitrariness, the evaluation must specify its method, its criteria, its scale of reference, and remain open to criticism, as is the case for any other argumentation.
1. Dimensions of evaluation
1.1 Scales of evaluation
Arguments can be evaluated on the basis of different types of scales, such as:
An efficiency scale — The best argument is the one that best orients its recipients with thesis it defends, or the action it advocates.
A logical-scientific validity scale — Good arguments are valid deductions, that start from true premises and carry their truth to their conclusion according to valid rules and methods.
Invalid arguments are misleading, and effective arguments may be so; indeed, effective arguments are systematically suspected of being misleading. Conversely, a valid argument may be completely ineffective: for example, “P, therefore P” is a valid deductive inference but it has no persuasive power. It could be argued that ordinary arguments often simply just disguise this kind of truism by using two different formulations of the same proposition P “P, therefore (paraphrase of P)”. Since trains never leave before their scheduled time, the following account is not a real justification:
Because of the delay, the train will not leave on time.
1.2 Binary and stepwise evaluation
— Binary evaluation classifies arguments as valid (good, accepted) and invalid (bad, rejected). This evaluation follows the rules and criteria of formal logic. It requires the translation of the argumentation produced in ordinary language into a logical language. The evaluation is based on this logical characterization, which is taken as an expression of the essence of the argumentation, and this logical evaluation is then transferred to the original discourse, see Connectives.
— Gradual evaluation positions the argument on a gradual scale, as more or less good or bad. In practice, the evaluation criteria depend on the argument scheme under consideration, and on the availability of a relevant set of critical questions, which may be quite heterogeneous. The argument under consideration is then checked for each condition, and its global evaluation may be only a precarious synthesis of the results of these different operations.
2. The diagnosis of fallacy
The imputation of fallacy is an adversarial procedure by which a discourse is condemned, rejected, or disqualified. The accused arguer has the right to defend his argument according to the principle of “no execution without representation”. Discussions about the fallacious nature of argumentation are, in principle, open-ended and their conclusions are open to challenge and corrections. They are arguments like any other, possibly fallacious themselves. In any case, meta-argumentative disputes about the evaluation of arguments evaluation provide interesting data for argument analysis.
Evaluators
Hamblin gives a clear answer to this question: the logician is not the arbiter of the argument or dispute (Hamblin 1970, pp. 244-245):
Consider, now, the position of the onlooker and, particularly, that of the logician, who is interested in analyzing and, perhaps, passing judgment on what transpires. If he says “Smith’s premises are true” or “Jones argument is invalid”, he is taking part in the dialogue exactly as if he were a participant in it ; but, unless he is in fact engaged in a second-order dialogue with other onlookers, his formulation says no more than the formulation “I accept Smith’s premises” or “I disapprove of Jones’s argument”. Logicians are, of course, allowed to express their sentiments but there is something repugnant about the idea that Logic is a vehicle for the expression of the logician’s own judgments of acceptance and rejection of statements and arguments. The logician does not stand above and outside practical argumentation or, necessarily, pass judgment on it. He is not a judge or a court of appeal, and there is no such judge or court: he is, at best, a trained advocate. It follows that it is not the logician’s particular job to declare the truth of any statement or the validity of any argument.
While we are using a legal metaphor it might be worthwhile to draw an analogy from legal precedent. If a complaint is made by a member of some civil association such as a club or a public company, that the officials or management have failed to observe some of the association’s rules or some part of its constitution, the courts will, in general, refuse to handle it. In effect the plaintiff will be told: “Take your complaint back to the association itself. You have all the powers you need to call public meetings, move rescission motions, vote the managers out of office. We shall intervene on your behalf only if there is an offence such as a fraud.” The logician’s attitude to actual argument should be something like this.
The diagnosis of fallacious speech operates on a meta-argumentative level, but this second level does not transcend the dialog under scrutiny, it remains an integral part of the argumentative game. In other words, the judgment « this argument is fallacious » works in the same way as any other ordinary refutation, whether it is made by a participant (ordinary use of the word fallacy) or by an analyst, who then acts as a participant. One must then speak of an ad fallaciam argument.
In a letter to Scherer, the economist Leon Walras refers to a controversy between Scherer himself and Guéroult:
I take […] your [= Scherer’s] study of December 30 to the point where you […] clearly and plainly address the more general considerations about the divergence between his [Guéroult’s] opinions and yours.
“Perfectibility, you say is a modern idea, one of those that best indicates the distance between the old world and the new world. It bears its own self-evidence, so that its opponents are but a few sophists or a few misanthropes. It has become into the general law of intelligence. But perfectibility must not be confused, as M. Guéroult sometimes seems to do, with the possibility of perfection. This confusion is not merely a matter of words; for those who understand the scope of the questions, it marks the dividing point between two systems, liberalism and socialism. Socialism, reduced to its principle, is nothing other than the belief in the possible perfection of society and the effort to realize this state.”
This is clear and precise. Mr. Guéroult and you agree up to a certain point: for both of you, humanity advances and does not retreat; the law of the development and organization of society is a law of progress and not of decadence. Beyond these limits, you part company, you think that society is only perfectible, while M. Guéroult, for his part, thinks that society, will sooner or later, will be perfect; you are a liberal, M. Guéroult is a socialist. Perfectibility or perfection, liberalism or socialism, such is the alternative and the question that is raised. (Léon Walras, [“Socialism and liberalism”], [1863][1])
Schérer argues that Guéroult deduces from the possibility of the perfectible (point on which they agree) the possibility of the perfect (point on which they disagree). This is a typical argument based on derived words. Schérer does not consider this inference to be a sophism (he does not attribute to Guéroult the intention of misleading his readers), not even an error, a fallacy of “confusion”, simply a criticism. The analysis is not made from an external logical point of view; it comes from a political opponent, who makes this point as a sub-issue of a larger debate “Liberalism or Socialism?”
3. For a laissez-faire approach in argumentation
Ordinary argumentation is conducted in particular domains by communities of speech, corresponding to what Hamblin calls “civil associations”, which have their interests, programs, ways of thinking and rules for deliberation and action. In these domains, the logician as such does not have the substantial expertise required. This observation is at the heart of “critical liberalism”, which advocates a laissez-faire attitude toward argumentation.
From such a point of view, what about of evaluation? Hamblin’s objection is taken into account, and the evaluation of the arguments is entrusted to the “civic association” to which the arguing party, interested in the outcome of the issue, belongs. The data to be considered for the evaluation is not limited to the one isolated argument under scrutiny, but consists of a well-defined selection of contradictory discourses developed around the same issue.
As a result, the evaluation process can be empirically documented and critiqued on three levels:
— Non-thematic criticism: description of the practices of evaluation in action, such as concessions, objections, refutations and counter-discourses in general.
— The emergence of a specific ordinary critical metalanguage: accusations of fallacy, misplaced authority, irrelevance, emotionality, amalgam and impugned motives, etc. (Doury 2000).
— Evaluations carried out by the specialists in the field. This level, which includes scientific expertise, is the ultimate level of evaluation. Scientists routinely evaluate the discourses and fallacies of their colleagues; historians and social scientists evaluate the fallacies of historians (Fisher 1970), and teachers and students evaluate the arguments of students and teachers.
All of these activities are “[meta-argumentative]”, as opposed to “ground-level argumentations” (Finocchiaro, 2013, p. 1). Provided that the intervention is useful and desired, the argument analysis specialist can intervene at all levels. As Hamblin has explained, his or her function and deontological position is that of a “well-trained advocate”. As such, the specialist can evaluate all the arguments in the world, the stance being that of the participant analyst and evaluator, working under a double constraint of externality / internality well known in ethnomethodology. He or she can meaningfully intervene in court as a jurilogician or a jurilinguist, that is as a counsel, not a substitute for the judge.
Argumentative discourse is in itself evaluative and critical; scientific evaluation is a process of argumentative expansion and deepening of the issue itself. There is no super-evaluator who can put an end to the critical process by providing a final, conclusive evaluation in order to silence all other participants.
[1] Quoted from Léon Walras L. (1896). “Socialisme et libéralisme”. In Études d’économie sociale – Théorie de la répartition de la richesse sociale Lausanne: Rouge & Paris: Pichon. P. 4.
« Socialisme et libéralisme ».
Études d’économie sociale – Théorie de la répartition de la richesse sociale