1 Why Do We Argue?
The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle was an especially astute observer
of human nature. Among his many famous pronouncements and ideas, the
following two claims may already be familiar to you:
1 Humans by nature are political creatures.
2 Humans by nature desire to know.
The ﬁrst of these quotations comes from Aristotle’s book titled Politics
(1253a2), and it is often interpreted as saying that humans are naturally
“political” in our current colloquial sense of that term. To say that we are
political in this sense is to say that we are competitive, ambitious, cunning,
shrewd, manipulative, and perhaps ruthless. But this is not the sense of
“political” that Aristotle intends. In claiming that we are by nature political,
Aristotle means to say that we are by nature social and sociable
beings. That is, Aristotle saw that it is no accident that human beings live
together in families, neighborhoods, communities, and other social forms
of association, including political associations.
Not only are we social in the sense that we enjoy the company of others,
we also depend on each other in various ways. We need others if we are
going to live lives that exhibit the familiar characteristics of a human life.
From the time we are very young, we need others to nurture and care
for us; we need others to teach us how to get along in the physical and
social world. Moreover, there are certain distinctively human capacities—
capacities for friendship, loyalty, love, gratitude, sincerity, generosity,
kindness, and much else—that can exist only given the presence of others.
For example, one cannot be a friend all by oneself, and generosity can be
exercised only toward needy others. Finally, it seems that the ability to use
language—to communicate, to express ourselves—is one of the most central
features of human life, and communication presupposes a social life.
In order to be fully human, we need others.
As Aristotle also observed, our dependence on others is not a one-way
street. Others need us, too. Our dependence is mutual. This is most
obvious in the case of friendship. Our friends need us, and, though it may
sound odd to say so, we not only need them, but we also need to be needed
by them. That’s just what friendship is. Even infants, arguably the most
helpless among us, provide for adults occasions for the development and
exercise of the distinctive dispositions and attitudes appropriate to caregivers,
nurturers, and guardians. We depend on others even when they
depend on us. Dependence is not necessarily a one-way street. As human
beings, we are interdependent. We need each other, and we need to be
needed by each other.
Importantly, this inevitable and pervasive mutual dependence is not a
sign of weakness or deﬁciency in human beings. As Aristotle also claimed,
interdependence is proper to human beings. That’s simply who we are. We
are the kind of creature that needs others of its kind. Our relationships
with others are what make us properly human. In fact, Aristotle went so far as
to say that any creature that is not dependent on others in these distinctively
human ways is thereby not a human being at all, but rather something either
greater than or less than human—a god or a beast, he said.
Although our dependence on each other is not a defect, our mutual
dependency does make our social relations complex and sometimes even
problematic. It’s obvious that our interdependence means that we must
rely on others. We count on others to be sincere, to think and behave
rationally, to follow the agreed-upon rules, to play fair, and so on. Consequently,
in order to have the humanizing eﬀect we all need, our relations
of mutual interdependence must be in some sense reciprocal. They must
have as their aim some mutual beneﬁt. Or, to put the matter in a diﬀerent
way, we are not made more human when our relations with others are
one-sided and inequitable, aimed at dispensing beneﬁts only to one party
to the relationship at the expense of the other party. Takers need Givers
and perhaps Givers need Takers, too; but unless the taking and giving are
aimed at some kind of mutual beneﬁt for both parties in the long run, their
relationship becomes merely a case of someone taking advantage of
another. We sometimes speak of one person using another. The term using
captures the one-sidedness of the relationship’s beneﬁt.
Perhaps more importantly, if our relationships are to have a humanizing
eﬀect, they must involve more than a simple quid pro quo or exchange of
beneﬁts, as when you scratch your neighbor’s back so that he will in turn
scratch yours when the time comes. Living socially involves relying on
others, and in relying on others we seek not only a mutual beneﬁt, but a
common beneﬁt, a beneﬁt that accrues to us. In other words, properly
ordered social relations aim at a common good among those who participate
in the relation.
Consider, for example, the norms for standing in line. When someone
cuts the line, the people behind that person in line have been wronged to
some degree, at least by the fact that they must now wait a little longer, or
they may miss out on the ﬁnite resource being doled out. It is certainly
right for those folks to object to this instance of line-cutting. But it does
4 A Conception of Argument
not seem out of place for someone in front of the person cutting the line to
object, too. This is because cutting in line is not simply a case of one
person inconveniencing others; it also involves the breaking of a social
rule, and following the rule in question provides for everyone a more
peaceful and cooperative social environment than the one that would
result from a mad scrum for counter service. A mark of civic-mindedness
is that even those not wronged by an infraction can and will object to it.
The humanizing element of our social relations makes possible civicmindedness,
the disposition to think not merely of one’s individual good
(good for me), but to consider also the shared good of the group (good for
us). Families are the ﬁrst places where these group-minded goods begin to
motivate humans, but that civic-mindedness grows to larger associations,
and ultimately to the state.
As mentioned above, these features of our mutual interdependence
make our social relations complex, and this complexity gives rise to complications.
Our mutual dependence creates opportunities for some to take
advantage of others. Sometimes people enter into relations with others that
are in fact not nurturing and mutually beneﬁcial, but instead are lopsided,
manipulative, stiﬂing, or even abusive. What is philosophically interesting
(and personally vexing) about relations of this kind is that those who are
on the losing end of them often do not realize that they are being harmed;
they do not see that they are being manipulated and used by the other.
Frequently these are cases of misplaced trust and outright manipulation.
These cases are possible because of our mutual dependence, and it is
often because of the dependencies that people who are exploited in these
relationships cannot recognize their exploitation.
Consequently, our natural dependence gives rise to a kind of vulnerability.
In relying on others, we place a degree of trust in them; we interact
“in good faith,” and we count on others to reciprocate. In some sense this
initial expression of trust and good faith is made blindly. We trust others so
that they may prove worthy of trust; we rely on others, at least initially, in
the hope that they will prove to be reliable. As we know all too well,
sometimes we trust the wrong people to the wrong extent. Hence we not
only depend upon others, we depend on others to be worthy of our dependence;
we trust them to be responsible, reciprocating, and cooperative. And
sometimes we learn a diﬃcult lesson, and we consequently know that some
others, under certain circumstances, are not to be trusted. And there are
certain people who not only should not be trusted, but rather should be
positively distrusted. It’s an unpleasant fact. But that’s life.
We are inherently social creatures, we depend on each other. This, in
turn, means that it often matters to us how others live their lives. Since the
question of whether those upon whom we depend are in fact trustworthy
is a recurring issue for us, we must make the lives of others our business.
We must sometimes make it our business to discover and evaluate what
others do, even in private, as it were. That your neighbor stores dangerous
Why Do We Argue? 5
chemicals under unsafe conditions in her garage is your business. That the
store-owner downtown engages in unfair hiring practices is also your
business. Perhaps it is also your business how the couple across the street
raises their children. Of course, it has been a main occupation of political
philosophers to discern the limits to the concern we should have with the
lives of others. We depend and rely on each other, and so the lives of
others are our business, at least to some extent; nonetheless, we must not
become busybodies. The philosophical project of drawing a proper line
between having a healthy regard for others and being a nuisance or busybody
is notoriously diﬃcult. The history of philosophy is replete with
varied attempts to do just this. Luckily, we need not undertake this task at
present, because our concern is with an area of our shared social lives
where we tend to think that the line is easier to discern.
To be more speciﬁc, one of the most obvious features of our social lives
is that we depend on each other epistemically. Epistemology is the area of
philosophy that examines the nature of knowledge, evidence, belief, and
the like. Epistemologists are also concerned with the ways in which
knowledge is transferred and accumulated, how new knowledge is
achieved, and how knowledge diﬀers from other phenomena, such as
wishful thinking, blind faith, and lucky guessing. We need not delve deeply
into the ﬁeld of epistemology to make our central point, which is this:
Much of what we believe and take ourselves to know derives in large
measure from others.
Think about it. Apart from what you believe based on your own memories
(“I had Cheerios for breakfast this morning”; “Tomorrow is my
mother’s birthday”) and current bodily sensations (“I have a mild headache”;
“I see an apple”), most of what you believe involves reliance on
reports, information, ﬁndings, testimony, and data that are provided by
others. You depend on these others to be reliable, accurate, sincere, and
honest. Accordingly, we often regard what others think, and especially
what others claim to know, as our business.
And this brings us to the second of Aristotle’s claims from the beginning
of this chapter. In his book titled Metaphysics (980a22), Aristotle observes
that we each desire to know. Aristotle is often taken to be saying that
humans are naturally or insatiably curious and eager to learn. This is a
claim that is obviously disputable. Some of our fellow professors would go
so far as to say that, in light of their many years teaching college students, it
is obviously false. According to a more plausible interpretation of the quotation,
Aristotle is asserting that we take ourselves to know quite a lot, and
we are disturbed when we discover that we are wrong about some thing or
another. We do not like being mistaken. We hate being wrong. We all desire
to know insofar as we desire to avoid being duped, confused, incorrect, or
deluded. If this is what Aristotle meant, then it looks as if he may be correct.
Again, we try to avoid error, and we do not like having to change our minds
about things, especially when it comes to the things we think are important.
6 A Conception of Argument
The interest we have in knowing, the importance we place on getting
things right, and the corresponding discomfort and frustration we feel
when we discover that we have erred are all easy to understand. Our
actions, plans, and projections are to a large extent based upon the things
we believe to be the case. Consider even the mundane example of planning
to meet a friend for lunch at a local restaurant. In setting your plans, you
take yourself to know the location of the restaurant at which you are to
meet your friend. You also take yourself to know that the restaurant in
question is open for lunch. And in setting your plan, you take your friend
to also know the location of the restaurant, and to understand that you
are to meet at the determined time of day. And so on. To be mistaken in
any of these beliefs will likely result in a failure to meet your friend for
lunch. So, if it is important to you that you succeed in meeting your friend
for lunch, it is important that you actually know the things you take
yourself to know. The same is true in examples involving more important
matters. Suppose you think that your health is very important, and
accordingly try to keep to a healthy diet. Now imagine that you (mistakenly)
believe that banana-splits are extremely healthy, and so you eat
one or more banana-splits every day. Your false belief about what foods
are healthy undermines your attempt to preserve your health.
More generally, your behavior is based on what you believe to be the
case. If your beliefs are false, you are more likely to act in ways that contravene
your intentions and undermine your aims. In a very literal sense,
when your actions are based on false beliefs, you don’t know what you’re
doing. Hence we tend to think that knowledge is highly valuable, and,
correspondingly, we think it is important to avoid error. Consequently, it
makes sense that we attempt to manage our cognitive lives, to exercise
some kind of control over the processes by which we form, evaluate, sustain,
and revise our beliefs.
The main way in which we try to manage our cognitive lives is by trying to
attend to our reasons. When we hold beliefs, we typically take ourselves to
have good reasons for them, reasons that provide suﬃcient support for the
beliefs we hold, while also suggesting that we should reject competing beliefs.
Consider an example. You look out the window and see that it is sunny. You
consequently form the belief that it is not raining outside. Your observation
of the clear sky and the bright sun provides you with reasons for your belief
that it is not raining, while also giving reason to reject the belief that it is
raining. Moreover, your belief that it is not raining outside provides you with
reasons to act in various ways. If you were planning to go outside, you would
probably not wear your raincoat nor carry an umbrella, and so on. Additionally,
you think that your reasons for thinking that it is not raining outside
can readily be made available to others. Were someone to doubt that it is
sunny, you could show her the clear sky and bright sun or you could tell her
that you just saw it was a nice day, and then she, too, would have good reason
to believe that it is not raining outside.
Why Do We Argue? 7
It all seems rather easy, right? We believe for reasons. Or, to put the
point more precisely, when we believe, we typically take our belief to be
the product of what our reasons say we should believe. And this is exactly
as it should be. There seems to be something odd, perhaps irrational or
even idiotic, about believing against the reasons we have. Someone who
insists that it is raining while gazing out the window onto a sunny day is
not only making the error of believing what is false; she is also failing at
rationally managing her beliefs. She not only fails to believe what her best
reasons say she should believe; she also believes against them. That is, she
not only denies what is obviously true, she denies something whose truth
should be obvious to her. In such cases, we may say to her, “Look out the
window! Can’t you see that it is sunny?” And if our interlocutor persists in
asserting that it is raining outside, we are likely to conclude that she’s
playing some kind of joke or just being stubborn. In either case, we take it
that she doesn’t really believe that it is raining, but only says that she does.
We may scratch our heads, and then move on.
The sunny day case involves a low-cost error. Our friend may be wrong
about the rain, and so she may take her umbrella with her when she goes
outside. No biggie—she carries an umbrella with her on a sunny day.
However, change the case a bit. Imagine that it’s raining, it’s clear from the
available visual evidence that it’s raining (that is, if she looked out the
window she’d see a rainy day), and yet she believes it’s not raining but
sunny. So she’s wrong, again. But now add one more thing to the case:
she’s planned a large picnic. She’s taking the kids, some grandparents, the
neighbors out to the park for a day in the grass and sun. Imagine she
reasons as follows: it can’t be raining, because rain would ruin the
picnic. Not only does our friend reason badly (this is a case of simple
wishful thinking), this is a high-cost error, and the cost in this case isn’t
paid only by her, but by the kids, the grandparents, and the neighbors.
There they are in the rain with their cute little picnic baskets, which
now are full of soggy sandwiches. That’s a biggie, and one that our
friend should want to avoid not just for the sake of having true beliefs
about the weather, but to avoid ruining a Saturday for her friends and
family. Her beliefs and how she forms them, then, matter not just to
her, but to all those folks involved.
Recall from earlier our point about civic-mindedness. Even those who
aren’t directly impacted by those breaking the rules nonetheless have
grounds for objecting to the violation. Originally our point was about the
norms of standing in line, that even those in front of the person cutting
the line are right to criticize the person who cuts the line behind them.
Well, the same thing goes for cognitive norms, too. With the rainy picnic
case, not only do the neighbors, kids, and grandparents who got wet have
reason to criticize the reasoning, but even those who’d never go on the
picnic are right to criticize it, too. And it’s not just because the picnic got
ruined, but also because it was bad reasoning.
8 A Conception of Argument
Again, consider the line-cutting case. Imagine that the inconvenience to
those back in line was negligible, and the line moved quickly, and nobody
missed out on anything. It still is reasonable to criticize the line-cutter for
the simple reason that they broke the rule of lines—no cuts, wait your turn.
That’s because it was just a lucky accident that nobody was inconvenienced.
The rule exists in order to make the inconvenience of linestanding
equitable and so that we can reasonably manage our time. Well,
the same goes for the picnic. Even if the picnic came out ﬁne, the reasoning
behind it was still worthy of criticism. This is because it put the picnic
and others’ Saturdays in jeopardy of ruin, and that ruin was avoided
merely by a stroke of good luck. The reasoning was, in a word, careless.
We depend on each other to make plans responsibly, follow the rules, and
reason well. Those who don’t do those things deserve criticism, even if
things turn out just ﬁne in the end. Why? Because in being careless, they
break the trust we place in them as social creatures.
We are now in a position to pull Aristotle’s two insights together. That
we are social creatures means that we are interdependent; we rely on each
other in various ways in order to develop the attitudes, dispositions, and
capabilities most characteristic of human life. Our interdependence
involves relations that are mutual and reciprocal. Hence our lives are, at
least to some extent, properly the business of others. This is most
obviously the case when it comes to the ways in which our beliefs are
dependent on information provided by others. We depend upon others to
be honest, precise, careful, and accurate. When we rely on others who turn
out to be deceitful, malicious, careless, or sloppy, our lives can be
damaged. The health of our cognitive lives depends in large part on the
health of the cognitive lives of others.
Now, one of the persistent, and perhaps permanent, facts of social life is
that people disagree with each other about many of the most important
matters. To live socially is to encounter others who believe things that
diﬀer from what you believe. What’s more, to live socially is to encounter
others who believe things that you believe to be patently false. And on top
of that, living socially involves encountering others who believe that the
things you believe are patently false. In short, social life is rife with disputes
and disagreements. This is evident to anyone who reads the newspaper
or watches the news on television or has ever read a political blog. It
is also evident that not all disputes can be solved by a casual glance out
the window, as with the cases we discussed a moment ago. That is, not all
disputes are cases in which one party has grasped the relevant facts and
the other has simply failed to do so. When people disagree, often they also
disagree about what their reasons say they should believe. And sometimes
they disagree about what reasons there are.
Perhaps it is unsurprising to ﬁnd that disagreements over the things we
tend to think most important are often of this latter kind. When it comes
to Big Questions—matters of how to live, the meaning of life and death,
Why Do We Argue? 9
the natures of justice, liberty, dignity, and equality, and the like—we
often not only disagree about what to believe, we also disagree about
what should count as a good reason to believe one thing rather than
another. For sure, these are cases in which errors can be high-cost. If
you’re wrong about the nature of justice or the meaning of life, you’re
likely to do many unjust things and do things with your life that don’t
actually contribute to its meaning. It’s important to ﬁgure such things
out. The trouble is that disputes over Big Questions are often messy, and,
consequently, seemingly interminable. Moreover, they are also persistent:
that is, despite their messiness and seeming interminability, we nonetheless
continue to debate these matters. Debate concerning these matters
continues precisely because we want to get them right. In fact, even the
view that Big Questions are nonsensical and that hence the debates over
them are pointless is itself a view about which there is great and ongoing
debate. Whether we should spend our time debating Big Questions is
itself a Big Question! (And whether it’s a very costly error to continue to
discuss Big Questions is one too!) The point is that we can’t stop caring
about these matters, and so debate over them persists, despite the fact
that it seems likely that no one will ever have the last word.
Imagine a trolley which just keeps going along its track, never reaching
a destination. Would it be wise to board such a trolley? More importantly,
once on the trolley, would it be wise to not get oﬀ if given the chance?
Students in our courses sometimes contend that philosophy is like a trolley
that just keeps going around in circles. They say that this means that philosophy
is a pointless voyage that goes nowhere. Maybe they are correct in
the simile. Philosophical debates do seem to go endlessly around and
around. But we think our students are wrong to draw the conclusion that
philosophy is for that reason pointless. Again, to claim that ongoing, perhaps
never-ending, debate about things that matter is pointless is to take
oneself to know something about what really matters. It is to take oneself
to know something about what is a waste of time and what is worthwhile.
The claim that philosophy is pointless is itself a philosophical position
about a Big Question, one about which there is, as usual, lots of room for
prolonged debate. Once again, we confront our puzzling, perhaps even
mysterious, condition. We are creatures for whom argument over Big
Questions is inescapable—some would say that it is irresistible—yet it is, it
seems, without termination. To put the matter succinctly, we are incurable
arguers. The question is why we bother.
So why do we bother? Why do we engage in argument? It might help to
begin by asking what argument is. As it turns out, it is not easy to say
what argument is. In fact, there are long-standing debates among philosophers
about the matter. Yet we have to start somewhere. So we begin
with the following. In the most general sense, argument is the attempt to
make clear the reasons why we believe something that we believe. That’s
not bad for a start, but it is insuﬃcient. Argument has an additional
10 A Conception of Argument
dimension that must be introduced. Argument is the attempt not only to
make clear what our reasons are, but also to vindicate or defend what we
believe by showing that our belief is well-supported by compelling reasons.
We may say, then, that argument has an inward-looking and an outwardlooking
aspect. On the one hand, argument is the attempt to articulate the
basis for the beliefs we hold; it is an attempt to explain why we believe
what we believe. On the other hand, argument is the attempt to display to
others that they have reason to believe as we do.
Given this latter formulation, we see that argument is one kind of
response to disagreement. Since it involves an attempt to respond to disagreement
by stating and examining the weight of our reasons, we may say
that argument is the rational response to disagreement. Argument addresses
disagreement by trying to resolve it by means of reasons. To put the
point in a diﬀerent way, an argument is an attempt to put a disagreement
to rest by showing those with whom you disagree that they should be
compelled by reasons to adopt your belief.
Assuming that this is at least minimally acceptable as a starting-point, it
is important to notice that an argument is not simply a verbal ﬁght or a
contest of words. To repeat, it is an attempt to rationally respond to a disagreement.
But notice also that, when we argue, our aim is not simply to
resolve a disagreement by winning agreement. Rather, the aim of argument
is to win agreement in the right way, namely, by presenting reasons
and compelling those who disagree with us to recognize their quality.
Consequently, when you and your neighbor argue about, say, the death
penalty, you do not aim for your neighbor to simply say that she believes
what you believe; rather, you want her to come to actually believe what
you believe. Moreover, you want her to come to believe what you believe for
the good reasons you (take yourself to) have to believe it. You don’t seek
merely to persuade your neighbor, you want her to rationally adopt your
belief. And so you must attempt to show her that the most compelling reasons
support your belief (and not hers). To seek simply to persuade her to
say that she believes what you believe is not to attempt to resolve the disagreement
so much as to merely cover it up. But covered-up disagreement is
disagreement nevertheless.
To return now to our main query, why should you care about whether
your neighbor agrees with you about the best answer to some Big Question,
such as, for example, the justice of the death penalty? Why should
you care about what your neighbor thinks about anything, for that matter?
The insights from Aristotle that we discussed earlier can help us. We are
by nature social creatures for whom believing the truth and avoiding error
is of high importance. Consequently, disagreement is troubling to us. This
is not only to say that we typically ﬁnd disagreement uncomfortable,
especially in face-to-face contexts. It is also to say that we often ﬁnd the
fact that others disagree with us to be troubling. The simple reason is that
the fact that others believe things that you reject can sometimes be
Why Do We Argue? 11
evidence that you are wrong. To be sure, this is not to say that widespread
agreement about some belief is evidence that it is correct (though it can be,
especially when there is widespread agreement among those who have
thoroughly investigated the belief in question); nor is it to say that when
others disagree with you there is suﬃcient reason to take yourself to be
wrong. The point rather is that when others who seem relatively intelligent,
informed, sincere, and rational reject a belief that you accept, you
have good reason to worry that you have made a mistake. Perhaps you
have misjudged the force of your evidence? Maybe you have overlooked
some important consideration or misunderstood the signiﬁcance of some
piece of data? Could there be some new reason or argument that you have
not considered? Or perhaps you have been misinformed, mislead, or
deceived? In other words, disagreement is often an appropriate cause for
concern about our beliefs.
But it is important to note that to be concerned about your beliefs is not
to stop believing. That others deny what you accept is not in itself cause
for skepticism, or the suspension of belief. Believing that Madrid is the
capital of Spain is consistent with feeling the need to double-check or
reassess the evidence you have for that belief. When one feels concern
about a belief, and consequently reviews one’s reasons and evidence, one
engages in an act of cognitive hygiene, not self-doubt. In fact, in our next
chapter, we will present reasons for thinking that cognitive health requires
us to maintain our beliefs, rather than simply holding them steady. That is,
we will argue that cognitive health is much like health of other kinds. For
example, dental health requires us to make regular trips to the dentist,
even when we have no special reason for thinking that our teeth are
unhealthy. Other forms of physical health require us to exercise our muscles
and consume healthy foods. We do these things even when we have no
special reason to believe ourselves unwell. In fact, in the cases of dental
and bodily health, if one does not engage in routine check-ups, one incurs
certain risks; health problems that would otherwise be minor and easily
treated can become serious if they are not diagnosed in their early stages.
Moreover, we have regimens of maintaining the health of our teeth and
our bodies—we brush regularly and have exercise regimens. Similarly, our
cognitive health requires us to occasionally check and maintain our beliefs
and the reasons we have for holding them.
And here’s the rub. Cognitive health requires us to maintain a regimen
of cognitive hygiene. In order to be healthy believers, we must on occasion
reexamine, reassess, and reevaluate the reasons we have for holding our
beliefs. Now, these processes are inevitably social in that our reasons, evidence,
and data in large measure derive from the experiences, testimony, and
expertise of others. We must rely on others in order to remain cognitively
healthy. We need others in order to manage our cognitive lives.
People tend to see disagreements and the arguments they occasion to be
signals of disharmony and unhealthy conﬂict. To be sure, face-to-face
12 A Conception of Argument
disagreements sometimes are hostile and unfriendly aﬀairs. But recall that
in the sense we are employing here, argument is not necessarily aggressive
or unsociable. Our claim is that properly conducted argument and reasoned
disagreement is a normal and necessary feature of social life. In
fact, we have suggested further that disagreement is a kind of cognitive
resource, and thus a good. Those who disagree with the things you believe
provide an occasion for you to check your beliefs and your reasons.
And this gives rise to two results that may seem surprising: There is a
sense in which argument is an expression of our respect and care for each
other. That is, when you argue with your neighbor, you exhibit concern not
only for your own beliefs, but for hers. Again, in arguing, you not only try
to win agreement from your neighbor, but you also address her as a fellow
rational agent, a person both capable of following and being moved by
reasons, and one who can be a source of reasons that can move you. In
this sense, engaging in argument with others is a way of showing respect
for them. But we also see that arguing is also a way of caring for others. In
arguing, we help others to check their own beliefs and reasons; we provide
the resources by means of which they can maintain their cognitive health.
It does seem strange, we admit, to say that arguing with others is a way of
showing that you care, but everything hangs on what argument is and how
it is conducted. If you conduct yourself properly in argument, arguing with
others indeed shows that you care for them. If you behave badly in argument,
it most certainly alienates others and gets in the way of our cognitive
health. And as a consequence, we’d say it’s a failure of care. Consequently,
arguing well is very important, and what we call the dialectical notion of
argument captures this social element of arguing well.
So let us ask once more: Why do we bother with argument? We bother
with argument because it matters to us that we believe responsibly, and it
bothers us when we ﬁnd that we have made a mistake or have been duped.
The fact that others disagree with the things we believe occasions in us the
concern that, in forming our beliefs, we have overlooked or misjudged
some important piece of evidence or some compelling kind of reason. In
cases where the beliefs in question are important, we often call upon those
who reject what we believe to provide their own reasons, and we subsequently
attempt to weigh their reasons against our own. Even though
some arguments over Big Questions seem to go on and on, we engage in
the activity of arguing for the sake of caring for our beliefs. You see, it is
not so puzzling or mysterious after all.
Not all communication is argumentative. Sometimes people speak in
order to haggle, bargain, jockey, compete, ﬂatter, insult, amuse, inform,
threaten, and charm. As was said earlier, argument is the attempt to
resolve disagreement rationally. The discussion so far has emphasized the
positive aspects of argumentation. However, as everyone knows, in the real
world, things are not nearly as rosy. People often evoke the apparatus of
argument in order to accomplish aims other than rational persuasion.
Why Do We Argue? 13
Under the guise of earnest reason-giving, they seek to embarrass, discredit,
ridicule, humiliate, stigmatize, and silence those with whom they disagree.
Further, there are those who are simple rationalizers; they have preferred
beliefs and pretend to argue for them, but they do not put forth the reasons
on the basis of which they truly hold their beliefs. They’ll just say
anything that they think will place their beliefs in a favorable light. Such is
what might be called pseudo-argument. It is often diﬃcult to tell the difference
between proper argumentation and its counterfeits. In other words,
there is a dark side to argumentation. The rest of this book consists of
an attempt to provide guidance on how to argue properly, and how to
distinguish proper argument from its imposters.
For Further Thought
1 According to the view developed in this chapter, we argue primarily
because we encounter disagreement, and we need to ﬁnd a way to
respond rationally to it. But maybe a better response to disagreement
is simply to avoid it altogether. Is there any reason why one should
not attempt simply to interact only with those with whom one agrees
about the things that matter most?
2 Might the answers to certain Big Questions be a matter not of evidence
but of faith? Does the answer to this question aﬀect the overall
view presented in this chapter?
3 Many philosophers think that almost no one forms beliefs on the
basis of reasons, arguments, and evidence. They say that our beliefs
are most frequently the products of non-rational phenomena, such as
habituation and acculturation. Suppose they are correct. Does this
render argument pointless? Might there be a diﬀerence between how
we come to believe what we believe and how we maintain our beliefs?
4 Is it really other people’s business what you believe? Is it your business
how your neighbor forms her beliefs, even if they have nothing to do
with you?
5 In this chapter we argue that if people think it’s pointless to argue
over Big Questions, they must take themselves to have answered a Big
Question. Is that right? If we are right, does it mean that the view that
it’s pointless to argue about Big Questions is self-refuting? Or is there
another option?
Key Terms
Epistemology The philosophical analysis of knowledge. The key
questions are: What is Knowledge? What do we know?
How do we show that we know?
Big Questions Roughly, questions about central values and truths at
the foundation of a meaningful human life. There is
14 A Conception of Argument
wide and persistent disagreement about these questions
and their answers.
Dialectical View
of Argument The take on argument that it is an attempt to
rationally resolve a disagreement and answer critical
questions. Argument is best seen as an instance of
dialogue in search of truth.
Pseudoargument The argumentative product of rationalization, where
one ﬁnds a preferred conclusion and goes looking for
premises to support it.
Why Do We Argue? 15