THE MAKING OF ARGUMENTS

J.H. GARDINER

Table of Contents

PREFACE

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

APPENDIX I

APPENDIX II

PREFACE

The object of this book is to lay out a course in the writing of arguments which shall be simple enough for classes which give only a part of the year to the work, and yet comprehensive enough for special classes in the subject. It is especially aimed at the interests and needs of the student body as a whole, however, rather than at those of students who are doing advanced work in argumentation. Though few men have either the capacity or the need to become highly trained specialists in the making of arguments, all men need some knowledge of the art. Experience at Harvard has shown that pretty much the entire freshman class will work with enthusiasm on a single argument; and they get from this work a training in exact thought and a discipline that they get from no other kind of writing.

Accordingly I have laid out this book in order to start students as soon as possible on the same kind of arguments that they are likely to make in practical life. I have striven throughout to keep in mind the interests and needs of these average individuals, who in the aggregate will tread such a variety of paths in their passage through the world. Not many of them will get to Congress, there to make great orations on the settlement of the tariff, and the large majority of them will not go into the law; and even of the lawyers many will have little concern with the elaborate piecing together of circumstantial evidence into the basis for a verdict. But all of them will sooner or later need the power of coming to close quarters with more or less complicated questions, in which they must bring over to their views men of varying prepossessions and practical interests; and all of them all their lives will need the power of seeing through to the heart of such questions, and of grasping what is essential, though it be separated by a hair's breadth from the inessential that must be cast to one side. It is for this training of the powers of thought that a course in the making of arguments is profitable, even when pursued for so short a time as can be given to it in most schools and colleges.

In laying out the book I have had these three purposes in mind: first, that the student shall without waste of time be set to exploring his subject and running down the exact issues on which his question will tarn; second, that as he collects his material he shall be led on to consider what part of it is good evidence for his purpose, and how to test his reasoning from the facts; third, that with his material gathered and culled and his plan settled he shall turn his attention to presenting it in the most effective way possible for the particular occasion.

Throughout I have tried to lay stress on the making of arguments, not as an end in themselves, and to fit certain more or loss arbitrary formulas, but as the practical kind of appeal that every young man is already making to his fellows on matters that interest him, and that he will make more and more in earnest as he gets out into the world. The tendency of some of the books to treat argumentation, especially in the form of debating, as a new variety of sport, with rules as elaborate and technical as those of football, turns away from the subject a good many young men to whom the training in itself would be highly valuable. The future of the subject will be closely dependent on the success of teachers in keeping it flexible and in intimate touch with real affairs. I have made some suggestions looking towards this end in Appendix II.

My obligations to earlier workers in the field will be obvious to all who know the subject. In especial, I, like all other writers on the subject, have built on foundations laid by Professor George Pierce Baker, of Harvard University.

For permission to use the articles from The Outlook I am indebted to the courtesy of the editors of that journal; for the article on "The Transmission of Yellow Fever by Mosquitoes," to the kindness of General Sternberg, and of the editor of The Popular Science Monthly.

CHAPTER I

1. What Argument is. When we argue we write or speak with an active purpose of making other people take our view of a case; that is the only essential difference between argument and other modes of writing. Between exposition and argument there is no certain line. In Professor Lamont's excellent little book, "Specimens of Exposition," there are two examples which might be used in this book as examples of argument; in one of them, Huxley's essay on "The Physical Basis of Life," Huxley himself toward the end uses the words, "as I have endeavored to prove to you"; and Matthew Arnold's essay on "Wordsworth" is an elaborate effort to prove that Wordsworth is the greatest English poet after Shakespeare and Milton. Or, to take quite different examples, in any question of law where judges of the court disagree, as in the Income Tax Case, or in the Insular cases which decided the status of Porto Rico and the Philippines, both the majority opinion and the dissenting opinions of the judges are argumentative in form; though the majority opinion, at any rate, is in theory an exposition of the law. The real difference between argument and exposition lies in the difference of attitude toward the subject in hand: when we are explaining we tacitly assume that there is only one view to be taken of the subject; when we argue we recognize that other people look on it differently. And the differences in form are only those which are necessary to throw the critical points of an argument into high relief and to warm the feelings of the readers.

2. Conviction and Persuasion. This active purpose of making other people take your view of the case in hand, then, is the distinguishing essence of argument. To accomplish this purpose you have two tools or weapons, or perhaps one should say two sides to the same weapon, conviction and persuasion. In an argument you aim in the first place to make clear to your audience that your view