Adversariality in Argumentation: Shortcomings of Minimal Adversariality and A Possible Reconstruction

This essay differentiates argument as constituting the set of premises that justify a conclusion, portrayed here as A→ B, from argumentation as the practice of arguers critically engaging with each other’s arguments, portrayed here as “A → B”.

Casey (2020, p. 97) makes this distinction as well. This is obviously an idealization, as argumentation can also turn irrational. We discuss irrationality in argument when introducing the notion of adversariality in Sect. 2.

The way that “conclusion” is being used in this essay is not as a justified singular proposition that closes a deductive argument, but as any proposition that has been logically treated, either being proven or not via deductive justification, which can then be appropriated to extend already ongoing argumentation.

Govier, for example, considers ‘good or sufficient grounds’ as what informs an argument’s cogency (1999, p. 46).

This reflects a need for a holistic modelling of our notion of argumentation that considers both epistemic and psychosocial features. This need may be realized in a more eclectic psychological account of argumentation. See, for example, Kidd (2016, p. 397) and Hornikx and Hahn (2012).

The issue of how disagreement plays a role in argumentation is outlined in Sect. 2.

See, Govier (1999, p. 245; 2010, p. 2); van Eemeren and Grootendorst (2004, pp. 61–62); Rooney (2010, p. 211); Hundleby (2013, p. 247); Novaes (2016, p. 2618).

Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pressing me on this point.

See, Gregg and Mahadevan (2014, p. 10); Aikin (2011, p. 250).

See, Moulton (1983, p. 153), Rooney (2010, p. 211), and Stevens and Cohen (2019, p. 5). Aikin (2011) has argued that, at times, adversarial stances can serve epistemic ends. Nevertheless, it should be noted that whatever epistemic ends are instantiated by such adversariality are incidental to the non-epistemic dynamic of one’s adversarial attitude, and thus should not be counted as part of this attitude’s general character.

(3) can turn dangerous when one arguer is willing to stand by the truth of their position even with no regard for the moral good. See Gilbert (1997, p. 43) for a discussion.

An anonymous reviewer has pertinently noted that behavioral intolerance in argumentation, such as through intimidation, typically does not function to elicit conceptual change in an arguer, for instead what we usually get is some kind of performative acquiescence if not outright opposition. However, my inclusion of ancillary adversariality as persuasive is not to gloss over the fact that such adversarial framing is often not persuasive at all, but simply that it can be persuasive in the irrational sense of behavioral maneuvers eliciting conceptual change. It is solely in this irrational capacity that an ancillarily adversarial agent is persuasive. Furthermore, yes, irrational persuasion is not within the sole jurisdiction of ancillary adversariality—one can be persuaded irrationally even without outright conflict—so something more than the avoidance of conflict in argumentation is needed to secure rational persuasion. This is precisely part of the theme addressed in Sect. 3 where I criticize a particular construal of minimal adversariality that realizes irrational persuasion.

In this case, we are assuming that the law of the excluded middle is operative and that “¬X → Y” is not being argued for. The argument form where ¬Y is the conclusion could be represented as, “A → ¬Y”, where A = (A₁ ʌ A₂ ʌ … A_n) and A is not necessarily ¬X.

See, for example, van Eemeren and Grootendorst (1984, pp. 85–88). The idea of disagreement as integral to the entire process of argumentation is also not an uncommon view. See, Jackson and Jacobs (1980); Willard (1989); Gilbert (1996).

Notice that this dynamic of giving and asking for clear and valid reasons between Prover and Skeptic is an argumentative norm similar to that of Brandom (1994).

Novaes (2016, p. 2619) also makes this point.

Alternatively, the norm of cooperation may end up playing too much of a role in one’s theory of argumentation if the function of disagreement is given too much of a back seat. This may be a way of interpreting Steven and Cohen’s (2019) critique of Bailin and Battersby (2016).

For the sake of argument, I am assuming that logical entailment is necessarily truth preserving, but I recognize the ostensibly interminable argument between entailment’s truth as applicable to all possible worlds or just this one, or whether that truth is analytically or synthetically derived. It is outside the scope of this paper to enter this debate.

This analysis mirrors that of John Searle (1995, p. 24).

Of course, one could argue that other inferential rules could better conclude Y from X, but we are foreclosing on the importance of this for now since we are dealing with deductive argumentation here.

See, Burrow (2010, p. 236). Adversariality in games wherein you have contrasting winners and losers may even be less relevant in games that have the participants either winning or losing together—i.e., participants are playing the game itself instead of each other. Indeed, game examples of the latter variety would be more apt to describe argumentation by. (Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for bringing this up.) However, we may augment the relevancy of adversariality in argumentation in the sense that, while I may come to legitimately know a position contrary to mine via truth-preserving justification, I may not necessarily know that I know this fact. This implies that I could be considered a loser in the way of not acknowledging my own epistemic gain. Nonetheless, pursuing this line of thought is not for this paper.

See, Rooney (2010, pp. 221–222); Hundleby (2013, p. 240). Indeed, Govier describes participants in argument as ‘opponents’ (1999, p. 244).

Philosophical discourse in particular has been chastised for its legacy of ancillary argumentation (Rooney 2010, p. 227).

Stevens and Cohen (2019) offer up similar remarks (p. 19n31). This distinction between telos and motivation resembles one made in Walton and Krabbe (1995, p. 66) between dialogue purpose and participant goals. Having non-epistemic motivations may also be why, according to Gilbert, ancillary adversariality in argumentation can be ‘exhilarating and downright enjoyable to those to whom it is considered play’ (Gilbert 1994, p. 102).

The metaphor, as ideal, assumes that ‘whatever we need to know about arguers’ motivations, assumptions, knowledge, reasoning, and feelings’ are encapsulated by the arguers’ spoken and/or written words (Hample 2007, p. 166). See also Mills (2005) for a general discussion on idealizing tendencies within philosophical theory-crafting.

Rooney even considers that the justificatory force between premises and their conclusion is at least partly conditioned by the argument’s hidden assumptions/premises (2012, p. 324).

See Kidd (2016, § 5) for a list of empirical accounts describing how social experience capacitates biases within one’s rational capacities. Moreover, this natural propensity towards identity prejudice features in broadly motivationalist understandings of argumentative virtue, such as one mirrored in Annas (2011).

See Warren (1988) for a discussion on how adversarial notions of argumentation are especially costly for the argumentative participation and perceived validity of minority speakers.

See, Le Dœuff (1989, p. 12). It is this capacity of minimal adversariality’s game metaphorization, as naïve acceptance of majority narratives informing doxastic attitudes towards what are the appropriate premises to have in argument, that is being criticized here. The easy solution would be to adopt an open-mindedness in argumentation about the premises being brought to the table, perhaps realizable in a back-and-forth process between the arguers that is sensitive to the premises intended to support an argument. However, following our interpretation of adversariality as an involuntary state of affairs in the relation between argumentation’s telos of epistemic betterment and rational persuasion, there are implicit rational limitations to this open-mindedness in terms of how a proposition’s truth value can be argued for or falsified, which is the primary theme addressed in Sect. 4.

See also, Casey (2020, p. 83).

One popular way, as noted by Stevens and Cohen, is to view adversarial competition, even in ancillary modes, as mitigating in this regard (2019, pp. 8, 19n32). What is evoked is a more general model of Darwinian natural selection, wherein our best arguments are born out of a battle for survival of the fittest due to the human capacity for argumentation being an evolutionary adaptation, a stance held by Mercier and Sperber (2017). This strictly evolutionary perspective however, as an adequate explanation on the causation and function of argumentation, is contested by Novaes (2013; 2018), who instead situates argumentation as a more socially conditioned phenomenon than a biologically adapted one.

See Hundleby (2013, pp. 253–254) for a related example.

This resembles the argument made in Nagel (1974).

This may correspond to Novaes’ understanding of Mercier and Sperber’s distinction between an objective reason—‘a fact that objectively supports some conclusion’—and a psychological reason—‘a mental representation of an objective reason’ (Novaes 2018, p. 514n3). Notwithstanding, we are not identifying the involuntariness of logical entailment with that of experiential justification: the former impinges upon people equally while the latter does not. Nonetheless, insofar as experiential justification impinges involuntarily at all, then it attains features of minimal adversariality. It is not required for experiential justification to attain the character of rational justification that logical entailment has for my argument to work, hence their merely analogous relation.

I am here trying to avoid having as a criticizing remark to my argument the applicability of the statement, “you exist as a woman in terms of a phenomenological association, but you do not exist as a woman in terms of a biological assignment”, which is not a contradictory statement to make.

This shows that there is a way to read adversariality into the conclusions of an argumentation without having to rescue it, as Casey (2020) does, through the involuntariness of belief change through persuasion.

I am thus not advocating here for a form of dialogical foundationalism, in which the truth of privileged premises needs to be taken for granted without any justificatory reasoning attached to it. See Rhode (2017) for a pertinent discussion. Relatedly, what I am not saying here is that one can rationally use experience to involuntarily justify any proposition whatsoever to have it attain a privileged status, for there are legitimate issues pertaining to subject-matter considerations about propositions whose truth value one may try to adjudicate on. For instance, it is patently absurd that one can experientially justify, without defeat, whether the earth is round or flat, because the proposition of earth-roundness, as it is typically understood, is not solely under experiential purview. Matters like gender dysphoria, or phenomenological construals of gender and gender expression more generally, however typically are. Now, exactly how a proposition’s subject matter becomes typically constructed—e.g., whether purely experiential or not—is not made concrete from the outset, in that what constitutes its set of proper defeaters can itself be fleshed out via argumentation. Still, once a statement’s subject matter is defined as under experiential jurisdiction, whether wholly or partly, it is in its capacity as experientially informed that the statement becomes inevitably subject to no defeat outside that jurisdiction of the one employing that statement in argumentation.