Abstract
Some solo verbal reasoning serves the function of arriving at a correct answer to a question from information at the reasoner’s disposal. Such reasoning is good if and only if its grounds are justified and adequate, its warrant is justified, and the reasoner is justified in assuming that no defeaters apply. I distinguish seven sources of justified grounds and state the conditions under which each source is trustworthy. Adequate grounds include all good relevant information practically obtainable by the reasoner. The claim must follow from the grounds in accordance with a justified general warrant. If this warrant is not universal, the reasoner must be justified in assuming that no exception-making circumstances hold in the particular case to which it is applied.
Bibliographical note: This chapter was previously published under the same title in Arguing on the Toulmin model: New essays in argument analysis and evaluation, ed. David Hitchcock and Bart Verheij (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), 203–218. © 2006 Springer. Republished with permission of Springer. Earlier versions of the chapter were published in Argumentation 19 (2005), 373–391; and in The uses of argument: Proceedings of a conference at McMaster University, 18–21 May 2005, ed. David Hitchcock and Daniel Farr (Hamilton: OSSA, 2005), 199–208. An earlier version was presented at the conference referred to in the title of the last-mentioned publication. The chapter and its previous versions adapt material from Milos Jenicek and David Hitchcock’s Evidence-based practice: Logic and critical thinking in medicine (pp. 41–49; © 2005, American Medical Association; material used with permission). For helpful comments on previous versions, I thank Jonathan E. Adler , Mark Battersby , J. Anthony Blair , Robert H. Ennis , James B. Freeman , Trudy Govier , Nicholas Griffin, Ralph H. Johnson , Robert C. Pinto , Bart Verheij and Mark L. Weinstein . I thank as well the referees, James B. Freeman and Bart Verheij, for their careful and perceptive comments.
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Notes
- 1.
The preceding paragraph adapts points from Jean Goodwin ’s insightful commentary at a conference at McMaster University in May 2005 on a presentation of this paper; I thank her for her commentary.
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Hitchcock, D. (2017). Good Reasoning on the Toulmin Model. In: On Reasoning and Argument. Argumentation Library, vol 30. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53562-3_23
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