Acceptable Premises

An Epistemic Approach to an Informal Logic Problem

When, if ever, is one justified in accepting the basic premises of an argument? What is the proper criterion of premise acceptability? Can the criterion be theoretically or philosophically justified?

   This is the first book to provide a comprehensive theory of premise acceptability and it answers these questions from an epistemological approach that the author calls commonsense foundationalism. It will be eagerly sought out not just by specialists in informal logic, critical thinking, and argumentation theory but also by a broader range of philosophers and those teaching rhetoric.

James B. Freeman is Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College of the City University of New York.

---

For the Hoffmans,
all of those who are with us,
and in memory of Don

---

Acceptable Premises

An Epistemic Approach to an Informal Logic Problem

JAMES B. FREEMAN

Hunter College of the City University of New York

---

PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK
40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia
Ruiz de Alarcón 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain
Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa

http://www.cambridge.org

© James B. Freeman 2005

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2005

Printed in the United States of America

Typeface ITC New Baskerville 10/13 pt.     System LATEX 2_e   [TB]

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Freeman, James B.
Acceptable premises : an epistemic approach to an informal logic problem / James B. Freeman.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-521-83301-9 – ISBN 0-521-54060-7 (pb.)
1. Logic. I. Title.
BC71.F734     2005
160–dc22       2004045887

ISBN 0 521 83301 9 hardback
ISBN 0 521 54060 7 paperback

---

Contents

Preface			page ix
Acknowledgments			xiii
PART 1. ACCEPTABILITY: DIALECTICAL AND EPISTEMOLOGICAL COSIDERATIONS
1	Why Do We Need a Theory of Acceptability?		3
	1.1	Acceptance – A Basic Definition	3
	1.2	Acceptability, Certainty, and Epistemic Duty	4
	1.3	“Popular” Criteria for Acceptability	10
	1.4	Conditions for Acceptability	19
2	Acceptability and Presumption		21
	2.1	Uses of “Presumption”	21
	2.2	Presumption and Dialectics	27
	2.3	Challenger Presumption and Acceptability	30
	2.4	Comparison with Other Views	33
3	Factors Determining Presumption: Basic Considerations		38
	3.1	Principles of Presumption – A Basic Survey	40
	3.2	Presumption and Belief-Generating Mechanisms	41
	3.3	Belief-Generating Mechanisms and Warrant	42
	3.4	Warrant and the Factors Determining Presumption	44
	3.5	Warrant, Presumption of Warrant, and Presumption	67
4	Epistemological Considerations: Acceptability, Deontology, Internalism, Justification		73
	4.1	Classical Foundationalist Accounts of Epistemic Obligation	74
	4.2	BonJour’s Defense of the Meta-Awareness Requirement	76
	4.3	Nondeontological Conceptions of Epistemic Justification	79
	4.4	Alston’s Account of Epistemic Justification	80
	4.5	Epistemic Justification and Acceptance	85
PART 2. STATEMENTS, BELIEF-GENERATING MECHANISMS, AND PRESUMPTIVE RELIABILITY
5	What Types of Statements Are There?		93
	5.1	Rhetorical Systems of Statement Classification	95
	5.2	A Fourfold Typology of Statements	97
	5.3	Basic Beliefs, Inferred Beliefs, Received Beliefs	109
	5.4	Basic Belief-Generating Mechanisms: A Heuristic Suggestion	110
6	Necessary Statements and A Priori Intuition		114
	6.1	What Types of Necessary Statements Are There?	114
	6.2	Necessarily True Statements and Reason	119
	6.3	Is There a Presumption of Reliability for A Priori Intuition?	121
7	Descriptions and Their Belief-Generating Mechanisms		124
	7.1	What Types of Descriptions Are There?	124
	7.2	Perception and Its Presumption	127
	7.3	The Presumptive Reliability of Introspection	138
	7.4	Memory and Its Presumption	140
8	Interpretations and Their Modes of Intuition		143
	8.1	Three Types of Explanations	143
	8.2	Explanations and Subjunctives	146
	8.3	An Analysis of the Subjunctive Conditional	150
	8.4	What Types of Interpretations Are There?	154
	8.5	Types of Subjunctives, Types of Explanations, and Intuition	171
	8.6	Physical Subjunctives and Physical Intuition	174
	8.7	Personal Subjunctives and Personal Intuition	187
	8.8	Institutional Subjunctives and Institutional Intuition	193
	8.9	Interpretations in General and Intuition	199
	8.10	Objections and Replies	206
9	Evaluations and the Moral Faculties		218
	9.1	The Standard Account of Types of Evaluations	218
	9.2	Supervenience, Moral Intuition, and Moral Sense	220
	9.3	Judgments of Intrinsic Value	226
	9.4	Judgments of Deontic Value	242
	9.5	Judgments of Aretaic Value	251
	9.6	Objections and Replies	271
10	Taking One’s Word: The Interpersonal Belief-Generating Mechanism		281
	10.1	Importance of Taking One’s Word	281
	10.2	Testimony Defined	284
	10.3	Presumption for Relying on Testimony: Preliminary Considerations	291
	10.4	Sources of Testimony	296
	10.5	Personal Testimony and Its Presumption	297
	10.6	When Is There a Presumption for Testimony Received Through a Chain?	299
	10.7	Expert Testimony and Its Presumption	303
	10.8	The Issue of Common Knowledge	309
	10.9	Presumption for the Word of the News Media?	312
	10.10	Presumption for Institutional Testimony	313
PART 3. PRACTICE AND PERSPECTIVE
11	An Outline of the Practice of Epistemic Casuistry		319
	11.1	When Is There a Presumption for a Basic Premise Which Is Logically Determinate?	323
	11.2	Under What Conditions Is There a Presumption for a Basic Premise Which Is a Description?	325
	11.3	Under What Conditions Is There a Presumption for a Basic Premise Which Is an Interpretation?	347
	11.4	Where Is There a Presumption for a Basic Premise Which Is an Evaluation?	357
12	Theoretical Considerations: A Commonsense Foundationalism		367
	12.1	Why Foundationalism?	367
	12.2	Why Common Sense?	369
	12.3	Objections and Replies	372
	12.4	Prospects	375
Notes			379
References			389
Index			395

---

Preface

The project of this book is easily stated. Suppose a proponent puts forward some claim that is in some way doubtful or controversial. The proponent thus incurs a burden of proof. He may attempt to discharge this burden by presenting an argument for his claim. For simplicity’s sake, let us assume that he puts forward a one-premise argument. But if that premise in turn is controversial, if by putting it forward the proponent incurs a further burden of proof, he will not have discharged his initial burden unless he discharges this further burden. By attempting to do that, the proponent may incur a further burden of proof because of the premise he puts forward to defend his controversial premise, and so on. Now the opposite of burden of proof is presumption. So if the proponent is proceeding in good faith, he is seeking a premise for which there is a presumption. Given a presumption, his premise should be acceptable. Now any noncircular argument will have basic premises, those not argued for in the course of that argument. So the proponent is seeking ultimately to ground his argument on basic premises for which there is a presumption. When is there a presumption for a premise and how do we recognize it? That is the project of this book, developed over Chapters 1 through 11.

   Our conception of the problem of premise adequacy limits our investigation from being even more complex or drawn out. First, notice that our proponent is pictured as asserting each of the premises he puts forward. He has not supposed or asked his interlocutor to suppose some statement true for the sake of the argument. On our view, the question of premise adequacy or acceptability does not arise for supposed premises, such as those assumed in the course of a reductio ad absurdum or conditional argument. Such premises are not accepted, at least in the contexts in which they are supposed, and thus the question of their acceptability does not arise in connection with their occurrences in those contexts.

   There is another less trivial way in which the project of this essay is circumscribed. From our perspective, we turn to an argument to discover whether there is good reason to accept some claim. If we recognized that we were justified in believing the premises of an argument and that the argument transferred this justification to its conclusion, we would have a positive answer. Traditionally, logic has concerned itself with the connection of premises with conclusions, and thus with the issue of transferring justification. Informal logic’s raising the question of premise acceptability, to our mind, raises the question of whether one is justified in believing or accepting the basic premises of an argument. But we may turn to arguments for other purposes. As Walton has pointed out on numerous occasions, arguments may occur in many types of dialogue. As Blair (1995) points out, this gives rise to different contexts of arguments raising different questions of premise adequacy. Whether or not one should argue for a premise may depend on whether the argument is occurring in the context of a quarrel, an attempt at rational persuasion, or an exchange involving hostile advocacy. But from our perspective here, growing out of the logico-epistemic evaluation of arguments especially as conceived by informal logic, we may set such issues aside. From our perspective, the issues of argument evaluation concern whether the conclusion is justified in light of the premises and whether those premises are justified. We address ourselves exclusively to premise adequacy in this sense in this essay.

   To give just a hint of our answer, let us say here that premise acceptability is to be explicated in terms of presumption, which depends upon the source vouching for a statement. By a source, we do not mean simply some person or organization that might put forward that statement. If one believes some premise because one perceives that the state of affairs the premise alleges to hold actually does hold, one’s own perception is the source (at least a source) vouching for that premise. What sources then may vouch for a premise? May we presume a particular source reliable in general or under certain circumstances? Because presumptions can be undercut or defeated, what factors defeat a presumption for a source’s reliability? If we know how to answer these questions, we might very well be able to determine whether there is a presumption for a premise. But why should one worry about this question in the first place? Does the standard textbook account not tell us that an argument is good from the logical point of view just in case it has true premises which either deductively entail or give inductively strong support to the conclusion? Why is truth not the proper criterion for premise adequacy? That indeed would seem to be the first question. We turn to it in Chapter 1.

---

Acknowledgments

Some material prepared for this book has appeared in various previously published papers. Material from Chapter 1 appeared in “Why Classical Foundationalism Cannot Provide a Proper Account of Premise Acceptability,” Inquiry (1996). Material from Chapter 2 was included in “A Dialectical Approach to Premise Acceptability,” Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Argumentation (1991). Material from Chapter 3 appeared in “Consider the Source: One Step in Assessing Premise Acceptability,” Argumentation 10 (1996), 453–60 (© 1996 Kluwer Academic Publishers). “Consider the Source” appeared earlier in Analysis and Evaluation: Proceedings of the Third ISSA Conference on Argumentation 2 (1995). Further material from Chapter 3 appeared in “The Pragmatic Dimension of Premise Acceptability,” in Anyone with a View: Theoretical Contributions to the Study of Argumentation, 2003 (© 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers). This paper also was included in the Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Argumentation (2003). Material from Chapter 4 was included in “Epistemic Justification and Premise Acceptability,” Argumentation 10 (1996), 59–68 (© 1996 Kluwer Academic Publishers). Material from both Chapters 3 and 4 also appeared in “Premise Acceptability, Deontology, Internalism, Justification,” Informal Logic (1995). Sections and 2 of Chapter 5 are largely drawn from “What Types of Statements Are There?” Argumentation 14 (2000), 135–57 (© 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers). An earlier version of this paper appears in Argumentation & Rhetoric (1998). Material from Chapter 8 is included in “Can Interpretations Ever Be Acceptable Basic Premises?” in Argumentation and Its Applications: Proceedings of the Fourth OSSA Conference, 2002. I hereby express my thanks to these publications and their editors for allowing me to use this material. In particular I note that material from the three articles in Argumentation and the article in Anyone with a View appears with kind permission of Kluwer Academic Publishers.

   We wish to thank the editor of The Monist for permission to reprint selections from “Concepts of Epistemic Justification” by William P. Alston, Copyright © 1985, THE MONIST: An International Quarterly Journal of General Philosophical Inquiry, Peru, Illinois USA, 61354. Reprinted by permission. We wish to thank Dr. James Q. Wilson and The Free Press for permission to include quotations from The Moral Sense by James Q. Wilson. Copyright © 1993 by James Q. Wilson. Reprinted with permission of the author and The Free Press, a Division of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved. Work on this book has occupied two sabbatical years, in 1994 and 2001, when I held Fellowship Leaves from Hunter College of The City University of New York. I hereby gratefully acknowledge Hunter College’s granting me these leaves.