advertising it would give to the college, and, perhaps most important, the drawing card it would be to bring new athletes to the college in the fall. These points and others are too well known to need pointing out and too evident to need proof." This is a typical football argument. It attempts to prove the necessity of the proposed trip by showing that it would tend to perpetuate the thing the value of which is under dispute. 4. Apply the tests to the following argument. Would direct evidence be more convincing in this case? "Let me ask your attention, in the first place, to those appearances, on the morning after the murder, which have a tendency to show that it was done in pursuance of a preconcerted plan of operation. What are they? A man was found murdered in his bed. No stranger had done the deed, no one unacquainted with the house had done it. It was apparent that somebody within had opened, and that somebody without had entered. There had obviously and certainly been concert and coöperation. The inmates of the house were not alarmed when the murder was perpetrated. The assassin had entered without any riot or any violence. He had found the way prepared before him. The house had been previously opened. The window was unbarred from within, and its fastening unscrewed. There was a lock on the door of the chamber in which Mr. White slept, but the key was gone. It had been taken away and secreted. The footsteps of the murderer were visible, outdoors, tending toward the window. The plank by which he entered the window still remained. The road he pursued had been thus prepared for him. The victim was slain, and the murderer had escaped. Everything indicated that somebody within had coöperated with somebody without. Everything proclaimed that some of the inmates, or somebody having access to the house, had had a hand in the murder. On the face of the circumstances, it was apparent, therefore, that this was a premeditated, concerted murder; that there had been a conspiracy to commit it." Webster, "The Murder of Captain Joseph White," Webster's Great Speeches, p. 200. 5. Criticize the argument in the following editorial: "If you want to pay twenty dollars a barrel for flour, vote for Wilson' - that is what a prosperous-looking, well dressed, and evidently perfectly sincere man was overheard saying to a little group of more or less serious thinkers in a country hotel in Connecticut. How fully he may have developed the argument the witness is unable to say; but from the hearty response visible in the faces of his auditors it was plain that any elaboration of the reasoning was unnecessary. Flour is in the neighborhood of ten dollars a barrel under Wilson, whereas, it was four or five under Taft and Roosevelt and do we not all know that a word to the wise is sufficient? If, however, anything more were needed, the figures of the market furnish it in abundance. On Tuesday of last week 'Flour, Minn., pat.,' was quoted at $9.20, and $5.50 on June 23, 1916. This is an advance of 67 per cent in four months, which percentage of increase, if continued, will bring the price to twenty dollars a barrel very soon after the inauguration of the next President. And if that President should be Woodrow Wilson, who can doubt that the price will go to that level, or even higher? If we want to continue to eat the white bread that we love, we must put in a Republican President, who will put prices down by the enactment of a good stiff old-fashioned tariff." The Nation, November 2, 1916. 6. Name, and apply tests to, all the types of argument in the following letter to The Nation: "We protest against the idea that beer is the cure for the drink evil. Distilled liquors were not used to any extent for beverage purposes in England until about the time of Henry VIII, and yet we all know that England was cursed with drunkenness from ale and wine long ere this. Not only does beer cause drunkenness, it also leads to immoderate drinking. Take, for example, the fact that in Germany the extreme accessibility of beer has so fostered the taste for alcohol that Germany is no longer primarily a beer-drinking country, 49 per cent of her consumption being (according to Gabrielssohn's well-known figures) distilled liquors. Says Professor Gustav von Bunge, 'Beer in Germany is worse than the whiskey pest, because more apt to lead to immoderate drinking.' "As for the non-hygienic, disease-making quality of beer, we refer the reader to Professor Bollinger's researches. He found among other things, that in Munich, Germany, one out of every sixteen hospital patients died of beer drinkers' heart. "We note in some of these articles that beer below 2 per cent becomes harmless. But Mr. Mjven, from whom the Brewers' Year Book draws this conclusion, says that he found this solution apparently harmless as far as digestion went, but adds that the point where alcohol becomes altogether harmless is a purely technical one and should in no way stay the hand of temperance workers. The amount is so small as to be practically negligible for ordinary beverage purposes. "Moreover, Georgia tried from 1908 to 1916 a 'near' or light-beer experiment, but gave it up, because, according to Judge Broyles, of Atlanta, a light-beer law is unenforceable, as you cannot have a chemist with every barrel to see that the beer is light. "As for assertions giving the impression that the case against moderate drinking is not proved we believe that Dr. Benedict at the Carnegie Nutrition Laboratory, Boston, has proved beyond cavil that 30 to 45 cubic centimetres of alcohol (about a wine-glass of whiskey) 'slow down' neuromuscular action. "As for prohibition being nowhere successful, we refer our friends to the recent survey made by the State University at Kansas, showing that in 1913-14 the per capita consumption of Kansas was 86 per cent less than that of the country at large." - Letter to The Nation, July 6, 1916. 7. Classify the kinds of reasoning used by Poe in The Gold Bug, and apply the tests suggested in chapters vi and vii. 8. The instructor may read to the class the first part of a short story and let them decide, from a priori reasoning, how the story may end and how it may not end. EIGHTH CHAPTER REFUTING OPPOSING ARGUMENTS: FALLACIES "Men give me some credit for genius. All the genius I have lies in this: When I have a subject in hand, I study it profoundly. Day and night it is before me. I explore it in all its bearings. My mind becomes pervaded with it. Then the effort which I make is what the people are pleased to call the fruits of genius. It is the fruit of labor and thought." ALEXANDER HAM ILTON. REFUTATION - REFUTATION is argument which weakens or destroys the contentions of the other side. Mere contradiction is not refutation. Many attempts at destructive argument amount to something like this: "My opponent has defined shipping subsidies as grants of money to merchant ships for carrying the mails, but I think that these are not subsidies; he has tried to prove that such subsidies would soon put American shipping on a firm basis, but I deny it; finally, he has attempted to show that foreign carriers now charge exorbitant rates, whereas we all know that such is not the case." This is contradiction, not refutation. It is precisely what we have condemned as unsupported assertion. Refutation is an essential part of argumentation. Though destructive in nature, it is scarcely less important than constructive proof. Indeed, there are times when a negative case cannot proceed without refutation. Even an affirmative case on a really debatable question cannot safely rely on constructive work. Those who are to be convinced of the truth of a proposition wish to know not only why the arguments in its favor are sound, but also why the opposing arguments are unsound. Otherwise, as frequently happens in debate, the contentions of both sides may seem convincing, and their relation to each other may be obscured. The first arguments of students usually ignore the other side. They move so directly and easily to sweeping conclusions that the wonder grows how the question ever came to be discussed at all. Not until students are forced to hear the other side of the question under the conditions of actual debate do they approach effective and adequate refutation. Broadly speaking, there are two ways by which we may overthrow an argument: we may question the truth of the alleged facts on which the argument is based, or the validity of the reasoning process. To object to the alleged facts or premises, on the score that they have not been proved true, is to prefer a charge of unsupported assertion and call for evidence. To object to the reasoning process, on the score that the conclusion does not follow logically from the premises, is to prefer a charge of fallacious inference. Objections to unsupported assertion we have already considered; objections to fallacious inference we shall now consider. FALLACIES A fallacy is an error in the reasoning process. It is an unwarranted transition from one proposition to another, quite independent of the truth or falsity of the individual propositions. The fault lies not in the premises or in the conclusion, 1 Sidgwick says, a fallacy is used to mean: (1) a piece of false reasoning in the narrower sense; either an invalid immediate inference, or an invalid syllogism; a supposed equivalent form which is not equivalent, or a syllogism that breaks one of the rules. (2) A piece of false reasoning in the wider sense; whereby from true facts a false conclusion is inferred. (3) A false belief, whether due to correct reasoning from untrue premises (reasons or sources) or to incorrect reasoning from true ones. (4) Any mental confusion whatever." No doubt the term fallacy is thus loosely used, but we shall apply it only to the first and second of these classes. Nearly all logicians and rhetoricians deal with a class of fallacies which they call Non Sequitur or Fallacy of the Consequent. Non Sequitur (meaning "it does not follow") is a name applied to any inference in which the conclusion does not follow from the premises. The term Fallacy of the Consequent is usually employed in the same sense. Evidently we might include, under either of these terms, the whole range of reasoning processes which fail to satisfy the tests of argument given in the preceding chapter. The |