No alterations have been made in the text of the original edition for the purposes of the present printing; but I am glad of the opportunity to say that, five years after the original publication, I still feel that the questions raised in the present book are as relevant to the main themes of current British philosophy as they were when the book was first written. The reception which the argument of the book met with from the critics in fact served only to sharpen for me the point of my central thesis—namely, the contrast between the standards and values of practical reasoning (developed with an eye to what I called ‘substantial’ considerations) and the abstract and formal criteria relied on in mathematical logic and much of twentieth-century epistemology. The book has in fact been most warmly welcomed by those whose interest in reasoning and argumentation has had some specific practical starting-point: students of jurisprudence, the physical sciences, and psychology, among others. Whether the implications of my argument for logical theory and philosophical analysis will become any more acceptable with the passage of time remains to be seen.

A man who makes an assertion puts forward a claim—a claim on our attention and to our belief. Unlike one who speaks frivolously, jokingly or only hypothetically (under the rubric ‘let us suppose’), one who plays a part or talks solely for effect, or one who composes lapidary inscriptions (in which, as Dr Johnson remarks, ‘a man is not upon oath’), a man who asserts something intends his statement to be taken seriously: and, if his statement is understood as an assertion, it will be so taken. Just how seriously it will be taken depends, of course, on many circumstances—on the sort of man he is, for instance, and his general credit. The words of some men are trusted simply on account of their reputation for caution, judgement and veracity. But this does not mean that the question of their right to our confidence cannot arise in the case of all their assertions: only, that we are confident that any claim they make weightily and seriously will in fact prove to be well-founded, to have a sound case behind it, to deserve—have a right to—our attention on its merits.

The purpose of these studies is to raise problems, not to solve them; to draw attention to a field of inquiry, rather than to survey it fully; and to provoke discussion rather than to serve as a systematic treatise. They are in three senses ‘essays’, being at the same time experimental incursions into the field with which they deal; assays or examinations of specimen concepts drawn rather arbitrarily from a larger class; and finally ballons d'essai, trial balloons designed to draw the fire of others. This being so, they may seem a little inconsequent. Some of the themes discussed will recur, certain central distinctions will be insisted on throughout, and for literary reasons I have avoided too many expressions of hesitancy and uncertainty, but nothing in what follows pretends to be final, and I shall have fulfilled my purpose if my results are found suggestive. If they are also found provoking, so much the better; in that case there is some hope that, out of the ensuing clash of opinions, the proper solutions of the problems here raised will become apparent.

What is the nature of these problems? In a sense they are logical problems. Yet it would perhaps be misleading to say that they were problems in logic, for the whole tradition of the subject would lead a reader to expect much that he will not find in these pages.

The status of epistemology has always been somewhat ambiguous. Philosophers' questions about our claims to knowledge have often appeared to be of one kind, while the methods employed in answering them were of another. About the questions, there has been a strong flavour of psychology, the epistemologist's object of study being described as the ‘understanding’, the ‘intellect’, or the ‘human reason’: on the other hand, if we take psychology to be an experimental science, the methods used by philosophers in tackling these questions have only rarely been psychological ones—until recent years, when Piaget began to study methodically the manner and order in which children acquire their intellectual capacities, the development of the human understanding had been the object of little deliberate experimental inquiry. Instead of conducting elaborate scientific investigations and building up their picture of the human understanding a posteriori, philosophers had proceeded quite otherwise: namely, by considering the arguments upon which claims to knowledge can be based, and judging them against a priori standards. Epistemology, in short, has comprised a set of logical-looking answers to psychological-looking questions.

To say this is not to condemn the way in which philosophers have attacked the subject. There are, it is true, some people who talk as though no serious questions whatever could be answered a priori; and who would advocate the massive collection of factual observations and experimental readings as a necessary preliminary to any intellectual inquiry.

These first two studies are both, in different ways, preliminary ones. The aim of the first was to indicate in broad outline the structure our arguments take in practice, and the leading features of the categories we employ in the practical assessment of these arguments. By and large, I aimed throughout it to steer clear of explicitly philosophical issues and leave over to be discussed later the relevance of our conclusions for philosophy. The method of this second study will be rather different. We shall in the course of it carry our analysis of modal terms rather further; yet at the same time a secondary aim will be to indicate how the results of such an inquiry can be relevant to philosophical questions and problems; and certain broad conclusions will be suggested which will have to be established more securely and in more general terms in subsequent essays.

So far in these essays I have done my best to avoid any explicit discussion of logical theory. Whenever I have seen any danger of a collision with formal logicians, I have sheered away, and put aside the contentious concept—‘logical necessity’, or whatever it might be—with a note to reconsider it later. By now the list of items to be reconsidered has become pretty long; and we have seen plenty of signs of a divergence between the categories of practical argument-criticism and those of formal logic. The time has come when the collision can no longer be avoided: rather, our task will be to ensure that we meet it head-on, and with our grappling-irons at the ready.

In the first part of this essay, I shall proceed in the manner of a scientist. I shall begin by stating my hypothesis: namely, that the categories of formal logic were built up from a study of the analytic syllogism, that this is an unrepresentative and misleadingly simple sort of argument, and that many of the paradoxical commonplaces of formal logic and epistemology spring from the misapplication of these categories to arguments of other sorts. I shall then explore the consequences which follow from treating analytic syllogisms as a paradigm, and especially the paradoxes generated by treating as identical a number of ways of dividing up arguments which are genuinely equivalent in the case of analytic syllogisms alone.

The intentions of this book are radical, but the arguments in it are largely unoriginal. I have borrowed many lines of thought from colleagues and adapted them to my own purposes: just how many will be apparent from the references given at the end. Yet I think that hitherto the point on which these lines of argument converge has not been properly recognised or stated; for by following them out consistently one is led (if I am not mistaken) to reject as confused a conception of ‘deductive inference’ which many recent philosophers have accepted without hesitation as impeccable. The only originality in the book lies in my attempt to show how one is led to that conclusion. If the attack on ‘deductive inference’ fails, what remains is a miscellany of applications of other people's ideas to logical topics and concepts.

Apart from the references to published work given in passing or listed at the end of the book, I am conscious of a general debt to Professor John Wisdom: his lectures at Cambridge in 1946–7 first drew my attention to the problem of ‘trans-type inference’, and the central thesis of my fifth essay was argued in far greater detail in his Gifford Lectures at Aberdeen, which were delivered some seven years ago but are still, to our loss, unpublished.

The first, indispensable steps in any philosophical inquiry are liable to seem entirely negative, both in intention and in effect. Distinctions are made, objections are pressed, accepted doctrines are found wanting, and such appearance of order as there was in the field is destroyed; and what, asks a critic, can be the use of that?

In immediate effect, the philosopher's initial moves do certainly tend to break down rather than build up analogies and connections. But this is inevitable. The late Ludwig Wittgenstein used to compare the re-ordering of our ideas accomplished in philosophy with the re-ordering of the books on the shelves of a library. The first thing one must do is to separate books which, though at present adjacent, have no real connection, and put them on the floor in different places: so to begin with the appearance of chaos in and around the bookcase inevitably increases, and only after a time does the new and improved order of things begin to be manifest—though, by that time, replacing the books in their new and proper positions will have become a matter of comparative routine. Initially, therefore, the librarian's and the philosopher's activities alike are bound to appear negative, confusing, destructive: both men must rely on their critics exercising a little charity, and looking past the initial chaos to the longer-term intention.

Books are like children. They leave home, make new friends, but rarely call home, even collect. You find out what they have been up to only by chance. A man at a party turns out to be one of those new friends. ‘So you are George's father? – Imagine that!’

So has been the relation between The Uses of Argument and its author. When I wrote it, my aim was strictly philosophical: to criticize the assumption, made by most Anglo-American academic philosophers, that any significant argument can be put in formal terms: not just as a syllogism, since for Aristotle himself any inference can be called a ‘syllogism’ or ‘linking of statements’, but a rigidly demonstrative deduction of the kind to be found in Euclidean geometry. Thus was created the Platonic tradition that, some two millennia later, was revived by René Descartes. Readers of Cosmopolis, or my more recent Return to Reason, will be familiar with this general view of mine.

In no way had I set out to expound a theory of rhetoric or argumentation: my concern was with twentieth-century epistemology, not informal logic. Still less had I in mind an analytical model like that which, among scholars of Communication, came to be called ‘the Toulmin model’. Many readers in fact gave me an historical background that consigned me to a premature death.

An argument is like an organism. It has both a gross, anatomical structure and a finer, as-it-were physiological one. When set out explicitly in all its detail, it may occupy a number of printed pages or take perhaps a quarter of an hour to deliver; and within this time or space one can distinguish the main phases marking the progress of the argument from the initial statement of an unsettled problem to the final presentation of a conclusion. These main phases will each of them occupy some minutes or paragraphs, and represent the chief anatomical units of the argument—its ‘organs’, so to speak. But within each paragraph, when one gets down to the level of individual sentences, a finer structure can be recognised, and this is the structure with which logicians have mainly concerned themselves. It is at this physiological level that the idea of logical form has been introduced, and here that the validity of our arguments has ultimately to be established or refuted.

The time has come to change the focus of our inquiry, and to concentrate on this finer level. Yet we cannot afford to forget what we have learned by our study of the grosser anatomy of arguments, for here as with organisms the detailed physiology proves most intelligible when expounded against a background of coarser anatomical distinctions.