Let us recall this point: Acceptability is a normative, not a descriptive notion. Acceptability does not amount to acceptance. It is no synonym for marketability. As we understand the notion, to say that a statement or claim (on our belief) is acceptable for a given person is to say that it is proper, correct for that person to accept it, that is, take it as a premise for further deliberation or action. One way to put this is to say that one is within one's epistemic or doxastic rights to accept that statement; one's acceptance violates no epistemic or doxastic duty. One is epistemically justified in accepting the statement.

In our explication of normativity in the last paragraph, we have made contact with other normative notions – epistemic rights and duties, being epistemically justified. These notions have received detailed development in epistemology. Has this development placed certain constraints on these notions and does our notion of presumption, that is, presumption of warrant together with satisfaction of the pragmatic condition, fall within those constraints? What does it mean to be within one's epistemic rights or to have done one's epistemic duty or to be epistemically justified, and is one within one's epistemic rights to accept a statement if there is a presumption of warrant in its favor and the pragmatic condition is satisfied? Must acceptability be connected with epistemic rights and duties to be a normative concept? Could it be connected simply with epistemic justification?

We have accomplished the project of this book. We have given an account of acceptability for basic premises, explicating the concept and giving a rationale for why various conditions render certain basic premises acceptable. We also have outlined a procedure for determining in a given case whether a particular basic premise is acceptable. We conclude by putting this whole project in some theoretical or philosophical perspective. In contrast to the classical foundationalism that we criticized in Chapter 1, we call our position commonsense foundationalism. It is essentially the epistemological position Plantinga calls Reidian foundationalism (1993b, pp. 183–5) after Thomas Reid, the founder of the Scottish commonsense school of philosophy. We prefer “commonsense” to “Reidian,” because we believe first that our explication of acceptability in terms of presumption is eminently in accord with common sense. Second, other philosophers, notably Peirce and Moore, are identified with common sense, and their views may enhance the philosophical rationale for our approach. Commonsense foundationalism raises some obvious “big” questions. Why should an epistemic approach to basic premise acceptability be a form of foundationalism? Why should one seek a commonsense approach? Are there objections that should be addressed? What questions remain open? We proceed to these questions in the following sections.

WHY FOUNDATIONALISM?

Although epistemologists may debate the nature of the noetic structure for our beliefs, it is clear that argument structure is foundationalist. An argument will have basic premises, that is, premises that are not argued for at least in the context of that argument.

At the end of the chapter, we framed the following proposal:

This proposal practically follows analytically from Cohen's characterization of a presumption as what we may take for granted absent reasons against doing so (1992, p. 4). But it holds out much further promise for clarifying just what acceptability means and how we may determine when statements are acceptable. The concept of presumption is used in various disciplines. Aspects of its various uses and various ways of determining presumption may guide us in constructing a concept of epistemic presumption suitable for explicating acceptability. To develop this proposal, we first look at just how the concept of presumption is treated in various contexts.

USES OF “PRESUMPTION”

“Presumption” is first of all a jurisprudential notion. A courtroom proceeding is typically a debate between two opposing sides before an adjudicative panel. Presumption and its cognate notion “burden of proof” are ways of determining which adversary must argue what before this tribunal. If there is a presumption in favor of the innocence of the accused, then the burden is on the prosecution to argue for the guilt of that person. At least initially, the defense need not argue for innocence. The adjudicative panel is enjoined to accept that claim (i.e., to “take it for granted”) until and unless the prosecution successfully establishes guilt.

In this chapter, we follow the same overall procedure as in the last three. We first identify the types of evaluations or value judgments one may distinguish, presenting a standard philosophical account. We inquire for each of these types whether some mechanism generates such evaluations as basic beliefs and whether there is a presumption for its reliability in this employment. We see two mechanisms, moral sense and moral intuition, involved in generating basic beliefs expressing value judgments. Before asking about their presumptive reliability, we discuss how they are related and what types of evaluations may be basic.

THE STANDARD ACCOUNT OF TYPES OF EVALUATIONS

There is a standard threefold division of value judgments into judgments of nonmoral value, of moral obligation, and of moral value. Following Frankena, we call judgments of moral obligation deontic judgments and judgments of moral value aretaic judgments (1973, p. 10). Similarly, we may speak of deontic value and aretaic value. “Right” is the paradigm term for ascribing deontic value and “virtuous” for aretaic value. Deontic value is a property of acts, whereas aretaic value is a property of the motives and characters from which acts proceed.

“Good” in one sense is the paradigm ascription of nonmoral value. “Good” and “bad,” however, have several senses. Some things are morally good or morally bad. As Ross points out, moral goodness belongs to actions “in virtue of the motives that they proceed from” (1930, p. 156). Moral goodness and moral badness then are terms ascribing aretaic value.

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.

In this chapter we analyse and evaluate an argument by a famous philosopher, A. J. Ayer, about the connection between (i) electrical impulses in our brains and (ii) thoughts and ideas in our minds. Most of us have a reasonably clear idea about what we mean when we talk about ‘thoughts and ideas in our mind’ and we know that scientists study how the brain works, how it is constructed, how ‘messages’ are transmitted within it and so on, but Ayer's piece is about the connection, if any, between the two – about how one's brain and mind interact with each other.

If you conjure up an image of an elephant in your mind's eye, or entertain the thought that ‘the moon has a weak gravitational field’ or decide to raise your arm, you might expect some ‘corresponding’ activity in your brain – some activity (physical, chemical, electrical or whatever) of a kind that scientists could see, describe and study. But what is the connection between the two? Does one cause the other? Does the ‘mental activity’ of deciding to raise your arm somehow send signals to your muscles which cause your arm to raise and, conversely, do electrical impulses in your brain somehow cause you to have the image of an elephant in your mind's eye or to entertain the thought about the moon's gravitational field? Alternatively, do these two distinct kinds of activities – the mental and the physical – just occur together without causally interacting?

The following passages are provided so that the reader can try out the approach of this book to see if it is helpful. The exercise in each case is the same: it is to extract the argument and to evaluate it using the methods and principles explained in the preceding pages. The author's experience is that students have difficulty in being clear-headed about these and similar (theoretical and argumentative), passages, but that the methods expounded earlier are a genuine help. The teacher will no doubt wish to supply further exercises which are particularly suited to his or her students: the following examples are provided only as a starting point.

An argument is considered in Chapter 1 which relates to this exercise (see p. 13). The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) campaigns for unilateral nuclear disarmament for Britain. It does so on various grounds and the ‘nuclear winter’ evidence has been used widely by CND in support of its campaign. However, the following appeared in the Eastern Daily Press newspaper in October 1984. A similar position was taken by some prominent politicians.

Now that we have shown how in general to handle suppositions, we have explained how to extract arguments from their context and how to represent their structure in sufficient detail for us to be able to delve more deeply into the third part of the exercise – evaluating the soundness of an argument – for a wide range of important arguments.

Remember that in order to test whether an argument is sound we have to ask,

and in order to establish the appropriate standards we ask the Assertibility Question,

Remember furthermore that, as we have insisted from the beginning, anyone can ‘play this game’: it is not just a matter for the ‘experts’.

Two initial examples

Suppose we encounter the claim that ‘like magnetic poles always repel’ (M). What would show that this was true or false (allowing this as a paraphrase of the Assertibility Question)? If you understand the meaning of the claim M you must be able to give some kind of answer to the question (remember principle * p. 23).

In this chapter we apply the method we have outlined so far to a real and quite complicated example due to Karl Marx. The reader should first read the passage through and should then attempt to answer the questions which immediately follow it. Unless one does this it is easy to underestimate the difficulties in Marx's argument.

Those readers who can answer the questions without recourse to the method we have outlined need read no further, but we hope that others will find that the method enables them to answer questions which otherwise defeated them.

Karl Marx: Value, Price and Profit

Karl Marx was born in 1818, the son of a lawyer. He studied at the universities of Bonn and Berlin before embarking on a life of journalism and political activism. He was expelled from Prussia in 1849 having been acquitted of high treason. He settled in London where he spent the rest of his life, often in real poverty. He died in 1883 and is buried in Highgate cemetery in North London.

His major work, Das Kapital, makes very hard reading, but our extract comes from his Value, Price and Profit, which gives a much simpler statement of his ideas. It was originally delivered as a paper to an international congress of working men in 1865. At that time there was ‘on the continent a real epidemic of strikes, and a general clamour for a rise of wages’, as Marx put it, and the question was whether working people could increase their wages by such activity.

This second edition differs from the first mainly by the addition of two new chapters. These deal with some fascinating arguments about the existence of God and about how our minds and bodies interact. Although this approach to teaching students how to analyse and evaluate arguments was first published in 1988, many students and teachers still find it useful and instructive, and this seems to be especially true in Philosophy departments, hence the choice of new topics. The general approach has not been changed here, but the new examples illustrate applications of my approach in particular contexts – some especially philosophical and one which is rhetorically powerful. It has been a pleasure to write this second edition and I particularly want to thank Nicholas Everitt for reading the new chapters and making very helpful suggestions; I often accepted these but, needless to say, the resulting work is my responsibility. Again I also wish to thank Cambridge University Press for their help and patience and my wife and family for theirs too.

The method of argument analysis which is developed in this book is distinctive in employing the Assertibility Question. We introduced it in Chapter 2, we explained how to use it and we have illustrated how it works in several examples, but since it underlies our whole approach we must now attempt to answer some questions which may be raised about it. We shall first remind ourselves of our objectives and of how the Assertibility Question functions in attempting to realise those. We shall then explain some ideas about meaning which lie behind our method. We then provide a brief reply to the general challenge of scepticism and finally we explain why we attach relatively little importance to the notion of deductive validity in this whole exercise.

Objectives

Our objective is to describe and demonstrate a systematic method for extracting an argument from its written context and for evaluating it. We want a method which will apply to a wide range of both everyday and theoretical arguments and which will work for ordinary reasoning as expressed in natural language (and not just for those made-up examples with which logicians usually deal). We also want a method which draws on the insights and lessons of classical logic where these are helpful, but which is non-formal and reasonably efficient (both requirements exclude a method which requires us to translate real arguments into the symbolism of classical logic).