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.

THE common theory of motivation refers to what people want and believe. It speaks of motives as reasons, and it holds that people's reasons are composed of desires and beliefs, that a person has a reason for choosing (and for doing) a where he wants to choose (or take) an action of a certain sort b and believes a is of sort b. I have argued that this is too thin, that we need to bring in also how he sees or understands a, that he has a reason for choosing (and for doing) a where he wants to choose (or take) an action of a certain sort b and believes a is of sort b – and sees a as being of that sort. This seems to me not only correct but useful and suggestive. Others resist the idea. What are their grounds for resisting it?

My three-part idea brings in people's seeings. These are not seeings of houses or trees but of actions or events or situations – I will use “situations” as a catchall for this. They are our grasps of those situations, our construals or understandings of them. They are our reports of them (to ourselves), our conceivings of them. Such seeings-as aren't retinal; the blind have no problem with them. An inner eye is engaged.

This last only adds a metaphor to a long string of synonyms. The question remains: what are such seeings? And to that question I have no answer. I think the concept can't be defined in any noncircular way, that it is too basic a concept to be laid out in terms of others.

WE will start with the mother topic, with the logic of thought. That is not the logic of truth; it isn't about validity and about what follows from what. It has to do with what a person ought to believe or not to believe, or with what he ought (or oughtn't) to believe if he believes certain other matters. Also with what he ought to want or not to want. … Most broadly: with what propositional attitudes he ought to hold or not to hold, or to hold or not hold in certain contexts of others.

First, about belief. There are said to be some people who believe nothing whatever. No logical fault in being a skeptic. We may think such people foolish, or excessively cautious, but we can't call them illogical.

Suppose that Jack is a skeptic, that

1. Jack believes nothing

2. problem there. But suppose too he believes he is a skeptic, that he believes (1), that

3. B(1)

4. follows (by the usual logic of truth) that

5. Jack believes something from (2)1

6. contradicts (1), and so, by reductio, it follows that

7. ∼(1 · 2) and also

8. (2)⊃ ∼(1) which says that

9. B ⊃ ∼(1)

10. is a skeptic; nothing wrong there. But if he believes he is a skeptic, what he believes can be shown to be false (as in (6)). If we describe a belief as false where it focuses on a false proposition, Jack's belief then makes itself false. In that sense, it undermines itself, and there is something wrong in that.

NEAR the middle of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Levin is sitting in his bedroom listening to the sounds of his dying brother.

The thought of death and the void that follows sent Levin into despair. He remained as active as before, for the thought didn't always intrude, but “darkness had fallen upon everything for him.” He even married and had a child, but at the core of all he did there was a sense of the pointlessness of it. “He saw nothing but death or the advance towards death in everything.”

Here is a report of the same awakening and of same reaction to it, this one from longer ago.

JACK and Jill have been arrested. The District Attorney now tells them this. They can either talk or keep silent. If they both talk, they will each get a ten-year sentence. If one of them talks (confessing for both) and the other does not, the one who talked will go free; the other will get a twenty-year sentence. If they both keep silent, each will get a one-year sentence on some trumped-up charge. The DA makes sure they believe him. Then he puts them in separate cells and goes to take their pleas.

Say that neither Jack nor Jill has any idea of what the other will do but that each supposes that it doesn't depend on what he (she) will do. Also that neither expects to meet the other again at some future time, or to meet the other's cousins in a dark alley somewhere. Also that neither cares at all about how the other makes out; each cares only about the length of his (her) own stay in jail. This lets each map his (her) own problem as in Figure 2.1.

Jack is here the row-chooser, Jill the column-chooser – S is staying silent, T is talking. Each number-pair refers to the outcome of one of the possible action-pairs, the first number being Jack's ranking of that outcome, the second being Jill's (the larger the number, the higher the ranking). The rankings reveal that talking is the dominant option for both: each would do better by talking, whatever the other did. So if Jack and Jill are both rational, both of them will talk.

EACH of the essays in this book was written during the past five years. Only two have been published elsewhere. Each can be read on its own. Still, they were meant to be read in sequence; Essay 1 is general, Essay 2 more narrowly focused, Essay 3 more technical, etc. In a wholly perfect world, they would be read in the order presented.

An earlier version of Essay 3 appeared in Economics and Philosophy of 1999 (as “Status Quo Basing and the Logic of Value”). An earlier version of Essay 5 appeared in The Journal of Philosophy of 2000 (as “Surprise, Self-Knowledge, and Commonality”). Essay 2 is a revised version of a paper that will appear in Synthese. I thank the editors and publishers of these journals for their permission to reprint these papers.

Each of these papers, or some earlier version, has been presented to one or another academic group, at Lund University and Uppsala University in Sweden, at Cambridge University in England, at Columbia, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, the University of Arizona, the New School University, and others in the United States. I thank the audiences at these meetings for their lively and useful discussions.

Finally, a special thanks to my friends – they know who they are – who have encouraged me in this. And a very special thanks to those who encouraged me though they weren't persuaded.

SAY we are fully informed. Say we know all we could possibly know. Still, there remains ambiguity. What we now do is ambiguous, and what that will bring about is too, and so is all that would have happened if we had done something else instead. How we act in any setting depends on how we there get around this, on how we disambiguate there. And our later making sense of our actions calls for our knowing how we did it.

Let me begin with some stories that may help to bring that out. The first will be about me, and it will do me little credit.

When this happened, I was thirty and on my first good job. I then had two particular friends – call them Adam and Bob. Adam was lively and good-looking. Women liked him and he liked women. Bob too liked women, but they cared for him less, and he ached for what Adam had. He would always ask about Adam, hoping at least to feed fantasies, but I knew nothing he wanted to hear, so I couldn't oblige him.

Then, one day, I did. To his “What's new with Adam?” I said “He moved; he had to.” Bob asked why. “Because it was three o'clock in the morning and he had the music on loud, and the landlord came up from downstairs” – I was making all this up – “… and found him in bed with two women and evicted him.”