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With problematic frequency, I’ve seen posts on reddit and other social media platforms in which the poster says something along the lines of, “My friend [or coworker, acquaintance, what have you] believes this, and I think they’re wrong. What should I say to prove them wrong or convince them to change their opinion?” There are a few problems with this. One is that it’s difficult or impossible to argue against a general viewpoint absent specific points of support, and certainly impossible to anticipate what the other party might offer by way of counterargument and refutation. But more problematic to me is the apparent trend of people being unwilling or unable to make arguments for themselves, and from what I’ve seen, the inability to make a persuasive case for a particular position extends far beyond those who are at least cognizant of their deficiency in that regard. What I’m going to say next, I say without an ounce of hyperbole: rational argumentation is the most important of all human skills, because rational argumentation forms the basis not only for critical thinking, which is of paramount importance, but for affecting the world and shaping it to one’s ends.
I find this trend all the more frustrating because, while rational argumentation is something that can be refined and developed endlessly over the course of one’s life, it’s not an especially difficult skill to pick up and put into practice. It’s something anyone can do and that everyone should work towards implementing and improving.
By rational argumentation, I mean the ability to justify a claim with reasons, and that’s really all it comes down to. One could, if one wished, do a deep dive into argumentation theory, and some theorists spend their entire lives working on the topic, but all of it is essentially elaboration on how we use reasons to justify claims. While rational argumentation is, as I’ve said, a critical skill for all, it has a special importance to the Satanist for several reasons. To begin with, we, by definition, commonly find ourselves in positions of opposition—especially to claims regarding religion—and need to be able to properly support those positions. Additionally, rational argumentation has significant power to influence the world—probably more power than any other individual skill—and is therefore critical for achieving our personal aims and desires and for effecting the kind of world that we wish to live in.
The history of rational argumentation, at least as far as its role in Western civilization goes, begins in ancient Greece, with a school of teachers called the Sophists. As participatory democracy arose, there arose along with it a demand for education in those skills which would support one’s ability to make persuasive public arguments, and the Sophists were the ones who answered that demand (Taylor & Lee, 2016). The terms “sophist” and “sophistry” acquired a negative connotation at some point, and in contemporary parlance refer to argument aimed purely at “winning” the debate in question, without regard for the actual truth of the matter, but the original Sophists of ancient Greece were a varied sort and cannot be collectively said as representing fallacious and deceptive reasoning. I’ll be addressing the problems of contemporary sophistry a little further on.
In ancient Rome, rational argumentation was associated with the Trivium, the first three schools of learning studied as part of a liberal education: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Grammar concerns the general rules of language, and while an understanding of grammar in a particular language is vital to rational argumentation, it’s not a matter I will be addressing here. Logic concerns the relationship between ideas: what are the rules governing what must also be true given certain truths and preconditions? Logic is a deep and interesting topic in its own right and I’ll be providing an introduction here, but my main concern in this essay is rhetoric, the art of conveying claims to others and convincing others of the truth of those claims.
Emphasis on rhetoric as a core component of education declined in the modern era along with the rise of the school of thought known as logical positivism or logical empiricism, which asserted that only claims verifiable through empirical observation or through rigorous, deductive logical proof had any meaning at all (Creath, 2020). All else was just expression of feeling and personal preference. However, as the project of logical positivism has, over the last several decades, increasingly been demonstrated as an utter failure, the art of rhetoric has made a comeback.
In 1958, the British philosopher Stephen Toulmin published his book The Uses of Argument, which investigated and explicated the ways in which rhetoric is used in practice. When people in the real world argue about a particular claim, Toulmin asked, what methods do they use, and which ones are effective, and why? This model of rational argumentation—the Toulmin Model—is the one I will be discussing here.
In the Toulmin Model, an argument is constructed from four components: claims, evidence, inferences, and warrants. The claim is the thing that one is arguing for. I would define a claim as “a proposition that one asserts is true,” with a proposition, in turn, being “a statement that can either be true or false,” whether or its truth is at all plausible and whether or not its truth or falsehood can actually be determined in practice. For example, “The moon is a dragon’s egg,” is a proposition. However implausible it may be to those with a general knowledge of the world, taken in itself as a statement, it could be either true or false. If I then tell you that, yes, the moon actually is a dragon’s egg, my proposition has become a claim.
You, being a person of critical thought, will not take my claim as a given. After all, I can turn any proposition into a claim without any regard for whether the given proposition is true or not. There is nothing at all to stop me from stating the most ridiculous propositions you could imagine as claims. It’s hard to demonstrate this by example because it would be obvious that I’m just stating various propositions that could be stated as claims without me actually trying to convince you of their truth. But let’s say that this was a different episode of A Satanist Reads the Bible called “The Moon Is a Dragon’s Egg,” and the first paragraph of that essay was as follows.
What do you see when you look up at the sky at night? A vast expanse of dark marked by glimmering stars, and perhaps as well, the moon. The moon has long been described by scientists as a rocky planetoid orbiting our own planet, but I’m here today to tell you that it is in fact the egg of a giant dragon, laid long before the first humans walked the earth and due to hatch within our lifetimes. I’m entirely convinced of this fact and, over the course of this episode, I intend to convince you as well that this is exactly the case.
In this paragraph, I’ve made several claims, centrally that the moon is a dragon’s egg, and also that this dragon egg is very ancient and “due to hatch within our lifetimes.” I hope that, if I actually released that as the cold open to one of my episodes, you would be, by that point, entirely unconvinced of these claims. No matter how well I’ve established my ethos over the course of this project as a reliable source of information and insight, I hope that none of my listeners would just turn off the episode there, saying, “Well, I’m convinced!” And not only because the claim is preposterous on its face. Whatever I say, you expect me to back up my claims with evidence.
This is the foundation of rational argumentation. Even concocting ridiculous examples like this, it’s impossible to avoid the necessity for providing the reasons for my own acceptance of the claims I’m making. This much is intuitive. The real art of rhetoric comes from understanding what kind of evidence is or should be accepted in discourse, and why.
The general rule for building an argument is to base it on evidence that would be accepted by a critical audience, meaning, an audience that is inclined to view the claim with skepticism rather than taking it on faith. And, of course, not all evidence that meets that criterion is up to the task. Not only must the evidence be acceptable to a critical audience, it must have some sort of reasonable connection to the claim. This connection is the inference: the evidence presented must infer the claim being argued, and this inference must meet the same criterion of acceptability by a critical audience. If I offer my having had eggs for breakfast as evidence for my claim of the moon being an egg, then my argument will obviously fail, not because my evidence is implausible, but because it has no reasonable inferential connection to the claim I’m making.
Not all of the evidence presented needs to meet this criterion of acceptability immediately, but any evidence that doesn’t meet the criterion must be backed up by further evidence with proper inferences. The inferences don’t have to immediately meet the criterion of acceptability either, but those that don’t have to be backed up by warrants—reasons why a given inference is a valid one—and all of these chains of reasoning must eventually end with evidence, inferences, and warrants that a critical audience would accept.
If you do research into this topic on your own, which I always encourage, you might find some differences in the vocabulary used. Some sources use claim synonymously with evidence—and evidence is indeed a kind of claim—or inference synonymously with warrant, but the general concept and structure of supporting arguments with relevant information remains the same.
This kind of process of informal reasoning is related to but distinct from formal logic, and the word formal here doesn’t designate importance or official status but rather a concern with form rather than meaning. Formal logic often strips the meaning from propositions entirely, reducing them to symbols so that the formal relationships between ideas can be studied absent semantic distractions. Conclusions in formal logic are deductive: they follow invariably from their premises. It is, in other words, entirely impossible for the conclusion of a formal argument to be false if the premises on which it is based are true, but again, this kind of certainty can only take place when the meaning of the premises has been confined to certain specific cases or stripped away entirely. As an example, we can take the common logical form:
- If P, then Q
- P
- Therefore, Q
This form is called modus ponens, Latin for “the mode of affirmation.” It starts with a hypothetical: a statement that, if one thing is true (called the antecedent), then another thing (the consequent) is true as well. Then the antecedent is asserted as true, and the consequent is thus inferred as the conclusion of the argument. If our first premise is true that Q invariably follows from P, and if our second premise P is true by itself, then Q must be true as well, with perfect certainty. If Q isn’t true, it must either be the case that P isn’t true, or that Q doesn’t invariably follow from P (or both are false). But, of course, P and Q don’t actually mean anything by themselves; they’re just abstract symbols. We can substitute simple propositions for the symbols in our logical argument—for example, “If it rains, the street will get wet. It is raining, therefore the street is wet”—but claims made in general discourse are often far too complicated and loaded with semantic complexity to be reducible to formal logic.
The kind of informal logic I’ve been discussing here is, in contrast to formal logic, inductive. Its conclusions are, at best, very likely, but never certain. And while deductive arguments are either valid or invalid, informal, inductive arguments and their constituent claims and support exist on a spectrum from weak to strong. But despite the differences, the study of formal logic is very useful in general and particularly helpful as an aid to rhetoric, as it helps one to gain an intuition for inferences and a stronger ability to identify fallacious reasoning. One example of such a fallacy is affirming the consequent, stating that the antecedent of a hypothetical is true because the consequent is true, instead of the other way around. The argument
- If P, then Q
- Q
- Therefore, P
…is invalid; the conclusion does not follow invariably from the premises. To put this in more concrete terms, if it’s true that if it’s raining, the street is wet, and if it’s true that the street is wet, I cannot rightly infer from that information that it’s raining. The street could be wet for other reasons without it raining at all.
A familiarity with various formal and informal fallacies is invaluable to the study of rhetoric, as it allows one to identify failures in the arguments of others and also to avoid making these kinds of reasoning errors oneself, which in turn allows one to construct stronger arguments and a more accurate understanding of the world. An exhaustive list of reasoning fallacies would be impracticable here, but I’ll cover a few as examples.
The one I see most often misunderstood is the appeal to authority. All of us have beliefs that are based not on our own personal experience and understanding but rather on the expertise of others. For example, I accept quantum mechanics as an accurately predictive mathematical model. I don’t understand the mathematics and I have never performed any of the relevant experiments myself, but I nevertheless accept quantum mechanics because that’s the consensus of the experts, among other reasons. Appeal to authority is, in general, a perfectly valid justification for a claim so long as the authority in question is indeed an expert on the relevant subject matter and does not have a vested interest in my acceptance of the claim. This is not to say that appropriate appeals to authority should be taken at face value or not questioned or explored, or that they always (or ever) constitute definitive proof of a claim (which never occurs in informal, inductive rhetoric in any case); only that they should not be dismissed out of hand as fallacious.
Common in defenses of certain religious beliefs is the appeal to ignorance, the argument that some claim should be taken as true based on it not having been proved false, or that a claim should be taken as false because it hasn’t been proved true. This is obviously fallacious. There are an infinite number of both false and true claims that have never been proved as such, and thus there is no basis for drawing the opposite conclusion in the absence of such proof. However, this is distinct from an argument in which expected evidence for a claim has been sought but found absent. Returning to my “moon is an egg” claim, if I base my argument on it never having been proven false, I’ve made an appeal to ignorance, but a refutation of the claim made by citing the absence of evidence in lunar geological surveys would be entirely valid.
Many fallacies have been documented and it would be worth familiarizing yourself with them as much as possible. Wikipedia has an excellent list, but keep in mind—and I’ve seen a great deal of confusion on this subject—that many fallacies do not describe argument forms that are universally invalid, but rather invalid applications of otherwise valid argument forms. For such fallacies, there exist some arguments in which their use is entirely legitimate. For example, if you were to attack my “moon is an egg” claim based on me being a Satanist and thus inherently untrustworthy, you would have committed an ad hominem fallacy, in which an irrelevant attack on the person is made instead of a relevant attack against the argument itself (this could also be described as an example of a genetic fallacy). However, if my trustworthiness were to itself be the claim under discussion, then attacks on and defenses of my character would be entirely relevant and not necessarily fallacious, although the argument that Satanists are inherently untrustworthy would certainly fail for other reasons. A claim that Christianity is true because so many people believe in it would be a fallacious appeal to popularity; a claim that the Beatles are the most important band of the 20th century based on their enduring popularity would be an appeal of the same variety, but not at all fallacious. A claim that a defendant should be found innocent based on a failure to prove the defendant guilty is a valid appeal to ignorance. So it’s clear that alleged fallacies must be analyzed and not merely asserted, and that the reasons why an occurrence of a given fallacy fails to support its argument must be understood in every particular instance. What’s more, a fallacious argument does not indicate that the claim being argued is actually false; only that the claim should not be accepted based on that particular argument. To assert otherwise is to commit a fallacy known as the fallacy fallacy.
On to a quick example, for which I’ll use a passage from archaeologist Kenneth Feder’s 1990 book Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries, as cited in the 2010 philosophy textbook How to Think About Weird Things by Theodore Schick and Lewis Vaughn:
Is there archaeological evidence for the [Biblical] Flood? If a universal Flood occurred between five and six thousand years ago, killing all humans except the eight on board the Ark, it would be abundantly clear in the archaeological record. Human history would be marked by an absolute break. We would see the devastation wrought by the catastrophe in terms of the destroyed physical remains of pre-Flood human settlements…. Unfortunately for the Flood enthusiasts, the destruction of all but eight of the world’s people left no mark on the archaeology of human cultural evolution.
p. 59
First of all, this is one of those arguments that superficially resembles an appeal to ignorance, but in this case the argument isn’t simply that the Flood myth is false because it hasn’t been proven true, but rather that there is evidence that would be expected if the myth were true that isn’t there. And we’ve got all four of our argument components in this paragraph. The claim is that the Biblical Flood didn’t actually happen, and note that the claim isn’t stated in those words anywhere in the paragraph, but that’s still clearly what the argument is claiming. As evidence for this claim, we have several examples of evidence that we would expect to find if the Flood myth had actually occurred, and which do not exist. The inference is the last sentence: “The destruction of all but eight of the world’s people left no mark on the archaeology of human cultural evolution.” That’s the sentence that connects the evidence to the claim. And then we have a warrant: “If a universal Flood occurred between five and six thousand years ago, killing all humans except the eight on board the Ark, it would be abundantly clear in the archaeological record.” That sentence states why the evidence infers the claim. Also note that the argument does not progress in order from claim to evidence to inference to warrant. The claim is only implied by the question with which the paragraph begins, and then we have a warrant, then evidence, and finally the inference (which also implies the claim). Arguments can always proceed in whatever order is most rhetorically effective, and claims, inferences, and warrants can sometimes be implied rather than stated outright.
Like any other skill, one must practice rational argumentation in order to be effective at it. You can start by analyzing the claims and arguments that surround us every day. Arguments that you should buy something, or do something, or not do something, or believe or not believe something. Claims made by friends on Facebook or strangers on reddit or by news anchors on television. Try to break them down into claims, evidence, inferences, and warrants, or observe where those elements are absent and where they could have been used to better support the claims being made. Identify fallacies. Construct counterarguments. I’ve found the social journalism platform Medium to be an outstanding repository of practice material, as the articles frequently rise above the level of vacuous clickbait while remaining shoddily-constructed and riddled with fallacious reasoning. Most importantly, argue against yourself. Outline an argument for a position you believe in, and then do your best to construct an argument to counter it. And, while not at all certain to be productive (though no debate is), try engaging others in online debate using rational argumentation.
Under ideal circumstances, arguments against claims made by others should follow the rules of game theorist Anatol Rapoport, as described in the 2013 book Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking by philosopher Daniel Dennett:
- You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.”
- You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement)
- You should mention anything you have learned from your target.
- Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.
I’ve found that this approach often helps to make the discussion more productive and objective, and, after all, the point of rational argumentation is not to “win” a given debate, but to resolve disagreement and get to the truth, and if a claim holds up to the most intense scrutiny and reasonable doubt, then we have good reasons for accepting that claim as true. But finding out that you’re wrong about something is just as much of a victory as someone else agreeing that you’re right, and people respect those who admit when they’re wrong more than they respect those who stolidly insist that they’re right despite mounting evidence to the contrary.
I hope you’ve found this piece interesting and informative. If you’ve enjoyed it, I encourage you to look at some of my other essays, and if you find my approach to philosophy and religion at all valuable, I hope that you’ll stop in at my Patreon page, which features bonus content for patrons, and that you’ll stop back by to check on my new content.
Works Cited or Referenced
Creath, R. (2020). Logical Empiricism. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2020). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2020/entries/logical-empiricism/
Dennett, D. C. (2013). Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking. Norton & Company.
List of fallacies. (2020). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_fallacies&oldid=965166208
Schick, T., & Vaughn, L. (2010). How to think about weird things: Critical thinking for a new age (6th ed). McGraw-Hill.
Taylor, C. C. W., & Lee, M.-K. (2016). The Sophists. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/sophists/
Toulmin, S. E. (2003). The Uses of Argument (Updated edition). Cambridge University Press.