The Unspoken Step in an Argument

Tag: Synthesis

Imagine two people talking about a birthday. It is a made-up conversation, and this piece follows one idea in it.

First: “My brother didn’t call on my birthday.”

Second: “He forgot his own anniversary last year.”

First: “Which says everything about what matters to him.”

Second: “It says he’s bad with dates.”

They agree on the facts. He didn’t call. He forgot an anniversary. But they do not agree on what it means.

Ask each of them why, and they will say more.

First: “People remember what matters to them.”

Second: “Some people just don’t remember dates.”

They agree on the facts and differ on the step after it

Put into plain words, each person’s step looks like this.

He didn’t call → people remember what matters to them → so he doesn’t care much.

He didn’t call → forgetting a date is usually about memory, not caring → so he’s bad with dates.

Same fact. Different middle step. Different conclusion.

The middle step is what Stephen Toulmin described in his book The Uses of Argument (1958). He called it a warrant (a belief about how things usually go, which lets you step from a fact to a conclusion). Most of the time nobody says it aloud.

Toulmin’s idea has several parts. This piece follows only one: the warrant.

To the person holding it, a warrant can feel like plain fact

I think this is why neither person said it aloud. It can feel like plain fact, so there is nothing to defend. Someone who reaches a different conclusion can then look unreasonable. This is my own thought about a made-up conversation. It does not come from Toulmin or from any study.

Saying it aloud shows a question underneath

If both warrants were said aloud, a question would show: does forgetting dates mean someone doesn’t care? Each conclusion depends on the answer, and nobody has asked it. That is how I read the exchange.

Saying the warrants aloud would not settle that. The two might still disagree.

Toulmin described how an argument is built. As the scholar Bart Verheij notes, he gave no standard for judging whether an argument is good. So his idea cannot say which warrant is better. And one made-up conversation cannot show how often real arguments work this way.

In Toulmin’s account, an argument usually rests on a warrant nobody says aloud. Two people can accept the same facts and still differ on it.

He hadn’t called. They agreed on that.

Glossary

• Warrant: the belief about how things usually go that lets you move from a fact to a conclusion. It usually goes unspoken.

Sources

Claims about Toulmin’s book are drawn from the Verheij and Hitchcock papers listed here.

• Toulmin, S. E. (1958). The Uses of Argument. Cambridge University Press. (An updated edition was published in 2003; cite the edition you read.)
• Verheij, B. (2005). Evaluating arguments based on Toulmin’s scheme. Argumentation, 19, 347–371. https://www.ai.rug.nl/~verheij/publications/pdf/toulmin2005.pdf
• Hitchcock, D. (2003). Toulmin’s warrants. Pp. 69–82. Reprinted in Argumentation Library, vol. 30 (2017), pp. 81–95. https://www.humanities.mcmaster.ca/~hitchckd/Toulminswarrants.pdf