In this guest post, philosopher and public policy researcher Dr Alan Tapper wonders: Where does the teaching of reasoning fit into the life of the classroom? Is it built into the curriculum? Is it part of the tacit knowledge of teachers, something that they pass on to their students, perhaps not explicitly but in the way they model discussion and analysis? Or is it perhaps somewhat neglected and under-recognised?

Truth is a wonderful thing, but it is only half of a good argument. Even if the argument’s premises are true, the inference must be a good one. But we don’t take enough notice of the inference process. Educators that I have discussed this with have no shared name for the inference process, nor a shared language for the evaluation of inferences. It is a serious lack, but one that can be fixed.

All arguments, by definition, have three basic components. Teachers readily identify two of the three: arguments must start from reasons (which are also referred to as premises or grounds or evidence) and conclude with a conclusion. Nothing problematic there. Thus the simplest possible standard form of any argument looks like this:

Reason(s) 

Conclusion

The third component is, obviously, the arrow that shows the flow of the argument from reason to conclusion. But what does the arrow symbolise? What is the natural terminology for it? The teachers with whom I have spoken stumble at this point. There is no dispute that arguments have these three components, but they have no agreed terminology, and often have no words at all to pick out this part of the argument.

Teachers of reasoning universally refer to it as the inference, and they observe that the English language marks the inference with two different sets of inference indicators: the therefore set, which stands in front of the conclusion, including thus, hence, so, and consequently; and the because set, which stands in front of the reason, including since, for, and as shown by. These words are not always used explicitly, and sometimes the fact that an argument has been put forward has to be read contextually, but whenever the intention to argue is correctly identified, the inference is in place and the inference indicators can be inserted.

Note that this three-part division involves no judgements about the quality of the argument. All arguments, whether good, bad or indifferent, possess this structure. But the great advantage in being familiar with the structure is that it makes it possible to engage in argument evaluation in a focused way. Arguments can fall short in two distinct ways. They may suffer because the premise or premises are unreliable—that is, at least one of the premises is not known or agreed to be true. Or, quite differently, arguments may fail because the step from premise to conclusion—that is, the inference—is faulty. The premise fails to support the conclusion adequately.

Curiously, this second sort of failure is not a failure of truth, since the step from premise to conclusion is not itself a proposition that might be true or false; it is an action, a step, a move, or more generally, an inference. And the terminology required to evaluate inferences is different from the terminology used to evaluate propositions (truth and falsity). Inferences are evaluated as valid or invalid. A special sort of thinking is needed to make judgements of validity. Its general form is captured by the question: Does this conclusion really follow from that premise (or those premises)? This is mental muscle-building, but it works only if we have a shared practice of argument.

Good arguments must be successful on two quite different fronts: on their premises, and on the inference. If both dimensions are acceptable then the argument overall is a good one; it is cogent, and we are required to accept the conclusion, if we wish to behave like rational beings. A good critical thinker should be able to evaluate any given argument on both counts and be clear exactly at which point the argument is flawed, if it is.

All argumentative essays are supposed to have premises, inference, and conclusion. If the conclusion claims more than the evidence will support, or less than it will support, or if it is even—as I would guess is not uncommon—irrelevant to that evidence, then the essay falls down because the inference process is poorly thought through. A student might do plenty of excellent research and yet fail to make that research add up to a cogent position.

Awareness of the structure of argument is just as important in classroom discussion as it is in essays—maybe even more important, because in discussion there is little time for careful reflection and so it is much easier to get side-tracked or bamboozled by leaps in reasoning. A good student is one who is able to ask, when leaps are being made: But how does that follow?

I think that the explicit teaching of reasoning skills can accelerate student learning and strengthen student engagement and motivation to learn. All that is needed is some knowledge of the elementary structures of argument, and a bunch of realistic and interesting examples.

The practice of reasoning is an inherently creative and constructive activity. It is the kind of creativity that happily wrestles with controversy. To quote Laurence Splitter and Ann Sharp, “Inquiry aims at a common understanding or agreement while nevertheless being driven by a sense of tension: the creative tension that springs from embracing that which is problematic or contestable” (Teaching for Better Thinking: The classroom community of inquiry, p. 19). In their view, however, “for many students, problems are obstacles to be eliminated, and the sense of intellectual tension that comes from confronting a problem is something to be avoided: if things get tough, look for a short-cut, ask the teacher, or just give up”.

The teaching of reasoning has a further higher-level benefit. A grasp of the reasoning process will help students to steer a course between what I regard as two sterile philosophical dogmas: positivism, and relativism. The positivist dogma is that all knowledge is simply factual. The pedagogy that follows from this is one that treats inquiry as a process that need not occur in the classroom, since it has already been completed in the laboratory or the research institute. The relativist dogma is that all supposed knowledge is endlessly contestable. The relativist pedagogy can also be hostile to disciplined inquiry, since such inquiry assumes that ‘reason’ gets results, the very contention that relativism seeks to deny. Contrary to both these extremes, we should be clear that an educated person is one who knows how to engage in the practice of reasonable debate and discussion, weighing up opposing opinions and evidence. Such a person respects both the importance of established bodies of knowledge and the difficulty of reaching sound judgements on contested questions, without collapsing into the dogmas of positivism or relativism.

I could add also that this issue has a political dimension, since being able to critically evaluate competing policies and ideologies is an important part of democratic citizenship. One would like to think that what the Marquis of Halifax said 300 years ago is still at least partly true: “… the world is grown saucy and expecteth reasons, and good ones too, before they give up their own opinions to other men’s dictates, though never so magisterially delivered to them.”

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This is an abridged version of Alan Tapper’s longer article, The Magical Inference – A guide for educators which appears in Wondering: A Journal of Philosophical Inquiry Of, By and For Children of All Ages, published by Christopher Phillips and adapted here with permission.

Dr Alan Tapper is a philosopher and a public policy researcher in Perth, Australia. He is the co-author of three philosophy textbooks for secondary schools in the series Philosophy and Ethics (Cengage, 2015). See his profile on PhilPapers.

I would like to thank Alan for his longstanding support for The Philosophy Club’s work.