Читать книгу Making Arguments: Reason in Context - Edmond H. Weiss - Страница 33

An advocate’s anticipation of, and adaptation to, judgment, both in the preparations stage and during the actual argument, is the single most important factor in the framing of arguments. But that consideration does not tell the whole story about how to make our arguments. We must clearly differentiate the arena of judgment from the particularities or peculiarities of the judge.

What we have called philosophies or paradigms of judgment represent the broad arenas in which an argument is assessed. Argumentation theorists call these "argument fields." Their distinctness (or divergence) derives from the different ways that arguments can be judged. Moreover, for each way of judging an argument, an autonomous field can emerge, enabling disciplinary boundaries between argumentative judges and communities. Thus, scientists can judge arguments differently from politicians, for example. We know, for example, that critical and scientific arguments are not only different, but they are settled differently. We expect the standards for judgment for a given field to distinguish it from another. In fact, the disciplinary boundaries that we recognize in intellectual settings like universities are a map of these different judging paradigms.

Many philosophers, especially those who study intellectual history and the philosophy of science, recognize such boundaries. Rather than view them as arbitrary, or as the mere products of inter-subjective agreement, these thinkers suggest that the grounds for what is accepted in a field arise less out of social epistemology, and more out of rational, logical, and argumentative structures. Similarly, scientists accept certain standards of argument not just because scientists agree with them per se, but rather because there is no recognizable science without them. (Note: Scientists can develop opinions and claims any way they like; to prove their conclusions, though, they need formal scientific arguments.)

In later chapters we will examine not only at how different fields argue, but also the standards within those fields that help to “fence them off” from other fields.