The Practice of Argumentation (Critical Reasoning and Argumentation) by David Zarefsky

Author:David Zarefsky
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2019-09-18T21:00:00+00:00

Sign

Warrants from sign are used in arguments about representations, justifying inferences that relate unknowable essences to their observable properties. They enable us to make predictions about the underlying condition or abstraction from the presence of the tangible representation. If we accept that one thing is a sign of another, then the presence of the first thing should enable us to infer the presence of the second. But the relationship between the sign and the thing signified could turn out to be nothing more than coincidence, or the same sign could herald more than one underlying condition – even underlying conditions that are inconsistent and work at cross-purposes. And another difficulty with sign inferences is that they tell us nothing about why the essential feature and the external property go together. In particular, we do not know that either condition exerts any influence on the other, so making judgments about what we should do in the future based on a sign relationship can be fallacious. Suppose we know that inflation tends to be low when presidents of the Republicrat party are in office. Since we don’t know why this relationship exists, it does not follow that if we elect the Republicrat candidate in the next election, low inflation would ensue. We need to remember that sign warrants justify inferences based on correlation, not causal links.

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