The recently-announced death of the philosopher Stephen Toulmin reminded me of graduate school, where I so frequently heard the words "Toulmin says" pronounced by faculty and graduate students alike. Toulmin paid close attention to the nature of argument and persuasion, and in doing so provided some lessons for those who aspire to skill in critical thinking. He described six characteristics of argument, but to my mind there are three that most of us need to concentrate on. Careful consideration of these three characteristics can help us decide whether we should be persuaded to accept an idea that someone offers us and can help us challenge some incorrect statements about child development.
The first of these aspects of argument is the making of a CLAIM. That is, when we want to persuade another person to agree with us, we have to begin by a fairly direct statement of what it is we want them to agree with. This statement--- "the sun is shining at this moment", or, "the health care reform bill presently contains language that would encourage the use of complementary and alternative treatments", or, "when you bake chicken, spreading it with mayonnaise gives a juicier dish than marinating it does"--- is presumably different from what our hearer currently believes, or there would be no argument needed. The claim needs to be stated in a way that is meaningful and means the same thing to all parties, or they may think they have agreement when they do not.
The second aspect of argument is presentation of a GROUND. The ground or grounds involve information that we provide as evidence for the claim, as we can't expect people to be persuaded by a simple statement with nothing to support it. We might present our own observations or photographs of the sun which include the time of day; we might present a list of the number of statements in drafts of the bill that refer positively to complementary and alternative treatments; we could provide two dishes of chicken, cooked in different ways, and allow our audience to make his or her own decision on their juiciness.
The third aspect of argument, and in my opinion the one most often neglected or handled inappropriately, is the WARRANT. The warrant shows the logical connection between the ground and the claim. Information offered as a ground, even though it is perfectly correct, may actually have nothing to do with the claim in question. If this is the case, or if claim and ground are only tenuously connected, the warrant cannot be made, and an audience of critical thinkers should not be persuaded to accept the claim.
Let's consider a claim about child development that occurs on a number of Internet sites: "If older adopted children and their parents frequently gaze into each others' eyes, the children will develop emotional attachment to the adoptive parents." Sustained eye contact is often recommended in advice about adoption available on the Internet, but should we accept this claim?
Our best reason for accepting or rejecting a claim of this kind would involve systematic collection of data under controlled conditions, but no such research is available, so we have to examine the argument given in support of the claim, and the claim itself. In this case, does the claim make sense and mean the same thing to every reader? Mutual gaze seems easy enough to define, and it would be possible to decide what "frequently" might indicate. But what about "develop emotional attachment"? Is there an agreed-on way to decide whether or not such attachment has been developed? For toddlers, yes, there are standardized attachment measures, and similar methods have been suggested and tested for preschoolers and even 6-year-olds. However, the claim had to do with older children, and although there have been many efforts to assess attachment in school-age children, there is no well-accepted method. We find, then, that in this case the claim itself is difficult to clarify.
The grounds offered in support of this claim involve observation of infants and toddlers and the fact that young children often engage in mutual gaze with their parents during the age period when attachment seems to be a most obvious aspect of behavior and emotion. These facts are well substantiated.
But what about the warrant? We need to connect the grounds with the claim by logical reasoning. We seem to be missing a couple of steps in this case. First, our grounds are lacking any evidence that mutual gaze of toddlers and parents is an actual cause of attachment; they could both be caused by other factors, or a feeling of attachment could be the reason for enjoying mutual gaze. Without some evidence that gazing causes attachment in younger children, we cannot connect the grounds we have with support for the claim that older children can be caused to form attachments in this way. Second, we have no information suggesting that the rules governing events in toddlerhood are relevant to events in later childhood. It would be possible to gather such information if it exists, but it certainly is not stated in the grounds given in the previous paragraph. It does not seem possible to construct an acceptable warrant using the claim and grounds in question.
Examination of this claim, the available grounds, and the problems of creating a warrant shows that an audience of critical thinkers would not be persuaded to accept the claim as it stands. Following Stephen Toulmin's rules can provide a good defense against persuasive statements about unsupported claims. The tricky part is really about the warrant. People who are trying to persuade us to accept their claims are often eager to rush past their reasoning, just as advertisers of dish detergent use loud music to prevent us from realizing that unless your hands are really filthy, they probably won't be improved by any detergent! Be sure to examine the warrant, and you will have a much better chance of using your capacity for critical thinking.
