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Persuasive Argument and Disagreements of Principle

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Eric B. Dayton
Eric B. Dayton*
Affiliation:
University of Saskatchewan
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Extract

It is commonly said that ethical disputes either involve disagreements of fact or disagreements of principle and that while disagreements of fact can be overcome by rational means, disagreements of principle cannot. The difficulty is supposed to be this: for an argument to be rationally persuasive it must appeal to premises already accepted by the person to be persuaded, and if the premises include the principle in question then they will not be acceptable to that person; however, if the premises do not include the principle in question the argument cannot succeed because the conclusion can only validly be inferred from premises which do include the principle in question. While this doctrine is appealing to philosophers who find the idea of ultimate disagreement in ethics comforting, it is a visciously skeptical view which can be generalized to cover all systematic areas of human knowledge. As ‘disagreements of principle’ can appear in almost any domain of human inquiry, the hidden cost of this doctrine is terribly high.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 11 , Issue 4 , December 1981 , pp. 741 - 749
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1981

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References

1 As any inductive argument can be reconstructed as a deductive practical argument to accept the conclusion, this is no real limitation; see, e.g., W. Sellars, ‘Are there Non-deductive Logics?’, in Essays in Honour of C.G. Hempel, Synthese, 1970.

2 Nothing hangs on this reference to the moment before t. However I find metaphysically repugnant the idea that an act of inference takes no time: first, it seems to me that all actions take time. Secondly, propositions are involved in acts of inference and, if one inferred something one initially believed to be mistaken and inference took no time, one would simultaneously believe propositions which are inconsistent.

3 See my ‘Towards a Theory of Rational Inference’, Philosophical Studies, 30 (1976) 259-67. This kind of view, which is essentially the traditional pragmatic Theory of Inquiry is again gaining currency largely as a result of the views of Gilbert Harman, Lehrer and others.