Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Causal theories
- 3 Evidence to support theories
- 4 Alternative theories
- 5 Counterarguments
- 6 Rebuttals
- 7 Epistemological theories
- 8 Evaluation of evidence
- 9 The role of expertise
- 10 Conclusion
- Appendix 1 Main interview
- Appendix 2 Coding procedures
- Appendix 3 Summary of statistical analyses
- Appendix 4 Causal line frequencies
- References
- Index
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Causal theories
- 3 Evidence to support theories
- 4 Alternative theories
- 5 Counterarguments
- 6 Rebuttals
- 7 Epistemological theories
- 8 Evaluation of evidence
- 9 The role of expertise
- 10 Conclusion
- Appendix 1 Main interview
- Appendix 2 Coding procedures
- Appendix 3 Summary of statistical analyses
- Appendix 4 Causal line frequencies
- References
- Index
Summary
In this chapter, we examine a reasoning skill that plays a clear and important role in everyday life. People come in constant contact with information that bears on the beliefs they hold. How do they interpret this information? Although this processing of new information is not usually connected to argumentive reasoning, in this chapter we see that the two in fact bear a close and important relation to one another.
Subjects are asked to interpret two kinds of evidence related to two of the three topics they have previously been questioned about – school failure and prisoners' return to crime. The main interview for these two topics occurs during the first interview session, and evidence evaluation takes place during the second session. Hence, subjects' discussion of their theories is separated in time from their evaluation of evidence related to the theories.
The two kinds of evidence, which we refer to as underdetermined and overdetermined evidence, stand in sharp contrast to one another. Underdetermined evidence is not really evidence at all. It simply describes the phenomenon (school failure or return to crime) in the context of a single, specific instance of its occurrence, with at most minimal cues with respect to possible causes. In the case of overdetermined evidence, in contrast, three broad sets of antecedents are identified as possible causes of the phenomenon. Each set of factors co-occurs with outcome (school failure or return to crime), and each is advocated as causal by a different authority figure.
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- Chapter
- Information
- The Skills of Argument , pp. 204 - 239Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991