Publisher's Synopsis
From the PREFACE.
This book arises out of certain beliefs concerning the study of argumentation, which, though perhaps not wholly novel, have as yet found no recognition in the literature of the subject. The first of these beliefs is that the principles of argumentation should be derived by the student from its practice before the practice is made to conform to the principles. In short-one may as well acknowledge it-a firm faith in the so-called "inductive method" as applied to argumentation lies at the root of this treatise. Such a faith implies, of course, that the student should be asked to dissect out logical formula; for himself from his own unconscious reasonings, using them, when discovered, to render those reasonings more exact. The construction and the rough analysis of arguments would, similarly, precede the formulation of any principles of persuasion.
Such a plan as this, it will be noted, assigns to the student a task at once more difficult and more stimulating than that which the usual methods require. He is not asked simply to accept certain logical formulae on the authority of text-book or teacher and apply them to his own writing; but first to quarry out these formulae from his own writing and then to use them for such modification of that writing as may seem necessary. His duty is thus doubled; but it is also enlivened by the zest of discovery. He deals not with the dead products of other people's labor, but with the fruits of his own first-hand observation and thought. In his study of the processes of reasoning he reasons himself, inductively as well as deductively, - an issue by no means inevitable under the old system.
From the conviction that the student should formulate his own principles of argumentation follows the second article of faith: that the subjects set for argument and the material used for analysis should be not remote from the student's natural interests, but interwoven with his daily experiences. If the student is to gain his principles from his unconscious practice, it follows that he will, for a time at least, be concerned with arguments about the probable score of the coming football game or the fairness of a certain examination rather than the desirability of a high protective tariff for the United States or the iniquity of free silver. Whenever these latter topics come to have a real and first-hand interest, they may well be used; but simpler and more intimate questions will usually serve better to disclose the typical processes of reasoning and argument, not obscuring them by needless bulk and complexity in the subject-matter. When once these typical processes have become thoroughly familiar in their simpler aspects, they may easily be traced through the mazes of an intricate and voluminous argument in politics or sociology. Work of this more ambitious type, however, properly follows the elementary study of the principles of argumentation with which we are here concerned....
