Justificatory Reasoning

-- Valerie Ross If on my theme I rightly think, There are five reasons why men drink, Good wine, a friend, because I m dry, Or lest I should be by and by, Or any other reason why. --John Sirmond (1589) Justificatory reasoning is demanded whenever we advance a proposition that is debatablethat some or most readers may not accept. John Sirmond, in the toast cited above, offers five reasons why men drink, satirizing the rigorous, grinding study of logic demanded of students in the 16th century. As things change, so they remain the same. Justificatory reasoning may defend or revise (or satirize) a proposition that most take for granted: Bicyclists should obey traffic regulations could be one such. Or a proposition might advance a new or generally unfamiliar idea: Plants have emotions. Whatever the occasion, the justificatory proposition must have as its goal to justify something, and all reasons, evidence, and explanations in the text must be aimed at this justification. The object is to gain the audiences adherence, filling their minds with reasoning, conditioning them at every turn to accept ones proposition: a convergence of arguments. To locate good reasons, a writer should take Aristotles advice: use your imagination, observation, and research to discover every possible reason, bit of evidence, figure of speech, feeling, analogy, experience in support of your argument. Then select from among these the few that your reader will find persuasive. Aristotle and others also encouraged aspiring rhetoricians to keep their eyes and ears peeled for situations and premises that the people around them seemed to find persuasive or that incited strong emotions. Aristotle created a catalogue of emotions and the situations that inspired them, while Cicero made lists of premises that people seemed to find compelling. There is more to good critical writing than identifying persuasive premises, reasons and evidence, however. In The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare criticizes the weak reasoning skills of Gratiano, because he speaks an infinite deal of nothing. He continues, His reasons are as two grains of wheat hid in two bushels of chaff: you shall seek all day ere you find them, and when you have them, they are not worth the search. Good reasoning, as Shakespeare asserts, depends on strong reasons, to be sure, but also reasons that can be easily located and identified as such. Those who read critical writing are in search of reasons and evidence. The pleasure of reading critical writing is its reasoning. Aesthetic pleasure is a plus, but not at the expense of clarity. Thus skillful critical writers tend to foreground the architecture of their arguments. The reasoning is, after all, what informs and persuades us, unless we are of the sort who embrace propositions at face value, regardless of the quality of reasoning behind it. For those versed in critical reasoning, however,

how a writer arrives at his position is what we will use as the basis of our reaction. If a writer has not clearly reasoned his way to his proposition, the skillful critical reader will remain unpersuaded. Barbara Ehrenreich exemplifies this approach to critical writing in her recent essay, Are Women Sadder (2009). Her proposition refutes the findings of a recent study on happiness, which led to the conclusion that feminism has made women unhappy. Ehrenreich offers several reasons why this conclusion is misguided. Here are the first two reasons she provides: For starters, happiness is an inherently slippery thing to measure or define. Philosophers have debated what it is for centuries, and even if we were to define it simply as a greater frequency of positive feelings than negative ones, when we ask people if they are happy, we are asking them to arrive at some sort of average over many moods and moments. Maybe I was upset earlier in the day after I opened the bills, but then was cheered up by a call from a friend, so what am I really? In one well-known psychological experiment, subjects were asked to answer a questionnaire on life satisfaction, but only after they had performed the apparently irrelevant task of photocopying a sheet of paper for the experimenter. For a randomly chosen half of the subjects, a dime had been left for them to find on the copy machine. As two economists summarize the results: "Reported satisfaction with life was raised substantially by the discovery of the coin on the copy machine -- clearly not an income effect." As for the particular happiness study under discussion, the red flags start popping up as soon as you look at the data. Not to be anti-intellectual about it, but the raw data on how men and women respond to the survey reveal no discernible trend to the naked eyeball. Only by performing an occult statistical manipulation called "ordered probit estimates," do the authors manage to tease out any trend at all, and it is a tiny one: "Women were one percentage point less likely than men to say they were not too happy at the beginning of the sample [1972]; by 2006 women were one percentage more likely to report being in this category." Differences of that magnitude would be stunning if you were measuring, for example, the speed of light under different physical circumstances, but when the subject is as elusive as happiness -- well, we are not talking about paradigm-shifting results. Note that Ehrenreich opens each paragraph with a clearly-stated reason to support her proposition. Each paragraph is then devoted to developing its reason with examples and other concrete evidence. Her first reason is supported with one example drawn from philosophy, another hypothetical example, and then a third drawn from a different study on life satisfaction. Each of these examples clearly supports and illuminates reason one: defining and measuring happiness is very difficult. Ehrenreich opens her next paragraph with reason two: the study is unreliable. She develops this reason throughout the paragraph by pointing to the data and how it was interpreted by the researchers. As in the prior paragraph, she provides concrete evidence to support her reason. This paragraphs concluding sentence manages to support the reason of the paragraph while tying it to the reason of the previous paragraph, a masterful display of convergence.

As Ehrenreichs argument suggests, ones reasoning may be subtle, imaginative, even playful, but ones structure of reasoningits architectureshould be solid and transparent to reader and writer alike. Demonstration of reasoning is fundamental to persuasion. It is not sufficient for Ehrenreich to declare that people have drawn the wrong conclusions from a recent happiness study and then to meander about, offering stories, evidence, ideas about happiness and feminism, no matter how lyrically she writes about these. Tangents and associative trails are red flags of weak reasoning, of a writer not in control of what he is trying to say. Muddled structure is muddy thought. While the framework (though not necessarily the ordering) of reasoning is relatively consistent across disciplines and professions, members of specialized audiences, scholarly, professional, or social, have rules and evidence that are acceptable, or unacceptable, to their community. The most obvious example is the court of law, where some evidence and some lines of argument are admissible, and others are not. Similarly, hauling in charts and graphs to support your interpretation of a poem is unlikely to move your English professor. Quotations and close readings of poetry will not move your math and science professors. Some of your readers will put great stock in number crunching, while others will prefer ethnographies and case studies, and still others will seek material objects or recordings, or evidence exclusively confined to a particular text, such as a poem or film or religious tract. In such fields as philosophy, how the writer reasonsthe nature of the proofis what most matters; in others, such as literature, how well the writer demonstrates skill with language can be as persuasive as the textual evidence itself. When you set out to persuade others, begin by thinking of reasons that cover the gamut: numbers, stories, analogies, studies, examples, abstract and concrete universal premises. Sort through these to find the ones you think will be most compelling to your particular readership. And if you are an undergraduate student with a writing assignment, or a newbie at a professional firm, you should find out what kinds and rules of evidence are permitted and persuasive in that particular field.