How do we Learn from Argument? Toward an Account of The Logic of Problems

Abstract

From the pre-Socratics to the present, one primary aim of philosophy has been to learn from arguments. Philosophers have debated whether we could indeed do this, but they have by and large agreed on how we would use arguments if learning from argument was at all possible. They have agreed that we could learn from arguments either by starting with true premises and validly deducing further statements which must also be true and therefore constitute new knowledge, or that we could start from putative premises and validly deduce false consequences thereby showing that our premises were false. Our aim in this paper is to suggest a third alternative: we can learn from plausible arguments (invalid arguments which meet some other unspecified desiderata of approximation to valid arguments) through criticism of such arguments which enable us to discover new problems.