Virtue theories of argumentation

Although, as we have seen, virtues have been invoked for some time in theories of argument, an explicit virtue theory of argumentation (VTA) is a more recent innovation (for a brief survey, see Aberdein and Cohen, 2016).

One of the difficulties that besets argumentation theory as a whole is that it is massively interdisciplinary: it brings together work from many different disciplines, including logic, epistemology, both cognitive and social psychology, communication, management, rhetoric, decision theory, law, computer science, education, economics, and others. This is, of course, a tremendous opportunity, but it also presents a massive coordination problem: it can be difficult for the minority of people in each discipline who focus on argumentation to find each other (and avoid duplicating each other's work).That problem is exacerbated for subdisciplines of argumentation theory, such as VTA, since the numbers involved are even smaller. Perhaps for this reason,VTA has mostly drawn inspiration from the familiar fields of virtue ethics and virtue epistemology; there has as yet been much less interaction with virtue jurisprudence or virtue-theoretic work in rhetoric and economics, although there is an independent interest in applying virtues (including humility) to argumentation in all of these areas (for example, de Bruin, 2013;Agnew, 2018;Amaya, 2018).

A crucial question for VTA is whether its virtues are argumentation-specific or whether it just applies generic intellectual (or moral) virtues to argumentation. For present purposes, this is to ask whether there is any such thing as argumentative humility, distinct from, or a special case of, intellectual humility. If we concede as much, perhaps we should also recognize deliberative humility and critical thinking humility as further subdivisions. We have already seen that Aikin and Clanton distinguish deliberative from epistemic virtues, since being conducive to truth need not be conducive to the optimal conduct of deliberation.

In other words, deliberation and belief formation have a different telos. Elsewhere, I have argued that the telos of argumentation is the propagation of truth: “where virtuous knowers are disposed to act in a way that leads to the acquisition of true beliefs, virtuous arguers are disposed to spread true beliefs around” (Aberdein, 2010, p. 173). Katharina Stevens has a more sweeping proposal: “the good of argumentation is the bettering of belief-systems—furthering of knowledge, extension ofjustificatory inferences, gaining of information and understanding etc.” (Stevens, 2016, p. 377). However, the same virtue may contribute to the successful pursuit of different activities with different ends. So, it need not follow that argumentation (let alone deliberation or critical thinking) requires a distinct set of virtues just because it has its own telos. On this basis, at least on Kidd's confidence-calibration account, I think it is reasonable to see intellectual humility as contributing to all of these goals.

If intellectual humility is a virtue of argument, how is it related to other such virtues—and what are these other virtues? One radical perspective would be to argue that traditional character virtues, such as intellectual humility, are all that is needed for argumentation. Against such a position, Olivier Morin maintains that “mere civil virtues (respect, humility, or honesty) do not suffice: we need virtues that specifically attach to the practice of making conscious inferences” (Morin, 2014, p. 499). I shall not attempt to adjudicate this issue here, although in my own work I follow Daniel Cohen, an early advocate ofVTA, in proposing four basic virtues of argument: willingness to engage in serious argumentation; willingness to listen to others; willingness to modify one's own position; and willingness to question the obvious (Cohen, 2005, p. 64). Each of these is to be understood as a mean between a pair of vices. I complicate Cohen's typology by subdividing each of his virtues (and vices) to make room for many of the more traditional, character-based virtues and vices, especially those invoked in the responsibilist approach to virtue epistemology (Aberdein, 2010, 2016a).

Specifically, I list intellectual humility as a subtype of willingness to modify one's own position. Perhaps it might with equal justice have been treated as a subtype of willingness to listen to others. Certainly, if one modifies one's own position after carefully listening to another's arguments, one has exercised humility at each step; which step took the greater humility is presumably specific to the individual case.³ More generally, no typology of this kind can be more than suggestive, since the relationship between the virtues is too multi-dimensional to be fully captured by a simple hierarchical classification.

Some scholars argue that intellectual humility is not just a virtue of argument, but the virtue of argument—that it has a significance more profound than other such virtues. For example, Lois Agnew maintains that intellectual humility is “a guiding principle of public discourse”, central to the discipline of rhetoric (Agnew, 2018, p. 335). And we have already noted Kyle Scott's argument that “humility is pivotal to the proper functioning of the other virtues” (Scott, 2014, p. 230). The concept of a higher-order virtue that is necessary for the regulation of the others is an ancient one. For Aristotle this is the virtue of phronesis, variously translated as practical wisdom or common sense. A number of virtues of argument have been proposed as candidates for a higher-order role in VTA, notably “willingness to inquire” (Hamby, 2015) and “willingness to be rationally persuaded” (Baumtrog, 2016), Elsewhere, I have suggested that intellectual humility may function in this role (Aberdein, 2016b, p. 8). We have already noted the close affinity between intellectual humility and metacognition, which is naturally implicated in any project of higher-order regulation of thinking dispositions. Moreover, the other candidates appear to be subordinate to intellectual humility: if one’s level of intellectual confidence is appropriately calibrated, then one should also be both willing to inquire and willing to be rationally persuaded; but if it isn’t, one won’t be.

Nonetheless, as just remarked, the relationship between virtues is complex and multi-dimensional. For this reason, we should be cautious about any simple assignment of priority among virtues.Anything less would be a conspicuous failure of intellectual humility.

Notes

1 It should be noted that, although the explicit invocation of a principle of charity can be dated with confidence to the 1950s, the underlying sense of charity is manifestly older:Thomas Carlyle, for one, could write of a “charitable reading” almost a century earlier (Carlyle, 1865, p. 560).

2 The rhetorician John Duffy makes a complementary point:“to provide evidence is to subject one’s self to the authority and judgment of another, which is a form of humility” (Duffy, 2014, p. 220).

3 On this basis, I am unconcerned by the apparent tension between the discussion of the ad verecundiam fallacy above as a failure of humility, and my earlier treatment of it as primarily a failure of recognition of reliable authority, treated as a subtype of willingness to listen to others (Aberdein, 2016a, p. 420). As I argue in that paper, we should not expect fallacies to map neatly to vices: which of these vices is uppermost will turn on features of the individual fallacious argument.

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