Laypeople\u2019s Evaluation of Arguments: Are Criteria for Argument Quality Scheme-Specific?

Peter Jan Schellens,Ester Šorm,Rian Timmers,Hans Hoeken

doi:10.1007/s10503-016-9418-2

Peter Jan Schellens, Ester Šorm + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-016-9418-2

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Abstract

Can argumentation schemes play a part in the critical processing of argumentation by lay people? In a qualitative study, participants were invited to come up with strong and weak arguments for a given claim and were subsequently interviewed for why they thought the strong argument was stronger than the weak one. Next, they were presented with a list of arguments and asked to rank these arguments from strongest to weakest, upon which they were asked to motivate their judgments in an interview. In order to assess whether lay people apply argument scheme specific criteria when performing these tasks, five different argumentation schemes were included in this study: argumentation from authority, from example, from analogy, from cause to effect, and from consequences. Laypeople’s use of criteria for argument quality was inferred from interview protocols. The results revealed that participants combined general criteria from informal logic (such as relevance and acceptability) and scheme-specific criteria (such as expertise for argumentation from authority, similarity for argumentation from analogy, effectiveness for argumentation from consequences). The results supported the conventional validity of the pragma-dialectical argument scheme rule in a strong sense and provided a more fine-grained view of central processing in the Elaboration Likelihood Model.

Highlights

To assess the quality of an argument, criteria can be applied that are specific for the argument scheme at hand.1 For instance, when evaluating an argument from analogy, different criteria are relevant compared to evaluating an argument from example or an argument from cause to effect
In order to assess whether lay people apply argument scheme specific criteria when performing these tasks, five different argumentation schemes were included in this study: argumentation from authority, from example, from analogy, from cause to effect, and from consequences
The results revealed that participants combined general criteria from informal logic

Summary

Introduction

To assess the quality of an argument, criteria can be applied that are specific for the argument scheme at hand. For instance, when evaluating an argument from analogy, different criteria are relevant compared to evaluating an argument from example or an argument from cause to effect. According to Petty and Cacioppo’s (1986) Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) receivers who lack the motivation and/or capacity to scrutinize the arguments will evaluate the acceptability of the claim employing less energy consuming procedures, for instance by applying heuristics such as ‘if an expert says it, it is probably correct’. If they are motivated and able to evaluate a persuasive message thoroughly, they will critically evaluate the arguments comparing them to their own beliefs about the world as well as the extent to which these arguments should lead to adapting one’s opinion

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