The Russell–Copleston Debate as a Study In Argument

Abstract

The Russell–Copleston Debate as a Study In Argument Stefan Andersson Fernando Leal and Hubert Marraud. How Philosophers Argue: an Adversarial Collaboration on the Russell–Copleston Debate. Cham: Springer, 2022. Pp. xiii, 472. isbn: 978-3-030-85367-9, us$109.99 (hb); 978-3-030-85368-6, us$84.99 (ebook). [End Page 183] This is not an easy read, mostly because the authors have put a not so easy-to-follow radio debate on the existence of God, between Bertrand Russell and Father Frederick Copleston, s.j. (1987–1994), into two even less easy-to-follow argumentation theory paradigms. Fernando Leal, who teaches at the Universidad de Guadalajara in Mexico, applies a version of the pragma-dialectical approach to his analysis of the debate. He was introduced to this theory fifteen years ago while preparing a course in argumentation for students in philosophy. He became increasingly aware that he had entered the field of “argumentation in context”, in which attention is paid to special features of communicative activity called “philosophical argumentation”. This new and burgeoning research area requires adapting the general framework of standard pragma-dialectics to the way argumentation has been institutionalized in philosophy (p. v). Hubert Marraud teaches at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, and he applies a version of the pragma-dialectical approach that he calls “argument dialectics”. This is not so well known in the international field of argumentation studies because most of Marraud’s work is only available in Spanish. Argument dialectics, “focusing on reasons vs. inferences, recovers a logical approach to argumentative structures and inter-argumentative relations, embracing at the same time a naturalized logic related to the interactive construction of arguments by discursive agents” (p. viii). Pragma-dialectics, or pragma-dialectical theory, was developed in the early 1980s by Frans H. van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst, two Dutch scholars of speech communication and argumentation theory at the University of Amsterdam. Pragma-dialectics is an argumentation theory that is used to describe, analyze and evaluate argumentation in actual practice. In contrast to strictly logical, or purely communication approaches, pragma-dialectics was developed to study the entirety of an argumentation as a discourse activity. The pragma-dialectical theory views an argumentation as a complex speech act that occurs as part of natural language activities and has specific communicative goals. The method used in the authors’ analyses of the debate is based on standard pragma-dialectics augmented by an erotetic perspective (erotetics or erotetic logic is a part of logic, devoted to logical analysis of questions. It is sometimes called “the logic of questions and answers”). Pragma-dialectics posits an ideal model of a critical discussion with defined discussion stages, rules for critical discussion, and analytical operations. An erotetic perspective makes explicit the place of questioning in that model. This model and method have been applied to various fields of practice and are in this book applied to the debate between Russell and Copleston (see Chapter 3, “Description of the Method Followed”). [End Page 184] Since there are major differences between the aims and scope of Leal’s erotetic-dialectical approach and Marraud’s argument-dialectical method, they have called their joint effort an “adversarial collaboration”. The chief focus of Leal’s analysis is the Russell–Copleston debate as an exercise in argumentation, whereas Marraud is concerned more with the behaviour of the participants and the extent to which they behave reasonably. A good example is how differently the authors treat the concept of “necessary being”—which looms large over the debate (p. 149ff.). The book is divided into two parts and fifteen chapters with many subsections where the authors give their separate interpretations of the debate, which took place on 28 January 1948. Chapter 1 (the introduction) and Chapter 2 (“Argumentation Theories”) are co-authored. Leal wrote all of Part 1 and Marraud all of Part 2 except for the second half of the book’s closing chapter (“Final Cross-Examination”), in which each author comments on the analysis of the other. An appendix reproduces the text of the debate, which consists of 138 exchanges of argumentation divided into propositions, sentences and (sometimes) whole paragraphs. These are then analyzed in detail...