Epilogue: The Way Ahead?

Abstract

We have seen that a recurring criticism of the Woods-Walton Approach to the investigation of fallacies is the general lack of success — indeed lack of interest — in producing a unified account of the fallacies. In a number of earlier chapters I have tried to handle this objection as best I can. But I must admit that I have never been completely “sold” on this complaint. By and large, a theory should minimize differences only with considerable care, just as it should postulate similarities also with requisite circumspection. Of course, as with all good policies, there are exceptions. One of the most interesting is a theoretician’s opting for undisguised, outright reconceptualization of the theory’s target concept. If for various reasons, it strikes the investigator that his target concept, K, will continue to resist solid theoretical articulation, then he may propose to drop K in favour of a successor-concept that he thinks he can make more of, theoretically speaking. It was in this spirit that eliminative materialists gave up on the ordinary notion of belief as a theoretically realizable target of scientific psychology, in favour of the ontology of the emerging brain sciences. Pragma-dialecticians have done much the same thing with the concept of fallacy. Rather than plugging away at the traditional notion of fallacy as an argument that seems to be good when in fact it is not good, they proposed a reconceptualization in which a fallacy is simply the breaking of a rule of critical discussion. It is a bold idea, not at all dismissable out of hand. One of the things that I have not been able to understand is why, after having achieved this liberation, pragma-dialecticians got cold feet¹ and tried to reconnect their liberated notion with the vexed and stressed old one.