Studies in Logic, Vol. 4, No.

1 (2011): 116 PII: 1674-3202(2011)-01-0001-16

Informal Logic and Its Early Historical Development*

J. Anthony Blair
Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation and Rhetoric, University of Windsor tblair@uwindsor.ca
Abstract. The first and main section of the article traces the rise of informal logic by an outline of its intellectual and social histories, with remarks about the early figures and textbooks in its development, its main themes and its socialization. Section 2 briefly describes the innovations in the textbook Logical Self-Defense. Section 3 briefly mentions informal logics early contacts with other fields.

1. The emergence of informal logic

The purpose of this article is to convey a sense for the emergence of the subfield of logic known as informal logic in Canada and the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. An assumption of the article is that the nature of informal logic can be illuminated when it is viewed in the light of its historical development. Accordingly, I begin with remarks in the domain of the history of ideas. One good reason for not simply setting out the elements of the theory, leaving its history to historians, is that informal logic does not denote a theory. Informal logic is in part an intellectual movement, in part an approach to argumentation and in part a view about the nature of logic, all of which can be best understood by understanding how they developed.
1.1 Intellectual background: Anglo-American analytic philosophy

Unlike some other theoretical approaches to argumentation such as PragmaDialectics ([9]), informal logic was not begun by linguists or by communication theorists, nor was it developed by debate theorists or rhetoricians. It was developed by philosophers trained in the analytic tradition during the decades following World War II who were teaching introductory applied logic courses. Those who initiated informal logic developments were influenced by the following philosophical views, which were current at the time. (1) By analyzing how words and expressions are used, we can gain an understanding of the concepts that
Received 2010-10-29 * This article is a considerably revised version of a lecture delivered at the Institute of Logic and Cognition, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China on 21 April 2009.

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they express. Meaning is use was the slogan.(see [33] and [1]) (2) Given that how words are used tells us what they mean, we need to study actual language usage and not rely on a priori theorizing.(see [28]) Adopting this doctrine led the early informal logicians to look at arguments made for other practical purposes than to illustrate formal deductive relations, contrary to the practice of logic textbooks of the day. 1 (3) Logic means formal deductive logic, and doing philosophy requires using logic. As a result of this view, the training in logic received by philosophy graduate students during this period was, as a matter of course, training in formal logic, also known as symbolic logic and mathematical logic. As a result of these influences, a generation of philosophy students at universities in Canada and the United States in the late 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, were trained to consider deductive logic, especially formal logic, as the paradigm of logic, yet at the same time were influenced to be open to the phenomena of how language functions, and so be open to examining to examples of language use outside the textbooks and outside philosophical texts.
1.2 Social background

In my view it is also important for an understanding of informal logic to appreciate that these philosophy students did not attend university in a social or political vacuum. By the 1960s, certain social and political events were influencing the thinking of any reflective person in the United States and Canada, as well as elsewhere in the world. In the United States, there was agitation for equality for African-Americans. Among those enrolled in philosophy doctoral programs in the mid-1960s were students who had spent their summers as undergraduates in Mississippi and Alabama helping African Americans to register to vote, and to organize boycotts and protest marches. They had been reviled by many southern white people, sometimes attacked and even some of their co-workers were murdered. So there was a cadre of these students with experience in standing up for their principles and challenging the status quo. Also by the mid-1960s, the American opposition to the Vietnam War was increasing. At that time, young American males were subject to be drafted into the armed forces, and as the war went on and American involvement and numbers of armed forces deployments increased, means of obtaining a deferment from being drafted into the armed services (such as for attendance at university or college) were reduced, so that middle-class males were increasingly drafted. Many American intellectuals opposed the war, and presented their arguments against it in universiIt is an anachronism to call those who developed informal logic in the 1970s informal logicians, since as we will see, the term did not come into fairly widespread usage until the mid 1980s. However, it is convenient to do so.
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ties, especially the influential universities such as Michigan and Berkeley, Yale and Columbia. There emerged an anti-war movement that mobilized students to public demonstrations and encouraged draft-evasion. The Canadian government of the day admitted American draft-dodgers as conscientious objectors, and did not return them to the United States, so Canada and Canadian universities became a haven for radicalized young Americans. Again, there was a precedent for questioning the standard ways of doing things and seeking to dismantle those deemed objectionable. Related to these developments, during the 1960s, especially in the United States, there was an atmosphere of support for radical change on university campuses, and to a degree in the society at large. This change was often brought about by grassroots activism, by people challenging the assumptions of the society and taking steps to bring about changes for increased democracy and social justice. If one argues for equal rights for African-Americans on the basis of democratic values such as the right to self-determination, then it is only consistent to oppose military intervention to support autocratic regimes in South Vietnam. And one had a real interest in this position if there was a non-negligible chance that ones brother or boyfriend, or oneself, would be drafted and sent to Vietnam to fight to support such regimes and against what looked like a struggle for national self-determination. At the same time, the post-war economic and demographic boom was also filling the universities in the United States and Canada to the bursting point. Big universities became huge in relation to their traditional size, with 40,000 and 50,000 thousand students, very much larger classes than before (several hundred students in each then a new phenomenon), and instruction, especially in the first year or two, largely by graduate students rather than professors and full-time academic faculty. Students already radicalized over civil rights and opposition to the Vietnam war, began to turn their attention to the quality of their education. All of these factors created a cohort of young university instructors and their students who were disposed to question and unafraid to challenge the status quo not only in society at large, but also more narrowly and immediately (and no doubt with less risk) in their university courses.
1.3 Reaction to the status quo in teaching critical reasoning skills

The widespread assumption in philosophy departments in the United States and Canada in the 1960s had been that if students learn logic, they will improve their logical skills, and that improving logical skills is necessary if not sufficient for improving critical thinking skills. But logic was universally taken to be formal deductive logic. So an introductory course in formal deductive logic was taught with the aim of improving students thinking skills. Since the subject matter of logic was taken to be arguments, and deductive relationships illustrated by using arguments in natural language invented for that purpose, the course focused on the analysis and evaluation of

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such arguments. However, when students questioning the social and political status quo began asking how to apply this logic to examples of contemporary social and political argumentation, and instructors themselves tried to make this application, it soon became clear that there were problems.(see [17]) For one thing, to apply the apparatus of formal propositional logic or the predicate calculus to such natural language argumentation requires a difficult and often controversial translation step in order to assign variables to all the propositions so as to express the natural language arguments in symbolic form. For another thing, when that translation is accomplished, in almost every case the arguments turn out to be deductively invalid, regardless of how cogent the argument might be. (In a deductively valid argument, as these terms were used, the truth of the premises is inconsistent with the falsehood of the conclusion: if the premises are true, the conclusion cannot possibly be false.) On the other hand, most argumentation about the public issues of the day was ampliative, so that even if given premises supported a conclusion, it was in principle possible for the conclusion to be false (for instance, if new information incompatible with it were to be found). So the deductively valid vs. deductively invalid dichotomy that is the criterion of formal deductive logical evaluation does not serve to distinguish the good from the bad among such arguments. Some teachers tried to save the applicability of deductive validity to natural language arguments about social issues. They argued that we should presume that the arguer intended to express a deductively valid argument, and therefore we should add premises that may be assumed to have been implicit in the argument in order to make it valid. However, this move is problematic, for a number of reasons. For one, there is no non-trivial rule for formulating assumed implicit premises, and so, for texts being interpreted without their author present, no way to be sure which implicit premises the arguer was assuming. For another thing, even when asked, arguers were not always sure what assumption they intended or were supposed to have made. For a third, it is widely accepted that there can be strong inductive arguments that are deductively invalid. For a fourth, it is widely accepted that there can be strong but defeasible arguments that are not quantitatively inductive and not deductively invalid. Let me illustrate some of these problems. Suppose one is trying to reconstruct an incompletely-expressed argument by supplying the implicit premises. Take a simple, invented example: He is a red-head (i.e., has red hair), so he is hot-tempered. Any one of the following candidates for the unexpressed premise (no doubt, among others) makes the above argument deductively valid: If he is a red-head, then he is hot-tempered. Red-haired males are hot-tempered. Red-haired people are hot-tempered. Red-heads have Scottish blood, so he has Scottish blood, and Scots are hot-tempered.

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Logic does not provide any basis for selecting which of these the argument presupposes, so some theoretical apparatus besides logic is required by the project of replacing the constants in the text with variables in order to provide a formal representation of the argument. Or suppose the following sort of text is encountered: The night of the last German national elections, 36 of the voters sampled in well-designed and well-executed exit-polls in a representative sample of voting districts across Germany said they voted for the Angela Merkels Christian Democrats and 35 said they voted for the Gerhard Schrders Social Democrats.Therefore German voters were divided more or less equally between Christian Democrat voters and the Social Democrat voters. This is a logically good argument, for its premises provide very strong inductive grounds for its conclusion. But it is deductively invalid: the truth of its premises is consistent with the falsehood of its conclusion. So not all invalid arguments are logically bad. There can be various kinds of strong inductive arguments that are deductively invalid. Or suppose the following sort of text is encountered: You should not keep his book any longer, because you promised to return it to him by today, he needs it immediately, and you no longer need it. This example shows that on the face of it there can be arguments that are logically cogent even though they are technically invalid and also are not inductively strong in any well-recognized, quantifiable respect.
1.4 Pedagogical origins

These difficulties in using the then-standard tools of formal logic to teach students how to interpret and analyze arguments in everyday public discourse were not published in journal articles or scholarly monographs. They were encountered and dealt with by individual instructors in their classrooms. The phenomenon was so widespread that several instructors independently wrote up their class notes as handbooks, which were subsequently published as textbooks for undergraduate philosophy courses teaching students these skills. Let me repeat that informal logic did not develop as a theory. The term, informal logic does not name a theory. It was the name that began to be used, in the late 1970s, for a range of curriculum innovations developed for university courses or classes designed to teach students critical thinking skills (by teaching skill in the management of arguments) that started several years earlier, at the beginning of the 1970s, and that saw the light of day in textbooks.

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Three early influential textbooks The first of three particularly influential teaching handbooks (known as textbooks in the United States and Canada) was Howard Kahanes Logic and Contemporary Rhetoric([17]). Kahane (who was also the author of a widely-used formal logic textbook, Logic and Philosophy, [16]), introduced using, as the tool of logical evaluation of arguments, an updated version of informal fallacies, instead of deductive logic or deductive and inductive logic. Kahane dropped the classical Latin fallacy labels, and introduced several new fallacies such as suppressed evidence (failing to mention known information that is incompatible with ones thesis) and false charge of inconsistency. He also provided advice for critical appraisal of other material besides arguments, such as political advertising, news reporting, and indoctrinating textbooks. Kahanes 1971 textbook, by the way, illustrates the politically engaged stance of the day, for most of his examples are critical of the arguments of then-recent and contemporary political leaders in the Unites States. In Logic and Contemporary Rhetoric ([17]), Kahane defined an argument, for his purposes, as a use of language or pictures intended to persuade anyone of anything, and a fallacy as an argument that should not persuade a rational person to accept its conclusion.(p. 1) The person who commits a fallacy is whoever is convinced by a fallacious argument, and a person is guilty of a fallacy or argues fallaciously who uses a fallacious argument in an attempt to convince someone else.(pp. 1-2) He introduced and used a weaker concept of validity than is used in formal deductive logic. Roughly speaking, he wrote, a valid argument is an argument, whose premises, if true, alone provide good, or sufficient, grounds for accepting its conclusion.(p. 3) He then classified fallacies as fallacious even if valid and fallacious because invalid in the sense of valid and invalid he introduced. This was a novel, and perhaps controversial, but clear and systematic, theory of argument and fallacy that does not rely on the tools of formal deductive logic for the basis of the critical evaluation of arguments. The second early influential textbook was Stephen Thomass Practical Reasoning in Natural Language.([25])2 Thomas characterized his approach, which he termed natural logic, as the direct study of reasoning as it actually occurs in a natural language.(p. 6) He contrasted it with two other approaches: the formal symbolic logic approach to the study of reasoning, which studies reasoning expressed in certain artificial languages, and the informal fallacies approach, which samples various kinds of incorrect reasoning that occur in natural languages.(pp. 4-5) He rejected the formal symbolic logic approach because it is often in practice too difficult, or even impossible in principle, to make the needed translations of reasoning in natural language into the symbols of an artificial language; because it takes longer to master these necessary artificial languages, which must be learned beforehand; and in general because
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The page references to Thomas that follow are to the second edition.

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the methods of symbolic logic are of little practical usefulness in dealing with much reasoning encountered in real-life situations.(p. 5) He rejected the fallacies approach on the ground that the list of informal fallacies never completely covers in detail all the different mistakes that are possible in reasoning and so that approach fails to provide a universally applicable way of separating correct reasoning from incorrect reasoning.(p. 5) Thomas used argument to refer in general to any kind of reasoning done for any purpose (p. 12), and characterized it more particularly as a discourse in which certain claims or alleged facts are set forth as supporting, making probable or explaining others.(p. 8) He used tree diagrams to display the inferential relations between the supporting claims (which he termed reasons) and the claim supported by them (which he termed the conclusion) with the illative therefore represented by arrows pointing from the reasons to the conclusion.3 Like Kahane, Thomas deliberately introduced a non-traditional conception of logical validity. He defined a valid argument as one in which the reasons justify believing or expecting the conclusion to be true.(pp. 93-94) On his conception, different reasons can support their conclusion with different degrees of support (p. 98) and so validity in his sense in effect comes in degrees. To avoid confusion with the usage according to which validity is an on/off concept, Thomas used the term degrees of support instead of degrees of validity, and distinguished five degrees: nil (for an irrelevant reason), weak, moderate, strong (for what others would term a cogent inductive argument), and deductively valid.(p. 99) The third influential early textbook was Michael Scrivens Reasoning. ([23]) Reasoning was not initially published by McGraw-Hill, Scrivens publisher for others of his books, because, according to Scriven4 , they didnt think there was a market for it presumably based on the advice of the philosophers used as referees for the manuscript. Only after Scriven published this book himself and a market for it was demonstrated did McGraw-Hill agree to publish the textbook commercially. Such was the attitude of the philosophical community to these departures from traditional instruction in logic. Scriven argued against teaching formal logic as a means of teaching reasoning partly on the ground that there was no evidence that skill in doing formal logic transfers to other domains of reasoning such as the average editorial or columnist today (p. xv). Also (like Thomas) Scriven argued that to use a calculus to handle problems that occur in natural language involves encoding the original problem into its formalized representation (as well as transforming and decoding it), but the encoding
This method was also used by Monroe C. Beardsley in various textbooks: Practical Logic ([2]); Thinking Straight, Principles of Reasoning for Readers and Writers ([3]); Writing With Reason, Logic for Composition ([4]). 4 See the letter dated February, 1976 that Scriven sent to philosophy departments in the U.S.A. and Canada advertising Reasoning.
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step, particularly, is just about as debatable (in anything but trivial arguments where theres no need to use the calculus) as the assessment of the original argument (p. xv). Like Thomas also, Scriven rejected the fallacies approach, but for a different reason: ... the fallacies generally turn out not to be fallacies unless one builds into the identification process, and hence into the labels, all the skills needed for analysis without the taxonomy of fallacies. In that case one has made it a formal approach, and the encoding (i.e., diagnosing) step has become the tricky one. (p. xvi) For Scriven, arguments are one of the products of reasoning and one of the objects to which reasoning is applied (p. 29), and logic constitutes the standards or principles of good reasoning (p. 30). In a logically cogent argument the premises are true or can be shown to be true and they force one to accept the conclusion in the sense that there is a contradiction, or an inconsistency of a weaker kind, between accepting the premises and rejecting the conclusion. (pp. 32-33) Most of Scrivens textbook is take up with teaching students how to manage a seven step decision procedure for the interpretation, analysis and evaluation of arguments: (1) clarify the meaning of the argument and its components, (2) identify the conclusion, whether stated or unstated, (3) portray the structure, (4) formulate the unstated assumptions of the argument, (5) critique the premises and the inferences from the premises to the conclusion, (6) consider other relevant arguments, and (7) evaluate the argument overall, in the light of (1) through (6). Notice that step (6) introduces an explicit dialectical element into Scrivens decision procedure, an element not found in Kahane or Thomas. These three textbooks seem to have been written independently of each other: Thomas makes no reference to Kahane, and Scriven makes none to Kahane or Thomas. The courses in which these textbooks were used usually had logic, reasoning or critical thinking in their titles. For instance, Johnson and Blair called the course they taught together, starting in 1971, Applied Logic. It was only later that they came to be called informal logic courses and the textbooks called informal logictextbooks. But by the time Robert Fogelins textbook, the first to use the term informal logic in its title, came out in 1978, that label had begun to catch on, so when Johnson and Blair organized the first conference to discuss the all these developments, also in 1978, they called it a symposium on informal logic. Thus what is now called informal logic, might equally have been called applied logic or argument-appraisal logic or some other name.5
It follows that those who criticize informal logic for being a contradiction in terms on the ground that logic is by definition formal do not pay attention to the substance of the ideas collected under this rubric.
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While these textbooks and others were being devised, there was a parallel development in work on fallacies by the Canadian philosophers John Woods and Douglas Walton. They had been influenced by Charles Hamblins monograph, Fallacies, which was a strong critique of the state of fallacy theory up to 1970. In the decade between 1972 and 1982, Woods and Walton produced a series of journal articles, each of which was a careful analysis of a different informal fallacy, treated as a logical failing. Other early textbooks of note are: Alex Michalos, Improving Your Reasoning ([21]); Ralph Johnson & Anthony Blair, Logical Self-Defense ([15]); Robert Fogelin, Informal Logic ([10]); Perry Weddle, Argument, A guide to Critical Thinking ([30]); Stephen Toulmin, Richard Rieke and Alan Janik, An Introduction to Reasoning ([29]); John Woods and Douglas Walton, Argument: The Logic of the Fallacies ([34]).
1.5 Themes

(a) Orientation: pegagogy. Initially, apart from Woods and Waltons appeal to various developed logics in their work on the informal fallacies and Fogelins use of speech act theory and Grices conversational analysis, informal logic theory was inspired by attention to the practical demands of effective classroom instruction in argument identification, analysis and evaluation. (b) Focus: on arguments in the media about the social and political issues of the day. Important to the development of informal logic was the focus, in teaching about arguments, upon examples of arguments found in newspaper and magazine articles taking sides in discussions of the social issues of the day. These were (and are) the raw materials of discourse about the issues that concern people in their various social roles (entrepreneur, parent, taxpayer, etc., etc.), yet they were (and are) often not wellorganized, unclear, incomplete, not fully thought-out texts that present challenges to the critic and to the theorist. (c) Topics: in general, those related to the identification, analysis and evaluation of arguments. In particular, there were debates about types of arguments the deductive/inductive distinction and the possibility of a third type: conductive arguments; about the analysis of argument structure (and relatedly, about diagramming argument structure); and about argument norms: fallacies; strength of support; relevance, acceptability, sufficiency. To sum up so far, it is possible to identify the early developments of what came to be called informal logic in terms of three themes. First, the orientation was to teaching an introductory logic course as a means of improving students critical thinking skills, and, second, to do so by teaching the analysis and evaluation of the arguments in newspapers and magazines related to the social and political issues of the day. Third, in doing so, the assumption that the only criterion of logical merit in arguments is deductive validity was given up. And the assumption that a logically

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good argument must be either deductively valid or inductively strong was abandoned by many. Some began to borrow the term conductive argument that Carl Wellman ([31]) introduced in his analysis of ethical reasoning, to refer to arguments that are neither deductive nor inductive. (There was quite a bit of discussion in the early literature about this distinction. Some people made the distinction refer to different kinds of argument; others made it refer to different kinds of criteria of evaluation. See the Informal Logic Newsletter 1979-1983.) Attention was paid to diagramming the logical structure of the argument, and different kinds of norms were developed for evaluating arguments.
1.6 The socialization of theory

Theoretical perspectives do not spread just because they are true or they are good ideas. They spread because people deliberately spread them. The time has to be ripe for ideas to be taken up and become widespread, but that is not sufficient. Someone has to market the ideas. (For instance, van Eemeren and Grootendorst, the founders of the pragma-dialectical theoretical approach to argumentation, recognized this fact. They translated their dissertation from Dutch into English in 1984 in order to reach a wider the scholarly audience beyond the Netherlands, and in 1986 they organized a big international conference partly to publicize their theory.) The marketing of informal logic began when Johnson and Blair announced a conference at Windsor in the spring of 1978, and sent invitations to all the philosophy departments in Canada and the United States within 500 km, plus to certain prominent philosophers, such as Howard Kahane from Baltimore and Michael Scriven from Berkeley. That small conference fewer than 50 people attended was quite exciting for those who were present, because they discovered that they had all been doing much the same thing. They got the sense from the papers and conversations at the conference that they were all onto something significant. From that first conference, the movement spread. Blair and Johnson started a newsletter, which over the next few years grew into a kind of informal journal. With Scrivens assistance they also published the proceedings of that first symposium.([6]) The list of research questions that Johnson and Blair appended to their introductory chapter began to motivate research and journal articles began appearing. They organized a second conference five years later, in the spring of 1983. More people came to it, and there were more papers presented at it. As a result of the encouragement it generated, Blair and Johnson turned The Informal Logic Newsletter into a refereed journal called simply, Informal Logic. Those attending that conference created an organization, the Association for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking (AILACT), to encourage research and to sponsor special sessions at the annual meetings of the American Philosophical Association and the Canadian Philosophical Association. That summer (1983) Richard Paul, who had attended the Windsor conference, held the first

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of what became an annual conference on critical thinking at Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park, California. Critical thinking and informal logic were closely associated, and many of the same people who attended the Windsor conferences also attended the Sonoma State conferences. In 1985 John Hoaglund organized the first of a series of conferences at Christopher Newport College (now Christopher Newport University) in Newport News, Virginia. All these conferences were occasions to present research and the Informal Logic journal was a place to publish research, so the conferences and the journal provided an opportunity for people to do research in the area. As more research was published and reported, it led to even more research as critics began to develop and sharpen their own theoretical perspectives. A kind of scholarly movement had begun. (a) Conferences: 1978, 1st Windsor conference (Johnson and Blair); 1983, 2nd Windsor conference (Johnson and Blair), first Sonoma State University Critical Thinking conference (Paul) held annually thereafter; 1985, first Christopher Newport College conference (Hoaglund) also in 1988; 1986, first International Society for the Study of Argumentation conference in Amsterdam (van Eemeren and Grootendorst) held every four years thereafter; 1989, 3rd Windsor Conference (Johnson and Blair); 1995, George Mason University conference; 1997, first Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation conference (Hansen and Tindale) held every second year thereafter. (b) Second-generation Textbooks: Edward Damer, Attacking Faulty Reasoning ([8]); David Hitchcock, Critical Thinking, A Guide to Evaluating Information ([13]); John Hoaglund, Critical Thinking ([14]); Trudy Govier, A Practical Study of Argument ([12]); James Freeman, Thinking Logically, Basic Concepts for Reasoning ([11]). By the 1990s there were scores of new textbooks in publication. (c) New journals: Informal Logic Newsletter (1978), Informal Logic (1983today), Argumentation (1986-today), Inquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines (1987-today).

2. Logical Self-Defense
A point about terminology. As philosophers with some study of formal logic as part of their training, and teaching a course that was a modification of an introductory logic course, Johnson and Blair thought within the general framework of logic and used the much of the apparatus of logic. From that perspective, an argument has an epistemic function it consists of a proposition and a set of propositions that are reasons that function to support it (or that someone puts forward as supporting it). Each non-compound proposition in the supporting set is called a premise and the proposition that they support, or are supposed to support, is called a conclusion. The term argument is used interchangeably to refer to the proposition being supported plus the support for it (as I just did, so that an argument is made up of premises and a conclusion) and also to refer to just the supporting propositions (so that one can speak

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of the argument for a conclusion). Johnson and Blair first drafted Logical Self-Defense as a set of notes for the course they were teaching that they called applied logic. They had initially used Kahanes 1971 textbook, using fallacies as the tool for argument evaluation. But they started to introduce their own, Canadian, examples, because Kahanes book was written for an American audience with examples from United States current affairs, and they were teaching in Canada. Also, they became dissatisfied with some of Kahanes analyses of fallacies, which they thought were insufficiently precise, and with his system of classifying fallacies. It occurred to them that a simple and exhaustive classification system put the fallacies into three groups: (1) those where the fallacy consists of the argument having a premise that is unacceptable (either because it is inherently dubious or it has been challenged and so requires defence itself, but is given none in the argument); (2) those where the fallacy consists of the argument having one or more premises that are, in the context, irrelevant as support for the conclusion (i.e., probatively irrelevant); and (3), those where the fallacy consists of the argument having premises that collectively supply insufficient support for the conclusion, either because the amount of evidence is too weak or because evidence of other kinds is also required, or both. A logically good argument, then, is one that is free of any of these defects: its premises will be individually acceptable (A), as a set will be probatively relevant (R), and together will be jointly sufficient (S): ARS. The ARS criteria have the virtue that any argument that is sound in the technical sense that is, deductively valid with true premises will according to them count as logically good, as will any argument that is inductively strong (such as a strong inductive generalization). Another virtue is that this model is simple and easilylearned, so that students have an easy theory to apply to the hard work of interpreting and assessing actual arguments. Finally, these three criteria seemed to provide an exhaustive classifying scheme for the informal fallacies. Although Johnson and Blair had to overcome objections to the publication of Logical Self-Defense6 , several subsequent textbooks took over this tripartite normative criterion, sometimes with different terminology. Some acknowledged its source; some did not. T. Edward Damer, Attacking Faulty Reasoning ([8]); Trudy Govier, A Practical Study of Argument ([12]); J. Frederick Little, Leo A. Groarke and Christopher W. Tindale, Good Reasoning Matters! ([20]); Zachary Seech, Open Minds and Everyday Reasoning ([24]); Dianne Romain, Thinking Things Through ([22]); Takuzo Konishi, Logical Competence ([18]); and T. Konishi, K. Tomohiro, P.J. Collins, Let the Debate Begin! ([19]). Some have treated the ARS criteria as definitive of informal logic, although Johnson and Blair would not make and have never made such a claim.
The first set of referees recommended that the publisher not publish the book. The authors were able to persuade the publisher to try a second set of referees who might be more open to the aims of the book. The second set of referees strongly recommended its publication.
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I now think these criteria also have shortcomings (see [5]; Johnson might not agree). Relevance is presupposed by sufficiency, and as such in the first instance it is a criterion of argument identification, not evaluation. That is, to judge a proposition to be a premise in an argument is to judge it to be probatively relevant, or at least intended to be probatively relevant, to the alleged conclusion. Even so, an arguer can indisputably intend a proposition to count as probatively relevant to his conclusion and yet be demonstrably mistaken. So relevance does play a secondary role as a criterion of intended argument evaluation. Acceptability and sufficiency remain viable broad criteria of argument assessment, but in any given case each needs to be applied in ways that differ for different functions and contexts of argument. There are no universal criteria of acceptability or of sufficiency, in my opinion. Christopher Tindale ([27]) has written a cogent critique of the Relevance-Acceptability-Sufficiency criteria as adequate to serve as basic principles of a theory of fallacy, which is how Johnson and I used them in Logical Self-Defense, but that is a separate question.

3. Informal Logic makes friends

A final point worth making briefly in this history of the early development of informal logic is that informal logic did not for long remain unconnected to the other developments that were occurring around it at the same time. One event that caused it to look outward initially was an approach that came from the outside. Two Netherlanders, Frans van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst, were on a holiday in New York city in December 1985. They somehow heard about an Association for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking session at the annual Eastern Division American Philosophical Association meetings, being held that year in New York, and decided to drop in. There, they struck up a conversation with two Canadian philosophers who had been at the AILACT session, David Hitchcock and Anthony Blair. Van Eemeren and Grootendorst, who had been doing more scholarly outreach than the informal logicians, told Hitchcock and Blair about another scholarly community that they thought would be of interest to them the debate and speech communication community in the United States. Nothing similar existed (or exists today) in Canada, and the Canadians had not heard about it. It turned out that at the same time that informal logicians were rebelling against the monopoly of formal logic in introductory reasoning skills courses, the debate community was rebelling against classical Aristotelian logic as the critical tool for the arguments used in debates. The next step occurred when van Eemeren and Grootendorst organized the first International Society for the Study of Argumentation (ISSA) conference in Amsterdam, held in June 1986, and invited Charles Willard (University of Louisville, Kentucky), representing speech communication, and Blair, representing philosophy, to serve on the organizing committee with them, and to encourage scholars from their respective communities in the U.S. and Canada to come to Amsterdam. That con-

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ference gathered scholars mainly from Europe and North America, but it was widely international. The following summer Blair attended one of the conferences of argumentation branch of the American speech communication scholarly community, held in Alta, Utah, every second year, and met a number of people who were interested in learning about informal logic. Just over two dozen years later, there was recently held the sixteenth biennial Alta argumentation conference (August 2009) and the seventh quadrennial Amsterdam ISSA (June 2010).

4. Conclusion
What began in the early 1970s as the attempt to find better tools than those available from formal logic for the identification, analysis and evaluation of the arguments and argumentation found in public discourse, had by the end of the 1990s become more or less established as a field of research. Connections with dialectics were wellestablished by the mid 1980s (see [7]); those with rhetoric came in the late 1990s (see [26]). Developments flowed in fallacy theory, argument scheme theory, probative (plausible, defeasible) reasoning and argument, the Toulmin conception of argument, Wellmans concept of conductive reasoning, Wisdoms concept of case-by-case reasoning, abductive reasoning, Artificial Intelligence applications, applications to legal reasoning and argument, and many other areas (see the OSSA Proceedings on CDROM). In the early years there was resistance for example, Scrivens and Johnson and Blairs textbooks were initially turned down by publishers. But the disposition of many faculty members and their students to challenge the status quo, a manifestation of the social dynamic of the period, plus (in my opinion) a strong case on the merits, combined to create this new scholarly field. Today there are informal logic courses at most colleges and universities in the United States and Canada, and the output of scholarly research related to informal logic flows at a strong and steady rate.

References
[1] Austin, J. L., 1961, Philosophical Papers, Oxford: The Clarendon Press. [2] Beardsley, Monroe C., 1950, Practical Logic, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. [3] Beardsley, Monroe C., 1950, Thinking Straight, Principles of Reasoning for Readers and Writers, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. [4] Beardsley, Monroe C., 1976, Writing With Reason, Logic for Composition, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. [5] Blair, J. Anthony, 2007, Relevance, acceptability and sufficiency today, Anthropology and Philosophy, 8: 33-47. [6] Blair, J. Anthony and Johnson, Ralph H. (eds.), 1980, Informal Logic: The First International Symposium, Point Reyes, CA: Edgepress. [7] Blair, J. Anthony and Johnson, Ralph H., 1987, Argument as dialectical, Argumentation, 1: 41-56.

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[8] Damer, T. Edward Damer, 1980, Attacking Faulty Reasoning, 1st edition, Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. [9] van Eemeren, Frans H. and Grootendorst, Rob., 1984, Speech Acts in Argumentative Discussions, Dordrecht: Foris. [10] Fogelin, Robert, 1978, Understanding Argument: An Introduction to Informal Logic, 1st edition, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. [11] Freeman, James B., 1988, Thinking Logically, Basic Concepts for Reasoning, 1st edition, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. [12] Govier, Trudy, 1985, A Practical Study of Argument, 1st edition, Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. [13] Hitchcock, David, 1984, Critical Thinking: A Guide to Evaluating Information, Toronto: Methuen. [14] Hoaglund, John, 1984, Critical Thinking: An Introduction to Informal Logic, Newport News, VA: Vale Press. [15] Johnson, Ralph H. and Blair, J. Anthony, 1977, Logical Self-Defense, 1st edition, Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson. [16] Kahane, Howard, 1969, Logic and Philosophy, 1st edition, Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. [17] Kahane, Howard, 1971, Logic and Contemporary Rhetoric, 1st edition, Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. [18] Konishi, Takuzo, 2003, Logical Competence, Tokyo: Subarusha. [19] Konishi, T., Tomohiro, K. and Collins, P. J., 2007, Let the Debate Begin! Hiratsuka, Kanagawa, Japan: Tokai University Press. [20] Little, J. Frederick, Groarke, Leo A. and Tindale, Christopher W., 1989, Good Reasoning Matters! 1st edition, Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. [21] Michalos, Alex, 1970, Improving Your Reasoning, 1st edition, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall. [22] Romain, Dianne, 1997, Thinking Things Through: Critical Thinking for Decisions You Can Live By, Mountain View, CA: Mayfield. [23] Scriven, Michael, 1976, Reasoning, New York: McGraw-Hill. [24] Seech, Zachary, 1993, Open Minds and Everyday Reasoning, Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. [25] Thomas, Stephen, 1973, Practical Reasoning in Natural Language, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. [26] Tindale, Christopher W., 1999, Acts of Arguing: A Rhetorical Model of Argument, Albany: State University of New York Press. [27] Tindale, Christopher W., 2007, On fallacy, in Hans V. Hansen and Robert C. Pinto (eds.), Reason Reclaimed, pp. 155-170. Newport News, VA: Vale Press. [28] Toulmin, S. E., 1958, The Uses of Argument, Cambridge: Cambridge Univesity Press. [29] Toulmin, S. E., Rieke, R. and Janik, A., 1979, An Introduction to Reasoning, New York: Macmillan. [30] Weddle, Perry, 1978, Argument: A Guide to Critical Thinking, New York: McGraw-Hill. [31] Wellman, Carl, 1971, Challenge and Response: Justification in Ethics, Carvbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press. [32] Wisdom, John, 1991, Proof and Explanation: The Virginia Lectures(1957), Lanham, MD: University Press of America. [33] Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1953, Philosophical Investigations, New York: Macmillan. [34] Woods, John and Walton, Douglas, 1982, Argument: The Logic of the Fallacies, Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson.

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Studies in Logic, Vol. 4, No. 1 (2011)

tblair@uwindsor.ca

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