Arguments about Arguments: Systematic, Critical, and Historical Essays in Logical Theory.

• Author: Lessl, Thomas M.
• Position: Book review

Arguments about Arguments: Systematic, Critical, and Historical Essays in Logical Theory. By Maurice A. Finocchiaro. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005; pp. vii + 467. $75.00 cloth; $31.99 paper.

I have come to know the work of Maurice Finocchiaro, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, mainly because I share some of his interest in Galileo's persuasive campaign on behalf of the Copernican position. Finocchiaro has produced four volumes on this subject. Perhaps the most important of these is his Galileo and the Art of Reasoning, a book that deserves to be read by all who have an interest in the rhetoric of science. It is an illuminating examination of the argumentation employed by not only one of science's great figures but also one of its great writers.

Professor Finocchiaro has practically built a second career as historian and translator, but the interest that originally brought him to Galileo was logical theory, the subject of the current volume. The 23 essays that fill the pages of Arguments about Arguments represent a selection of the author's published work that has appeared in journals, anthologies and conference proceedings during the past thirty years. Although they span a number of different topics and methods of analysis, their unifying subject is informal logic. Those whose exposure to this subject has been limited to just a few of the authors more generally read in the field of communication, such as Stephen Toulmin, Chaim Perelman, and Henry Johnstone, will find their horizons much broadened here.

The very idea of informal logic is difficult to pin down. Many of the early chapters in this volume are efforts to situate its complex identity, especially in relationship to the more traditional field of formal or symbolic logic. Finocchiaro introduces informal logic as a "theory of reasoning" that attempts "to formulate, to test, to clarify, and to systematize concepts and principles for the interpretation, the evaluation, and the sound practice of reasoning" (22). So, in the end, for the author informal logic means something like meta-argument, an alternative to the meta-theorizing that has long been built up within formalist or, as he calls them, "apriorist" schools of logic. More specifically, this means theorizing reasoning in historical and textual settings. If there is an abiding difference that separates this approach from its more traditional cousin, it is this...