The idea of argument: reasoned speech in every age

Logos, ethos and pathos

Questions of ethics and morality call for reason, words and logic, but just as much for emotions and an understanding of connections wider than the self. The big question for schools is to practise the wisdom of recognising where the limits of discussion lie. Must it be possible to discuss everything? May one argue in favour of racism? If everything is tolerated, do the intolerant win? When is a dialogue of genuine encounter possible even on the most painful issues?

Plato and Aristotle opposed the sophists' teaching that disputes are won regardless of where the truth lies. In the Gorgias, Plato compared such rhetoric to cookery and cosmetics: they aim at pleasure and good looks, whereas medicine and gymnastics aim at real health. Plato placed dialectic at the heart of philosophy, the search for truth through questions and answers. Aristotle, too, gave dialectic priority, but he also considered rhetoric useful when used rightly: it brings truth within everyone's reach.

Aristotle's Rhetoric distinguishes three means of persuasion. Logos is the use of reason: content, meanings and justifications. Ethos is the speaker's character, intentions and personal credibility. Pathos appeals to the emotions of the audience. Logos is clearly the root of the Delphi method, which emphasises the logic of speech and the justification of positions. The other means are not insignificant either. They affect, for example, how a question is posed, how a discussion is started and how participants are drawn in. In the facilitator's work, all three are present.

The threefold division can be simplified into two: demonstration and persuasion. Demonstration seeks to show that a conclusion is true and relies on observations, experience or logical inference: "Research shows that smoking increases the risk of cancer, so smoking is harmful to health." Persuasion seeks to get the listener to accept a conclusion through images, emotions or authority: "Vote for this candidate and Finland will become a better place."

In a Delphi study, the content of speech weighs more than the speaker's personality. The place of ethos is taken by a many-voiced panel that ensures there are enough justifications. Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of multivocality, a plurality of voices, is the most important hallmark of a Delphi panel. In a successful panel, all well-reasoned perspectives relevant to the phenomenon are represented. When panelists also have a personal stake in the phenomenon, the discussion gains energy: they are dealing with matters that affect their own lives.

The place of pathos is taken by the question's power to capture attention and interest. An interesting, contested or even provocative question stirs emotions and opens doors to other futures. David Bohm pointed out that thoughts and feelings work together: thoughts often carry a positive or negative emotional charge of which we are only partly aware. The emotional tone of a text can be analysed, and AI based on language models brings sentiment analysis to the Delphi method alongside argument analysis, reflecting the panel's emotional states.

Aristotle also linked the kinds of speech to time. Deliberative, or political, speech concerns the future: what should be done and what should be left undone. Forensic speech concerns the past: what happened and whether it was right. Epideictic speech, which praises or blames, concerns the present. The future is thus political by nature, and this has not changed in 2,500 years. Today we know that the past and the present have a political side as well. In authoritarian systems, control of the past and the present is almost more important than control of the future, because through them the future is controlled too. Such systems accept only one future and one kind of justification.

Democracies think differently. Jürgen Habermas extended the idea of dialogue to the level of society, a theme taken up in the essay The idea of open speech. In ideal discussion, according to Habermas, no force operates except the unforced force of the better argument. A position wins only because it has the best justifications, and neither prejudice nor external constraints distort the outcome. This is also the central idea of the Delphi method.

The idea of the best argument

At the core of the Delphi method is the weighing of several parallel and competing views. Justifications are sought for and against mutually exclusive positions. Answering on a scale allows intermediate positions from the start, which dissolve oppositions and open the way to solutions that no one recognised at the beginning of the process. The most important means of assessment is argumentation: justifying claims and putting the justifications to a dialogical test. A plurality of voices is ensured by gathering people with different knowledge and abilities to reason into the panel. Even when certain knowledge is unavailable, the reliability of the results can be increased by examining the probability and desirability of all assumptions and alternatives that seem reasonable.

Recycling knowledge and discussion are especially important when the subject of study lies in the future. Part of the future takes shape quite predictably. For example, the age cohorts entering comprehensive school are known well years in advance. Qualitative and discontinuous changes are much harder to anticipate. Support for political parties varies considerably within just a few years. Even that development can be understood by identifying the structural and social factors behind the changes.

The difference lies in whether we ask what or why. A question of what is answered by a time series, such as a population projection. A question of why, such as why one party's support rises and another's falls, can only be answered by giving reasons. The future still often manages to surprise us. The reason is rarely that no one knew, but that the knowledge was not taken in. The Delphi method aims to improve both the formation of understanding and its reception, and compared with many other methods it is well suited to identifying discontinuities.

With its emphasis on argument and dialogue, the Delphi method suits open and complex settings, in which the content of a phenomenon or its solution is unknown, better than quantitative techniques do. The problem is visible in the present, but the keys to its solution lie in the future. The method suits scientific research as well as practical development, when an organisation, sector or region looks for new directions.

This connects to the idea of anticipation: an understanding of the future guides action in the present. People's expectations, plans, fears and attitudes shape what the future becomes, and the same expectations lead people to prepare for what they assume will happen. Knowledge of the future, right or wrong, therefore always affects how we think and act now. The Delphi method is a tried and tested way of gathering foresight knowledge whose quality is ensured through expertise, argument and discussion.

The structure of an argument

When we speak, we do not merely make true or false statements; we produce meanings and in doing so shape reality. A statement about the future cannot rest directly on observation, but it can still be justified in many ways.

An argument has three parts. The most obvious are the claim and its justification. The justification may show a cause-and-effect relationship, present an analogy or appeal to some other reasoning or evidence. The third part consists of the underlying assumptions that bind the claim and the justification together. Stephen Toulmin called this link the warrant: the licence that allows one to move from the justification to the claim. Two examples:

"Because of climate change, forest felling must be reduced, because Finland's carbon sink is turning into a source of emissions."

"Because of climate change, felling forests is important, because only growing trees are carbon sinks."

The arguments look contradictory. Neither is right or wrong as such, because they concern things that have not yet happened. An argument is a possible justification for how things might turn out.

A Delphi thesis does not itself contain an argument; justifying is left to the panelists. The felling example can be formulated as a thesis like this: "By 2040, the volume of forest felling has halved from its 2020 level." What matters is that the panelist can take a position on the change in either direction. Answering on a scale is characteristic of the Delphi method: the panelist places their answer more or less for or against the thesis, and the choice on the scale finally shapes their individual claim. If a panelist chooses the negative end of the scale, their claim is the opposite of the thesis. Discussion is the follow-up technique in which scale answers and justifications are weighed against one another. The assumption of the Delphi method is that a well-conducted discussion brings the best arguments to the surface and so leads to the best choices.

Underlying assumptions are decisive for analysis. The assumptions of someone who denies climate change differ fundamentally from those of someone who considers the climate threat real. Without recognising these differences, it is hard to find common ground in the arguments. That is why in a Delphi study it is not enough to ask what a panelist thinks; it is just as important to find out why they think so.

Let us return to the felling example. The underlying assumption of the first argument is that felling has been so extensive that the forests' capacity to bind carbon has weakened. The assumption of the second is that only growing stands bind carbon and that ageing forests lose this capacity. Both assumptions hold under certain conditions. The arguments therefore do not cancel each other out but complement each other, because they approach the same phenomenon from different directions. The example shows how the opposition of debate can, as discussion continues, develop into a dialogue of many perspectives.

Four ways of thinking

Tim Urban distinguishes four ways in which people arrive at their views. The difference lies not in what they think but in how they reached their view.

• The scientist establishes the facts and weighs them objectively without letting preconceptions steer the conclusions. They do not pick and choose facts or dismiss others' views. Their starting point is to admit that they do not know. That leads them to gather and assess information, form a hypothesis, seek out dissenting views and adjust the hypothesis. The scientist's way keeps solutions, and when speaking of the future, futures, open throughout the process, and it suits the Delphi method as it is.
• The sports fan openly takes the side of a cause or community. They do not deny facts but favour those that speak for their side. In a world of interests, many professions are built on this kind of commitment, and it cannot be removed from a Delphi study either.
• The attorney is on the side of the cause they defend in all circumstances. However weighty the other side's evidence, the position does not change, and the only reaction is to develop new counter-arguments. In conspiracy theories this shows up in the way even a lack of evidence is read as a cover-up.
• The zealot is not content to be devoted to a cause, but also pressures others to adopt it.

A Delphi panelist is hoped to think in the first two ways. The last two have little to offer a Delphi study. One way of interpreting underlying assumptions is to examine how interests, or "fandom" in Urban's terms, influence them. This can also be a key to understanding Delphi data.

Kinds of justification

According to strict empiricism, the only permissible source of scientific knowledge is observation. There are no observations of the future, and futures studies therefore relies on broad empiricism. It also accepts as a basis for argument the empirical and theoretical results of earlier research, experiential knowledge and the reasoned views of experts.

According to Ludwig Wittgenstein, many philosophical problems stem from the misuse or misunderstanding of language. They are not real problems but linguistic confusions, and the task of philosophy is to clear them up. That is why Wittgenstein regarded philosophy more as therapy than as science. A facilitator can learn from this: linguistic confusions are best avoided when theses are formulated, and if they arise, the discussion can be "treated" during the round.

Marja-Liisa Kakkuri-Knuuttila has set out the ways in which a hypothesis can be supported. An argument may describe a mechanism that explains what will happen. It may rely on the results of earlier research, on expert statements, on one's own observations and experiences, on generalisations and analogies, or on the refutation of alternatives. A panelist's justification may contain elements of several kinds.

From this line of thought has grown the coding of Delphi data that Pronoia uses today. It asks of every justification what carries the claim. There are seven options: observational evidence, experiential knowledge, a value or norm, a theory, an institution, an imagined scenario and an analogy. It is also coded whether the argument supports the thesis, challenges it or opens a new frame for the question. Together these form a map of the knowledge base of the panel's thinking. The empty places on the map are as interesting as the full ones, because they show what the panel has not thought of. The coding is described in more detail in the facilitator article Argument analysis in Pronoia.

Argumentation has been studied from many directions. Walter Fisher's narrative paradigm emphasises that people judge the credibility of claims through stories. Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance explains how people react to conflicting claims and try to ease their discomfort. Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's new rhetoric shows that an argument is always tuned to its audience and is never purely rational. Stephen Toulmin's model of argument breaks a justification down into its parts: claim, grounds, warrant, backing, the qualifier that sets the strength of the claim, and rebuttal. The model has become the basis for analysing Delphi data.

Argumentation as a panelist's skill

An important criterion for selecting a Delphi panelist is the ability to know, to understand and to argue. Argumentation is the skill of formulating justifications in order to express one's view and convince others. It requires the ability to build consistent and credible justifications, but also the willingness to understand and critically assess the arguments of others. In ethical argumentation, honesty, logic and proportion matter. The capacity for dialogical listening shows when at least some participants change their original position as a result of the arguments.

The rest of the series

The next essay, The idea of open speech, extends dialogue and argumentation to the level of society and systems. The idea of expertise examines how expertise changes along a continuum of three information flows: biological, cultural and external to the human body. The last two, The idea of the future and The idea of futures studies, broaden our understanding of what can be known about the future and how a desired future can be made.

Sources

• Aristotle. Rhetoric. In Barnes, J. (ed.), The Complete Works of Aristotle. Princeton University Press, 1984.
• Festinger, Leon (1957). A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford University Press.
• Fisher, Walter R. (1984). Narration as a human communication paradigm: The case of public moral argument. Communication Monographs 51(1), 1–22.
• Habermas, Jürgen (1981). Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. Suhrkamp. In English The Theory of Communicative Action (1984–1987), Beacon Press.
• Kakkuri-Knuuttila, Marja-Liisa (2001). Mitä on tutkimus? Argumentti, väittely ja retoriikka [What is research? Argument, debate and rhetoric]. Metodix.
• Linturi, Hannu & Kauppi, Antti (2021). Miten tutkimme tulevaisuuksia Delfoi-menetelmällä? [How do we study futures with the Delphi method?] In Kylmäkoski, M. & Rainò, P. (eds.), Delfoilla tulevaisuuteen. Humak University of Applied Sciences Publications 120.
• Perelman, Chaïm & Olbrechts-Tyteca, Lucie (1958). Traité de l'argumentation: La nouvelle rhétorique. Presses Universitaires de France. In English The New Rhetoric (1969), University of Notre Dame Press.
• Plato. Gorgias. In Cooper, J. M. (ed.), Plato: Complete Works. Hackett, 1997.
• Toulmin, Stephen (1958). The Uses of Argument. Cambridge University Press.
• Urban, Tim (2023). What's Our Problem? A Self-Help Book for Societies. Wait But Why.
• Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1953). Philosophische Untersuchungen. Blackwell. In English Philosophical Investigations.