Discussion Note ALETHIC, EPISTEMIC, AND DIALECTICAL MODELS OF ARGUMENT

In a double-barreled attack on Charles Hamblin's influential book Fallacies (1970), Ralph Johnson (1990a) argues that Hamblin's chapter 1 is an unfair account of the standard treatment of fallacies, and then argues, in a second paper in Philosophy and Rhetoric (1990b), that Hamblin's chapter 7 on the concept of argument arrives at a wrong conclusion, based on reasoning that is flawed and problematic. This attack makes Hamblin's book appear, incongruously, to commit many of the very sorts of logical lapses, errors, and fallacies that it is supposed to be warning against. According to Johnson, Hamblin was not only biased and unfair in his account of the textbooks and other sources of his time-thus committing a kind of straw man fallacy he was also weak in his reasoning. Although most of Hamblin's scholarship has stood up amazingly well, his book still being an indispensable resource in the field of argumentation, it is, of course, easy to pinpoint some lapses or weaknesses in the book now, twenty years later, with twenty-twenty hindsight. But did Hamblin really commit the errors that Johnson attributes to him, to the serious extent that Johnson claims? In a companion reply (1991b), I argue that he did not, in his chapter 1 of Fallacies on the standard treatment. In this article, I will argue that Johnson's assessment of Hamblin's chapter 7 is also an attempt at refutation that does not hold up to critical scrutiny.