In Frans H. van Eemeren, Rob Grootendorst, J. Anthony Blair, and Charles A. Willard (eds.) Special Fields and Cases, Proceedings of the Third ISSA Conference on Argumentation, Volume IV, pp. 539-545; Amsterdam: International Centre for the Study of Argumentation (1995).
This paper attempts to display the inus-conditional structure of some justifications through an examination of part of Gutmann's argument in Democratic Education for the compulsory schooling of young people. It does not attempt to address the substantive issue of the justification of compulsory schooling, but simply to use a focus on one strand in the arguments relating to the distinction between adults and children to display as clearly as possible a form of argument, or a structure of reasons, that is frequently found elsewhere and which deserves special attention.
The paper begins by reporting the dialectical context of the relevant part of Gutmann's reasoning, her response to the incisive arguments of John Harris in favour of children's rights to freedom from compulsory schooling. Having set out the exchange, and highlighted the prima facie oddity of Gutmann's position, it seeks to show that the logical situation is comparable to that discussed by Mackie in a paper on causation in which he introduced the notion of insufficient but necessary parts of an unnecessary but sufficient (inus) condition. This structure is revealed in an extreme form in the conventions governing many multiple-choice tests; it may be presumed to exist in other less formal examination contexts.
The paper attempts to indicate the ways the inus-conditional structure of reasons interacts with our normal modes of argumentation about the adequacy of reasons, and finally brings these findings to bear on the state of play in the Gutmann/Harris debate.
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