Mapping the Future of Argument
Paul Monk
A version of this essay appeared in The Australian Financial Review, May 2001
Imagine trying to find your way around a big city with no street guide-book;
having to rely on people for verbal directions. Suppose that, having experienced for years
the time-consuming difficulties of getting around like this, you were told one day that a
street guide-book had finally been created. That would seem to be a real breakthrough,
wouldn’t it?
Imagine, however, that the book is a huge tome, thousands of pages in length,
consisting of a description of the street-layout in prose. Would this help or hinder your
navigation? Provided there was a very good index, it might be of some use. But how
cumbersome it would be, compared with what we all take for granted – the indexed book
of street maps.
Over the past few years, the idea has dawned on specialists that we have such
difficulty getting around complex arguments because there are no maps for reasoning. So
we engage in endless, often circular verbal disputes, or rely on the maze-like structure of
forbidding volumes of prose. For scholarship, for public policy, for business management
there surely must be a less frustrating, clearer way of ‘doing’ argumentation. There is. It
is the map.
As human beings we are creatures of argument. Around camp fires and in small
assemblies, human beings have discussed and disputed their practical affairs and their
myths and speculations for countless millennia. The capacity to communicate and resolve
differences verbally, to plan and to prognosticate, long ago set us apart from other
primates. It put hominids on the path to what we like to call sapience.
After tens of thousands of years of ingenious hunting and gathering, in some parts
of the world, sapient hominids invented agriculture. They started to create larger and
larger agrarian settlements and to trade with other such settlements over long distances.
Life became more complicated and arguments more complex. Denise Schmandt-Besserat
has shown that writing was invented, starting in Mesopotamia in the fourth millennium
BCE, to create records enabling traders and taxation officers to deal with complex
arguments of a pecuniary nature. Literature, history and philosophy came later.
Now, writing is an enormous advance over unaided verbal processing, if you want
to bring reliable memory and rigour of thinking to bear on an argument. However, it
suffers from certain disadvantages as far as clarity is concerned. The more complex the
argument, the more this is so. Just think of the notional example of the prose street-guide,
compared with street maps. The problem with prose is that it is linear and abstract,
placing a considerable burden on our memories, in regard to grasping and reproducing
what a piece of prose ‘says’. By comparison, a map is holistic and pictorial, enabling our
minds to see at a glance the spatial interrelations between locations, to see both the whole
and the part.
Maps in the usual sense were created to help us get around the physical landscape
and may pre-date writing. It took a huge amount of work and the development of
specialised tools, however, before maps became accurate and the world itself a ‘mapped’
place, as John Wilford showed in his book The Mapmakers. James Romm, in The Edges
of the Earth in Ancient Thought, shows how vague the geographic knowledge of the
world was even among Greeks and Romans at the height of classical civilisation.
Astonishing mathematical speculations by the Greek natural scientists Aristarchos and
Eratosthenes aside, it took until the sixteenth century CE for the idea that the world is
round to begin to take hold. Over the last hundred years or so, however, a universal
cartography has come into being. It is no longer difficult to discuss where places are or
how to get there, at least in principle, from anywhere in the world.
This is not yet true in regard to argumentation, whether in general or in regard to
the numerous issues subject to ongoing dispute. Philosophers have been arguing for 2,400
years about what constitutes good argument. They have also been arguing about many
specific matters such as human nature and knowledge of the ‘real’ world. Their lack of
decisive progress over many centuries led quite a few philosophers - in the twentieth
century - to suspect that there was some fundamental problem with philosophy itself.
They wanted, as Ludwig Wittgenstein put it, to do philosophy in such a way that one
could do away with it. Do away with it and subsequently think better; not just give up
thinking.
One philosopher who was heir to this suspicion, in mid-century, was Stephen
Toulmin. In The Uses of Argument (1958), he grappled with the puzzling fact that the
formal logic developed by philosophers since Aristotle did not work very well when
applied to practical, real-world arguments. This led him to a novel and interesting theory
about arguments in general. In the real world, he observed, argument leads not to things
true by definition so much as to “guarded or qualified assertions or conclusions.” You
can see this at work in legal argument, in natural science and in moral debate. Yet
philosophers lacked a clear understanding of how such arguments actually worked, as
against a philosophical scorn for them as ‘impure’, in the manner of Rudolf Carnap and
the logical positivists.
“What is required”, he concluded, “is not epistemological theory but
epistemological analysis” and “to do this adequately will be a lifetime’s work for many
men.” He sought a new method for laying out the structure of arguments. Arguments, he
believed, have an organic structure which can be dissected and laid out, as it were, on a
table. Their structure does not consist simply of the logical operators, premises and
conclusions postulated in formal logic, but of various claims supported on an informal,
probabilistic basis, by data and what we take to be warranted beliefs.
The challenge was to explore more carefully how this kind of structure worked
and then work with it, rather than ignoring it with Carnapian disdain. Toulmin made a
good start on this project, developing a new method for diagramming simple patterns of
reasoning. For some reason, the metaphor of mapping did not occur to him. When it
emerged, forty years later, however, in the work of Robert Horn and his colleagues in the
U.S., the aged Toulmin was at once alive to its significance in relation to his own work.
Toulmin’s insights might be likened, looking back, to Eratosthenes’s third century
BCE trigonometric calculation of the circumference of the earth. It was Robert Horn who
played the role of Christopher Columbus. He applied Toulmin’s forty year old insight
experimentally, to see how one might navigate around arguments. Horn was not
prompted by Toulmin’s insight alone, though; any more than Columbus was inspired
simply by Eratosthenes’s trigonometry. Columbus’s voyages were undertaken against the
background of Western European frustration with Ottoman control of the spice trade,
after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Horn’s work was undertaken against a
background of frustration with the sheer complexity of serious debates in the late
twentieth century. Columbus’s voyages were made possible by advances in sea-going
navigational technologies. Horn’s pioneering work was made possible by rapid advances
in information technologies.
Building on Toulmin’s insights and Gestalt psychology, Horn thought of laying
out the structure of arguments in a more or less pictorial or holistic format. This way, the
human mind finds them much easier to grasp and manipulate. After all, our brains
evolved to deal with the visual long before we invented abstract symbols. Horn produced
a seven chart “map” of the long-running and highly complex debate “Can Computers
Think?” In doing so for academic purposes, like Columbus trying to reach India, he
discovered something of a “New World” epistemologically – a world which had, of
course, been ‘there’ all the time.
Using the argument map Can Computers Think?, any intelligent non-specialist
can see and understand very quickly why there is a debate, what the experts disagree
about, and where the cutting edge of thinking is. It was never possible to do this before,
using traditional learning devices. It had always been necessary to read a mountain of
books, take folders full of notes and try to form a mental picture of the matter. The latter
is what, at the end of the day, we try to do with any argument we enter into. This is why
argument mapping is a breakthrough. It is also why it is a better way to set out and
discuss even quite simple arguments than unaided verbal discussion or writing. We are so
addicted to verbal debate and equipped for writing prose arguments, however, that a
technological and educational breakthrough will need to accompany Horn’s conceptual
revolution.
Argument mapping and Can Computers Think? was featured in New Scientist, in
July 1999. Interestingly, Horn was there quoted as saying that an obstacle in the way of
argument maps being more widely used was the difficulty people would have in learning
how to create and use them. So might Columbus have queried the feasibility of large
numbers of Europeans ever settling in the New World. Learning to read and write is
difficult, but became so vital to the working of complex societies that we now require
every child to learn these skills.
For millennia reading and writing were the monopoly of elites. They were an
arcane mystery to ordinary folk. In backward and disadvantaged societies, this is still so.
What drove universal and compulsory education in these skills was their utility. The same
may soon start to occur with argument mapping. Beginning as an elite technique for
comprehending the complex and the pressing, it could well – and much more rapidly than
reading and writing – become a mass technique for thinking clearly and presenting
arguments. It might come to be used at every level of the curriculum in schools and
universities, as well as for intelligence analysis and strategic planning in both the public
and the private sector.
The key to having this happen will be information technology and especially
graphical software facilitating the swift and elegant creation of argument maps and their
display on both screens and charts. The evolution of writing, from cuneiform symbols
incised on wax or clay tablets, to alphabetic script written in ink on papyrus, to printed
texts reproduced in books, took place over thousands of years. The evolution of
information technologies is now measured in months. What is seen to be useful and to
have a market will quickly evolve. Horn’s peculiar doubts will dissipate as the
“Americas” of diffuse and cumbersome argumentation are rapidly overrun by the bearers
of the “guns, germs and steel” of argument mapping and its associated software.
While the utility of being able to navigate around complex arguments, as casually
as we drive around large cities or across whole countries, is surely attractive, the almost
metaphysical significance of this conceptual breakthrough is beautiful to contemplate.
Human beings are thinking animals. Nothing sets us so much apart from the rest of the
animal world as the peculiar properties of our minds. Our philosophies and our religions,
both East and West, are rooted in reflections on the nature of ‘mind’. Since before the
dawn of history, human beings have been awed and puzzled by its mysteries. How is it
that we are able to think in the ways that we do? What is it that actually ‘thinks’? Is it
something free and even immortal? Is it a ‘soul’ that has somehow been placed inside
‘mortal clay’, like wine in a clay jar, but has a ‘higher destiny’? How do we apprehend
the thoughts of ‘other minds’? Do animals ‘think’? Can computers do so?
In his superb study of the nature of human intelligence, Origins of the Modern
Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition, Merlin Donald pointed
out that the road to the staggering technical and creative achievements of our kind only
begins with our inordinately large brain. It enabled us not simply to process data, but to
do two other, unprecedented things: to generate metaphor and to communicate our
thoughts to others of our kind through speech. These two capacities, interacting with one
another, made possible the existence of cognitive collectivities and the accumulation of
insight. ‘Mind’, in the human sense, therefore, was something which was intrinsically
dependent on symbiotic interaction with external storage of ideas. This is why oral
cultures are so bound to their myths and epics. The invention of pictographic skills and
then written symbols, however, took symbiosis to a radical new stage, challenging the
cognitive world of orality.
As written records accumulated and the first libraries were developed, the skills
needed in education systems, from ancient Mesopotamia or China to eighteenth century
England were the skills necessary to access and manipulate the ever larger mass of
material in the “external storage system” (ESS). There is nothing especially original in
this observation, taken in itself. What Donald shows, however, is that the nature of
‘mind’ itself is bound up with the evolution of this symbiosis between individual brains
and the ESS. Thinking itself evolves in a process governed by the feedback between the
millions of human brains and the technologies constituting the huge prosthetic and
collective brain – the ESS. ‘Mind’, in other words, equals neither brain nor soul, but a
sort of cognitive coral reef generated by millions of brains interacting over time.
In this context, argument mapping can be seen as both the product of ‘minds’
wrestling with the complexity of the ESS and a further evolutionary leap of ‘Mind’ itself.
It brings together many convergent insights to reduce the difficulties experienced by
individual brains in accessing and manipulating the ESS. The biological ‘big brain’ is not
the thing which has evolved in historic time. A rocket scientist has that in common with a
Hottentot. What has evolved is the collective, technological Big Brain. Argument
mapping, rooted in metaphor, like the first body decorations and cave paintings, the first
pictograms and the first poems, is another extraordinary creative leap of the Big Brain.
Little ‘big brains’, under the pressure of complexity and with an incentive to roam
the ESS and hunt for big game there, will use this tool and invent variations of it. The
work of Toulmin and Horn and Donald is part of this ‘big picture’. That’s what makes
even thinking about argument mapping fascinating. Using it, like using any new tool, is a
challenge to acquire skill and an opportunity to perform in ways that were simply not
possible before – as a ‘mind’ within ‘Mind’. The only real question now, as New
Scientist pointed out two years ago, is how rapidly the ‘cuneiform’ versions of argument
mapping software will be ‘alphabetised’. It will be thousands of days, rather than
thousands of years. Argument mapping really is a thinking toll for those who are, in Don
Tapscott’s phrase, ‘growing up digital’.