ABSTRACT
Everyday English arguments come in all sorts of forms and are frequently casually expressed, with crucial elements remaining merely implicit. Logicians attempt to formalize these arguments. But it can be a mistake to project too much of those formalizations onto the everyday arguments themselves. Timothy Smiley has repeatedly drawn our attention to the subtleties of ordinary language reasoning and some of the mistaken assumptions and simplifi cations that logicians and philosophers often make in connection with it. At one time, logicians sought to treat all arguments as syllogisms, but that now seems clearly too restrictive. But it may also not be right to assume that arguments nonetheless take one of the wider range of forms that logicians now recognize. Perhaps there is no fact of the matter about the real underlying form of an argument in many cases. In this essay I consider the possibility of arguments that are taken to be good arguments in an informal setting, despite not being strictly or absolutely valid. In his ‘A tale of two tortoises’ (1995), Smiley provides an attractive framework for assessing arguments as relatively valid. He defends the appealing thought that everyday arguments can rely on rules of inference that are not formally valid: such rules can be presumed to be good ones in the context, just as context can justify suppressed premises relied upon in other arguments.
