ABSTRACT
More than any logician of his time, Timothy Smiley taught us that there are more good arguments in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our formalizations. Indeed, the attempt to formalize a good argument can lead to straight-jacketing and distortion:
In the grip of the misguided belief that all correct reasoning is really syllogistic, traditional logicians took arguments that were in perfectly good order as they stood and forced them into the straitjacket of the syllogism. In the grip of a similar but I think equally misguided belief, their successors force the straightforward inference ‘Al is older than Bill, Bill is older than Charlie; therefore Al is older than Charlie’ into the form of a universal instantiation followed by modus ponens. It is a truism that we constantly rely on all sorts of things-timetables, geometry, casual items of knowledge or information-to sustain inferences as well as to sustain assertions. When one talks of the practical value of logic, of logic as something that ordinary people use, it is logic in this extended sense, not the textbook sense, and similarly with the language of ‘proof’, ‘follows from’, ‘deduction’ and ‘must’. (Smiley 1995: 731-2)
I am interested in a form of practical reason that can be extraordinarily powerful-those who experience its force experience it as a practical syllogismbut if one were to try to formalize it, it is hard to see how it would look like anything other than some kind of tautology: perhaps, ‘If you are an A, then be an A’. More puzzling, the power of the injunction does not fl ow from the transition from the indicative in the antecedent to the imperative so much as from a developing understanding of what it means to be an A.
