ABSTRACT
The Owl of Minerva flies only at dusk. This is a poetic way of saying that wisdom emerges only in hindsight, that understanding is always backward-looking. The need to systematically identify and diagnose bad but apparently good arguments calls us to theorize argument. The way to appreciate the Owl of Minerva problem is to think a little about metalanguages. The objective in developing a metalanguage about argument is to enable us to talk about a given argument's quality without taking a side in the debate over the truth of its conclusion. The problem is that when the concepts of the metalanguage are used as first-order tools in an ongoing argument, the impartiality of the metalanguage is dissolved. The Owl of Minerva problem, however, has some good news mixed in with its bad news. The bad news, of course, is that the tools we have for argument correction will contribute to new problems that need new corrections.
