The most important part of any argument is usually the part nobody says out loud

You’ve now learned what an argument is (premises leading to a conclusion) and the two types of inference that connect them (deduction for certainty, induction for probability). You’re doing better than most cable news pundits. Congratulations.

Here’s the next problem. Most arguments in the real world are missing pieces.

Not because they’re bad arguments. Because that’s how humans actually talk. We leave things out. We assume our audience shares certain beliefs. We skip steps that seem obvious to us. The result is that the most important part of an argument is often the part nobody says out loud.

Also, I am personally guilty of this just because I don’t want to have to repeat every point I’ve already made when I’m writing something new. That’s why many people get confused when they’re new to my content. I seem like a nice, middle-aged white liberal Democrat lady – and then people find out I’m not – well, not nice or Democrat, at least. (that’s a joke, calm down).

Stephen Toulmin spent his career figuring out how to deal with this. Toulmin was a British philosopher who studied under Ludwig Wittgenstein at Cambridge, worked on radar technology during World War II, and then wrote a book in 1958 called “The Uses of Argument” that his colleagues in England hated and American rhetoricians loved. His crime was pointing out that formal logic – the kind with syllogisms and proofs – doesn’t actually describe how people argue in real life.

Sidenote: when I took Logic in college as a philosophy major, I was very, very good at it. I can recall two seperate times that I was called to the board to write a proof because my professor did not think I was paying attention (the class was at 8 AM and I could usually barely keep my eyes open), and I finished with one less step than they expected (the fewer steps, the better.) But alas, according to Toulmin – this is worthless in real world scenarios (yet, still, a huge ego boost in that scenario.)

Toulmin’s insight was that real arguments have hidden connective tissue. He called it the warrant.

Here’s his famous example. Suppose someone says: “Harry was born in Bermuda, so Harry is a British citizen.”

That looks like an argument. There’s a premise (born in Bermuda) and a conclusion (British citizen). But something’s missing. The inference only works if you accept an unstated assumption: that people born in Bermuda are legally British citizens.

That unstated assumption is the warrant. It’s the bridge between your evidence and your conclusion. And most of the time, nobody bothers to say it out loud.

This matters because warrants are where arguments actually succeed or fail.

Think about it. When someone presents evidence for a claim, you can challenge them in two ways. You can dispute their evidence – maybe Harry wasn’t actually born in Bermuda. Or you can dispute their warrant – maybe being born somewhere doesn’t automatically make you a citizen of that country.

The second challenge is usually more powerful. And it’s the one most people never think to make.

Political arguments are riddled with hidden warrants. Take a common one: “Crime rates went up after we elected a progressive prosecutor, so progressive prosecutors cause crime.”

The evidence might be true. Crime rates might have actually increased. But the warrant – that the prosecutor’s policies caused the increase rather than a dozen other factors – is doing all the work in this argument. And nobody states it explicitly because stating it explicitly would reveal how shaky it is.

Here’s where this connects to everything we’ve covered. Remember confirmation bias from Essay 6? One reason we accept bad arguments from our own side is that we share the hidden warrants. The unstated assumptions feel so obvious to us that we don’t even notice they’re assumptions.

When someone from the other political tribe makes an argument, we’re more likely to spot the hidden warrants – and reject them. When someone from our own tribe makes an argument with equally questionable warrants, we sail right past them because the assumptions match our existing beliefs.

Toulmin gave us a method for slowing down and making the implicit explicit. When you encounter an argument, ask: What would have to be true for this evidence to support this conclusion? What’s the bridge?

Sometimes the bridge is solid. “All humans are mortal” is a pretty reliable warrant for concluding that any specific human will die. Sometimes the bridge is made of tissue paper. “Correlation implies causation” is a warrant that collapses under the slightest pressure, but people use it constantly.

The skill isn’t just identifying warrants. It’s evaluating them. Is this assumption actually true? Does it apply in this specific case? Are there exceptions?

Toulmin called these exceptions “rebuttals” – the conditions under which the warrant doesn’t hold. A good critical thinker doesn’t just accept or reject arguments. They map out when the underlying assumptions apply and when they don’t.

This is hard work. It requires engaging with arguments on their own terms rather than just pattern-matching them to your existing beliefs. It means treating the people you disagree with as if they might have a point worth understanding, even if you ultimately reject it.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth again. We’re all walking around with hidden warrants in our heads. Assumptions so deep we don’t even recognize them as assumptions. Learning to surface them – in other people’s arguments and in your own – is one of the most difficult and most important critical thinking skills there is.

The issues we’re facing are too serious for arguments built on foundations nobody bothered to examine. Take the time to find the bridge. Then check if it can actually hold any weight.