The most important part of any argument is usually the part nobody says out loud
Essay 11 covered what an argument actually is – premises leading to a conclusion. Essay 12 covered the two types of inference that connect them – deduction for certainty, induction for probability. At this point you’re doing better than most cable news pundits.
Here’s the next wrinkle. Most arguments in the real world are missing pieces.
Not because they’re bad arguments. Because that’s how humans actually talk. People leave things out. They assume the listener shares certain beliefs. They skip steps that feel obvious. The result is that the most important part of an argument is very often the part that nobody ever 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 separate 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 somebody 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 is 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 the evidence and the conclusion. And most of the time, nobody actually says it out loud.
This matters because warrants are where arguments actually succeed or fail.
Think about it. When somebody presents evidence for a claim, there are two ways to challenge them. 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 kind of challenge is usually way more powerful. And it’s the one most people never think to make.
Political arguments are riddled with hidden warrants. Take a really common one – “crime rates went up after we elected a progressive prosecutor, so progressive prosecutors cause crime.” The evidence here might be accurate. Crime rates might have actually increased in that jurisdiction. But the WARRANT – that the prosecutor’s policies caused the increase, rather than any of a dozen other overlapping factors – is doing all the actual work in that argument. And nobody ever states it out loud, because stating it out loud would reveal how shaky it is.
This is where it connects back to confirmation bias from Essay 6. One reason people accept weak arguments from their own side is that they already share the hidden warrants. The unstated assumptions feel so obvious they never register as assumptions at all.
When somebody from the other political tribe makes an argument, people are much more likely to spot the hidden warrant – and reject it. When somebody from their own tribe makes an argument with equally questionable warrants, they sail right past them, because the assumptions match what they already believed.
Toulmin’s whole method is basically a way of slowing down and making the implicit explicit.
When you encounter an argument, ask one question – 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 eventually die. Sometimes the bridge is made of tissue paper. “Correlation implies causation” is a warrant that collapses under even gentle pressure, but people use it constantly.
The real 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 those exceptions rebuttals – the conditions under which the warrant doesn’t hold. A good critical thinker doesn’t just accept or reject arguments wholesale. They map out when the underlying assumptions actually apply and when they don’t.
That is hard work. It requires engaging with arguments on their own terms, instead of just pattern-matching them to existing beliefs and either accepting or dismissing them based on tribe. It means treating people you disagree with as if they might have something worth understanding, even if you end up rejecting their conclusion.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth this series keeps landing on.
Everybody is walking around with hidden warrants in their heads. Assumptions so deep they don’t even register AS assumptions. Learning to surface them – both in other people’s arguments and in your own – is one of the hardest and most important critical thinking skills there is. And one of the most underused.
The issues we’re facing right now are too serious for arguments built on foundations nobody bothered to look at. Take the time to find the bridge. Then check whether it can actually hold any weight.