Think Again: How to Reason and Argue

A clear argument has to lay out an inferential pathway, starting from what the audience already knows or accepts. If you don’t recurse far enough, you’re just talking to yourself.

So reason and proof must start with faith in reason and belief in some particular concept of proof. However, there is even more faith involved in ordinary rationality than that. Twentieth-century thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Ludwig Wittgenstein have argued that all reasoning is based on prior faith commitments to which

THE ART OF CONTROVERSY. PRELIMINARY: LOGIC AND DIALECTIC.