The three kinds of judgement

[originally posted to BlogCisive]

To a first approximation, all deliberative judgements (i.e., those that turn on to-some-degree careful consideration of the relevant arguments) can be usefully sorted into three kinds.

These are the three Ds of judgement.

1. Decision

Decision is a matter of choosing from among options, particularly where those options are possible actions.  The question here is “What should I (we) do?”

2. Diagnosis

Diagnostic judgements concern what is going on.   The question is “What is happening?” or “What’s the situation?”  The term diagnosis has medical connotations, but here I’m widening its use to include various kinds of investigation, hypothesis testing,  and problem-solving.  All diagnostic judgements involve hypotheses (conjectures) as to what is actually happening.  A good example of diagnostic judgement in this sense is the assessment in intelligence analysis.

3. Deliberation

Deliberation is trying to determine the truth of some proposition by considering the arguments for or against it.  The question is “Is it true?”

Austhink has two products – Rationale, and bCisive.  Rationale, the argument mapping tool, supports deliberation.  bCisive, the business decision mapping tool, has been positioned as supporting decision.  We haven’t had a tool for diagnosis, and have tended to recommend that people wanting to make diagnostic judgements use some variant of the “Analysis of Competing Hypotheses” (ACH) method.

However, just as argument mapping supports deliberation, and business decision mapping supports decision, so “hypothesis mapping,” an alternative to ACH, supports diagnosis.  Further, hypothesis mapping is quite easily handled in bCisive as it stands. 

Austhink is currently working on a “Pro” version of bCisive which will include crucial features needed for supporting both deliberation and diagnosis. 

This means that one tool will help users map the thinking behind all three major kinds of deliberative judgement. 

The tool should be available in a few months.

Dinosaurs and inference rebuttals

Spotted at the Creation Museum:

Q: Are human bones found with dinosaur fossils?

A: None have been discovered yet.  However, if human bones aren’t found with dinosaur bones, it simply means they weren’t buried together.  Humans have come in contact with lots of animals, like crocodiles and coelecanths, but they aren’t buried with humans.

The obvious thing to say about this is that it is flagrant “confirmation bias” – seeking or treating evidence in such a way as to confirm one’s cherished beliefs rather than to evaluate or test them.

From an argument analysis perspective, though, it is a nice example of what, technically, we’d call an “inference rebuttal” – an objection to an primary objection which targets not any of the stated premises of the primary objection but rather the inference from the primary objection to the falsity of the main contention.

That’s quite a mouthful, but the basic idea is simple enough, and can be easily illustrated.

Doing so will help explain one of the most distinctive – but subtle – features of the Rationale software.

On the face of it, the fact that human bones have not been discovered with dinosaur fosils is an objection to the standard Creationist story, which includes the idea that humans and dinosaurs once both roamed the earth at the same time.

The premise of the objection is a blunt fact, and so the Creationist has to accept it:

However the Creationist still wants to defuse the objection, and can do it by arguing that the premise, though true, doesn’t show that the contention is false.

To represent this kind of move, Rationale allows a lower-level objection to be connected to the primary objection itself rather than to any of its premises.  Graphically, the lower-level objection points to the word “opposes”:

Evaluating this argument as a Creationist presumably would, the objection has been defused:

There is however another way to read the Creationist’s argument.  This way of framing things probably better reflects the Creationist’s underlying mindset.   From this perspective, creationist “science” combined with the basic facts imply an interesting “discovery”: those humans who did (supposedly) coexist with dinosaurs never buried themselves with said dinosaurs:

Mega-Litigation

Maybe this post should’ve been called “Why judges should be paid more.”

Simon Lewis alerted me to the written judgment of Justice Ronald Sackville in the case Seven Network Limited v News Limited, otherwise known as the C7 case, or “Kerry Stokes against the world.”

This is a monster (1200 pages, 76mb in rtf format) document, itself the tip of the iceberg consisting of a far more monstrous legal case. The first chapter is a commentary on the case itself and its challenges. Some highlights:

“This case is an example of what is best described as ‘mega-litigation’…Mega-litigation, if it proceeds to finality, often generates very long judgments. Regrettably, this is a prime example.”

“The hearing occupied 120 sitting days…The burden on the Court was not limited to the 120 hearing days… ” Nevertheless “The hearing in the present case was considerably shorter than it might have been.”

One factor which reduced the length of the hearing was the extensive use of an “electronic courtroom.” “It would have been virtually impossible to conduct the trial without the use of modern technology.”

“the volume of closing written submissions filed by the parties was truly astonishing” – but “The written submissions are only a minor component of the ‘paper’ burden in a case like this.”

“What is surprising is the sheer amount of money that has been devoted to a single case…the litigation has cost the parties collectively a staggering sum, amounting to nearly $200 million…In my view, the expenditure of $200 million (and counting) on a single piece of litigation is not only extraordinarily wasteful but borders on the scandalous.”

“I directed the parties to prepare an agreed chronology and encouraged them to agree on a template for written submissions. However, the responses illustrate that parties to mega-litigation are often able effectively to ignore (albeit politely) directions made by the court, if they consider that their forensic interests will be advanced by doing so.”

“The fundamental difficulty facing a court hearing mega-litigation, however, is that the parties may decide, for whatever reason, to engage in a full-blown forensic battle in which almost every barely arguable issue is examined in depth. In these circumstances, the best efforts of the court to limit the scope of the dispute may amount to very little.”

“No doubt courts must endeavour to control mega-litigation more efficiently.”

“the boards and shareholders of public companies embroiled in litigation of this kind need to take a more critical and sustained interest in the proceedings…If there is one lesson to emerge from this case, it is that even the largest and best-resourced corporations owe it to their shareholders, if not to the general public, to think very carefully before committing themselves irrevocably to mega-litigation.”

“the length of written submissions may not be a true reflection of their worth. Very detailed submissions, despite their length, can of course be most helpful in clarifying the issues in dispute and in analysing the complex factual and legal questions requiring resolution. But this is not necessarily so.”

“the parties had not structured their Closing Submissions by reference to an agreed list of topics that had been handed up in court towards the conclusion of the evidence…by and large, they had decided to ignore the ‘agreed’ list of topics. They had taken this course notwithstanding my understanding, derived from discussions in court, that the list would provide a template for the written submissions and, in all probability, for the judgment.”

From a letter to the parties: “Quite apart from their length, I must confess to being surprised about some aspects of the submissions. At the risk of stating the obvious, part of the art of advocacy is to make it easy for the decision-maker to understand what issues need to be resolved and to explain clearly, cogently and concisely how and why the crucial issues should be resolved in favour of a particular party. To leave the Judge, if not completely at large, then without a reliable working compass in a vast sea of factual material, is not a technique calculated to advance a party’s case. This.. is because the cogency and persuasiveness of submissions depends on the ability of the Judge to follow them and to isolate the critical legal and factual issues upon which a case is likely to turn’.”

“Writing a judgment in a case such as this is an extremely onerous task. In part, this is due to the sheer volume of material that must be read, absorbed and analysed. The onerous nature of the task increases in proportion to the complexity of the legal and factual issues requiring resolution. In my view, only those who have undertaken a task of this character and magnitude can appreciate how relentless and indeed stressful it can be.”

“mega-litigation requires the judge to be given every assistance that modern information technology can provide…in future, the setting up and co-ordination of electronic databases in mega-litigation must be carried out under the direct supervision of the Court, not the parties. Moreover, the process must be directed from the outset to meeting the judgment writing needs of the judge. ”

“The conclusion I have reached is that Seven has not succeeded in any of the many causes of action in which it has relied.” Note: this is amazing. They spent 100 million dollars fighting a legal case and didn’t succeed on a single point.

“There is a particular risk associated with mega-litigation that (happily for all concerned, but particularly for me) has not (yet) eventuated in these proceedings. The completion of the trial and the timely preparation of a judgment are contingent upon the trial judge surviving in reasonable health for the entirety of the proceedings…I asked at a pre-trial directions hearing whether the parties in the present case had considered insuring against the risk of judicial death or infirmity. “

Two of these issues – the failure of the lawyers to present their arguments in a manner easily comprehended by the judge, and the need for “every assistance that modern information technology can provide” are the ones of most interest to me and I will address them in a subsequent post.

Whately the …?

I’ve often commented on how odd it is that argument mapping took so long to appear, only starting to take off in the past decade. After all, argument mapping is really just drawing diagrams showing the relationships among propositions in some piece of reasoning or argumentation on some topic we care about. It is a very simple and (at least in hindsight) obvious idea. Yet the consensus among those few of us who take an interest in such things is that the first diagram recognizable as an argument map didn’t appear until the early nineteenth century, tucked away at the back of a book on logic by the Reverend Richard Whately. Which strikes me as completely implausible – surely there are earlier examples?

Seems like Whately was quite an interesting fellow. Steve Simmons, in a recent post on this blog, credited Whately with saying something like the following: “there is no argument so bad that it cannot be rendered more acceptable by embedding it in a sufficiently prolonged text”. Indeed.

I tried but failed to find the original quote. Anyone?

Update: Steve has provided the original: “A very long discussion is one of the most effective veils of Fallacy;….a Fallacy which when stated barely would not deceive a child, may deceive half the world if diluted in a quarto volume”. Whately, Richard. Elements of Logic, New York, Jackson, 1836, p162, found in: ‘Informal Logic’, Douglas N Walton, Cambridge University Press, 1994, p 278.

How to get going with your thesis

 A new Rationale user working on a PhD thesis emailed the following:

I finished my comps in March and have been working to nail down my dissertation topic since. I have too many interests and little discipline so it’s been daunting. Notably, I sat down last week with rationale and decided to map out what I was thinking and feeling. I used the reasoning tools to nail down my main argument, the assertions I am inclined to make in support of that argument, and then what I know (or believe) supports those. Trying to not get bogged down, I next skipped to basis statements that helped me sort out which of these things I know are supported in the literature, which I need to do original logic on, which I need to test using a game model, and which I need to support using case studies. And finally – after months of circling, I went to the text panel and got the skeleton of a précis. Spent three more days cleaning up and thinking, and then as of this morning I sent those 4 pages off to a prospective adviser to start a conversation.

It might also be useful later in the process, articulating and evaluating what you take to be your core arguments.

If you’re writing a thesis, or some other elaborate piece of argumentative prose, then its a good idea to try mapping your arguments just to test whether you really know what they are.

If you actually have any substantial arguments, and if you are truly clear about what they are, mapping them should be a trivial exercise – just whacking claims into boxes and putting those boxes where they belong in the logical hierarchy.

However, it almost never is a trivial exercise.  We are, in fact, often quite deluded about the extent to which we really understand our own arguments.   Of course often we’re aware that we’re not fully on top of the arguments.  The more interesting point here is that, most of the time, when we think we know exactly what they are, we’re laboring under a kind of illusion of clarity.  There’s nothing like the demand to lay out the arguments in a map (well, a map observing the core principles of good argument mapping) to puncture the illusion.

The amount of effort you find you need to put in to get a tolerably good map of your arguments is a measure of the lack of clarity you have about those arguments.

(This assumes that you’re using a tool, like Rationale, which reduces to almost nothing the mechanics of producing an argument map diagram.)

Support is transitive?

On the news tonight there was coverage of protests in Washington against the Iraq war. There was a soundbite of an Iraq veteran saying “You can’t support the troops and oppose the war, because the troops support the war.”

These thoughts flashed through my mind in quick succession:

1. Argument.
2. Argument, very concisely expressed.
3. Bad argument.
4. Bad, but interesting.

Why interesting? Well, consider what this fellow must be assuming. Put another way, what co-premise would, if true, make this argument strong?

Presumably something like, “if you support somebody, you have to support what they support”.

This is similar to the technical notion of transitivity: if A supports B and B supports C, then A supports C. Conversely, if A doesn’t support C, then A doesn’t really support B.

So we get:

Now it seems to me that this assumption is obviously wrong as a general principle. For example I can support my child without thereby being obliged to adopt whatever ill-considered attitude they might adopt.

From a “critical thinking” perspective, the argument is really a “fallacy of equivocation” – i.e. an argument that is fallacious because it “equivocates” on a key term, meaning that it uses a key term in different ways in different places.

The term “support” means one thing when you talk about supporting the troops, and another thing when you talk about supporting or opposing the war.

But there is a deeper issue here – the idea that allegiance to a group requires allegiance to the beliefs of that group. Something profound (and presumably of evolutionary origin) in the human psyche makes us tend this way. Many human organisations promote the idea and owe their continued existence to its power. But it is of course a dangerous idea.

Arguments for compound events

Peter Tillers raised an important issue on the Rationale google group:

“I will have to figure out how best to use ‘Rationale’ to assess the
occurrence or non-occurrence of “composite events,” e.g., an event X
consisting of events a, b + c. This is because in law the factual
events in question in adjudication and investigation are invariably
such composite events; e.g., Did the Defendant (a) deliberately (b)
cause (d) the death of (e) another person… Incidentally, almost all
work on charting argument about or analysis
of factual questions in litigation assumes that the occurrence or
character of but a single event is in question. But that assumption is
incorrect. See P. Tillers, “Probability and Uncertainty in Law,”
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=738764″

I replied as follows:

Peter’s note concerns what lawyers call the elements of the crime of murder. Murder is a compound event. One way to specify the elements is, as Peter does, by listing the parts of speech which occur in a succinct sentence describing the compound event, i.e. the defendant

- deliberately

- caused

- the death of

- another person

Each of these however is shorthand for a component or aspect of the compound event. Thus “caused” is shorthand for the proposition

The defendant caused the death of the victim.

Note that this proposition takes for granted another proposition

The victim died.

and, if the charge of murder is to be sustained, another proposition must be true:

The victim was a person.

Since these propositions must all be true together, in Rationale we’d use an “Analysis” mode map:

The disadvantage of such a representation is that it is wordy, especially as compared with the shorthand approach mentioned above. However there are corresponding advantages. In particular it more accurately represents what the prosecution will, in fact, have to establish – i.e., the truth of a series of distinct but interrelated propositions. It also represents them in a more logically appropriate order, i.e, getting the order of logical priority roughly right; there’s no point in proving that the defendant did it deliberately if the victim wasn’t even a person. (It is interesting that the natural order in an English sentence is almost the reverse of the order of logical dependency.)

Nevertheless, we’re interested in the idea that there might be some alternative diagramming format in software such as Rationale which provides a more succinct and perhaps in some ways more practically “useable” way of representing these sorts of top-level legal cases.

An elegant argument

Theodore Dalrymple is one of my favourite writers.  He is perhaps most well known for his descriptions of the lurid depravities of underclasses, both social and intellectual.  Equally obvious are his scathing opinions and dry wit.  For afficionados of argumentation, however, his writing also appeals due to his skillful deployment of crisp and often complex chains of reasoning.  Here is a glimpse of Dalrymple doing his thing:

“Abbott was on the run for a short while, but then returned to prison where, about twenty years later, he hanged himself. In his only other book, called My Return, he argued that he could not have intended to kill the young waiter, because he stabbed him only once, and a man like him would have stabbed him many times had he intended to kill him. This was not the argument of a good man.”

Diagrammed in Rationale, the central argument looks like this:

Note how the two premises “work together,” and the diagram represents this by “enveloping” both premises in the same green area – which is really just an extension of the line connecting the premises to the main contention, the claim that he could not have intended to kill the young waiter.

Dalrymple’s confident control of the fundamentals of good reasoning is evident in the way he has laid out three claims which, in the way they are worded, display their tight interconnectedness.   Put another way, the three claims comprise a simple argument observing almost to the letter some basic principles of informal argument structure. 

The argument is an example of a classic form known by logicians as modus tollens.  In Rationale’s template section, we find a schematic version of modus tollens:

Dalrymple’s argument, massaged so as to more exactly fit the modus tollens template, looks like this:

And with that, I promise that not all entries in this blog will end up like lecture notes for an introductory reasoning class!