Improving your argumentation skills

Within the course of your BMAN trajectory, but certainly aslo beyond, you will find that people  expect you to deliver solid argumentations. In the context of this course, I am keen on finding  rigorous argumentations, which are explicit so they can be scrutinized. I am quite sure that whoever  is going to be your thesis supervisor will have a similar requirement. Ideally, you should find good  examples in academic articles. But the quality in that set of texts varies greatly, and often things are  taken as a given because the audience is expected to fill in argumentative gaps (nobody will ask a  physicists to explain what they mean when they are writing about atoms).

Let's look a bit deeper into what an argument really entails. We make an argument whenever we are  in the presence of one or more others, and we want to convince them to accept a certain statement  we are making. So an argument is part of an interaction between several persons, where one of  them seeks to convince the others of something. This means a number of things:

-  you have to make your position as explicit and clear as possible;  -  you have to present a set of arguments that you think may convince the other person to accept  your position;  -  you should try to find out what counterarguments could be made by the other, and pre-empt  these by trying to make clear why you believe they are not valid, relevant, or important.

Toulmin (The Uses of Argument, 1958) provides a model of the 6 parts that an argument contains  (for a summary, see http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~digger/305/toulmin_model.htm . Let’s run  through these with an example.

The CLAIM is the position that you put forward. As an example we will use the following statement:  “Social sciences contribute to insight into industrial ecosystems”. In order to provide a compelling  argument, we must first state the GROUNDS for this claim: the reasons why we feel this claim is  correct. One important reason is that industrial ecosystems are – in part - social systems (they are  also technical systems, and connect to material resource flows that are part of natural ecosystems).  The next element in the argument is the WARRANT, which connects the reason to the claim. It  specifies why the fact that industrial ecosystems are (in part) social systems leads to the conclusion  that social sciences contribute to insight into industrial ecosystems. My specification of this link  would be that social sciences provide the up-to-date knowledge on social systems, and such  knowledge is indispensable to gain insight into the social system-part of industrial ecosystems. This  warrant also builds on reasons, which are the BACKING. In the example, this would be something like  ‘insight requires up-to-date scientific knowledge’ (you may accept this as a common sense truth, but  others might be less convinced; they might stress that insight can only be developed by actually  working within industrial ecosystems for a long period of time).

Being an attempt at convincing others, there may be objections to this claim. As far as you know  these, they become part of your argumentation as REBUTTALS (counter arguments to objections to  your claim). In our example, one could say that in an analytical sense, the social system only causes a  minor part of the dynamics of industrial ecosystems, and can therefore be safely dismissed. In  argument, I would include a rebuttal to show that this is not true: I could show with empirical

evidence that the same industrial activity, using similar technologies (say oil refining), is organized in  radically different ways in different countries, and that these different organizational forms have  consequences for the flows and environmental impacts produced. This would effectively silence any  opponent that would want to make the objection. This is one way to take objections to your claim  into account in your argumentation. Another way is to add a QUALIFIER. This is a statement that  narrows down the scope of your claim. It could be that, after summing up certain evidence, you hold  the claim to be unproven in certain types of industrial ecosystems.

So, providing a full argument means that you are precise in formulating your claim and possible  qualifiers, provide not only the grounds for the claim but also how these grounds connect to the  claim (warrant), and the backing for that warrant (see the scheme in this link, together with some  additional explanation). If you apply this to your blogs and research proposal, you will notice that it  takes some time to figure out all these elements, and the way they connect. That’s exactly what is  supposed to happen: you are then making the implicit parts of your thinking explicit. If you write  that up, then your argumentation is solid. In essence, that means: you provide others with all the  information necessary to make a decision whether they are convinced by you. If not, then they will  have to provide good reasons for questioning one of these elements.

Argumentation is important in any scientific discipline. It is especially important in the social sciences  (including business administration), where there is less unity about the concepts and theories that  are used. This simply means that the choice for a theory or concept also has to rest on a solid  argumentation.

