Alfred Sidgwick: A Little-Known Precursor of Informal Logic and Argumentation
Douglas Walton · 2000
Alfred Sidgwick (1850-1943) is such an obscure figure in philosophy that whenever his name is brought up, inevitably people confuse him with his well-known cousin Henry Sidgwick. Although he wrote six books on practical logic (listed below), and wrote many articles in this area, mostly published in the journal Mind a list of these is given in the bibliography (in Nielsen, 1997) hardly anyone seems to know who Sidgwick is. Hamblin (1970, p. 176) wrote that although Sidgwick was the only person to have tried to develop a theory of logic around the study of fallacies, 'the result is not a success ... and has been passed over by modern developments.' Hamblin adds however (p. 176) that we should not infer Sidgwick's project does not deserve attention, and that on some topics, Sidgwick has some interesting things to say about topics that have been neglected in logic. Contrary to this somewhat gloomy view of the prospects of Sidgwick's contributions to logic, Sidgwick did contribute some worthwhile insights on various topics in these areas. Nielsen's dissertation (1997) has shown how Sidgwick was a man ahead of his time, whose concerns are familiar and resonant to those of us now working in argumentation and informal logic. Nielsen's explanation of Sidgwick's work in practical logic shows how Sidgwick's ideas were not only ahead of their time, but out of step with developments in logic during and after his lifetime. The explosion of work in mathematical (formal) logic around the beginning of the twentieth century eclipsed the pragmatic concerns of Sidgwick and the few contemporaries of his, like F. C. S. Schiller (1912), who were interested in the uses of argumentation, as opposed to its formal representation, abstracted from contexts of use. We can see now why Sidgwick's work was ignored by most of his contemporaries, and then fell into obscurity. Sidgwick was a highly important precursor to the recent work in argumentation and informal logic studies. There is much that could be said