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Jane

LINKED AND CONVERGENT REASONING

For each of the following arguments, decide whether it is linked (L) or convergent (C).

1. Yes you have to go to bed because I'm telling you to and I'm your father.
L

2. I can't be the murderer because I'm completely incapable of taking a life. And, anyway, I wasn't even in the city when the murder happened.
C

3. You say that Mark has just been swimming, but he can't have been. In the first place, he can't swim properly. In the second place, I saw him only two minutes ago and his hair wasn't even wet.
C or L. Either answer is acceptable.

Explanation: This is a matter of interpretation. On the one hand I think it needs to be linked because neither reason is good enough without the other. Not being able to swim doesn’t tell against the colloquial sense of swimming and one can always wear a swimming cap. On the other hand, it could be argued that convergent arguments are more robust to attack than linked ones, because a successful attack on just one of the reasons of a convergent argument leaves the remaining reasons untouched, but a successful attack on just one of the reasons of a linked argument successfully attacks the entire linkage. So by the principle of charity, we should read this argument as convergent. Arguments like this should really be interpreted as convergent. The reason is that the “not good enough without the other” standard simply rules out the possibility of moderate-strength inductive linked arguments, and we don’t want to do that. It also unnecessarily complicates the evaluation of many inductive arguments. A sufficiently large (and diverse) number of moderately strong reasons can add up to a strong argument, without being in any way linked. What makes an argument linked is the interdependence among the reasons, not the total degree of support for the conclusion. A good way to express this is that in a linked argument, removing one reason causes the other to provide less support than it did...