It is surprising to notice how often in political debates this fallacy is committed. It is human nature to believe for the time being that the other side will do the worst thing that the circumstances make possible. Fortunately, human nature just as constantly refutes the error.
To make clearer this necessity of having a definite proposition to argue, let us take one of the subjects suggested on page 10 which is not yet in a form for profitable argument, and amend it. "The standard for graduation from this college should be raised," is a subject that can be discussed, but as it stands it would not be a good proposition for an argument, because it is vague. How much should the standard be raised? By what method should it be raised? These and other questions you would have to answer before you would have a proposition definite enough to be argued with profit. The proposition could be made definite enough by such amendments as the following: "The standard for graduation from this college should be raised by requiring one eighth more hours of lecture or recitation in each of the four years"; or, "The standard for graduation from this college should be raised by increasing the pass mark in all courses from fifty per cent to sixty per cent"; or, "The standard for graduation from this college should be raised by allowing no student to have his degree who has fallen below sixty per cent in one fourth of his work, and has not attained eighty per cent in at least one eighth of his college work." In each of these cases the proposition is so definite that you could find exactly how many students would be affected. A proposition which involves a definite body of facts is arguable; one which involves an indefinite and incalculable body of facts is not.
To take another example from the brief we shall be working out in this chapter, the proposition, "Wytown should adopt the commission form of government," is not definite enough, for there are various forms of commission government, such as the Galveston plan, the Des Moines plan, and by this time a considerable variety of others; and citizens who are at all particular in their voting would want to know just which of these was proposed for their approval. The proposition, therefore, would have to be limited to, "Wytown should adopt a commission government after the Des Moines plan."
The exact form of your proposition will not always come to you at the first try. It may easily happen that you will not see the exact issue involved in the argument until you have gone some way with the processes of analysis which we shall be considering in the rest of this chapter. Always hold yourself ready to amend your proposition, if you can thereby come closer to the question.
Notebook. Enter the exact proposition which you are to argue.
Illustration, Wytown should adopt the commission form of government, in the form now in practice at Des Moines, Iowa.
EXERCISES
1. Make three arguable propositions on the subject, "Entrance examinations for college."
2. Criticize the following propositions and amend them, if necessary, so that they might be argued with profit:
a. Freshmen should be required to keep reasonable hours.
b. The honor system should be introduced everywhere.
c. This city should do more for its boys.
d. The street railway companies in this city should be better regulated.
e. The amateur rules for college athletes are too stringent.
f. Intercollegiate football is beneficial.
19. Definition of Terms. Making a proposition definite is chiefly a process of defining terms which are found in it; but when these are defined you may still in your argument use others which also need definition. In general the definition of terms, whether in the proposition or not, implies finding out just what a term means for the present purpose. Almost every common word is used for some variety of purposes. "Commission," for example, even within the field of government, has two very different meanings:
As applied to state and national administration, the term "commission government" is used in connection with the growing practice of delegating to appointed administrative boards or commissions—the Interstate Commerce Commission, state railroad commissions, tax commissions, boards of control, etc.—the administration of certain special or specified executive functions … From the standpoint of organization, then, "commission government," as applied to the state, connotes decentralization, the delegation and division of authority and responsibility, and the disintegration of popular control … As applied to city administration, however, commission government has a very different meaning. In striking contrast to its use in connection with the state, it is used to designate the most concentrated and centralized type of organization which has yet appeared in the annals of representative municipal history. Under so-called commission government for cities, the entire administration of the city's affairs is placed in the hands of a small board or council—"commission"—elected at large and responsible directly to the electorate for the government of the city.7
Furthermore, even the term "commission government for cities" is not wholly definite, for there are already several recognized types of such government, such as the Galveston type, the Des Moines type, and recent modifications of these. If you are making an argument for introducing a commission government, therefore, you must go still further with your definitions, and specify the distinguishing features of the particular plan which you are urging on the voters, as is done in the definition on page 59. In other words, you must make exactly clear the meaning of the term for the present case.
Your first impulse when you find a term that needs defining may be to go to a dictionary. A little thought will show you that in most cases you will get little comfort if you do. The aim of a dictionary is to give all the meanings which a word has had in reasonable use; what you need in an argument is to know which one of these meanings it has in the present case. If you were writing an argument on the effects or the righteousness of the change wrought in the English constitution by the recent curtailment of the veto power of the House of Lords, and wished to use the word "revolution," and to use it where it was important that your readers should understand precisely what you intended it to convey, you would not burden them with such a definition as the following, from an unabridged dictionary: "Revolution: a fundamental change in political organization, or in a government or constitution; the overthrow or renunciation of one government and the substitution of another, by the governed." Such a definition would merely fill up your space, and leave you no further ahead. A dictionary is studiously general, for it must cover all possible legitimate meanings of the word; in an argument you must be studiously specific, to carry your readers with you in the case under discussion.
Moreover, words are constantly being pressed into new uses, as in the case of "commission" (see p. 54); and others have entirely legitimate local meanings. Only a dictionary which was on the scale of the New English Dictionary and which was reedited every five years could pretend to keep up with these new uses. In an unabridged dictionary dated 1907, for example, the full definition of "amateur" is as follows: "A person attached to a particular pursuit, study or science, as to music or painting; especially one who cultivates any study or art, from taste or attachment, without pursuing it professionally." Of what use would such a definition be to you if you were arguing in favor of strengthening or relaxing the amateur rules in college athletics, in which you had to follow through the intricacies of summer baseball and of reimbursements for training table and traveling expenses? Such a definition hardly comes in sight of the use of the word which is most in the mouths of college students in America. Words mean whatever careful and accepted writers have used them to mean; and the business of a dictionary is so far as possible to record these meanings. But language, being a living and constantly developing growth, is constantly altering them and adding to them.
What a dictionary can do for you, therefore, is merely to tell you whether in the past the word has been used with the signification which you wish to give to it; but there are very few cases in which this will be much help to you, for in an argument your only interest in the meaning of a term is in the meaning of that term for the case under discussion.
There are two quite different kinds of difficulty