Extending a Toulmin Diagram with Additional Backing

Dealing with the "Terrorism Guide"

So a couple days ago we diagrammed this out:

Deputy commissioner showing bike lock as evidence of professional terrorism.

This was a deputy police commissioner holding up a bike lock with a big chain saying that the students at Columbia who were protesting had barricaded the doors with this heavy chain, and that this was not the sort of thing normal students had. The argument was that the students were being organized by professionals. The problem was this bike chain was not only something that students had, but was actually a bike lock and chain that the university had recommended students get.

Surely after that embarrassment we wouldn’t see other examples of that, right? Well, as they say, I regret to inform you…

Still from Newsmax of a deputy commissioner holding up the Oxford Very Short Introduction to Terrorism with knowing look. On the side is live coverage from the Trump trial of the Hope Hicks questioning.

Yes, that is a still from Newsmax of a deputy commissioner holding up the Oxford Very Short Introduction to Terrorism as if it was Terrorism for Dummies. I honestly thought this must be fake when I first saw it. It’s not. From Newsmax:

Daughtry displayed some of the evidence the police collected including a book on terrorism and an array of brand-new equipment. "I know this is not part of the curriculum in Columbia: ropes, chains, goggles, gas masks. So somebody is behind this, and we're gonna take a deep dive to see who exactly is the mastermind behind the scenes," he said during an appearance on "American Agenda."

One weird thing about researching argument structure is that when the world is this dumb there’s at least a bit of an upside, because it allows you to test out your models. In this case we can use the new example to check and refine our previous “bike lock” model. As you’ll remember, the bike lock model looked like this:

Toulmin model connecting bike lock with heavy chain to grounds of “the protesters were using professional gear” to a claim that the level of police force was justified.

As usual, some caveats. You can believe the use of force against the protesters was justified while still thinking the argument is bullshit. You can even believe there were professional agitators involved while thinking the backing provided is ridiculous. (If you want my take on these things, go read the footnotes in the original piece, but it honestly doesn’t matter).

The neat thing about seeing an individual or community providing additional backing like this for an argument (whether the argument is good or bad) is that you can check your model. We do that by adding in the book and a couple other things mentioned in the segment into backing and seeing if the model needs to be tweaked a bit. Here’s the model with the new stuff added:

Same Toulmin model as above, but with book on terrorism added and gas masks

It honestly doesn’t look too bad. The term “gear” in the grounds doesn’t quite fit the book. After a couple minutes thought it occurs to me the term “paraphernalia” (a collection of items or equipment associated with a particular activity) covers both the book and the other items well. So we’ll make that edit.

The second thing we get from this Newsmax appearance is some new language:

So somebody is behind this, and we're gonna take a deep dive to see who exactly is the mastermind behind the scenes

Does that still fit with our model? In the warrant our model links this to the protest being organized by professional agitators — organization and “masterminding” are in line. There’s also more of a hint here in the Newsmax segment of there being not only an outsider but a shadowy organization, but I think that’s not necessary to the argument. So it looks pretty good, and we can redraw it like so, making the small paraphernalia edit.

Diagram with additional backing and altered term

I like the edit for a number of reasons, and one is that I have a vague sense there is a general model here in argument, where “paraphrenelia discovered” is run through a “no better explanation” warrant¹ to get to the conclusion that the associated people are a certain type of people. That’s just a fuzzy sense right now but I may develop it out.

Returning to this argument, I’d note again that you can draw it out multiple ways. In this case I’ve compacted the argument a bit by covering a lot of ground in the warrant. If I wanted to be more granular, I could make the claim of this argument be that the protesters were professional agitators, and then have that subclaim feed into another argument that the use of force was justified. But the point of diagramming is not to do a math problem, but to get the thing out on the page where you can check and adapt your understanding, and expose that understanding to critique and revision by others. By checking models against newly offered evidence from the same individuals or communities you can refine your models in useful ways.

(If you want to know how the Toulmin diagram shows the failure of this argument, see the previous post)

1. “No Better” warrants stipulate that an event or pattern discovered is either best explained by the associated claim or that the associated claim is at least one of the better explanations of the event. One of the most common failures of an argument is to ignore or hide much better alternative explanations.