Trudy Govier and Premise Adequacy

Abstract

My main concern in this paper is with Trudy Govier’s acceptability criterion for the adequacy of the premises of an argument considered independently of whether they are “properly connected” to the conclusion. I consider arguments she makes against the view that a good argument must have true premises, and I con-tend that a theory of argument could hold both that for an argument to be a good argument its premises must be true and that for it to be a good argument relative to its audience, the audience must be epistemically justified in accepting its premises as true.