Characterizing Factual Arguments

Factual arguments are often motivated by simple human curiosity or suspicion: Are people who earn college degrees happier than those who don’t? If being fat is so unhealthy, why aren’t mortality rates rising? Researchers may notice a pattern that leads them to look more closely at some phenomenon or behavior, exploring questions such as What if? or How come? Or maybe a writer first notes something new or different or unexpected and wants to draw attention to that fact: Contrary to expectations, suicide rates are much higher in rural areas than in urban ones.

Such observations can lead quickly to hypotheses — that is, toward tentative and plausible statements of fact whose merits need to be examined more closely. Maybe being a little overweight isn’t as bad for people as we’ve been told? Maybe people in rural areas have less access to mental health services? To support such hypotheses, writers then have to uncover evidence that reaches well beyond the casual observations that triggered an initial interest — like a news reporter motivated to see whether there’s a verifiable story behind a source’s tip.

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For instance, the authors of Freakonomics, Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt, were intrigued by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s claim that car seats for children were 54 percent effective in preventing deaths in auto crashes for children below the age of four. In a New York Times op-ed column entitled “The Seat-Belt Solution,” they posed an important question about that factual claim:

But 54 percent effective compared with what? The answer, it turns out, is this: Compared with a child’s riding completely unrestrained.

Their initial question about that claim led them to a more focused inquiry, then to a database on auto crashes, and then to a surprising conclusion: for kids above age twenty-four months, those in car seats were statistically safer than those without any protection but weren’t safer than those confined by seat belts (which are much simpler, cheaper, and more readily available devices). Looking at the statistics every which way, the authors wonder if children older than two years would be just as well off physically — and their parents less stressed and better off financially — if the government mandated seat belts rather than car seats for them.

What kinds of evidence typically appear in sound factual arguments? The simple answer might be “all sorts,” but a case can be made that factual arguments try to rely more on “hard evidence” than do “constructed” arguments based on logic and reason (see Chapter 4). Even so, some pieces of evidence are harder than others!