Originating in the
legal profession
Legal profession is a profession in which legal professionals study, develop and apply law. Usually, there is a requirement for someone choosing a career in law to first obtain a law degree or some other form of legal education.
It is difficult to ...
, argument in the alternative is a strategy in which a lawyer advances several competing (and possibly
mutually exclusive
In logic and probability theory, two events (or propositions) are mutually exclusive or disjoint if they cannot both occur at the same time. A clear example is the set of outcomes of a single coin toss, which can result in either heads or tails ...
) arguments in order to pre-empt objections by his adversary, with the goal of showing that regardless of interpretation there is no reasonable conclusion other than the advocate's.
Bart Simpson's classic "I didn't do it, no one saw me do it, you can't prove anything!" could be considered a somewhat humorous example. In a more serious example, a lawyer might argue, not only that his client was elsewhere when a murder or other crime took place, but also that ''even if he had been on the scene'', he would have had no way of accessing the alleged murder weapon. In this way, the lawyer attacks several premises of the prosecution's argument at once. The secondary line of reasoning might be presented to persuade a sub-audience who would not otherwise agree with the primary
argument
An argument is a statement or group of statements called premises intended to determine the degree of truth or acceptability of another statement called conclusion. Arguments can be studied from three main perspectives: the logical, the dialectic ...
.
In regards to
contract law
A contract is a legally enforceable agreement between two or more parties that creates, defines, and governs mutual rights and obligations between them. A contract typically involves the transfer of goods, services, money, or a promise to tran ...
, arguing in the alternative is done where a dispute arises over the terms of a contract. In a particular case it may be best for the
plaintiff
A plaintiff ( Π in legal shorthand) is the party who initiates a lawsuit (also known as an ''action'') before a court. By doing so, the plaintiff seeks a legal remedy. If this search is successful, the court will issue judgment in favor of the p ...
to allege that a statement made was to become a term of the contract. However the circumstances of the case may be such that the plaintiff cannot be certain that the court will accept this argument. To allow for this possibility, all the plaintiff need do is to argue in the alternative that the statement was in fact a representation (which allows for remedies based on misrepresentation) or again in the alternative that the statement became a part of a collateral contract.
Occasionally, such arguments can be confusing to some people, who perceive a self-contradiction. Generally speaking, this is a case of mistakenly thinking the argument claims ''both'' alternatives are true, when in reality it is claiming only that one or the other of them must be.
See also
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Alternative pleading
Alternative pleading (or pleading in the alternative) is the legal term in the law of the United States for a form of pleading that permits a party in a court action to argue multiple possibilities that may be mutually exclusive by making use of le ...
*
Kettle logic
Kettle logic (''la logique du chaudron'' in the original French) is a rhetorical device wherein one uses multiple arguments to defend a point, but the arguments are inconsistent with each other.
Jacques Derrida uses this expression in reference ...
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Disjunction elimination
In propositional logic, disjunction elimination (sometimes named proof by cases, case analysis, or or elimination), is the valid argument form and rule of inference that allows one to eliminate a disjunctive statement from a logical proof. It ...
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Hypothetical syllogism
In classical logic, a hypothetical syllogism is a valid argument form, a syllogism with a conditional statement for one or both of its premises.
An example in English:
:If I do not wake up, then I cannot go to work.
:If I cannot go to work, then ...
*
Paradigm case argument
In analytic philosophy, the paradigm case argument is an argument which is applied as a rebuttal to the claim that certain concepts, such as free will or knowledge are meaningless. The paradigm case argument is that if a term, such as "knowledge", ...
References
{{Reflist
External links
Arguing in the Alternative. Oct. 22, 2007
Legal reasoning
Legal terminology