This video excerpts the “Argument Clinic” sketch from the television series Monty Python’s Flying Circus, episode 29, “The Money Programme” (1972), providing a rich basis from which to introduce and explore the philosophical conception of argumentation.

One of the first concepts in any introductory course in philosophy is that of an argument:

An argument is a collection of statements, one of which is the argument’s conclusion and the rest of which are the argument’s premises, which are intended to support or justify the conclusion.

Students can readily recall and repeat this definition (or variations on it), but are often initially unsure of how to apply it. Monty Python can help with that!

In their “Argument Clinic” sketch, an unnamed Man, played by Michael Palin, enters an office reception where he requests to have an argument. After a disorienting misstep into the Abuse office, he finds himself “arguing” with John Cleese’s character (identified as “Mr. Vibrating” on official transcripts). Hilarity and frustration ensue when it becomes evident that the two have very different conceptions of argumentation.

I show students the “Argument Clinic” sketch through to the point where Palin’s character leaves Cleese’s character’s office in a huff [3:54]. (The sketch continues briefly before ending with a touch of absurd slapstick: a department offering “being hit on the head” lessons.) I ask them to pay close attention to any definitions or arguments they detect.

The sketch reinforces the idea that the philosopher’s sense of “argument” differs from others in common parlance. Argument is distinct from the curses, ridicule, and taunts of abuse, as we learn from Palin’s initial startled interaction with Graham Chapman’s “Mr. Barnard” character. It is also distinct from mere contradiction. The essential dialogue illustrating this is as follows:

After showing the clip, I ask students to answer the following multiple-choice question using audience response technology:

Why was Michael Palin’s character dissatisfied with the “argument” provided by John Cleese’s “Mr. Vibrating” character?

1. Vibrating had no conclusion.

2. Vibrating provided no premises.

3. Vibrating’s premises didn’t support his conclusion.

The first two options correspond with the two ways that a collection of statements could fail to be an argument, in the philosopher’s sense, while the third concerns one way in which a purported argument could fail to be successful. After students vote, I break them into small groups of about three each with the following instructions: after briefly introducing yourself, try to convince your group-mates that your answer is correct. (This exercise is possible both in person and online, the latter when using software like Zoom that enables the creation and management of “breakout rooms.”) After some minutes, I dissolve the small groups and ask students to vote again, taking into account their discussion. When I have used this technique in this case, invariably students have converged after their discussion to the best answer, B: while Cleese’s character did have a conclusion—that an argument can be the same as contradiction—he provided no reason to justify it.

Within the following week, students return to the “Argument Clinic” sketch for their first homework assignment. At that point, I have covered the new concepts of implicit premises and conclusions, how they are demanded by the principle of charity, and the process of regimenting an argument—that is, separating its premises and conclusion onto separate lines, listing the premises before ending with the conclusion. I ask them to identify and regiment an argument in the sketch, supplying any needed implicit premises or conclusion. (I encourage them to use a transcript of the sketch, such as the one linked in “Other Resources” below.) This task requires applying the abstract definitions concerning arguments to an example not artificially constructed to be unambiguous. This can be frustrating for some students who are uncomfortable with the idea that the application of logic requires interpretation. But it demands that students consider how they might apply the concepts they have learned to examples they might encounter outside of the classroom.

There are two common sorts of challenges that students face in this assignment. First, when the parts of an argument are interspersed in a dialogue, it can be harder to identify which statements are intended to support others and to disregard repetitions of statements expressing the same proposition. Heuristics for identifying the conclusion, such as “pick the statement that sounds the most important,” can easily mislead. Second, students are often unsure about when charity demands adding an implicit premise; this often derives from uncertainty about when the meaning or content of an assertion needs to be made explicit.

To illustrate this second sort of challenge, let’s focus on the dialogue quoted above, as students often do. Here is an example of a model answer, with two corresponding selections for each of P1 and P3, respectively:

Premises P3 and P4 are implicit. Students don’t always identify premise P3 because it is implied by the common meanings of “automatic” and “gainsaying”; yet, those meanings should be made explicit. Some students find the following advice helpful: include as implicit premises any statements that a reader would need to follow the argument if they were knowledgeable of English grammar but had a minimal vocabulary.

For similar reasons, it’s rare for students to identify P4, which is a version of the principle of the indiscernibility of identicals. For many, it is so immediate that the same things have the same properties that the principle’s role in the argument can easily go unnoticed: it figures in an instance of modus tollens to support the conclusion. But for more advanced (or curious!) students, identifying this implicit premise invites further discussion on the logic and metaphysics of identity: is this principle true, in general? What about for a clay statue and the mass of clay from which it is made?

A bit later in the term, after having covered the syntax, semantics, and natural deduction system for propositional logic, the “Argument Clinic” sketch can still be a font for examples and discussion of how to apply these formal logical tools and also of those tools’ limitations. I’ll mention just one example of the latter. After teaching the semantics for propositional logic, I often motivate the next unit on a system of natural deduction by observing that even though the semantics allows us to evaluate the validity of arguments, the tools we use to do so (such as truth tables) don’t reflect how we actually reason. A similar move might be deployed against natural deduction systems: they perhaps model how we actually reason individually, but not together, not in dialogue. What advantages might accrue to one who reasons in dialogue? How might we model that through an extension of our system of natural deduction? These sorts of questions emphasize to students the purpose, limitations, and creative power of formal logical systems.

Thanks to T-CUP, Tomoya Imaizumi, Justin Ivory, and Becca Kosten for their comments on an earlier version of this essay.

Possible Readings

Brighouse, Harry. “Why Is an Argument Clinic Less Silly Than an Abuse Clinic or a Contradiction Clinic?” In Monty Python and Philosophy, ed. Gary L. Hardcastle and George A. Reisch, 53–64. Peoria, IL: Open Court, 2006.

Falzon, Christopher. “The Holy Grail—Critical Thinking.” In Philosophy Goes to the Movies, 3^rd ed., 259–294. New York: Routledge, 2015.

Other Resources

Various transcripts of slightly different versions of the Argument Clinic can be found online. For example: “The Argument Sketch.” MontyPython.net. 2009. Accessed February 7, 2021. https://montypython.net/scripts/argument.php

The Teaching and Learning video Series is designed to share pedagogical approaches to using humorous video clips for teaching philosophy. Humor, when used appropriately, has empirically been shown to correlate with higher retention rates. If you are interested in contributing to this series, please email the Series Editor, William A. B. Parkhurst, at parkhurst1@usf.edu.

Samuel C. Fletcher

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Samuel C. Fletcheris McKnight Land-Grant Professor and Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.