Standardizing Arguments and Argument Identifiers

Lecture 3

Dec 27, 2006

Many people dislike the effort and trouble it takes to standardize arguments.  Why do we need to standardize arguments?

a. Take out most important part of a reading to isolate an argument.

b. Necessary because often many philosophical works are difficult to understand.

c. When an argument is pulled out and placed in standardized form it is much easier to understand and evaluate.

d. Do this for every major argument of all the works read for each class.

I. Identifying Premises and Conclusions

1. There are many ways a person can present the same idea.

2. Might involve taking rhetorical questions and translating them into declarative sentences.  In doing so lose humour, writing style and possibly the "power" but it is necessary in order to evaluate arguments.

3. Need to be able to do this to evaluate the arguments.

II. Identifying the Conclusion of an Argument

After you realize someone is trying to convince you of an argument you should ask "What is that person trying to convince me of?"  ie. Conclusion = the answer.

Tips to Help Identifying Conclusions:

1 . Look for conclusion indicator words, they are not always there though.  Make sure not to have a mechanical process, you have to think.

2. Sometimes the conclusion is not even stated.

3. You should identify two things about the claim.

a. What kind of definiteness the arguer is attaching to the conclusion. (Certainty, maybe, high probability etc.)

b. What is the scope of their claim (all cases, some cases, one case, no cases)

III. Identifying Premises

Premises are often harder to find than conclusions, that is why it is always best to try and identify the conclusion first.  Premises are the reasons given in support of a conclusion, so once you know the conclusion, you can try and find the reasons the person gives in order to support that conclusion.

1. The same factors that made it difficult to identify the conclusion will make it difficult to identify the premises.

a. Indicator words do not always show up, not a mechanical process.

b. Premises might be left out. (ie. enthymemes)

2. What is the person really saying?  We cannot always take everything at face value.

3. You need to disentangle the premises from any other material (literary elements, asides, jokes) which are not part of the argument.

4. Principle of charity is very important here, we ought to interpret the arguer as being rational if possible.

a. This does not always mean we ignore the fact that people are giving very bad arguments.

IV. How To Standardize an Argument

1. Each premise needs to be changed into a declarative sentence.  Need to formulate each premise in a way that it can be read literally.

2. Make sure the same nouns (terms) and pronouns are used throughout the different premises and conclusions. Need to formulate each term in a way that it can be read unambiguously and consistently.

3. Assign a number to each premise and to the conclusion (which is a special premise.)

4. Standardization will allow us to get at some of the structure that is built into an argument.  Through this process we can identify any subarguments.

5. Reserve the word THEREFORE for the final conclusion, not for sub-conclusion.

6. Make sure no premise or the conclusion contain an argument by itself.  If it does break it down into a subargument.

a.  This might happen due to missing premises.

b. If you leave it as it is you cannot evaluate the premises of the subargument.

c. The above advise does not include conditional statements (If... then), they can be expressed as declarative sentences.  Conditional statements are a crucial part of arguments.

V. Missing Premises and Conclusions

People often present arguments that when written out in standard form have a logical gap.  In this case they are either missing a premise or a conclusion.

The arguer might often think that a premise is common knowledge so you have to keep the principle of charity in mind here.

But logical gaps can also be in an argument because a bad argument has been given.

• This involves a judgment call.
• You do not automatically fill in every logical gap because it might need a premise which is completely implausible.