Introduction to Arguments
An argument is a reasoned attempt to support, justify, or prove a conclusion via a series of statements. Do not confuse it with people fighting over something, that is a separate use of the word. We use argument to try to find out what is true or false, or to convince others of a conclusion. If someone is using poor reasoning, they may still be making an argument. Judging something as an argument or non-argument is not a judgement about its quality.
Arguments come in many different forms, from poetry to action to written words to speaking. For our purposes, we will be converting arguments we come across into written sentences in order to analyse them.
Arguments are constructed from declarative sentences which are sentences that express a claim that something is the case. They assert something, they make a statement of fact. Declarative sentences can be true or false. This is in contrast to other types of sentences such as questions, “What is the time?”; exclamations, “Wow!”; and imperatives, “Hand me the phone”.
Because we are dealing with language, we often encounter problems with working out what is a declarative sentence and what is not. Try to look at the function of a sentence rather than its form. Rhetorical questions can appear to not be declarative, but they often are, based on the context. “Wasn’t that a great movie?” could be equivalent to “That was a great movie.” for instance. The opposite can also be true, when you say something that seems like a declarative sentence that is actually a question (usually with a rise in inflection of the spoken word) such as “This is the restaurant you were talking about(?)”.
Declarative sentences can also be simple, meaning that they make one declaration; or compound, meaning they make more than one. “The cat is white” is a simple declarative sentence. Some examples of compound declarative sentences are “The cat is white and the dog is brown” and “The cat is white and cute”.
Statements are declarations. The may be a whole sentence, part of a sentence, or even made up of more than one sentence. Statements are what we will be extracting from sentences and working with to evaluate arguments. They are the key parts of communication that actually form the argument, and that reasoning can be applied to. We can convert the sentence “The cat is white and cute” into the statements “The cat is white” and “The cat is cute”. Statements can be simple or compound, just like sentences. The most basic type of compound statement is called a conjunction. A conjunction is when two simple statements are joined together with an ‘and’, such as “The cat is white and the cat is cute”. A conjunction asserts that both of the conjuncts, meaning the parts, are true. As I said before, we have to be careful with language. You will come across sentences without the word ‘and’ in them that will be conjuncts, some will use commas; some will use semi-colons while others will do it in other ways (I hope you saw what I did there :p). Again, it is the function rather than the form that we are looking for when processing natural language.
An argument is a series of statements that are used to justify, support, or prove another statement. There are two main types of statements in an argument. The conclusion is the statement being supported. The premises are the statements doing the supporting. These terms reflect the roles the statements play rather than anything about the statements themselves. A statement may act as a premise in one argument, and a conclusion in another, or in fact both at the same time in more complex arguments. An argument may use premises to support sub-conclusions, which are then used to support a main conclusion. To determine if a discourse is putting forward an argument or not, try to determine if there are statements in the discourse that are providing support or justification for other statements in the discourse. If that is occurring, then you are probably dealing with an argument.
An argument has to do with the truth and falseness of statements in relation to other statements. This type of reasoning is what we call an inference. An argument allows you to infer the truth of one statement from the truth of other statements.
Inference indicators are words that are commonly used in language to show that something is either a premise or a conclusion. Premises often follow words such as ‘because’, ‘as’, ‘since’ and conclusions often follow words such as ‘therefore’, ‘so’, ‘thus’ etc. Once again, because of the many ways we use language, we need to be careful when spotting these words and check the function that they are performing, they can be used in ways other than inference indicators too. Some arguments will not have inference indicators at all; always look at the context.
Quite often you will run across arguments with hidden premises or implied conclusions. These are statements that make up part of the argument but are not stated explicitly. This is basically a shortcut or rhetorical device we use when communicating. Saying “That car is fast because it is red” has a hidden premise “red cars are fast” and “Fred’s car is a BMW, BMWs are awesome” implies the conclusion “Fred’s car is awesome”. We would not need to say this conclusion if speaking with someone because it’s so obvious, but we need to recognize that it is there when dealing with arguments.