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Assuring

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Think Again I: How to Understand Arguments

Duke University

4.7 (1,137 ratings) | 140K Students Enrolled

How to Understand Arguments Think Again: How to Reason and Argue Reasoning is important. This series of four short courses will teach you how to do it well. You will learn simple but vital rules to follow in thinking about any topic at all and common and tempting mistakes to avoid in reasoning. We will discuss how to identify, analyze, and evaluate arguments by other people (including politicians, used car salesmen, and teachers) and how to construct arguments of your own in order to help you decide what to believe or what to do. These skills will be useful in dealing with whatever matters most to you. Courses at a Glance: All four courses in this series are offered through sessions which run every four weeks. We suggest sticking to the weekly schedule to the best of your ability. If for whatever reason you fall behind, feel free to re-enroll in the next session.We also suggest that you start each course close to the beginning of a month in order to increase the number of peers in the discussion forums who are working on the same material as you are. While each course can be taken independently, we suggest you take the four courses in order. Course 1 - Think Again I: How to Understand Arguments Course 2 - Think Again II: How to Reason Deductively Course 3 - Think Again III: How to Reason Inductively Course 4 - Think Again IV: How to Avoid Fallacies About This Course in the Series: When is someone giving an argument instead of just yelling? Which parts of what they say contribute to the argument? Why are they arguing instead of fighting? What are arguments made of? What forms do they take? Think Again: How to Understand Arguments will answer these questions a more. In this course, you will learn what an argument is. The definition of argument will enable students to identify when speakers are giving arguments and when they are not. Next, we will learn how to break an argument into its essential parts, how to put them in order to reveal their connections, and how to fill in gaps in an argument. By the end of this course, students will be better able to understand and appreciate arguments that they and other people present. Suggested Readings: Students who want more detailed explanations or additional exercises or who want to explore these topics in more depth should consult Understanding Arguments: An Introduction to Informal Logic, Ninth Edition, Concise, Chapters 1-5, by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Robert Fogelin. Course Format: Each week will be divided into multiple video segments that can be viewed separately or in groups. There will be short ungraded quizzes after each segment (to check comprehension) and a longer graded quiz at the end of the course.

Skills You'll Learn

Evaluation, Interpretation, Language, Linguistics

Reviews

4.7 (1,137 ratings)

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CW

Apr 15, 2019

I've taken several online courses on logic and argumentation. This one stands out by virtue of the professor's enthusiasm and clarity of explanations. Worth every minute I've spent on it.

MM

Oct 12, 2016

This course goes super in depth on how arguments work. I learned things in this course that'd I'd never heard of before and it gave me a more critical view on how people say things.

From the lesson

How to Untangle an Argument

CONTENT: This week’s material will focus on the special language in which arguments are formulated. We will investigate the functions of particular words, including premise and conclusion markers plus assuring, guarding, discounting, and evaluative terms. Identifying these words will enable students to separate arguments from the irrelevant verbiage that surrounds it and then to break the argument into parts and to identify what each part of an argument is doing. The lectures end with a detailed example that uses these tools to closely analyze an op-ed from a newspaper. LEARNING OUTCOMES: By the end of this week’s material, you will be able to: understand three levels of meaning. identify argument markers OPTIONAL READING: If you want more examples or more detailed discussions of these topics, we recommend Understanding Arguments, Ninth Edition, Chapters 3-4.

A Problem for Arguments12:59

Discounting10:25

Evaluation17:11

Taught By

Dr. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
Professor
Dr. Ram Neta
Professor

Transcript

In the previous lecture, we looked at the skeptical regress problem and

I kind of introduced three different ways of solving that problem in practical life.

Namely assuring, guarding, and discounting.

Those are three ways to solve the

skeptical regress problem in practical life, and

in the next three lectures what we're going to do is look at each of these,

in much more detail, and more carefully, so as to understand how they work.

Let's begin with assuring.

Here's an example.

I assure you that smoking is bad for your health.

If I say, I assure you, then I'm trying

to get you to accept that claim on my authority.

Now I might have some reason for saying

that smoking is bad for your health, namely,

I've read the US Surgeon General's report, which cites the

scientific evidence to show, that smoking is bad for your health.

But notice that I don't actually say it, when I

say, well it's obvious that smoking is bad for your health.

Or everybody knows that smoking is bad for your health.

Or I assure you, certainly, clearly, smoking is bad for your health.

Then what I'm doing

is I am trying to get you to accept

that premise without actually citing the Surgeon General or anybody.

I haven't cited the evidence.

I simply have indicated to you I do have evidence.

I do have a reason to believe that smoking is bad

for your health, but I haven't given you what the reason is.

So what good is that?

It's a lot of good, because what it means

is that if I don't give the reason, you can't

question the reason.

If I simply say everybody believes it, it's certainly true, then you can't

ask whether those people who believe it have any reason to believe it.

Or rather I have any reason to be so certain about it.

If I don't give the reason, I've cut off

your attack of the reason that I would give.

So assuring is kind of tricky.

I say I assure you,

and if you can trust me, that's fine.

But if you can't trust me, then you should be

asking, well, what kind of reason does he really have?

There are many ways to assure people.

There are three kinds that we're

going to look at: authoritative, reflexive, and abusive.

Let's start with authoritative.

Authoritative is just what it says, it cites an authority.

So, I might

say I assure you that smoking is bad for your health.

The Surgeon General has shown that smoking is bad for your health.

And I cite an authority, the Surgeon General.

Okay. Fine.

But, have you seen the studies? Have I cited the numbers?

Have I told you when the studies

were done, how many subjects, under what circumstances?

Which statistical tests were used? How do you know it's causation instead or

correlation and so on and so on.

No, I just say the Surgeon General has shown this.

And you're supposed to take my word for it that those are good

studies, unless of course your share my

assumption that the Surgeon General is trustworthy.

So, that's the way an authoritative assurance works.

It cites an authority that the audience

shares as an authority with the other person.

They share the assumption

that that the authority is trustworthy.

Now, sometimes it's the Surgeon General

and the Surgeon General is pretty reliable.

But you also get this kind of

thing from reporters they say, an unimpeachable source

close to the President has assured me that the President's plans are such and such.

And they cite an unimpeachable source, but they won't tell you want the source

is and they won't tell you how the source knew it was true.

So they're citing an authority but they're not telling you what the

authority is, or what reason the authority has for what the authority claims.

Now if you trust that authority, then that's fine.

And if authority's reliable, then you might be safe, but if you don't know

who the authority is or where they got their information, there can be problems.

And here's my favorite. Here's my favorite.

I sometimes hear students say, but Professor

[UNKNOWN]

Armstrong, my teacher in the other course said that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Well, why do you trust your professors? I mean why do you trust me?

You shouldn't be trusting me or your other professors any

more than you're trusting an unimpeachable source close to the president.

So, you have to trust somebody sometime, and

you have to decide who you're going to trust.

And then, it's going to be okay to cite an authority, in

this kind of assurance, but you have to watch out for tricks when

people start citing authorities that aren't

really authorities, because even the best

authorities sometimes do studies that aren't

very careful, and might even be wrong.

A second kind of assurance, is what I call reflexive, reflexive because it's

talking about yourself.

I believe that, I know that, I am certain that, I feel sure that.

And you're signing something about your own mental state.

You feel sure.

Great, you feel sure, but why do you feel sure?

Notice however, that this assurance works, because people don't

want to question what other people feel sure about.

If I say, well, I feel sure that

this is going to happen, in many societies, it's going to

be impolite to go, well, I don't feel sure.

Matter of fact, I think you're wrong.

Or, why do you feel sure?

because then you're questioning the person.

And if that's impolite, then using this type of phrase, I am

certain that, will get people to shut up and not say anything.

So here's an example from Monty Python.

>> Now let's get one thing quite clear, I most definitely told you.

But my favorite is when people say you know, I've held

this opinion for years or I've thought about it year after year.

It's really bothered me and you know, after careful consideration I've come to

the conclusion that blah, blah, blah, whatever, and you're supposed to say,

well, since you've thought about it so much, I'll save myself a lot of

trouble of thinking about it, and trust you and go along with what you say.

Well if you let other people do your thinking for you, then that's up to you.

But you're going to be misled in some cases cause they thought about it for

years and years and gotten themself into a

tizzy and ended up at the wrong conclusion.

So the fact that somebody's thought about

it for years doesn't necessarily mean it's right.

But somehow in conversation, when you say I've thought about it

for a long time and checked all the sources I could,

then people will take the fact that you've reached a certain

conclusion to be okay for them to reach the same conclusion.

And that's how this reflexive type of assurance works.

The most fun of all is the abusive assurance.

Here's another example from Monty Python. >> No, no, nonsense!

>> Maybe he's right. Maybe it is nonsense.

That the point is that he gets you to accept

what he believes by abusing you and calling it nonsense.

And the same thing happens when somebody says, nobody but a fool would think that.

Everybody knows this.

If you say, everybody knows it, then you're saying,

well, if you don't know it, then you're a dummy.

And so they're abusing you in order to get you to agree with them

by making a conditional abuse that applies to you only if you don't agree with them.

And you don't want to be a dummy.

You don't want to speak nonsense.

You don't want to say something that's stupid.

So if somebody says, you'd have to be stupid to disagree with

me about this, then that's going to incline you to agree with them.

Some of these abusive assurances are a little

bit more subtle, so it's worth mentioning one

that's used all the time, and this is what might be called appeal to common sense.

Someone says, it's just common sense that such and such.

It doesn't matter what the such and such is,

the point here is simply that if you deny that, then you're

telling that person you lack common sense. And nobody wants to lack common sense.

So by saying, it's just common sense that, it's just plain common sense.

People say it all the time, but what they're doing is

they're abusing their opponents by saying that their opponents lack common sense.

So it's a little bit more subtle, but it shows that abuse

of assurances occur either subtly or openly all the time.

So we've see three different types of assurances.

Okay.

The first is authoritative, the second is reflexive and the third is abusive.

And they're all used in common speech to stop the skeptical regress problem.

So why do we need any of these assurances

in the first place? And the answer is, we've got limited time.

You know, you can't go out and check every

study, you can't go out and look into every issue.

You've just got to accept authorities and listen to other people and learn from

them, or you'll never be able to figure out the issues that matter to you in life.

So assuring can be a perfectly good thing.

If you trust the Surgeon General of the United States instead of going out and

starting your own laboratory and doing your own

statistical studies, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.

But when you start trusting authorities that are not worthwhile,

or not trustworthy, then, you can get yourself into trouble.

And we'll talk later in the course,

about, ways to tell which authorities are

reliable or trustworthy and which ones are not.

That tells you why, assurances are needed

in general, but what about particular cases?

Well when you're talking to a certain audience,

if they share your trust of a certain

authority, or if they trust you when you

give a reflexive assurance, or if what you're

saying really is something that everybody with common sense believes in,

then again, it can be perfectly fine to use an assurance.

It saves you the time of having to go check out every issue

and it helps you avoid the skeptical regress problem in a very practical way.

So assuring can be a really useful tool in argument.

But, you have to be careful because assurances are also subject to

a lot of tricks that you have to learn to watch out for.

We've already seen that you can cite authorities

that aren't trustworthy and that's kind of obvious.

But something that's maybe a little less obvious is that people

use assurances at points in their argument in order to distract you.

When something really is questionable,

they often say, well, that's obvious.

In order to get you to not pay attention to it.

So when someone says that's obvious, it's certain, I'm sure, it's worth looking

carefully at what they're so sure about and asking yourself whether you agree with

them because people try to paper over the cracks in their arguments with

these assurances, at least in some cases, and you have to learn to watch

out for that.

Another trick is when assurances get dropped.

People will start off saying, you know, he believes this, I believe

that, and then they drop it and start talking as if it's true.

You know, my favorite example of this was a case a few

years ago when there was a person caught in Germany for cannibalism.

And it started off with the reporters saying, well he,

the person accused of cannibalism says that

there are lots of other cannibals in Germany.

And then, it becomes, it is reported that there are lots of cannibals in Germany.

And then it became, sources have said that, as if the sources are reliable.

And pretty soon they were saying, there are lots of cannibals in Germany.

And it moved from, he believes it to there are lots of them.

And that's the trick of dropping the

assurance in a way that can be illegitimate.

So, assurances can be useful and they can also be misleading.

And, that's going to be true of all

the different ways of stopping the skeptical regress.

There can be uses and abuses

of all of these tricks.

For assurances, we want to have an assurance

when, first of all, somebody might question it.

Second, the audience accepts the authority that is being referred to.

And third, it would be too much trouble to actually cite the

study and all the numbers, and the evidence, and the particular people.

The assurances

are not appropriate when nobody would question the claim anyway.

Then why are you wasting your time assuring people?

When the authority that you're basing your assurance on is not really trustworthy.

Because then, why should they believe your assurances?

And third when you've got plenty of time and it would be

really easy to give the reasons

straight-forwardly instead of simply assuring them.

So,

you've got good and bad uses of assurances.

And I hope we understand what they are and how to distinguish them, but

let's do a few exercises just to make sure that we've got the general idea.

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