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.
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From the course by Duke University
Think Again I: How to Understand Arguments
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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.
Meet the Instructors
Dr. Walter Sinnott-ArmstrongProfessor
Philosophy
Dr. Ram NetaProfessor
Philosophy
There's one more kind of language that we need to
discuss, because it's also used to stop the skeptical regress.
Much like assuring and guarding and
discounting, and this language is Evaluative.
Just imagine, that a politician says, You ought to
support my healthcare plan, because it would be good for
the country. What is the word good doing here?
Some philosopher's going to tell you that the word
good is just a way of expressing your emotions.
Or maybe telling you what to do.
So the politician is saying, Yay, for my healthcare plan or telling
you in an imperative form, you ought to support my healthcare plan.
But that can't really
be the whole story, because when someone says, Yay, Duke,
like I do when I cheer for the Duke team.
First of all I'm not saying that the team is good, I
might cheer for the Duke team, even when I know they're not good.
And secondly, you can't ask me why.
If I say, Yay, Duke, it doesn't make any sense if you turn to me and say, but why?
Why, yay
Duke? It don't make any sense.
So, merely to express your emotions with something like Yay,
Duke, is very different from saying Duke has a good team.
And saying Yay for my healthcare plan, is very different
from saying that the healthcare plan is good for the country.
Similarly, if I say, I don't like fish, so we shouldn't have fish for dinner.
Well,
I don't really owe you a reason.
I can just say I just don't like the taste of fish, end of story, leave me alone.
I don't owe you a reason for why I don't like fish, I just don't.
But, if I say it's immoral to eat fish, it's wrong to eat fish.
You ought not to eat fish. It's a very different story, now I
owe you a reason.
If I say, it's immoral to eat fish I need to say what's immoral about it?
I need to point to some feature of eating fish that makes it immoral.
I can't just use that evaluative language without some kind
of reason to back it up, that would be illegitimate.
So, what that shows is that merely expressing
preferences is very different from making an evaluation and
saying that something is good or bad or right or wrong or immoral or moral.
And one way to capture this feature evaluative language is to interpret a word
like Good as meets the standards and Bad as violates the standards.
Notice it's very vague, because it doesn't tell you what the
standards are and those standards will change from one context to another.
If you're talking about a good painting, the standards of a good painting are
different from when you're talking about say a good investment.
Where the standards are going to be
completely different from the aesthetic case.
So, if we interpret good as meets the standards, and
we say, my health care program is good for the country.
Then that means, it meets the standards for what
will make the country function in a certain way.
Whereas if we say, eating fish
is immoral, what we're saying is that
eating fish violates a certain kind of standard.
And more specifically it's a moral standard.
That's why we use the word immoral.
So we can interpret this language in terms of meeting or violating standards.
And then, to give the reason, why it's good
or bad, or right or wrong, or moral or immoral.
We can cite the standard and apply it to the case
in order to give a reason for why the evaluation holds.
But now, here's the trick, when we call it good, we don't say what the standards are.
We leave that up to the context to specify what kind of standard we're talking about.
So, it's kind of like assuring, when you say, I assure you, and you might cite
some, authority or tell them that you have some reason, and you don't tell them what
the reason is.
When you call it good, you say it does
meet the standards, but you don't say the standards are.
So, by alluding to the standards without actually laying them
out, you have made your claim a little more defensible.
Because, if you lay out the standards,
they might be questionable and your audience
would know exactly what to question and what to deny and how to object.
But, if you simply say it's good, and
all you're saying is, it meets the standards.
Then, you've avoid it on objection and made your premise more defensible.
And that's how this type of evaluation of
language might help to stave off the skeptical regress.
And here's another way evaluation can help.
We don't always have to agree what the standards are.
Suppose you're driving down the road and I say, you know we ought to turn left here.
And you say, yeah we ought to turn left here.
Well I might think that we ought to turn left here,
because that's going to be a quicker way to get to our destination.
But you might think that we ought to turn left here, because that's going to
be a more beautiful view and you'll be able to look out on the hills.
But, we can agree that we ought to turn left here.
Cause, we both agree that turning left
meets the standards, even though my standards
are efficiency and getting there quickly.
And your standards are aesthetic and getting beautiful views.
So if you can get more people to agree to your premise simply by saying this
health care plan will be good for the
country, without saying exactly how it's going to be good.
Then you've avoided people disputing your objections, because they can agree
to it since they can use their own standards to determine
whether it is good or not.
And that could be yet another way to avoid the skeptical regress.
Notice that evaluation can occur at a lot of different levels.
We have some words that are very abstract like good and
bad and ought and ought not, should, should not, right, wrong.
And those words can be used in a lot of different context.
You can have the wrong investment,
or a good investment. Or an investment that you ought to make.
But you can also drive on the right path, or a
bad path or a way that you ought not to go.
And so, you can have navigational standards and economic standards,
but they can all be expressed by these very general abstract evaluative words.
Like good and bad and right and wrong and ought
and out not and should and should not and so on.
But other evaluative words are much more specific.
Now, for example, you can call a painting beautiful or ugly.
But you don't call fertilizer beautiful or ugly.
You would never say that a stock is beautiful or ugly.
They're just not the kind of thing to be evaluated
in that way.
So an evaluative word like beautiful or ugly is more specific.
It only applies to a small range of things.
Things whereas other words apply like good and bad, apply to almost anything.
Here's another example.
Cruel or brave, a person can be cruel or brave.
But you can't say that a painting is cruel or brave.
Or a desk is cruel or brave, or a chair is
cruel or brave. A chair might be comfortable.
But a painting is not comfortable, and a soldier is not comfortable.
Soldiers are brave or not, chairs are comfortable or not, but chairs
are not brave or not, and soldiers are not comfortable or not.
So these evaluative words like brave or cowardly,
and beautiful are ugly, or comfortable or uncomfortable.
Apply only to limited ranges of things, rather than to just about anything.
So we have very general, or abstract devaluative words,
and we have more specific More concrete evaluative words.
And, of course, which ones are specific or concrete will vary.
Some are more concrete than others. It's not an absolute dichotomy.
But, some words that are evaluative
really will apply to almost anything.
And other words apply to a more limited class.
And they vary in how limited that class of things they apply to will be.
So you might ask, why are all these words evaluative words?
Think about it.
If you want to explain a more limited evaluative
word like beautiful, you want to explain what it means.
You need to define it in terms of the more general words, like
good.
If you want to say it's beautiful, you can say that kind of means looks good.
I know that's not quite right, but basically, when you want to define the
word beautiful, you need to cite one of the more general words good.
And then cite the specific way in which it's good, namely, the way it looks.
And when you want to say an economic word like bargain.
Bargain means a good price.
It sells for
a good price, and a good price is a low price.
So, when you define what a bargain is, you need
to cite the word good in order to define bargain.
So the relation between these very general evaluative words and
the more specific evaluative words that makes them all evaluative.
Is that you need to define the specific
evaluative words in terms of the more general ones.
So it all comes down to what makes something
evaluative is its connection to what's good or bad or right or wrong or what
ought or ought not to be done or should or shouldn't be done and so on.
You know, the trickiest cases of evaluative
words are, words that are contextually evaluative.
They don't actually get defined by good or
bad or right and wrong as their general meaning.
But they do suggest an evaluation in a particular context.
Let me give you an example of what I mean. A conservative politician might criticize
her opponent by saying, Wow, his policies are way too liberal.
Now, by calling them liberal, is that a criticism?
Well, she intends it as a criticism, but does the word liberal mean that it's bad?
Not really if you think about it, because the
opponent might say, i'm proud to be a liberal.
Being liberal's good, yes it's liberal, so what?
Yes it's liberal, nothing wrong with that.
The word liberal by itself doesn't mean that it's bad, even
though the conservative thinks that things that are liberal are bad.
So that word liberal is not evaluative in the strict
sense, because it doesn't get defined by the words good
or bad or right or wrong or should or should not.
It's only evaluative in the context.
It suggests an evaluation, because of the assumptions of the speaker, but it doesn't
in and of itself mean that anything is bad, or good, for that matter.
Because of this difference, we will call language
evaluative only when it's openly and literally evaluative.
So that it gets defined in terms of words like good or
bad or right or wrong, and not when it's merely contextually evaluative.
That is in the context given the assumptions of the speaker.
This person needs to be suggesting an evaluation.
If they're not openly, saying, this is good or bad
or right or wrong, then, they're not really, using what language
that we will call, evaluative.
But there're a couple of tricky examples that are worth bringing up, okay?
You might think, that if you take two
good things, and put them together, it gets better.
And when you add a bad thing to a good thing, it makes it worse.
At least, that's the way it usually works.
But notice, that when you say something's good, that suggests it's good.
But when you say eh,
it's pretty good, then you just added pretty,
which is something good, to the word good.
But, pretty good, it's not really any better than good, it might even
be worse, but then you can add a negative word in the middle.
huh, that was pretty darn good.
Well that means it's very good, so you're actually taking a negative
word darn and putting it in the middle of two positive words, pretty
and good, and made something that means very good.
So you really have to think carefully about exactly what the language means.
It's not going to be a simple formula of adding and subtracting
goods and bads to figure out whether the language is evaluative.
Now another word that's surprising is the word too.
I like spicy food so when I say, this food is spicy.
That's good or, at least, it's neutral.
To say it's spicy to me means I'm probably going to like
it, but notice that if we just add that little word too.
If I were to say this food is too spicy, that means it's bad.
The little word too takes a positive evaluation or sometimes just something
that's neutral and makes it bad. So the word too is actually a negative
evaluative word, because it turns what was neutral or positive into something bad.
It moves it in that negative evaluative direction.
So it's a negative evaluative word.
So is there anything wrong with using evaluative language?
No, some people seem to think that you
shouldn't evaluate at all that you should just describe.
But they're just kidding themselves.
Try going through life without
deciding what's good or bad or right or wrong
or what you ought or ought not to do.
You can't really live your life without making evaluations at some point.
So it's a mistake to think that evaluation is always bad.
Of course, when you do evaluate, it's not like saying Yay, Duke.
You have to give a reason.
So you should think about the standards that
you're applying and why they apply to this case.
That's going to be your reason for evaluating the thing as good or bad.
Because often going to be hard to come
up with the exact standards that you're applying.
Because people tend to think of things as good or
bad without getting very specific about what the standards are.
So you're not always going to be able to
tell people what your standards are, and when
you ask them, they're not always going to
be able to specify what their standards are.
But it's still going to be useful exercise, whenever you make an
evaluation to think about why you think this
thing is good or bad, or right or wrong.
What are the standards that you're applying?
And when somebody disagrees with you, to ask about what their standards are.
So that you can understand where the disagreement is coming from.
Although evaluation can be very useful and legitimate, it can also be dangerous.
Because some people use evaluative terms without reasons.
Let's call that Slanting.
You slant when you use an evaluative word and
don't give any justification for that use of the word.
So you might call somebody an idiot or a queer and you're using
an evaluative word or at least you take it to be negatively evaluative.
And you haven't given any reason why
there's anything wrong with what you're calling
that nasty word.
Now, that's slanting if you don't have
any reason and that can be terribly illegitimate.
When do people do it?
Well they typically do it when they don't have any reason.
If you don't have any reason for your evaluation
you just use some nasty name like, you idiot.
And, so when people start using language like that.
When they start slanting then
that's a good indication to you as a critic that
that's the point at which their argument is probably week.
Their using that kind of language to paper over
cracks as I put it before in their argument.
So as to hide what's the real weakness.
So we can to use evaluative language in arguments, and how it
gets placed at certain points to signal where the weaknesses, and the strengths,
in the argument are. So now, what we've got, is we've got
Argument Markers, we've got Assuring Terms, Guarding
Terms, Discounting Terms, Evaluative Language.
And in the next few lectures, we're going to look at a
general technique that looks at all those different types of language.
And uses those different categories to analyze
some real passages that we found in newspapers.
But before that, let's do a few exercises,
just to make sure that you understand Evaluation.
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