1.

Week

Formal Logic X Informal Logic

• Traditionally, logic has been considered the most general science dealing with
arguments. The task of logic is to discover the fundamental principles for
distinguishing good arguments from bad ones.
• For certain purposes, arguments are best studied as abstract patterns of reasoning.
Logic can then focus on these general forms rather than on particular arguments. The
study of those general principles that make certain patterns of argument valid and
other patterns of argument invalid is called formal logic.
• A different but complementary way of viewing an argument is to treat it as a
particular use of language: Presenting arguments is one of the important things we do
with words. This approach stresses that arguing is a linguistic activity. Instead of
studying arguments as abstract patterns, it examines them as they occur in concrete
settings. When an approach to argument has this emphasis, the study is called informal
logic.
•
Reason, Justification and Argument

We encounter arguments frequently – when we read, when we talk, and when we are
thinking to ourselves. Every day we are bombarded with messages apparently telling us
what to do or not to do, what to believe or not to believe. When we ask the question
‘Why?’, we’re asking for a reason for doing what is demanded from us to do, or for
believing what is demanded from us to believe.
When we ask for a reason in this way, we are asking for a justification for taking the
action recommended or accepting the belief; not just a reason, but a good reason – one
that ought to motivate us to act or believe as we are recommended to do.

To attempt to persuade by giving good reasons is to give an argument. We encounter

many different types of attempts to persuade. Not all of these are arguments. Critical
thinkers should primarily be interested in arguments and whether they succeed in
providing us with good reasons for acting or believing. But we also need to consider non-
argumentative attempts to persuade, as we need to be able to distinguish these from
arguments. The crucial point of difference for arguments, though, is that when we argue
we attempt to give reasons. In non-arguments there is an absence of an attempt to give
reasons.

• There is another sense of the term «argument». It simply means disagreement. But we
don’t use it in this sense here.
• In fact, sometimes in a disagreement each side may develop an argument in our sense
to make a case for their view. But this is not essential to every disagreement.
• Although it must not be equated with disagreement, the sort of argument we have in
mind does still occur frequently in ordinary, everyday situations. It is by no means
restricted to the works of philosophers and logicians. People give each other reasons
for believing something or doing something all the time – why we should expect our
friend to be late for dinner, why we should walk rather than wait for the bus, and so
on.
• Open a newspaper or magazine (on almost any topic) and you’ll find arguments in the
letters section, editorials and various other discussion pieces. The same thing occurs in
a more academic form at universities. Throughout your time as a student you will hear
lecturers and other students arguing for a point of view, and in readings you will
encounter attempts to persuade you of various claims about all manner of issues.
• If you develop your ability to analyse people’s attempts to persuade so that you can
accurately interpret what they are saying or writing and evaluate whether or not they
are giving a good argument – whether, for example, they are providing you with a
good reason to reduce your consumption of single-use plastic – then you can begin to
liberate yourself from accepting what others try to persuade you of without knowing
whether you actually have a good reason to be persuaded, and this can prevent you
from doing or believing the wrong thing.

• Even though you may not always be able to tell definitively whether you have been
presented with a good argument, paying due attention to arguments gets you closer to
the truth of a matter.
• Even if a desire to discover the truth does not seem a sufficiently strong reason for
being concerned about having good reasons to justify your actions and beliefs, there
are various life situations in which the ability to interpret and evaluate a person’s
reasons properly may be crucial to that person’s well-being, or even to their remaining
alive.
• Those in power sometimes fear the effects of those who can think critically about
moral, social, economic and political issues. The ability to think critically, about both
one’s own beliefs and commitments and the claims and reasons given by others, then,
is essential if one is to function properly in one’s role as a citizen.

• As we’ve mentioned, not all attempts to persuade are attempts to persuade by

argument. Some are attempts to persuade by means of rhetorical devices. For our
purposes, rhetoric is defined as follows:
• Rhetoric: Any verbal or written attempt to persuade someone to believe, desire or do
something that does not attempt to give good reasons for the belief, desire or action,
but attempts to motivate that belief, desire or action by other means.
• For example: 1- When you try to persuade someone by manipulating their emotions,
by giving a promise or by swearing an oath.
• The use of rhetorical techniques should generally be avoided by those who aspire to
think critically and to persuade by reason. That is not to say that rhetoric is always
undesirable.

Conclusion, premises

• The claim the argument is intended to establish is its conclusion. The reasons that are
supposed to support the conclusion are the premises of the argument.
• Identifying the premises and conclusions of the arguments presented in a written
passage is essential to understanding the argument in the passage. It is part of
determining exactly what the author means.
• What can make this task difficult is the fact that people do not always express their
arguments clearly. Sometimes people leave some of their premises unstated.
• In interpreting argumentative passages we often have to add premises to the arguments
to make explicit their overall structure and content. We call the process of interpreting
and clarfying an argument reconstructing the argument.

Argument Analysis

• Once we have identified the argument in a passage, we can go on to decide whether

the authors have given good reasons in support of their claims, that is, whether they
have succeeded in establishing the point they set out to establish. When we do this we
are evaluating the argument.
• Argument analysis is the process that consists of these two elements: 1-
reconstruction and 2- evaluation.
• This method is not limited to the interpretation and evaluation of the writings of
others. You also deal with reasons and arguments when you think about something on
your own.

• As we just said, you can also evaluate reasons and arguments when you are simply
thinking about things on your own. Arguments are not restricted to situations in which
two or more people are debating some issue. In fact, the best way to approach
arguments is not to think of them as parts of contests in which one person tries to
defeat another. Rather, it is best to think of them as factors you consider when you
want to determine the most reasonable thing to believe about a topic. When other
people present arguments, they simply provide you with new arguments to consider in
deciding what you should believe.
• There is no limitation on the sort of topic about which arguments can be constructed.
• People regularly interpret and evaluate the arguments they encounter, though perhaps
without realizing exactly what they are doing. They attempt to understand these
arguments and decide whether they are good ones. While in many cases people assess
arguments accurately and easily, there are also cases in which they fail to do this.

• Sometimes arguments may be seen as tools we use to get what we want from other.
People sometimes think that argument is a tool by which we can achieve an end,
satisfy a want, fulfill a desire. According to this view, winning an argument is
succeeding in getting what we want out of it. But in fact there is something
completely false in this view.
• Our goal in argument analysis is not to look for winners and losers in competitions. In
analyzing an argument, our goal is to determine whether the argument succeeds in
showing its consclusion to be true. The important point is that it is reasonable to
believe the conclusion of the stronger argument.
• Of course it is not all together negative for an argument to have a rhetorical aspect.

Rhetorical force X Rational strength

• Arguments can have a more or less rhetorical power. Some arguments tend to
convince people of their conclusions. Sometimes, this effectiveness is a consequence
of the fact that the argument really is a good one: its premises are do provide strong
reasons to accept its conclusion. But, as we said before, sometimes arguments are
rhetorically powerful for other reasons. For example, arguments that appeal to
 particularly vivid and strking examples sometimes tend to convince people of general
conclusions that they do not really support.
• There is another important aspect of analyzing an argument. Besides examining its
rhetorical power, we can assess its rational strength. An argument has rational, or
logical, strength when it provides a good reason to believe its conclusion, even if it
does not persuade people. Likewise, an argument lacks rational strength when it does
not provide a good reason to believe its conclusion, even if it does persuade people.

Abilities and Attitudes

• Rational thinkers have a set of abilities and attitudes that enable them to deal
effectively with arguments.
• Among the abilities are the following: 1- The ability to distinguish genuine arguments
from other things. 2- The ability to understand and interpret argments. 3- The ability to
evaluate arguments. The first two abilities depend on sympathetic and careful reading
and thinking. The third is largely a matter of being a careful fair-minded critic.
• The attitudes of a rational thinker include the following: 1- A willingness to examine
arguments with an open mind. 2- A willingness to change one’s mind when the
arguments call for it. 3- A willingness to give up comfortable of popular beliefs when
the arguments call for it. 4- A willingness to go along with popular beliefs when the
arguments call for it. 5- A willingness to form beliefs even when matters are uncertain.

• Of attempts to persuade that are arguments, not all are good arguments. We seperate a
good argument from a bad one by analyzing them. But before starting to analyze an
argument, we must distinguish whether an argument is being presented. We need to
identify the issue being discussed, and determine whether or not the writer or speaker
is attempting to persuade by means of argument.
• When we put forward an argument we are either advancing an opinion (a claim that
we think is true) or recommending an action. In either case we give a number of
claims intended to support the claim or the recommendation. However, these two
types of argument can be unified. For we can think of an argument that recommends
an action as advancing a claim. For example, an argument whose aim is to get you to
use less plastic can be understood as advancing the claim ‘You should use less plastic’.

• Thus all arguments can be understood as attempting to provide reasons for thinking
that some claim is true. Our working definition of truth is as follows: To say that a
claim is true is to say that what is claimed is how things actually are. For example,
if a person makes the true claim ‘New York is further from Istanbul than Berlin is’,
then, according to our intuitive conception of truth, it is true just because New York is
further from Istanbul than Berlin is.
• However, a single claim does not constitute an argument. An argument needs more
than one claim: it needs the claim of which the arguer hopes to convince his or her
audience, plus at least one claim offered in support of that claim.

Unsupported claim X Supported claim

• Since a single claim does not constitute an argument, the additional claim or claims
must support the first one. For example, take the following single claim: «The world is
facing environmental catastrophe.» As such this claim is unsupported. It becomes
supported only when the following claim is added to it: «Climate experts predict that
 the world is facing environmental catastrophe. Since their predictions are based on
scientific data collected via research following sound and accepted methodologies, we
should take their claims seriously.».
• Another example: «It is important to become an effective critical thinker.» This claim
is supported as follows: «It is important to become an effective critical thinker;
because being able to recognise good arguments and avoid bad ones will prevent you
from doing or believing the wrong things.»

• The primary claim, the one we are trying to get others to accept, is the conclusion; the
supporting claims, the ones intended to give us reasons for accepting the conclusion,
are the premises. A premise is simply any claim put forward as support for the
conclusion of an argument, however certain or uncertain that claim may be.
• Arguments are made up of language, so we cannot understand arguments without first
understanding language. We will examine some of the basic features of language,
stressing three main ideas. First, language is conventional. Words acquire meaning
within a rich system of linguistic conventions and rules. Second, the uses of language
are diverse. We use language to communicate information, but we also use it to ask
questions, give orders, write poetry, formulate arguments, and perform an almost
endless number of other tasks. Third, meaning is often conveyed indirectly. To
understand the significance of many utterances, we must go beyond what is literally
said to examine what is conversationally implied by saying it.

• Arguing is a practical activity. More specifically, it is a linguistic activity. Arguing is

one of the many things that we can do with words. In fact, unlike things that we can
accomplish both with words and without words, arguing is something we can only do
with words or other meaningful symbols. That is why nonhuman animals never give
arguments. To understand how arguments work, then, it is crucial to understand how
language works. Language is conventional. There is no reason why we use the word
“dog” to refer to a dog rather than to a cat, a tree, or the number of planets in our solar
system. It seems that any word might have been used to stand for anything. Beyond
this, there seems to be no reason why we put words together the way we do. Although
it is important to realize that language is conventional, it is also important not to
misunderstand this fact. From the idea that language is conventional, it is easy to
conclude that language is totally arbitrary. If language is totally arbitrary, then it might
seem that it really does not matter which words we use or how we put them together. It
takes only a little thought to see that this view misrepresents the role of conventions in
language.

• A misunderstanding of the conventional nature of language can lead to pointless

disputes. Sometimes, in the middle of a discussion, someone will declare that “the
whole thing is just a matter of definition” or “what you say is true by your definition,
false by mine.” There are times when definitions are important and the truth of what is
said depends on them, but usually this is not the case. The truth of what we say is
rarely just a matter of definition. Whether what we have said is true or not will
depend, for the most part, on how things stand in the world. In general, though the
meaning of what we say is dependent on convention, the truth of what we say is not.
• We said «in general» because there may be some exceptions.
 Exceptions

• There exist exceptions because sometimes the truth of what we say is simply a matter
of definition. Take a simple example: The claim that a triangle has three sides is true
by definition, because a triangle is defined as “a closed figure having three sides.”
Again, if someone says that sin is wrong, he or she has said something that is true by
definition, for a sin is defined as “something that is wrong.” In unusual cases like
these, things are true merely as a matter of convention. Still, in general, the truth of
what we say is settled not by appealing to definitions but, instead, by looking at the
facts. In this way, language is not arbitrary, even though it is conventional.