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The University of Auckland | CTMOOC_Week_2.2
You should now know what statements and arguments are.
Basically, statements are sentences that
are either true or false. And arguments are ways of combining
statements so as to make a point by
providing premises, the reasons, intended to support a
conclusion. When you encounter arguments in
the wild, it becomes difficult to isolate the premises from the
conclusion and to isolate sentences that
are actually part of the argument.
And that's why it's very useful for us to agree on a systematic
way of presenting arguments. And we'll
do that before we can analyse them. We call this a standard
form. Before you start evaluating
arguments, your first task will be to put them in standard
form.
The standard form of an argument is a way of presenting the
argument which makes clear which
statements are premises, how many premises there are, and which
statements is the conclusion. In
standard form, the conclusion of the argument is listed last. A
standard form looks like this-- premise 1,
premise 2, and so on for as many premises as there are--
therefore, conclusion.
For example, here's a very simple argument presented in standard
form. Premise 1-- I'm having a bad
day today. Premise 2-- I only have bad days on Mondays.
Therefore, conclusion-- today is Monday. To
illustrate why putting an argument in standard form is useful,
let's see the kind of arguments you might
encounter in the wild-- for instance, on YouTube. For this one,
we've used an actor to protect the
identity of the or iginal.
Hi. I'm Justin. I'm the author of the book LivingaBetterLife.And
I'm here to tell you my top three
reasons for going vegan. Animals from factory farming spend
their entire lives in miserable conditions
until the day they are slaughtered. Most won't ever feel the
warmth of the sun on their backs or breathe
fresh air until the day they're loaded onto trucks, bound for
the slaughterhouses. Their suffering is
unimaginable.
Animals from factory farming are treated cruelly. Now, you might
think that eggs are OK to eat because
after all, you don't need to slaughter chickens to eat their
eggs. Wrong. Chickens get their beaks cut off
with a burning hot blade and with no painkillers. And half of
the chickens on farms, the cockerels, are
slaughtered. The fact is, eggs come from hens that are treated
cruelly-- all that so that you can enjoy
bacon and eggs.
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Call this the main argument. As we've seen, Justin provided
reasons to believe each of the premises.
Call those sub-arguments. Now that we've isolated the main
argument, the next step would be to look
at each sub-agreement and put them in standard form. We'll ask
you to do this as an exercise.
But I'd like to stress that it's very important for you to be
able to identify the main argument when you
face arguments in the wild. First, identify the main conclusion
and the reasons that are provided to
support it. Then work your way down to each sub-argument. When
you get to analyse sub-arguments,
you will follow the same pattern. More about this later.
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