Arguments

Philosophy 130: Intro to Critical Thinking

This will be a general overview of arguments – we’ll break the major components down over the following weeks.

What Arguments are NOT

• When we use the term “argument” in casual conversation, we usually mean a “fight,” as in “I had a huge argument with my boyfriend last night because his ex-girlfriend texted him 6 times while we were out and he wouldn’t stop answering her!”
• Or, we might use it to mean a kind of “debate,” where we’re using manipulation and tactics to sway people’s opinions, without caring about getting to the truth of a position.
• In this class, we’re going to use the term “argument” in a very precise way – NOT to mean “fight” or “debate.”

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A Tool for Answering Real Questions

As we talked about on the first day of class, there are real, serious issues in the world, and we need to be serious about confronting and solving them. Arguments are a tool for getting the best answers we can to those questions and issues.

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Arguments

Arguments are the fundamental tool for finding answers to questions and issues we genuinely want to solve.

Complexity and Subtlety

• Think about all of the incredibly complicated questions involved in a single serious issue.
• Think about how all of those questions twist together, so you can’t think of one without considering the others.

If we just jump in and start spouting opinions, we’re going to get no where with real, helpful answers – there’s too much complexity involved to work without a system.

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Arguments provide the system to keep out thoughts organized and ourselves disciplined.

Analyze, Evaluate, Organize

• Arguments help you to carefully:
• Gather
• Analyze
• Evaluate, and
• Organize

all of the complex ideas and information you need to make good decisions about complicated issues.

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Arguments are systems designed to help us get as close to the truth as we can get.

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Humans are imperfect – we have limited access to information, we have cognitive biases that influence us, we miss important points and questions all of the time.

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But we still have to do our best.

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Arguments try to help us do our best to get past our weaknesses and use our strengths.

Interlocutors

Because arguments are tools, not battles, in an argument, you don’t have an opponent. You have an interlocutor: a conversational partner. You’re working together to try to find the best answer to the questions you’re asking.

Partners

Someone arguing against you is even more helpful than someone arguing for you!

• They can help you see things from a different perspective.
• They can help you by pointing out issues and questions you hadn’t thought of.
• They can show you where you were mistaken (yes, of course you can be mistaken, even where you’re most passionate).
• They can help push you closer and closer to the truth – just as you’re helping to push them.

Corrigibility

As J.S. Mill notes in his work On Liberty: given how commonly we make mistakes in thinking and reasoning, the ONLY reason we can ever have any trust in our conclusions is that we’re capable of correcting our mistakes.

Arguments are our tools for confronting other opinions so we can correct our mistakes.

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Two Stages

• There are two basic stages to an argument:
• The first is the INQUIRY. This is where we try to work out for ourselves what we think is the best answer to the issue we’re thinking about.
• The second stage is PERSUASION. This is where we carefully lay out and support our reasons for holding the position we decided on.
• When you’re doing your inquiry to figure out your best answer to a question, you’ll be reading lots of other people’s persuasions to help you develop your own thoughts.

Inquiry

Here are the parts of the INQUIRY – we’ll go through them one by one

1. Keep your mind open
2. Familiarize yourself with the issue
3. Familiarize yourself with the arguments
4. Evaluate the arguments

By Marretao22 (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

1. Keep Your Mind Open!

One of the most important things to keep in mind when you’re starting an argument is that when you first begin, YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOUR ANSWER WILL BE.

A true argument starts with questions, and tries to find the best answer to those questions.

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It DOES NOT start with an answer and then look for justifications to hang on the answer like decorations on a tree.

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This is one of the hardest parts of engaging in a real argument – avoid determining your answer until you’ve really investigated!

Remember what we said about corrigibility* above:

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If you just look for arguments and information that support your first reaction to an issue, you won’t be getting any closer to the best possible answer – you’ll only be reinforcing your own assumptions, blind spots, and unexamined worldview.

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*Corrigible means “able to be corrected or fixed.”

“I do not know what my conclusion is yet”

• Write that on your bathroom mirror, put it on sticky notes all over your room and on your x-box. That is your most important mantra in critical thinking.
• Of course you’ll have initial impulses about issues – everyone does.
• The key is to be aware of those impulses and NOT let them take over your thinking on an issue
• Think of your initial response as a working hypothesis and then make like a scientist: set out to DISPROVE it

“I do not know what my conclusion is yet”

• NEVER start your inquiry trying to figure out what your answer is
• You SHOULD NOT KNOW your answer until the end of your inquiry
• You should be willing to change your answer even after you’ve started the persuasion!

By NASA (Great Images in NASA Description) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

2. Familiarize Yourself with the Issue in General

• Do research to find out the basic facts of the issue.
• If you’re wondering about the ethics of embryonic stem cell research, find out what’s the actual process of embryonic stem cell research before you do anything else.
• If you’re concerned about higher course fees at school, find out about the school budget and funding.
• Find out what’s agreed upon by experts, and what’s still uncertain.
• Try to get a sense of how the parts of an issue fit together.

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For example: say you wanted to find the best solution to increasing student fees at California colleges. What are some of the parts involved in that issue?

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• The California budget as a whole
• State laws governing the way the budget is divided up
• The school budget – what do the schools spend the money on? What would they do if some of their funding got lost?
• If you wanted to make a change, what legal and political process would you have to go through?

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All these parts fit together in complex ways, to influence the issue as a whole.

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3. Familiarize Yourself with the Arguments

Your next step is to research and brainstorm about reasons for holding positions on all sides of the issue.

Reasons and Positions

• The position someone takes on an issue (in an argument) is her CONCLUSION
• The reasons she has for believing her conclusion to be true are her PREMISES
• The premises and conclusion, together, are the (persuasive) ARGUMENT

Often, several premises link together so that they all have to be true, to support the conclusion. Let me give you an example:

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In the short story “Silver Blaze,” Sherlock Holmes is investigating the robbery of a valuable racehorse. Here’s his argument:

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PREMISES

• There was a dog who slept in the barn with the horses.
• The dog barks at strangers.
• The house is in hearing-distance from the barn.
• On the night the horse was stolen, the owners didn’t hear the dog bark.

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CONCLUSION

The horse was stolen by someone the owners know.

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See how all of those premises have to be true, for the conclusion to be true?

So, Your Job is to Find Out:

What positions do people take on the issue?

What REASONS do they have for their positions?

How do those reasons add up? How are the premises meant to fit together?

4. Evaluate the Arguments

• You’ll ask yourself 3 main things about the arguments you’re reading:
• Assuming the premises are true, do they add up to give you good reason to believe the conclusion?
• For each individual premise, do you have good reason to believe it’s true?
• Have major arguments AGAINST that conclusion been considered, and shown to be wrong?

Remember our discussion of cognitive biases: you’ll have a strong tendency to discount arguments against the position you lean to. So be vigilant, and read reasons on all sides of the issue with charity. If you find a bad reason for a position, keep looking and see if there are better ones!

Add a Strong Dash of Humility and Introspection

• Remember to keep examining your own impulses and intuitions on the subject as you’re working through the inquiry –if you were interested in the subject, you almost certainly had an initial opinion about it.
• As you’re researching and examining the arguments of others, be sure to keep asking yourself why you feel the way you do about the subject.
• Be as skeptical of your own opinion as you are of others’!

Persuasion

• Okay: after learning about the issue as a whole,
• Looking into each position one could take on the issue,
• Examining all the premises in support of each position, and
• Determining which position has the best, strongest support…

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You’re ready to determine your own conclusion!

Now you’re on to Part 2 of your own argument: Persuasion. Here you’ll show others why your conclusion on the issue is the right one.

Show Your Work

In the Persuasion, you’ll essentially present a clear, concise version of your own thought process as you worked through the inquiry. You’ll

1. Tell the reader/listener what CONCLUSION you’re arguing for.
2. Say what major PREMISES (reasons) you have for believing your conclusion to be true (the best answer).
3. Go through each PREMISE and give your evidence for it.
4. Go over each major argument against you and show why it’s wrong (or less important than the reasons supporting you).

Example of a Short Argument

The next several slides run through an example of an argument OUTLINE. If we were to develop it into a good argument, we’d go back through each premise and provide mini arguments, evidence, and citations showing why each premise is true. This is just to give you an idea of what one kind of argument looks like.

Americans Should Significantly Reduce Their Consumption of Meat

In the next few slides, I’ll argue that Americans in general should reduce the amount of meat they consume, down to the recommended daily intake of 1 oz. for women, and 1.5 oz. for men.

Premises

1. Unless we have very good reason to do so, like self defense or to avoid greater suffering*, we should avoid causing suffering to those who can feel pain.
2. We have a very solid understanding of the way pain works: nerve fibers carry information from the site of the physical sensation to the spinal cord, where the fibers fire up transmission cells. Spinal cord fibers carry the signals to certain parts of the brain. When the signals reach these parts of the brain, the animal experiences pain.
3. We know that humans and animals have all of these structures (listed in #2). So, we have excellent reason to believe that humans and animals experience pain.

*(We might, for example, cause pain in setting a broken limb, but it avoids greater suffering down the road.)

Premises Continued

4. Very well established research has shown that contemporary large-scale methods of meat production in the United States leads to a lot of pain and suffering in the animals raised and slaughtered that way.

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Premises Continued

5. Americans consume much more meat than is recommended for health – it’s advised that women should consume no more than one ounce of meat per day for optimal health, and men no more than 1.5 ounces (slightly smaller than the size of a pack of playing cards).

6. High meat consumption has been tied to higher rates of liver, lung, pancreatic, breast, colo-rectal, and esophageal cancer, as well as heart disease, diabetes, and osteoporosis.

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More Premises

7. Recommended quantities of iron and protein are easy to in other foods, so it’s possible – even easy - to consume no meat and be very healthy (vegetarians have higher life expectancies and lower rates of all major diseases).

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Yep, There’s Another Premise

8. If all Americans were to cut their meat consumption to recommended levels for health, we would need a lot less meat. So, we could change our methods of producing meat to reduce the pain and suffering caused.

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Conclusion

Therefore, Americans should significantly reduce their meat consumption.

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(We’ll go over the form of a persuasive argument later, but, yes, you put your conclusion at the beginning and again at the end.)

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During the course of the semester, we’ll go through each of these parts of an argument, break them down further, and practice with each of the skills.

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We will have very few lectures in class. Please write down any questions you have, or note where you thought something was confusing, so that you can ask about it in class. Otherwise, I’ll assume that you understood the presentation, and we’ll go right into hands-on work in class.

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Feel free to email me with your questions, as well.

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See you in class!