AinA 020 – Identifying the argument.

It isn’t enough to be able to recognise when something is an argument, you also have to be able to identify the component parts of the argument and see how they fit together.

The first thing to note is that arguments are made up of statements.

A statement is a sentence or a part of a sentence that is capable of being true or false.

Not all sentences are capable of being true or false. Questions, commands and exclamations cannot be true or false. ‘Leave the room’ is a command. It doesn’t make sense to say, ‘Is it true that leave the room’. On the other hand, it does make sense to say ‘Is it true that the moon is made of cheese.’ This is because ‘the moon is made of cheese’ is a statement. It is capable of being true or false.

Although arguments are made up of statements, sometimes these statements are left unsaid and simply implied. It isn’t always necessary to state the obvious. Sometimes a rhetorical question can be used to imply a statement. For example, if somebody says, ‘Who cares?’, it isn’t necessarily a genuine question requiring an answer, instead it may be used to imply the statement, ‘nobody cares’.

In an argument one of the statements, the point that the person is trying to establish, is called the conclusion. 

The conclusion is the point that the argument is trying to establish.

The word ‘conclusion’ can be a bit misleading because it might suggest that it always has to come at the end in the same way that a concluding chapter or a concluding paragraph comes at the end. In an argument the conclusion can come anywhere, the beginning, the middle or the end. In a dialogue the conclusion might start out as simply a statement of opinion and then, when that opinion is questioned or challenged, reasons are given in support of the opinion. A statement of opinion by itself is not an argument but it becomes an argument when reasons are given in support of the opinion. In an argument the reasons are called premises.

A premise is a statement which either by itself or in conjunction with another statement is offered as a reason for accepting the conclusion.

Having said that the conclusion can come anywhere in an argument, once the argument is analysed and tidied up the convention is to put the conclusion at the end. Consider the following:

‘I think we should go to France this year.’

‘Why’s that? I was looking forward to going back to Spain.’

That’s the problem. We always go to Spain and it would be good to go somewhere different. And anyway, it will give me the opportunity to try out my French.’

To begin with ‘I think we should go to France this year’ is just a statement of opinion but then reasons are offered and it becomes an argument. When tidied up the argument looks like this:

We always go to Spain and it would be good to go somewhere different. 
Going to France this year will give me the opportunity to try out my French.
We should go to France this year

This particular way of writing out an argument is called putting it into standard form. The straight line is called an inference bar and is used to separate the premises above from the conclusion below. If you read the lines from the top then the inference bar can be read as ‘therefore’; if you read the lines upwards from the bottom then the inference bar can be read as ‘because’.

Notice that in the second premise we didn’t write,

‘it will give me the opportunity to try out my French’

but instead changed it to,

‘Going to France this year will give me the opportunity to try out my French.’

Replacing ‘it’ with ‘going to France this year’ means that the statement makes sense all on its own. Not all textbooks do this and it isn’t always possible but, whenever it is, you should always rewrite the premises and conclusion as standalone statements. This is an SQA requirement. You will lose marks if yo don't do it.

Sometimes the statements are numbered to make it easier to refer to them in a discussion. The SQA tends to label them as follows, although, strictly speaking, the Ps and the C are superfluous as the inference bar gives a clear indication of which statements are the premises and which is the conclusion. 

P1. Aberdeen is further North than Dundee.
P2. Dundee is further North than Edinburgh.
  C. Aberdeen is further North than Edinburgh.