The Art of Arguing-Class Notes 1/21

Class January 21, 2011

Arguments can come in two forms: the formal argument, and the informal or familiar argument. In Friday’s class a formal argument was under review and Aristotle’s syllogism was presented to us. Syllogism has two parts to it: premises and conclusions.

Premises are statements that one argues from, i.e. 1) All men are mortal. 2) Socrates is a man.

Conclusions are assertions that you are arguing to, Therefore, Socrates is a mortal.

The premises must be interwoven and inevitably must lead to the conclusion.

An argument is a process of reasoning that intends to establish the truth of a conclusion and is valid if the conclusion follows the premises. An argument is invalid if the conclusion does not follow the premises.

Arguments do not typically follow this formulaic premise, premise, conclusion formula in a choppy fashion. They follow the natural language and normally have a multitude of various premises to qualify the conclusion. They are more eloquent and complex and often have “conclusion indicators” that include, but are not limited to: thus, so, therefore, hint, consequently, so we see that, and we may conclude.

We then practiced viewing several “arguments” and tried to identify whether or not the statements were valid or invalid arguments (the patriotic citizen, humpty dumpty, the disgruntled art student)

There were also two types of arguments that were presented in this class, the Sophistic argument and the Socratic argument.

Sophistic arguments are what we typically see on a political platform where there are two persons each taking one pro and one contra side to a certain conclusion. One person agrees with the conclusion and the other constructs his premises to contradict the original conclusion. Sophists are often the people that play the “devil’s advocate.”

Socratic arguments often analyze the validity of the premises in order to establish the opposite conclusion.

Now that the idea of an argument is at least slightly more concrete and defined it is now that one is able to evaluate an argument and determine whether or not it is well constructed (valid or invalid). Just because the argument’s conclusion follows the premises does not necessarily make the argument true. We, the person evaluating the argument, must either accept or deny the conclusion that the person making the argument is trying to present. More often than not these conclusions are made from what are known as False Premises.

In one case all sentences within the argument may be false for example 1) All streets in New Orleans are paved with gold. 2) Wall Street is a street is a street in New Orleans. Therefore Wall Street is paved with gold.

In another type of these faux arguments the premises are false but the conclusion is true. 1) All cats are green. 2) All things that are green have paws. Therefore all cats have paws.

In lieu of this lecture it has caused me to reflect on various everyday occurrences and evaluate each situation and figure out if what had happened was in fact an argument. I live with four other guys and at least once a day we find ourselves in some sort of heated discussion/debate and I now can step back analyze what going on, pick apart the statements being made and ask myself, “is that really an argument?”