PHIL 201ANALYZING ARGUMENTS TRANSCRIPTS1:Hello, and welcome to another presentation in Philosophy 201: Philosophy and Contemporary Ideas. I’m Dr. Mark Foreman. In this presentation, we’re going to do our final presentation aboutlogic, and for that matter, our final presentation in this introductory unit to the course here. What I want to do here is I want to talk about how to anylize arguments. Just simply knowing the principles of logic and knowing how the rules work is not enough. There’s a lot more involved inanalyzing an argument. What I’m going to do in this presentation is I’m going to divide our discussion into two parts. First of all, I want to talk about what goes in to creating a good argument. You may have to write and argument sometime. Maybe you’ll have to write a paper oryou’ll have to talk – you’re talking to a friend – about a particular issue, and you want to put together a good argument. What are some of the elements you need to consider in putting a good argument together? Well we’re going to talk about. I’m going to give you nine elements that I think need to be thought through as you’re putting together a good argument. The second part of this presentation, I want to talk about how to analyze someone else’s argument. When someone else presents and argument to me, what are the steps involved that we should do when we go about analyzing. And I want to give you a series of actual step by step processes by which to analyze an argument. First of all, let’s talk about creating an argument itself. What are some important points, elements, of a good argument?S2:Well, the first element of a good argument is: a good argument is going to contain good reasoning. And that means that it’s going to conform to the laws of logic, the laws of inference, and avoid formal/informal fallacies. Pretty much all of the stuff we’ve been talking about in the last couple presentations kind of gets wrapped up in here. Now you don’t know all of the laws of logic or laws of inference. We haven’t gone that deeply into logic. If you were to go into it you’d learn a little bit more about that. You’ve learned I think some of them, ok, but you want to make sure that your argument conforms to all of that. So it’s going to have good reasoning behind it. But good reasoning is not enough. Good arguments have other things besides that.Clarity of thought and language: and here we want to avoid being vague or being ambiguous. Wewant to make sure we are clear when we present out argument to others. Sometimes that means stopping in the middle of your argument take time to define the terms that you’re using, so that everyone is on the same page, so that you’re not going to have some people who will disagree with you over terminology that may even not be a disagreement at all. You want to avoid any vagueness, any ambiguity. So you want to make sure your argument is clear. Take the time to define your terms, your concepts; explain them thoroughly so that everyone understands where you’re coming from.A third element of is consistency and coherency. Consistency simply means that within a set of beliefs, none of them contradicts the other. And you certainly want to make sure that within your argument you don’t have contradictory statements, or statements that can appear contradictory because they’re not clear. So you want to make sure that you’re consistent with everything, that everything within your argument works together well. The second part of this is coherency. Page 1 of 10PHIL 201Coherency means that the beliefs relate together in a way that’s mutually supportive. What we’resaying here is beyond just making sure you don’t have contradictions; you want to make sure that you have an argument where all the beliefs work together well, where all the premises work together well, mutually support one another, so that you have a very strong conclusion at the end of the argument.S3:Our fourth element to a good argument is that it’s comprehensive. And what we mean by this is that good arguments take all the facts into account and attempt to answer all the problems. Now when we say all the facts here of course we don’t mean literally everything, because we simply don’t know things and we have to recognize that. But what we do mean is that all the things we do know, that have to do with what we’re arguing about, are taken into account in our argument –that we’re answering all the problems. There’s a tendency sometimes that we want to pretend that a problem’s not there or not worry about that or hope that our opponent doesn’t recognize that problem, but in fact that’s simply not true. The best thing, if you have a particular problem inyour view, is to bring that problem out, to recognize it and to deal with it in some way or another.You want to be comprehensive in your argument. You want to take everything into account whenyou present a good argument.Also good arguments are going to be orderly structured. That’s our fifth element, ok. They’re mapped out and presented in a form where the reasoning is apparent. There’s nothing worse than reading a student’s paper where I can’t figure out where he’s going or his structure is just simply not there; and he’s got one point, then over here he’s got another point that doesn’t really relate tothe first point and I don’t know where he’s going. You want to map your argument out in a way in which each point follows very succinctly from the other point, and it’s structured very well so I can follow the reasoning that’s involved in the argument. That’s very important in presenting a good argument.Our sixth element is what I call fair use of evidence. This kind of relates a little to our comprehensive element we talked about before. But here, we are saying that a good argument uses evidence fairly, and avoids suppressing evidence in favor of a particular position. Here we’re talking about the idea of hiding evidence that goes against your position. There’s a tendency to want to do that, to suppress it or play it down, or not treat it as important. But in fact you need to use the evidence fairly. You need to look at all the evidence, pro and con, of whatever position you are arguing for, and recognize the other evidence that may be against yourparticular position, and deal with that argument, not try to hide it, not try to pretend that it’s not there. We use