Guide for Identifying, Standardizing, and Evaluating Propositional Arguments Identifying Arguments 1. Look for an attempt to convince. Prop. Look for an attempt to convince that relies on the logical relationships between statements.

Guide for Identifying, Standardizing, and Evaluating Propositional Arguments Identifying Arguments 1. Look for an attempt to convince. Prop. Look for an attempt to convince that relies on the logical relationships between statements. 2. Find the conclusion. 3. Find the premises. 4. Review the following to make sure that you’ve correctly identified the conclusion and the premises: imperfect indicator words, sentence order, premises and/or conclusion not in declarative form, and unstated premises and/or conclusion. 5. Review the following to make sure that you haven’t incorrectly identified something as a premise or a conclusion when in fact it isn’t part of an argument: assertions, questions, instructions, descriptions, and explanations. Standardizing Arguments 6. Rewrite the premises and the conclusion as declarative sentences. Make sure that each premise and the conclusion is a grammatically correct declarative sentence. Rewrite the premises and conclusion as necessary to make them clearer, but don’t change the meaning of the passage. Remove pronouns from the sentences and replace them with the nouns or noun phrases to which they refer. Remove emotionally charged language. 7. Review any phrases you’ve omitted to be sure that they aren’t premises or a conclusion. 8. Number the premises and the conclusion. Put [ ] around the number of an unstated premise or conclusion. Place the premises before their conclusion and insert “Therefore,” between the premises and the conclusion. 9. Compare your standardization to the original passage to make sure that you haven’t omitted any arguments found in the passage and to be sure that you’ve correctly identified the premises and the conclusion. 10. Review your standardization to see if the argument’s form matches any of those studied in this book. Evaluating Arguments: The True Premises Test 11. Check to see whether the premises are accurate descriptions of the world. 12. Consider whether the premises are appropriate for the argument’s audience. 13. Review the assumed premises to be sure that the assumptions are reasonable. Make sure that all assumed premises are uncontroversially true empirical statements, uncontroversially true definitional statements, or appropriate statements by experts. Make sure the definitions are good ones. Prop. If the argument contains a disjunction, check for a False Dichotomy. Evaluating Arguments: The Proper Form Test 14. Determine whether the argument is a deductive argument or inductive argument. 15. Determine whether the premises are relevant to the conclusion. Look at each premise individually to see whether the truth of the premise provides some evidence for the truth of the conclusion. Look at the premises as a group to see whether the truth of all of them provides some evidence for the truth of the conclusion. Prop. Determine the form of the propositional argument. Compare it to the nine propositional argument forms discussed in this section. See above. Evaluating Arguments: Checking for Fallacies 16. Compare the argument to the list of fallacies in the Reference Guide at the end of the book to see whether the argument commits any of the fallacies. 17. End answer with global comments about how good the argument is as a whole. If the argument is a deductive argument, then state whether the argument is valid, and/or sound. If the argument is inductive, this may be a degree like not wholly cogent but almost or very strong but not cogent, etc.

Looking for a Similar Assignment? Order now and Get 10% Discount! Use Coupon Code "Newclient"