Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Basic Constituents of an Argument (How to Justify a Claim)

“If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.”
-Leviticus 20:13

I am going to go through the steps necessary to make a valid argument in the order they must be done. An argument consists of a series of premises leading to a necessary conclusion. If any of these premises are invalid, the entire argument is invalid. This does not mean the conclusion is false, it simply means that the particular argument has in no way shown the claim to be either true or false. This is comparable to if someone claims to have completed a mathematical proof that one plus one equals two. If you find a wrong step in their math, you have not proved their conclusion wrong or right, you have simply shown that their argument is flawed and therefore does nothing to demonstrate the truth of the claim.
1. State an observation or accepted fact. This part is easy; the first premise can be anything, so long as it is true and valid. If this is under question, then the statement itself must be justified. As a general rule, this should not be based upon any negative statements or subjective statements which may be questionable. Negative statements are acceptable, however, when such statements can be implicitly accepted as true, such as in the reptile example below.
Good examples:
-There exists at least one cat which does not have a tail
-No reptiles have fur
-Some of the jars in this cupboard are cracked
Bad examples:
-Abortion is bad
-Three sided dice do not exist
-There is a nonmaterial dog that floats by my ear and whispers nonsense to me
The first argument is flawed because it is a subjective statement, and cannot be immediately accepted as true. The second is a negative, and while it does turn out to be true, it must be shown to be true; it is not inherently obvious that this is a valid premise. The third is a claim with no verifiable evidence, and it would be faulty for others to blindly accept this as true.
2. Follow the claim with one or more premises that necessarily follow from either the claim or a previous premise, following the same conditions as above. It must be shown that if premise 1 is true, then premise 2 is a logically valid conclusion. For example:
Premise 1: No reptiles have fur
Premise 2: All snakes are reptiles
Conclusion 1: No snakes have fur
3. Come to a final conclusion. If all premises leading up to the conclusion are valid and logically derived, the conclusion can be accepted as valid, Validity does not imply truth. If all premises appear to  be logical extensions of those prior, it simply means that the argument is justified, not necessarily right or wrong.  I will use the topics presented in this post to explain fallacies presented in later posts.

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