preview

Chapter 1 Study Guide

Better Essays
Open Document

Chapter 1

THE NUTS AND BOLTS OF REASONING
ARGUMENTS
Reasoning is the activity of making inferences. This is when you attempt to justify or prove one statement by appealing to another statement/s. To prove or justify a statement means to give a good reason for believing it.1 The statement that you are trying to justify is called the conclusion whereas the justifying statements are called premises. All reasoning has a conclusion (implied or explicit) and at least one (and typically more than one) premise. Logicians also refer to inferences as (logical) arguments.
Statements that do not form arguments:
Arguments need to be distinguished from statements. While arguments contain statements, not every statement, or set of statements, …show more content…

For example, instead of saying that American soldiers forced Iraqi prisoners into acts of sexual humiliation, it qualifies this by saying that they were accused…according to officials and others familiar with the charges. Clearly, newspapers are reticent to draw conclusions that may later be proven to be false. This opens them up for civil suits as well as embarrassing retractions, which can adversely affect these company’s bottom lines. Such caution, however, has a negative feature. As discussed later (chapter __), in simply reporting what government officials tell them rather than drawing inferences from their own careful investigations, the mainstream media run the risk of misleading the public. In short, in not advancing their own arguments, newspapers play it safe but not necessarily to the advantage of the public whom they serve.

3

Literary Metaphors:
Literary metaphors are also often used to make statements that do not form arguments. A literary metaphor is an explanation of an object or idea by way of relating it to something else that is seemingly disparate and unrelated. For example, consider
Albert Einstein’s characterization of nationalism, which he says is ―an infantile disease.‖
It is, he says, ―the measles of mankind.‖ Here Einstein is using ―measles‖ and ―infantile disease‖ to drive home the idea that nationalistic thinking--which involves zealous devotion to one’s own nation over and above any other

Get Access
Related
Get Access