CLAIMS: THE KEY ELEMENTS OF REASONING 19would be strengthened if Australia declared its final independence from its
European origins by becoming a republic'.
The claims that act as reasons are 'premises' and the claim that is being
supported or explained is the 'conclusion'. When reasoning, we will always be
dealing with at least two claims: the claim we want people to accept and the claim
we are using to support the first claim. Almost always there are a number of
premises supporting one conclusion, but the minimum requirement is one premise
and one conclusion. A fundamental skill in reasoning is to be able to identify, in
our own and in others' work, those claims that are serving as premises to support
the claim that is acting as a conclusion. Thus we need to understand how claims
can be used as conclusions and premises.
To do so, we must remember that, before we use them in reasoning, all premises
and conclusions are the same thing: they are claims. There is nothing about a claim
on its own that makes it a conclusion or a premise. Until we decide, in our
reasoning, that claim Z will be the conclusion and claims X and Y will be the
premises, X, Y, and Z are all just claims. They only become premises and con-
clusion through the act of linking them together, as in 'Because of X and Y, my
conclusion is Z'. The difference between premises and conclusions is not
dependent on any essential qualities of the claims; it is, instead, a functional
difference. Whether a claim is a conclusion or a premise depends on the function
that the claim performs in any particular argument or explanation. What
determines that function is the relationship between one claim and another.
Let us use the following claims to demonstrate this point:
- Your car is dirty.
- You drove the car through some mud.
- You should wash your car.
And here are two very simple examples of the way we can use these claims in
reasoning, with the claims marked as [c] (conclusion) or [p] (premise) to show how
they perform different functions: - Your car is dirty [c] because you drove through some mud [p].
- You should wash your car [c] since your car is dirty [p].
The same claim—'Your car is dirty'—is used in two different ways: first, as a
conclusion being explained and, second, as a premise. The general rule, thus
demonstrated, is that any claim can be either a conclusion or a premise depending
on how it is linked with other claims and the context in which it is used.
Conclusions and premises are very similar because both are claims. However,
within reasoning, some claims serve a different purpose to other claims. The nature of
premises and conclusions is not already laid down, magically, in the words we use to
express them, but is something that we can actively control and alter. For example, we
may read someone else's conclusion and then use it as a premise in our own reasoning.
Or, we see that the premises of someone's argument need further explanation and, by
using them as conclusions, proceed to give that explanation with our own premises.^3