58 SMART THINKING: SKILLS FOR CRITICAL UNDERSTANDING & WRITING
with the nation's colonial foundation, then Australians today will
continue to experience unease and guilt about race relations with
indigenous Australians,
f. The history of the war against indigenous Australians continues to be
a political issue in the current era.
These claims might all concern the broad topic of the violence attendant on the
arrival of European settlers in the country we now call Australia, but in each case,
the primary focus of the claim is different.
- Claim a is about the actions of white settlers in the nineteenth century.
- Claim b is about the conflict between settlers and indigenous Australians.
- Claim c identifies the views of some Australian political and religious leaders
in the nineteenth century.
- Claim d concerns what historians should be debating.
- Claim e predicts the consequences that will flow from some action concerning
the history of violence in Australia, which may or may not happen (as
indicated by the 'if').
- Claim f concerns the current status of the history of the war against
indigenous Australians, about which many of the other claims might be
made.
The differences also show us that there are a variety of different uses for
claims. Claims a and b are direct claims, in the first case describing some event
and in the second case directly expressing the author's own moral judgment.
However, 'Some Australian political and religious leaders in the nineteenth
century wrote at the time that the violent conflict between white settlers and
indigenous Australians was wrong' is indirect, for it concerns what other people
think. There is no indication that the author of the claim either agrees or
disagrees with the 'political and religious leaders' who thought this way.
Arguments and explanations often require not just our own views on a particular
issue, but also our analysis of others' views. We need to make sure that our
claims are well formed so that there is no confusion between what we are
directly claiming and what we are reporting about other people's views. Claim e
demonstrates another crucial type of claim, often used in hypothetical reasoning
about a possible future event. To argue in this manner does not necessarily imply
that the effect (the 'then' part of the claim) has happened, but simply that it
probably w;/'//happen in the future. It may even be part of an argument aimed at
stopping some action from happening. We might also find such hypothetical
elements in claims such as 'Let us assume for a moment that the violence
between whites and indigenous Australians did not occur': such claims do not
propose that it did not happen, but simply develop a hypothetical situation that
might enable a clearer analysis to proceed. The key point here is to recognise
that claims can say and do all sorts of things, and if you are not careful in how
you write them, then they will provide a very weak foundation for your
analytical structure.
