MORE EFFECTIVE REASONING I: BETTER CLAIMS 59Making claims also involves deciding between values and descriptions. We can
think about the six examples just given from this perspective: claims a, c, and f
describe some state of affairs; whereas claims b and d make explicit value
judgments about the goodness or otherwise of some state of affairs; claim e sits
uneasily between these two alternatives; and while claim e appears to be free of
values, most of us would probably see in it some implicit value judgment, probably
because of the implication in the first half of the claim that we should do the
opposite of the 'if. Yet it is unlikely that we will ever be able to write many claims
that are completely free of value judgments. An individual claim may be
descriptive, but it can only be understood in relation to other claims and other
words. What appears, to us, to be a description will, necessarily, appear to others
as a judgment of value. For many years, the word 'violence' was never used to
describe white settlement in Australia. Thus, when historians began to uncover the
evidence of violence, their claims appeared in comparison to be distinctly value-
laden. So we must simply be aware of the value judgments in our claims in order
to understand what we are saying.
Claims always involve, implicitly or explicitly, some statement of the scope and
certainty of the information they contain. Well-formed claims always state their
scope and certainty explicitly. For example, Australians took part in military-style
operations against indigenous Australians' is unclear. How many—all of them,
some, a few? Where did this occur? And for how long? Whatever you wish to say
about this issue (and there are competing views among historians), a well-formed
claim should try to make clear what you are asserting. Hence, (for example) 'Many
colonial Australian settlers took part in military-style operations against indigenous
Australians throughout the nineteenth century, in different parts of the country' is
a better-formed claim.
Exercise 5.1
Identify, in the following claims: (i) the two components of the claims, paying partic-
ular attention to claims that state someone else's views or that employ the 'if... then'
form; (ii) the value judgments that some of them are making (explicitly or implicitly);
(iii) the explicit or implicit markers of scope and certainty that are essential to the
claim's proper functioning; and (iv) any words that might appear to have interesting
connotations.
a. Some years ago, the Northern Territory passed legislation allowing some
people to commit voluntary euthanasia.
b. Most religious leaders at the time, and now, claim that legislation
permitting voluntary euthanasia is immoral.
c. If a state government passed voluntary euthanasia laws, then the Federal
Government would not be able to stop that legislation in the same way that
it did for the Northern Territory.
d. Several terminally ill people were reported in the media at the time as
saying they were moving to the Northern Territory.