78 SMART THINKING: SKILLS FOR CRITICAL UNDERSTANDING & WRITING
Exercise 6.4
Go back to exercise 6.3 and review what you have done. You will need some
further premises to show why the ones you have given are relevant to the four
conclusions. Add a premise in each case.
Another example of using an additional claim to show the relevance of one
claim to another concerns the use of authority to give a good foundation for claims.
In the previous chapter, we saw how a claim can be well founded if it is supported
by reference to a relevant authority. Obviously, then, effective reasoning will
depend on our judgments of the relevance of various authorities to the claims that
we wish to make. But, as before, we must be prepared to demonstrate this
relevance. The following is an example we have already considered, but it has been
expanded so that our reasoning is transparent:
- Australian history is marked by considerable conflict and tension over
the competing interests of labour and capital. - Rickard, Australia: A Cultural History (1992) asserts claim 1.
- Rickard is a relevant authority on such matters.
- Rickard is a widely published and well-respected Australian historian.
- If historians are widely published and well respected, then we can be
confident that they are a relevant authority.
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Think about this example and how similar it is to the basic form of reasoning
discussed in chapter 3. Can you see that claims 4 and 5 serve to establish that
Rickard is indeed a relevant authority, as asserted in claim 3 (and hence go above
this claim in the diagram)? Claim 3, in turn, is added to claim 2 (the reference to
Rickard's book) to show its relevance in founding claim 1.
From this example we can see that the reasoning that, logically, underpins the
simple use of a reference can be long-winded. However, the lesson to learn from this
is not that we should be so explicit and lengthy in our own work. Rather, when we