82 SMART THINKING: SKILLS FOR CRITICAL UNDERSTANDING & WRITING
of compelling evidence before the orthodox view was overturned.
Equally, recent arguments that run counter to the new orthodoxy that
Aboriginal people resisted in numerous ways have failed—by and large—
to achieve much currency, precisely because they do not have enough
evidence behind them.^2
Who is correct is not the issue here. What matters is that we recognise that
context creates a background of accepted conclusions and explanations, which if an
established position is challenged, must be taken into account to decide if the new
reasoning provides sufficient support for its conclusions.Justifying all aspects of the conclusion
As we know, claims are complex statements that tie together all sorts of informa-
tion about ideas, scope, certainty, values, and so on. As a result, any reasoning to
support or explain a claim (the conclusion) must attend to each aspect of that
claim. For example, if we wanted to explain why 'Most people do not understand
that late capitalism will never sustain unemployment levels lower than 5 per cent',
then there are many aspects of the claim that need explanation. At the very least,
our premises would need to answer the following questions:- Why 'Most people' (and not some or all or none)?
- Why do they not understand this point?
- What is late capitalism?
- Why will late capitalism not sustain low unemployment?
- Why 'lower than 5 per cent' (and not a smaller or larger proportion)?
- What is unemployment (does it include, for example, partial employ-
ment)? - Why is the word 'sustain' used?
Part of the trick in reasoning effectively is to frame our conclusions in such a
way that we can justify all of what they state explicitly. There is no point, for
example, in concluding that 'capitalism has never caused social problems'. Even if
we wish to argue that capitalism is better than any other economic system, it is
better to assert the conclusion in a way that does acknowledge its problems, while
still making an argument that it has some advantages. On the other hand, we
should not be afraid to state our conclusions (if we believe in them) and then go to
the effort of covering all the many aspects involved. For example, the Australian
historians, such as Reynolds, who dramatically improved our understanding of
Aboriginal-European relations did not back away from their conclusion that
Aboriginal people actively and persistently resisted European invasion simply
because it was hard to prove. They did the detailed research necessary to establish
this conclusion.
Justifying all aspects of the conclusion is particularly necessary when the
conclusion contains some value component. The premises must provide support
both for the descriptive basis of the claim and for the value judgment that it makes