The Language of Argument

8 3

Dissecting the Argument

Clarifying Crucial Terms

After the essential premises and conclusion are isolated, we often need to clar-

ify these claims before we can begin our logical analysis. The goal here is not

perfect clarity, for there probably is no such thing. It is, however, often neces-

sary to eliminate ambiguity and reduce vagueness before we can give an argu-

ment a fair assessment. In particular, it is usually helpful to specify the referents

of pronouns, because such references can depend on a context that is changed

when the argument is put into standard form. “You are wrong” or “That’s

wrong” can be perfectly clear when said in response to a particular claim, but

they lose their clarity when they are moved into the conclusion of an argument

in standard form. We also often need to specify whether a claim is about all,

most, many, or just some of its subject matter. When people say, “Blues music is

sad,” do they mean all, most, some, or typical blues music?

Another common problem arises when someone argues like this:

You should just say “No” to drugs, because drugs are dangerous.

What counts as a drug? What about penicillin or aspirin? The speaker might

seem to mean “drugs like cocaine,” but “like” them in which respects? Maybe

what is meant is “addictive drugs,” but what about alcohol and nicotine

(which are often addictive)? You might think that the speaker means “dan-

gerous drugs,” but then the premise becomes empty: “Dangerous drugs are

dangerous.” Or maybe the idea is “illegal drugs,” but that seems to assume

that the law is correct about what is dangerous. In any case, we cannot begin

to evaluate this argument if we do not know the extent of what it claims.

Of course, we should not try to clarify every term in the argument. Even

if this were possible, it would make the argument extremely long and bor-

ing. Instead, our goal is to clarify anything that seems likely to produce con-

fusion later if it is not cleared up now. As our analysis continues, we can

always return and clarify more if the need arises, but it is better to get the

most obvious problems out of the way at the start.

Some problems, however, just won’t go away. Don’t get frustrated if you

cannot figure out how to clarify a crucial term in someone else’s argument.

The fault might lie with the person who gave the argument. Often an argu-

ment leaves a crucial term vague or ambiguous, because serious defects in the

argument would become apparent if its terms were made more precise. We

will discuss such tricks in detail in Chapters 13 and 14. For now, we just need

to try our best to understand and clarify the essential terms in the argument.

DissectinG tHe ARGUMent

A single sentence often includes several clauses that make separate claims.

When this happens, it is usually useful to dissect the sentence into its small-

est parts, so that we can investigate each part separately. Because simpler

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