Thinking Skills: Critical Thinking and Problem Solving

4.8 Applying analysis skills 177

one as the last word, it would be the second, the

recommendation to confiscate income, since

this follows from the more general claim that

the law should be extended.

You might have been tempted by the last

sentence of paragraph 3, which claims that

there is no real difference between direct and

indirect profit from crime. This certainly is a

conclusion, as the word ‘therefore’ would

suggest, and it follows from the reasoning in

the third paragraph. But establishing this

conclusion is only one step in the argument,

and it is not the final step. It is therefore an

intermediate conclusion, not the main one.

Best answer: ‘If the principle of not

benefiting from crime means anything, all

income, direct or otherwise, should be

confiscated from anyone whose criminal past

has helped them to get rich’; or the same

statement in your own words.

2    Two objections, or counter-arguments, are

considered in the passage. What are they?

Why does the author raise them? How

does he deal with them?

Activity

Commentary

The counter-arguments are contained in the

third and fourth paragraphs. They are

recognisable from the use of the words

‘protest’ and ‘object(ed)’, but also from the

obvious fact that they challenge the author’s

conclusions.

Why should an author include in a text a

challenge to his own conclusions? Doesn’t

that weaken the argument? No, it strengthens

it, because it shows that the author has an

answer to the challenge. Imagine you were in a

In the previous chapter you looked at a longer
piece of text and answered some searching
critical questions. Some of them were about
analysis, some about evaluation and some
about objections and further argument. In
this chapter, and in the next two, we will
examine two new articles, applying each of
these skills in turn. We start, in this chapter,
with analysis.
The text on the next page is an argument
about criminals who become celebrities. Read
it through twice, once for general meaning,
then again for more detail. Then answer the
following questions.

1    What is the main conclusion of the

passage?

Activity

Commentary
Although arguments like this are longer and
more involved than the ones you have been
used to, the strategy for analysing or
interpreting them is much the same as it was
for the short, illustrative examples in Unit 2.
When seeking the main conclusion, first look
for a likely candidate – perhaps some
recommendation or prediction or verdict –
and ask yourself if other parts of the argument
are reasons for making such a claim, or not. If
not, look for another candidate.
It should be fairly obvious what this passage,
‘Time to get tough’, is leading up to. It claims
that the legal principle of no profit from crime
should be extended to cover celebrity criminals.
And it claims that, on principle, income from
criminal celebrity should be confiscated. These
two claims between them summarise the
author’s main contention. If you had to pick

4.8 Applying analysis skills