The Language of Argument

7 9

5

Deep Analysis

Arguments in everyday life rarely occur in isolation. They usually come in the mid-

dle of much verbiage that is not essential to the argument itself. Everyday argu-

ments are also rarely complete. Essential premises are often omitted. Many such

omissions are tolerable because we are able to convey a great deal of information

indirectly by conversational implication. Nevertheless, to understand and evaluate

an argument, it is necessary to isolate the argument from extraneous surroundings,

to make explicit unstated parts of the argument, and to arrange them in a systematic

order. This reconstruction puts us in a better position to decide how good the argu-

ment really is. This chapter will develop methods for reconstructing arguments so

that they may be analyzed and assessed in a fair and systematic fashion. These meth-

ods will then be illustrated by applying them to an important disagreement that

depends on fundamental principles.

Getting Down to Basics

To understand an argument, it is useful to put it into standard form. As

we saw in Chapter 3, this is done simply by writing down the numbered

premises, drawing a line, adding “∴” followed by the conclusion, and indi-

cating which premises are supposed to be reasons for the conclusion. That is

all we write down in standard form, but there is often a lot more in the pas-

sage that includes the argument. It is not uncommon for the stated argument

to stretch over several pages, whereas the basic argument has only a few

premises and a single conclusion.

One reason for this is that people often go off on tangents. They start to

argue for one claim, but that reminds them of something else, so they talk

about that for a while; then they finally return to their original topic. One

example occurred during the Republican presidential candidates’ debate on

October 9, 2007, when Governor Mitt Romney said,

We’re also going to have to get serious about treating Ahmadinejad [the

President of Iran] like the rogue and buffoon that he is. And it was outrageous for

the United Nations to invite him to come to this country. It was outrageous for

Columbia to invite him to speak at their university. This is a person who denied

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