Alright, so we’ve worked through
a few concepts to help figure out if our opinions line up with reality, so our
next step is to figure out how to structure these ideas in a simple, logical manner.
This might not seem important, but it will be something I return to in a later
post. I also want to point out that this is a pretty basic overview of how to build
a deductive argument—I realize there are other types of arguments (inductive),
but I find deductive to be the most useful for our purpose, and I want to try
and limit your boredom.
So how do we go about setting up
an actual argument? What we need to do is write out a series of statements, called
premises, which will lead to our conclusion. If our premises are valid, meaning
that they are true, then our conclusion will also be true. For example:
Premise 1: Stubby is a cat.
Premise 2. All cats are mammals.
Conclusion: Therefore, Stubby is
a mammal.
Nothing too crazy. Both premises
are true, so we can be confident that the conclusion is also true. Now let’s
add a little twist to it.
Premise 1: Stubby is a cat.
Premise 2. All cats are black.
Conclusion: Therefore, Stubby is
black.
Like the first example, this
argument is completely logical. It is absolutely true that if Stubby is a cat,
and if all cats are black, then Stubby is black. But the obvious
problem is that not all cats are black! As a result, the conclusion is false.
When formulating and analyzing
arguments, break them down into their premises and conclusion. Not only will this
help you better understand your own argument, it will give you the opportunity
to really investigate whether or not each premise is true. Let’s take another
example that at first seems simple, but then becomes much more complicated once
we scratch the surface.
P1: Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
P2: The universe began to exist.
C: Therefore, the universe has a
cause.
Easy enough. There are only two
premises which both seem true, and they logically flow to the conclusion. You
probably are convinced by this argument, as it seems fairly straight forward. However,
let’s expand the first premise to make it a bit more specific.
P1: Whatever begins to exist in space and time has
a cause.
P2: The universe began to exist.
C: Therefore, the universe has a
cause.
When we add the clarification of
“in space and time”, things suddenly don’t seem so simple. Of course, one might
object, saying “Zak, you just changed the argument, so of course it doesn’t work
as well anymore.” But notice I didn’t actually change the argument—I just
exposed a hidden assumption in the first premise. When we talk about something
beginning to exist, we are talking about things within the universe—within space
and time. There are also a few more hidden assumptions.
P1: Whatever begins to exist in space and time has a cause that obeys the
laws of physics.
P2: The universe began to exist independent of space and time, and not according to any
laws of physics.
C: Therefore, the universe has a
cause.
At this point, the argument is
just getting crazy, and completely breaking down. You may have been convinced
by the first version of the argument, but as we teased out more and more hidden
assumptions, you may have become more and more skeptical, until the whole thing
fell apart. We will return to the importance of this point in a later post.
The lesson I want to stress for
the moment is that we need to be very careful with our premises! Make sure that
we aren’t sneaking in any hidden assumptions, or overlooking something that, if
pointed out, could cause our argument to collapse. As I explained in previous
post, trying to argue for something that isn’t true doesn’t help anyone.
When constructing your argument,
you want it to be as simple and solid as possible. You aren’t limited in the
number of premises you can use, but I recommend trying to limit the premises to
as few as possible, to try and prevent anyone finding something to make a fuss
over and break your argument apart. Let’s look at another example for
practice:
P1: Genetically modified crops can grow better in areas that other
crops couldn’t survive.
P2: Having more crops will prevent more people from dying of
starvation.
P3: Preventing starvation is will help make the world a better place.
C: Therefore, genetically
modified crops are good.
Look over each of the first three
premises, and consider whether or not they are true. Are there any hidden
assumptions? And if so, what are they?
Let’s take the first premise.
This is absolutely not true. Yes, SOME GM crops can grow in harsh environments,
but not all can. Some crops are engineered for other things. As such, we need
to change that premise to something more specific, such as “GM wheat can
produce much more grain than traditional strains of wheat.”
The second premise seems pretty
straight forward and true, though, since we are now being specific, we should
update the language to be just about GM wheat, and not GM crops in general. As
for the third premise, more food means fewer people will be hungry, and the
less people are hungry the better. However, “better place” isn’t very specific.
In what way do we mean things are better? We should clarify that. At this point, our argument is:
P1. GM wheat can produce much more grain than traditional strains of
wheat.
P2: Having more wheat will prevent more people from dying of
starvation.
P3: Preventing starvation will help reduce pain and suffering in the
world.
C: Therefore, genetically modified crops are good.
The argument looks pretty
good—but we don’t want any room for error, and that conclusion seems pretty
broad. The premises are discussing wheat, but suddenly the conclusion busts out
genetically modified crops in general. Sure, many GM crops might make the world
a better place as a whole, but we don’t want to leave the door open to anyone
who may have an example of a GM crop doing harm. To prevent that, we need to update
our conclusion so that it’s more precise and more accurate. Our final argument
would look like this:
P1. GM wheat can produce much more grain than traditional strains of
wheat.
P2: Having more wheat will prevent fewer people from dying of
starvation.
P3: Preventing starvation will help reduce pain and suffering in the
world.
C: Therefore, GM wheat is good
for the world.
Are there any hidden premises
left? Sure. The first premise is stating that GM wheat can produce more grain
than traditional wheat in certain environments.
However, if you were to add that detail in, unlike the argument regarding the
cause of the universe, it doesn’t disrupt the rest of the premises or
conclusion.
I realize that formulating your
argument, breaking down the premises and conclusion, analyzing and critiquing
your premises to make sure that they are true, and then reformulating your
argument… isn’t very exciting. However, as I mentioned before, this process
will help clarify your views and hone in on what you are trying to argue. If
you are struggling to fit your argument into a handful of premises, your
argument may be too vague, which will force you to rethink it. Either way, it’s
an important step in helping determine if you are right or not—or at the least,
if your argument makes logical sense. All of this will be extremely helpful
when trying to convince others that you are right, and they are wrong.
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While making arguments, we need
to watch out for logical fallacies. If we accidentally slip a fallacy into an
argument, a keen observer will pounce on it, and use that as a reason to
completely dismiss the point you are making. As such, you must be diligent!
There are tons of
fallacies, and I have no desire to go over all of them. Instead, I am going cover one that I’ve seen pop up more and more frequently. In future
posts, I will probably mention others, but in the interest of not boring you
too much, I will try and space them out.1
The Genetic Fallacy. This is the
mistake of going after the origin or source of topic or argument in question, rather than the
topic or argument itself. Creationists have been doing this for years--they don’t accept
arguments from biologists, because the researchers are a bunch of atheists. Similarly,
many atheist mythicists (atheists who don’t think Jesus existed) will
often discount what New Testament historians say, since “they are a bunch of
Christians, so they are biased.” Some feminists don’t accept arguments from
certain fields of science, because the researchers are often men. Holocaust
Deniers won’t accept evidence from historians, since they are apparently a bunch of
Jewish sympathizers. Every ideologically based group will try and dismiss dis-confirming evidence any way they can, and that often means by trying to
discredit the source.
When criticizing an argument, the
ONLY acceptable approach is to go after the logic of it, or the methodology of
the research. If Big Tobacco funded a study which finds that nicotine isn’t
addictive, it’s not enough to say “well of course that was the conclusion. I
don’t believe it, since Big Tobacco had their stinky hands all over it.” While such a
conflict of interest is certainly a reason to be skeptical, you actually have to
look into the methodology of the research and explain why it’s wrong, before
you can claim that the research or argument is false.
The above examples discuss the
mistake of going after the source of an argument—but there is also a very
common mistake of people going after the origin of something (usually words) to
try and argue against an idea. For example, “you shouldn’t say Happy Holidays,
since holiday comes from ‘holy day’, and not everyone is religious.” Well,
sure, holiday did originate as meaning holy day, but language is extremely
fluid, and changes constantly. As such, saying “holiday” no longer means HOLY
day. Likewise, “Christmas” did originally refer to the Christian holiday, but
it’s changed so much in secular culture that to many people, it's about
family, presents, decorating an evergreen tree, Santa Claus, etc—all things that have nothing
to do with Christianity.
I find that people struggle with
this quite frequently. If you tend to question if it’s okay to say a certain
word, because of what it meant at one time or another, consider the fact that “bad”
comes from the Old English word “baeddel”, which meant a hermaphrodite, or
womanish-man. You must consider what a something means or refers to in its
current context, rather than its origin.
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To wrap up, remember that if your
argument can be laid out in a logical manner that doesn’t commit any fallacies,
you can be confident that you have a good argument. If you try to
discredit someone’s argument based on who made it (a fallacy), you aren’t going
to get very far. On the other hand, if you are trying to advance an argument on
the basis of who said it (rather than on the logic and evidence of the
argument), you won’t get very far either. Similar to the Richard Feynman quote, if your argument disagrees with logic, it’s wrong. That's all there is to it.
In the next post, we will discuss
a few helpful concepts from psychology that we should always keep in mind when
working towards to goal of convincing people that we are right, and they are
wrong.
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1. If you're interested, this site covers the most common fallacies.
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