What is an Argument?

Since arguments are at the heart of logic and argumentation, it's natural to start with this question. The first thing to say about arguments is that as this term is used in logic, it isn't intended to imply anything like an emotional confrontation like when I say that an argument broke out at a bar or I just had a huge argument with my parents about my grades or something. In logic, an argument is a technical term. It doesn't carry any connotation about conflict, or confrontation. So here's our definition, it'll have three parts. First part. An argument is a set of claims, or statements. What I wanted to say about what a claim or statement is later but for now it's enough to say that a claim is the sort of thing that can be true or false. Next part. One of the claims is singled out for special attention. We call it the conclusion. The remaining claims are called premises. And finally, the premises are interpreted as offering reasons to believe or accept the conclusion. That's it. That's the definition of an argument. Now let's have a look at one. All musicians can read music, John is a musician. Therefore, John can read music. These are the premises and this is the conclusion. Premises one and two are being offered as reason to accept the conclusion that John can read music. This may not be a particularly good argument actually. Since that first premise makes a pretty broad generalization about all musicians that isn't very plausible, I don't think. I'm sure there a are few great musicians that don't read sheet music. But it's an argument, nonetheless. Now, notice how it's been written. The premises are each numbered and put on separate lines and the conclusion is placed at the bottom and set off from the rest by a line and flagged with the word therefore. This is called putting the argument in standard form and it can be useful when you're doing an argument analyses. In ordinary language, we almost never are this formal but when you're trying to analyze arguments, when you're investing your logical properties or considering whether the premises are true or not, putting an argument in standard form can make life a lot easier. Now just to highlight this point, here's another way of saying the same thing. Can John read music? Of course, he's a musician, isn't he? These actually express the very same argument. And notice how much easier it is to see the structure of the argument when it's written in standard form. In the second version in yellow here, you have to infer the conclusion, John can read music, from the opening question and the of course part. And you have to fill in an assumed premise. What you're given is, John is a musician. But the conclusion only follows. If you assume that all musicians, or most musicians can read music, which is not given. It's just a background assumption. The argument only makes sense because you're filling in the background premise automatically. But you can imagine as this might become a problem for more complex arguments where you can't always be sure that everyone is filling in the same background premise. So standard form can be helpful and we're gonna be using it a lot in this course. Here are the takeaway points to remember from this. First an argument is just a set of claims that are offered as reasons to believe or accept another claim. Second, we saw that the same argument can be written in more than one way. And in general it's true that the same argument can be written or expressed in many different ways using different words, different sentences, and different sentence structure. Now, because of this it's often helpful to put arguments in standard form, where you can clearly identify which parts of the argument are functioning as the premises and which part is the conclusion. And you make all the premises and background assumptions explicit, by writing them on separate lines. Being able to do this is very actually an important skill in logic.