Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill.original_ [128]
Psychology departments, for example, concentrate much less on the soundness of an argument than they do on factors that influence the way people think. We offer one example of thinking about thinking in psychology in the Voice from Across the Curriculum appearing at the end of Chapter 2. There psychologist Mark Sciutto speaks about cognitive behavior therapy and the problem of various kinds of automatic thoughts, such as globalizing and fortune-telling, that distort the way people think. In Chapter 2, we argue that the deeply ingrained habits of overgeneralizing, judging, and leaping prematurely to conclusions are the most fundamental causes of poor thinking.
Neuroscience departments study thinking in a more materially empirical way, by trying to isolate the various biochemical and other mechanisms in the brain that determine how we process experience. History, religion, English, and art history departments, among others, study the various traditions of thought, including traditions in language that shape and condition thinking in individuals and cultures.
We now turn to the long tradition of analyzing arguments that has evolved from the thinking of Aristotle and other early Greek philosophers. This necessarily brief discussion cannot do justice to the methods of argument analysis employed by philosophers, especially logicians. But it is possible to provide a skeletal version of how these methods operate and also to locate them in the context of other ways of thinking about argument.
THE RULES OF ARGUMENT: SYLLOGISM AND ENTHYMEME
Philosophers have long quested for forms that might lend to human argument some greater clarity and certainty, more like what is possible with formulas in math. As you will see and as most philosophers readily admit, the reality of evaluating arguments in day-to-day life is necessarily a less tidy process than the rules of argument might make it seem. The kinds of certainty that are sometimes possible with formulas in math are not so easily available when using words to make claims about human experience. Nevertheless, the rules of argument described here offer a set of specific guidelines for discovering things that go right—and wrong—in the construction of an argument.
Probably the most common way of talking about logical argumentation goes back to Aristotle. This approach doesn’t always have direct applications in the kinds of analytical writing described in this book, but knowing the ways that philosophers have devised for evaluating arguments can expand your ability to assess your own and others’ reasoning about claims and evidence.
There are a number of rules for evaluating the validity of a syllogism’s conclusion. In this short section, we cannot offer enough of the details about argument analysis to equip you with the necessary skills. But we will give you enough detail so that you can understand the basic principles and methods of this way of thinking about argument.
At the heart of the Aristotelian model is the syllogism, which consists of three parts:
Major premise: a general proposition presumed to be true;
Minor premise: a subordinate proposition also presumed to be true; and
Conclusion: a claim that follows logically from the two premises, if the argument has been properly framed.
Here is a frequently cited example of a syllogism:
All men are mortal (major premise).
Socrates is a man (minor premise).
Therefore, Socrates is mortal (conclusion).
A premise is a proposition (assumption) upon which an argument is based and from which a conclusion is drawn. In the syllogism, if both of the premises have been stated in the proper form (both containing a shared term), then the conclusion must be valid.
An important thing to know about syllogisms is that they are only as true