week 2 - The basic structure of argument

Week 2

The basic structure of argument

Before we move to today’s chapter, we recap again the quality of a good critical thinker. A good critical thinker needs to have the cognitive ability and intellectual disposition which able to analyse, identify and evaluate arguments and truth claims. An argument contains of supporting statements, premises, conclusion and premises or prepositions.

This week I discover more in detail about argument. First of all, proposition is a statement believed to be true and presented as argument for consideration by the target audience. A sentence is only qualified if the sentence make a declaration and as audience I must capable of determining whether the statement is true or false. But, not all the sentences are statements as there are lot kind of sentences such as command, question, proposal, greeting, request, instruction and exclamation. Here our lecturer push one thing to our head which is sometimes argument may contain many noises such as exclamations, command and threats. After I heard it, I am very confusing. Then I learnt that as a critical thinker I should able to spot noises and concentrate on the argument mainly the premises and conclusion.

In my view, argument is only a statement to argue and end up with fight. Since, in critical thinking there are different definitions for argument. An argument is a claim supported by one or more premises and support conclusion. I learnt several skills to identify an argument from today’s lesson which are the point of producing this sentence, the main message I supposed to take from the sentence, the author try to make a case or not and the reasons offered to support their position. On the other hand, I had learnt about non- arguments which are descriptions, explanations and summaries, command and much more.

Another type of statement is premise/proposition. Premises are statements that support the conclusion. A simple argument contains two premises and a conclusion. There are many words and phrases that are usually combined with a premise which are indicated by, as shown by, because, and much more. The ‘mix’ of messages that we receive from other person is known as the ‘raw material’ contains arguments and extraneous material. Reconstruction is a series of techniques where we look for “indicator words”. Besides that, another type of argument is implicit argument. It means when a person making an argument, he or she will assume that the audience can figure out the argument without include premises and conclusion.

As I remember question cannot be a statement because they can neither be right or wrong. We can divide questions into two types which are interrogative questions and rhetorical questions. Interrogative questions are questions that intended to solicit some information from audience while rhetorical questions are intended to solicit audience’ agreement or to motivate them to take some action. Rhetorical questions are act as premises and conclusion. To trigger my head, there is another type of question called leading questions which guide someone being questioned in making his/her response.

 This week I discover about basic argument. I rating 1 for question; I know the different meanings of the word argument in critical thinking. After I learned this lesson, I can know the different meaning of critical thinking. I rate 2 for question; I can analyse the structure of an argument. Here, I don’t know that this question is content in critical thinking. So, I plan to do more practice to make me easy in analyse the structure of argument. Moreover, I rate 3 for the question; I usually pay attention to small details. In identify an argument, I must consider to some important points. From the rating I can know that my attention is not enough in identify small details. So, I plan to pay more attention although it is small detail. Lastly, I rate 3 also for; I can remain focused on the exact requirements of an activity. Here, I plan to understand clearly the exact requirements of activity to be success. So, this is what I learn from today’s learning.