Critical Thinking 101: Arguments
How to Identify Premises and Conclusion in Short Arguments
What’s Critical Thinking?
Critical thinking, or informal logic, is more than simply learning a bunch of logical fallacies or mistakes in reasoning. Rather, it’s a full-blown discipline that deals with the principles governing the practice of understanding, evaluating, making good arguments and answering other people’s arguments.
What’s an Argument?
The most common meaning of ‘argument’ is something like what my sister and I used to do most of the time when we were both sharing the same room as children. We were constantly bickering over toys, whose friends could share the room with us to play, using and misplacing each other’s stuff, etc.
This is not what arguments are in critical thinking.
Arguments are ways of backing up or supporting views or conclusions using reasons.
Why are Arguments Important?
Not all views are created equal.
Some are better than others.
One important way you can find this out is by assessing the reasons and evidence that support that view.
Also, once you work out some good reasons and evidence for the view you intend to support, you can use arguments to explain to others why your view is correct or better than other views. In other words, arguments can be the tool you use to convince other people to embrace your views, not by force, yelling, name calling, or manipulation, but by sharing reasons and evidence.
Assessing and building good arguments, respectfully and constructively participating in conversations with people hold different views, handling objections, etc., are skills that need work and practice to develop, but at least for me, are worth the effort.
And here’s a good reason why:
The mental gym argumentation skills provide is a great way to making your mind more flexible and perfecting it into a fantastic BS detector you can reliably count on for life.
Breaking Down a Short Argument
When you analyse or build an argument, identify these two essential components:
The conclusion. This is the point the argument is trying to make.
The premise(s). This is the reason or the set of reasons the argument puts forward to support its conclusion.
Longer arguments may contain intermediate premises, which are preliminary conclusions drawn from preliminary premises needed to support the final conclusion.
But, short arguments work with just one conclusion and one or more premises.
Example of a short argument
I’ve condensed this opinion piece from The Guardian, Why stop at breakfast? We paediatricians think all of England’s primary pupils should have lunch for free, in argument form.
Here’s what it looks like.
Conclusion (C):
The government must introduce free school meals for all primary school children to improve child health and prevent future health problems
Paraphrased and summarised from the following text in the original article:
“… there is one policy that will provide significant and long-lasting benefits to our children: the extension of free school meals for every primary school child. […] To prevent lifelong chronic health issues, […] We need free school meals for all now.”.
Premises:
Because
(P1) Free school meals improve children’s health, as seen in examples from London and Wales, where providing nutritious meals has led to better health and education outcomes.
Paraphrased and summarised from the following text in the original article:
“Earlier this year, we saw the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, commit to a permanent extension of free school meals for all, because the evidence showed that when pupils have a hot, nutritious meal in school every day, almost every key health and education indicator went up. Wales has also completed a rollout of universal free school meals in primary schools – proving there are plenty of examples for the government to follow elsewhere.”.
(P2) Healthy habits start in childhood, and ensuring children have access to nutritious meals is an important step in preventing lifelong health issues.
“As doctors, we know – and it is also common sense – that prevention is better than cure. Many lifelong physical and mental health issues are established when children grow up with unaddressed ill health and multiple morbidities. Healthy habits start early. [ …] why not start with interventions in childhood? It is just common sense. By supporting children to have healthy food at school, we are supporting them to have a healthy life today and tomorrow. If we are to make Britain “the best country to grow up in and the best country to grow old in”, as Keir Starmer so boldly envisions, this government must take swift action to reverse years of deteriorating child health.”.
Tips for Identifying Premises and Conclusion
There is no hard and fast method to identify the various parts of an argument, mainly because arguments are often teased out of a wider context and are not always laid out in a clear and ordered manner.
That said, there are a few strategies you can use.
Here are the most common ones.
Start with the conclusion
If you identify your conclusion first, usually what’s left are the premises. This might make your job easier.
The conclusion answers the question: “What’s the argument trying to get you to believe?”
So, find the answer to this question and you’ll find the conclusion.
The premises answer the question: “What are the reasons the argument gives to get you to believe its conclusion?”
Nail down the reasons and you’ll have the premises.
Finally, put the conclusion and the premises in order like I did in the previous section, and you’ll be ready to examine and evaluate the argument.
Look for indicator words
A useful but less reliable tactic is that of identifying indicator words. These words are often signs that either a conclusion (conclusion indicator) or a premise (premise indicator) is coming up in the text.
Common conclusion indicators are:
therefore
thus
so
hence
Easy-to-spot premise indicators are:
because
for
since
as
A clear formulation of the argument I presented above using common indicator words can be put like this:
Since P1 and P2, C.
Or:
P1, P2, therefore C.
Warning 1!
You’ll easily find more examples of indicator words on the internet, but keep in mind that some arguments might not use them at all and some of the words I listed above might not always work as an indicator for premises and conclusions but fulfil other roles in the text.
Warning 2!
Keep in mind that an argument lives in a wider context. So, not everything in the text is either a conclusion or a premise. You’ll need some practice to tease out the parts of the argument from the rest of the content.
Practice Your Argument-Detecting Skills
Here are a 5 short arguments I’ve put together to get you to practice identifying the conclusion and the premises in short arguments.
Don’t worry, you’ll find my suggested answers at the bottom of the page.