PSCI 2701 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Determinism

• School: Carleton University
• Department: Political Science
• Course: PSCI 2701
• Professor: Vandna Bhatia

Document Summary

Elements of an argument: a claim, statement or proposition, a reason or other evidence to support the proposition, that is, why something is being claimed, a conclusion, the point, or the claim of the argument, the answer to the question posed. Reasons in effective arguments: major premise (p, general statement that links minor premise to conclusion, provides the warrant or authority for conclusion to follow from evidence, minor premise (p, specific information or observations, the evidence or immediate grounds for believing something. Critiques of determinism: complexity of social phenomena (that cannot be accurately depicted and modeled, human indeterminacy (free will, we make our own decisions, however, when we look for why/how something happened because we are looking for causes therefore we have to assume some determinacy, we make the assumption that it is explainable by some cause, does not assume that anything does have a direct cause though .