Philosophy 1200 Lecture Notes - Lecture 34: Good And Evil, Inductive Reasoning, Tangled
6 Aug 2020
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An argumentative essay is just a long argument, so all of the steps from last term plus what we have learned about deductive and inductive reasoning are used together to assess the essay. The difficulty with such an analysis is the length of an essay. We cannot make sense of an essay if we consider every sentence as a premise for we will have dozens if not hundreds of premises and lose track of what we are assessing. For this reason, we want to assess the main argument, which is the macrostructure required to write the argument. Find the main conclusion and the main lines of reasoning supporting it. Some subargument structure can be added to these lines, aiming for approximately 12 premises in total, which gives enough structure for analysis, while remaining simple enough to make clear what is going on. The following argument is taken from saint augustine"s on free choice of the will.
