Think again

I think an argument is a structured assertion with the purpose of transferring knowledge. So it can't be a mere definition, but it could be a justification, an explanation or persuasion

An argument is a series of propositions starting from premises giving reasons to justify the conclusions. It should be made in a well-known language with a purpose to transfer knowledge.

An argument could be:
- justification
- explanation: causal, teleological, formal, material
- persuasion
- Generalization
- prediction

Why did he add more sugar? To make the cake sweeter.
teleological explanation gives the purpose or function of the phenomenon that it explains, and this explanation says that his purpose was to make the cake sweeter.

Language principles
- fundamental
- conventional
- social
- representational

Animals can communicate but can't argue.

To justify a conclusion is to give a reason for that conclusion, but the audience might not understand or accept that reason, even when it is a good reason. Then the argument might have no effect (or an unintended effect) on the audience. One can give a reason for a conclusion, and it will be a reason, regardless of the effect on the audience.

We need to understand the purpose of an artifact in order to understand that artifact. Artifacts are created for special purposes, and different artifacts (such as a screwdriver and a spatula) are distinguished by their purposes, among other things.

You can try to give a reason for the conclusion even when you know that the audience will not understand or accept that reason. The point might be to show them that you have a reason, even if they don’t accept your reason.

Even if we can't persuade everyone with strong arguments, luckily, being good in justification could lead to big changes in society since we would understand much better the reasons that are the root causes of one's behavior. Imagine this happening for real in politics!

Three levels of language usage"
- linguistic
- speech
- conversational
Wittgenstein meant by his slogan “Meaning is use.”

Question 1
The old man the ship.
Answer: Meaningful.
If you read “the old man” as a noun phrase, then you will look for a verb and not find one. That makes this garden path sentence seem meaningless. However, “the old” can be a noun by itself referring to old people, and “man” can be a verb referring to managing the ship, and then the sentence means “The old people manage the ship.”

Arguing is a speech act.

Paul Grice conversational maximes.

the special language in which arguments are formulated. We will investigate the functions of particular words, including premise and conclusion markers plus assuring, guarding, discounting, and evaluative terms. Identifying these words will enable students to separate arguments from the irrelevant verbiage that surrounds it and then to break the argument into parts and to identify what each part of an argument is doing.

how to organize the parts of an argument in order to show how they fit into a structure of reasoning. The goal is to make the argument look as good as possible so that you can learn from it. We work through the main steps of reconstruction, including putting the premises and conclusion into a standard form, clarifying the premises and breaking them into parts, arranging the argument into stages or sub-arguments, adding suppressed premises where needed to make the argument valid, and assessing the argument for soundness.

Deductive arguments are supposed to be valid in the sense that the premises guarantee that the conclusion is true. In this course, you will learn how to use truth-tables and Venn diagrams to represent the information contained in the premises and conclusion of an argument so that you can determine whether or not the argument is deductively valid.
how such phrases as “and”, “or”, “if”, and “not” can work to guarantee the validity or invalidity of the deductive arguments in which they occur. It will also teach you to understand the functioning of these phrases using a device called a “truth-table”, which shows how the truth or falsity of propositions that use these phrases depends upon the truth or falsity of the propositions contained within it. We highly recommend that you practice the skills that you will learn in this module by doing the puzzles

how to analyze and assess five common forms of inductive arguments: generalizations from samples, applications of generalizations, inference to the best explanation, arguments from analogy, and causal reasoning. The course closes by showing how you can use probability to help make decisions of all sorts.