Lecture Notes

Lecture Notes by Christopher Lay

Los Angeles Pierce College

Department of History, Philosophy, and Sociology

Mathew Van Cleave's 2016 Introduction to Logic and Critical Thinking

https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/BookDetail.aspx?bookId=457

Chapter 1 "Reconstructing and Analyzing Arguments"

§10 "Assuring, Guarding[,] and Discounting"

"Sometimes [folks] use certain rhetorical devices to cut [an] argument short, or to hint at a further argument without actually stating it."

Assuring

" ... informing someone that there are further reasons although one is not giving them now."

Guarding

" ... weakening one’s claims so that it is harder to show that the claims are false."

Discounting

" ... anticipating objections that might be raised to one’s claim or argument as a way of dismissing those objections."

Assuring

" ... informing someone that there are further reasons although one is not giving them now."

"Why would we want to assure our audience? Presumably when we make a claim that isn’t obvious and that the audience may not be inclined to believe."

Authorities

"[O]ne way of assuring our audience [is] by citing authorities."

(We'll talk about the Appeal to Authority later.)

Personal Convictions

"Another way of assuring is to comment on the strength of one’s own convictions."

" The rhetorical effect is that by commenting on how sure you are that something is true, you imply, without saying, that there must be very strong reasons for what you believe—assuming that the audience believes you are a reasonable person, of course."

Bandwagoning-ish

"Yet another way of assuring one’s audience is to make an audience member feel that it would be stupid, odd, or strange to deny the claim one is making. One common way to do this is by implying that every sensible person would agree with the claim."

"Another common way of doing this is by implying that no sensible person would agree with a claim that we are trying to establish as false."

(We'll talk about Poisoning the Well later.)

Careful with Assuring

"Assurances are not necessarily illegitimate, since the person may be right and may in fact have good arguments to back up the claims, but the assurances are not themselves arguments and a critical thinker will always regard them as somewhat suspect. This is especially so when the claim isn’t obviously true."

Guarding

" ... weakening one’s claims so that it is harder to show that the claims are false."

"[G]uarding involves taking a stronger claim and making it weaker so there is less room to object to the claim."

"Guarding involves weakening a claim so that it is easier to make that claim true."

"A weak claim is more likely to be true whereas a strong claim is less likely to be true."

"We can also guard a claim by introducing a probability clause ... ."

Guarding and Charity

"One common use of guarding is in reconstructing arguments with missing premises using the principle of charity ... ."

Discounting

" ... anticipating objections that might be raised to one’s claim or argument as a way of dismissing those objections."

"Discounting involves acknowledging an objection to the claim or argument that one is making, while dismissing that same objection. The rhetorical force of discounting is to make it seem as though the argument has taken account of the objections—especially the ones that might be salient in a person’s mind."

"The 'A but B' locution is a form of discounting that introduces what will be dismissed or overridden first and then follows it by what is supposed to be the more important consideration. By introducing the claim to be dismissed, we are discounting that claim."

"Table 2 below gives a partial list of words and phrases that commonly function as discounting terms."

although	even if	but	nevertheless
though	while	however	nonetheless
even though	whereas	yet	still

Exercise 7

"Which rhetorical techniques (assuring, guarding, discounting) are being using in the following passages?"