Premises

-- Valerie Ross The paradox of argument is that it must begin in agreement. If you share no common ground with your interlocutor, you are unlikely to change her mind. To commence an argument, you and your reader need to agree on at least one of the following: Form of argument Type of evidence Shared premises

The first half of the critical writing seminar will give you practice in the major forms of argument that scholars and professionals find persuasive: explanatory and justificatory reasoning. The natural and social sciences, as well as business and engineering, generally have highly formal structures for presenting their reasoning. The humanities, on the other hand, have significantly more varied demands in terms of structure. All, however, rely on reasoning as their means of explanation and persuasion. The types of evidence that you will use in your writing seminar will be that of the discipline that your course represents. Each discipline and profession is persuaded by different types of evidence and different formats for documenting and presenting this evidence. For example, a professor in the social sciences is unlikely to be persuaded of a social theory based on quotations from poetry. In turn, a professor of English will not be impressed with interpretations of poetry based on demographic data and surveys of poets. Among the many challenges an undergraduate faces in writing papers for professors across the disciplines is to discover what kinds of evidence the professor will accept as credible, and how to arrange the reasoning and document the evidence in the manner deemed acceptable by that discipline. But without doubt the toughest job of a student is to identify what his readersteachers and scholarsknow, believe, feel, and understand about a topic, when the student writer is a complete novice in the field. In the second half of the course, we will give you some tips and practices that will accelerate your grasp of specialized premises. For now, practice detecting and building upon premises you share with your peers. A skillful critical writer is able to identify common ground between himself and his readers, and uses this to launch his argument from the very edge of that common ground. If one begins too far back in a chain of shared premises, one risks chasing the reader away, bored by the barrage of vague generalities: From the beginning of time mankind has found love to be central to human existence. Since then love has taken many forms. Today everyone continues to talk about the importance of love. Yet fully half of all marriages end in divorce such a dreary chain of broad universal premises is a waste of valuable writerly real estate. The more targeted the premise that launches the argument, the more economical and persuasive it will tend to be. The targeted premise gives the writer a firm footing on which to begin, and avoids the tedium of writing that rehearses too much familiar territory before it gets on with the business at hand.

On the other hand, its equally easy to lose your reader and your argument by neglecting to base it on shared premises. A student of mine recently provided an apt example of such failure when he attempted to persuade his visiting parents to dine at a Moroccan restaurant. He felt his reasons were brilliant and compelling. But, alas, he neglected to consider whether his audience shared a prior premise. As it happened, they had no desire to dine out. The presumption that ones audience share certain desires, beliefs, or values is a basic error in argumentation. Had my student done his homework, he would have understood that his first job was to talk his parents into dining out. He would have identified a premise that allowed him to build this argument, perhaps one of these: Our family enjoys new experiences, Our family loves to do things together, or Theres no food in the house. Each of these premises, if embraced by his parents, provides a basis for developing the argument in strategic blocks, from dining out to choosing the Moroccan restaurant. As this suggests, an understanding of your audiences premises is fundamental to any argument, and will dictate both content and ordering. We will be touching more on ordering of arguments in the coming weeks. For now, suffice it to say that ordering is contingent on an understanding of an audiences beliefs, feelings, and knowledge: premises. One of the difficulties for high school and undergraduate student writers is that they seldom know as much about the topic as their audience. These artificial writing conditions (who wants to read an essay by someone who knows less than you about the subject?) leads teachers to come up with all sorts of imaginary audiences. Write to someone who read the book a few months ago, or, Write to a group of businesspeople who are planning to invest in a food processing company, or, as one teacher advised her students, Write to a Martian. Of course it isnt possible to know the beliefs, knowledge, values, and feelings of a Martian, or an abstract someone who hasnt read the book in a few months, or a mysterious group of businesspeople. Real people have real values, beliefs, and knowledge, and real writers must get a lock on them if they are to be successful. Seldom can a student manage this when writing to a teacher or professor. That is why, in the critical writing seminars, we genuinely encourage you to practice writing to your peers. This is invaluable practice in grasping what moves an audience. When you begin the semester, your peers will mostly know about as much as you do about the topic. By the second half of the semester, you and your colleagues will have a fair amount of common ground in the topicthe shared readings, writings, and discussions. As your research project advances, they will know less than you about your particular area of research. This gives you the actual conditions of a typical writer in a scholarly or professional field: writing to a community of peers who share certain knowledge in common, in an effort to advance or change their understanding about a particular issue in which you have equal or greater expertise. In these early stages of the seminar, however, the premises you share with your readers will be less specialized because you and your colleagues have not yet formed a scholarly community. To get started, it is helpful to identify whether a premise belongs to the category of universal or specialized premises: Universals: facts, truths, assumptions accepted by most Specialized: facts, truths, values accepted by a particular audience

For example, most of us would agree that people are entitled to certain rights, such as not to be caged or eaten or experimented upon without permission. Thus these particular premises fall into the category of universal premises. In contrast, some people agree that animals are entitled to certain rights, such as not to be caged or eaten or experimented upon without permission. Thus these premises fall into the category of specialized premises, accepted by a particular audience but probably not embraced by most. The first few weeks of class you will probably have to target universal premises, for you will not know your audience well enough to ascertain their specialized premises. As the class unfolds, however, you and your colleagues will begin to develop a set of specialized premises: facts, truths, values you, or a portion of your classmates, will agree upon and which can serve as a basis for your arguments and explanations. The broader or more unknown your readership, the more a writer is confined to working from the broad contours of universal premises. Thus an editorialist for a newspaper must begin quite broadly, with very general premises, while an academic writer with an audience of scholars in a narrow subfield may be able to launch her argument from quite targeted, specialized premises. Failure to grasp whether one needs to commence with universal or specialized premises will typically stall the argument before it gets off the ground. Along with identifying whether to use universal or specialized premises, a critical writer is also wise to consider the types of premises that will be most persuasive to her audience. To equip oneself with an arsenal of such premises, Aristotle urged his readers to collect and catalogue them. It can also be helpful to sort them, for some premises are compatible and others war against each other. For example, one can divide universal values, a fundamental type of premise, into two basic groups: Abstract values (based on abstract ideas): truth, beauty, justice, God, change, freedom Concrete values (based on observable human relationships): solidarity, fidelity, loyalty, discipline, reliability, generosity

Abstract values are generally incompatible. Try to pair any two and you will see: truth or justice, God or freedom. The most fraught arguments tend to be battles between two abstract values: the death penalty, for example, whose proponents argue for justice and whose opponents argue for the sanctity of life. One way to intervene in an argument based on an abstract value is to juxtapose it with another abstract value. If one person is arguing for freedom of speech, another might argue for protection from harm. Another strategy is to subordinate one value to the other: the ends justify the means; justice must prevail over freedom. Unlike abstract values, concrete values are usually compatible, since they are based on actual human relationships, and thus can be used in combination as building blocks in an argument. If, for example, your audience values solidarity, you can build a bridge from this value to that of generosity, and use these as the basis for a persuasive argument in the service of fund-raising. There are many other sorts of premises that a skillful arguer uses to his advantage:

Quantitative/universal: most people in most circumstances believe that more is better taller versus shorter, rich vs poor, greater versus lesser. Qualitative/specialized: depending upon the audience, some will prefer urban to rural (or vice versa), institutionally-educated versus self-educated (or vice versa).

We tend to regard as common sense certain types of quantitative and qualitative premises. For example, we are calling upon a quantitative/universal premise when we argue that the majority believe or do something. Our argument is based on a qualitative/universal premise when we argue for something based on its effectiveness, desirability, or uniqueness. As all of this suggests, premises tend to be historically and culturally specific, with the universal referring to majorities within those broader contexts. The job of a writer is to identify and employ the premises that her audience will find most persuasive and relevant to the purpose at hand. As you commence your study and analysis of premises, pay close attention to what your colleagues, and the authors you read, believe, value, know, and take for granted. These will be your most powerful tools.