Guide for Identifying, Standardizing, and Evaluating Propositional Arguments

Identifying Arguments
1. Look for an attempt to convince.
Prop. Look for an attempt to convince that relies on the logical relationships between statements.
2. Find the conclusion.
3. Find the premises.
4. Review the following to make sure that youve correctly identified the conclusion and the premises: imperfect
indicator words, sentence order, premises and/or conclusion not in declarative form, and unstated premises
and/or conclusion.
5. Review the following to make sure that you havent incorrectly identified something as a premise or a
conclusion when in fact it isnt part of an argument: assertions, questions, instructions, descriptions, and
explanations.
Standardizing Arguments
6. Rewrite the premises and the conclusion as declarative sentences. Make sure that each premise and the
conclusion is a grammatically correct declarative sentence. Rewrite the premises and conclusion as
necessary to make them clearer, but dont change the meaning of the passage. Remove pronouns from the
sentences and replace them with the nouns or noun phrases to which they refer. Remove emotionally
charged language.
7. Review any phrases youve omitted to be sure that they arent premises or a conclusion.
8. Number the premises and the conclusion. Put [ ] around the number of an unstated premise or conclusion. Place
the premises before their conclusion and insert Therefore, between the premises and the conclusion.
9. Compare your standardization to the original passage to make sure that you havent omitted any arguments
found in the passage and to be sure that youve correctly identified the premises and the conclusion.
10. Review your standardization to see if the arguments form matches any of those studied in this book.
Evaluating Arguments: The True Premises Test
11. Check to see whether the premises are accurate descriptions of the world.
12. Consider whether the premises are appropriate for the arguments audience.
13. Review the assumed premises to be sure that the assumptions are reasonable. Make sure that all assumed
premises are uncontroversially true empirical statements, uncontroversially true definitional statements, or
appropriate statements by experts. Make sure the definitions are good ones.
Prop. If the argument contains a disjunction, check for a False Dichotomy.
Evaluating Arguments: The Proper Form Test
14. Determine whether the argument is a deductive argument or inductive argument.
15. Determine whether the premises are relevant to the conclusion. Look at each premise individually to see
whether the truth of the premise provides some evidence for the truth of the conclusion. Look at the
premises as a group to see whether the truth of all of them provides some evidence for the truth of the
conclusion.
Prop. Determine the form of the propositional argument. Compare it to the nine propositional argument
forms discussed in this section. See above.
Evaluating Arguments: Checking for Fallacies
16. Compare the argument to the list of fallacies in the Reference Guide at the end of the book to see whether the
argument commits any of the fallacies.
17. End answer with global comments about how good the argument is as a whole. If the argument is a deductive
argument, then state whether the argument is valid, and/or sound. If the argument is inductive, this may be
a degree like not wholly cogent but almost or very strong but not cogent, etc.