Think Again: How to Reason and Argue - Week 1 and 2
Language proficiency is the foundation of making or analyzing arguments.
Argument:
- From some premises.
- Through a series of sentences or propositions.
- To a conclusion.
Types of argument:
- Persuasion (change people’s belief).
- Justification (show people a reason to believe).
- Explanation (why something happened; why something is true).
Explanation vs prediction:
- Unexplainable but predictable, e.g., machine learning models.
- Explainable but unpredictable, e.g., non-quantifiable models.
Language, meaning, and semantics are crucial in understanding and analyzing arguments.
Ambiguity makes you harder to distinguish arguments from non-arguments.
The problem of skeptical regress (this is a philosophical problem): Practically, we work around this problem by finding some shared assumptions as our (starting) premises of an argument.
How to establish assumptions:
- Assuring: Trust some authorities.
- Guarding: Weaken the strength of the premises (so that people can not reject it).
- Extent: All—some.
- Probability: Must—might.
- Mental: Know—tend to believe.
- Discounting:
- Citing and discounting criticisms.
- The trick of discounting straw people.
Rule of thumb: Think about the objections that the arguer is not considering.
Expressing preference is not making an evaluation. Evaluation: Good vs bad, beautiful vs ugly, etc.
