Analyzing arguments

The argu­ment, as men­tioned pre­vi­ous­ly, is a basic con­cept in crit­i­cal think­ing. The abil­i­ty to ana­lyze argu­ments and their com­po­nents thought­ful­ly and com­plete­ly is, sim­i­lar­ly, a basic and extreme­ly impor­tant skill for crit­i­cal thought.

This top­ic is a lit­tle bit longer than the oth­ers. It con­tains three videos select­ed to intro­duce you to a few things to con­sid­er when ana­lyz­ing argu­ments. As infor­ma­tive as they are, they bare­ly scratch the sur­face of what is a deep, intri­cate, and poten­tial­ly immer­sive activ­i­ty.

But you’ve got­ta start some­where; and every lit­tle bit counts!

CAVEAT: Depend­ing on what course, book, video, or web­site you use to enhance your knowl­edge about crit­i­cal think­ing, you’ll find dif­fer­ent terms for dif­fer­ent con­cepts, includ­ing the build­ing blocks of argu­ments that we’ve already dis­cussed. That’s okay! What’s impor­tant is that you under­stand, con­cep­tu­al­ly, what argu­ments are, how they’re used, and how they’re com­posed.

WATCH: The fol­low­ing two videos, pre­sent­ed by the folks at Snap Lan­guage, intro­duce a few things to con­sid­er about the claims and premis­es of argu­ments. The con­tent may seem over­whelm­ing at first, but don’t wor­ry — we’ll be delv­ing more deeply into argu­ment analy­sis in future lessons.

Facts versus opinions

One ongo­ing task for the crit­i­cal thinker ana­lyz­ing argu­ments is dis­tin­guish­ing facts from opin­ions. It’s not as easy as it sounds. As with ana­lyz­ing argu­ments in gen­er­al, dis­tin­guish­ing facts from opin­ions takes some skill and prac­tice. But here’s a short glimpse into the mat­ter.

WATCH: A brief intro­duc­tion to the dif­fer­ence between facts and opin­ions.

In a nut­shell, and at a min­i­mum, you might think of facts as being objec­tive and exter­nal (that is, not per­son­al). Opin­ions, rather, are sub­jec­tive and inter­nal (per­son­al).

Let’s start sep­a­rat­ing fact from opin­ions via this top­ic’s quiz.