Arguments

The term “argu­ment” may bring to mind two or more angry peo­ple yelling at each oth­er or some oth­er kind of tense, heat­ed ver­bal dis­agree­ment.

Along sim­i­lar lines, you might also think of an argu­ment as some­thing you win or lose. 

But an argu­ment being an alter­ca­tion or dis­agree­ment that may be won or lost is only one sense of the word.

In crit­i­cal think­ing, an argu­ment is a state­ment with a con­clu­sion (aka a claim) and at least one premise to sup­port that con­clu­sion.

The argu­ment is the basic con­cept that the oth­er con­cepts of crit­i­cal think­ing are con­nect­ed to or built upon. 

Argu­ments are not won or lost—rather, they are ana­lyzed or exam­ined.

But what is meant by state­ment, con­clu­sion, and premise?  Under­stand­ing argu­ments and their build­ing blocks is fun­da­men­tal to under­stand­ing and apply­ing crit­i­cal think­ing. We’ll cov­er these all-impor­tant terms in the next few les­son top­ics. 

And we’ll start to ana­lyze argu­ments in the next les­son (Intro­duc­tion to fal­lac­i­es).

But before we get to all of that, here’s anoth­er quick quiz.