 I'm Peter Elerton, I'm the director of the University of Queensland's critical thinking project and a lecturer in critical thinking. When we talk about pulling apart the structure of an argument, we're talking about looking at reasons why. We're talking about issues of justification, so they're really important for accepting a conclusion or not, as the case may be. And when we look at someone's argument structure, we're really saying what are your reasons and how did you get from your reasons to your conclusion? Now, if you can't lay out that in a rational way, then it's a bit of a lost cause. It's just mouthing a conclusion that you haven't to agree with. It has no persuasive value apart from some emotive persuasion, I suppose, but there's not a rationally persuasive course of action to try and convince somebody by just yelling your statement of belief or ridiculing them for not having it, for example. If you're going to come into the rational arena and make your case, you need to understand what the rules are, so we have to know what an argument is. We have to know that an argument is about laying out your premises, those things you take to be true, and saying why you think they're true, and then showing how those together form a pathway to a conclusion, and being able to explain that in detail, in a way that's rationally persuasive to other people. If you're not going to do that, then I think you're really just trying to cheat the system, trying to wear the mantle of a rational being without playing by the rules. There are some very important technical terms in argumentation that give us the means of evaluating arguments, and they're tied to that structure of an argument as premises leading to a conclusion. What we say is if you've got a conclusion that follows logically from the premises, so for example, if I said something like, all gronks are green and Fred is a gronk, then it follows that Fred is green, and that's a valid argument. It's valid because the conclusion follows logically. Whether or not the premises are true is a different issue, but the logical structure of that argument is what contributes to being called valid. Of course, if we say that all gronks are green and Fred is a gronk, therefore Fred is not green, well, that's an invalid argument. An argument is invalid if the conclusion doesn't follow from the premises. So that's one way that we have to evaluate whether or not we should accept an argument. But we might accept an argument as valid, but then we have to ask ourselves, well, are the premises true? Now, if the premises are true, we call the argument sound. It could be valid, but with false premises, in which case we call it unsound. So calling an argument valid or invalid or sound or unsound gives us a kind of technical language for evaluating claims that are based in arguments. One of the things to do is to establish what the person's position is because that's typically their conclusion. I'm arriving at this point, I'm trying to persuade you to this point. That point might be the end of the conversation or it might be the opening of the conversation. Here's what I think is the case. Now, let me give you my reasons, and I'll go through those reasons. So I think if we understand that, the reason giving is the search for premises, then we can kind of pull it together in an argument. You see that, of course, lots of linguistic clues if someone says, therefore, what follows after that would be a conclusion, if someone says, because or since, what follows after that would be a reason or a premise. So there are those ways of looking for argument structure out in the wild, if you like. It's not as easy as it might sound because not everybody speaks as an argument, even casually, even in a hidden way, because what most people do is appeal to someone's core values. And in doing that, they try and say, look, if you disagree with what I'm saying, you're disagreeing with this kind of value set, and that's a bad thing. So the argument isn't so much there, it's more an appeal to emotion. You must understand that sometimes our value sets can be the premises of our arguments, because we might say, look, if we value this particular thing, then it follows that we should do this course of action. So it's not that what we value is outside of our arguments, it's not just the cold chrome and steel of argumentation, and then our value sets, because our values make up what are their premises sometimes. If we think, for example, that the goal is the greatest good for the greatest number of people, then we take that as a premise, then we should behave in certain ways. If we think otherwise, we behave in different ways, but they form the kind of basis. And I guess that's an important aspect of looking at people's arguments too, is to understand what are their core values that they're bringing, and not necessarily stating in their reasons, but trying to find out what those values are. And sometimes you have to really talk to people to understand what they're on about, so that you can understand their position as expressing one of those core values as a premise. So values and argumentation often merge together, and when you're talking to people about why they believe a particular outcome or a particular conclusion, it's very important sometimes to understand what their value set is, because even if they don't know it themselves, or if they haven't made it explicit, what they're taking as their core values can form part of their argument. Can I give you an example of a climate myth or a claim against climate change in Newport Park? So a common argument is that it's cold outside, therefore global warming isn't happening. A full expression of that argument might be something like, as the first premise, that well, if the planet is warming, then we would expect everywhere to be getting warmer as one premise. The second premise might be the observation that some places are experiencing extreme cold, and from there we would draw the conclusion that therefore global warming isn't happening. Now that argument is valid, that that conclusion does follow from the premises, but let's look at those two premises. The first one was, if the planet is warming, then all areas should be warming equally, or at least should all be getting warmer. And the second premise was that some areas are experiencing extreme cold. Now that second premise is true. So, you know, we're on track for a sound argument, but you just have to look then at the first premise, which says, is that in fact the conditional statement, that the if then statement, if the planet is warming, then all areas should be warming. Is that true? And in fact it's not. That's not a claim made by climate scientists. So, if people accept that argument, then they are accepting that first premise as being true, and it's not. So that's where their error lies. But expressing it as an argument like that allows us to pinpoint where the problem is. And, you know, those types of statements, those if-then statements, are often causal. And if we don't understand the causal relationships between things, then that's where we make our mistakes. It's a poor understanding of science, or a deliberate misrepresentation of science, or sometimes what we call slothful induction, in which we overlook obvious information to draw a conclusion that's useful to us. Is slothful induction a form of cherry picking? It is a form of cherry picking. It's just a zeroing in on the information that's useful to us at the time, and not worrying about the reams of information that might contradict what we're saying. So I guess slothful is the charitable interpretation, and that we're just not bothering to look at it. But I think more often than not, people look at it and decide to reject it or leave it out for the purposes of influencing others for themselves, perhaps. The process of analyzing an argument is hard work. But that's the kind of entry price you have to pay if you want to play in the arena of public rationality. The owners has to be on arts individually to explain our case rationally, and indeed to analyze the rational case of others. In terms of recognizing arguments, it's not that hard once people give it a go and get used to the process of argumentation. One of the transformative experiences, I think, of people who do study critical thinking is the recognition that almost everything is an argument. And once you see that, it's impossible to unsee it. And so crossing that threshold to going through argument analysis and talking about it and trying to understand it is the educational goal. And it takes a little while to get there. Once it's there, it's quite easy. So it is just a matter of practice. It's like any other skill. It's just a matter of practice before you can achieve that. Could you describe the difference between inductive and deductive logic? In deductive logic, the truth of the premises guarantees the truth of the conclusion. So that if I say that all gronks are green and Fred is a gronk, then deductively it follows that Fred must be green. If those premises are true, if they are, then Fred must be green. If you think Fred's not green, you're wrong. It's not a matter of opinion in that case. Deduction is ironclad. And it's like doing a Sudoku puzzle or something like that, or some of the mathematics problem where there is an answer. And if you think the number in that box is a three, but there's already a three there, well, you're wrong. There's a particular answer to it. So whatever premises might be there, if they are true, the conclusion must follow. Now, contrast that with an inductive argument in which the premises might be true, but it doesn't guarantee the truth of the conclusion. Let me give you an example. See, if I say that every time I've had a chocolate-covered oyster, I've been sick. And as my first premise, and as my second premise, that I've just had a chocolate-covered oyster. Now, that's a pretty good argument to accept the conclusion that I'm about to be sick. But it's not guaranteed. And that's where we see the distinction between inductive and deductive. And we spend most of our time in inductive reasoning where it might be a good argument, it might be a bad argument. So what we have to do is evaluate the strength of arguments. And by testing how good, say, an analogy is or how good a generalization is, that we use to support our inductive conclusions. And most of science works through induction. Most mathematics works through deduction. So we can't have the kind of certainty we see in mathematics for a lot of our scientific findings. For some we can, but not for a lot. And so this kind of, I think, plays to a public misconception that we have to know with absolute 100% certainty in a scientific outcome. Or it's not a good argument. But that's not the case, because in induction we can never be sure. There are lots of fallacies where we can make an induction. We've spoken about slothful induction, that not having all the information or not trying to find all the information and drawing conclusions from what we see in front of us. We can use faulty analogies. We might say something like the death penalties like a lighthouse. We don't know how many people a lighthouse has saved, but we don't tear it down. So therefore we don't know how many people have been deterred from committing murder from the death penalty, say, so we're not gonna get rid of it. Now that's not a very good analogy as the data shows. So how good is the analogy? How good is the generalization? These kind of things are susceptible to a range of fallacious reasonings like hasty generalizations or choosing a bias sample, that kind of thing. Cherry picking data, all sorts of things can come into play as soon as we move outside of deduction. Deduction has its own fallacies, but induction seems to contain the vast majority of them. The two main deductive fallacies, what we call affirming the consequent and denying the antecedent. And let me explain those. We've spoken about conditional statements, the if-then statements, where we say that if this is the case, then this will be the case. Now joining those two statements, I could say use my hand to represent going from this statement to this statement. We call this statement the antecedent, the if statement, and this statement the consequent, the then statement. So we have the antecedent and the consequent. Now, if we do something like an argument like or conditional as we call it, if you watch Denial 101, then you'll have a good understanding of climate science denial. Let's say that's a conditional. Now, if I said I did watch Denial 101, therefore I do have a good understanding, that's a valid argument, okay? But if we take that conditional as our first premise, that if you watch Denial 101, then you'll have a good understanding of climate denial. And the second premise being, well, I didn't watch it, so therefore I don't have a good understanding. Now, not everybody who has a good understanding of climate science denial has watched the MOOC, so that's fallacious reasoning. If we're saying, well, I didn't do the antecedent, that's called denying the antecedent, and I have the hand gesture like this to say denying the antecedent, and that's fallacious reasoning, that I can't get to here if I don't do that. Bit like saying, if it's raining, I'll be wet, it's not raining, so I can't be wet, but I could be wet by other means, just like I could learn about climate science denial by other means, apart from the MOOC. Okay, so that's one time, denying the antecedent. The other fallacy I could make is to say, well, let's accept the conditional, that if I watched Denial 101, I'll have a good understanding of climate science denial, and then say, well, I do have a good understanding of climate science denial, so I must have watched it. And of course, for the same reasons, that doesn't follow, that's called affirming the consequence. So if I say, well, I did watch it, so, sorry, I did have a good understanding, I do have a good understanding, so I must have watched it, that doesn't follow. So there's a fallacy, or I didn't watch it, so I can't have a good understanding, is another fallacy. So affirming the consequence, or denying the antecedent, are two logical fallacies based around a conditional. I have to do it from that perspective, yeah, from the audience perspective, otherwise it doesn't work. Yeah, it doesn't work if you do it yourself. Come on. Okay. Well done. That gets you confused.