Core Concepts in Critical Thinking, Part I

Critical Thinking
Across the
Curriculum Project Critical Thinking Core Concepts
Contributed by: Lauren Miller and Michael Connelly, Longview Community College

Simplifying or Paraphrasing Arguments:

As we noted in our section on identifying Premises and Conclusions, we run into difficulty when there are no premise indicators at all. To review, there are two possible strategies. Probably the best strategy is to find a statement to function as the conclusion of the presentation's as-yet latent argument. Sometimes such a statement (or rhetorical equivalent thereof) can be found among the sentences explicitly included in the presentation. If so, use it. If not, you'll have to construct one of your own (see below). Either way, here's how to proceed:

*Look over the presentation very thoroughly, to get the general drift.

*If necessary, pick up clues about the author's probable outlook or message from outside the presented material - from the biographical facts about the author, for example, or from what you can tell about the context of presentation. (If your raw material came from a speech given at a Klan rally, for example, the statement "We need to look beyond superficial differences and find the good in each individual heart," is probably not a good candidate for its conclusion statement.)

*Put together a short sentence which seems to summarize the one main message of the presentation, within the limits of outlook as indicated by the biographical and circumstantial information at your disposal. Ask yourself what declarative sentence this peddler would use to state the main point on an expensive billboard on the Interstate-- one that people have only a few seconds to read, at 70 mph.

*Look for such a statement, or the equivalent thereof, among the explicit sentences of the presentation. If you find one, that helps confirm that you're interpreting the presentation correctly. So call that sentence the conclusion, and go ahead with the analysis. If you can't find such a sentence, then review the above procedure in hopes of finding one which is confirmed. If this yields no better results, then just adopt your own formulation as the conclusion statement, and go ahead.

*Use that conclusion statement in subsequent steps of reconstruction and analysis, but remember that your "conclusion" here is a guess or hypothesis, and could be replaced by a better one if this one doesn't lead to a satisfactory overall reconstruction.

*Once you've picked an overall conclusion, revisit the raw material in search of statements which could function in a supporting role for that conclusion-- i.e. ones which the author could be giving in answer to the question "What makes you think so?" Repeat the process (and the imaginary question) in your search for further premises in support of those statements, and so on.

A second strategy is just to leap into the middle of the thing, pick any statement as a starting point, and keep asking those two very important logical questions:

a) What makes [the author] think so? This, as you can see, is a request for statements to function as premises in support of your target statement. So ransack the raw material until you find something to fill that requirement, then re-ask.

b) So what? This, for all its apparent insolence, can usefully be seen as a query as to what conclusion is to be reached, using the starting statement as a premise. Again, you ransack the material to find a statement which, at least apparently, was intended to fulfill that relative-conclusion role.

This strategy should not be your first choice, but it can sometimes allow a small ray of light to shine through an otherwise totally opaque presentation.

Last modified: 02/08/02