Arguments
In this book, we use the word “argument” in a slightly technical way. In everyday talk, we tend to call any kind of verbal fight an argument. Once I was driving from Wellington to Auckland with my kids, and just out of Levin I had a fight with my seven-year-old about how far it was to Auckland . They insisted that we were nearly there; I insisted that we weren’t. A small chunk of the conversation went like this. “We’re nearly there.” “No, we’re not.” “Yes, we are.” “No, we’re not.” “Yes, we are.” This is not an argument, in the sense of the word which we’ll be using here, although it is a verbal fight. Raff and I were making statements or claims that contradicted each other, but not giving any reasons in support of them.
An argument in the sense in which we’ll be using the word is a set of statements consisting of a conclusion and some reasons to believe that conclusion.
If either Raff or I gave reasons in support of our claims, we’d have the beginnings of an argument. They thought we were nearly there because they saw a factory that looked like the Tip Top factory, which is on the motorway coming in to Auckland. I thought we weren’t for lots of reasons, one of them being that we hadn’t been driving for nearly long enough to be near Auckland.
My argument
It takes at least seven hours to drive from to Auckland, and we’ve only been driving for an hour and a half, so there’s still a long way to go.
Raff’s argument
I just saw the Tip Top factory.
When you see the Tip Top factory, you’re nearly in Auckland.
So we’re nearly in Auckland.
Notice that now we are not just going head to head (“Yes we are!” “No we’re not!” etc). Now each of us is giving reasons to believe the thing that we are asserting: each of us is providing an argument in support of our claim.
You can see that not everything people say or write is an argument. A bit of speech or writing is an argument only if the writer or speaker is trying to convince someone of something by providing reasons to think that it is true.
