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Week 2 - 1.2.1 Premises — Transcript · YTtoTranscript

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Week 2 - 1.2.1 Premises

Philosophy at Azim Premji University · 2,541 words · 13 min read · EN

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Below is the complete, readable transcript of Week 2 - 1.2.1 Premises by Philosophy at Azim Premji University on YouTube. Read the full text, copy any part you need, or generate a transcript for any video with our free tool.

Welcome to the second week of public reasoning. By now you know what an argument is and you've had some practice spotting conclusions. In this week we are going to look at the other main component of an argument namely the premises. Let's get started. So, a premise um is what we offer in support of the conclusion. They're the

claims in the argument that support a conclusion. They aim to convince you as to why you should think the conclusion should be true. And together, the premises, and this is really important, they give you a single reason for believing the conclusion. Now, when someone is speaking, they may give you many reasons for believing a conclusion.

But then there are as many arguments as there are different reasons for believing that conclusion. But more on that in the next lecture. For now, let's just look at the slightly more straightforward cases of premises. So for example, if I if I ask you and here here the the bad uh old reference

comes back. If I ask you why should I believe that dogs are better than cats? I'm asking you to convince me of this conclusion. The premises are in blue. These are what you tell me to convince me. You say, "Well, they're better. They're better than cats because you can have a real relationship with them." And assume you

can't with cats. And so dogs are better than cats. Let's look at another simple case. Um, tell me why I should believe that cats are better than dogs. We finally have a true conclusion. Uh, and then you say in response, you give me the premises. Uh well cats are better than dogs because they are

lowmaintenance. Right? So you see in all these cases the conclusion is in red um and the uh the premises are in blue. So the premises tell us why we should accept the conclusion. Or let's look at something a little more complicated. Tell me why I should believe that there's never any justification to kill

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animals. And you say well because animals have feelings. You don't always get it because and there's no justification to kill them. Uh or tell me why we should have lunch at the tapri instead of at the dashini. Right? And you're like, well uh we should have lunch at the tapri. It has delicious dosas. Okay. So you're giving

me you're justifying your claim the conclusion that you want me to believe. The right thing to do what we should do is have lunch at the top. Okay. Um so you should think that it is true that conclusion because it is true that premise and again I should say throughout all of this um you know I'm

I'm not saying that uh premises are always true or conclusions are always true. You can you can offer arguments for things that are completely false. But at least the idea is that when someone is offering you an argument, they want to get you to accept the truth of the conclusion on the basis of two

things. Uh one of which is that the conclusion follows from the premises. And you learn what that means in the next unit. And they also want you to think that the premises are in fact true. But again as you'll see this also then gives us two ways in which we can push back against arguments. But I am

jumping on the subject matter for the second unit. Let's just stick with this for now. So okay you should believe conclusion because premise that's all you need to keep in mind for now. So let's take an example. Uh Dorimon is a cat robot from the 22nd century. If Dorimon becomes sad he will turn blue.

Dorimon becomes sad because a mouse has chewed off his ears. So, Dorimmon will turn blue. See if you can spot the conclusion as well as the premises for this little argument. Pause and do this. Write down your answers. Hopefully, you came up with this. Hopefully, you saw. Here's one thing that Dormon being a cat robot from the

22nd century is irrelevant for the conclusion that Dorimon turned blue. A lot of the work in identifying premises is isolating premises. That is isolating them from all the irrelevant information. Information that's irrelevant for establishing the conclusion. If you were to remove the sentence about the 22nd century cat robot, the argument would still work. Okay. So this is really this

is what makes sometimes a task a little difficult because when people speak uh they often say things that are not they have nothing to do with the argument they're trying to make. They add little details that actually don't help us. They don't actually help the argument along. So you have to figure out what's

what's what's not necessary, what's fluff, and what what is necessary to get to the conclusion. That that's the job. Um, so I should also say right here what we have, as is often the case, we have a nested argument. There's this one argument where the premise is Dormon becomes sad and if Dormon is sad, his

ears will turn blue. That gets us a conclusion that Dormon will turn blue. There's a subargument in defense of the premise that Dormon becomes sad. Has to do with the mouse and all of that. But more on this in the next lecture. Just want to flag this for now in case some of you already noticed this.

All right. Uh let's use a closer to home example about relevance, right? Imagine you want to convince your RM or to give you leave from campus for 3 days and you tell them you have a family function and you say, "Oh, there's a there there's a wedding and it's going to go on for 3

days and I have to attend this wedding." And then you start describing the function, let's say, and you talk about the difficulties your family is having in choosing between jellybees and gulab jams for the dessert at the reception. That's irrelevant, right? It's not going to convince anyone to give you leave the the the choice between the desserts.

Unless of course you're some kind of dessert expert and only your presence can make that choice happen. But assuming that's not the case, um it has nothing to do it's not going to get someone to believe that they should give you leave. So you would not include it in your premises. You would presumably

include the importance of ceremonies and the importance of your presence for each of those ceremonies and that this goes over 3 days. You might mention that it's a close family member who's getting married, not some distant relative because these are all relevant to the conclusion. You should give me leave for 3 days to attend a wedding. Right? Okay.

And again, we'll get plenty of practice doing this. So, if it's not all crystal clear right now, don't worry. Uh the first bit of practice we're going to do is actually right now. So, we already looked at uh two uh videos uh in the last lecture. So, what we're going to do now is look at these videos again. We

already have the conclusion. So, let's I'm going to play play the clip one more time. Try and figure out if you can get to the premises for this first one here.

I consider it extremely extremely unfortunate that what is being taught to children in textbooks in schools depends on the political party in power in the state at that time. It's absolutely ridiculous. History is history and of course it is told through the eyes of the victor. But facts are facts and what has happened is what has happened. There

is no need to either eulogize a person a historical personage or to criticize and demonize him. It's happening. Tip Sultan existed. Whether you like what he did or didn't like what he did, he existed. He was there. To remove him, to change the chapters is utterly utterly ridiculous. As it is the case with other uh

historical personages as well, people who have been part of India's history who have helped form the country to be the way it is. and for political parties to censor and change whether it's a BJP, whether it's a Congress, to interfere with historical teaching of history. I mean, it's it's it's beyond ridiculous really and it's something which really

has to be nipped in the bud. It's already there, but hopefully it'll stop. An ideal thing would be a panel uh objective panel in this divided country. An objective panel set up to make these books properly as objectively as possible. And that is what should be taught to the children. So what do you think supports the

conclusion? I'm hoping you've written your own answers down. So I think what's going on here is the idea is something like if political parties interfere with text textbooks, then this risks going contrary to established historical fact. If you go against established historical fact, this defeats the purpose of education. If an action defeats the

purpose of education, it's wrong. So if political parties interfere with textbooks then this is wrong and this is not at all how the argument was put forward by the speaker. This is the kind of work that we have to do here because she just said these things separately. She mentioned facts are facts uh and you know she talked about

uh political ideas, ideology, textbooks, you can say anything. So what we're doing I I've been talking about identifying isolating but it's constantly rewriting, interpreting, abstracting. Again, these are the harder cases. So don't worry if if this is proving to be difficult. Um you're going to get plenty of practice. Okay. Now let's look at the

second argument that we saw in last week's lectures. The conclusion there was this. Here's the clip. Sankit, you just said none of those rights are available to Indian citizens. Actually, they're not available to me as well. Although I am not an Indian citizen. I have an OCI for India. I am legally married in the UK to my samesex

partner. We got married last year. I've been with her for 16 years. We've raised children uh over the last 16 years together. Our children are now adults at 25 years old. So for but when I get on a flight to India, I become single again. So those rights that you were talking about apart from not even having the

respect of that a couple should get we don't have any other rights either in India all the conversations and all the arguments that the opposition has been making about that you know children from samesex marriages will have mental health issues sorry I mean I I'm not a perfect mother I don't claim to be a

perfect mother I don't want to be a perfect mother but yes there are parents like us women sames sex couples same gendered couples who have brought up children raised children and really function ally. So we can't make those those blanket statements in terms of you know samesex marriage. I keep saying it's not samesex marriage. We talk about

marriage equality. When we have you know gay people have lunch we don't call it gay lunch. When we drive a car we don't call it you know gay car. So why are we calling marriage samesex marriage? Let's call it marriage equality. So we can all be equal. We can have equal rights. Okay.

Okay. So this is an interesting case because there are two sets of arguments for the same conclusion. That means there are two arguments, not just one. Even though the conclusion is the same in both cases. The first argument is a kind of counterargument. Actually, it's a response to critics who claim that children of same-sex couples face more

mental health issues than other children. Raad Dilva argues anecdotally that this isn't the case. The second argument is a kind of argument from analogy, something you'll be meeting up close and personal in the next unit. Uh, but here she analogizes marriage to driving a car or having lunch, claiming that marriage is marriage and calling it

heterosexual or same-sex marriage is as exclusionary and silly as saying heterosexual lunch and samesex lunch. Okay, so we've got two kinds of arguments going on here. But this is even uh murkier than the previous example. Okay. So, a premise, as you'll see, it doesn't include everything the person says. They're just those things that support

the conclusion. When someone makes an argument, a big part of the task is isolating what offers justificatory support and what is just superfluous. Okay? We often repeat ourselves to make a point more vehemently and that's just fine. In fact, these things serve an important rhetorical purpose. I'm not denying that. just but for the purpose

of argument analysis, you want to ignore all of that. If someone says the same thing multiple times in different language, you want to abstract from what they're saying and write out a premise in your own words. Okay? A single declarative sentence or one premise is a single declarative sentence. So again, keep in mind that premises shouldn't be

long complex clauses, right? Okay? And if then is one thing, but if you have a this and that and that as a result of which that's not a premise, that's several premises condensed into a sentence. Both with conclusions and with premises, you don't want to take your standard English sentence um as your

gauge depending on who's writing. I mean, you could imagine, you know, there are people who write page long sentences and people write paragraph long sentences. Sentences can contain an entire argument in just one sentence. So the grammatical sentence is not what you're looking for. You're looking for in some sense unity of idea. And again,

you got to practice on this, but just don't let the sentence fool you. All right? And again, this is as the conclusions. Treat this with a pinch of salt, but premises can also sometimes uh help you out by with these little flags. So in some arguments you'll find these. So you can pause and kind of note this down.

Here are your premise flags. They will help you isolate premises. And that's it for a basic introduction to premises. Uh we are now in the next lecture going to look at the slightly trickier cases. And this is the case of supplying missing premises arguments at different levels. So make sure that this is making sense to you. maybe go back

and watch this a second time. And once you feel certain that you know what a premise is and how one isolates a premise from the other superfluous information when reconstructing an argument. Once you feel you've got this, move on to the next video.