Week 1 - 1.1.2 Argument vs Explanation

Welcome to week two of unit one of Pre. By now you should be familiar with what an argument is and you should be able to distinguish it from some kinds of non-arguments explored in the previous lecture. If you're still shaky on any of it, I recommend that you watch the previous lecture before progressing to

the next one. In general, you want to do that. You want to make sure you've understood what comes first before moving on to what comes next. It's fairly obvious, but doesn't hurt to say it. Let's get into this. Pause and read this tweet carefully. Now, on the face of it, this looks an

awful lot like an argument. There seems to be something that resembles a conclusion. Bangalore traffic is bad. There seems to be something that kind of looks like promises. It's bad because of poor infrastructure. um and bad governance and improper public transport. But this is not an argument. This is an explanation. And explanations are not arguments. In

this video, we're going to explore why that's the case and how to distinguish the two. All right. So the issue I think why we often confuse explanations and arguments is that they have an extremely similar structure. Right? So you've got these two things. In the case of an argument, what you have is the premise and the

conclusion. So for example, the conclusion is we you know it makes sense for us to take the climate crisis seriously and the premise is there's scientific consensus about worsening climate change. Right? So scientific consensus justifies us taking the climate crisis seriously. Okay. With an explanation, what you have is, and don't worry about the jargon. You do not have