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Week 2 - 1.2.2 Premises tricky cases — Transcript · YTtoTranscript

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Week 2 - 1.2.2 Premises tricky cases

Philosophy at Azim Premji University · 2,765 words · 14 min read · EN

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Below is the complete, readable transcript of Week 2 - 1.2.2 Premises tricky cases 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.

All right, now let's get to the tricky cases. So, you've watched the first video, you have a basic grasp of what premises are. Now, let's complicate things a little more before we wrap up this unit. Again, we'll start with a reminder. What are premises? Premises are the claims in an argument offered in support of a

conclusion. They aim to convince you as to why you should think the conclusion is true. Okay. So we should think it is true that the conclusion because it is true that premise. So the first kind of tricky case I want to talk about is the case of multiple premises. Now think just take a look at this.

Right? So the conclusion here is we should all turn vegetarian because eating animals is cruel and cruelty towards any living creature is morally wrong. Now this argument is giving us a single reason to become vegetarian and that has to do with cruelty. And of these two premises, this is just a little map I've

drawn. Uh you know we can represent arguments this way. There are many ways to do this. Uh but don't worry too much about being able to do that. Depends on how things make sense to you. But if mapping uh makes sense to you, you may want to map things this way. But here

what we have is we've got these two things. We've got these two premises um which together lead us to this conclusion. But they work together, right? Either one of these by itself wouldn't get us the conclusion. The two of these together get us a conclusion. So we have an argument for vegetarianism from moral from cruelty from the

wrongness of cruelty. Okay. Now let's look at the next one. Uh pause and read this yourselves. Right here we have the same conclusion but we have a bunch of different reasons as to why we should believe that conclusion. We have an argument from cruelty. We have an argument from ecology. We have an

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argument from the health benefits. And this is very common. We often present arguments this way. We often think that the more reasons we give you to believe something, the more likely you are to believe it. Actually, that's not always true. Uh, in fact, adding reasons can give your opponent more to push back on.

For example, someone might be convinced about cruelty, but they may disagree with you about the health benefits. They may point out things about oh you can't get enough proteins by just eating vegetarian food or you don't get the right kinds of proteins or even the argument from ecology they might come back to you and say oh right and you

know you you want us all to start eating kinoa do you know the amount of damage that eating kinoa is doing to farmers or do you know what this craze for superfoods how it's affecting agriculture worldwide there are lots of ways to push back on these it might be a lot harder to push back on say the

argument from cruelty or maybe it's harder to push back on one of the other arguments. The fact is the more you're giving the more reasons you're giving in support of your conclusion um in a sense uh you're not making your argument stronger. Right? So when you eventually writing your opeds and things like that,

please keep in mind that a single strong argument welldefended is much better than a bunch of different arguments all pointing towards that conclusion. But for now, that's not that's me. We're not there yet. For now, we're just figuring out what to do when you have multiple arguments. So, you got to be very

careful when you're isolating premises to make sure that you're making the separation that you're able to isolate a single chain of premises. Premises that give us a single reason for believing the conclusion. It would be a mistake to kind of collapse these three things together. Okay? So it's a single declarative sentence, a

single justification for the conclusion. Uh the second kind of tricky case is that of missing premises. And this is, you know, we are I'm going to give you a brief introduction to it today, but it's going to take you a lot of time. And I mean, I still struggle with this. So, it's not this is not uh something you're

going to master, but I mean and and and in particular, what's difficult about missing premises is there's a judgment you have to make. Is there genuinely something that was meant but that wasn't said or is the person just making a bad argument, right? Or is there not an argument here? So, you know, when in

doubt, be charitable. When in doubt, supply missing premises. But then you also have to in some sense put yourself in the shoes of the person for whom you're supplying the missing premises assuming it's not you and your own argument. And that's also a really useful thing to be able to do and one of

the main goals of this course is to be able to reason from somebody else's perspective. So again you'll get lots of practice doing this in class. So let's look at this argument. So in a sense, you know, if someone says, "Oh, you know, maragolds attract bees, so we should plant marolds." Yeah, that makes sense. That's because

we're really good at automatically supplying the missing premises. We we we give like if you're having a cooperative conversation, uh we don't pick on what's missing. We just provide it. Right? So, but if you try and write this out as an argument, there is something missing. And it's important for us to be able to

isolate these these unsaid presuppositions because sometimes they're controversial. Do do you see what's missing here? Pause and think about it. So hopefully you came up with the thing that's missing is that we should plant flowers that attract bees because we don't get to marold attract bees. We should plant maragolds without connecting the two without without

connecting bee attraction and what should be planted, right? And again, it's it's a fairly easy one to supply. Yeah, we should plant stuff that attract bees. And now that might need a further argument, a subargument, uh but we won't get to that just yet, right? So, you may need to then say why is it that we

should we should plant be, you know, be attracting flowers? And then you might talk about, okay, this is good for ecology and so on and so forth. Okay. Um or let's take something like this. India experienced extreme weather events on 235 of the 273 days studied in 2023 and the conclusion is that India is being

affected by the climate crisis. Now again this seems I mean it doesn't you don't really feel that something is missing but something is missing. Can you can you spot what it is? Again try pause and write it down. Uh did you come up with this? Right. Here what you have is is something that

needs to connect the extreme weather events and the climate crisis. You need to say because again someone could say okay extreme this happened and that could just be bad luck right maybe it was a freak here or there are other things that could possibly explain it or it just seem to be that a bunch of

really unfortunate coincidences coincidence or I don't know the gods are angry at us. There are lots of reasons that one might supply for extreme weather events and the conclusion that we're experiencing the climate crisis or the the effects of it um assumes that the best explanation for these extreme weather events is the climate crisis.

Right? But this is an assumption and an important assumption and a controversial assumption. So it this is why it matters to be able to uh to at least know to make explicit what is implicit, right? to make visible, to make clear what is unsaid, what is assumed. And what makes it difficult is that we often just

supply this ourselves, right? So, we don't even notice when something is missing. So, you're going to have to train yourself to notice this. And again, I'm going to give you some tools to do this. Uh let's go back to our Dorimon example, right? You remember this. Pause and reread it if you don't. Um the main

argument here is something like if Dormon becomes sad, he will turn blue. Dormon becomes sad, Dormon will turn blue. Right? And what we have here is a main argument plus a subargument. Mouse chews off Dormon's ears. This leads to Dormon becoming sad. And then this gets us to the whole Dormon will turn blue.

The missing premise here, so we've got a bunch of things happening, is that having one years chewed off makes one sad because we can't just get from a mouse chew off Dormon's ears to dormons become sad because why? What's the connection between having your ears chewed off and becoming sad? Well, you need to say something about having one's

ears chewed off that make one sad. Okay, again you can go back and play this again to see if it makes sense to you. But you've got I mean this is a this is a complex argument for two reasons. One is that you've got this argument and a subargument and then in the subargument

there is a missing premise that we had to supply for this to work. Okay. So step by step here's what we do this. So we going to look at the premises that are explicit. We're going to identify what the main terms the main topics are. And I'm going to give you an example

shortly. Is there anything is there anything in the any any term any topic in the conclusion? Anything a term or topic that's not in those premises? And if yes, you probably have at least one missing premise. Next, we look at these terms and topics that are not yet linked. We ask how we

might link them. And then we finally write the assumption, the premise that links the unlin terms. This is all very abstract, I know, but we're going to see concretely what this means. So, let's look at this. The UN has to intervene in North Korea. The United Nations has to intervene in North Korea. The Kim Jong

dynasty is simply never going to give up on their goal of being a nuclear power. Okay. So, again, what's the conclusion? What are the premises? Try and write this down for yourself and then and then pause and then unpause. So, here's a conclusion. the UN has to intervene in North Korea and the premise we have as a

Kim Jong dynasty is never going to give up on their goal of being a nuclear power. But why should that mean that the UN has to intervene? We're missing a bunch of steps here. Why should the Kim Jongs dynasty's uh desire to give up a nuclear power mean that the UN intervenes in North Korea? So you think

about um what are the terms that are in the conclusion that are maybe not in the premises or what are the terms that have not been connected in any obvious way. So I would say that the terms that have not been connected um and again hopefully you paused before you moved on are that the UN should intervene

North Korea right what does the UN what does and and then the King Jong dynasty and nuclear power. So, you've got um what does the UN's intervention have to do with nuclear power? What does North Korea have to do with the Kim Jong dynasty? Because in the premises, we talk about the Kim Jong dynasty. In the

conclusion, we talk about North Korea. We say something about nuclear power. In the premises, we say something about intervention. In the conclusion, nothing about nuclear power. So, these terms are not connected in the argument the way it's written. So now we try and connect these and we say okay uh we have to

first connect North Korea with the Kim Jong dynasty and then being a nuclear power with the UN should intervene. Okay so here is one way of doing this. The Kim Jong dynasty is simply never going to give up on their goal of being a nuclear power. This means the Kim Jong dynasty is going to rule. This is what's

how how we connect the Kim Jong dynasty and North Korea is going to rule North Korea for the foreseeable future then right we could connect the UN should intervene in nuclear power. The UN should intervene in any country that is trying to be a nuclear power. The UN has to intervene in North Korea. And

there you have it. Right here is the argument with the two missing premises supplied. Now again I'm not evaluating whe this is a good argument or a bad argument but the the important thing here is that these missing premises are crucial right uh without these missing premises a lot of what's pretty controversial about this argument would

not be made explicit now that this argument's out there you could actually think of what you might start to push back on and this is what we're going to do um in evaluating arguments moving forward but before we can evaluate them we have to know what the argument arguments are. That's what we're doing

here. All right. Again, you want you want to go back and replay this. It was a little dense. Uh try to make sense of it. Okay. Now, that's it in terms of the content we're covering. What I'd like you to do at this point is a little self assessment quiz. So, as with last week,

I'm just going to move through the slides. Uh what you need to do is um is basically use uh you know the pause button to read and then unpause. And again we're using the arguments quiz from last week. So you already have the conclusions. Go back to your notes to find them. Uh see if you can isolate

what's relevant for establishing these premises. Okay. So here we are. Uh we have question one pause. Question two. Pause. Three. Four. Five. All right. Now, on pause. Hope you've won. Push. Pause. On pause. Written down your guess. Your best guess of the premises. The next slide will give you these. And again, if

you have something radically different from this or you couldn't do this at all, and that's fine if you couldn't do this, right? Just be sure to get help from your instructor and bring your questions to your class. So, here are the answers. Pause and and work on this and you'll see there are cases where there are

missing premises that have been supplied and all of that. Um and again this is something that you can if if you're struggling with this you can go with this to your instructor in class or in office hours and discuss these to get further help. And so what you should know now uh by the

end of this is that a single argument requires a series of connected premises. So there can be different chains of premises for the same conclusion and when and how to supply missing or tacit uh unsaid suppressed all these words will be used premises premises that aren't clear. And that's a wrap on this

on this week uh and this unit of public reasoning. So, you've now successfully completed unit one. Well, you will have successfully completed once you're done with this week's classes. Uh your first unit of public reasoning. And again, uh by the end of this, you should know what an argument is, how you distinguish

arguments from non-arguments, identifying conclusions, identifying premises like that. So at this point um you can now start to have fun from the next unit onwards where you start talking about good and bad arguments. How do we evaluate arguments? So that's it from me and uh you'll be starting next week with good and bad

arguments with Juliana.