UNIVERSITY OF THE WEST INDIES
DISTANCE TEACHING EXPERIMENT
(UWIDITE)
CERTIFICATE IN EDUCATION
ED402: INTRODUCTION TO ARGUMENT IN EDUCATION
ARGUMENT ANALYSIS
Ed Brandon
Faculty of Education
U.W.I.
Mona
© University of the West Indies, Mona, October 1983
Revised February 1985, November 1988
CONTENTS
PREFACE
This little book is intended to help people deal with arguments. In particular, it is intended to help people see more clearly what is going on when a person gives reasons for believing something or doing something, and to see some of the pitfalls in the way of clear reasoning. The foundations of the approach I have adopted are to be found in logic; the matters I discuss are, for the most part, well-known and generally agreed upon by students of logic. You should therefore beware of finding anything original in these pages.
I have learnt most about the questions discussed in this book from the teaching and writings of the late J.L. Mackie. I am pleased to acknowledge a particular debt in this work to some lecture notes by Mackie on the structure of arguments and discussions from which I have borrowed liberally in the earlier portion of this booklet. In my own teaching I have also relied heavily on Anthony Flew, Thinking about Thinking, P.T. Geach, Reason and Argument, and Michael Scriven, Reasoning. There are, I hope, echoes of these writers in this book; any distortion is, of course, my responsibility.
This material is being published at the behest of the U.W.I. Distance Teaching Experiment, and I am grateful to the project team for asking me to participate. I am also grateful to Paul Ernest, Christine Marrett, Jacquie Moriah, Kay Morrish, Velma Pollard, and Kathryn Shields for their comments on earlier versions of some of the following.
The first version of this booklet was prepared in 1983. A second version, with several new examples and some minor additional remarks, was prepared early in 1985. I should like to thank Kay Morrish for her concern for that version to be as polished in appearance as it could be. This third version was prepared by the author from a Wordstar text produced by Kay (with a little help from Island Microsystems) so I can now take the blame not only for the style and content but also the appearance of the text.
URL http://www.uwichill.edu.bb/bnccde/epb/aa.html
HTML prepared June 2000, last revised June 29th, 2000.