Some people whom we want at the meeting will refuse to meet on the last day of Ramadan. We ought not to schedule the meeting on a date on which some people whom we want at the meeting will refuse to meet. Therefore, we ought not to schedule the meeting on the last day of Ramadan. June 4 is the last day of Ramadan in 2019. Therefore, we should not schedule our meeting for June 4, 2019.
A single sentence has grown into five sentences in two stages. What could possibly justify our putting so many words into your mouth? How can we tell whether you really do assume the extra premises in the larger argument? The answer relies on validity. It is fair to ascribe these extra assumptions to you, even though you did not say them, because they are needed in order to make your argument valid. Without the implicit assumption that “We ought not to schedule the meeting on the last day of Ramadan,” it is hard to see how your explicit premise “That [June 4] is the last day of Ramadan” gives any reason for your explicit conclusion “We should not schedule it [our meeting] for June 4.” Adding the extra premise makes the argument valid, for it is not possible that both premises are true and the conclusion is false in the same situation. The new premise thereby explains why the original premise was a reason for the original conclusion.
This addition then raises the question of why we should accept the new premise. After all, even if the argument with this premise is valid, that validity by itself does nothing to show that its conclusion is true unless its premises are true. What we need is soundness, not just validity. So, we need to ask: Why not schedule the meeting on the last day of Ramadan?
One potential reason is that a meeting on that day would violate some religious rule. However, whether a meeting violates a religious rule depends on the kind and time of the meeting. Moreover, even if our meeting would violate a religious rule, this fact by itself would not support the conclusion that we ought not to meet on that date unless religious rules determine what we ought to do. Some people might accept this rule, but atheists and secular humanists would reject it, and they might be everyone in the group that is meeting. Thus, this extra premise would make the argument questionable and unable to reach this audience.
We do not need to endorse any religious rule in order to agree that a meeting does not go well when the right people do not show up. That is a reason why we do not want to schedule a meeting for a date when crucial people would refuse to show up. Therefore, if we know that some people whom we want at the meeting will refuse to meet on the last day of Ramadan, that gives us a reason not to schedule the meeting on that date. This reason is captured by the initial premises in the longer argument, and its premises are acceptable to a wider audience than the alternative premises that cite a religious rule. Moreover, this premise is strong enough to make the resulting argument valid, since it is not possible for its conclusion to be false when its premises are true.
These features speak in favor of the secular interpretation of this argument. It is unfair to saddle arguers with stronger assumptions when weaker assumptions would make their arguments better. The goal of filling out assumptions in arguments is not to make the arguers look silly or stupid. The goal is instead to understand their point of view and learn from it. For this purpose, we need to make arguments look as good as possible, since then they teach us more. We still might end up disagreeing, but we cannot conclude that there is no good argument for a position unless we have looked at the best possible argument for that position.
All of this together explains why it is fair to ascribe the extra premises and the longer argument to someone who explicitly asserts only the shorter original sentence. Implicit premises like these are often called suppressed, perhaps because the arguer supposedly suppressed an inclination to assert them openly. In general, we should ascribe suppressed premises to an arguer only if they are necessary to make the original argument valid, and only if the arguer would view the added premises as true and hence the longer argument as sound. In this way, validity and soundness are essential standards for completing arguments by adding suppressed premises.
To call a premise suppressed might seem to disparage it as sneaky. However, the term “suppressed” here is not a negative evaluation. Everyone suppresses premises, and it is hard to see how we could (or why we would) avoid doing it. It is often legitimate for arguers to suppress premises. Indeed, it is often bad not to suppress premises. Just look at how much longer our completed argument is than the original sentence. If we had to spell out every assumption whenever we gave any argument, then it would take a very long time to say much at all. Suppressing premises promotes efficiency in communication.
Other arguers use this defensible tool for nefarious purposes. They try to fool fools by suppressing the most dubious premises in their arguments. Imagine a used car dealer who argues, “You should purchase five years of service from my dealership, because then you will not need to pay for repairs.” He is suppressing the premise that you should buy whatever will avoid repair expenses. He never comes out and asserts that extra premise, because you could question it if he did. Nonetheless, he still does need that premise in order to make his argument valid. The problem is that this suppressed premise raises crucial issues that the dealer is trying to hide. How much does the service contract cost? How likely is the car to need repairs? How expensive will the repairs be? And, of course, why is he selling you a car that is so likely to need such expensive repairs? His trick is to steer you away from those questions by focusing your attention on other premises instead of the questionable one. To avoid getting fooled by such tricks, it is useful to fill out all of the suppressed premises in an argument. That exercise will make you less likely to overlook a dubious premise that the arguer is hiding.
DO THESE METHODS SCALE UP?
An extended example can illustrate how close analysis and deep analysis work together in argument reconstruction. Here is one example from the opening of an unsigned article entitled “New Approaches Needed to Address Rise of Poor Urban Villages in the Pacific”:
New approaches are needed to address the challenge of rising urban dwellers in the Pacific who live in poor-quality housing with inadequate provision for basic services in settlements known as “urban villages,” a new Asian Development Bank (ADB) report says. “There has been a rapid rise of urban villages in recent years due to increased poverty and the negative impacts of climate change,” said Robert Jauncey, head of ADB’s Pacific Subregional Office in Suva, Fiji. “These informal or unplanned settlements are often neglected and excluded from the government’s planning system, so we need to rethink approaches to urban management and development to include urban villages in the mainstream policies, strategies, projects, and programs.”
The report, entitled The Emergence of Pacific Urban Villages—Urbanization Trends in the Pacific Islands, defines urban villages as native and traditional communities and village-like settlements in urban areas that display common characteristics: association with certain ethnic groups, strong socio-cultural ties, land tenure based on custom, heavy reliance on the informal economy, and persistence of subsistence activities. Urban village dwellers often live in hardship and poverty, and are stereotyped with negative traits.3
What we need to determine is whether this passage includes an argument, where that argument is located in the passage, what it is, what purpose it serves, and how it is structured. Those tasks require careful attention to detail. We will work backward through the text.
Without Argument
Consider the second paragraph first. Does that paragraph give any argument? No. It gives the title of the report, perhaps so that readers can look it up. Then it defines what an urban village is, presumably so readers will know what the article is about. Then it describes the lives of urban villagers. The evaluative words in this paragraph might make readers think of an argument: Urban villagers face “hardship and poverty” as well as “negative” stereotypes. Therefore, someone needs to help them. That argument seems implicit. However, the paragraph does not explicitly g
ive that argument or any other. We can tell this by applying our definition of argument and looking for argument markers. Just ask where the premise and conclusion are.
Justification
Next consider the last sentence of the first paragraph. The argument marker “so” indicates that an argument does occur in this sentence. However, this argument is quoted from Jauncey, so the author of the article does not assert this argument. Jauncey does. Perhaps the author of the article wants to preserve neutrality as a news reporter. Or maybe the author agreed with Jauncey. After all, the article never suggests any doubts about what Jauncey (or the ADB) said. In any case, we can see that at least Jauncey is giving an argument, so let’s try to reconstruct it.
The word “so” is a conclusion marker that tells readers that what comes before is a reason for what follows:
Urban villages are often neglected and excluded from government planning.
Therefore, we need to rethink approaches to urban management and development to include urban villages in the mainstream policies, strategies, projects, and programs.
The last instance of the little word “to” is also an argument marker if it can be interpreted as “in order to,” which is plausible. This reason marker indicates that what follows it is a reason for what comes before, so we might reconstruct the whole argument like this:
We need to include urban villages in the mainstream policies, strategies, projects, and programs.
Urban villages are often neglected and excluded from government planning.
Therefore, we need to rethink approaches to urban management and development.
Now we have two premises and one conclusion.
What is the purpose of this argument? It is often hard to tell precisely what someone intends, and arguers are no exception. Still, Jauncey seems to be trying to persuade or convince his audience that his conclusion is true—that we need to rethink urban management in certain ways. He presumably believes that many in his audience did not have that belief before he spoke. They thought that urban management was going fine, at least in this area, or they did not think about it at all. So, he was trying to change their beliefs. But that is not all, we can assume. He probably also wanted them to believe his conclusion not arbitrarily but on the basis of reason. That is why he did not simply assert the conclusion but instead presented an argument that gave reasons for the conclusion. Hence, he was trying not only to persuade but also to justify his audience’s belief in his conclusion.
To see how this argument is supposed to serve that purpose, we need to fit these premises and conclusion into a structure that shows how they work together to justify its conclusion. The presence of two argument markers might seem to suggest that each premise provides a separate reason for the conclusion. On that interpretation, there are two distinct arguments:
(1) Urban villages are often neglected and excluded from government planning.
Therefore, we need to rethink approaches to urban management and development.
(2) We need to include urban villages in the mainstream policies, strategies, projects, and programs.
Therefore, we need to rethink approaches to urban management and development.
Each of these arguments needs a suppressed premise to make it valid. In particular, the first argument needs a suppressed premise like this: “We need to rethink any approach to urban management that neglects and excludes urban villages.” But that suppressed premise is close to the explicit premise in the second argument: “We need to include urban villages in the mainstream policies, strategies, projects, and programs.” Similarly, the second argument needs a suppressed premise something like this: “Current approaches to urban management and development do not already include urban villages.” But that suppressed premise is close to the explicit premise of the first argument. This search for suppressed premises thus reveals that the two premises are supposed to work together (not separately) to justify the conclusion. Each depends on the other. This structure can be called joint.
To see how these premises work together, first we need to clarify the terms. In particular, the first premise refers to “government planning,” the second premise instead mentions “mainstream policies, strategies, projects, and programs,” and the conclusion says “approaches to urban management and development.” Writers often vary their wording in inessential ways to avoid the appearance of repetition. However, such unimportant variations can obscure the structure of the argument. If these three phrases describe different things, then it is hard to see how a premise about one could adequately support a conclusion about another. Then the argument would make no sense. In order to show how the argument works, then, we need to relate these phrases somehow. One option is to add a premise that identifies them: “Mainstream policies, strategies, projects, and programs as well as urban management and development are government planning.” This sentence might seem true, but it is verbose. For simplicity, I will instead replace them all with a single phrase:
We need to include urban villages in urban management.
Urban villages are often neglected and excluded from urban management.
Therefore, we need to rethink urban management.
This simple rewording seems to capture what Jauncey had in mind while also revealing the relation between the premises and the conclusion.
A similar issue arises with “include” in the first premise and “neglected and excluded” in the second premise. Presumably what is neglected and excluded is not included, so we can slightly reword the argument again:
We need to include urban villages in urban management.
Urban villages are often not included in urban management.
Therefore, we need to rethink urban management.
Uniform wording makes it clear that the different parts of this argument are about the same topic.
Next notice the guarding term “often.” Why does the premise say “Urban villages are often not included in urban management” instead of simply “Urban villages are not included in urban management”? Presumably because the latter could be read as “Urban villages are never included in urban management,” which is false. There are a few exceptions. The guarding term “often” is needed to make this premise defensible. But does it make the premise too weak to support the conclusion? No. If half of urban management neglects urban villages, then we need to rethink that half, even if the other half is just fine. Why? Because we always need to include all urban villages in urban management. Including half or even 80% is not enough (at least for people who live in parts that are excluded). Maybe we should add “all” to the first premise to make this clear. After that addition, the guarding term “often” in the second premise seems just fine.
A subtler guarding term is “rethink.” Is Jauncey really arguing only that we need to think again or more about urban management? To answer this question, just ask: What if we rethought urban management but still did nothing to change urban management or to help urban villages? Would Jauncey be satisfied? I doubt it. If not, then he really wants to argue not only that we need to rethink urban management, but also that we need to change urban management so as to include urban villages. In that case, his argument really amounts to this:
We need to include all urban villages in urban management.
Urban villages are often not included in urban management.
Therefore, we need to change urban management so as to include urban villages.
In contrast with the first guarding term, we had to remove this second guarding term in order to capture the real force of what Jauncey meant to say.
This argument is looking pretty good so far, but it is not really any good unless its premises are true or at least justified. In particular, what justifies the first premise? Why do we need to include urban villages in urban management? Jauncey does not answer that question in this sentence. However, he does work for the ADB, so it would not be surprising if he builds his argument on top of their claims.
The AD
B report is quoted in the first sentence: “New approaches are needed to address the challenge of rising urban dwellers in the Pacific who live in poor-quality housing with inadequate provision for basic services in settlements known as ‘urban villages.’ ” All this sentence says openly is that new approaches are needed, that the housing quality is poor, and that the basic services are inadequate. It never explicitly connects these claims by saying that one is a reason for the others. Nonetheless, the fact that the ADB evaluates the housing as “poor” and the basic services as “inadequate” suggests an argument:
New approaches are needed to address the challenge of rising urban dwellers in the Pacific because they live in poor-quality housing with inadequate provision for basic services.
The only difference is that this revised sentence contains the argument marker “because they” where the original sentence contained “who.” That small difference matters. The original sentence did not openly argue from one claim to the other or say that one is a reason for the other. This new sentence says precisely that. As a result, the new sentence gives an argument even though the original did not.
Which sentence did the author really mean or intend? That is hard to tell. The context suggests that the author intends to give “poor” and “inadequate” as reasons why we need new approaches. Still, we cannot be sure what the author intended, because the author did, after all, choose to write “who” instead of “because.” In the face of this uncertainty, what can we do? We might try to ask the author, but the article is unsigned; and, even if we knew who the author was, he might be unreachable. Then the most constructive approach is probably to forget about what the author really meant and simply ask whether the argument that is suggested is any good. After all, we do not really care about catching this author in a mistake, as if we were scoring points in a debate. What really matters is whether we need to adopt new approaches to planning urban villages. If the argument works, then we do need a new approach to urban villages, and the argument tells us why—regardless of whether this author or anyone really meant to give that argument.
Think Again: How to Reason and Argue Page 12