(1) I'm on my way to school. (2) I left five minutes late. (3) Traffic is heavy. (4) Therefore, I'll be late for class. (5) So I might as well stop and get breakfast.
ARGUEMENT: yes
CONCLUSION: I should stop to get breakfast on my way to class.
ADDITIONAL PREMISES NEEDED: Something saying, if I am late to class, I automaticly get zero credit. Or something that justifies being later to class. It is obvious to most people that 2, 3, and 4 are not good enough reasons to come even later to class.
IDENTIFY SUBARGUEMENT: Independent claims 2 and 3 support 4, which is supposed to support 5. 1 is just setting up background information.
GOOD ARGUEMENT: No, it would need another independent claim to branch the area between me being late (4) and how it is then ok for me to be even more late to class (5).
Helpful??
I thought these exercises in the book were very helpful, and I actually looked them all over and did them all a little in my head. It is a lot more difficult to break down an arguement when you did not put it together yourself, because when you make one yourself if you make an error you conciously put it in and then it's not that hard to find or diagnose. I admit that when I have been doing the reading, I have been skimming over the exercises and most examples unless I am really stuck, but after doing this I will be much more likely to use the examples in the book because it really helped me understand the material more thuroughly.
I looked over this example myself, and I had the same feelings towards the argument being made. I felt that the premises the person used to justify the argument weren’t strong enough. The additional premises you came up with were much better than my idea because they stressed the importance of missing the class. If the person would get a zero automatically for not showing up, then there would be no point in them showing up after class started. Thus, the person’s argument would be much better justified. Otherwise, one would look at this argument and wonder why the person would avoid the rest of the class altogether and miss other valuable information that could be on a test in the future.
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