Teenagers will always behave like teenagers. After all, they are merely kids. However, not all kids are the same, and a one-size-fits-all parenting tool such as a curfew may not really work on every teenager out there. In areas where there is no curfew law, parents need to sit down with their teenagers to help assess their supervision needs. Download Driver: Windows XP (32 bit) Do Not Argue - no arguements needed: 8.582.0.0000 (2/03/2009) Download Driver: Windows Server 2003 (32 bit) Do Not Argue - no arguements needed: 8.582.0.0000 (2/03/2009) Download Driver: Windows Vista/Windows Server 2008 (32 bit) Do Not Argue - no arguements needed: 8.582.0.0000 (2/03/2009) Download Driver. In none of the three cases above (#4-6) do we see any premises which would supposedly support the conclusion. If you want to try to create a genuine argument when you see such claims, you have to focus on the antecedent of the conditional and ask why it should be accepted as true. Downloads the appropriate driver binaries, if not already present, into the local cache. Downloads the latest version of the browser binary, unless otherwise specified. Eliminates the need to store driver binaries locally. We also need not maintain various versions of the binary driver files for different browsers.
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If you've ever seen a spider lure a fly into its web you'll know that brains not brawn is the secret to emerging victorious in any confrontational act. In an argument you should take the roll of the spider. Stay calm and focused as you build your case (web), and lead your opponent neatly into the sticky parts while you stay on safe ground yourself.
Have you been at the losing end of more than just one argument lately? Read on for some comprehensive keys that will help you unlock your winning strategies and lure your opponents into your web.
The “I Win No Matter What” game is not so endearing when you’re twenty, or perhaps fifty. Still, there’s a middle ground. When the game isn’t working – when discussions veer into argument territory – it’s helpful to pause and consider some new rules. Sometimes it’s better not to play at all.
1. Soft and steady wins the race: It's basic human nature - the louder you talk, the louder your opponent shouts. An argument is not about who can out-shout the other, it's about making the other person see your point of view, by hook or by crook. One hook you can use to draw them to your side is to speak softly at all times, no matter what the provocation. Do not let your emotions get the best of you, for if you do, you let your defenses down. Remain calm under any circumstance, and at some point in the course of the argument, your opponent will run out of steam.
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2. Information is power: Know your facts before you get involved in an argument. When you're able to provide absolute proof that you're telling all the facts, you have the added edge in coming out on top. If your opponent is as good at arguing as you are, it helps not to let errors and half-truths creep into your argument - he'll be sure to call you out on them.
3. Paying attention pays: Winning an argument does not entail just presenting your side of the case, you also have to listen very carefully to what your opponent is saying. Very often, you'll find openings in his statements that will allow you to gain the upper hand. Knowing and being able to understand the way your opponent thinks is an added advantage. At times, you can second-guess what he's planning to say and chart out your course of action accordingly.
4. Do not stray from the chosen path: Sticking to the subject during an argument is sometimes the most difficult thing to do. If you or your opponent veers to another topic, you tend to start an entirely new argument. One thing leads to another and the original purpose is lost among the myriad views that emerge. Sometimes, changing the subject may be a ploy used by your opponent to throw you off course. Take this as a sign that he feels threatened you'll win, and steer the subject back to the original.
5. Learn the art of manipulation: There are some individuals so stubborn that they will never admit when they are wrong, no matter how blatantly obvious it is. To deal with this species, it pays to be a master manipulator. A surefire way to win the argument against them involves you getting them to project your point of view as their own. Admittedly, this takes a great deal of skill and patience, but once you're adept at using your persuasive powers, you'll never lose an argument. And the best part is that there's no ill will on your opponent's part - after all, he thinks he's the victor.
6. The longer route is sometimes shorter: A worthy opponent will know how to bring you to your knees if you reveal your hand at the outset. An argument is like a game of poker - you have to play your cards close to your chest and try to bluff your way through to the end. Keep your plans up your sleeve and put your points across in random order so that your opponent is left guessing where you're going till the very end. This leaves him with no time to plan his argument, and you've succeeded in putting him on the defensive.
7. Eat humble pie: Being human means we are entitled to our fair share of mistakes. The greatness of an individual lies not in being right all the time, but in being man enough to admit that he was wrong when he makes a mistake. When you realize in the middle of an argument that you are in the wrong, be the bigger person and say so. You'll find your opponent's respect for you go up several notches. Admitting you're wrong when you are will also make it easy for people to actually believe you are right when you emphatically state so. While on the subject of mistakes, let me add that it's never a good idea to accuse your opponent of being wrong. It's ok if you can back up your accusation with hard facts, but otherwise, it's only going to get his hackles raised.
8. Silence is golden: Sometimes, silence is the most effective argument. Stop talking in the middle of the argument and stay quiet no matter what your opponent says or does. Use this tactic after you've made a pretty strong point and your opponent is trying to bluster his way out of the net you've entangled him in. You'll find that the argument dies a natural death when only one person is powering it. Your opponent may not admit that he's lost, but you'll know you've won when he turns around and walks away.
9. Don't play dirty: No matter how low your opponent stoops, never resort to name-calling, swearing or attacking him on a personal level. Racial, social and cultural slurs reflect poorly on you and only emphasize that you are not confident in your knowledge of the argument's subject. Stay calm and collected, even when your opponent is showering you with the choicest epithets.
10. The argument against arguments: Never argue just for argument's sake. It's the worst thing to do. If you're the kind who argues for every single issue under the sun, you'll find your credibility questioned even when you really need to engage in a real argument.
For greater appreciation of what an argument is and what it does, it is useful to contrast the entire category of arguments with things that are not arguments. What other kinds of things do we typically do with words, in passages of text or in speeches, conversations, etc.?
We might just tell, or pass along, facts (or apparent facts) about a situation, pointing out some event or some feature of a situation. We could call such doings “reports.”
Or we might be saying how we feel about some person or state of affairs. We could call this “stating an opinion.”
Or we might talk about what we believe to be the case with respect to a given situation. That sounds like the word “belief” might capture the idea.
(Now, even though I just presented opinion and belief as two categories, for the purpose of this course, I’m going to suggest we not concern ourselves with insisting on their difference. In my view, they have more in common, and that’s what’s important: they are both expressions of a claim, made without supporting evidence. The difference (that one seems to express a personal feeling, while the other expresses what someone thinks is true) is less important, from the point of view of logic, than is the fact that if you add another statement, and a conclusion or premise indicating word, you’ll get an argument from them both.)
Often what we do is something like telling others what they ought to do (or what they ought not to do!) or how they ought to do it. On the positive side, this would be advice; viewed a little more negatively, you might call it a “warning.”
In none of those five cases are we providing an argument, because in none of them are we giving reasons to support what we are conveying. (But that last sentence was an argument: It proposed a reason why you should believe that none of the others were arguments. Hopefully, you noticed “because” functioning as a premise indicator.)
Reporting, advising, warning, stating your belief about something or expressing your opinion about something –these are all very commonplace everyday things we do with words. Being able to identify and name cases of them as they occur –around us and within us–is a matter of a tiny little skill at observing, paying attention, and categorizing. In Philosophy in general, and in Logic in particular, that kind of skill is quite important to cultivate.
Let’s move on to some other kinds of things that we do with words. These are a little more sophisticated perhaps.
You might claim something is true (that’s stating a belief), but then give an example of it to help make the point you’re trying to convey more clear. Giving an example is what we’ll call an “illustration.” “If it’s not obvious enough what I mean, let me draw you a picture!” one might say. And with that, I have provided an illustration of what “illustration” means.
Conditionals
You might claim that something is true on condition that something else is true. This is not the same thing as merely expressing a belief, because in this case, the believed thing is presented as dependent on some other thing, which is presented as hypothetical. To illustrate, consider this:
“If the Pope is a Nazi, I’m a monkey’s uncle.”
Strange enough proposal, you might think. And you might immediately realize that the point of it is that whoever said it wanted whoever heard it to reject as utter nonsense the notion that the Pope is a Nazi. We will call such things “conditional statements.” At first glance, it could seem that a conditional statement is making an argument: is it not proposing that something is true as a result of something else?
The answer to this question is “No.” What a conditional statement is doing is saying that one thing is the case if something else is the case. But it is not claiming that either of them actually is the case. The conditional is one single claim, not a series of claims; the word “if” brings this about.
This claim requires that we be very literal, and of course, in everyday life we seldom are. Consider the following conditional statement, one of the most consequential perhaps, of 2019, from Robert Mueller’s press conference on the day he resigned from the Justice Department: “If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.” Literally this is just a single statement. But it is hard not to hear “and we did not say so, so we do not have confidence that the president did not commit a crime.” In context, single statements can have more force than they have on their own, decontextualized. As you will see later in the course, this conditional statement is the first premise in a formal argument pattern called “Modus Tollens.”
A conditional statement has two parts. The “if” clause is known as the antecedent, and the “then” clause is known as the consequent. You’ll want to get those terms into your vocabulary if you don’t already use them. Conditionals are a very central topic in Logic, and we’ll be talking about the relations between antecedents and consequents quite a lot later on. For now, it is worth pointing out that “if” and “then” are paradigmatic ways to express conditionals in English, but not the only ways. “Then” need not be said; “if” can do all the work. Also, “if” can be expressed by other words, such as “given that,” or “provided that,” or “on condition that.” Also, in ordinary everyday language, the order in which antecedent and consequent come makes no difference:
If it rains, you’ll wish you had an umbrella.
You’ll wish you had an umbrella if it rains.
It doesn’t hurt to point out –since we’re on the topic–that there are two kinds of conditions, and that their location in a conditional statement is quite predictable. A necessary condition is a state of affairs that has to be met in order that something else happen, such as rain being necessary for plant life, or gas in the tank being necessary for the car to run.
But more than gas is needed for the car to run; it may be necessary, but it’s not all that’s needed –that is, it is not sufficient. It would require quite a lengthy list of necessary conditions to constitute the sufficient condition for a car to run.
But, if the car is already running, there is something we can be quite sure of, isn’t there? Namely that there is gas in the tank! If all we have to know is that the car is running, in order for us to know that there is gas in the tank, then the car running is a sufficient condition of there being gas in the tank.
If we try to capture this in a conditional statement, it’s going to be this one: If the car is running, there’s gas in the tank.
Now, we just saw that
a) Gas in the tank is necessary for the car to run.
and
b) The car is running is sufficient for there being gas in the tank.
This conditional statement says both these things, because the antecedent of a conditional expresses a sufficient condition (for the consequent), and the consequent expresses a necessary condition (for the antecedent).
Being a mammal is necessary for being a cat, so it makes sense to say “If Socrates is a cat, then he’s a mammal.”
And it also makes sense to say this because being a cat is sufficient for being a mammal.
Being 21 is old enough to buy a drink: that doesn’t mean that if you are 21, you can buy a drink; it means that if you can buy a drink, you’re 21. Being 21 is a necessary condition for buying a drink; it is not sufficient (you also need money, for instance).
Explanations
A final example for our purposes here in telling arguments apart from non-arguments is the case of explanations. In fact, there are two kinds of explanations, so this will give us two categories to distinguish between.
In everyday life we use “explanation” and “explain” to talk about a) making the meaning of something more clear or evident, as well as b) why things happen the way they do. For instance (illustration), if, in talking about Descartes’ Meditations, I mention his version of the ontological argument for God’s existence in the 5th Meditation, you might raise your hand and say “Can you explain why that’s an ‘ontological’ argument?” Probably, what you’re asking for is what “ontological” means in that context, i.e., you want to have some insight into the meaning of that word and its relevance. What I would offer would be an explanation in the sense of an explication: exhibiting and clarifying meaning (the meaning of a word or phrase).
But there is another perfectly standard meaning of “explanation” which is not focused on the meanings of words or actions, but on the causes of events. “What is the explanation of poverty?” asks for an account of why poverty exists, not what it is. Of course, if you put “poverty” in quotation marks, and ask “What is the explanation of ‘poverty’?,” by this shift from use to mention, you have shifted the meaning of “explanation” from “causal account” to “clarification of meaning.” Now you’re not asking what causes poverty, you’re asking what the word itself means.
Some textbooks in Logic use “expository passage” to refer to what I’m thinking of as an explication. That makes sense too, since in an expository passage, one is exposing, at some length, the meaning or significance of some claim. But I think it’s a bit more narrow than “explication,” and I think it’s not as clear, in part because there is no acknowledgement that in everyday life we use “explanation” in both senses, and it is perfectly legitimate to do so. I’ll follow the standard, however, and say that we are going to use “explanation” to mean “a causal account of why something is the way it is.” In addition, I’ll introduce “explication” (you can interchange it with “exposition” if you like) to mean “a clarification of the meaning of something.”
The distinction between arguments and explanations is quite important, and there can be cases where it is difficult to make it with complete confidence. Another way to say this is:
Words like “because” have a logical sense as well as a causal sense.
We saw at the outset of this course that “because” is a very common word for signaling a premise: whenever you encounter “A because B” you can be sure that A is the conclusion and B is the premise. Well, now we have to admit that that’s the case only if we are talking about an argument. If I replace “A” with “The lights are on” and “B” with “Someone forgot to turn them off,” then this is not an argument, but rather, an explanation. “The lights are on” is what’s called an explanandum (the thing to be explained), and “Someone left them on” is called an explanans (the thing that explains it). Pardon my Latin.
With very minor paraphrasing, we can turn this explanation into an argument (actually we don’t even need the paraphrasing; it is a matter of a shift in attention):
No one turned the lights off, therefore they are on.
What accounts for the difference?
In the one case, I know the lights are on, but I don’t know why they are. What I am given is an explanation. In the other, I don’t know they are on, but I am wondering about it, and I am given a reason to believe they are on — an argument.
When someone says “It’s going to rain because the WUSA meteorologist said so,” is this an argument or an explanation? How about “Dr. Ackermann is here today because a student saw him”?
Both are arguments. To understand them as explanations would be to say that the student’s vision had the power to hallucinate Dr. Ackermann into existence, and that the weather forecaster has the ability to make it rain, by calling for it. It just takes a second to realize that that’s not the right interpretation of either.
Now, the rest of this chapter is simply three sets of exercises, selections of passages you can read over. Decide whether they are arguments or not. And if you think they are not, then draw on this list of non-arguments to see how it makes best sense to categorize them. They come from a range of sources, and this is the beginning of a phase in your thinking/ reading such that you should try to be mindful, and be on the lookout, as you read papers, websites, articles, etc., for these various things we do with words.
Here’s a brief audio recording that reviews these distinctions:
http://logic.umwblogs.org/files/2011/12/Non-arguments.mp3Here is a list of the seven kinds of non-arguments we’re identifying for the purposes of this class:
Advice/ warning,
Report,
Opinion/belief,
Conditional,
Illustration,
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Explication,
Explanation.
It’s the first of several lists that you’ll need to commit to memory for the duration of this course (and beyond).
This link will open a Powerpoint that reviews this material:
An Impeachment Example
On January 7, 2020, the Washington Post published this quote from a statement made by John Bolton (Trump’s former National Security Adviser, who did not appear before the House of Representatives during the Impeachment Inquiry):
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“It now falls to the Senate to fulfill its Constitutional obligation to try impeachments, and it does not appear possible that a final judicial resolution of the still-unanswered Constitutional questions can be obtained before the Senate acts. Accordingly, since my testimony is once again at issue, I have had to resolve the serious competing issues as best I could, based on careful consideration and study. I have concluded that, if the Senate issues a subpoena for my testimony, I am prepared to testify.”
Five of our distinctions of things done with words can be applied to explicate what is going on in this passage. See if you can spell them out as clearly as you can before you read any further.
The first statement is a Report. The second statement (the second part of the first sentence) is an Opinion or Belief. The second sentence is an Conclusion based on the report and belief (note “Accordingly”). The conclusion is really “I have had to resolve this the best I could” which is presented here as the explanandum of an Explanation: the “since” is causal, not logical. The final statement looks like a conclusion, but I think it’s more accurate to say this is a Report of a conclusion, since he does not really give any information as to how he arrived at it (except “study and consideration”). And this report of a conclusion is in the form of a Conditional Statement.
Thank you Mr. Bolton, for a great and up-to-date example!
Now go on to 3.1 and other sets of exercises to continue practicing this ability to tell arguments from non-arguments. It’s fundamental to the course to be able to avoid confusing them.