Inferring and Explaining

27 e 1 . Premise e 2 . Premise e 3 . Premise . . . e n . Premise t 0 . Conclusion Let’s begin at the bottom. Every argument will have a conclusion —that’s part of the defnition of an argument. When we put an argument in what we will be calling its schematic form , it will always come at the end, under the big, heavy line. But in the real world of arguments, we should treat the term conclusion as technical jargon. Conclusions don’t always come at the conclusion of a person’s argument. Sometimes theycomeat thebeginning. Dick’s cheating on Jane. He told her he had to work late, but Sally saw his car at Joe’s Bar. Not only that, he leers at other women, and the last three times she called him, he didn’t answer. Sometimes they come in the middle. Charlie’s take-home examwas word-for-word identi- cal to Sarah’s. Clearly, Charlie copied it fromSarah . Te guy’s a loser, never comes to class, and doesn’t know how to write very well. And, of course, some of the time, they are at the end. Te light from virtually every galaxy is “red-shifed.” Tis shows that every galaxy is moving away from every other galaxy. Terefore, the physical universe is expanding . I have used the lowercase letter t in my sche- matic representation to stand for theory . Te subscript “0” is used to do two jobs. Although there is only one theory defended in the argu- ment’s conclusion (though that single conclu- sion can be complicated and composed of many parts—“therefore, Jake did it or helped plan it, or someone read his diary”), we will need to keep track of other possible theories besides the one defended in the argument. So “0” can be understood as the number zero and starting a sequence of numbered theories. But the “0” can also be read as the letter o and standing for original —the original theory or conclusion in the argument. To standardize things, we will use the low- ercase letter e to stand for an individual bit of evidence . Tere are no set numbers of prem- ises, or pieces of the evidence, in an argument. Sometimes there will be just a single datum, and sometimes, there will be quite a bit of sup- porting data. Te previous examples illustrate not just that conclusions can come in many places in the statement of an argument but that the same holds true the statements of the evidence. Let’s recast our schematized argument in terms of evidence for a theory: arguments e 1 . Evidence (datum) e 2 . Evidence (another datum) e 3 . Evidence (another datum) . . . e n . Evidence (another datum) t 0 . Theory