Inferring and Explaining

33 Holmes proceeds to entrapSlaney, andhe con- frms that he was one of the authors of the danc- ing men messages and that he and Mr. Cubitt exchanged gunshots through the window. Te story never tells us precisely what happened to Elsie, but we know, just as Holmes knew. t 0 . Slaney sought to win Elsie back and was refused. He came to the manor and exchanged almost simultaneous gunshots with Cubitt. Elsie closed the window and either heartbroken at the death of her husband, guilt-ridden and feeling partial responsibility, or misguidedly seeking to preserve her husband’s good name, shot herself in the head. Schematizing the Argument Let me state something explicitly. Te single hardest part of argument analysis or the IBE recipe may ofen be simply identifying what the argument is in the frst place . Tere are a num- ber of reasons for this. First and foremost, people aren’t always as clear as the might be when they state their arguments. But there are other complicating factors as well. My guess is that Conan Doyle would have said he wasn’t presenting an argument at all but simply tell- ing a story. Still, I think it’s clear that the story is about Holmes’s following the evidence and coming to a conclusion about what happened. Add to all that some arguments touch on deeply divisive moral and political issues and few of us read them and set our personal politics to the side. Tese unavoidable biases that we all carry with us will ofen tempt us to simply misread what the argument is. Finally, as we get a hint of in this short story but becomes daunting when an argument is developed over the course of a whole book, the sheer number of words, thoughts, and sentences makes it extremely challenging to keep the structure of the argument clearly in mind. Granted all this, the frst step in the IBE pro- cedure that we will develop in the next chap- ter is not only the most difcult; it is the most important. If we misrepresent what the argu- ment is, then all our work in analyzing it will be a waste of time. Who cares if you show “the argument” to be a spectacular success or a dis- mal failure if it wasn’t the real argument in the frst place? Useful schematization requires three vir- tues, all of which defy simple characterization. First and foremost, as we have just emphasized, you should strive for copy fdelity . Your task is to characterize “the other person’s argument,” a representation of his or her evidence. You may think of better ways to make the argu- ment, or you may even think that the evidence points in a diferent direction. Tat’s all fne and good and will be useful in later steps. Right now, however, your job is to faithfully repre- sent the argument as it was stated. You want to also strive for brevity . We just saw how an argu- ment might take up several pages of a short story but just imagine when we look in a later chapter at Darwin’s “abstract” of his theory in On the Origin of Species 9 and try to keep straight all the evidence presented in more than four hundred pages. In order for your schematiza- tion to be useful to you, you will need to keep your representation of the evidence down to, say, no more than a page. Finally, and most difcult of all, you should strive for charity arguments