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From time to time in this class, Philosophy 2420, Critical Thinking, I will make a short
video and post it so that you can easily see a concept or a lesson that's not so easy to
grasp if you're just reading text. Let's talk about arguments, first of all, the first important
concept and perhaps the most important concept in this course. An argument is taken from
a passage. An argument is simply a set of statements by someone who wants to convince
you of something, or it's a chain of reasoning. It's a unit of reasoning, we might say, that
consists of a chain from premises to conclusion. Each of those is a statement. So in a passage
of text... which I'm abstracting into wavy lines, we might see several sentences, several
statements. To put that argument in standard form, we would extract the important parts,
that is, each statement that makes a premise, one of the assumptions or one of the givens,
and the statement that makes the conclusion. After the premises are all written clearly,
we draw a horizontal line, and then write the conclusion. So these are meant to be actual
English sentences, of course.