Topic 7: Restatement

PHI332 : The Class : Argument ID : Restatement

Topic 7: Restatement

If you hate logic, the good news is that you can relax now. You have learned all the logic you need in order to succeed in this course. Very few arguments you will ever see in health care ethics will be as complex as the logic puzzle you did in 2.6. Most will be simpler.

The bad news is that you will probably come to hate the ambiguity and vagueness of English even more than you hate logic! What you need now is to develop your skill at distinguishing an argument from the rest of the stuff you always find around it. If you looked at the textbook to check how I took passages from it to give you exercises, you will have noticed that often I edited the text before I gave it to you. It made it easier for you to see what the argument was. Now you need to learn to do this weeding, this editing, yourself. It can be frustrating, because many authors, even good writers, leave their arguments poorly stated.

Within a passage that contains an argument, you often find the same premise or the same conclusion repeated, restated in other words. Authors often use Discount Words to sum up an argument. Authors also restate if they want to emphasize or clarify a statement. If you recognize the Discount Wordss, it makes your job of identifying the argument a lot easier. Consider this well-written example of Discount Words from p. 367.

From one perspective, the fetus is, as Petchesky says, a "biological parasite" taking resources from the woman's body. During pregnancy, a woman's whole life and energies will be actively involved in the nine-month process. Gestation and childbirth involve physical and psychological risks. After childbirth a woman will either be a mother who must undertake a twenty-year responsibility for childrearing, or face giving up her child for adoption or institutionalization. Since hers is the body, hers the risk, hers the burden, it is only just that she alone should be free to decide on pregnancy or abortion.

To complete this topic successfully, do as many of the following exercises as you find necessary to acquire the relevant skill. You have acquired the relevant skill when your answers to exercises are reliably either the same as the given answers or are alternative answers you can explain and defend:

ASSIGNMENT 1: Exercise2.7.1

ASSIGNMENT 2: Exercise2.7.2

ASSIGNMENT 3: Exercise2.7.3

ASSIGNMENT 4: Exercise2.7.4

Once you have completed this module you should:

Go on to Topic 8: Discount Words
or
Go back to Argument ID

E-mail George Rudebusch at George.Rudebusch@nau.edu
or call (520) 523-7091