Page 28 - Smart Thinking: Skills for Critical Understanding and Writing, 2nd Ed

CLAIMS: THE KEY ELEMENTS OF REASONING 15

not become a republic' also makes this connection, although the meaning of that
claim is completely different. The technical, grammatical names for the two
components within a claim are the 'subject' and the 'predicate' of the statement.
Roughly speaking, the subject is the main focus of the claim, and the predicate is
some property or consequence of, or notable point about, that subject and the way
the claim is made is to identify through the verb the link between the subject and
the predicate. Hence 'Reasoning is a skill' uses the verb 'is' to assert that reasoning
is a member of the larger set of things we know about called 'skills'. As another
example, 'Reading this book on critical thinking is no use if you are not practising
critical thinking exercises' is also a claim with a more complicated link between the
subject 'Reading this book on critical thinking', and a predicate 'not practising
critical thinking'.

Exercise 2.3

Identify the subject and the predicate in the following statements:
a. Drinking milk makes some people feel sick.
b. I do not drink milk.
c. Milk drinking is not recommended for people who are lactose-intolerant.
This property of a claim—an internal connection between two or more ideas—
is fundamental. The internal connection underpins the external links between
claims that are necessary in reasoning. While reasoning does not consist simply of
one claim, it does occur when you take a number of claims and, by varying the
pattern of interconnections, produce a 'link' from the first interconnection to the
next. Here is a simple example (we will be doing much more on this concept in
later chapters).

Reasoning is a skill. Skills can be improved by practice. The book Smart
Thinking gives you a chance to practise reasoning. Reading Smart
Thinking and doing the exercises will improve your reasoning.
See how the same ideas get used, but in a different order? These claims, because
they share the same ideas even though in some the idea is the subject and in others
it is the predicate, are well on the way to being used for reasoning. So, to reason, we
always need more than one claim, all linked together in some way. It is this internal
connection within a single claim that allows these external links to be made.

Claims that include claims

One example of the importance of grasping this process of internal connection is
provided by a special kind of claim in which an entire claim serves as one element
of another claim. We find two main uses of this kind of claim-formation. First,
there are claims such as 'George W Bush said that Saddam Hussein was an evil
dictator'. In this claim, what is being asserted is that George W Bush has said those