Page 56 - Smart Thinking: Skills for Critical Understanding and Writing, 2nd Ed

UNDERSTANDING THE LINKS BETWEEN CLAIMS 43

If

The weakness of independent premises

Independent premises are easier to generate, because we can quickly think of a
reason for our conclusion and then jump to expressing it as a single claim. But the
resulting independent premises are not strong. They reflect either a lack of insight
into the complexity of (most) problems or a failure to recognise that our audience
may not be as clever as us at grasping these complexities implicitly. Indeed, there
are no genuinely independent premises. What we tend to think of initially as being
a single, independent premise is often two (or more) dependent claims; alter-
natively it may well be a single claim, but one that is dependent on another claim,
which we have failed to recognise.
In the following argument, claims 2 and 3 are offered as independent premises:
1. Australia's natural environment should be protected.
2. Tourism will benefit the economy.
3. Environmental protection improves the quality of life for all
Australians, which is something we all want.

If

However, claim 2 only supports the conclusion when it is read together with
the implied (that is, unstated) premise that:

4. Protecting the natural environment will make Australia a popular
tourist destination.
Claim 3 is, when we look closely, a clever way of adding together, in written
form, two dependent claims:
3. Environmental protection improves the quality of life for all
Australians.