Page 82 - Smart Thinking: Skills for Critical Understanding and Writing, 2nd Ed

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More Effective Reasoning II:

Better Links

Writing well-formed and well-founded claims is only half the task of
effective reasoning. The links between these claims must also be well
made if our overall argument or explanation is to be strong. Looking
carefully at the links between premises prevents us from making un-
conscious assumptions about how information is interrelated. We must
also check the connections of our premises with their conclusion, making
sure they are relevant and provide strong support. Otherwise our
conclusion will not be acceptable, or the explanation of it will be uncon-
vincing. At each stage, as discussed in chapter 5, we will need to
consider the way that the context of our reasoning will affect our
judgments about its effectiveness.
In this chapter we will consider three main issues:
1 We look at how effective reasoning requires that we work out the neces-
sary links between dependent premises. Carefully expanding our 'reasons'
into a fully expressed chain of premises ensures that our reasoning has
depth, so that no important premises remain 'implied' (not explicitly
stated).
2 We will consider how relevant premises provide information that does
actually bear on the conclusion, whereas irrelevant premises (even if well
formed and well founded) do not.
3 We examine the strength of the support that premises provide for a
conclusion. As we saw with well-founded claims, judgments of audience
expectations and other contextual issues play a central role in making
sure our reasoning is effective.

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