Page 84 - Smart Thinking: Skills for Critical Understanding and Writing, 2nd Ed

MORE EFFECTIVE REASONING II: BETTER LINKS 71

overcomes this source of confusion. Claims 2 and 3 make clear the exact relation-
ship between economic benefit and education. Moreover, by expanding the hidden
aspects of our initial reason, we have discovered a key issue: who should pay. No
matter how strongly we might believe it, the reason 'education benefits the
economy' does not, of itself, mean education's users should not pay. This implica-
tion is not self-evident. If we want to argue that education should be free, then we
must say why. Claims 4 and 5 provide, then, an explication of the idea of free
education. Note how claim 4, in particular, expresses a clear value judgment: the
government should do something. Since the conclusion is a value claim ('education
should be free'), there must be a premise somewhere that addresses the value
judgment involved here.
If we were to provide an additional reason, 'free education is a fundamental
democratic right', we need to keep it separate (both in our minds and on paper)
from the reason about economic benefit. We would, of course, need to expand this
initial reason into a series of dependent premises, but they would occupy a different
place in the analytical structure of our argument. We could unpack this additional
reason into claims and include them in the format:
7. Free education is a fundamental democratic right.
8. Australia is a democracy.
9. Education includes all levels from primary to tertiary.

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In this process of unpacking or expanding a basic reason for a conclusion, we
should carefully distinguish between the internal complexities of that statement (which
become a series of dependent claims), and any new claims that we introduce to make
a dependent claim well founded. One of the claims resulting from our expansion of
the economic benefit reason was 'The best way for the government to encourage
Australians to be well educated is to provide free university education' (claim 5). We
could show why claim 5 was true by including the following claims:
10. Any cost that the government imposes on people attending higher
education will probably reduce the numbers attending.
11 . If numbers are reduced, then Australians are obviously not being
encouraged to attend.