Page 97 - Smart Thinking: Skills for Critical Understanding and Writing, 2nd Ed

84 SMART THINKING: SKILLS FOR CRITICAL UNDERSTANDING & WRITING

needed here? Well, to say simply that the economy benefits may be countered by
an argument that there is no point in having a strong economy if the result is an
impoverished culture. In such a situation, the conclusion may well not be accepted
and our argument would be ineffective. Or, for example, if we were to fail to
provide reason c, those people in our audience who would themselves argue for the
primacy of international relations in determining economic, cultural, and defence
conditions might not be convinced.
As we might expect, for most claims there are arguments for and against; there
are explanations from one angle and another. Whenever we reason, we are, by
definition, setting up an opposition with possible counter-arguments. To give
sufficient support to our own conclusion, we must give evidence that defeats, or at
least casts doubt on, likely counter-arguments in advance of them actually being
mounted against what we are proposing. For example, we know that one significant
reason that opposes our conclusion that 'Australia's current rate of immigration is
too low' is that 'social tensions will increase with increased immigration'. If we
know in advance that such a counter-reason exists and we fail to address it, then we
are making our reasoning less effective. First, we run the risk of appearing to have
failed to understand all the relevant issues (and thus casting doubt on our overall
competence). Second, we may find people unconvinced of our conclusion, even
though they accept all of the positive reasons we give. The response of such people
might be: 'Well, defence, politics, culture, and the economy will all improve, but
that means nothing if the society that all those other things serve is falling apart'.
That we disagree will not matter; the error we will have made is that our disagree-
ment has not been included in the original argument we presented. So, in general
terms, effective reasoning requires that we cover all the relevant issues involved in
establishing or explaining our conclusion, whether they are positive or negative. 3
We do need to consider whether or not our arguments and explanations meet
objective criteria of strength. We need to consider whether they are well founded
and strong regardless of what any particular audience thinks of them. However,
because knowledge is never used or useful outside a social, non-objective context, 4
we must also consider the audiences of our reasoning. Hence breadth of premises
can best be understood in relation to the burden of proof. In essence, to meet our
burden of proof, we must mainly meet the expectations of our audiences, but not
simply 'give in' to what they want to hear.
If an audience, for example, expects to see, in a discussion of contemporary
European-Aboriginal relations, some consideration of the history of those
relations, then we would be failing our audience if we did not offer it or did not,
at least, dismiss the relevance of such a consideration. Which approach we would
use, of course, depends on our views of the topic, but as a general rule, it is fair to
say that our arguments must address (either positively or negatively) those aspects
of a topic that we guess our audience is expecting to see covered in our reasoning.
Furthermore, if the members of our audience have mixed backgrounds—with some
being more convinced by and interested in economic arguments, others by histor-
ical arguments, and a third group by purely moral or ethical arguments—then all