Causal Arguments

The most challenging of the types of reasoning. We can’t see causal relationships, we can only infer them.

We encounter causal issues all the time. What caused the September 11 terrorist attacks for example? Was it caused by people trying to destabilize the US economy? Did people who were upset with US foreign policy cause it? Was it just motivated by pure hate and jealousy?

In other words, you are trying to argue that X caused Y because of A, B or C.

Here Y is the phenomenon or event that is caused by X. You have a causal chain when you argue that X caused Y, which in turn caused Z. Problem solvers like psychiatrists for example, try to find out the cause of a pattern before trying to find a solution to the problem. For example: You cannot stand the dark because sometime in your childhood you may have been locked up in a dark room for a few hours.

The Nature of Causal Arguments
Causal arguments argue that one event brings about another. For example, smoking cigarettes causes lung cancer. Causal arguments can be manipulated to persuade an audience. For example, one can argue that America should not go to war because many innocent lives will be lost. On the other hand, one can also argue that America should go to war because not going to war will lead to the terrorists getting away.

Causal arguments can be based on:
- Informal induction:
Identifying a common element that explains a repeated circumstance. For example, a teacher notices that most of the kids who live in one particular part of town are always late to class. He realizes that their bus is always late.
- Scientific experimentation:
A cause and effect relationship which is proved scientifically. For example, not drinking enough water leads to dehydration.
- Correlation:
Finding a link between two phenomena. In other words finding that they often go together and therefore one must be causing the other. For example, a link between going to college and getting a higher paying job.

Causal Argument by Analogy and Precedent

By Analogy:
Making a causal argument by comparing one phenomenon to another. For example:
a. We need to go to war because terrorism is like cancer. If you don’t snip it in the bud, it will get out of hand and spread.
b. We cannot have war because war is like a roller coaster with no brakes. It will lead to disaster.

By Precedent:
Making a causal argument by saying that something will happen because it has happened before. For example:
a. We need to have war because see what happened after Nairobi. We have had even more terrorist attacks.
b. We cannot have war because see what has happened to countries like Afghanistan who have been devastated by war.

Examples

* Chewing tobacco
* causal chain: “Chewing tobacco contains grit and sand, which wear away at teeth; it also contains sugar which wears away at teeth, leading to cavities and then tooth loss.
* “Chewing tobacco caused Tom’s death.” “Chewing tobacco caused Sean’s death.”

* Boating and Drinking
* “boater’s hypnosis” causes you to become impaired from alcohol use more quickly.
* drinking while driving a boat is legal and causes accidents and fatalities.

Additional Problems of Causal Arguments

* “post hoc ergo propter hoc” = “after this therefore because of this”
o confusing a relationship in time with cause and effect
o seen in superstitions
o seen in “just look what happened after we . . . . “ arguments.
* multiple causation
o rainforest destruction is the cause of global warming
o T.V. is responsible for school gun violence.
o my printer problem caused me to be unable to do my speech
* correlation vs. causation

Tips for success in causal reasoning

* use causal chains to help the audience see the causal relationship.
* use testimony of experts to support conclusions

Don’t forget the types of fallacies from Good Reasons, including: slippery slope, red herring, Either-Or fallacy, ad hominem, and bandwagon. Read that discussion for more information.

Practice
Can you identify the kind or reasoning and or the fallacy in the following examples?

1. According to a study by the American Medical Association, men with bald spots have three times the risk of heart attack as men with a full head of hair. Strange as it may seem, it looks as if baldness is a cause of heart attacks.

2. The U.S. Constitution guarantees all citizens the right to bear arms. Gun control legislation infringes on the right of citizens to bear arms. Therefore, gun control legislation is contrary to the Constitution.

3. I don’t see any reason to wear a helmet when I ride a bike. Everyone bikes without a helmet.

4. It’s ridiculous to worry about protecting America’s national parks against pollution and overuse when innocent people are being killed by domestic terrorists.

5. There can be no doubt that the Great Depression was caused by Herbert Hoover. He became President in March 1929, and the stock market crashed just seven months later.

6. If we allow the school board to spend money remodeling the gymnasium, next they will want to build a new school and give all the teachers a huge raise. Taxes will soar so high that businesses will leave and then there will be no jobs for anyone in this town.

7. Raising a child is like having a pet–you need to feed it, play with it, and everything
will be fine.

8. One nonsmoker, interviewed at a restaurant, said, “I can eat dinner just fine even though people around me are smoking.” Another, responding to a Los Angeles Times survey, said, “I don’t see what all the fuss is about. My wife has smoked for years and it has never bothered me.” We can see, then, that secondhand smoke does not cause a problem for most nonsmokers.

9. I can’t support Representative Frey’s proposal for campaign finance reform. After all, he was kicked out of law school for cheating on an exam.

10. Our school must either increase tuition or cut back on library services for students.

Proposals

Our next assignment will be to write a short proposal paper. Proposals are fun because you already know that whatever the problem you will describe in the proposal is, you are in favor of your solution. It also goes without saying that good a argument speaks directly to the proposal process. Your proposal will describe some surmountable problem that you can easily (but not TOO easily) solve. You don’t want to pick a problem like world peace, or the end of poverty in the third world, because those are HUGE problems that human beings have been trying surmount for millennia. Your proposal topic should be small, manageable and detailed. And since we already know that good logical syllogism makes for good argument , we can define our problems with them and attack them accordingly. The first introductory paragraph should be a detailed explanation of the problem you propose to solve. The following paragraphs (in the body of the essay) should detail very specifically how you plan on rectifying the the situation. The final paragraph sould be a summary of the problem, your solution and projected results of implementing your proposal.

Proposals are also interesting because you can write proposals about proposals, or even proposals about a proposal to write a proposal, each essay getting tighter, tighter and tighter until it almost disappears. We won’t do that BUT it is an interesting idea.

Cynthia

Evaluative Essays

Probably one of the first essays you ever had to write (after you wrote about what you did on your summer vacation) was a book review of some kind. You probably gave a brief run-down of the book’s major characters, a summary of the plot (if there was one) or told what the book was about, and then said how wonderful the book was (being careful not to reveal too much about the ending). The evaluative essay remains a valuable tool in your arsenal of composition patterns. Hopefully, your ability to say what you like about the subject at hand, whether it’s a book or a painting or a jazz album or a rock concert or a dinner at a fancy restaurant or the design of a new car, has become more subtle and convincing over the years since your first book report.

Writing about literature demands special skills. In writing about poetry or a short story or play or novel, it is very important to keep in touch with the language of the art, showing your reader over and over again where (exactly) in the poem or story you get your ideas, and to do that you have to use quotations, sometimes a lot of quotations.

One device you might want to use in writing your evaluative essay is comparison and contrast. The art work you are looking at doesn’t exist in a vacuum. You can beef up your essay and add to your readers’ understanding at the same time by comparing, for instance, this rock album to an earlier album by the same group, showing how the group has matured (or deteriorated) or by comparing this album to another group’s album, which does the same thing, but better. Be fair in your comparisons.

Whether you are writing about literature or a rock concert, though, there are several points about the evaluative essay you want to keep in mind.

How can an essay about literature or the other arts ever be “wrong”? Isn’t it all opinion, all subjective analysis, anyway? How can an instructor say that my feelings about a poem or a painting are wrong?
First, avoid using language that is simplistically judgmental. Don’t say that something is great or beautiful or exciting or interesting. Your readers are apt to become defensive: “We’ll be the judge of that,” they’ll say. Your job as the writer of this essay is to show how the work under consideration is beautiful or exciting. If you do that well, your readers will be convinced of the work’s beauty without your saying that it’s beautiful. An occasional, off-handed “beautiful” or “exciting” is all right; just don’t expect your readers to be convinced unless you make them feel that beauty or excitement.

Second, don’t re-tell the story. Only a sentence or two is enough to recap the story of an entire novel. If you spend your essay telling readers what happened in The Bluest Eye, they’re going to wonder why they aren’t reading Toni Morrison’s novel instead of your essay; after all, the Nobel Prize winner probably did a better job telling her story than you could ever do. Your job is to provide some insight into how Morrison did what she did. Then, in reading your essay, readers will say, “Wow! That’s great! I better go read that novel.”

There will be occasions when you are forced to use the specialized vocabulary that people who really like this kind of art are used to using. Reading the CD booklets of jazz albums is sometimes like reading a foreign language if you’re not hip. That’s to be expected. If it is written well, your reader will go along with you. You can’t be expected to review a rock concert with the same language that you’d use to review the performance of a string quartet. The environment and special effects of a rock performance are a big part of your enjoyment of it; on the other hand, you would remark on the environment of a string quartet performance only if it were particularly inappropriate for careful listening. Critics who write about art sometimes have their own vocabulary for doing so, and you need to be at least somewhat familiar with that vocabulary before writing seriously about art.

Writing about Literature

The titles of plays, novels, magazines, newspapers, journals (things that can stand by themselves) are underlined or italicized. The titles of poems, short stories, and articles (things that do not generally stand by themselves) require quotation marks. Robert Frost’s “Design” and Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” are compared in an important article, “Comparing Frost to Carver,” which appeared in The Literary Hegemony.

Double-space all typing! When quoting, quote exactly!

In the United States, the usual practice is to place periods and commas inside quotation marks, regardless of logic. (This practice actually goes back to a time when a little period or comma coming after a quotation mark might actually break off from the rest of the lead type.) Other end-marks: question marks, exclamation marks, semicolons, and colons, go where logic would dictate. Thus, we might see the following sentence in a paper about Robert Frost: The first two lines of this stanza, “My little horse must think it queer / To stop without a farmhouse near,” remind us of a nursery rhyme. (Note, also, the slash mark “/ ” with a space on either side, used to denote the poem’s line-break.) But observe the placement of the semicolon in the following sentence: There is a hint of the nursery rhyme in the line “My little horse must think it queer”; however, the poem then quickly turns darkly serious.

If you can write an entire essay on literature without using the first-person singular I, that’s fine; it is to be commended. However, it is not the end of the world if the first-person singular enters your prose, and it might, in fact, be a breath of fresh air, a sign that this writer is taking responsibility for what he or she is claiming to be true. In papers written for the humanities, some instructors will more readily approve of the “journalistic we” (sometimes called the royal plural): We hear in these lines an echo of Frost’s “Design.” Be consistent. Generally, the more objective your paper sounds, the better, and it would be a good idea to confer with your instructor before using first-person, especially the first-person singular, in your paper.

Quotations that constitute fewer than five lines in your paper should be set off with quotation marks [ “ ” ] and be incorporated within the normal flow of your text. For material exceeding that length, omit the quotation marks and indent the quoted language one inch from your left-hand margin. If an indented quotation is taken entirely from one paragraph, the first line should be even with all the other lines in that quotation; however, if an indented quotation comes from two or more paragraphs, indent the first line of each paragraph an additional quarter-inch from the left-hand margin).

If quotation marks appear within the text of a quotation that already has the usual double-quote marks [ “ ” ] around it (a quote-within-a-quote), set off that inner quotation with single-quote marks [ ‘ ’ ]. A quote-within-a-quote within an indented quotation is marked with double-quote marks.

When quoting from a poem and using fewer than five lines, use slash marks ( / ) to indicate line breaks and incorporate the lines within the flow of your text. In the lines “My little horse must think it queer / To stop without a farmhouse near,” Frost creates a tone that reminds us of nursery rhymes. However, when using more than four lines, indent the lines, use the poet’s own line breaks, and do not use quotation marks. (This rule is flexible and its application depends on the length of the lines involved and how important the exact shape of the poem is to your discussion.) When indenting the poem’s lines, use the poet’s own arrangement of lines as accurately as possible, including indents and the relative size of those indents. If, because of the length of the poet’s lines and the width of your paper, you are forced to impose line breaks where the poet had none, be judicious about the point where you impose these breaks. Try to avoid orphan lines (single-word lines), and be consistent about the indent given (about half an inch will do) to the lines you have added.

If you quote dialogue between two or more characters in a play, set the quotation off from the text. Begin each part of the dialogue with the appropriate character’s name indented one inch from the left margin and written in all CAPS. Indent all subsequent lines in that character’s speech an additional quarter-inch.

Write about literature in the present tense unless logic demands that you do otherwise. (Even though a story is written in the past tense, we say that the main character writes to her brother because she thinks she knows something important. Even though Robert Frost is long gone, we say that Frost suggests or uses or says. And in his poems, we say that a phrase or word suggests or means or implies something (all present tense verbs). However, Frost moved his family to England and he died in 1963, etc.)

Do not depend on judgmental language (words such as “beautiful,” “interesting,” “great,” “wonderful”). In showing us how something works, you imply your enthusiasm; in showing us how something doesn’t work or it might have worked better, you’ve gone far enough. Biographical information (about the artist whose work is being discussed) can be interesting; however, for most brief papers designed to demonstrate a critical understanding of literature, the author’s life remains a relatively minor consideration and remarks about his or her biography can often be omitted altogether. Consult your instructor on this matter if you have questions about it.

When discussing what the speaker or narrator of a poem or story says or does, refer to that person as “the speaker” or “the narrator” or “the voice of the poem (or story)” and don’t assume that the narrator or voice of the poem or story represents the author himself or herself.

Evaluations are deceptively easy. But good grammar and structure are evry bit as important to the end product of your effort as choosing the thing to evaluate.

Outlines & Free Writing

The major assignments for class require three stages of completion, all of which,must be submitted in order to receive credit. The first step is, of course, topic selection. You must choose a topic for your final project and submit it no later than the 8th week of the semester. The next stage to completion of your project after topic selection is an outline and freewriting on your chosen topic. This same requiremnt is part of the presntation assignment, if you have signed up to do a presetation your outline of it will be due one week prior to your presentation.

It should look like this:

I. I am going to explain how to write an essay for ENG101.
a) Choose a topic
i)make a choice of some sort of thing that
you’re interested in

ii)then submit it to the instructor.

iii)It can be about anything that one desires,

iv) but it has to be a legitimate research topic.

b) A legitimate research topic has to be

i)in a field of academic inquiry

ii) be compelling

iii) be solvable and explanable

II. The final ten-page, 2400 word essay may be one of four different kinds:

a) A proposal that gives a solution to a problem

b) An essay that redefines or delineates known problems and explores proposed solutions.

c) An editorial response to a political stance of an opponent.

d) A research paper that evaluates (makes value judgements based on argumentation) known approachs to areas of research.

. . .and so on. . .

With the outline you should submit some brief brainstorming/freewriting (informal writing) explaining and clarifying your decisions about your task. It doesn’t have to be the paper in itself, keep it short, clear and as accurate as possible.

The next stage due in the eleventh week of the semester will be a double-spaced rough draft of your paper.

The final phase will be the research paper itself due the last Monday of the semester.

The Narrative Assignment:

In reviewing your papers I was impressed with your imaginative paths to your individual subjects. They were all very interesting. However, the tone that we want to approximate is one of a calm, reasoned approach to explaining our views. The spectacle and hyperbole of music videos and the casual language of the street is to be avoided. We are doing academic explanation of arguments, evaluations, proposals and research, not poetry or fiction writing. Do I mean that metaphor, simile and metynomy should not be used in academic essays? No, those devices are necessary for good writing, but the high drama, and spectacular descriptions that are suited for movies, TV and plays, do not fit in academic essays. There were many problems with spelling, grammar and structure, but in general everyone did a good job. In the future, please use vocabulary that you understand, be brief and clear.

The ‘Good’ Essay

The components of a “good” essay.

Aristotle’s Rhetoric, or at least the part we’re relying on as a framework for writing academic papers, categorizes a good piece as being composed of the following components:

– It must have an introduction that has a “hook” (a compelling sentence or
statement that encapsulates the creator’s attitude toward his subject)

– The introduction in its entirety must foreshadow the arguments and points the
writer will touch on in the essay.

– It must have a body, a series of paragraphs where the individual parts of the
speaker’s argument are delineated point-by-point, and amply illustrated, proven and
analyzed.

– And finally it must have a conclusion that reiterates the message foreshadowed in the introduction, and elucidated in the body.

Aristotle says that we do that by first deciding who our audience is. That determines the kind of language and the relevance of the data we will use.The second guidepost we establish is what are we doing in our essay, what is it’s purpose? Are we trying to persuade others to take a course of action? Are we convincing them of the nature of an occurance, person, thing or activity? Are we determining whether anything can be done or whether we should even be addressing the issue? Once we have determined the stasis (conjectural, definitive, translative, or qualitative), then we can determinedly choose the appeals (rational argument and logic, ethical arguments or arguments from personal authority, or prods to the reader’s emotions and passions, or some combination of all three) and the data or facts we will use in our writings. The following is a “good” essay by way of these standards:

The Evils of Rhetoric

“The truck will be backed up to the rail delivery system, and the individual units will be loaded directly into the holding area in the rear.. .maximum capacity is 180 in the 3mx12mx2m space. In testing it was discovered that windows in the back doors would cause the cargo to surge toward the light emitted thereby causing instability in load distribution thus the windows were designed out. . .The floor is slanted to allow easy cleaning of debris emitted by the load during transport. A lifting mechanism can be activated upon arrival at the disembarkation depot and the rear doors can be triggered to open automatically allowing easy disengagement of the cargo . . .”

Thus reads the specifications of a execution truck designed by Nazi engineers to execute by gas and transport the unwanted from railheads directly to mass graves at Auschwitz at the end of the Second World War. The words they used, the rhetoric of dehumanization they employed, allowed them to disguise their own lack of humanity and forcibly removed from the mentally challenged, the homosexual, the gypsy, Jew and prisoner of war their own. Those engineers’ words, their rhetoric turned people into things.

Rhetoric is the act of utilizing the available means of persuasion to convince others in a course of action, to change their opinion or to accomplish some feat or act in a certain way. Adolph Hitler used it to captivate his people into believing they had rights and privileges due them as the super-race that should be afforded to no other group. Stalin conflated socialism with a cult of personality that condemned thousands to death in the Gulag. Polpot convinced thousands that he was the great educator and that hundreds of thousands of “stubborn, stiff-necked” capitalists should die in the killing fields of Cambodia. That they succeeded through the use of rhetoric does not mean that effective rhetoric is evil, but that it is useful and valuable, and in a tyranny that brooks no counter-arguments, seems evil. In the hands of these ill-intentioned people, its use indeed resulted in evil acts.

But rhetoric is not to blame. Rhetoric has no mind of its own; it has no morality. It is neither a unified way of living nor a code of justice. It is simply a tool. And like any tool it can be used to build or destroy, to do good or to do nothing, to do evil or to inspire people to great heights of sacrifice. When used by well-intentioned individuals in open and free debate rhetoric can do equally great things. Abraham Lincoln used rhetoric to proclaim man’s right to dignity in the Gettysburg Address, and John F. Kennedy inspired another generation to “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. . .” It’s not the rhetoric itself that is ethical or unethical, but the intent and character of the user of the rhetoric that determines the ethicality of the end results. Whose rhetoric to what use must always be identified.

Rhetoric in and of itself is neither good nor evil. While words may sting and arguments may slash, the act of persuasion among well-intentioned human beings in an open venue can only end in the union of hearts and minds, and cooperation and fairness for all.

Writing a Successful Essay

Information on writing a successful essay: one of my favorite ways of keeping my essays organized is a method I learned long ago and I discovered was detailed yet again in a tip sheet at the writing center I worked at last year. I learned the method under a different name but the techniques involved remain the same. I suggest that you absorb this method at least as a good fallback position when you’re really stumped about a writing task. I use it all the time.

One of the things I like about it is its recursivity. The formula can be applied not only to paragraph construction but can also be applied at the top level of paper organization and down to the essentials of writing a pithy, well constructed sentence.

The method was called TREET (Theme, Reason, Examples, Explanation, Transition) when I was in grade school, but now it’s called TRIAC and the ASU Writing Center description is excellent:

TRIAC: Paragraph and Paper Organization

TRIAC is a writing pattern you can use at the paragraph level for strong organization and effective argument. The same components in TRIAC paragraphs can give entire papers stronger organization. TRIAC has five parts:

T Topic Sentence – The first sentence introduces the subject of a paragraph, essentially serving as a miniature thesis statement.

R Restatement or Restriction – The second sentence can restate or restrict what was written in the first sentence, making the subject more specific.

I Illustration – This section of the paragraph consists of the illustrations (evidence, data, facts, quotes, etc.) that support your topic sentence. This section can contain several sentences.

A Analysis – Here, you should explain, interpret, and contextualize the illustrations that have been made. Never leave illustrations by themselves; they are not effective without the writer analyzing them.

C Conclusion – The final sentence (or two) might review what the paragraph has discussed, and/or reemphasize what the illustration and analysis suggest. This closing section may also evaluate the connections you’ve made in your paragraph. Keep in mind that you are also setting yourself up to move smoothly and logically into the next paragraph.

An Example, Sentence by Sentence, of a Paragraph Illustrating TRIAC:

(T) Although vegetarianism has often been associated with issues

(T) of ethics and animal rights, for many people it is no more than a

(R) means to a healthier lifestyle. A vegetarian diet can reduce the

(R) risk of health problems such as high cholesterol, arterial

(I) clogging, and even cancer. Recent evidence indicates that people

(I) with diets rich in dark green vegetables had a 40% less chance of

(I) developing colon cancer. In addition, cutting out meat can

(I) dramatically reduce saturated fat intake. (Stewart and Cranshaw 8 )

(I) Alice, a university student and seven year vegetarian, says, “I

(I) recognized my potential for cancer because of my genetic history;

(I) when my father’s doctor put him on a strict no-meat diet, I decided

(I) it was time to give up burgers and pepperoni.” Choosing to cut

(A) out beef and poultry can help many people to become more aware of

(A) what they are consuming, and in turn lead to an overall healthier

(A) style of cooking and eating. In addition, it is not necessary to

(A) become a vegetarian in the strictest sense of the word; for some

(A) people, it simply means cutting down on meat intake and increasing

(A) the amount of fruits and vegetables included in meals. These

(C) adjustments alone can be beneficial without completely altering

(C) an individual’s eating habits, and these changes may prevent a

(C) myriad of health problems later in life.

“How to write a successful essay”, ASU Writing Center tip sheets, (2007), WWW:

http://studentsuccess.asu.edu/files/shared/tempe/tipsheets/TRIAC%20for%20Organization%20and%20Revision.doc