Lessons in LOGIC Chapter 5

Lesson 5:  Arguments and Explanations

This lesson is a departure from previous lessons and their

direction to take a detour to an issue raised in the following
email. Keith Jewell questions whether the following exercise
from Lesson 3 is actually an argument, as stated in the
solutions:

When interest rates fall, investors put higher values on future

corporate earnings and dividends and thus bid up share prices.

I claimed that this passage is an argument and that the

occurrence of "thus" in it is an argument indicator. Here is
Keith's objection:

I suggest that this is not an argument, or at least not the apparent

argument. For "thus" to be an argument indicator it must be used with
the meaning "gives reason to believe": premiss gives reason to
believe conclusion. I do not think the meaning of the exercise was (1)
"investors put higher values on future corporate earnings and
dividends" gives reason to believe (2) "investors bid up share prices".
I do not think the sentence attempts to support a conclusion, I think it
hypothesises a mechanism so that the meaning is 1 causes 2; 1 is
not put forward to increase our degree of belief in 2, but to explain
why it's true. Indeed, the confidence in 2 is much greater than in 1; if
it is an argument it is 2 gives reason to believe 1 rather than vice
versa.

I agree with Keith's analysis of the meaning of the sentence. He

is right that the point of the passage is to explain why share
prices go up when interest rates fall, rather than to try to
convince the reader that that's indeed what happens. Where I
disagree with Keith is on a matter of terminology: I use the
word "argument" in a broad sense to include explanations,
whereas Keith is thinking of arguments and explanations as
disjoint categories.

Usually, it's not profitable to argue about the meaning of

technical terms; one should simply choose a term, define it, and
then stick to the defined meaning consistently. However, in this
case the narrower meaning of the word is quite common in
logic books, and I'm broadening its meaning to include
Lessons in LOGIC Chapter 5

explanations. This departure from standard usage calls for an

explanation.

Many logic books nowadays have a short chapter or section,

usually near the beginning of the book, explaining the
difference between a piece of reasoning which is an argument
in the narrow sense and one that is an explanation. This
difference has to do with the purpose served by the reasoning:

 Argument (Narrow Sense): A piece of reasoning

whose purpose is to provide evidence for its conclusion.

 Explanation: A piece of reasoning whose purpose is to

make its conclusion more predictable or understandable.

One reason why it seems necessary to draw this distinction is

that explanations frequently use the same indicator
words―such as "thus" in the exercise above―as arguments in
the narrow sense. So, if you rely upon indicator words to
identify narrow-sense arguments, you'll occasionally mistake
an explanation for such an argument if you're not careful.
However, whether a piece of reasoning is an explanation or a
narrow-sense argument has little, if any, effect upon its logical
analysis and evaluation.

Reasoning can be used for many purposes, and attempting to

convince the audience of the truth of a conclusion is only one
such purpose. Some arguments aim to convince the audience of
the falsehood of a premiss by reasoning to an obviously false
conclusion; such an argument is known as a reductio ad
absurdum or an indirect argument. Some reasoning proceeds
with no intention of either establishing the truth of the
conclusion or the falsehood of a premiss, but simply to see what
implications hold between propositions. It seems to me that
what purpose is served by reasoning is not a logical question,
but a pragmatic or even psychological one.

Now, an alternative to using the word "argument" in such an

unusually wide sense would be to continue to use it in the
standard sense and use "piece (or unit) of reasoning" for the
broad sense. This would have the virtue of not confusing
readers such as Keith who are already familiar with the
standard usage. However, "piece of reasoning" is awkward, and
I don't know of a better term. Moreover, logic is usually
understood to be the study of "arguments", but there's no
Lessons in LOGIC Chapter 5

reason why explanations should not be part of this study.

Therefore, when you see the word "argument" in these lessons
and in the Fallacy Files as a whole, remember that it means a
piece or unit of reasoning, including explanations.

Exercises: Determine whether the following pieces of

reasoning are arguments in the narrow sense or explanations.
Since there is no mechanical way to do this, you must use your
general knowledge. Is the author trying to convince
you that the conclusion is true (argument) or is the author
trying to explain why it's true (explanation)?

1. Today we know why the planets take such unusual paths

across the sky: though the stars hardly move at all in
comparison to our solar system, the planets orbit the sun,
so their motion in the night sky is much more
complicated than the motion of the distant stars. (P. 8)

2. In 1609, Galileo started observing the night sky with a

telescope, which had just been invented. When he looked
at the planet Jupiter, Galileo found that it was
accompanied by several small satellites or moons that
orbited around it. This implied that everything did not
have to orbit directly around the earth, as Aristotle and
Ptolemy had thought. (P. 10)

Source: Stephen Hawking & Leonard Mlodinow, A

Briefer History of Time (2005).
Lessons in LOGIC Chapter 5

Answers to the Exercises:

1. An explanation: "so" is a conclusion indicator, and the

conclusion is: the motion of the planets in the night sky is
much more complicated than the motion of the stars.
Hawking is explaining why the planets' motions are more
complex than the stars'.

2. A narrow-sense argument: "this implied that" is a

conclusion indicator, and the conclusion is: Everything
did not have to orbit directly around the earth. Hawking
is not explaining why everything did not have to orbit
around the earth, since the fact that Jupiter's moons
don't orbit around the earth implies the conclusion that
not everything orbits around the earth, but does not
explain it.