Section 1.1: Arguments, Premises, and Conclusions

Reading

Read section 1.1 in your text.

Instructor's Commentary

Since conclusion indicators and premise indicators help you find arguments in what you read and hear, it is important to become familiar with them. Table 1.2 lists some premise indicators and conclusion indicators.

Some of the indicators in lists like Table 1.2 do not appear in your textbook. Don’t be too surprised. Once you become familiar with how these words and phrases function, you will be able to recognize even more premise and conclusion indicators than appear in the lists. However, the best way to become adept at this recognizing is to try to identify the premises and the conclusion of an argument yourself.

Table 1.2

Premise Indicators

since	in that	seeing that
as indicated by	may be inferred from	for the reason that
because	as	inasmuch as
for	given that	owing to
follows from	may be derived from	may be deduced from
the reason is that	in view of the fact that	as shown by

Conclusion Indicators

therefore	thus	hence
wherefore	consequently	whence
accordingly	we may infer that	so
we may conclude	it must be that	it follows that
entails that	proves that	implies that
In consequence	which means that	as a result
which shows that	I conclude that	which points to
which allows us to infer	which implies that	conclusion that

Exercises

Do exercise 1.1, pages 7–13, as follows:

Part I, problems 4, 7, 13, 16, and 25.
Part II, problems 1, 4, and 7.